| dc.description.abstract | This study presents an empirical case study of the Czech Underground community, focusing on actors’ entrance into, and experience within, the Underground from the late 1960s to 1980s. The Underground can be conceived as a network of alternative dispositions toward social and cultural life in Czechoslovakia that emerged through non-official musicking practices. The author uses this case to focus on the non-official uses and reinventions of ‘music-as-resource’ in the Underground in a simultaneous, two-fold manner: 1) to understand music as a transformative aspect in the activities and processes of community-building and 2) to think more specifically about music’s role in collective agency and how collective phenomena begin and grow. The article explores how ‘music-asresource’ takes shape in relation to what is described as ‘creative constriction’: the paradoxical situation whereby suppression generates new opportunities for creative action. The ‘creative constriction’ – censorship, banning, state-consolidation of the music industry, auditions/reviews – is situated in the production of music, subsequent consumption of these products, their embodied practices, and how actors articulate meaning to musical materials. Through non-official musicking in the Underground, the author illustrates how ‘music-as-resource’ afforded new and socially important cultural practices that were informally learned in and through musical experience. These ‘lessons’ in turn provided a springboard for alternative, non-official, or ‘underground’ modes of being, permitting us to see the creation of an imaginative cultural space and how this collectively coalesces into a community. | en_GB |
