Page 25 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

16 Cultural change and ordinary life

consideration of the role of music in everyday life, which also allows an intro-
duction of an area that has tended to be relatively neglected in previous studies
of everyday life (Bull and Back 2003; Erlmann 2004; Hesmondhalgh 2002).

Music, sound and ordinary life
The following quotation taken from research where respondents were able to
comment freely on the meaning of music for them (Crafts et al. 1993: 109)
captures something of the significance of music in everyday life:

Q What does music mean to you?
A Music is just part of life, like air. You live with it all the time, so it’s
tough to judge what it means to you. For some people, it’s a deep
emotional thing, for some people, it’s casual. I turn on the radio
and it’s there in the morning; it’s there when I drive; it’s there
when I go out.
Q If it isn’t there, do you miss it?
A No.
Q So you’re not really aware that it is there?
A It’s like a companion, or a back-up noise. Just something in the
background. A lot of people turn the radio on and they’re not
listening to it for the most part, but it’s there to keep them com-
pany, it’s background noise. It’s like the TV; they leave the TV on
all the time, although it never gets watched. But it’s background,
people use it just to feel comfortable with.
Sociological work has deepened the understanding of the place of sound
and music theoretically and empirically. An excellent example of this is the
work of Tia DeNora (2000). The DeNora approach is premised in interactionist
sociology. She explores how music is a part of the constitution of the inter-
actions between people and how it plays a role in the constitution of the
identities of those people themselves. Who we are and how we engage with
other people are processes that are brought about significantly by interaction.
DeNora points out that aspects of research on youth subcultural groups
explored how music was a part of such interaction processes, and in her view a
strength of this approach was its ‘focus not on what can be said about cultural
forms, but on what the appropriation of cultural materials achieves in action,
what culture “does” for its consumers within the contexts of their lives’ (p. 6).
In seeking to strengthen theoretically the descriptive approach of Crafts
et al., DeNora considers three aspects of music’s place in everyday life: its place
in the constitution of our senses of self, or identity; its role in the con-
struction of the body and the physical self; and its place in ‘ordering’ social
relationships.
With respect to the first, DeNora shows how music is involved in the
construction of feelings, as well as preventing the onset of undesired moods
and feelings. For DeNora:
Music is not simply used to express some internal emotional state.
Indeed, that music is part of the reflexive constitution of that state; it is a