When a Place Becomes a Community: Music, radio and the reach of social aesthetics

What questions do we face when the familiar, informal or semi-formal modes of musical place-making are constituted instead by formal institutions whose explicit recognition by the state and the market are necessary for their existence and survival? A community radio station is one such institution. Their participants’ primary goal is to enact different ways of producing culture, doing so by constructing a series of social relationships crafted through acts of communication and organisation that define the institution itself. The scholarly consensus has it that the ways of producing culture through community media enact a distinctly civil discourse that challenges traditional notions of cultural belonging, citizenship and the public sphere. The bare, simple fact that the vast majority of programming materials on most community radio stations in Australia is music begs a series of questions about the role of the social aesthetics of music in the construction and maintenance of institutions of civil society. I argue that we can draw out of these institutions the core values of a civil or democratic aesthetics specifically through understanding the type and character of the kinds of relationships that constitute them. Moreover, these relationships present an enticing contrast to the commercial relationships which dominate most of consumer culture.