After Fame: A Micro-Ethnography of Popular Late Style

Abstract

After Fame is an ethnographic account of aging and musical creativity in the everyday life of the then 90-year-old South African accordionist Nico Carstens. It consists of three parts: (1) a theoretical and methodological framing, refiguring the Western elite concept of “late style” for the study of popular music; (2) an animated and narrated digital essay, accessible online; and (3) a version adapted here for print. Based on personal conversations, a micro-geography of Carstens’s living space, analyses of annotated scores, and material from his personal archive, I speculate on his confrontation with the objects in his contained domestic milieu as a process of self-fashioning in old age.

Notes

1. A different attempt at aligning popular music with musicological discourses of lateness is Richard Elliott’s The Late Voice: Time, Age and Experience in Popular Music.

2. Edward Said points out how the ideas of the grand theorist of late style – Adorno – supposes wealth, privilege, and elitism: “Adorno’s world is the world of Weimar, of high modernism, of luxury tastes, of an inspired, if slightly sated, amateurism” (20).

3. See Lévi-Strauss (16) on the virtues of the reduction of scale is also relevant here.