Page 26 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

Concepts and theories of everyday and ordinary life 17

resource for the identification work of ‘knowing how one feels’ – a build-
ing material of ‘subjectivity’.
(p. 37)
DeNora discusses a number of examples of this process and argues that:
In none of these examples, however, does music simply act upon indi-
viduals, like a stimulus. Rather, music’s ‘effects’ come from the ways in
which individuals orient to it, how they interpret it and how they place
it within their personal musical maps, within the semiotic web of music
and extra-musical associations.
(DeNora 2000: 61)
DeNora also shows in some detail how music is central to the constitu-
tion of the body and the physical self. A good example is her empirical study
of the importance of music in an aerobics class. Thus, music ‘defines the com-
ponents of a session through its tempo changes (for example, music for warm
up, core and cool down) and it also profiles the bodily movements associated
with each of these components’ (p. 92). Moreover, music is also involved in
structuring how the body is deployed during specific aerobic movements.
Music is far more than a background for those movements; it is core to how
those movements are defined. As DeNora puts it: ‘Following aerobics’ musical
changes and the ways in which real bodies interact with prescribed musical
bodily changes, bodily changes allow us to examine the body, moment by
moment, as it interacts with, and is configured in relation to, music’ (p. 93).
The aerobic body is (partly) constituted through the interaction with music,
which is just a specific example of how ‘music is, or rather can serve as, a
constitutive property of bodily being’ (p. 99).
Third, DeNora examines the way in which music is involved in the pro-
duction and reproduction of ordered social life. Such social order is produced
through a process of ‘ordering’. Thus music can be implicated in the break-
down and reconstitution of social relationships. As DeNora comments on an
interview with a woman who discussed music in the context of the breakdown
of her marriage:
Lesley describes how she began to make a deliberate musical move away
from her relationship, replacing the ‘popular jiggly’ music that she per-
ceived as within the bounds of the relationship – for example, Dire
Straits – and also the more, as she perceived it, ‘intellectual’ mode of
Radio 4, with music that her husband disliked and viewed with disap-
proval. Lesley goes on to describe how, near the end of the relationship
with her ex-husband, she would sometimes, when she was angry play a
Soft Cell song entitled, ‘Say hello wave goodbye’ (from an album called
Erotic Cabaret).
(DeNora 2000: 126–7)

The way in which television figures in such processes of relationship
breakdown and family reconstitution is also shown clearly in the work of
Gauntlett and Hill (1999). Music is also used in the ordering of the ‘ordinary’
consumption practices involved in shopping (DeNora and Belcher 2000).