The Practice of Perception: Multi-Functionality and Time in the Musical Experiences of a Heavy Metal Drummer

n this article I will argue that musical perception is best understood as a kind of practice and explore some of broad consequences of this orientation for music research. I use term practice in dialectical sense elaborated by writers such as Pierre Bourdieu (1977) and Anthony Giddens (1979, 1984, 1993). In their writings, practice (or human action) has been considered as underlying social reality from which seemingly intractable opposites such as the individual and are derived. The central insight of practice theory is that practice is always individual's active achievement, but that that active achievement is always constrained and enabled by past and present social contexts. In this view, agency (the subject's active intervention in world) and structure (the order of society in which subject is surrounded) are a duality, as inextricable as two sides of same coin (Giddens 1979). In this paper I will apply these ideas to issue of musical perception. Many ethnomusicologists have revealed underlying, culturally specific systems of perception in music; others have observed that same object in perception can be experi- enced in different ways. My aim is to show that perception is both pro- foundly influenced by perceiver's social context and nevertheless is open-ended and actively accomplished by musical participants. In short, perception is a kind of practice.1 As a case study in practice of perception, this paper offers some tentative hypotheses to explain how a heavy metal drummer actively shifts focus of attention among temporal levels in musical perception in or- der to achieve various musical goals in nightclub performance. While