My Music: Explorations of Music in Daily Life

Appendix: Music in Daily Life Guidelines

C H A R L E S K E I L Appendix Music in Daily Life Guidelines The following general instructions to interviewers were used in the spring semester of 1988, about halfway through the process of collecting the interviews . These instructions may not have been read very carefully by interviewers, but they capture the exploratory spirit of our research. Introductory Notes for the Music in Daily Life Project I have stopped looking at what we will be doing as a varietyof social science. There is nothing very precise, repeatable, predictable, verifiable, law-seeking, etc. about finding another person and talking with them about music. I'm not even sure that "science of the spirit" or what the Germans call Geisteswissenschaften is loose enough a term, but I like the way Bruno Bettclheim describes Wilhelm Windelband's definition: "The Geisteswissenschaften he called idiographic, because they seek to understand the objects of their study not as instances ot universallaws but assingular events; their method is that of history, since they arc concerned with human history and with individual ideas and values. . . . Idiographicsciences deal with events that never recur in the same form—that can be neither replicated nor predicted [butthat can be understood]."1 I like the references to spirit and to "idiographic," and one possible title for the book that I hope will result from this spring's work could be "My Music: Studies in Idioculture" because that is one way to look at what people are doing with music in this society: building an idioculture, an idiosyncratic, idiolectical , even idiotic musical world that each person can call his or her own.My first impulse and primary purpose is to celebrate the unique selection of musics to be "into" and the unique configuration of ways to be "into" those musics that emerges from each interview. Our musical life has never been more mass mediated and commodified than it is today and yet individual musical lives, as evidenced in the interviews done so far, are highly variable, very idio- and not slightly so. A second purpose, in contradictory or paradoxical relation to the first purpose , isto understand how allthese musicallives arc the same and in most of that sameness, probably "part of the problem." A hundred Walkman users may be listening to a hundred different musics, but they arc all encased in headphones Appendix I 211 and letting mediated music substitute for fall environmental and social awareness in present time. People use a wide varietyof musics as drugs to "pump up" their selves to face the day and another whole range of musics to "catharse" or "let go" of their bad moods at the end of the day. Is this really like a drug? If so, isn't music a "good" drug?These two examplesand the questions that flow from them can be multiplied many times and I don't want to evade ANYissues in the book or collection we're assembling this spring.2 I would like to urge you to keep both purposes in mind but separated and prioritized as much as possible. In other words let's focus on elaborating and celebrating each person's musical world first and foremost. Later on we can look for patterns of musical life in the U.S.A. that suggest problems and begin to explore those problems. This is a little too simple—first celebrate American individualism in the interviews,then debunk it later in an analysis—because as you are doing an actual interview and then later as you are editing and/or interpreting an interviewdone by yourself or someone elseyou will be constantly presented with choices and more choices of what to askabout next,what to leave out of a text, what to draw attention to with an interpretation. I'm suggesting that we keep the contradiction or paradox in mind, meditate on it, reformulate it various ways, read about it (D. Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, P. Slater's In Pursuit of Loneliness), but when interviewing lean toward the optimistic idioparticipatory side of the contradiction, knowing that lateron we'll be looking at the negative side of the puzzle. Somebody says,"I really love Bruce Springsteen and his music, can't help it, I get weepy over 'Born in the USA,' you know? But sometimes I wonder if I haven't just swallowed the hype about his being a working-class hero from New Jersey with the symbolicblack guy by his side, you know what I mean?" and...