In this article, I examine the history of a genre that spans several continents and several centuries. I bring together material from Mexico, Cuba, France and the UK to create anew, expand upon and critique the ‘standard’ histories of danzón narrated by Mexico's danzón experts (and others). In these ‘standard’ histories, origins and nationality are key to the constitution of genres which are racialised and moralised for political ends. Danzón, its antecedents and successors are treated as generic equivalents despite being quite different. From the danzón on, these genres are positioned as being the products of individual, male originators (and their nations). ‘Africa’ is treated as a conceptual nation, and ‘Africanness’ as something extra which racialises hegemonic European music-dance forms. Political leanings and strategies determine whether these music-dance forms are interpreted, adopted or co-opted as being ‘black’ or ‘white’.

This article explores agency as an ability to act and exert power creatively when failure implies literal death. It draws on interviews with an ex‐narco and rappers who willingly accept narco‐commissions in 2010s Tamaulipas, Mexico, a context where precarity and necropolitical logics prevail. It asserts that many rappers exert power creatively, despite the risks. Rappers shape narco‐aesthetics by determining the lyrical and sonic elements of songs; draw on experiences of narco‐life to contribute to narco‐ethics; and mould narco‐masculinities by encouraging listeners to stay firm. It proposes that prevalent discursive Us–Them dichotomies facilitate Othering and stigmatisation of actors in the narco‐world, and serve to accentuate narco‐power.

In contrast to established musicians, lesser-known composers have received scant attention in art music scholarship. This article, based on an ethnographic study, considers how a group of British composers construed ideas of success and prestige, which I analyse in terms of anthropological writings on exchange, Bourdieusian symbolic economies, and Foucauldian notions of disciplinary power. Prestige was ascribed to composers who created 'interesting' music, a category that eclipsed novelty as an aim. Individuality, enacted within a context of individualism, was key to assessing whether music was interesting. This individuality had to be tempered, structured, and embedded in the social norms of this and related 'art worlds'. The article examines the social processes involved in creating this individuality, musical personality, and music considered interesting.Success relates to achieving a position in a social hierarchy, to taking someone's place, or some other desired outcome. Prestige, however, is a favourable impression made on others who must confer it back to the subject. Prestige must be constantly made and remade. Success does not necessarily entail prestige, for prestige must be achieved and ascribed; it involves a distinct form of social exchange. In this article, I explore success and prestige in a context which at first sight appears meritocratic, an 'art world' founded on notions of talent where positions of power and privilege are reproduced in part through an economy of exchange. That symbolic economies operate in spheres of cultural production is nothing new, and much excellent research in this area builds on the work of Pierre Bourdieu. 1But what interests me here is how success and prestige appear to operate in a specific context, the British new music network, based on the viewpoints of a specific group -young composers -and the broader implications for unpacking the making of prestige. Many of these composers teach composition in universities and music conservatoires. They form a significant part of the UK new music network and interact with, but are less well known than, the few established British new music composers who have been served by critical studies. 5 It is striking how little attention has been paid to lesser-known composers, particularly given the cultural turn in musicology in recent years. This may be, as Howard Becker insightfully proposed in his treatise on the collective nature of artistic production, because 'art worlds deal with the contradiction between thinking only a few worth caring about and actually paying attention to many more by distinguishing between great artists, however that is defined and whatever words are used to express it, and those who are competent '. 6 It is also striking that the vulnerability involved in claiming to be an artist or a composer -and, with it, the danger of being judged as an incompetent fraud -has also received scant scholarly attention.2 Henceforth, I use the vernacular term 'classical music' to refer to European-derived art m...

AbstractUnderstandings and discourses about age have tended to be instrumental to popular music in terms of production, promotion and consumption, and many studies of popular music have taken younger people, and especially ‘youth’ cultures, as their subject matter. Where older people have been considered, the focus has mostly been retrospective, that is on their experiences when young and their attitudes to contemporary ‘youth’ cultures, rather than relationships between the temporal dimension of the life course and music. As the case of danzón illustrates, stereotypes that older people are resistant to novelty, change and possibility are ill founded. Moreover, where age is used to justify rescuing ‘cultural traditions’, caution may be called for and analysis required to assess what lies behind such claims and why. In Veracruz, the older age of the majority of danzón performers is evoked to ‘authenticate’ this local ‘tradition’, and justify its ‘rescue’ and promotion by Veracruz's culture industries. Yet, older people are not considered repositories of ‘tradition’ or sought out as ‘authentic’ practitioners. Instead, many older performers are new to danzón.

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