| Public concerts are sites of city- and civic subject-making. The dissertation is an ethnography of Grand Performances, a nonprofit organization that presents free public concerts in a downtown corporate plaza, exemplifying efforts to create public life and a city center for Los Angeles in the context of neoliberal privatization and urban decentralization. At public concerts the city is "sounded" through performances that presume and produce urban subjects and publics based on demographics, geography, and taste, thus constituting through music and dance that which was set in motion by the urban renewal project out of which Grand Performances emerged. In coming together downtown, the segregated city is understood to have the possibility of becoming unified and harmonious, creating a public that is based increasingly on the performance and consumption of identity, a refiguring of the relationship between public and private, and a privileging of consensus rather than dissent. The chapters of the dissertation examine processes by which the public concert audience, comprised of multiple publics, becomes a unified collective, a public in itself and reflective of the diversity of the city. The recognition of a multicultural and global Los Angeles in Grand Performances' audience---of "Los Angeles at its best"---indicates how the administration of diversity can also support a space for local and translocal civic belonging. |
