Music and the Collective Life of the Prison

Music holds an ambivalent and integral character within the collective lives of prisoners, providing important sources of shared experience but also marking distinctions and providing the means for exclusion and othering. Research in this area tends to focus on the personal relation between music and the self and the processes of change that prisoners are subject to, or which they seek to effect. To apprehend the role of the music within the political dimensions of the prison it is important to include the powerful features of the collective life of the prison which is often overlooked in accounts of music in carceral institutions. This chapter considers how music can constitute part of the cultural lines of inclusion and exclusion within the prison, and how music is used collectively by prisoners within their daily lives to constitute atmospheres of shared feeling.