My Music: Explorations of Music in Daily Life

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments In her talk on the importance of acknowledgments at a collaborative learning conference a few years ago, Elaine Maimon made it clear that all knowledge is "acknowledge": receiving, recognizing, owning, admitting , confessing, affirming that every single thing we know comes from outside us, expressing our appreciation and gratitude for other people and their unique ways of knowing the world. All of the Music in Daily Life Project could be presented as a seriesof thank you notes to each of the graduate student editors, the 40 or so interviewersand the approximately 150 people interviewed. No author can acknowledge the multiplicity of sources adequately. But what is especially unfair in the presentation of these interviewsis that the interviewershave been edited more than the interviewees, deliberatelyturned into “Q ”s so as to highlight the subject. And, of course, the editors who diminished these interviewers arc even more invisible, though their efforts to make the interviews shorter and more enjoyable to read represent the crucial step between a file drawer full of data and a book availableto a broad public eager to acknowledge what is inside. Ellen Koskoff interviewed people in depth about music in their lives over a decade before we started this project and she also developed a useful model for diagramming a person’s musical tastes in relation to the rest of their values. Her imaginative and careful work inspired the Music in Daily Life Project and is still the starting point for any further research and analysis in this area. The other starting point for our work was SUNY Buffalo student Carol Hadley’s independent study project in 1984. Her first interviews were surprising and idiosyncratic. A hundred and fifty interviewslater we still Acknowledgments / xxi haven't found ourselves filing away an interview saying, "Yeah, this is a lot like . . . .” Each person is unique. A parallel starting point was the research done by Jennifer Giles and John Shepherd at Carleton University in Ottawa; four English-speaking teenage girls in Montreal were very carefully interviewed by Giles and allof this material wasgraciously shared with us as we began our editing. Many thanks. Looking backwe are proud that this book represents amodel of collaborative work at the university.The Music in Daily Life Project consisted of two undergraduate courses to do the interviews and three semesters of graduate seminars to discuss, edit, and organize the interviews into something close to their present form. There are a great many other issues that can be explored in courses where students learn how to interview , analyze,edit and construct a text for an audience. Projects like this don't happen often because it takes time, a series of semester classes, and a supportive environment. Thanks to the American Studies Department at SUNY Buffalo—Larry Chisolm, Bob Dentan, Hester Eisenstein , Mike Frisch, BevHarrison, Rick Hill, Endesha Ida May Holland, Liz Kennedy, June License, Oren Lyons, Alfredo Matilla, Ruth Meyerowitz , John Mohawk, Francisco Pabon, BarryWhite—for providing the freedom to explore and much encouragement along the way. Joe Wetmore was only with us for the last semester, but he quickly clarified the virtues of grouping the interviews into six generations and he led the democratic forces against the “reflexives” who wanted to put more of us profs and grad students into the collection. “Isn’t the main point to hear from more people rather than from the critic and expert types again?" Well,yes. Barry Morris edited and commented insightfully for two semesters, taking special delight in thinking up new names for people, and in finding the representative quotation that summed up a basic theme. A lot of the very first impressions you get from these interviews are thanks to Barry. Nicolas Tulus, Andy Prochl, Andy Byron, AlexandriaGelcnscer, Kevin Mogg,Tony Sylvestre,YvetteMcKoy, CrystalAlbert, Rita Johnson, and LeeWysong contributed substantially to the editing work at one time or another. Mike Huber, John Frink, and John Cicchetti didfineinterviews as undergraduates and then joined the editing team for a semester. Acknowledgments I xxii A great many sparkling interviews did not make it through the many editing stages but the following students gave us a variety of material to choose from and together they created the core of this book. Many thanks to Charlie Weigl, Lynn Gowgiel, Yvette Evans, Wilma Lange, Lisa Weinberg, Gina Pasquale, Henry Hilska,Tony Grajeda,Evan Bauer, Alyson Bader, Tammy Lynn Brown, Kathy Ralabate, Mary Kay Rigney (who also interviewed children in France...