This book is about the patterns of social connection and disconnection that the
consumption of music helps to shape, to (re)create, and to defy in Freetown, the
capital city of the West African country Sierra Leone. As a conceptual gateway
for this work I draw on the expressive and playful metaphor from sociomusicology
that “interacting sounds constitute the abstraction ‘music’ in the
same way that interacting people constitute the abstraction ‘society’” (Keil 1998:
303). Hence, I aim to explore the connecting and the competing disseminations
of sounds and people, the conjunctures of music practices and social affiliations,
and the diverse intersections, interactions and contradictions between music and
society in Freetown’s past and present.
It is a truism that music unites and connects people; music dissolves boundaries
of otherness; music is used to shape, to assert and to express communal and
collective identity. In creating aural spaces in which members of society
congregate, whether physically in discos, music halls, on the street or in rather
virtual spaces created through radio broadcasts or the circulation of cassettes,
music does function to integrate society. While taking part in a music performance,
whether live or recorded, by dancing, by singing, by listening collectively
or individually, people share experiences of sounds and grooves. Music is, in this
sense, indeed bringing about a “pattern which connects” (Small 1995).