Abstract
There is little written about non-musician individuals in academic literature about music/cultures. For example, as Jesse D.
Ruskin and Timothy Rice establish in their 2012 essay "The Individual in Musical Ethnography," ethnomusicologists in their studies mostly focus on musician, but rarely on non-musician individuals. The situation is similar in other fields, where scholars perhaps focus more on non-musician aspects of music-making (e.g., music industry), but still place very little emphasis on the study of non-musician individuals.
In this article, I therefore center on studying non-musician individuals within the U.S. DIY ("do-it-yourself") culture, and their central role in shaping, defining, and maintaining particular DIY music spaces, and particular local and translocal DIY music scenes.
I focus mainly on organizers of DIY shows, often seen by DIY participants themselves as "pillars" of local DIY music scenes, or sometimes as the embodiment, or "icons," of those scenes (individual as "the [DIY] scene"). This assertion in itself calls for the examination of non-musician DIY individuals both on material and discursive levels: to study them both as agents and "building blocks" of DIY music scenes, and at the same time, as symbolic, and contested personalities that often define the substance and boundaries of these scenes.