ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how, for Connecticut River Valley fife and drum musicians, interpenetrations of music, meaning, affect, and experience merge in sensate ways with notions of locality and community in ritualized soundscapes called musters. It argues that sonic and musical signs embodied in these soundscapes help Ancient musicians sublimate a competitive past and predictably generate feelings of societás and communitás. These feelings resonate with perceptions of being-in-the-world that are ineffably bound to a sense of community in the Connecticut Valley. Following a brief historical sketch of the fife and drum’s earliest military functionality in Europe, this chapter discusses their adoption by revivalist drum corps in the Connecticut River Valley. It then develops a conceptual framework for understanding Ancient musters as cyclical acts of building and dwelling that embody place via liminal experience, modulating the music’s social frame. The last section uses Peirce’s notion of indexicality to analyze component muster sound events and discuss some of the ways in which the CRV Ancient community engages with its own material culture.
