| Summary: | This dissertation examines musical events in the public auditory spaces of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Drawing upon seventeen months of ethnographic and archival research conducted in the city of Sao Paulo during 2009-2013, I interrogate the public musical event as a specific mode of musical practice constitutive of the city's contemporary urban condition. I develop the concept of listening heuristics---instruments of public policy that, in the broadest sense, facilitate an encounter between audiences and some sonic activity---as an analytic with which to understand these events as a nexus of social processes that unfold in the realms of cultural finance, the musical labor market, urban leisure, and urban spatial management. I use listening heuristics to explain how musical practices have become essential components of social and political projects of late capitalism in large urban agglomerations like Sao Paulo. Embedded within highly contentious debates about cultural policy, urbanism, citizenship, and economics, such events both characterize the social processes of music making in Sao Paulo and highlight the particularly fraught negotiations of aesthetics and power in the city's aural public sphere.
The dissertation addresses the role of musical events in Brazil's recent, uneven economic growth through an examination of the alternately divergent and complementary logics of social inclusion and economic accumulation that are implicated in many cultural initiatives, contributing to an emerging area of musical scholarship that deals with neoliberal policy reforms and musical production. Furthermore, I position the ways in which musical actors experience the spatial and symbolic aspects of urbanity as a central research question, providing ethnographic accounts of economically segregated urban spaces in early twenty-first-century Brazil and employing the concept of urban imaginaries, which understands the physical and symbolic aspects of urban social life as mutually constitutive, as a way of interrogating the ways in which sonic practices participate in the construction of the city's contemporary modernity.
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