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Music in Everyday Life

The power of music to inﬂuence mood and create scenes, routines and

occasions is widely recognized and this is reﬂected in a strand of social

theory from Plato to Adorno that portrays music as an inﬂuence on

character, social structure and action. There have, however, been few

attempts to specify this power empirically and to provide theoretically

grounded accounts of music’s structuring properties in everyday experi-

ence. Music in Everyday Life uses a series of ethnographic studies – an

aerobics class, karaoke evenings, music therapy sessions and the use of

background music in the retail sector – as well as in-depth interviews to

show how music is a constitutive feature of human agency. Drawing

together concepts from psychology, sociology and socio-linguistics, it

develops a theory of music’s active role in the construction of personal

and social life and highlights the aesthetic dimension of social order and

organization in late modern societies.

T D  N  is senior lecturer at the University of Exeter. She rec-

eived the International Sociological Association’s ‘Young Sociologist’

award in 1994 and is the author of Beethoven and the Construction of

Genius (1995) as well as numerous journal articles.

Music in Everyday Life

Tia DeNora

         

The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

  

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK

40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA

477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia

Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain

Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa

http://www.cambridge.org

First published in printed format

ISBN 0-521-62206-9 hardback

ISBN 0-521-62732-X

erback

ISBN 0-511-03523-3 eBook

Tia DeNora 2004

2000

(Adobe Reader)

To my parents

John DeNora and Shirley Wood Smith DeNora

Contents

Listofﬁgurespageviii

Prefaceandacknowledgementsix

1Formulatingquestions–the‘musicandsociety’nexus1

2Musicalaﬀectinpractice21

3Musicasatechnologyofself46

4Musicandthebody75

5Musicasadeviceofsocialordering109

6Music’ssocialpowers151

Bibliography164

Index177

vii

Figures

1 Georges Bizet, Carmen, ‘Habanera’ page 9

2 Aaron Copland, ‘Fanfare for the common man’ 12

3 Franz Schubert, Impromptu in G ﬂat major 42

4 A ‘good’ aerobics session – music and beats per minute over time 94

5 ‘Don’t worr

y’ (aerobics music) 98

6 ‘Yodelling in the canyon of love’ (aerobics music) 99

7 Johann Sebastian Bach, Cantata BWV 140, ‘Wachet auf, ruft

uns die Stimme’ 154

viii

Preface and acknowledgements

On a drizzly Saturday morning in July 1998, I was sheltering under a tree

in a North London market, conducting a series of impromptu interviews

with women on the topic of ‘music in their lives’. A contact had agreed to

let me attach myself to her record stall and to vouch for me if questions

arose. During a lull, the market manager wandered o

vertoaskwhatIwas

doing. He told me he was originally from Nigeria, where, he said with

emphasis, they ‘really knew’ how to use music. The situation was diﬀer-

ent in the United Kingdom, he said, where people did not seem to be

aware of music’s powers, and did not respect its social and physiological

force. As he saw it, Europeans merely listened to music, whereas in Africa

people made music as an integral element of social life. His mother, for

example, sang certain songs as a regular part of her tasks and chores, even

culinary operations, and she made use of diﬀerent rhythms for diﬀerent

things. In Nigeria, he concluded, people had a richer and more overt

understanding of music’s powers, and a knowledge of how to harness

those powers was considered to be an important part of common sense.

By contrast, in the cold and over-cognitive climate of pre-millennium

Britain, people were considerably less reﬂexive about music as a ‘force’ in

social life.

For me, this encounter was deeply signiﬁcant. It seemed to encapsulate

so many of the issues I had been thinking about and the themes that

undergird this book. It is certainly true that music’s social eﬀects have

been underestimated in Western societies, despite the long-standing

tradition from Plato to the Parents’ Music Resource Centre devoted to

just that theme, and despite the plethora of music’s uses in daily life.

Within modern societies, music’s powers are – albeit strongly ‘felt’ – typ-

ically invisible and diﬃcult to specify empirically. I believe, as I shall argue

throughout this book, that this invisibility derives from a far more general

neglect of the aesthetic dimension of human agency. This neglect is as

common in the social sciences (with its cognitivist bias) as in the arts and

humanities (with their emphases on text-objects).

Butevenifitsoﬃcial proﬁle is not high, music’s unoﬃcial recognition

as a powerful medium is strong. Over the past two years, nearly everyone I

have spoken with about my research has had something to say on the

subject of music’s powers in their own lives, even when they were some-

times bemused by my interest in such picayune matters as whether or not

people listen to music while washing the dishes. Their comments, taken

as a whole, point to music as a dynamic material, a medium for making,

sustaining and changing social worlds and social activities. Perhaps socio-

musical scholarship’s failure to recognize music’s powers is due more to

the use of inappropriate models for conceptualizing the nature of those

powers – too often, music is thought of as a stimulus capable of working

independently of its circumstances of production, distribution and

consumption.

In this book I take a diﬀerent tack. I suggest that it is probably impossi-

ble to speak of music’s ‘powers’ abstracted from their contexts of use,

though, within cer

tain settings and in relation to par

ticular types of

actors, music’s eﬀects on action may be anticipated to varying degrees.

Indeed, thinking about the nature of musical power can help to enrich the

ways we think about other types of ‘human–non-human’ relations and the

role played by other kinds of objects and materials within social life.

The question of how music works remains opaque. Perhaps because it

is rarely pursued from the ‘ground level’ of social action, too much

writing within the sociology of music – and cultural studies more widely –

is abstract and ephemeral; there are very few close studies of how music is

used and works as an ordering material in social life. In the course of con-

ducting the research detailed in this book, I was struck repeatedly by just

how much of what I observed in relation to music’s powers could simply

not have been imagined in advance. It is ironic that, nearly without excep-

tion, discussions of music’s aﬀect have had little association with interac-

tionist sociology’s abiding commitment to the ﬁne-grained, exquisitely

practical detail of everyday life, and its focus on lived experience and lay

knowledge. A focus on music ‘in action’, as a dynamic material of

structuration, has yet to be developed. Within the social sciences, as I

discuss in the following chapters, it has been the psychologists who have

led the way to an environmental approach for socio-musical studies.

Within sociology, perhaps only Antoine Hennion’s studies of amateur

musical practices (through in-depth interviews) come close.

In short, we have very little sense of how music features within social

process and next to no data on how real people actually press music into

action in particular social spaces and temporal settings. These are large

issues, but are probably best advanced through attention to the so-called

‘small’ details illuminated by ethnographic and ethnohistorical research.

Accordingly, the arguments developed in this book draw upon a series of

x Preface and acknowledgements

ethnographic investigations of music in daily life. This work included in-

depth interviews with women of diﬀerent age groups in metropolitan

areas and small towns in the United States and United Kingdom, and

four ethnographies of music ‘in action’ within speciﬁc social settings.

(These included participant observation in aerobic exercise classes,

karaoke evenings and music therapy sessions, unobtrusive observation

of music in the retail sector and interviews with personnel in all these

settings.)

Referring to these studies, the ﬁrst aim of this book is to document

some of the many uses to which music is and can be put, and to describe

a range of strategies through which music is mobilized as a resource for

producing the scenes, routines, assumptions and occasions that consti-

tute ‘social life’. Building upon these tasks, the second aim is to relocate

music – as a type of aesthetic material – in relation to sociology’s project,

to bring it closer to the discipline’s core concerns. Chapter 1 highlights

music’s active role in social life and proposes a way of drawing together

perspectives from the American production of culture tradition, British

cultural studies and sub-cultural theory, and the so-called ‘grand’

approach to socio-musical studies as exempliﬁed by Adorno. Developing

the grounded perspective outlined in chapter 1, the second chapter out-

lines an interactionist conception of musical aﬀect that moves beyond

conundrums concerning whether music’s aﬀect is ‘immanent’ or ‘attrib-

uted’. Chapter 3 begins to put this perspective into practice by examin-

ing music’s role in relation to the construction of the self, centring on

music’s role as a technology of identity, emotion and memory. Chapter 4

considers the reﬂexive relationship between music and embodiment and

develops an interdisciplinary perspective for investigating many of the

ways in which the body – i.e., its physiological, micro-behavioural and

motivational processes – may be understood to be ‘musically composed’.

Chapter 5 considers the role played by music within social scenes and

situations, and describes how music may be used and inadvertently serve

to draw otherwise disparate individuals into temporary (albeit often

recurrent) conﬁgurations of social order – situations, scenes and institu-

tional relations. Finally, chapter

6 weaves together these di

ﬀerent strands

and argues that socio-musical studies deserve far greater prominence

within the social sciences, where they may be of considerable assistance

in articulating a theory of agency and its relation to culture. In the

twenty-ﬁrst century, at a time when aesthetic forms of ordering are

increasingly prominent, and as organizations are increasingly concerned

with producing agents as well as products, the aesthetic bases of

social life are – or at least should be – relocated at the heart of sociology’s

paradigm.

Preface and acknowledgements xi

Doing ethnographic research is always dependent upon the good will and

help of others. I would therefore like to begin by thanking the ﬁfty-two

women who were kind enough to let me interview them in the United

States and United Kingdom. I have promised them anonymity and have

changed identifying details. But I hope none the less that they will recog-

nize themselves in the discussions and transcripts and I hope I have been

as true as I could be to the spirit of what they told me when we met.

I am also deeply grateful to the retail managers and staﬀ (who must

remain anonymous) who allowed their stores to be used as a setting for

research and to the instructors and students in the various aerobics

classes studied (in particular to Kate Burnison) for the generous help they

gave. Creative music therapist Hazel Bailey kindly took time out from her

busy schedule to give advice and talk about her work with mental-health

and learning-disabled clients and Helen Tyler of the Nordoﬀ Robbins

Music Therapy Centre in London graciously oﬀered advice and the use

of the Centre’s library. Near the end of the project, conversations with

staﬀ nurse Helen Kirby of the Derriford Neonatal Intensive Care Unit

got me thinking about music’s role in neonatology and I have taken

inspiration from her ongoing practical work in that area. Thanks are due

as well to ‘Karaoke Bob’, Exeter’s well-known karaoke M.C., who

recounted a range of practical observations based on his long experience

in the karaoke world.

I would like to thank my American academic ‘hosts’ during the

ﬁeldwork phase, James Webster of Cornell University’s Music

Department and Vera Zolberg of the Sociology Department, the

Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. Jim and Vera

not only made it possible for me to be based at their institutions while I

conducted the American interviews described in this book, but were

instrumental in helping me to connect with contacts and potential inter-

viewees. For further help at the ﬁeldwork stage I would like to thank

Robert Alford, Judith Balfe, Lenore Coral, Carol Krumhansl, Trevor

Pinch, David Rosen, Margaret Webster, Neil Zazlaw, Ellen Zazlaw and

the members of the Music Colloquium, Cornell University for thoughtful

comments and discussions. I would also like to thank the member

s of the

Science Studies Seminar and the Project on Culture and Society at the

University of California, San Diego. In particular I am grateful to Bennett

Berger, Richard Madsen, Hugh Mehan, Chandra Mukerji and Jann

Pasler for very stimulating discussions.

During the year of the project on music and daily life I had the pleasure

of working with an exceptional research assistant, Sophie Belcher. I

would like to record my thanks to Sophie and note that the presentation

of empirical work used to illustrate the argument of this book, particularly

xii Preface and acknowledgements

the section on aerobic exercise, was originally hammered out in our

project meetings. I am also grateful to Sophie’s family members who

oﬀered ideas and support and even, on one occasion, allowed us to study

their ‘shopping behaviour’. Thanks to: Perry Belcher, Kate and Simon

Shattuck and Michele Anning. I would also like to thank Tessa Stone for

help in contacting interviewees in London.

I am also grateful to the following for discussion and comments on the

manuscript and for practical help at diﬀerent stages in the research

process: Paul Atkinson, Sara Delamont, Simon Frith, Sharon Hays,

Antoine Hennion, Stevi Jackson, Pete Martin, Jo McDonagh, Sharon

Macdonald, Frankie Peroni, Susan C. Scott, Robin Wagner-Paciﬁci,

Kees van Rees, John Sloboda, Paul Sweetman, Anna Lisa Tota and my

sociology of art collaborator here at Exeter, Robert Witkin. In addition,

two anonymous reviewers for Cambridge University Press were very

helpful, and I am grateful to the second reviewer who, at the last stages of

writing, directed me to newly translated essays by Adorno on the sociol-

ogy of music. I would also like to thank my editor at Cambridge, Sarah

Caro, for her help and enthusiasm for the project, and the copy-editor,

Katy Cooper, for her impeccable talent for producing clarity. I also wish

to thank Catherine Max, who was involved with the project at Cambridge

University Press in its early stages. Finally, I am, as ever, deeply grateful to

my husband, Douglas Tudhope, who read and discussed the manuscript

with me and helped me to see the relevance to the sociology of the arts of

his own area of research, ‘Human–computer Interaction’. Thanks, too, to

audiences at the BSA, ASA, ESA and ISA meetings and to seminar

groups at the universities of Cardiﬀ, York, Surrey, Southampton and

Milan.

The research for this book was supported by the Economic and Social

Research Council of Great Britain (‘Human–music Interaction – Music’s

“Eﬀects” on Feeling, Embodiment and Temporality’ (R000237013)). I

would like to thank my colleagues in the Department of Sociology at the

University of Exeter for the rotating study-leave plan that allowed me to

complete this book, and Mary Guy, Nicki Barwick and Linda Tolly for

their meticulous transcriptions of the taped interviews. Parts of chapters

3 and 5 draw on material previously published in Poetics and Sociological

Review.

Preface and acknowledgements xiii

1 Formulating questions – the ‘music and

society’ nexus

Music and society – the ‘grand’ tradition

When Howard Becker published Art Worlds in 1982, his ‘art as a form of

work’ perspectiv

e publicized a trend that had been developing in

American scholarship since the 1970s. Known as the ‘production of

culture’ approach, and developed by scholars such as Richard Peterson

(1976), Lewis Coser (1978), Janet Wolﬀ (1981) and Vera Zolberg

(1990), this new perspective provided an antidote to the brand of cultural

sociology that Bennett Berger cheerfully referred to as ‘culturology’

(Berger 1995). By this, Berger meant a kind of sociology devoted to the

‘reading’ of works or styles so as to ‘uncover’ or decode their social

content. In Berger’s eyes, the great virtue of the production approach was

its ability to unhook the study of art works from the grand but often

imprecise matter of associating styles of art with styles of social being and

with patterns of perception and thought.

In relation to music, the most notable exponent of this ‘grand’

approach was T.W. Adorno. For Adorno, music was linked to cognitive

habits, modes of consciousness and historical developments. While on

the one hand, he refers to music that ‘trains the unconscious for condi-

tioned reﬂexes’ (Adorno 1976:53), on the other hand, he speaks of music

that ‘aid[ed] enlightenment’ (1973:15). For example, the music of

Arnold Schoenberg:

demands from the very beginning active and concentrated participation, the most

acute attention to simultaneous multiplicity, the renunciation of the customary

crutches of a listening which always knows what to expect . . . it requires the lis-

tener to spontaneously compose its inner movement and demands of him not

mere contemplation but praxis. (1967:149)

Music such as Schoenberg’s, Adorno believed, had the capacity to foster

critical consciousness because its materials were organized in ways that

countered convention and habit. By avoiding musical cliché, and by

preserving dissonance instead of oﬀering musical resolution and

gratiﬁcation, progressive music had the power to challenge cognitive,

perceptual and emotional habits associated with the rise of ‘total socia-

tion’, habits that reinforced, as a matter of reﬂex, relations of power and

administration in ways that made those relations seem natural, inevitable

and real.

For Adorno, modern music stood at the end of an historical trajectory,

one that began with Beethoven. With its idiosyncratic late style and,

in particular, the manner in which it organized musical material,

Beethoven’s music exempliﬁed or held ‘truth-value’ for, as Witkin

describes it:

the subject confronted with the monolithic administrative force of modernity, of

bureaucracy. From this point on, a music that had truth-value could no longer be

governed by the illusion of harmony, but would have to recognise the true nature

of force in the condition of the subject dominated and even overwhelmed by it.

From now on, for the serious modern artist, there could be no more pretence that

individual and society were reconciled or that the sensuous life of the subject

could ﬁnd its fulﬁlment and expression in society; the authentic work of art would

henceforth have to reproduce the rupture of subject and object, of individual and

society, within itself. (Witkin 1998:67)

As one can glean from this brief description, Adorno’s work is exciting

and addressed to fundamentally critical issues in the human sciences.

Dedicated to exploring the hypothesis that musical organization is a sim-

ulacrum for social organization, Adorno’s work conceives of music as for-

mative of social consciousness. In this regard, Adorno’s work represents

the most signiﬁcant development in the twentieth century of the idea that

music is a ‘force’ in social life, a building material of consciousness and

social structure. But because it provides no machinery for viewing these

matters as they actually take place, Adorno’s work also has the power to

frustrate; his work oﬀers no conceptual scaﬀolding from which to view

music in the act of training unconsciousness, no consideration of how

music gets into action. The weakness of Adorno’s approach thus lies in its

failure to provide some means by which its tantalizing claims can be

evaluated.

This criticism may be regarded as unfair, since Adorno never claimed

to oﬀer a grounded theory of music’s eﬀects. None the less, the absence of

this grounding was certainly linked to the rejection of Adorno by musi-

cologists of the late 1970s and 1980s (with the lone exception of Rose

Subotnik 1976; 1978; 1983; 1990, who, as McClary notes (1991:175n),

was ‘severely chastised for having thus brought Continental criticism into

the discipline’), a time when his work was otherwise enjoying a resurgence

within the human sciences (Buck-Morss 1977; DeNora 1986a; Greisman

1976; 1986; Held 1984; Jay 1984; Middleton 1990; Witkin 1998). As one

writer within musicology bemoaned, ‘one cannot say a Zeitgeist reached a

2 The ‘music and society’ nexus

composer or other artist unless one can show the means by which it did’

(Lenneberg 1988:419).

Though today the terms are less hostile, less fraught with occupational

politics, the debate about Adorno’s project is very much alive. From the

viewpoint of the empirical historian, the strategy of divining social

signiﬁcance from the work itself (Berger’s ‘culturology’) is fraught with

diﬃculty. This is because it does not account, in an

y extensive manner,

for how the genie of Zeitgeist originally got into the bottle of music or,

conversely, how music’s organizing properties come to be decanted into

society. Here, quoted at length, is Peter Martin (quoting in turn Simon

Frith) on the problems associated with Adorno’s ‘grand’ approach to the

matter of music’s presence in social life:

As Frith puts it, the sociology of music, ‘has usually rested on more or less crude

reﬂection theories: the music is taken to reﬂect, to be “homologous” to, the

society or social group that makes it’.

As Frith’s remark implies, however, there are problematic aspects of the claim

that there are close connections between sound structures and social structures.

Durkheim’s notion of the conscience collective, for example, was developed in the

context of an analysis of simple, undiﬀerentiated societies, and, as I have sug-

gested, is not easy to reconcile with modern complex ones where a plurality of

contrasting cultures may coexist. Indeed, serious doubts have been expressed

about the usefulness of regarding any culture as a system, a relatively integrated

totality; there is, too, the associated danger of reifying such concepts as ‘culture’

and ‘society’, treating them as if they were real entities. And the attempt to explain

any social activities – such as the production of music – in terms of the general

characteristics of society entails a further set of diﬃculties concerning the nature

of human action. (Martin 1995:79–80)

Martin is certainly correct about the levels of diﬃculty entailed. For

example, how are we to conceive of the temporal relationship between

music and Zeitgeist? Is music merely a passive receptacle of social spirit?

Or may it take the lead in the formation of social – that is, non-musical –

constructions? Or are both music and ‘the social’ generated by some

(mysterious and perhaps mythological) generative force? It is important

to address these questions of process, to try to specify how the social comes

to be inscribed in the musical, if one is to spell out an account of how

structural aﬃnities or homologies between music and social formations

might arise and change over time. At best these issues are usually ignored;

at worst, they are fudged through some version of what Donna Haraway

(1991) calls ‘the God trick’, by which she means that the analyst poses as

if in possession of an omniscient vantage point from which to know the

social world (see also Hetherington 1998:11). And, as with early models

within the social study of science, the music-is-parallel-to-society

approach is best suited to static analytical frames – to the analysis of

The ‘grand’ tradition 3

particular composers or works – and to the description of shifts in musical

styles (from polyphony to homophony, for example). It is less equipped to

address the subtler matter of music stylistic change, moment-to-moment,

year-to-year, and within speciﬁcally circumscribed social worlds. Yet

without a descriptively informed theory of the music–society nexus, the

sociology of music, however grand its ambitions, is in peril of being

marooned, as the poet Ed Dorn once so eloquently expressed it, in ‘that

great Zero/Resting eternally between parallels’ (1978:73). The French

sociologist Antoine Hennion makes this point even more tersely: ‘it must

be strictly forbidden to create links when this is not done by an

identiﬁable intermediary’ (1995:248). Hennion’s point is eminently rea-

sonable: while music may be, seems to be, or is, interlinked to ‘social’

matters – patterns of cognition, styles of action, ideologies, institutional

arrangements – these should not be presumed. Rather, their mechanisms

of operation need to be demonstrated. If this demonstration cannot be

achieved, then analysis ma

y blend into academic fantasy and the

music–society nexus rendered ‘visionary’ rather than ‘visible’. Indeed, a

grounded theory of the music–society nexus allows conventional distinc-

tions between musical and social materials to be dissolved; in their place,

musical and social matters are understood to be reﬂexively linked and co-

produced. This matter is dealt with further in chapter 2.

Music and society – the ‘little’ tradition

In contrast to Adorno and the problems associated with his ‘grand’

approach, the production of culture or art worlds perspective established

a secure empirical footing through its focus on artistic production within

art worlds (Becker), realms (Peterson) or ‘meso’ structures (Gilmore

1987; Clarke 1990). Poised between large-scale notions such as social

structure or ideology and individual art producers, the approach made a

virtue of following ‘links’ as they w

ere forged at the ground level of action.

As Becker put it in his 1989 ‘Letter to Charles Seeger’:

Sociologists working in this [the Art Worlds] mode aren’t much interested in

‘decoding’ art works, in ﬁnding the work’s secret meanings as reﬂections of

society. They prefer to see those works as the result of what a lot of people have

done jointly. (1989a:282; see also Becker 1989b)

In emphasizing local social contexts of arts production, the sociologists

to whom Becker alludes were reacting against long-distance relationships

with their research material. Their perspectives helped to specify many of

the ways that art works were shaped by social organizations, interests,

conventions and capacities available within their realms of production.

4 The ‘music and society’ nexus

The art worlds approach thus showed its greatest potential when it

addressed the question of how society got into art in much the same way

that studies of the laboratory have illuminated scientiﬁc knowledge as a

human product (Barnes and Shapin 1979; Latour and Woolgar 1986

[1979]; Knorr-Cetina 1981; Lynch 1982). Bringing the sociology of

music closer to musicology’s traditional interest in historical detail and to

the then-burgeoning interest, within music scholarship, of ‘context

studies’ was thus one of the production of culture perspective’s greatest

strengths.

But the perspective suited some questions better than other

s. Its weak-

ness lay in its appellation, ‘production of culture’, where the realm of the

aesthetic was implicitly treated as an object of explanation but not as an

active and dynamic material in social life. Paradoxically, then, the journey

into context was also a journey away from a concern with the social pres-

ence of aesthetic materials, a journey away from the or

iginal concerns of

Adorno and others who focused on the ways in which music was active in

– and not merely determined by – social life. More recently, the sociology

of the arts has begun to return to this concern (cf. Bowler 1994; DeNora

1995a; Hennion and Grenier 1998; Witkin 1995; Born 1995; Frith

1990a; Tota 1997a). As Shepherd and Wicke have

remarked, ‘a viable

understanding of culture requires an understanding of its articulation

through music just as much as a viable understanding of music requires

an understanding of its place in culture’ (1997:34).

The challenge, in making this return, lay in how to articulate the

concern with music as an active ingredient without reverting to the

mythological realm of the ‘great Zero’, to show, symmetrically, how music

articulates social life and social life articulates music. As Simon Frith has

put it (1987:137), ‘the question we should be asking is not what does

popular music reveal about “the people” but how does it construct them’.

It is here that the originally British tradition of cultural studies,

ethnographically conceived, can be seen to provide excellent tools for the

job.

Within the classic studies of young people and their intimate involve-

ment with music, in books such as Paul Willis’s Profane Culture (1978),

and Frith’s early monographs, Sound Eﬀects (1981) and The Sociology of

Rock (1978), music’s social presence was illuminated. Rereading these

works, we can see music providing a resource in and through which

agency and identity are produced. Indeed, these studies can be seen to be

compatible with Adorno’s focus on music’s link to social being. But this

time, the music–social structure nexus was speciﬁed in a manner amen-

able to observation. Music’s structuring properties were understood as

actualized in and through the practices of musical use, through the ways

The ‘little’ tradition 5

music was used and referred to by actors during their ongoing attempts to

produce their social situations and themselves as selves.

For example, in his report on the culture of the ‘bikeboys’, Willis noted

that the boys’ preferred songs were fast-paced and characterized by a

strong beat, a pulsating rhythm. Willis resorted to the concept of homol-

ogy or ‘resonance’ to explain the relation of this music to bikeboy culture,

but his study eﬀectively evaded the ‘great Zero’ of parallelism by sho

wing

the reader how not he, Willis, but the boys themselves established this

connection between music and social life. In Profane Culture, structural

similarities between music and social behaviour – in this case small group

culture – were forged through the cultural practices and lay classiﬁcations

of the group members – the boys – themselves. They were never analysts’

constructs. As Willis put it, ‘objects, artifacts and institutions do not, as it

were, have a single valency. It is the act of social engagement with a

cultural item which activates and brings out particular meanings’

(1978:193). The boys, as Willis describes them, are active interpreters

whose group values were, ‘almost literally seen in the qualities of their

preferred music’ (1978:63). The focus is directed at the question of how

particular actors make connections or, as Stuart Hall later put it, ‘articu-

lations’ (1980; 1986) between music and social formations. Here, then, at

least for working purposes, is an interactionist and grounded ‘worlds’

version of Adorno’s original vision. The subsequent history of the

development of this perspective is, arguably, one of sociology’s greatest

contributions to the understanding of culture, in so far as it has provided

concepts and descriptions of how aesthetic materials come to have social

‘valency’ in and through their circumstances of use.

The observation that agents attach connotations to things and orient to

things on the basis of perceived meanings is a basic tenet of interpretivist

sociology. But its implications for theorizing the nexus between aesthetic

materials and society were profound. It signalled a shift in focus from aes-

thetic objects and their content (static) to the cultural practices in and

through which aesthetic materials were appropriated and used (dynamic)

to produce social life.

In the two decades that have followed the publication of Profane

Culture, the ﬁeld of audience and reception studies has advanced consid-

erably. But the early interactionist promise of these classic w

orks is too-

often muted in favour of a preoccupation with ‘what’ people think about

particular cultural works. The great contribution of Willis, Frith and Hall

was their 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. Thus,

one of the most striking (and usually underplayed) aspects of Profane

6 The ‘music and society’ nexus

Culture is its conception of music as an active ingredient of social forma-

tion. The bikeboys’ preferred music did not leave its recipients ‘just

sit[ting] there moping all night’ (1978:69). It invited, perhaps incited,

movement. As one of the boys put it, ‘if you hear a fast record you’ve got

to get up and do something, I think. If you can’t dance any more, or if the

dance is over, you’ve just got to go for a burn-up [motorcycle ride]’

(1978:73). Willis’s work was pioneering in its demonstration of how

music does much more than ‘depict’ or embody values. It portrayed

music as active and dynamic, as constitutive not merely of values but of

trajectories and styles of conduct in real time. It reminded us of how we

do things to music and we do things with music – dance and ride in the

case of the bikeboys, but, beyond this, work, eat, fall asleep, dance,

romance, daydream, exercise, celebrate, protest, worship, mediate and

procreate with music playing. As one of Willis’s informants put it, ‘you

can hear the beat in your head, don’t you . . . you go with the beat, don’t

you?’ (1978:72).

As it is used, both as it plays in real time and as it is

replayed in memory, music also serves to organize its users.

If we take them at their word, the bikeboys tell us that they enter into the

music and ‘go with it’. Music takes them from one state (sitting around)

to another (dancing as the music plays) to another (riding as the music

plays in memory). In this sense, music is a cultural vehicle, one that can be

ridden like a bike or boarded like a train. This description is metaphorical

(and the boys’ metaphors of ‘going’ and physical transformation are

themselves cultural resources for holding on to a mode of being and a set

of procedural commitments – in this case, to movement) but it is worth

noting that one of the most common metaphors for musical experience in

post-nineteenth-century Western culture is the metaphor of ‘transport’,

in the sense of being carried from one (emotional) place to another (and

indeed, at times, being ‘carried away’). Viewed in this way, music can be

conceived of as a kind of aesthetic technology

, an instrument of social

ordering. As Sarah Cohen suggests, ‘focus upon people and their musical

practices and processes rather than upon structures, texts or products

illuminates the ways in which music is used and the important role that it

plays in everyday life and in society generally’ (1993:127). And, as

Georgina Born puts it in her ethnography of IRCAM, it is necessary to

focus on ‘the actual uses of technologies [she could just as well have said

“musics”], which are often depicted in idealized, unproblematic, and

normative ways’ (1995:15). In common with all instruments and

technological devices, music needs to be understood in terms of its (non-

verbal) capacities for enabling and constraining its user(s). How, then,

can this idea be developed and how can music’s structuring powers be

illuminated at the level of social experience?

The ‘little’ tradition 7

Getting into the music

I begin with a simple, highly mundane and apparently trivial case. A few

years ago, when it was still a novelty to use a modem to access email

from home, I was writing a book review of Susan McClary’s Feminine

Endings (see chapter 2, below). Normally, I would dial up the mainframe

computer at the end of a work session, and there would be a short delay

before the connection to the terminal server was established. Though

the delay is only a few seconds, I tended to experience the wait as taking

a long time, probably because of my eagerness to read m

y mail and my

up-until-then rapid typing (and the expectation that when you press a

key you get a response). When initially instructed on how to log on, I

had been told to press the ‘enter’ key once or twice as a kind of prompt,

and so, for a number of months when logging on, I pressed the key,

somewhat impatiently, as fast as I could. Then one da

y, after I had been

reading McClary’s essay about Georges Bizet’s opera, Carmen, I found

myself pressing the enter key to the Habanera’s opening rhythm, while

simultaneously replaying the music in my head (see ﬁgure 1); and even

before Carmen had begun to sing the words, ‘L’amour est un oiseau

rebelle’, I was on the mainframe, impressed by the w

ay time had

ﬂown.

Somehow, this particular use of the Habanera became a habit. For some

months after, as I logged on to the computer, I thought of the music and

tapped the enter key to the opening rhythm, each time feeling, as I

reached my email, slight regret that I had to ‘interrupt’ the aria to read

my mail.

This simple example helps to introduce just a few of the ways in which

music can ‘get into action’, so as to organize subjects in real time. The

ﬁrst way music does this concerns the body. My body, in this example (my

index ﬁnger anyway), visibly slowed.

Not only was the number of times I

tapped the ‘enter’ key reduced, the action of my ﬁnger was realigned, or

musically entrained with the Habanera’s rhythm. In direct contrast to the

case of the bikeboys, whose music speeded them up (‘you’ve got to get up

and do something’), here, music slowed down embodied action by enlist-

ing the body into rhythm. But the Habanera’

s e

ﬀects extended beyond

bodily movement. The introduction of music changed the way I experi-

enced a ﬁve-second interval. It redeﬁned that temporal situation, trans-

lated it from ‘long time’ into ‘short time’. The music did not simply ﬁll in

the time of waiting; it reconstructed the ongoing aim of my action such

that the very thing I had been awaiting so eagerly (access to my email) was

redeﬁned in the real-time situation, as something that was interrupting

the pleasure of the music. Deﬁned in relation to the interrupted musical

phrase, the email was then re-experienced as arriving ‘too soon’. Here

8 The ‘music and society’ nexus

then, is the ﬁrst in a series of examples of music’s power to ‘compose’

situations. Consider now a second and distinctly less trivial one.

The ‘art’ of feeling secure – aesthetics of risk assessment

A transatlantic ﬂight epitomizes a peculiarly modern requirement,

namely the need to place one’s trust in technological systems. The

prospect of putting a few hundred strangers together in a hermetically

sealed, crowded and, for at least some, potentially frightening, space is,

of necessity, a prospect that confronts the problem of social order. Aware

of this, airlines attempt to mould their consumers, to form them into

‘ideal’ users, into individuals who exhibit ‘preferred’ forms of passenger

behaviour. Understandably, the airlines want no terrorists; they want

Aesthetics of risk management 9

bien

fas ci

en vain

nate,

qu’on

love can

l’ap pel

tease,

le, S’il

Its

whims

lui

con

and

moods

vient

are

de re

thou

sand

fold.

ser.

portamento

All

Rien n’y

free

est

the

way

seau

ward

breeze,

bel

Que

can

nul

shy,

peut

can

pri

voi

bold.

ser,

Love

can

c’est

Piano

Carmen

Allegretto, quasi andantino

L’a

Love

mour

( = 72)

Figure 1. Georges Bizet, Carmen, ‘Habanera’

passengers to remain mostly seated; they want passengers to obey

requests from crew and to appear calm. Accordingly, carriers deploy a

range of socio-technical devices to discipline passengers – security

checks, passports, metal detectors, x-ray machines, overhead lighted signs

and instructions from the ﬂight crew, for example. Some of these devices

are quite primitive – physical barriers, for example, of varying strength.

No one is allowed through security without a passport and ticket, or with

a weapon if it is detected in carry-on luggage. More subtly, passengers

may be less likely to try to get up from their seats when a meal cart is

blocking the aisle or the remains of a meal occupy a tray-table. Other dis-

ciplining devices appeal to passengers as ‘rational actors’, willing and able

to participate in a rule-governed basis for social order and placing their

trust in the superior knowledge claims of system professionals. When the

captain announces the possibility of forthcoming turbulence, for

example, and asks passengers to return to their seats, it is expected that

everyone – even those who had wished to go to the lavatory – will obey, o

the assumption that the airline and the ﬂight crew know what is best.

Trust in the face of contingency is a key component of any expert

system, and, as Anthony Giddens has observed, such trust ‘is inevitably in

part an article of “faith”’(1990:29). The literature on risk and risk cul-

tures has documented how faith, as the foundation of trust in expert

systems, is constituted from a ‘pragmatic element’ – for example, ‘the

experience that such systems generally work as they are supposed to do’

(1990:29), and from the manner in which expert systems are embedded

within external regulatory systems, and statistical representations of

‘safety’.

These literatures excel when they address the construction of faith in

expert systems from the point of view of general risk perception – the

safety of air travel as a general concept, for example – as spoken about in

the subjunctive (for instance, ‘would you say that air travel is safe?’). But

they are on weaker ground when they are called upon to account for the

construction of trust in particular experiences of travel (‘how do you feel

about this ﬂight?’). To ask about how individuals – atomized as passengers

in seats – come to apply their generally held precepts about safety and

security to the here-and-now of being on an aircraft is to ask about how

social order and its attendant beliefs, habits and authority structures get

instantiated in real-time circumstances. At the same time, this is a ques-

tion about how modes of agency are constructed in and through a tempo-

ral dimension, across time and space.

What, then, does it take to inculcate trust in a local sense, to instantiate

faith? What are the materials passengers use to make an interpretive

connection between the typically ‘safe’ features of ‘most ﬂights’ and ‘this’

10 The ‘music and society’ nexus

ﬂight? For it is in and through the nature of this interpretative activity that

faith is renewed and trust established. And how are reminders of this

propositional knowledge – ﬂying is, in general, safe – woven into the

texture of intra-aircraft culture so that the ontological security of the pre-

ferred passenger and his or her faith is sustained throughout the course of

the ﬂight? In relation to these questions, research on risk cultures needs to

address non-cognitive aspects of risk assessment. Within that area, a key

topic would revolve around the non-cognitive, aesthetic dimensions of

risk perception hitherto absent from the risk literatures (see Lash and

Urry 1994:5, 31–44 on this point). With regard to Giddens’

s notion of

‘faith’ in expert systems, throughout history and across culture, aesthetic

materials have been used to instil and inspire faith, as a part of the cere-

monial occasions and settings in which faith is renewed. In this sense, the

concern with the aesthetic dimension of risk perception is a species of a

far more general matter within sociology – the cultural foundations of

belief, co-ordination, conformity and subjectivity; and so, with respect to

air travel, the social sciences have missed what the airlines have known for

some time, that the here-and-now of travel depends as well on subtler

ordering devices. Among these, music is key.

Music ‘in ﬂight’

In March 1997 I ﬂew from London to California. I made note of the

musical accompaniment of my in-ﬂight experience. The hassle of board-

ing was musically underpinned with an ‘ambient music video’ – some-

thing called, ‘True North’, in which images of lakes and glaciers – cool

and muted greys, greens and blues – were accompanied by slow, low

pitched melodies and whale song. Just before take-oﬀ the mood changed.

Trumpets heralded the safety video (see ﬁgure 2). This decisive, upward-

sweeping and deﬁnite-sounding brass then faded to the background as

the ﬁrm but friendly (male) voice described what we should do in the

event of a water landing, etc. The brass returned full volume at the close

of the presentation and the plane taxied out to the runway for take-oﬀ.

There are many things that could be said about the use of brass,

the use of

a piece by an American composer (by an American airline), the fanfare

genre, of instruments associated with heraldry and the military (precision,

technology, expertise) and (thinking about gender and class (I ﬂew

economy)) about a piece by Copland entitled ‘Fanfare for the common

man’. Music is active in deﬁning situations because, like all devices or tech-

nologies, it is often linked, through convention, to social scenarios, often

according to the social uses for which it was initially produced – waltz music

for dancing, march music for marching and so on. Genre and conventional

Music ‘in ﬂight’ 11

Bass Dr.

deadened sound

Timp.

with hard sticks

Tuba

Tbns

B Tpts

Hns in F

(a2)

Very deliberately rit. a tempo

B Trumpets

Horns in F

Trombones

Tuba

Timpani

Bass Drum

Tam-tam

Very deliberately

( = ca. 52)

rit.

let vibrate

marc.

nobile

marc.

nobile

a tempo

let vibrate

Figure 2. Aaron Copland, ‘Fanfare for the common man’

formulations as they accrue over time in musical practice can in turn be

used to impart conventional understandings to the settings in which they

occur. They are part of the materials with which scenic speciﬁcity is con-

structed and perceived. Music can be used, in other words, as a resource for

making sense of situations, as something of which people may become

aware when they are trying to determine or tune into an ongoing situation.

Nearly all music exists in intertextual relation to compositional conven-

tions and works (for example, genres such as a mass, a symphony or dance

music, material procedures of harmony, melody, rhythm and so on, and

gestures of various kinds). It also exists in relation to sound structures in

the social natural worlds outside of music (sudden falling movement, tense

climbing, gently stroked keys, volume and energy levels) and in relation to

its past association with social situations, from its social patterns of

employment. Music comes to have recognizable social ‘content’ in and

through its perceived participation in these (and other) realms. The idea

that music makes

use of

ﬁgures, gestures,

styles, sonorities, rhythms and

genre, and that these are to varying degrees part of a public stock of

musical ‘understanding’, was a common part of music theory in Bach’s

day and in Mozart’s (Allanbrook 1983). In Mozart’s Vienna, composers

employed conventional music topoi of rhythmic gesture, melodic and tonal

material. Indeed, Bach’s project of instigating and reinstigating religious

faith through the aesthetic means of music (and drawing upon a shared

conventional vocabulary of musical gesture in order to do so) is, in opera-

tional terms, not so diﬀerent from what an airline does when it enlists

music to instil faith in its expert systems. Bach’s contemporary,

Mattheson, produced a catalogue of musical aﬀect (1981 [1739]). In our

own day, despite the range of compositional and reception practices, music

is still used to signal plot and mood within the ﬁlm and television indus-

tries and, there, catalogues of musical materials are still employed. If any-

thing, these industries have

only multiplied the kinaesthetic music–image

associations to which we are exposed, and which the advertising industry

draws upon to sell us everything from cars to bars of chocolate.

The musical materials of the airline’s safety video, for example, have

been used for centuries to imply – with a quick, relatively loud, tonally

centred and upward-sweeping gesture – a message along the lines of, ‘sit up

and pay attention, something important is about to happen’. They may

thus be understood as an attention-seeking gesture. At the same time, the

Copland fanfare moves at a stately moderato pace. There is nothing agi-

tated in its manner; to the contrary, it may be read as commensurate with a

graceful ‘lift-oﬀ’; it embodies the very activity it is used to signify.

Of course, other music may be equally able to command attention. And

no music is guaranteed to invoke ‘preferred’ or appropriate action frames

Music ‘in ﬂight’ 13

(music can be received with irony, naively, alternatively). What does seem

clear, however, is that there are some musical materials that would under-

mine preferred or appropriate action frames. Would an airline consider

using the ravaged atonality of Schoenberg’s Erwartung or Strauss’s Tales

from the Vienna Woods to underpin its safety video? Would the former

inculcate further passenger anxiety and the latter trivialize or possibly

perplex? Neither would convey the combination of organizational control,

formality, ceremonial gravitas, attention seeking and (musical-tonal)

security associated with the genre to which their chosen composition by

Copland is oriented, the generic musical materials of which it partakes.

But if the Copland were to be performed imprecisely, with unusual phras-

ing or dynamics, might it too be counterproductive? There is, however,

probably no music that would engender trust in the face of an aircraft

ﬁlling with smoke! Trust is kindled through gesture, both through the

choice of this – musical – gesture and through the way it is instantiated. In

addition, as Antoine Hennion has shown in relation to controversies over

baroque authenticity, works into which values are invested and which

become articles of faith (Bach’s St Matthew Passion, for example) can be

undermined according to how they are performed since ‘authenticity’ is

constructed in and through the mobilization of human and material

‘mediators’ – anything from who performs a work, to how a double-dotted

rhythm is executed, to instrument choice (Hennion 1997).

In fact, there are a good many known examples of music that have

failed in relation to air travel. According to Joseph Lanza, when

Pittsburgh Airport decided to play Brian Eno’s eerily ambiguous opus,

‘Music for airports’, over its public address system, performances were

quickly cancelled when travellers complained that the ‘background

music’ made them feel nervous. Similarly, certain numbers were deleted

from in-ﬂight radio programmes because they were associated with,

reminders of, the very matters that both passengers and crew typically

attempt to forget. ‘Stormy weather’, ‘I have a terrible feeling I’m falling

[in love with you]’ and ‘I don’

t stand a ghost of a chance’ all had to go. As

Lanza observes, ‘Music tinged with the slightest disagreeable song

content, altered tempo, stray key, or change in order can cause “the

Comfort Zone” to slip into “the Twilight Zone” ’(Lanza 1994:195).

Music as a medium of social relation

Consider a third example of how music can get into social life. Gar

y is in

his early twenties. He is unable to see or speak in words. He exhibits dis-

tress in the form of shrieks and screams when taken to (no doubt fright-

ening) public places such as shops, and sometimes he bites or scratches

14 The ‘music and society’

nexus

other people if they come too close. He was referred by a local health

authority for music therapy, often used as a ‘last resort’ for clients when

previous, more conventional, therapeutic strategies have been tried and

are deemed to have failed.

Gary is sitting in the music room with his carer, waiting for the music therapy

session to begin. He is very still. His child’s body is knotted up, his head bent over,

his legs are crossed. As the music therapist begins to play, Gary shouts, and rocks

backwards and forwards in his chair. The therapist responds to whatever noises he

makes, imitating them but also modulating them into softer, more ‘musical’

forms. The therapist then picks up a drum and bangs out a steady beat in sync

with Gary’s cries. She begins to sing, ‘Gary is rocking’, after which Gary’s rocking

becomes so intense that his carer has to hold on to Gary’s chair (he has toppled

himself over before). The therapist then holds the drum closer to Gary and he

takes her hand (the ﬁrst time he had ever done so). He then uses her hand as a

beater, and bangs the drum with it. Later, the therapist returns to the piano and

plays a low-pitched, ‘eastern’-sounding (pentatonic) melody. Gary is still rocking,

but gently now. His noises are gentler too. At the end of the session he is smiling,

making sounds that his carer identiﬁes as ‘happy’.

After the session, Gary’s therapist describes the progress he has made over

months of attending music therapy sessions. At ﬁrst, he would not allow the ther-

apist to come near him; if she did, he would bite and lash out. Now he is calmer

during sessions, more interactive, even allowing himself to touch or be touched.

(Belcher n.d.)

The therapy begins with the premise that, unlike most people,

Gary is

cut oﬀ from most media of interaction. He has few tools for world-

making, for imprinting ‘himself’ on the environment and for stabilizing

that environment (which most of us do through our everyday words and

other cultural practices such as decoration or gesture). Accordingly, the

session provides Gary with an environment in which he can interact, and

it provides him with media to which can relate and which he can

inﬂuence. It is possible that, for Gary, there is no other realm nor media in

or with which he can interact to this degree, no other environment that he

is able to structure as much as this one.

It provides an environment that

Gary can query and control through musical acts, a ground against which

his own musical acts are reﬂected back to him, and a medium with which

he can be and do things with another. For Gary, music is a vehicle that

brings him into closer co-ordinated activity with another person. It is a

device that enables him to act in (social) concert, one with which Gary

may develop his sense of self, his presence to self and other(s). The thera-

pist, through her musical-interactive skills – her considerable improvisa-

tional abilities – is providing what Gary cannot provide for himself: an

aesthetic environment and forms of aesthetic interaction capable of pro-

ducing pleasure, security and, perhaps most fundamentally, that allow for

Music as a medium of social rela

tion 15

the demonstration and self-perception of one’s self in an aesthetic

medium. Is it any wonder, then, that Gary appears to be more contented

at the end of the session?

Using music as a resource for creating and sustaining ontological

security, and for entraining and modulating mood and levels of distress, is

by no means unique to the purview of the professional music therapeutic

encounter. In the course of daily life, many of us resort to music, often in

highly reﬂexive ways. Building and deploying musical montages is part of

a repertory of strategies for coping and for generating pleasure, creating

occasion, and aﬃrming self- and group identity. Consider, for example,

Lucy, who is in her ﬁfties and works as an administrator for an interna-

tional academic organization. In the following excerpt, she is describing

her use of music in the face of the stresses and strains of daily life. On the

morning of the interview, she used music to foster a sense of inner ‘calm’.

She turned to some of the Schubert Impromptus.

Q. Can you describe the situation of listening in the front room, like maybe the

last time you listened to music in the front room?

A. This morning in fact [laughs].

Q. Oh. Excellent [laughs]. Can you just tell me it in f

airly detailed, just what

made you go in there to listen, like was it a choice or . . . ?

A. It was a choice because I was feeling very stressed this morning because

we’re in the throes of moving house and it’s, you know, we’re not, we haven’t sold

our house yet, and it’s moving, you know, and so I actively decided to put on

Schubert’s Impromptus because they were my father’s favourite – you might want

to come along to that again, because Schubert’s Impromptus have a long history

with my life – and I thought, my husband had just gone oﬀ to work and I thought

well, about half an hour before I come up here [to her place of paid work], I’ll just

listen to them. So, the speakers are [she gestures] there and there on either side of

what used to be the ﬁreplace and I sit in a rocking chair facing them, so I get the

sound in between the speakers, and I just sat there and listened [sighs, gentle

laugh]. But I needed it. It was only ten minutes or so, you know, I didn’t listen to

them all. I just listened to the bits I wanted to listen to.

Lucy goes on to describe how she entered the front room of her house

feeling ‘very stressed’. Ten minutes or so later she left feeling diﬀerent,

calmer. Here, self-administered music was a catalyst, a device that

enabled Lucy to move from one set of feelings to another over a relatively

short time span. Through reference to music, Lucy reconﬁgured herself

as a social-emotional agent. This matter is taken up in depth in chapter 3.

Conceptualizing music as a force

Music is not merely a ‘meaningful’ or ‘communicative’ medium. It does

much more than convey signiﬁcation through non-verbal means. At the

16 The ‘music and society’ nexus

level of daily life, music has power. It is implicated in every dimension of

social agency, as shown through the previous examples. Music may

inﬂuence how people compose their bodies, how they conduct them-

selves, how they experience the passage of time, how they feel – in terms

of energy and emotion – about themselves, about others, and about situa-

tions. In this respect, music may imply and, in some cases, elicit associ-

ated modes of conduct. To be in control, then, of the soundtrack of social

action is to provide a framework for the organization of social agency, a

framework for how people perceive (consciously or subconsciously)

potential avenues of conduct.

This perception is often con

verted into

conduct per se.

The ability to exploit music’s social powers is fundamental to any disc

jockey’s craft. Indeed, one of the best natural laboratories for observing

soundtracks as they are converted into social and social psychological

tracks, into action–feeling trajectories, modes of agency, is the humble

karaoke evening. Within such an event, the style and tempo of musical

numbers changes quickly; each number is chosen by performers individ-

ually. At a karaoke event, there is no preordained schedule of musical

numbers, no attempt to create a ‘grammar’ or sets of musical numbers

over the course of an evening, such as a disc jockey might seek to do.

However, at least in Britain, karaoke is often hosted by a ‘master of cere-

monies’, who may interject one or more of his own performances to tide

things over, get things going, and so on. In the course of our study of

music and everyday life we met up with one of the United Kingdom’s

most active karaoke hosts, ‘Karaoke Bob’, who was based in Exeter. Bob –

who currently holds the Guinness Book of Records title for the longest

karaoke impersonation of Elvis Presley – explained, as he saw them, the

ins and outs of karaoke as a social occupation. Here is part of what he had

to say about how quickly – from song to song (the order is usually

random, the result of who signs up for what, though Bob may interject

one or two of his own numbers at any time) – his audience adapts to and

begins to adopt musical stylistic trajectories, adjusting conduct style and

energy levels, such as when the music of Oasis encourages young men to

adopt a ‘cool’ stance and reach for a cigarette:

Like when they bring out Oasis everybody is standing there with cigarette smoke

in the eyes [one of the most popular Oasis numbers for Bob’s karaoke evenings is

entitled, ‘Cigarettes and alcohol’], they tend to love that sort of thing as much as

the Beatles. In the Beatles’ day they used to sort of stand there doing this, standing

at the bar . . . whatever music we play they tend to react as diﬀerent individuals

[i.e., through the adoption of diﬀerent personae].

[They] put on a lot of love songs and then it gets a bit boring so then I slip a

couple of rock ‘n’ roll songs in or line dancing – stuﬀ like that, basically stuﬀ in the

Conceptualizing music as a force 17

charts – then it starts to come back up again and at the end of the night if there’s

too many drunks shouting around and that then I say, ‘right, I’m going to put

some ballads on now to quiet it down again.’ So we look at the audience.

At the level of practice, music’s social eﬀects – of the kind that Bob

describes – are familiar to marketeers and social planners. In chapter 5,

music’s burgeoning role in relation to ‘social control’ and the structuring

of conduct in public is discussed. For example, clearly audible classical

music in the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal and Tyneside

railway station has been associated with major reductions in hooligan

activities (MAIL 1998; TEL 1998; NYT 1996; see also Lanza 1994:226).

In-store experiments suggest that background music can be used to

structure a range of consumer behaviour and choices – the time it takes to

eat and drink (Milliman 1986; Roballey et al. 1985), the average length of

stay in a shop (Milliman 1982), the choice of one brand or style over

another (North and Hargreaves 1997b) and the amount of money spent

(Areni and Kim 1993). In the commercial sector, where results are

assessed in the cool light of proﬁt margins, considerable investment has

been devoted to ﬁnding out just what music can ‘make’ people do.

Consider these excerpts from brochures from background music

companies:

Creating a happy and relaxed environment through the imaginative use of music

is a vital element in securing maximum turnover and ensuring that your business

has optimum appeal. Used correctly, music can inﬂuence customer buying

behaviour by creating or enhancing the image, mood and style you wish to

achieve. (Candy Rock n.d.)

Music is a powerful factor in creating your image . . . and one of the most cost-

eﬀective ways to change it. (AEI Music n.d.)

There is little doubt that music is experienced by its recipients as a

dynamic material. In interviews with music user

s, the psychologist of

music John Sloboda has shown that users highlight repeatedly the ways in

which they view music as having power over them (‘music relaxes me’,

‘disturbs me’, ‘motivates and inspires me’ (Sloboda 1992)). Similarly, in

the United States, in the ‘Music in Daily Life Project’, conducted by

Susan Crafts, Daniel Cavicchi and Charles Keil (1993), respondents

oﬀered a range of narratives about what music ‘did’ for them, albeit with

little description of their mundane musical practices and the contexts of

these practices.

The challenge is to unpack those narratives, and to resituate them as

musical practices occurring within ethnographic contexts. Just how does

music work to achieve its diverse ends? Does music make people do

things? Is it like a physical force or a drug? Will it aﬀect all its recipients in

18 The ‘music and society’

nexus

similar ways? Is it possible, not only to document music’s eﬀects, but to

begin to explain how music comes to achieve these eﬀects? And, ﬁnally,

what part does a focus on music’s mechanisms of operation form within

sociology’s core and critical concerns with order, power, and domination

or control? It is time to reclaim the matter of music’s powers for sociology.

Relations of music production, distribution and use

One of the ﬁrst issues this project needs to face is the matter of how music

is produced and distributed within environments – the who, where, when,

what and how of sonic production and reproduction.

This matter is crit-

ical in modern times where mechanically reproduced, mass-distributed

music is as ubiquitous as temperature control and lighting. As Lash and

Urry have observed (1994:54), the concept of ‘expert systems’ is applica-

ble beyond the realms of social science, techniques of self-therapy and the

environment. It applies as well to the aesthetic realm, where ‘the use of

ﬁlm, quality television, poetry, travel and painting as mediators in the

reﬂexive regulation of everyday life’ is also pertinent. The salience of such

systems can be seen perhaps most acutely in relation to particular social

groups. During an ethnography of high street retail shops I was intrigued

to learn that the larger of the national and global outlets not only play the

same music at precisely the same times of day, but they do so in order to

structure the energy levels of staﬀ and clientele. In principle, one should

be able to enter any one of these stores at any moment in any branch in

the United Kingdom and the music playing should be (or at least is

intended to be) identical. At a time when public spaces are increasingly

being privatized, and when ‘people management’ principles from

McDonald’s and Disneyland are increasingly applied to shopping pre-

cincts, sociologists need to focus much more closely on music’s social

role. Here, the concern with music as a social ‘force’ – and with the rela-

tion of music’s production and deployment in speciﬁc circumstances –

merges with a fundamental concern within sociology with the interface

between the topography of material cultural environments, social action,

power and subjectivity. This literature and the contribution it can make to

socio-musical studies is discussed in chapter 2 and again in chapters 5

and 6.

Consider again the examples discussed so far. In one, an individual

(myself ) replayed in memory a popular aria in a way that reconﬁgured the

experience of a temporal interval. In another, a group of individuals on an

aircraft are exposed to music chosen expressly for its perceived ability to

promote a particular image and to structure social mood. In a third, a

therapeutic client makes whatever ‘music’ he can while a music therapist

Music production, distribution and use 19

weaves that music into a larger musical tapestry and mode of interaction.

In a fourth example, an individual engages in a kind of do-it-yourself

music therapy, locating and listening to a desired recording as part of her

everyday regulation and care of herself. In a ﬁfth example, a karaoke host

alters the energy levels and social inclinations in a pub by interjecting

strategically chosen numbers of his own. In the ﬁnal examples, transport

stations and shops draw upon ‘expert’-designed music systems to encour-

age organizationally preferred forms of conduct. In all of these examples,

music is in dynamic relation with social life, helping to invoke, stabilize

and change the parameter

s of agency, collective and individual. By the

term ‘agency’ here, I mean feeling, perception, cognition and conscious-

ness, identity, energy, perceived situation and scene, embodied conduct

and comportment.

If music can aﬀect the shape of social agency, then control over music

in social settings is a source of social power; it is an opportunity to struc-

ture the parameters of action. To be sure, there are occasions when music

is perceived as something to be resisted. The degree of participation in

the production of a ‘soundtrack’ for ongoing (and future) action, the rela-

tions of music production, distribution and consumption, is thus a key

topic for the study of music’s link to human agenc

y. This hitherto-ignored

topic is focused on the social distribution of access to and control over the

sonic dimension of social settings.

The second topic for a sociology of musical power is less straightfor-

ward, despite the attention it has received within cultural theory. It con-

cerns the matter of how to specify music’s semiotic force. In what way

should we specify music’s link to social and embodied meanings and to

forms of feeling? How much of music’s power to aﬀect the shape of

human agency can be attributed to music alone? And to what extent are

these questions about music aﬃliated with more general social science

concerns with the power of artefacts and their ability to interest, enrol and

transform their users?

20 The ‘music and society’ nexus

2 Musical aﬀect in practice

What we have said makes it clear that music possesses the power of pro-

ducing an eﬀect on the character of the soul.

(Aristotle, The Politics, 1340a)

It is a pervasive idea in Western culture that music possesses social and

emotional content, or that its semiotic codes are linked to modes of sub-

jective awareness, and in turn, social structures. Equally pervasive,

however, is the view that music’s social force and social implications are

intractable to empirical analysis. At the level of the listening experience,

for example, music seems imbued with aﬀect while, at the level of analy-

sis, it seems perpetually capable of eluding attempts to specify just what

kind of meaning music holds and just how it will aﬀect its hearers. The

point of this chapter is to explore the ‘gap’, as John Rahn once put it

(1972:255), ‘between structure and feeling’, and to derive from it an

ethnographically oriented, pragmatic theory of musical meaning and

aﬀect, one located on an overtly sociological plane. Such a theory empha-

sizes music’s semiotic force as the product of what can be called

‘human–music interaction’.

The interactionist critique of semiotics – overview

This chapter considers musicological readings of works, socio-linguistic

conceptions of meaning in use, and social science perspectives on

material culture. Its aim is to dra

w these perspectives together and to

propose a theory of musical aﬀect in practice. The argument can be

summarized as follows: implicit in much work devoted to the question of

musical aﬀect is an epistemological premise. This premise consists of the

idea (albeit unacknowledged) that the semiotic force of musical works

can be decoded or read, and that, through this decoding, semiotic analy-

sis may specify how given musical examples will ‘work’ in social life, how,

for example, they will imply, constrain, or enable certain modes of

conduct, evaluative judgements, social scenes and certain emotional

conditions. Following this premise, the logical role for socio-musical

analysis is semiotics, and the analyst’s task may be conﬁned to the

consideration of aesthetic forms; music’s users thus hardly need to be

consulted. There is no need, in other words, for (time-consuming) ethno-

graphic research. This semiotic conception of socio-musical analysis is

what Bennett Berger (1995) (discussed in chapter 1) described as ‘cultur-

ology’. It also underpins Adorno’s way of working, and helps to explain

why he felt qualiﬁed to disparage jazz, for example, and why he so

exasperated Ber

tolt Brecht, who once observed, ‘he never took a trip in

order to see’ (quoted in Blomster 1977:200). This semiotic protocol is

prevalent in socio-musical studies. It is usually devoted to what is often

referred to as ‘the works themselves’.

In what follows, it is argued that semiotic approaches, conceived in this

manner, possess limita

tions. Their limits derive from a particular type of

theoretical shortcut taken by semiotic analysts as they slide from readings

of works to discussions of the social impact of those works. This shortcut

uses the analyst’s interpretations of music’s social meanings as a resource

instead of a topic. That is, they often conﬂate ideas about music’s aﬀect

with the ways tha

t music actually works for and is used by its recipients

instead of exploring how such links are forged by situated actors (particu-

lar audiences or recipients as, for example, in Willis’s study of the bike-

boys described in chapter 1). From the comfort of an ergonomically

designed armchair, poised in front of a lap-top computer in an oﬃce with

a view, the analyst duly ‘informs’ readers about music and what it will do

– for example, the forms of feeling it may engender, or the social struc-

tures to which it gives rise or from which it emanates.

To be sure, not all semioticians envisioned such analytical powers for

themselves; as Barthes once observed, his own responses to Vivaldi might

(but need not necessarily) align with the responses of others; they were

‘his’ responses, visceral, proximate, and bound up with the temporal weft

of his being. In this sense, Barthes captures the way in which ‘good’ semi-

otics is akin to criticism and appreciation but may not have the power to

tell us about how music works in social life. When it exceeds these

bounds, semiotics risks a kind of covert objectivism, a presumption that

music’s meanings are immanent, inherent in musical forms as opposed to

being brought to life in and through the interplay of forms and interpreta-

tions.

This tendency – to hypostatize the meaning and social consequences of

aesthetic forms, as discussed by Morley in relation to media studies

(1980:162) – is deeply ironic given that semiotic work within the ar

often aligns itself with ‘postmodern’ conceptions of meaning-as-

constructed, meaning-as-emergent, and with deconstructions of

22 Musical affect in practice

knower–known, subject–object relations. One of the hallmarks of these

conceptions is the idea that the meanings of things are made manifest in

and through attempts to interpret and describe them, in and through the

ways actors orient themselves in relation to them. The ethnomusicologist

Henry Kingsbury makes this point clearly when he says, ‘musicological

discourse is not simply talk and writing “about music”, but is also consti-

tutive of music’ (1991:201). He suggests that objects we describe may

lend themselves to being framed in a variety of w

ays; describing or

deﬁning an object is therefore an act of selecting, honing and ﬁltering a

particular version of that object’s implications. The act of description

thus co-produces itself and the meaning of its object. With regard to music,

then, the matter of its social signiﬁcance is not pregiven, but is rather the

result of how that music is apprehended within speciﬁc circumstances.

While these points are by now commonplace within literary theory, eth-

nomethodology and constructivist perspectives (as, for example, in

science studies), they are curiously often abandoned when analysis is

applied to art ‘objects’.

Within certain and more traditionally grounded segments

of musi-

cology, a concern with reception is often misconstrued as a disinclina-

tion to address music’s ‘intrinsic’ properties, whether these concern

structures, values or connotations. For example, it is often suggested

that by turning the analytical lens on to music consumption one aban-

dons the ‘music itself ’ (note again that phrase, ‘the music itself ’, as if

under the specialist’s analytical razor we would arrive at the ‘core’ or

essence of music’s semiotic force). On the contrary, a reﬂexive concep-

tion of music’s force as something that is constituted in relation to its

reception by no means ignores music’s properties; rather, it considers

how particular aspects of the music come to be signiﬁcant in relation to

particular recipients at particular moments, and under particular cir-

cumstances. The point, then, to be developed below, is that music

analysis, traditionally conceived as an exercise that ‘tells’ us about the

‘music itself’, is insuﬃcient as a means for understanding musical

aﬀect, for describing music’s semiotic force in social life. For that task

we shall need new ways of attending to music, ones that are overtly

interdisciplinary, that conjoin the hitherto separate tasks of music

scholars and social scientists.

Popular music studies have always been concerned with the matter of

how music is experienced by real people (see Frith 1990b). Indeed, the

very reason pop music culture is, in Willis’s terminology, ‘profane’ is that

it has traditionally been appropriatable, open to reinterpretation and

determination in and through use; it has possessed all the attributes of the

Interactionist critique of semiotics

non-sacred (despite various attempts by fans and critics to canonize

particular pop music works and performers, and to specify ritual

appropriations). Because of this, the emphasis within popular music

studies on the experience and appropriation of music has ﬂowed more

naturally (see Shepherd and Wicke 1997:18; Frith 1990b); such an

emphasis has neither had to deal with, nor been regarded as hostile to,

canonic discourse and the idea of musical ‘autonomy’, both of which are

products of late-eighteenth-century cultural practice (W. Weber 1984;

1992; DiMaggio 1982; DeNora 1995b).

The project proposed here, in this chapter and beyond, diﬀers mark-

edly from musicology’s traditional professional concerns. It is to

conceptualize musical forms as devices for the organization of experi-

ence, as referents for action, feeling and knowledge formulation. Such a

project begins with concerns outlined by thinkers such as Aristotle and

Adorno and seeks to convert them into a set of researchable questions.

This project diﬀers fundamentally from a concern with what music

signiﬁes, what it may inculcate. It also sidesteps the perennial wrangle,

recently summarized adroitly by Shepherd and Wicke (1997), concern-

ing whether musical meanings are ‘immanent’ or ‘arbitrary’. Drawing

inspiration from recent work in science and technology studies and from

socio-linguistic theory, it seeks to circumvent the dichotomous manner in

which questions of music’s aﬀect have been posed (‘music’ on the one

side, ‘aﬀect’ on the other) and to evade the various forms of reductionism

these interrogative formulations presuppose of their answers (for

instance, ‘music plays no role in determining aﬀect’ versus ‘music pre-

scripts aﬀect’). For while music’s semiotic force can be seen to be con-

structed in and through listener appropriations, a focus on how people

interact with music should also be concerned with, as I have already sug-

gested, the role music’s speciﬁc properties may play in this construction

process. Thus, even though they cannot be ‘read’ for the forms of social

life that issue from or within them, music’s materials provide resources that

can be harnessed in and for imagination, awareness, consciousness,

action, for all manner of social for

mation.

To begin to illustrate this point I draw on Susan McClary’s classic dis-

cussion of Carmen (1991; 1992), which exempliﬁes the virtues of semiotic

analysis but which also helps to bring into relief the point at which atten-

tion to ‘the music itself’ is insuﬃcient as a means of accounting for

music’s semiotic force, for its aﬀect and power in social life. McClary is by

no means the only semiotician within musicology; there are many excel-

lent works concerned with musical representation (for example, Charles

Ford (1991); Lawrence Kramer (1990; 1997); Philip Tagg (1991);

Gretchen Wheelock (1992)). Her work is dealt with here only because it

24 Musical affect in practice

makes what are probably the boldest claims for musicology’s intervention

in wider socio-cultural and epistemological issues.

Mapping gender on to music and music on to gender – the

case of Carmen

Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen, ﬁrst performed in Paris in 1874, is about a

soldier’s infa

tuation with a gypsy. The plot revolves around a nineteenth-

century, patriarchal obsession – ‘licentious’ woman leads ‘respectable’

man to ruin and, in the denouement, becomes his victim. According to

McClary’s pioneering mode of analysis, the music of Carmen helps to

underscore, make manifest or enhance certain sexual stereotypes in

circulation at

the time of the opera’s production and developed through

the opera’s libretto. McClary shows, for example, how the libretto is

musically enhanced in a manner that is by no means obvious to the

opera’s audience but that works, none the less, subliminally upon hearers

and their ability to respond, in non-cognitive ways, to musical material.

McClary focuses upon the alloca

tion of musical material and the ways

in which this material is mapped, within Carmen, on to the opera’s char-

acters or roles. This musical division of labour helps the opera’s recipients

to identify characters socially and – equally importantly – social-

psychologically. Throughout the opera, for example, Carmen’s arias are

cast in dance formats (Habanera; Seguidilla), ones that give priority to

musical pulse and, accordingly, Carmen’s body (in the Seguidilla and

elsewhere she vocalizes, dispensing with words – the idea being to signify

her embodiment over and above her rational faculties). Within the

canonic paradigm of nineteenth-century music aesthetics and its ideolog-

ical excision of the body in ‘absolute’ music, dance forms are constituted

as ‘lower’ order genre. In addition, Carmen’s musical material is highly

chromatic (using the notes in between the do-re-mi notes of the scale –

see ﬁgure 1) and is therefore unstable because it creates tonal ambiguity

(recall that the ‘Fanfare’ discussed in chapter 1 – used by an airline as the

theme for its safety video – employed a musical discourse that reaﬃrmed

the tonal centre and hence was an embodiment of tonal stability).

Musically, then, the character of Carmen may be construed as low

status, deviant, sensual and disorderly. The aesthetic material of music –

crucial to her embodiment as a character within the opera’s plot – can be

seen as active in the construction of her imagined forms of agency; she is

cut oﬀ, musically, from the discourses of high culture and musical

respectability. Her position here is further consolidated against the

musical foil of a second female character, Michaela, the demure ‘good

girl’ from Don Jose’s village, who plays the role of his potential saviour. A

Gender and music – Carmen 25

soprano to Carmen’s lower mezzo voice, Michaela’s melodies are full of

tonal certainty; indeed, they rarely stray far from the ‘home’ or tonic tone.

They are also rhythmically straightforward, their pulse unemphasized

(few dotted rhythms, no syncopation). Her accompaniment consists of

arpeggios (the harp is a traditionally feminine instrument and also the

instrument conventionally associated with angels). Comparing the two

female parts in terms of musical material alone, it is possible to see how

the distinction between nice, steady girl and unpredictable and slipper

woman is established through the medium of sound.

McClary’s brilliance, her great achievement in the work on Carmen,

was to show her readers how music is produced and consumed as a

resource with which to elaborate interpretations about extra-musical

matters. Her work shows us how music is by no means iner

t, how it helps

to construct our perception and imagination of non-musical matters –

social character and status, pleasure, longing and so forth. The question

of how a composer – in this case, Bizet – draws upon conventional

musical materials to frame or comment upon a text is not dissimilar from

the way in which music may be used by other types of actor

s or agents as

a framing device (as, for example, in the airline safety video). In both

types of use, music is employed as a way of enhancing its recipients’ sense

of what is happening; in both types of use, music provides a potential

map for making sense of the thing(s) to which it is attached. In this way,

music can be understood as providing non-cognitive resources to which

actors may orient and that they may mobilize as they engage in inter-

pretive action, as they formulate knowledge and aesthetic stance in real

time. It is worth repeating that this process is by no means always

conscious.

Thus, by describing the ways in which conventional musical gestures

and devices are enfolded into particular works and then mapped on to

non-musical matters, critical analysts such as McClary have illuminated

some of the ways in which musical works stand in intertextual relation to

the history of conventional musical practices and ho

w these practices may

be mobilized to non-musical eﬀect. This musical discourse analysis pro-

vides the groundwork to more overtly sociological programmes of

research, dealing with the question of how listeners draw upon musical

elements as resources for organizing and elaborating their own percep-

tions of non-musical things, whether these things are the perception of an

opera’s characters or the perception of a particular plane journey as ‘safe’.

We may infer, according to McClary, that Michaela is ‘good’ (albeit also

perhaps slightly boring) because her musical material is highly predict-

able, and that Carmen is ‘base’ because her musical material is tethered to

bodily pulse and dance rhythms. In short, music provides a resource for

26 Musical affect in practice

interpretation, one that can be referred to for the ongoing creation and

sustenance of non-musical matters.

This matter harks back to Hall’s concern with how articulations are

made between cultural and social formations, and to Willis’s description

of links between music and social values. Just as Willis’s bikeboys looked

to music in order to map or elaborate their values and activities over the

course of an evening (see chapter 1), so we, as recipients of Carmen,may

take account of Bizet’s deployment of music to reach an understanding of

the opera’s characters and storyline. In both cases, musical materials

provide parameters (stylistic, physical, conventional) that are used to

frame dimensions of experience (interpretation, perception, valuation,

comportment, feeling, energy). This framing is central to the way in

which music comes to serve as a device for the constitution of human

agency. Musical framing occurs when music’s properties are somehow

projected or mapped on to something else, when music’s properties are

applied to and come to organize something outside themselves. Using the

notion of framing as a starting point, it is possible to investigate how

actors of all kinds forge links between musical materials and non-musical

matters, whether at the level of musical production (for example,

composition – Bizet’s mapping of music and gender) or at the level of

consumption (for example, interpretation – our impressions of the

opera’s characters).

There is a good deal more to this project, however, than is comprised

by musicology’s conventional concern with the musical ‘object’. Indeed,

exclusive focus on the music itself is problematic. The problems associ-

ated with such a strategy highlight why semiotic analysis is not suﬃcient

as a means of addressing the question of music’s aﬀect in practice, music’s

role in daily life. This argument can be advanced by considering two

related issues.

First, focus on music’s ability to make manifest or clarify an opera’s

libretto cannot ignore, if it is to be a balanced view, the related topic of

how the music’s meaning or force is simultaneously made manifest

through its intertextual relationship with (a v

ariety of ) non-musical

things, for example, the opera’s libretto. As Shaun Moores puts it in his

survey of audience research (quoting Richard Johnson): ‘the reality of

reading is inter-discursive’ (Moores 1990:15). Sociologists Kees van Rees

(1987) and Anna Lisa Tota (1997a; 1999) have made similar arguments

regarding the construction of an art work’s identity (meaning, value and

so on). In case studies of, respectively, literary and theatrical value, they

show how the constitution of an art work’s social meanings proceeds in

relation to a range of interpretive resources, nearly all of which later come

to be hidden as the ‘work itself’ is hailed as giving rise to the very things

Gender and music – Carmen 27

that were attributed to it. Among the resources for interpretation of

musical works are textual documents (for example, programme notes and

libretto in the case of opera), critical reception, ongoing discussions and a

variety of reappropriations at the levels of production and reception ( Tota

1997a; 1997b; 1999). These resources may provide maps or grounds

of their own, against which music’s meaning and force are in turn

conﬁgured. To put this simply, when we are confronted with a kinaes-

thetic medium such as opera,

we may look to the music for cues about

how to interpret character and plot, and, simultaneously, look to the plot

and characterization to make sense of the music. (We may also look to any

number of other things such as programme notes, particular production

qualities, location of performance and so forth (DeNora 1986b).)

Examples of musical self-borrowing, where the same music is used to

signify diﬀerent things (when it is located against the ground of diﬀerent

contexts), make this point quite clear (see Barzun 1980 and throughout

this book for examples of self-borrowing). Musical and textual meaning

are interrelated, co-productive; the speciﬁc properties of each may be

used – by a sense-making observer – to clarify the other. The ‘restful’

tones of the Barcarolle from Oﬀenbach’s The Tales of Hoﬀmann were orig-

inally conceived as the ‘Goblin’s song’ in Die Rheinnixen, for example

(Barzun 1980:17). It is therefore not possible to speak of and decode the

‘music itself ’, for music’s semiotic capacity results from its intertextual

relation to many other things. One of these things is the framework plied

upon music by the analyst her/himself.

It is therefore necessary to consider the matter of how an analyst comes

to identify music’s signiﬁcance and aﬀect. Considering this point helps to

highlight again why semiotic analysis is not suﬃcient as a means of

addressing music’s aﬀect in practice. For example, just how far may the

analyst go in determining music’s semiotic force, its aﬀect and its social

eﬀect? And what methods may he or she use, legitimately, for this task?

There is a tacit shift in many semiotic ‘readings’ of music, McClary’s

included, from description of musical material and its social allocation to

the theorization of that material’s ‘wider’ signiﬁcance and cultural

impact. This is an epistemologically naive move. It occurs when an

analyst substitutes his or her own interpretations or responses to the

music for more systematic evidence that the music’s semiotic properties

and its aﬀects ‘pre-exist’ analysis, that they are ‘out there’, waiting to be

perceived or uncovered. In this regard, McClary is much more careful

than many; she would appear to conceive of her task as consisting of the

observation of conventions and codes tapped by composers for the

musical rendering of social and social psychological matters. The danger,

however, of this approach is always present; it lies in a tendency to slide

28 Musical affect in practice

between, on the one hand, the analyst’s personal responses to music and,

on the other, reference to catalogues of musical devices – a musical equiv-

alent of speech act theory. This slippage is problematic because the ways

in which music partakes of patterns and conventions at the moment of

production (even assuming such a matter can be speciﬁed) by no means

guarantees the ways in which it is appropriated and so comes to be mean-

ingful in particular social circumstances. (The moment of production is

never automatically isomorphic with the moment(s) of consumption.)

Hence, and despite the brilliance of her observations (for McClary’s

powers to illuminate music against the ground of her own interpretations

are considerable), even McClary exceeds the musicologist’s remit. This

transgression is clearest in statements such as the following:

The aspects of Carmen I have just discussed – namely these particular construc-

tions of gender, the ejaculatory quality of many so-called transcendental

moments, the titillating yet carefully contained presentation of the feminine

‘threat’, the apparent necessity of violent closure – are all central to the great tradi-

tion of nineteenth-century ‘Absolute Music’. We can easily ﬁnd both the

characterizations and plot lines of Carmen, Salome, or Samson et Dalila exquisitely

concealed in the presumably abstract, word-less context of many a symphony.

(1999:67)

The mode of explication becomes dangerously attenuated when

moments are speciﬁed where such matters as ‘violent closure’ are dis-

closed in these ‘presumably abstract’ contexts. For example, consider the

following, which draws inspiration from the Adrienne Rich poem, ‘The

Ninth Symphony of Beethoven understood at last as a sexual message’

(Rich 1994 [1973]:43):

The point of recapitulation in the ﬁrst movement of Beethoven’s Ninth

Symphony unleashes one of the most horrifyingly violent episodes in the history

of music . . . The entire ﬁrst key area in the recapitulation is pockmarked with

explosions. It is the consequent juxtaposition of desire and unspeakable violence

in the moment that creates its unparalleled fusion of murderous rage and yet a

kind of pleasure in its fulﬁlment of formal demands. (McClary 1991:128)

This reading is attenuated because it is not anchored in anything beyond

the analyst’s identiﬁcation of connotations. Identifying abstractions such

as ‘the feminine’ or ‘the masculine’, ‘violence’ or sadistic ‘pleasure’ (or for

that matter any type of non-musical content) and perceiving these things

‘in’ the music has no ground outside of what the analyst says. It is there-

fore indistinguishable from simple assertion, from an ‘I’m telling you, it’s

there’ form of analysis. Such a strategy is impossible to validate and

impossible to reﬁne. We may agree or disagree with it; we may, depending

upon the analyst’s rhetorical skill, come to perceive what the analyst per-

ceives (that it is ‘horrifying’ or ‘pockmarked with explosions’).

Gender and music – Carmen 29

To be sure, McClary’s rhetorical skills are considerable. In the discus-

sion of Beethoven, she brings into the vortex of ‘analysis’ linguistic

resources for perceiving Beethoven’s work, ones that map on to his work

certain analogies and metaphors that are particular ‘ways of seeing’ the

musical object, that provide a frame for the music and so oﬀer the reader

a discourse location, a perspective for viewing the musical works. This

strategy, which consists of a kind of linguistic legerdemain, helps to frame

the reader’s perception of her analytical object, so that the qualities per-

ceived in the music itself are in fact ones that have been attributed to it.

This is what Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple meant when she uttered the

phrase, ‘they do it with mirrors’.

By this I mean that McClary ‘tells’ us what the music connotes, ‘tells’

us the structures of consciousness and practical habits to which it is

homologous, but fails to locate the mechanism that ‘permits’ her (as

Hennion puts it – see chapter 1, above) to claim that this is so. Apart from

her own recognition (that is, articulation) or mapping of Beethoven’s mis-

ogynous musical practice, she identiﬁes no ‘mediator’ or accountant for

her claim. Instead, her ‘analysis’ provides a prescription through which

the musical object may be perceived. In light of her framework, we also

may perceive what she perceives and, fallaciously, make the assumption

that it was ‘there all along’. This strategy has been ably described by soci-

ologists of epistemology such as Dorothy Smith in her famous 1978 essay,

‘K is mentally ill’ (in Smith (1992)), by Steve Woolgar in his work on the

production of scientiﬁc knowledge (1988) and by Hugh Mehan on oracu-

lar reasoning in the context of a psychiatric exam (1990). Such a strategy

may occasionally win over readers since it prepackages their interpretive

work – it provides a guide for ﬁnding in the ‘music itself’ the very things

analysis has reﬂexively brought to bear upon it.

As Antoine Hennion (1990; 1993; 1995) suggests it is impossible to

speak of music ‘itself ’ since, as observed by Kingsbury (quoted above) all

discourses ‘about’ the musical object help to constitute that object. The

analyst exists in reﬂexive relation to the object of analysis. None the less,

as Hennion suggests, this reﬂexivity need not provide a cause for analyt-

ical despair. It is still possible to speak about musical materials – if not

‘works themselves’ – in relation to matters of value, authenticity, meaning

and eﬀect. To do so, however, requires us to identify not what the work, as

a bounded object, means, or does in itself, but rather, how it comes to be

identiﬁed by others who refer to or attend to (and this includes non-

discursive, corporeal forms of attention) its various properties so as to

construct its symbolic, emotive or corporeal force. Such a strategy

ensures that interpretation of music is not used as a resource for, but

rather a topic of, investigation. Interpretive work and/or many other

30 Musical affect in practice

forms of mediation serve as accomplices to the work’s meanings, to its

eﬀects. Thus, it is possible to speak of the content or eﬀects of musical

works, but never to speak of those matters in relation to (that standard

phrase within arts sociology) ‘the works themselves’. For the work ‘itself ’

cannot be speciﬁed; it is anything, everything, nothing. The social iden-

tity of the work – like all social identities – emerges from its interaction

and juxtaposition to others, people and things. It is underdetermined by

‘the work’. Thus,

McClary – and perhaps many listeners –

may hear

Beethoven in particular ways but these hearings are neither inevitable nor

derived from ‘the music itself’; they are the product of mediating dis-

courses and the instructions these discourses provide for music’s percep-

tion. When these instructions are followed, the phenomenon may come

to appear real,

authentic, true and so forth, for all practical purposes as an

article of faith. This is what Hennion means when he refers to ‘la passion

musicale’ (1993; Hennion and Gomart 1999).

Simply put, a sociology of musical aﬀect cannot presume to know what

music causes, or what semiotic force it will convey, at the level of recep-

tion, action, exper

ience. Sociologists have shown how not even proposi-

tional social rules (of etiquette, for example) can be fully known and

determining of actual social practice, since the very ‘telling’ of the rules is

itself an interactive and world-making resource (Barnes 1982; Wieder

1974). This point applies with perhaps even greater force to music where

the ‘telling’ of music’s aﬀect, its connotations and its implications for

forms of social life may be understood as secured through the ways

composers and listeners make connections between music’s materials

and other, non-musical things. To circumvent this project by pointing to

what music represents and how it will structure perception, is to take the

kind of theoretical short cut described above. That short cut consists of

substituting an analyst’s understanding of music’s social meanings for an

empirical investigation of how music is actually read and pressed into use

by others, how music actually comes to work in speciﬁc situations and

moments of appropriation. It is worth noting that, within current psy-

chology of music, a similar critique has been launched against the idea

that music’s role in social life cannot be deduced by studying music

reception within the white walls of the laboratory setting. Instead, there is

a trend in favour of observing music appropriation in situ because, as

described above, music’s semiotic force cannot be derived from the music

itself:

The relationship between music and the listening situation also has important

theoretical consequences. If the situation mediates responses to music and vice

versa, then it is only possible to arrive at a comprehensive explanation of music lis-

tening behaviour by carrying out investigations in the context of the everyday

Gender and music – Carmen 31

environments and activities in which we are conventionally exposed to music: the

‘social vacuum’ that typiﬁes most laboratory research may indeed be inadequate.

(North and Hargreaves 1997c:312)

How is music’s social power generated? The sources of

semiotic power

The tendency to take the short cut described above to account for music’s

social eﬀects through reference to the music itself, is by no means unique

to the discipline of musicology or experimental psychology. It is a staple

within sociology too. For example, in their enthusiasm to examine

musical aﬀect, Catherine Harris and Clemens Sandresky argue that:

Music plays a remarkable role in communicating a notion of the ‘character’ or

style of emotional expression of a particular people, nationalities and historical

periods. It has symbolized collective feelings of grief and joy, excitement and

despair . . . the list could go on. Some examples are in order . . . The exuberance of

our national anthem, the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’, gives form to one aspect of

patriotic feeling; the quieter radiance of ‘America’, another. When sung with

conviction, who among us can resist a feeling of pride and community.

(1985:296)

The popular music scholar Richard Middleton has intervened promis-

ingly in this area with an institutional theory of meaning ‘in’ music,

namely the idea that certain musical works may accumulate long-stand-

ing, widely accepted connotations, ones that, for all practical purposes,

arise from the musical works ‘themselves’. In this respect, Middleton

comes closest, perhaps, of the writers considered so far in this chapter, to

Hennion’s notion that particular conﬁgurations of meaning (value,

authenticity, aﬀect) can be stabilized through ritual procedures and prac-

tices over time:

[H]owever arbitrary musical meanings and conventions are – rather than being

‘natural’, or determined by some human essence or by the needs of class expres-

sion – once particular musical elements are put together in particular ways, and

acquire particular connotations, these can be hard to shift. It would be diﬃcult,

for instance, to move the ‘Marseillaise’ out of the set of meanings sedimented

around it . . . which derive from the history of the revolutionary French bour-

geoisie. (1990:10)

But there is still a short cut here. If we accept the idea that the process

of the stabilization of meaning is itself a topic for research and not some-

thing that may be taken as read, then we cannot make assumptions about

social responses to music without also oﬀering a description of how those

responses are actually produced. In Hennion’s sense, we need to identify

the mediators that make particular interpretations possible. So, are there

32 Musical affect in practice

mediators who might detract from the qualities of the ‘Marseillaise’ or

‘The Star-Spangled Banner’? Are there ways of performing or hearing

these works that would ‘shift’, as Middleton terms it, their meanings and

empower rival appropriations? Might ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ evade

all feelings of ‘pride and community’ under some circumstances of per-

formance and reception? Think, for example, of the Jimi Hendrix version

of this piece as played at the Woodstock Festival in 1969 during the

Vietnam War:

The ironies were murderous: a black man with a white guitar; a massive, almost

exclusively white audience wallowing in a paddy ﬁeld of its own making; the clear,

pure, trumpet-like notes of the familiar melody struggling to pierce through

clouds of tear-gas . . . One man with a guitar said more in three and a half minutes

about that peculiarly disgusting war and its rev

erberations than all the novels,

memoirs and movies put together. (Murry 1989, quoted in Martin 1995:262–3)

Think, too, of how certain renditions of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at

baseball games in the United States have had patriotic fans up in arms.

Moreover, even ‘sung with conviction’ would any version of ‘The Star-

Spangled Banner’ have evoked national pride and community spirit

among seasoned Hendrix fans? Would it perhaps have been contested or

heard ironically? With regard to the ‘Marseillaise’, could not the English

schoolboy lyrics set to that tune (‘A Frenchman went to the lavatory . . .’)

manage to shift its conventional connotations as evidenced if it makes us

laugh when we hear it? All of these are hypothetical examples of how

music may be reappropriated, reclaimed for diﬀerent interpretive uses

according to the conﬁguration of its mediators. Indeed, only a few pages

later in his book, Middleton himself discusses how musical works can be

‘prised open’ and rearticulated in new ways, for example in the football

appropriation of ‘Amazing Grace’, where the melody is sung to one

repeated word – ‘Arsenal’ (1990:16). He goes on to observe, later on in

the book, that these matters ‘must be referred to listeners, for the answers

depend on what is heard and how it is heard’ (1990:188).

These examples of musical mediation (or reappropriation) highlight

how music’s semiotic force – its aﬀect upon hearing – cannot be fully

speciﬁed in advance of actual reception. This is because musical aﬀect is

contingent upon the circumstances of music’s appropriation; it is, as I

wish to argue, the product of ‘human–music interaction’, by which I

mean that musical aﬀect is constituted reﬂexively, in and through the

practice of articulating or connecting music with other things. The music

analyst, in this view, does indeed occupy a signiﬁcant place in the study of

how music achieves its social, emotional and embodied eﬀects. Her or his

role is to specify a musical text’s mobilization of conventional musical

materials, gestures and devices, to specify its intertextual relationship

Sources of semiotic po

wer 33

with other musical works and the history of their reception. But the ques-

tion of how these materials may be experienced by future recipients is well

beyond the purview of semiotic analysis, and to develop a particular inter-

pretation of a work is, however illuminating or persuasive, still to engage

in the politics of representing that work. There are, however, ways of

attending to music as an active ingredient in the construction of aﬀect

without eliding the empirical processes of musical consumption. Such a

project, however, requires new tools, ones tha

t have yet to be applied to

the study of music in social life. In the remainder of this chapter I wish to

develop this new perspective through discussions of the sociology of tech-

nology and the ethnomethodologically inspired analysis of conversation.

Both these areas draw upon pragmatic theories of meaning in use,

meaning in interaction, and both conceive of cultural products – tech-

nologies and utterances – as simultaneously determining and determined

by the ways they come to be used or interpreted.

Artefacts and users

The sociology of technology in the 1990s has returned with vigour to

Langdon Winner’s classic (1980) question, ‘Do artefacts have politics?’

Winner’s famous essay took, as its case in point, the parkway bridges con-

necting New York City to Long Island. Built by Robert Moses, one of

New York’s greatest public architects, between 1920 and 1970, the

bridges had overpasses only twelve feet high. While this height limit posed

no problem to automobiles, the bridges were too low for buses. Thus,

they eﬀectively structured the access to Jones Beach along class and racial

lines (that is, those who had no access to travel by car – because they

could not aﬀord to keep one – had no access to Jones Beach). As tech-

nologies of transport, then, the bridges led to the – presumably – unantic-

ipated consequence of social exclusion; in collaboration with other forms

of transport technology, they constrained users. Many other scholars have

also provided examples of how the political is embedded within the tech-

nical. Discussing Cynthia Cockburn’s study of gender politics and the

transformation of typesetting (Cockburn 1983), Judy Wajcman has

observed that ‘there is nothing natural about units of work. Whether it is

hay bales or 50-kilo bags of cement or plaster, they are political in their

design ...Male workers use their bodily and technical eﬃciency to con-

stitute themselves as the capable workers and women as inadequate’

(1991:51).

In both of these examples, forms of social relations – patterns of

working, images of workers, the social distribution of travel options – are

prestructured by material culture. In no sense neutral, materiality is

34 Musical affect in practice

shown as a resource in and through which social regularities – produc-

tion, segregation, imagination – are accomplished and sustained.

But to what extent do technologies structure social relations and social

action? To what extent are users, in Steve Woolgar’s famous term,

technologically ‘conﬁgured’? Winner’s perspective left little space in

which to consider an artefact’s social properties as – ultimately – consti-

tuted in and through appropriation. His position may be (and often is)

read as implying a form of determinism, from artefact to behaviour and

social relations. More recent thinking on the subject (Akrich 1991;

Latour 1991; Akrich and Latour 1991; Law 1994; Pinch and Bijker 1987;

Woolgar 1997) has expanded the conceptual space around this issue. The

arguments, however, are complex and, because they do not take the form

of a discourse of cause and eﬀect, may seem hard to follow.

They begin with the idea that artefacts ‘prescr

ibe’ behaviour (Latour

1991) and ‘conﬁgure’ users ( Woolgar 1997). This means that an object’s

design is oriented to particular scenarios of use and users (and designers

may have attempted to elicit particular scenarios of use prior to the design

process). For example, a car implies certain forms of driving – on paved

roadways and at particular speeds. A book is produced to be read from

front to back ( jumping ahead to ﬁnd out ‘who did it’ only deprives one of

the pleasure of suspense). Artefacts may prescript, in other words, the

ways they are incorporated into social life, and so they structure use and

users. In Pelle Ehn’s sense, they serve as ‘reminders’ of ‘paradigm cases’

of action (Ehn 1988:433).

But artefacts do not compel users to behave in preferred or prescripted

ways. To argue along those lines is to succumb to what Bruno Latour calls

‘technologism’ – that is, a form of technological determinism as described

with reference to Winner (above), one that elides the question of how

artefacts can and are appropriated for use in a variety of ways. Artefacts

are, in Pinch and Bijker’s sense, ‘interpretively ﬂexible’ (1987). A car may

be driven in unconventional ways (for example, an elderly man in

Pontypridd, South Wales, was once issued a ticket for driving too slowly)

and a book may be ‘read’ by someone who is merely using it as a prop to

signal intellectual orientation or – as on a train or plane – to avoid

conversation. A gun, as Keith Grint once controversially stated (Grint

and Woolgar 1997:140–68), may be used for purposes other than shoot-

ing. None the less, one only has to consider the statistics on gun owner-

ship and murder rates to realize that artefacts do indeed come to be

associated with conventional patterns of use, that they may, in Anthony

Giddens’s sense, enable forms of activity. This is to say that while arte-

facts are not determining, they may come, via use and always in retro-

spect, to be associated with descriptive patterns of use. They may place on

Artefacts and users 35

oﬀer courses of conduct. Artefacts, and the scenarios with which they

come (through use) to be paired, provide means for enacting scenarios as

motivation and opportunity arise. To argue that artefacts contribute

nothing to the scenes in which they are used, that we pick up and ‘name’

the uses of objects solely according to local use and to whim (for example,

that one would recognize no diﬀerence between a hammer and a gun

when one wished to insert a nail into a piece of wood or to shoot at some-

thing) is merely the ﬂip side of ‘technologism’ (Latour (1991) refers to it

as ‘sociologism’). Moreover, as John Law has observed (1994), some

materials are more obdurate than others. Instead, and in common with

much recent thinking on the matter of technology, Latour argues that

neither technologism nor sociologism is suﬃcient as a way of accounting

for the production of order, subjectivity and action. Rather, these matters

issue from ‘human–non-human’ interaction. By contrast, new per-

spectives within the sociology of technology (and it is within this per-

spective that Hennion’s work may be located) attempt to document the

ways in which heterogeneous mixes of people and things are brought

together, and to examine the interactive process whereby people and

things are mutually structuring. Focus here – as it was in Willis’s study of

the bikeboys – is on the ways in which the speciﬁc properties of a material

(an artefact) are accessed and implicated in some social or social psycho-

logical process. To illuminate this appropriation process – the mutual

constitution of an artefact’s prescriptions and the behaviours and scenes

that cluster around it – is to illuminate the social-technical mélange

through which forms of agency and social order(s) are produced and held

in place. The ﬁnal section of this chapter shows how such a perspective is

useful in thinking about music’s eﬀects – for thinking about whether, how

and to what extent we may be permitted to speak of music as ‘prescribing’

its uses or responses. But ﬁrst, I wish to consider certain issues in the area

of natural language use and the pragmatic character of verbal meaning. I

wish to present the utterance as yet one more kind of cultural object or

artefact.

Verbal meaning in naturally occurring speech situations

Consider the statement, ‘The child picked up the tractor.’ To make sense,

context is required. Is this a giant child, such as had originally been

planned for the Millennium Dome in Greenwich (where a real car had

been planned to be set down as one of its toys)? Is it a superhuman child

of normal size? Or is the child an ordinary child, but the tractor toy-sized?

Or has the child – say aged fourteen – been sent down a farm lane to drive

a tractor back to a farm house?

36 Musical affect in practice

The example highlights a well-rehearsed line of thinking within socio-

linguistic theory and research, namely the idea that verbal utterances and

their meanings stand in interdependent relation to social contexts. This

idea illuminates many of the ways in which we draw, into the vortex of our

interpretive activities, a range of ‘relevant’ contextual features that help

to clarify the meaning of what is going on or what is being said. When I

ﬁrst arrived in Scotland in 1982, my mother-in-law and I spent a pleasant

interval chatting and looking at British cookbooks

. She handed me

Elizabeth David (with whom I was unfamiliar) and said something like,

‘She is known for haute cuisine.’ Because of her (correct) French pro-

nunciation (and my ignorance), and because of the novelty of having only

recently arrived in Scotland (which I associated with porridge), I heard

what she said as ‘oat cuisine’. I replied, as enthusiastically as I could

muster, ‘Imagine a whole cuisine devoted to the oat!’

Verbal meaning is by no means immanent. The utterance, ‘It is cold in

here’ may be understood as a passive observation, an attempt at small

talk, a polite reference to why the speaker has not bothered to remove his

or her outdoor clothes,

a sign of displeasure, an indirect request that a

window be closed or a ﬁre lit, and so on. A hearer’s sense of what an utter-

ance signiﬁes will be linked to matters of style and social relations – voice

tone, volume, phrasing, body language, the speaker’s relation to the

setting, what was said before, what these speakers have said to each other

before and so on. But the signiﬁcance of an utterance is dependent upon

the equally crucial matter of how hearers respond. As Jurgen Streeck

(1981) has observed in his critique of Searle’s speech act theory, the

meaning of an utterance is clariﬁed by the hearer’s response; it is assigned

only in retrospect, in and through the response it receives. Moreover, its

signiﬁcance is recursively constituted and reconstituted as talk continues.

The utterance, ‘It is cold in here’, for example, would function, retrospec-

tively (that is, in eﬀect) as a request to close a window if one or more

hearers respond to it in that way. Otherwise, it may pass in that moment as

signifying something else. Or it emerges as a coded for

m of complaint, or

even a compliment (reply: ‘Yes, the air conditioning works well, doesn’t

it?’). There is thus an array of received meanings that may be linked –

articulated – to any utterance. An analyst of spoken interaction cannot

therefore deduce meaning from a particular text object, whether that

object is one utterance or an entire conversation, to which he or she was

not party unless he or she is familiar with local circumstances that sur-

round it. To do so is to ply an interpretation – the analyst’

s own account –

upon that utterance. And in so doing, the analyst makes a fateful shift; he

or she becomes party to the creation of meaning within that scene; his or

her ‘map’ of conversational signiﬁcance becomes, as it were, a comment

Verbal meaning in natural speech 37

upon or way of framing meaning within that scene (precisely the problem

discussed above in relation to interpretations of the ‘music itself’ that do

not identify a ‘mediator’). To determine the meaning of an utterance

from outside is thus to forgo an opportunity to investigate how particular

actors produce indigenous maps and readings of the scene(s) in question

and how to read them. Real actors engage in semiotic analysis as part of

the reﬂexive project of context determination and context renewal.

Telling what the meaning is, and deftly deﬂecting dispreferred meanings

and readings, is part and parcel of the semiotic skills of daily life. We need

to learn to see professional semioticians in a similar vein – as mobilizing

particular features of utterances in order to produce meanings and

ongoing scenic locations from within the interaction order, providing new

‘versions’ of reality, new assertions, new deﬁnitions of situations, new cul-

tural materials. And, in particular, we need to consider and deconstr

uct

their unexamined commitment to particular constructions and constru-

als. They, like the speaker or hearers themselves, are ‘doing things with

words’, using and deploying linguistic formulations in order to tell partic-

ular stories about social reality.

From inscription to aﬀordance: the dual nature of

semiotic materials

Meaning, or semiotic force, is not an inherent property of cultural materi-

als, whether those materials are linguistic, technological or aesthetic. At

the same time, materials are by no means empty semiotic spaces. Latour

(1991) is correct to argue that the human sciences must avoid the twin

explanatory errors of technologism and sociologism and to look instead

at the ways in which people, things and meanings come to be clustered

within particular socially located scenes. Such a perspective leaves space

for the ongoing negotiation and renegotiation of the meanings of people,

things and situations. Readings, even highly professional ones, become

just that – particular interpretations, particular mobilizations of texts.

Readings are thus a topic for the study of how ‘artefacts have politics’ (see

Mulkay 1986); they are never resources in their own right. And to speak

‘about’ things is, as Kingsbury (1991) observed with regard to music, to

constitute those things.

Our focus needs to move away from one or the other pole of the ‘arte-

fact–actor’ divide to, as the sociologist Jürgen Streeck puts it (1996), the

topic of ‘how to do things with things’; this means a focus on the interac-

tions between people and things. There is no short cut to this issue; only

ethnographic research will do, and only ethnographic research has the

power to elaborate our conceptualization of what such processes entail –

38 Musical affect in practice

there is much work to be done before the mechanisms through which cul-

tural materials ‘work’ are properly to be understood.

Streeck grounds this argument in an analysis of a business discussion

between executives of a biscuit company. Sitting around a table, speakers

are tasting and talking about cookies – their own brand and those of a rival

ﬁrm. To underline certain points (for instance, the ‘better’ appearance

and texture of their product and so on) the cookies themselves are used as

props and arranged in contrasting geometric patterns. Here, the material-

ity of cookie arrangements is mapped on to utterances – rather as Bizet

mapped music’s material and stylistic properties on to the libretto in

Carmen. The cookies are enrolled as, in Michel Callon’s (1986) sense,

allies of the speaker and his argument. It is as if they, like the scallops of St

Brieuc Bay that Callon describes so beautifully (who have various

requirements attributed to them by environmentalists, ﬁshermen and so

forth), can ‘speak’. Their speech in these cases is in part ventriloquism

such that, when they make their utterances, they ‘say’ through another

means and therefore amplify points propounded by their spokesmen.

But, unlike ventriloquists’ puppets, they may also betray their spokes-

people in the form of unruly and unanticipated conduct (for example, by

not producing the requisite ‘snap’ when broken or bitten). Their materi-

ality also constrains what can be said, ‘in their name’. Streeck’s analysis

makes this clear. Thus, for example, if one’s own product makes a loud

snap and one’s rival does not, then the criterion of ‘snappiness when

bitten’ is invoked as a relevant category of value (as opposed to, say,

‘chewiness’).

Streeck argues that material objects – in this case, cookies – thus

possess properties that that can be lent to some uses more easily than

others (the biscuit texture, for example, and the criterion of ‘crispness’

versus ‘chewiness’). To make this point, Streeck appropriates the psy-

chologist J.J. Gibson’s notion of aﬀordances. Objects ‘aﬀord’ actors

certain things; a ball, for example, aﬀords rolling, bouncing and kicking in

a way that a cube of the same size, texture and weight would not. So, too,

the particular materials of the cookies aﬀord certain marketing ploys and

will not aﬀord others.

One of the most useful theoretical discussions of the notion of

aﬀordance – one that places the concept on an overtly sociological plane –

comes from ethnomethodologically inspired studies of organizations. In

‘Can Organizations Aﬀord Knowledge?’ Bob Anderson and Wes

Sharrock begin with the premise that technologies are social as well as

technical, ‘in the sense that they are deployed and used in social settings

and deﬁned by social constructs’ (1993:115). They develop the idea that

perception is ‘culturally provided’. This assumption is in line with what

Dual nature of semiotic ma

terials 39

socio-musical analysts such as McClary or Adorno propound; that pat-

terns of perception, modes of attention, structures of feeling and habits of

mind are inculcated in and through musical media. But, unlike Adorno

and McClary, Anderson and Sharrock navigate adroitly between technol-

ogism and sociologism; they do not fudge the issue of how artefacts ‘get

into’ action either by resort to implicit determinism or by dismissing the

idea that artefacts may possess speciﬁc and sometimes obdurate qualities,

that they may be active ingredients in the constitution of agenc

Moreover, they bring the idea of ‘inscription’ closer to the realm of what

can be observed in real time.

They begin by contrasting their own conception of aﬀordance with its

originator, J.J. Gibson (1966). For Gibson, objects aﬀord things inde-

pendently of how users appropriate them. Within such a view, we are

returned to the realm of Latour’s technologism and objects are again sole

‘authors’ of their inscriptions (the object ‘itself’), where they prede-

termine the responses that can be made to them. By contrast, for

Anderson and Sharrock, an object’s aﬀordances are ‘constituted and

reconstituted in and through projected courses of action within settings’

(1993:148–9). By this they refer to the reﬂexive process whereby users

conﬁgure themselves as agents in and through the ways they relate to

objects and conﬁgure objects in and through the ways they – as agents –

behave towards those objects.

Ethnographic studies of the constitution of aﬀordances show how

actors often erase the work they do of conﬁguring objects and their social

implications (one of the best examples here is Moore 1997). Indeed, it

would seem to be part of the natural attitude (or, in Adorno’s sense, the

‘ontological ideology’) to ‘forget’, paraphrasing Marx, that we are

oppressed by the things we have helped to produce. This ‘forgetting’ is the

cognitive practice of reiﬁcation. For this reason, the most interesting

questions concerning the social implications of artefacts (whether these

are technologies, utterances or aesthetic materials such as music) focus

on the interactional level where ar

ticulations – links – between humans,

scenes and environments are actually produced, and where frames of

order come to be stabilized and destabilized in real time. With regard to

the issue of musical aﬀect, recognizing music as, in Anderson and

Sharrock’s sense, an aﬀordance structure, allows for music to be under-

stood, as I put it in earlier work, as a place or space for ‘work’ or meaning

and lifeworld making (DeNora 1986b). Music can, in other words, be

invoked as an ally for a variety of world-making activities, it is a workspace

for semiotic activity, a resource for doing, being and naming the aspects of

social reality, including the realities of subjectivity and self, as discussed in

chapter 3, below. We are now, ﬁnally, at a place where we can begin to

40 Musical affect in practice

develop a theory of how music’s semiotic force is generated, to consider

how music comes to have social ‘eﬀects’.

Music is not a ‘stimulus’: semiotic force does not reside

within its forms alone

Reconsider Lucy, introduced in chapter 1, whose morning encounter

with some of Schubert’s Impromptus was a catalyst for realigning her

ongoing, local state of emotional being. Was it simple exposure to the

stimulus of this music that calmed Lucy? According to Lucy, the musical

material of the Impromptus was active in the process of her ‘de-stressing’;

it was a contributory factor, an accomplice to her mood shift. In the case

of the Impromptus, the works are mostly quiet (see ﬁgure 3), they are

highly melodic and songlike, they do not make a fea

ture of sudden rhyth-

mic or dynamic changes (they are ‘peaceful’) and they call for a pianist

who is ‘gentle’, for nuanced rather than pyrotechnic virtuosity. The pieces

also feature a kind of musical ambiguity and so may be associated with

connotations of detachment or wistfulness, especially if heard in conjunc-

tion with most sleeve notes or critical documents

. For example, they shift,

unobtrusively, from minor (the conventional ‘sad’ or ‘dark’ modality) to

major (‘happy’, ‘light’). Lucy herself alludes to these features when she

describes the Impromptus as ‘sort of sad, but not completely’. The ways in

which these pieces are phrased in performance serves to heighten this

ambiguity, through slight hesitations at cadence points (points of tonal

closure) and at the apex of melodic arches. The performative rendering of

these works then tends to intensify what might be read as gentle acquies-

cence (harmonic, rhythmic, melodic) implicit in the score, the dissipation

of tonal and rhythmic force through a variety of musical forms of reti-

cence, or gentle ‘pulling away’ from (musical) exertion, exuberance and

deﬁnition.

However, it would be wrong to say that the musical material ‘acts’ as

sole agent or stimulus for Lucy’s self-regulation. On the contrary, the

music’s powers are constituted by Lucy herself; they derive from the ways

she interacts with them. The Impromptus are, for Lucy, carriers of much

more than their conventional musical-stylistic connotations, however

these are described. Their character as physical sound structures and their

relation to a body of musical-stylistic convention is interpolated with, for

Lucy, equally important biographical connotations and with a history of

use such that the pieces calm her not only because they embody musical

calm, but because they restore to Lucy a sense of her own identity. First,

for Lucy, the works are associated with comfort; they are bound up with a

complex of childhood memories and associations. Her late father, to

Music is not a ‘stimulus’ 41

whom she was close, used to play the piano after dinner and these works,

wafting up the stairs, were ones Lucy used to hear as she was falling asleep.

Secondly, the material culture of listening is also an accomplice,

in this

example, of music’s power to shift Lucy’s mood on the morning she

describes. Lucy’s listening is conducted in a quiet room. She sits in a

rocking chair placed between the speakers and so is almost nestled in the,

as she perceives it, calm and nurturing music. (The vocabulary of nurtur-

ing is Lucy’s. As she puts it,

music ‘soothes me’, ‘I retreat into music when

I can’t bear the rest of the world’, ‘you can go into [music] and have it

around you or be in it’.) The point is that music’s power to ‘soothe’ derives

not only from the musical ‘stimulus’ but from the ways in which Lucy

appropriates that music, the things she brings to it, the context in which it

is set. Lucy did not, for example, listen to this music while scrubbing the

kitchen ﬂoor, or while working out on an exercise bike.

42 Musical affect in practice

cresc.

legato

Andante

R. H.

Figure 3. Franz Schubert, Impromptu in G ﬂat major

This process of appropriation is what consolidates and speciﬁes

music’s force. In Lucy’s case, music’s eﬀects are derived from the ways in

which she is active in pulling together a range of things (furniture, speak-

ers, memories, current emotional state, musical recordings, a temporal

interval). There is nothing untowardly mysterious about this process.

Music’s eﬀects are generated by a describable addition, whose sum is

greater than its parts: music, plus the ways that the recipient (in this case,

Lucy) attends to it,

plus the memories and associations that are brought

to it, plus the local circumstances of consumption. Through this alchem-

ical process of pulling together a range of heterogeneous materials, Lucy

herself is partner to the construction of music’s semiotic force; she is a

contributor to the constitution of the music’s power over her, its ability to

move her from one emotional loca

tion to another.

Music’s interpretive ﬂexibility was highlighted by nearly all the inter-

viewees consulted in the music and daily life project, who described how

music’s semiotic force varied according to the circumstances of its recep-

tion. For example, here is a nineteen-year-old Vietnamese woman, a

student at an Amer

ican university. She was discussing music in connec-

tion with ‘romantic’ relationships:

Q. Is there some music that is romantic or some music that isn’t romantic, or can

any music be romantic?

A. I think it would have to be the mood when you listen to the music – but some

music is – just the appropriate song, the tone of the song and the melody because

of the music kind of puts you in a cheerful mood, it doesn’t have to be romantic

and may be that same song when you listen to it, like when you’re in a really upset

mood or angry it just seems very sad, but then another time when you listen to it

among your friends when you have fun you may change your perception about the

song – you know, your hearing can change even though it’s the same song.

Q. Oh yes, even though it’s the same song?

A. The same song can create a diﬀerent atmosphere also, depending on the

mood, I think.

Latoya, a twenty-ﬁve-year-old sales assistant at Manhattan’s Tower

Records, makes a similar point, in her discussion of the ‘messages’ she

gets from music:

One day, I’ll listen to the song and I’ll, like, get one message out of it, like, ‘Damn,

that was messed up, maybe I shouldn’t have gone bad or that shouldn’t have hap-

pened.’ And the next day I’ll be like, ‘No I shouldn’t have done that, I should have

done this,’ you know, with the same song! You know, it’ll be, it goes back to the

mood thing, how I’m feeling during the day, and that moment, what the song will

do for me.

These quotes from in-depth interviews illuminate music’s interpretive

ﬂexibility, the way in which music’s aﬀordances – moods, messages,

Music is not a ‘stimulus’ 43

energy levels, situations – are constituted from within the circumstances

of use. The idea that music’s meanings are constituted in and through use

in no way implies that music’s meaning is entirely indeterminate. To the

contrary, music may contribute, as is discussed below in chapter 3, to the

sense that actors make of themselves and their social circumstances.

Music is active within social life, it has ‘eﬀects’ then, because it oﬀers

speciﬁc materials to which actors may turn when they engage in the work

of organizing social life. Music is a resource – it pro

vides a

ﬀordances – for

world building.

This last point emphasizes how, just as music’s meaning may be con-

structed in relation to things outside it, so, too, things outside music may

be constructed in relation to music. ‘I hear music/when I look at you’, run

the lyrics of Hammerstein and Kern’s ‘The song is y

ou’, ‘a beautiful

theme/of every dream/I ever knew’. Here music is being used as a referent

for the clariﬁcation of identity. A person is ‘like’ a particular type of

musical material. In conversation with the daughter of a colleague who

was describing a young man whom she thought looked too ‘cool’ for his

role in some conventional, professional occupation,

she said, ‘he was like

. . .’ and here she paused as if searching for the right words. She then broke

into a rhythmic execution to indicate the quality that she thought

incongruous with his pinstriped suits. Here is an example where a

conventional musical material – a rhythmic topos and its conventional

connotations that I, as the recipient of this utterance, perceived (urban

cool, drum and bass and so on) – serves as a framing device for the

constitution of a portrayed identity. Indeed, there are times when only

music will do, when a social situation is given over entirely to musical

materials. Beethoven’s friend and patron, Baroness Ertmann, for

example, described to Felix Mendelssohn how Beethoven had consoled

her on the death of her last child: ‘We will now talk to each other in tones,’

Beethoven had said, and through that exercise, she recalled, ‘he told me

everything, and at last brought me comfort’ (Thayer and Forbes

1967:413). All of these examples sho

w music as taking the lead in the

world-clariﬁcation, world-building process of meaning-making. In all of

these cases music serves as a kind of template against which feeling, per-

ception, representation and social situation are created and sustained.

In sum, music is a referent (with varying degrees of conventional

connotations, varying strengths of pre-established relations with non-

musical matters) for clarifying the otherwise potentially polysemic char-

acter of non-musical phenomena (social circumstances, identities, moods

and energy levels, for example). In this sense it is mythic, a resource

against which other relationships can be mapped in Levi Strauss’s sense.

Middleton captures this point precisely when he observes:

44 Musical affect in practice

music, too

, considered as a structural-semantic system,

ﬀers a means of thinking

relationships, both within a work and between works, and perhaps between these

and non-musical structures. Musical patterns are saying: as this note is to that

note, as tonic is to dominant, as ascent is to descent, as accent is to weak beat (and

so on), so X is to Y. (1990:223)

The point is that it is music’s recipients who make these connections mani-

fest, who come to ﬁll in the predicates, X and Y, that Middleton describes.

Music’s semiotic po

wers may, moreover, be ‘stabilized’ through the ways

in which they are constituted and reinforced through discourse ( pace the

discussion of McClary, above), through consumption practice and

through patterns of use over time (DeNora 1986b). Non-musical materi-

als, such as situations, biographical matters, patterns of attention, assump-

tions, are all implica

ted in the clari

ﬁcation of music’

s semiotic force.

Conversely, though, and simultaneously, music is used to clarify the very

things that are used to clarify it. Focus on this ‘co-productive’ or two-way

process provides a way around the twin poles of sociologism and technolo-

gism (or its corollary in socio-musical studies, musicologism) as they

apply to the musical ‘object’.

Of interest then is the re

ﬂexive problem of

how music and its eﬀects are active in social life, and how music comes to

aﬀord a variety of resources for the constitution of human agency, the

being, feeling, moving and doing of social life. To understand how music

works as a device of social ordering, how its eﬀects are reﬂexively achieved,

we need actually to look at musical practice. This is the aim of the chapters

that follow – to get closer to what Aristotle may have had in mind when he

spoke of music as possessing ‘the power of producing an eﬀect on the

character of the soul’. Accordingly the next chapter begins with three

interconnected topics: the self and its regulation, the constitution of sub-

jectivity, and the biographical work of self-identity. In relation to these

things, music is a resource to which actors can be seen to turn for the

project of constituting the self, and for the emotional, memory and

biographical work that such a project entails.

Music is not a ‘stimulus’ 45

3 Music as a technology of self

‘I think everybody should listen to music. It helps you to be calm,

relaxed, to see your life diﬀerently.’

(Mireille, contract cleaner, London)

The self and its accompanying narrative of the ‘unitary individual’ is a

linchpin of modern social organization. More recently, and in line with

various deconstructions of biography and identity, focus has turned to the

‘reﬂexive project’ of the self, whose care and cultivation rests upon a

somewhat fragile conglomerate of social, material and discourse practices

(Harré 1998; Giddens 1991). It is curious, then, that music – arguably the

cultural material par excellence of emotion and the personal – has not been

explored in relation to the constitution of self. As Shepherd and Wicke

have recently observed, even in the realm of sub-cultural theory as it is

applied to musical life, ‘there has been little conceptual space created for

a theorization of the private, internal world of an individual’s awareness of

existence and self’ (1997:40). Focus on intimate musical practice, on the

private or one-to-one forms of human–music interaction, oﬀers an ideal

vantage point for viewing music ‘in action’, for observing music as it

comes to be implicated in the construction of the self as an aesthetic

agent.

Here, the music psychologists have taken the empirical lead in their

turn to music’s role in so-called ‘naturalistic’ settings and their increas-

ingly qualitative investigations of ‘the mechanisms mediating between

music and social inﬂuence’ (Crozier 1997:74). At the Keele University

Centre for the Study of Musical Development and Skill, for example,

researchers have recently taken up the matter of how music is used by

individuals in their daily lives. In a report on recent work within the

Centre, John Sloboda (forthcoming) has described a range of investiga-

tive strategies that employ an individual ‘case study’ approach. In one of

these (Neilly 1995), twenty respondents were asked to keep a diary of

when they ‘exposed themselves to music by their own choice’. In another

(De Las Heras 1997), eighty-four respondents were asked to address

forty-ﬁve Likert-scale items about musical use. In an earlier study

(Sloboda 1992), sixty-seven people were interviewed about their emo-

tional responses to music. Of these, forty-one identiﬁed music as, in some

way, a ‘change agent’ in their lives. A third investigation used the format of

a 1997 ‘mass observation’ mailing in the United Kingdom to learn about

people’s music uses. (The mass observation study (Sheridan 1998)

involves a sample of 500 people in Britain who, two or three times a year,

respond in writing but in open-ended fashion to sets of questions they

have received in the post. The proportion of w

omen to men in this sample

is 3:1 and most correspondents are over forty years of age.) Sloboda

(forthcoming) describes the investigative process as follows:

The overarching question was ‘Please could you tell us all about you and music.’

All other questions were optional cues to focus correspondents on areas they

might like to talk about. The key cue for this study was ‘Do you use music in

diﬀerent ways? My mother used to play fast Greek music to get her going with the

housework – do you have habits like this? Are they linked to particular times,

places, activities or moods? For instance, you might use music in diﬀerent ways at

home, outdoors, or at work; in company or on your own; while you exercise, cook,

study, make love, travel or sleep; to cheer you up or calm you down.’

In a preliminary analysis of the replies (Sloboda forthcoming), respon-

dents reported using music in relation to six thematic categories:

memory, spiritual matters, sensorial matters (for pleasure, for example),

mood change, mood enhancement and activities (including things such

as exercise, bathing, working, eating, socializing, engaging in intimate

activity, reading, sleeping).

This research points clearly to the ways in which music is appropriated

by individuals as a resource for the ongoing constitution of themselves

and their social psychological, physiological and emotional states. As

such it points the way to a more overtly sociological focus on individuals’

self-regulatory strategies and socio-cultural practices for the construction

and maintenance of mood, memory and identity.

This chapter draws upon ethnographic interview data to spotlight

actors as they engage in musical practices tha

t regulate, elaborate, and

substantiate themselves as social agents. It is concerned with how music is

implicated in the self-generation of social agency and how this process

may be viewed as it happens, ‘in action’. Viewed from the perspective of

how music is used to regulate and constitute the self, the ‘solitary and

individualistic’ practices described by Sloboda and his associates may be

re-viewed as part of a fundamentally social process of self-structuration,

the constitution and maintenance of the self. In this sense then, the osten-

sibly ‘private’ sphere of music use is part and parcel of the cultural

constitution of subjectivity, part of how individuals are involved in consti-

tuting themselves as social agents. As such, private music consumption

Music as a technology of self

connects with recent discussions within sociology of ‘aesthetic reﬂexivity’

(Lash and Urry 1994) and with Attali’s (originally utopian) vision (1985)

of putting music ‘in operation, to draw it towards an unknown practice’,

and with Giddens’s (1991) notion of the self as a reﬂexive project, one

that entails the active production of self-identity over time.

How, then, can we begin to understand music’s powers with regard to

the constitution of self and self-identity? And how may music’s powers in

relation to the self and to subjectivity be seen in the private, aesthetically

reﬂexive musical practices of individuals? I begin by considering the very

high degree of practical musical knowledge as exhibited by the respon-

dents in our study.

Knowing what you need – self-programming and musical

material

‘Music helps me’, says Lucy, who has been quoted in chapters 1 and 2. It,

‘can inspire you’, ‘bring understanding’, ‘raise you to another plane’.

With her own experiences in mind, Lucy expresses what nearly every

interviewee has underlined – music has transformative powers, it ‘does’

things, changes things, makes things happen.

Lucy is but one of a sample of ﬁfty-two British and American women

interviewed between 1997 and 1998. These women were of diﬀerent ages

(between eighteen and seventy-seven). They lived in one of two small

towns in the United States and United Kingdom, or in London or in New

York City. The point of the research was exploratory – to investigate

musical practice in daily life, and to examine music as an organizing force

in social life. The study focused on women – as opposed to women and

men – because it was concerned with redressing the gender imbalance

characteristic of cultural studies of music and social life (see, for example,

Wise 1990 [1984] on this issue). Questions were open-ended. They

focused on respondents’ music collections (if applicable) and daily rou-

tines. For example, ‘Can you tell me about yesterday – from the moment

you woke up to the moment you fell asleep – and about how music fea-

tured in your day, whether this w

as music you chose to listen to or that

you overheard, for example in a shop?’ Prompts were used to jog respon-

dents’ memories (‘Did you listen to any music while you had your bath?

Did you use a radio alarm to wake you up?’). The interviews did not aim

to produce statistically ‘representative’ data about, for example, the links

between musical taste and social standing; this work has been conducted

ably by others (Bryson 1996; Lamont 1992; Peterson and Simkus 1992;

DiMaggio, Useem and Brown 1978; DiMaggio and Useem 1979;

Bourdieu 1984). They were, rather, oriented to exploring a so-far missing

48 Music as a technology of self

ethnographic dimension within music reception studies (cf. Radway

1988; Press 1994). They focused on the matter of how the consumption

of a cultural product (music) is part of the reﬂexive and ongoing process

of structuring social and social psychological existence. The aim was to

move beyond respondents’ bald statements of what music does to them in

the abstract (for example, Lucy’s comments about how music ‘helps’ her)

and to arrive instead at a gallery of practices in and through which people

mobilize music for the doing

, being and feeling that is social existence.

This strategy entailed an attendant shift from a concern with what music

‘means’ (a question for music criticism and music appreciation) to a

concern with what it ‘does’ as a dynamic material of social existence.

Nearly all of these women were explicit about music’s role as an order-

ing device at the per

sonal level, as a means for creating, enhancing, sus-

taining and changing subjective, cognitive, bodily and self-conceptual

states. Consider this quote from twenty-ﬁve-year-old Latoya, a sales

assistant at Manhattan’s Tower Records:

Like with my R&B, most of the time I listen to it when I’m, you know, trying to

relax. I’m gonna sleep, sometimes I’ll throw on a few tracks to wake me up, nice

’n’ slow and then I’ll throw on something else. And then, sometimes, you know, if

I’m not really, not in that relaxed mood, I’m like, you know, ‘I don’t wanna listen

to that’

and I’ll throw something fast on, or something fast is playing and I’m like

‘That’s too chaotic for me right now, I have to put something slow on.’

Here Latoya underlines one of the ﬁrst things that became clear from the

interviews with women about music ‘in their lives’ – nearly everyone with

whom we spoke, levels of musical training notwithstanding, exhibited

considerable awareness about the music they ‘needed’ to hear in diﬀerent

situations and at diﬀerent times. They were often working – as Latoya’s

quote makes clear – like disc jockeys to themselves. They drew upon elab-

orate repertoires of musical programming practice, and were sharply

aware of how to mobilize music to arrive at, enhance and alter aspects of

themselves and their self-concepts

. This practical knowledge should be

viewed as part of the (often tacit) practices in and through which respon-

dents produced themselves as coherent social and socially disciplined

beings. The use of music in private life and the study of this use turned

out to be one of the most important features of the constitution and regu-

lation of self. For example, Luc

y explains why she chose to listen to the

Impromptus, described in chapter 1:

Lucy: It’s very diﬃcult to explain. I mean, I knew I wanted to hear that particular

tape, sometimes I wouldn’t choose that because well, it would remind me of my

dad too much. I know that that music all my life has helped me, has soothed me,

and it’s lovely. I never get tired of it so, I knew I wouldn’t be disappointed in it and

– even so, it’s diﬃcult to say why I chose it. Sometimes – I didn’t have to think

Self-programming and music 49

about it this morning. I mean I wanted to play that but other times I know that I

want some music but I can’t, I look at all the tapes and I think, ‘No, that’s not

quite it, I don’t want to hear that.’

Q. And you go through thinking, ‘What seems right just now?’

Lucy: Yeah. And sometimes you just can’t ﬁnd the right thing, or you just want

a particular bit and it’s too diﬃcult to ﬁnd it in the tape, I mean a CD is a bit easier

because you can just ﬂick around.

Here, in another example, is Deborah, a twenty-ﬁve-year-old executive

assistant to a New York literary agent:

Deborah: First thing in the morning, when I get up I have the clock radio set to

music, it’s a lot softer than having the alarm go oﬀ in the morning.

Q. What kind of music is likely to come on when your clock radio comes on?

Deborah: A lot of things, depending on what kind of mood I’m in. I usually set

it the night before or something if I know I’m going to have a rough day the next

morning, that kind of thing.

The vocabulary of using music to achieve what you ‘need’ is a common

discourse of the self, part of the literary technology through which sub-

jectivity is constituted as an object of self-knowledge. But the speciﬁc dis-

courses that respondents invoke as descriptors of ‘what they need’ are not

free ﬂoating; they are typically linked to practical exigencies of their

appropriation and to interactions with others, as the discussion below of

‘emotional work’ makes clear. For example, Angela, an eighteen-year-old

high school student in New York City says, ‘If I need to really settle down

and just like relax or something I’ll put on slow music.’

Also with relaxation in mind, Monica, a twenty-one-year-old student at

an English university, describes what she views as ‘bath-time music’:

Q. . . . How about having a bath or exercising; would you have any music on for

either or both of those?

Monica: Having a bath, yeah I listen to Enya; it’s really nice and peaceful.

Q. Do you think of Enya as ‘the music you listen to when you’re in the bath’? Is

that particularly –

Monica: It tends to be.

Q. Why would that be as opposed to Blur [one of her f

avourite groups], say?

Monica: Because it’s so peaceful and relaxing. Because quite often you can’t

hear the words so it’s quite nice to not have to concentrate on it, but you can just

let it wash over you if you are trying to relax.

Later in the interview, Monica restates this position, and explains in

further detail the niche that Enya’s music ﬁts into within her life and her

musical needs, namely for unwinding in the bath. She describes how she

ﬁrst encountered Enya’s music in the context of a ‘ﬂotation tank’ (which

she regarded as a highly pleasurable experience). Now she associates it

speciﬁcally with bathing. The context in which the music was ﬁrst heard

50 Music as a technology of self

(the articulation between the music and the ﬂotation experience was

made by the Centre for Alternative Relaxation) came, in other words, to

be strongly imprinted upon her sense of what Enya connotes and on her

sense of how to ‘use’ that music such that Enya is reserved exclusively for

bath-time.

Monica: . . . If we’re having some lunch it’ll probably be more up-beat music. If

we’re sitting huddled with a cup of tea it’ll be slower stuﬀ.

Q. Yeah, yeah. Would Enya be something you’d choose there or would that be

inappropriate?

Monica: No. I never really put that on . . . I mean I wouldn’t really put it on

when people come round.

Respondents were also highly knowledgeable of musical materials that,

in pursuit of self-regula

tion, they tended to avoid. For example, here,

Lucy shows that she has given serious thought not only to the matter of

what she ‘needs’ musically, but also to what she needs to steer clear of

(rather as one might avoid certain foodstuﬀs). When she is in a sad frame

of mind, for example, minor keys are more sorrowful than they would be

otherwise; their eﬀects are heightened:

Lucy: I do ﬁnd that I have to be careful with music in a minor key, sometimes. I

remember once when my mother died, and I must have put some music on and it

made me cry – not that it was associated with her, but it was just – in a minor key

and my husband said, ‘Gosh, you should avoid the key for a little while,’ and he

was quite right because anything sad just dropped the mood a little bit lower. I

wasn’t able to cope with any more sadness a

t that time.

Q. At that time did you make any deliberate attempt then to turn to music that

would lift you, or make you not sad? Did you change listening habits?

Lucy: I can’t remember – this was years and years ago when she died, I can’t

remember that particular incident, but I think I’ve learned from that to be careful,

and not to, if I am feeling really sad, not to wallow in it with music, it can make

you, really, really, luxuriate in sadness. I think what’s coming out of this is that

music is so important to me that I have to be careful what it does to me, because it

can do an awful lot.

Aesthetic reﬂexivity

Recent social theory concerned with ‘modernity’ has identiﬁed the ability

to be reﬂexive about and mobilize cultural forms as a hallmark of being in

so-called ‘high’ modern societies (Lash and Urry 1994; Giddens 1990;

1991). Following Simmel (1917), these writers conceive of the rise of

aestheticization as a strategy for preserving identity and social boundaries

under anonymous and often crowded conditions of existence. The

modern ‘self’ is portrayed, within this perspective, as subject to height-

ened demands for ﬂexibility and variation. Actors move, often at rapid

Aesthetic reﬂexivity 51

pace, through the numerous and often crowded conditions that

characterize daily existence. These writers portray the ‘self’ – depicted as

emerging as a concept during the Renaissance but as incipient in the

Christian theological conception of the soul (cf. Auerbach 1953) – as

subject to heightened demands under advanced modernity. The self is

called upon to be increasingly agile, to be able to manage perspectival and

circumstantial incongruity, as happens, for example, when individuals

move rapidly through numerous and often discrete w

orlds where per-

sonnel and values may clash. As incongruity escalates, and as actors expe-

rience alternation as they move between worlds, the machinery or ‘work’

required of social actors as they conﬁgure themselves as agents is made

increasingly visible, as an object upon which actors can reﬂect (Witkin

1995). Heightened aesthetic reﬂexivity is thus conceiv

ed within current

social theory as a function of the (often contradictory) demands made

upon the self in the modern world. It is further fuelled by the rise of a

post-production economy in the West, where ‘service’ and ‘life-style’

industries have created and continue to expand markets at nearly all

socio-economic lev

els (Bocock 1993; Lash and Urry 1994; Belcher

1997). Individual actors thus not only engage in self-monitoring and self-

regulation; they also seek out such ‘goods’ as space, relaxation, pleasure

and so forth.

One need not accept the historicism of such arguments to be per-

suaded by their thesis concerning reﬂexivity and contradiction (see

Barnes 1995). Under any historical conditions where tension between

what an individual ‘must’ do and prefers to do, or between how he or she

feels and how he or she wishes to feel, the problem of self-regulation arises

and with it, the matter of how individuals negotiate between the poles of

necessity and preference, between how they think they ought to feel and

how they do feel. It is often unclear whether engaging in the regulatory

work aimed at reconciling these tensions (through forms of cultural and

aesthetic appropriation) is self-emancipatory or, as Adorno and other

critical theorists have suggested (such as Giddens 1991), whether it is

party to the ‘prison house’ of advanced capitalism with its reconﬁguration

of the subject as a ‘good’s desiring’ entity. Such ‘high-level’ questions are

perhaps best answered through speciﬁc reference to real actors. This

chapter aims to contextualize issues such as these by considering some of

the processes in and through which self-regulation transpires. Indeed, a

focus on self-regulatory strategies can only enhance current concern

within organizational sociology on the matter of how individuals manage

to equip themselves as appropriate organizational agents, which is

simultaneously a matter of how they conﬁgure themselves as aesthetic

agents possessed of an ‘incipient readiness’ (Witkin 1995; Witkin and

52 Music as a technology of self

DeNora 1997) for action modalities within speciﬁc social scenes and

schedules. Hochschild’s (1983) classic discussion of ‘emotional work’

speaks to this issue. Within organizationally sponsored circumstances,

individuals may feel it incumbent upon themselves to conﬁgure them-

selves as certain kinds of agents, characterized and internalizing certain

modalities of feeling. Hochschild describes, for instance, how ﬂight atten-

dants are called upon (in gender-biased ways) to engage not only in pro-

ductive, contractually speciﬁed, activities, b

ut also to engage in the

non-contractually speciﬁed work of adopting and projecting modalities of

emotional agency. Just as they must engage in ‘body work’ (Tyler and

Abbot 1998), so too they must seem genuinely friendly, caring and so on,

to produce themselves as human emblems of an airline’s ‘friendly skies’.

Musically reconﬁguring agency – self-regulation, self-

modulation

One of the ﬁrst things music does is to help actors to shift mood or energy

level, as perceived situations dictate, or as part of the ‘care of self’. For

Latoya, Lucy and Deborah, discussed above, music is an accomplice in

attaining, enhancing and maintaining desired states of feeling and bodily

energy (such as relaxation); it is a vehicle they use to move out of dispre-

ferred states (such as stress or fatigue). It is a resource for modulating and

structuring the parameters of aesthetic agency – feeling, motivation,

desire, comportment, action style, energy. By this, what respondents

often mean is that its speciﬁc properties – its rhythms, gestures, har-

monies, styles and so on – are used as referents or representations of

where they wish to be or go, emotionally, physically and so on.

Respondents make, in other words, articulations between musical works,

styles and materials on the one hand and modes of agency on the other,

such that music is used, prospectively, to sketch aspired and partially

imagined or felt states. When respondents are choosing music as part of

this care of self, they are engag

ing in self-conscious articulation work,

thinking ahead about the music that might ‘work’ for them. These

articulations are made on the basis of what respondents perceive the

music to aﬀord, what, in Lucy’s words above, will be ‘the right thing’,

what will ‘help’. This perception is in turn shaped by a range of matters,

as alluded to in chapter 2: previous associations that respondents have

made between particular musical materials and other things (biograph-

ical, situational), more generalized connotations respondents associate

with the music (for example, its style), perceived parallels between

musical materials/processes and social or physical materials/processes

(for example, slow and quiet: relaxed) and so on.

Musically reconﬁguring agenc

y53

For example here is Becky, describing how she uses music to motivate

her on evenings when she is going out. The passage comes after a discus-

sion of her ‘ambient sounds’ CDs that she uses for working, relaxing and

meditating.

Q. One of the questions I was going to ask [was] . . . are there sounds apart from

music that you particularly like . . . ?

Becky: . . . I love to listen to the sea. And I’ve also got dolphins, I like to listen to

the sound of the dolphins. I ﬁnd that quite peaceful. I ﬁnd that very soothing, all of

them are very, very relaxing. It makes me smile and when I ﬁnd myself smiling I

think what are you smiling for [laughs].

They have that e

ﬀect.

Q. And that would be the dolphin sounds or the wave sounds or whatever, that

would be something you would use if you needed to relax? How about like at bath-

time, do you listen to music during bath-time?

Becky: I do yes, I tend to listen to these tapes unless I’m getting ready to go out

[when] I tend to put something very loud, very heavy on [laughs]. Which again I

use it to try and motivate me to get in the mood for where I’m going.

Q. If you were going out what kind of thing [would you listen to]? Would it be

the radio?

Becky: No, it would probably be a CD. I don’t know, I think it would depend on

where I was going and how I was feeling at the time. If I was feeling particularly

like I wasn’t really looking forward to where I was going, then I would have to put

something really lively on to try and get me in the mood.

Q. Where might you be going that you weren’t really looking forward to?

Becky: Family gatherings [laughs]. Or some sort of meeting to do with the

scouts, I tend to really not look forward to that.

Faced with the prospect of having to get into what she perceives as the

appropriate energy and emotional mode for going out, Becky turns to

diﬀerent kinds of music to reconﬁgure herself, to get in the mood. Here,

music is used as a catalyst that can shift reluctant actors into ‘necessary’

modes of agency, into modes of agency they perceive to be ‘demanded’ by

particular circumstances. In this sense, interaction with music illustrates

Hochschild’s notion that emotion is ‘bodily co-opera

tion with an image, a

thought, a memory – a co-operation of which the individual is aware’

(1979:551, quoted in Williams 1996:129). This common musical strat-

egy was described by many respondents in relation to getting ready to go

to work or getting moving with household chores. For example, ‘I typ-

ically play a country music station almost every morning coming in to

work ’cause it is – I just enjoy the music, it’s sort of sad, twangy, ballady

music and there’s that very lively stuﬀ, but it’s lively music at the ﬁrst part

of the day so that’s what I almost always do,’ says Elaine, a ﬁfty-ﬁve-year-

old psychotherapist in up-state New York. ‘First thing in the morning I

like quite – sort of music that will get you up and get you going, so some-

thing that’s quite upbeat and cheerful,’ says Nancy, ‘And late at night as

54 Music as a technology of self

well if I’m going out, something similar.’ ‘[Music] keeps you going –

almost like nullifying in a way, because you don’t think about what you’re

doing, you just listen to the music and get on with the routine of house-

work or whatever,’ says Lesley.

In other cases, music is used by respondents to ease them on to courses

of action and modes of aesthetic agency that they wish to achieve. It is, in

Sloboda’s terms, a thing that ‘gets them going’ (forthcoming). Fifty-two-

year-old Vanessa,

for example, uses precisely this term in describing how

she uses music on summer afternoons as she prepares to host a barbecue.

Q. Have you ever tried to set a mood in any way, where you may have put things

on in the backg

round to get things liv

ened up, or have some e

ﬀect, in other

words?

Vanessa: Yeah, in particular barbecues. A barbecue should be lively, shouldn’t

it?

Q. Yes.

Vanessa: Everyone talking – that’s why I tend to put on Latin, which is really

buzzy.

Q. Yes? This is during the day?

Vanessa: Yeah, in the afternoon – whatever. And if I wanted to cheer myself up I

would play that type of music as well.

Q. OK – and what is it about that, that would cheer you up? I know that sounds

like a stupid question . . .

Vanessa: I don’t know – I just like Latin – it makes you feel good, I guess.

Q. Something to do with the music itself ? Like the rhythm?

Vanessa: Yeah, it must be the rhythm.

Q. Or is it something to do with the association?

Vanessa: It’s just a get-up-and-go type sound really. It sort of – instantly you

hear it – you speed up a bit.

Q. Would you say then, that it has quite an eﬀect on your energy?

Vanessa: I think so, music does deﬁnitely.

Q. When you put the Latin music on at the barbecue, do you put it on before

anyone arrives?

Vanessa: Yeah, I tend to whilst I’m preparing the food.

Q. OK – why do you put it on at that stage?

Vanessa: Before?

Q. Yes.

Vanessa: Because it gets me going.

Q. When you say ‘me’, what do you mean?

Vanessa: Well, it gets you in the mood. When you’re cooking and preparing it

gets you in the mood.

Using music to ‘get in the mood’, ‘get going’ and so forth were referred

to by nearly all respondents, particularly in reference to going out, or

getting ready for a social event. ‘I probably put a ’70s disco album on and

prance around and stuﬀ [laughs]. Or I’d probably put – this is another sad

thing I do – Gary Barlow,’ says nineteen-year-old Imogen.

Musically reconﬁguring agency 55

Conversely, music can be used to ‘get out of moods’ – bad moods in

particular, but also to ‘de-stress’ or wind down. Beatrice, a soft-spoken

twenty-year-old American university student who lives at home and likes

to play Bach preludes and fugues on her piano, puts it this way:

‘Whenever anyone gets angry we all tend to go to our rooms and turn on

the music really loud.’ She describes the process as ‘venting’ (that is,

letting oﬀ steam) with music:

I just go to my room, slam the door, play my music and just sort of feel mad for a

couple more minutes . . . When I turn the music up real loud it ﬁlls my room, it’s

like I can’t hear anything outside my room and just me really mad.

As Beatrice describes this process, ‘the act is parallel to – perhaps –

punching a pillow or something. Because it really makes me feel that I’m

taking the anger away. I don’t know how that happens but it really works.’

The music provides a simulacrum for a behavioural impulse – Beatrice

makes an articulation between an alternate course of action (‘punching a

pillow’), her feelings (‘angry’) and a set of musical ma

terials. Lesley, a

thirty-nine-year-old mature student at an English university and mother of

three teenage boys, makes this point explicitly: ‘Sometimes, like with punk

music or any sort of so-called anti-establishment music, you can identify

with it but it can also diﬀuse your mood because you sort of listen it out, if

you see what I mean – rather than just going and hitting someone or doing

something like kicking the door.’ Music gives respondents a medium in

which to work through moods. It provides a way of transferring their

means of expression from the ‘real’, physical realm (‘hitting someone or

doing something like kicking the door’, ‘punching a pillow’) to the imag-

ined, the virtual. Music thus provides a virtual reality within which respon-

dents are able to express themselves in a (symbolically) violent manner, for

example by choosing ‘aggressive’ or ‘anti-establishment’ music, or by

playing music at full volume. This virtual realm is a haven for angry indi-

viduals; within this haven, they adopt the position of being in control of the

symbolic and physical environment. For a few moments, the environment

consists, virtually, of only music (‘it ﬁlls my room . . .’), and the determina-

tion of this environment, within a bedroom in a house, can be controlled

with the ﬂick of a switch. One can thus recapture virtually, transposed to

the medium of music, what one has had to concede interactionally; self-

determination is re-established on a transposed level. It is no surprise then

that headphones are strictly not employed for this process; for the point is

to perpetrate a kind of aesthetic violence, to ‘scream’, ‘punch’ or ‘kick’

musically, and thus to have power over one’s (aesthetic) environment. As

discussed in chapter 5, below, it is also important to feel (and respond to)

the physical character of this reality throughout one’s body.

56 Music as a technology of self

Typically, for the purpose of ‘venting’, as Beatrice calls it, respondents

do not use music they associate with their regular routines, habits and

normal courses of conduct and musical tastes. Unlike cases where

respondents report on how they use music to ‘get them going’ prior to

going out or to hosting a party, here music is used to express and then

diﬀuse a particular interlude of intense, negative feeling. Karen, for

example, a twenty-six-year-old postgraduate student in New York City,

describes how she would never listen to her preferred music – Broadway

musicals – ‘because if I don’t want my mood to change, if I’m just

grumpy, I don’t want to hear people singing about being happy . . . I just

feel irritated more when I listen to it when I am in the wrong mood. Most

of the time I’ll know it and I won’t even think about putting it on.’ Karen

goes on to describe how, if she is in a ‘bad mood’ she puts on rock music

(which otherwise she does not listen to). And Monica describes how,

living with her boyfriend’s parents over the university summer vacation

she used Radiohead’s ‘We hope you choke!’ as a way of simultaneously

diﬀusing her anger against her ‘in-laws’ and also as a message to them,

played at full v

olume! (The use of music as virtual communication within

a household or through giving music as a present and so on is discussed in

chapter 5.)

‘Anger’ or ‘rage’ are, for these women, exceptional emotions; and

the musical materials (‘rock’, ‘anti-establishmentarian’) and music

consumption practices (‘blasting’) associated with these exceptional

states are accordingly located on the margins of respondents’ personal

musical maps. Unlike the far more common practices associated with

modulating and regulating mood and energy levels, here music’s role as a

virtual medium of self-expression, of letting oﬀ steam (‘venting’) is key.

But it would be wrong to fall into an expressivist discourse of accounting

for this practice. Music is not simply used to express some internal emo-

tional state. Indeed, that music is part of the reﬂexive constitution of that

state; it is a resource for the identiﬁcation work of ‘knowing how one feels’

– a building material of ‘subjectivity’.

This is to say that a candidate simu-

lacrum of feeling is also a template for ﬂeshing out feeling, a material

against which the aspects of ‘how I feel’ may be elaborated and made into

an object of knowledge. One may say to one’s self, ‘this music is how I

feel’ and one may grow tense and relax as the music does, when the music

does. Twenty-four-year-old Ellen, for example, describes how she uses

music to induce and heighten a sad emotional state, in a way that is akin

to ‘looking at yourself in a mirror being sad’, so as recursiv

ely to work

herself up into an emotional state that reaches a plateau and then sub-

sides. Henrietta, a seventy-year-old retired nurse, describes a similar

process in relation to grieving:

Musically reconﬁguring agenc

y57

The Verdi Requiem is one of my favourites. That is associated with losing a baby.

And I’d got to know it through my husband and it was really quite a way of griev-

ing – I’d shut myself away in a room [she begins to cry] . . . It’s cathartic, I think.

When the music gathers itself into a climax and subsides, one may ‘go

with it’, as Willis’s bikeboys (described in chapter 1) aptly put it (‘you go

with the beat, don’t you?’ (Willis 1978:72)), to the extent one identiﬁes

one’s emotional state with that musical structure. Over time, assuming

one uses the same musical materials for these events, one may develop

patterns or even styles to emotional states, and this issue is discussed in

chapter 5. Thus, to play music as a virtual means of expressing or con-

structing emotion is also to deﬁne the temporal and qualitative structure

of that emotion, to play it out in real time and then move on. In this sense

music is both an instigator and a container of feeling – anger, sorrow and

so forth. The natural history of the practices and processes in and through

which feeling states are identiﬁed and ‘expressed’ (that is, enacted to self

or other over time) is a key topic for the sociology and social psychology

of subjectivity

. It concerns the question of how aesthetic agency is

conﬁgured in real time, as passion is choreographed and entrained. This

question is taken up in relation to reliving past events at the end of this

chapter, and again in chapter 5 which examines the socio-cultural ecology

of music in public places and in that most private of aesthetic spaces – the

intimate interaction. Meanwhile, what of music’s role in establishing the

seemingly ‘passionless’ state of focused mental concentration?

Getting into focus – music and mental concentration

If there’s complete silence then my mind wanders and I just don’t concentrate.

(Monica)

[Music] keeps my mind working. (Yen)

I always have music on in my study. (Diana)

One of the most basic things music does is to block out other sounds. This

was crucial in noisy urban spaces such as Manha

ttan (‘I put my Walkman

on sometimes just to drown out sound’). Music also serves as an alterna-

tive stimulus for some women when they look up from their work (‘It’s

nice to have a background for something and it’s nice to just sort of stop

every so often and it refocuses you . . . You know how when you look at

your computer screen a lot they tell you to stop every half hour and look

away, well music does that for me, it sort of reminds me there is something

there pleasant I’m doing’).

But music for some respondents was intrinsic to producing environ-

ments that aﬀord concentration, that help them to produce the kind of

58 Music as a technology of self

focus they needed to carry out mental work such as balancing a cheque-

book, writing or studying; and there were certain musical materials that

they hailed as conducive to producing focus. For example, Karen

observes that music:

gives us both a distraction and a better focus. I ﬁnd I can focus better when there’s

music on . . . I think that’s why, it gives you something else that’s going on in your

head while you’re doing whatever you’re doing . . . um, if I’m doing like heavy con-

tracts work or something that I have to focus on it would probably be classical.

Sometimes it is Broadway music, but it’

s usually not pop or rock when I’m using it

to try to concentrate or something. It’s usually classical or stage music.

And Diana says:

Diana: [W]hen I was studying I would on the whole listen to something which I

didn’t have to think about, so I would be listening to Schubert, or Beethoven or

um – a lot of Bach choral things. What else have I got up there? Quite a lot of

Schubert, Sibelius – Mozart piano concertos, Mozart quartets, quintets, that sor

of thing.

Q. You mentioned things with words, are there any other styles of music that

you wouldn’t listen to when you were working?

Diana: I could listen to jazz – but when I’m studying if it’s something that, if

you like, pulls at your heartstrings, or conjures up memories then I won’t listen to

it when I am studying.

‘Classical’ music or music without words was most frequently cited as

aiding concentration. This did not appear to relate to the music’s ‘intrin-

sic’ qualities per se. Rather, music’s powers to promote concentration were

derived from its relational position in respondents’ map of tastes and

practices of music consumption. For the respondents who hailed ‘classi-

cal music’ as a ‘focuser’, this was usually because such was least likely to

be associated with aspects of their lives outside the realm of work or study

– that is, music not strongly associated with speciﬁc aspects of their social

or emotional lives or memories. (Indeed, they often did not know the

actual composers or works they used for this purpose but rather made use

of compilation CDs, such as baroque highlights and so forth.) Just as

some respondents used music that lay on the margins of their normal

music listening material to hold and diﬀuse anger, so, too, music for

holding and concentrating focus was music on the margins of their

musical-practical maps.

In addition, they were not the sorts of pieces that made them want to

sing along. For example, here is Monica describing the sorts of CDs she

had to turn oﬀ in order to get back to work:

I listened to Mick Drake actually, then I put on Madonna . . . the Immaculate

Collection, which is one of my favourites, then I’ve stopped working you see

because it’s really – I just sung along to all the songs! So I completely lost really

Music and mental concentration 59

what I was doing. That’s what I mean when there’s a really good song I like to sing

along to it.

The music that promoted concentration typically did not give promi-

nence to lyrics – at least not in a language they could understand. They

thus engaged in self-conditioning, associating familiar, focus-producing

music with concentration such that, when the music was replayed, they

were able to induce concentra

tion. (For example, ‘I wouldn’t put some-

thing new on. If I am trying to work and have music, I would know the

music already so I really don’t have reactions to it.’) Respondents

described how they used music that they associated with the production

of concentration and circumstances in which mental activity and focus

were predominant.

In short, music was used here to reproduce an aes-

thetic environment of ‘working’ and to circumscribe within that environ-

ment ‘where the mind can go’. One literally stays tuned, through such

practices, to a mode of concentrated focus, to the mental task at hand. For

example, at the end of the interview with Karen (quoted above) I asked

her if we could return to the issue of music and focus:

Karen: . . . Sometimes it holds my focus if I’m bored or something.

Q. It’s interesting, you have brought up this issue quite a few times of music and

focus. It sounds like you do use music to focus.

Karen: Yes, I do.

Q. And now I’m going to ask you something. I don’t know if you will be able to

help, but try. How do you think it helps y

ou to focus?

Karen: Um.

Q. Whether you could describe it in terms of how you feel.

Karen: OK. I just – this is kind of why I use it for work, I’ll try to describe it that

way – I stop thinking about random thoughts, [they] just stop going through my

head when I have music on, I won’t think of what I’m doing or I’ll be listening to

the music, I won’t just be thinking, ‘Oh I have to do this, this, this, this, this. It kind

of clears my head of all the random thoughts that may pop in and distract me oth-

erwise. And that’s how I’ve used it to focus.

Q. Can I ask you about random thoughts? Is there something about the rest of

the environment that’s maybe more conducive to bringing random thoughts to

you?

Karen: ...Ijust think I get distracted easily [laughs] and music helps me not to

get distracted easily, so I’ll focus on that and I will focus on wha

t I am, the other

thing I’m doing and not about the distraction.

As with the example of music for ‘venting’, here, too, music is used to

seal oﬀ an environment, and to regularize that environment by prede-

termining the types of sonic stimuli it will contain. Music is thus a device

with which to conﬁgure a space such that it aﬀords some activities –

concentration – more than others. And in these examples, music aﬀords

concentration because it structures the sonic environment, because it

60 Music as a technology of self

dispels random or idiosyncratic stimuli, aesthetic or otherwise. It places

in the foreground sounds that respondents associate with mental work,

sounds that are familiar and that recede to the background. With the

addition of music, an environment comes to be conﬁgured for mental

work.

To be sure, not all respondents used music to establish focus. Indeed,

to most of the respondents over seventy and to those who were profes-

sionally trained musicians,

the idea of music as ‘background’ to nearly

anything was antithetical. Music is something one either makes or listens

to intently. For example, seventy-ﬁve-year-old Eleanor, a church organist

and highly active amateur musician, describes how she would never

attempt to listen to music if she were doing paperwork, studying chess or

otherwise needing to concentra

te:

No. Because the music I have is not background music, the music that I love is

something that is wonderful to me, you know, and when I listen to music I listen to

the music and, well, I might sometimes put it on in breakfast time but then I can’t

really concentrate. I use the time during breakfast time doing two crossword

puzzles, two cryptograms. It gets my brain going [laughs].

Relevant units of aﬀect

In all of the above examples, music is an active ingredient in the organiza-

tion of self, the shifting of mood, energy level, conduct style, mode of

attention and engagement with the world. In none of these examples,

however, does music simply act upon individuals, 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.

Moreover – and this would be a grave disappointment for Adorno (see

Adorno 1991) – the concept of the musical ‘work’, the total work as a, or

indeed the, meaningful unit, is mostly irrelevant. Music takes its meaning

from many things apart from its intertextual relationship with other

musical works (and with the history of those works). While music-stylistic

and historical matters may be relevant to the conﬁguration of music’s

meaning and signiﬁcance in some cases (especially with regard to music’s

conventional signifying materials such as genre, instrumentation, style

and gesture), equally important to the matter of music’s social ‘eﬀects’ is

the question of how musical materials relate to extra-musical matters

such as occasions and circumstances of use, and personal associations,

where the relevant semiotic unit is more likely to be a fragment or a phrase

or some speciﬁc aspect of the music, such as its orchestration or tempo.

The use of music as an organizing device in relation to subjectivity and

Relevant units of affect 61

self is, above all, a pragmatic aﬀair and, although this practice may possess

a logic, it also diﬀers considerably from the practice of ‘music apprecia-

tion’ traditionally conceived. Respondents, particularly those without

formal musical training, engage in various DIY activities with regard to

music, mobilizing, picking and choosing, in magpie fashion, musical

‘bits’ or, as Keith Negus (1996:94–6) has aptly termed them, ‘semiotic

particles’ that in turn provide cues for and parameters within which a

respondent’s modes of aesthetic agenc

y come to be con

ﬁgured and trans-

formed. This practice can be seen clearly in relation to music’s role as a

resource for identity construction.

Music and self-identity

The point of this chapter so far has been to illuminate music as an active

ingredient in the care of the self and to introduce some of the ways in

which music is employed for this purpose. Music is a device or resource to

which people turn in order to regulate themselves as aesthetic agents, as

feeling, thinking and acting beings in their day-to-day lives. Achieving this

regulation requires a high degree of reﬂexivity; the perceived ‘need’ for

regulation described by our respondents emerges with reference to the

exigencies and situational ‘demands’ made upon them in and through

their interactions with others. Such reﬂexivity can also been seen in rela-

tion to music’s role as a building material of self-identity.

In light of recent social theory, the concepts of self-identity, personality

and biography have undergone major redevelopment. No longer

conceptualized as a ﬁxed or unitary entity – as something that is an

expression of inner ‘essence’ – identity has been recast conceptually as a

product of social ‘work’ (Garﬁnkel 1967; Giddens 1991; DeNora 1995a;

1995c). Resituated, identity and its historical counterpart, biography, are

conceptualized as an abiding trope of modern Western culture, realized in

and through practices – textual and social (Atkinson 1990; Bertaux 1986;

DeNora 1995b; Denzin 1989; Morgan and Stanley 1990).

Looked at

from this literary/pragmatic perspective, individuals engage in a range of

mostly tacit identity work to construct, reinforce and repair the thread of

self-identity. This work is what makes that thread appear continuous

throughout the varied moments of day-to-day living whenever one for-

mulates accounts of self to self and others. A great deal of identity work is

produced as presentation of self to other(s) – which includes a micro-

politics – through the enactment of a plethora of mini ‘docu-dramas’ over

the course of a day (see Garﬁnkel 1967 on passing). But the ‘projection’

of biography is by no means the only basis for the construction of self-

identity. Equally signiﬁcant is a form of ‘introjection’, a presentation of

62 Music as a technology of self

self to self, the ability to mobilize and hold on to a coherent image of ‘who

one knows one is’. And this involves the social and cultural activity of

remembering, the turning over of past experiences, for the cultivation of

self-accountable imageries of self. Here music again comes to the fore, as

part of the retinue of devices for memory retrieval (which is, simultane-

ously, memory construction). Music can be used as a device for the

reﬂexive process of remembering/constructing who one is, a technology

for spinning the apparently continuous tale of who one is

. To the extent

that music is used in this way it is not only, in Radley’s sense, a device of

artefactual memory (Radley 1990; Urry 1996); it is a device for the

generation of future identity and action structures, a mediator of future

existence.

‘The song is you’ – identity and relation through music

One of the ﬁrst things respondents used music for was to remember key

people in their lives, for example loved family members who had died.

‘There’s a piece of music tha

t my grandad used to like very much’,

Monica says, ‘and sometimes I’ll be feeling a bit reminiscent about him

because we were very close and I’d listen to that to remember him, but it

wouldn’t make me sad, it doesn’t make me happy either, it’s just sort of,

“I’ve just remembered you today”, sort of thing, you know.’ Similarly,

Lucy describes how, shortly after her father had died:

I was coming home from choir practice one evening, and I had the car radio on,

switched it on as soon as I got going, and it was playing the [Brahms] Double

Concerto and I just had to stop, and some friends were coming behind, you know,

and I was just in ﬂoods of tears and they said, ‘Why don’t you turn it oﬀ’ and I

said, ‘I can’t’ and that it was ages before I could listen to that or anything like it

without thinking of him, it’s only in the last year or so, because I know now that it

meant so much to him and it means so much to me and I realize now how much

like him I am. That’s not to say my mother didn’t have an important role in music

as well . . .

The most frequent type of relationship respondents descr

ibed in rela-

tion to music was romantic or intimate. Music helped them to recall

lovers or former partners and, with these memories, emotionally height-

ened phases or moments in their lives. Diana, for example, described her

listening habits and her tendency to listen to biographically key music in

the ‘late evening . . . I’m on my own with peace and quiet in my study and

I’m often up ’til two in the morning. I regard this time as my own space.’

Diana: . . . I had an aﬀair with a Londoner and we used to go out in the evenings,

about twice a week, I don’t know how I managed it, oh I know, because my

husband was [working at home] and I would just say I was going out and we used

Identity and relation through music 63

to go to a [London] pub . . . and [there singers] used to sing to pop music of that

era and ‘A whiter shade of pale’ was our tune and I just loved it and I suppose that

aﬀair went on for about two years, two and a half years.

Q. Can you tell me about how it came to be your tune? You heard it in that bar

did you?

Diana: Yes, and of course it was on the radio all the time. Yes, we just sort of

were absorbed in each other, or we’d hold hands or look at each other intently,

something like that.

For many of the respondents, such as Diana, music was linked to a

‘reliving’ of an event or crucial time, linked often to a relationship. Even

within the conﬁnes of the small, exploratory sample of ﬁfty-two, certain

works appeared more than once.

Lucy: There’s the whole pop music of the sixties and all those hits which can

instantly bring back memories . . . ‘A whiter shade of pale’ ...I can say it’s

[German university town] Hauptbahnhof, in August 1967, you know! . . . [It] was

the hit in summer ’67, and I spent a semester in Germany as a student, and being

there in the station, I was just leaving there to go to France, in fact, to meet up with

[her future husband] . . . and we spent the summer, well, a couple of weeks, in

France and that was the big record then, and . . . I suppose that was the start of our

– just before we got engaged or whatever . . . but it was just, just culminated the

sixties I think, there were a whole lot of songs like that. . . .

Q. Do you ever listen to that song now?

Lucy: Well I just heard it the other day. I was in a shop, buying something, and

there was a woman about the same age as me [ﬁfty-two] and I said, ‘That takes

you back, doesn’t it?’ and she said, ‘Yeah’ [laughs] and in fact, it was a CD, hits of

the sixties, that they were playing in that shop.

Q. How did you feel, you said, ‘It takes you back’?

Lucy: I just felt happy, you know, reminded me of [things] . . .

As Deborah puts it, ‘I have relationship songs, everyone has their rela-

tionship songs, and then years later when I talk to somebody I go, “Oh my

God, I totally related that with us,

with you.”’ Maria, for example,

describes an outdoor concert she heard on holiday. ‘Now every time I

hear a certain kind of new age music, I think of the sky that night and the

moon, it was a hot summer, the tall trees, and standing there, arm next to

arm with David, feeling electric, like part of a chain of being with him and

our environment.’ For Andrea,

Rod Stewart’s ‘The

ﬁrst cut is the deepest’

and ‘Sailing’ both ‘have sad memories for me but I like listening to them.

I suppose one likes to cry sometimes.’ The songs are associated with a

broken relationship and ‘the happiness that went with it, as well’. Here,

Andrea alludes to how, despite being a reminder of a happy time that has

come to an end, music simultaneously helps to recapture or construct a

sense of the capacity within which one once acted (one’s aesthetic

agency); in so doing, it helps dramatize to self a set of heightened life

64 Music as a technology of self

experiences. Through this vicarious review of past experience, this stock-

taking of ‘who one is’ or ‘where, interpersonally, one has been’, one regis-

ters one’s self to one’s self as an object of self-knowledge, in the aesthetic

construction that is memory.

For some respondents, such as Lucy above, music’s power to evoke the

emotional content of relationships is too painful; one does not ‘like to

cry’. Henrietta, for example, burst into tears and asked that the tape be

stopped during the inter

view simply after mentioning the song she and

her ex-husband shared when they were ﬁrst courting (‘Memories were

made of this’). Becky avoids what she terms ‘seventies’ music because ‘I

have very bad memories, they remind me of my ex-husband and I dislike

the music for that very reason.’ Here, seventy-seven-year-old Bertie, who

had recently moved, after her husband died, to an American ‘life care

center’ in up-state New York, tries to explain why she cannot recall in any

detail the contents of her record collection (which is stored just next to

where we were sitting in her living room but which she avoids consulting,

despite some gentle hints):

Bertie: ...I haven’t played myrecords now half as much as I used to.

Q. Yes, because you mentioned you listen to the radio.

Bertie: Yes. [Pause] And I think that has something to do with my husband

dying.

Q. Yes.

Bertie: [Pause] All those records were so shaded with him and with our listen-

ing. I think that’s why I don’t listen as much as I used to

For Lucy, Maria, Martha and Bertie, music brings back waves of

emotion, the speciﬁcity of a time, an event, a relationship. For other people,

music may evoke a more general era. As Judith puts it, ‘Music does do it –

brings back a certain time in your life. I don’t think it makes me remember

about speciﬁc things though, whereas photography does, it makes you

remember speciﬁc things.’ Psychologists refer to this process as priming,

where, ‘a network of associations that are linked by shared mood connec-

tions is activated by music’ (Crozier 1997:79). As Deborah, thinking back

to her student days and a pleasant semester abroad at Oxford, says:

Even if [I don’t like the music] I’d buy the record because of its memories, things

like Take Tha

t remind me of England [laughs]. Apart from the fact that I bought

one album and spent far too much money on imports because of it reminds me of

people I knew in England. Turning on Radio 1 in the morning, that kind of thing

when I was there.

For Maria, Diana and Deborah, music reminds them of who they

were at a certain time – a moment, a season, an era – and helps them to

recapture the aesthetic agency they possessed (or which possessed them)

Identity and relation through music

at the time. Reliving experience through music is also (re)constituting

past experience, it is making manifest within memory what may have

been latent or even absent the ﬁrst time through (Urry 1996) and music

provides a device of prosthetic biography (Lury 1998). Indeed, the telling

about the past in this way, and of music’s ability to invoke past feelings

and ways of being, is itself part of this reconstitution. The telling is part of

the presentation of self to self and other(s). Such reliving, in so far as it is

experienced as an identiﬁcation with or of ‘the past’, is part of the work of

producing one’s self as a coherent being over time, part of producing a

retrospection that is in turn a resource for projection into the future, a

cueing in to how to proceed. In this sense, the past, musically conjured, is

a resource for the reﬂexive movement from present to future, the

moment-to-moment production of agency in real time. It serves also as a

means of putting actors in touch with capacities, reminding them of their

accomplished identities, which in turn fuels the ongoing projection of

identity from past into future. Musically fostered memories thus produce

past trajectories that contain momentum.

At the most general and most basic lev

el, music is a medium that can be

and often is simply paired or associated with aspects of past experience. It

was part of the past and so becomes an emblem of a larger interactional,

emotional complex. A good deal of music’s aﬀective powers come from

its co-presence with other things – people, events, scenes. In some cases,

music’s semiotic power – here, its emblematic capacity – comes from its

conditional presence; it was simply ‘there at the time’. In such cases,

music’s speciﬁc meanings and its link to circumstances simply emerge

from its association with the context in which it is heard. In such cases,

the link, or articulation, that is made – and which is so often biograph-

ically indelible – is initially arbitrary but is rendered symbolic (and hence

evocatory) from its relation to the wider retinue of the experience, to the

moment in question.

To stop at this point, however, is to fail to appreciate the extent of

music’s semiotic powers in rela

tion to the construction of memory and,

indeed, to the experience that comes to be lodged and is ‘retrievable’

within autobiographical memory. These two issues are related. They

need to be developed because they lead into the matter of how, as it is

sometimes put, ‘the music itself’ is active in the constitution of the shape

of subjectivity and self-identity.

Musical memories and the choreography of feeling

Music moves through time, it is a temporal medium. This is the ﬁrst reason

why it is a powerful aide-mémoire. Like an article of clothing or an aroma,

66 Music as a technology of self

music is part of the material and aesthetic environment in which it was

once playing, in which the past, now an artefact of memory and its

constitution, was once a present. Unlike material objects, however, music

that is associated with past experience was, within that experience, heard

over time. And when it is music that is associated with a particular moment

and a particular space – as it was for Diana in a pub, Maria under the trees

at an outdoor concert and Lucy in the German train station – music

reheard and recalled provides a device for unfolding

, for replaying, the

temporal structure of that moment, its dynamism as emerging experience.

This is why, for so many people, the past ‘comes alive’ to its soundtrack.

But there is yet more to it. For the women described above, the sound-

track of their action was not mere accompaniment. It did not merely

follow their experience, was not merely overlaid upon it. True, the partic-

ular music may have been arbitrarily paired with the experiential moment

– indeed, Diana, Maria and Lucy all describe how the music that ‘brings

it all back’ was music that ‘happened’ to be playing, that was simply part

of the environment or era. But the creation of that ‘moment’ as a height-

ened moment was due in part to the alchemy of respondents’ perceived or

sensed ‘rightness’

or resonance between the situation, the social relation-

ship, the setting, the music, and themselves as emerging aesthetic agents

with feelings, desires, moods such that the music was the mood, and the

mood, the music. To the extent that music comes to penetrate experience

in this way, it is informative of that experience. Music thus provides para-

meters – or potential parameters because it has to be meaningfully

attended to – for experience constituted in real time. It serves, as was dis-

cussed in the previous chapters, as a referent for experience. This is

exactly what Lucy was doing, as described in chapter 2, where she could

be seen to contribute to music’s ‘power’ over her according to the circum-

stances under which she consumed the music. This environmental

appropriation, which is a reﬂexive constitution of music’s aﬀordances

within a context, scene or setting, is how experience comes to be made,

felt and known to self. It consists of an interlacing of experience (feeling,

action) and the materials that are accessed as the referents for exper

ience,

its metaphoric and temporal parameters. It is no wonder, then, that on

rehearing music that helped to structure, to inform experience, respon-

dents describe how they are able to relive that experience; the study of

human–music interaction thus reveals the subject, memory and, with it,

self-identity, as being constituted on a fundamentally socio-cultural plane

where the dichotomy between ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ is, for all practical

purposes, null and void.

Music may thus be seen to serve as a container for the temporal struc-

ture of past circumstances. Moreover, to the extent that, ﬁrst time

Musical memories and feeling 67

through, a past event was constructed and came to be meaningful with

reference to music, musical structures may provide a grid or grammar for

the temporal structures of emotional and embodied patterns as they were

originally experienced. Music is implicated in the ways that, as Urry

observes with poignant reference to Proust’s famous phrase, ‘our arms

and legs . . . [are] full of torpid memories’ (Urry 1996:49); it is a mediator

of, in Proust’s sense, the aesthetic, memory-encrusted unconscious (Lash

and Urry 1994:43).

Finding ‘the me in music’ – musically composed identities

The sense of ‘self’ is locatable in music. Musical materials provide ter

and templates for elaborating self-identity – for identity’s identiﬁcation.

Looking more closely at this process highlights the ways in which musical

materials are active ingredients in identity work, how respondents ‘ﬁnd

themselves’ in musical structures. It also highlights some of the ways that

music is attended to by its recipients, how music reception and the units

of meaning that listeners ﬁnd within music diﬀer dramatically from

musicological and music-psychological models of music reception and

their emphasis on the perception of musical structures. Consider this

example from the interview with Lucy:

Q. . . . Have you ever adjusted the volume of music that’s playing in your home,

either to turn it down or turn it up?

Lucy:...I would sometimes turn it up if something was playing, if it was

coming to something I really liked, a nice juicy chord, or a bit that I liked, I’d say,

‘Oh turn it up’ or I’d go in and listen.

Q. ‘A bit that I like’ – you’ve touched on that a couple of times earlier, that’s

something that’s very interesting. Could you give me an example of some ‘bit’ of

some piece of music, some chord or . . .

Lucy: Well, usually because it’s just a juicy chord.

Q. What do you mean by ‘juicy’?

Lucy: Well – a lot of notes, and, usually perhaps a lower register. I sing alto and I

tend to like cello music and lower register music, you know, really punchy sound

and, well, ‘juicy’ is the word, huge chords or just, I don’t know, just a phrase. I can’t

think of a particular bit of music but, I think probably in the Pastoral Symphony,

come to think of it, or there’s lots in Vivaldi, Vivaldi has a good – and Brahms.

There’s certain things, that you just wait for that bit and you really enjoy it.

Lucy goes on to explain how these things may be highly personal: ‘I don’t

know whether they’re there for anyone else. I really don’t know because

they’re gone in a second.’ At the end of the interview, we returned to the

topic of these ‘juicy’ musical moments, ones that feature the lower regis-

ter sounds (she describes how she does not like soprano solos) and

chords:

68 Music as a technology of self

Q. . . . You said, you’re an alto, and you like music that brings out the lower

sounds. Why is that? [laughs]

Lucy: I have no idea! [laughs] Maybe because it’s sort of meatier or something

and a sort of more intense experience.

When pressed further, Lucy says that she thinks she likes the lower

sonorities because they are:

Lucy: . . . part of the background. I think it’s more being in the background rather

than being, because the soprano tends to have the tune, even if it’s not a solo

soprano, whereas we [altos] provide the meat – it’s the sopranos and the tenors

that carry the song, if you like, and the basses and the altos that ﬁll out to make it a

sort of – [she stops and looks at me questioningly]

Q. A sonic whole?

Lucy: Yeah. And I think that maybe that characterizes me in life, that I don’t

like being in the limelight, I like to – [pause]

Q. I’m an alto too [laughs].

Lucy: [Laughs] Yes.

Q. So, not being ‘in the limelight’ but being?

Lucy: Being part of a group. And, you know, pressing forward and doing my bit

but not – [pause]

Q. Filling in, as it were, the needed middle?

Lucy: Yeah. Seeing what needs doing and doing it but not being spotlighted

and being ‘out front’ sort of thing.

Here Lucy makes a link between a preferred type of musical material

(‘juicy’ chords), a concept of self-identity (the ‘me in life’) and a kind of

social ideal (‘doing my bit but not . . . being spotlighted’). She ‘ﬁnds

herself ’, so to speak, in certain musical structures that provide repre-

sentations of the things she perceives and values about herself. In that

sense, listening for (and turning up the volume on) the ‘juicy’ bits is a

form of self-aﬃrmation. Simultaneously, these bits provide images of self

for self. Here, the music provides a material rendering of self-identity; a

material in and with which to identify identity. Through the mutual refer-

encing of self to music and music to self

, Lucy

ﬂeshes out the meaning of

each. Here then, in relation to the musical elaboration of self-identity, is a

virtuous circle: music is appropriated as Lucy’s ally, as an enabler for the

articulation of self-identity – for its spinning out as a tale for self and

other. Conversely, this tale of identity leads Lucy to value and specially

attend to certain musical materials. Through this aesthetic reﬂexive

process Lucy enhances ontological security in her self-identity by

drawing upon, and drawing together within a habitat, musical artefacts.

Through these artefacts she may come to ‘know’ herself (and thus project

herself in future action – generate herself as an agent). She accomplishes

this identity work through the ways she perceives herself as ‘like’ the

material to which she refers, reﬂexively, to produce her self-knowledge.

Musically composed identities

Here we can follow music as it comes to be converted or transposed – in

and through interpretive appropriation – into something extra-musical,

something social: Lucy’s registration of self-identity. Music is a ‘mirror’

that allows one to ‘see one’s self ’. It is, also, however, a ‘magic mirror’ in

so far as its speciﬁc material properties also come to conﬁgure (for

example, transﬁgure, disﬁgure) the image reﬂected in and through its

(perceived) structures. In this sense, music works as what Turner (1981)

calls an ‘action paradigm’. Like a cultural perfor

mance (Turner had in

mind theatrical performances), then, music too may serve as a repository

of value, of self-perception.

Using music in this way as a mirror for self-perception (locating within

its structures the ‘me in life’, as Lucy puts it) is a common practice of

identity work in daily life. There are some individuals, however – such as

Gary, the music therapeutic client discussed in chapter 1 – who cannot

and normally would not conduct this sort of identity work for them-

selves. They are not only removed from the aesthetic resources for the

constitution and maintenance of self-identity (see Goﬀman 1961), they

do not possess the aesthetic reﬂexive skills through which this work is

normally accomplished. They cannot therefore produce themselves –

as objects of knowledge, as concepts that can be remembered – for them-

selves.

Here, then, is one of the uses of music therapy: the improvisational

work of a music therapist may be used to ﬁll out and structure musical-

interactive sessions. As with the session with Gary, a therapist may use

music strategically to facilitate clients’ self-perception and ontological

self-security. In many cases one of the ﬁrst aims of such therapy is to

strengthen and reinforce a client’s attempted musical gestures, following

the ‘iso’ or correspondence principle (Bunt 1997) of matching the para-

meters of a client’s music, of replaying them back to the client, to promote

security (the client comes to be ‘in control’ of the aesthetic environment –

for many clients this determination is far removed from their daily rou-

tines). Such a procedure aims to mirror a client’s musical gestures so that

he or she may come to perceive them as an object – as part of his or her

self-expression. In this way, the therapist strategically constructs what the

client is unable to build for him/herself – an aesthetic registration of self,

constituted against the contrast structure provided by the music. The

client’s musical gestures are, through the therapist’s work, bound up

within the frame of the therapist’s musical gestures such that they come to

provide a feature or ﬁguration of the client him/herself. The client’s ges-

tures thus become traces of his or her identity and, through the therapist’s

attempts to make sense, musically, of these gestures, the client comes to

have, like so-called ‘normal’ people, a fabricated registry of self-identity.

70 Music as a technology of self

The resultant music ratiﬁes the client’s presence (and often results in

signs of pleasure from the client, such as smiling, bodily composure and

physical contact). Here is a therapist describing this process as she talks

us through a video tape of a session with Mandy, a severely disabled client

who is also visually impaired:

I don’t have any way of communicating with Mandy at all, so what she is giving

me is basically nothing. She has got this – she grinds her teeth which is awful and

there is no way I am going to reﬂect that back! And she has got this vocal sound she

makes and she is doing this with her head all the time.

So what I am trying to do in

this video is I am singing a greeting song to her, which is the way I always start the

session so that she knows that we have begun, and then I am following the rhythm

of her head and the idea that she gets the impression that she is in control of some-

thing that when her head stops the music stops and when she starts moving her

head again it starts so I am giving her some control in the hope that at some stage

she will start to interact.

As David Aldridge has observed, music provides here a ‘ground of

being – not in verbal logic but analogous to the ground of their [clients’]

own functioning. In this sense, insight is made, not in a restricted verbal

intellectual sense, but achieved in composition’ (1992:29). If Mandy –

the music therapeutic client described above – is at one end of a contin-

uum of musical use in regard to identity work, then Elaine, who describes

her musical practices in the following quote, is at the other:

Elaine: I would say about myself that my range of musical tastes which, in talking

to other people, I know are rather eclectic. It reﬂects something else about me,

which is that I love a wide variety of experiences . . . I love food from all around the

world, and will try anything, you know . . . I somehow grew up with an ability to

experience diversity or something and enjoy it enormously and be stimulated by it

rather than frightened by it or wanting to, you know, trying to keep things too con-

tained . . . I could go to a party looking very hippie, you know from the old days,

hippie, go out in beads and huge earrings and lots of colour, but go the next night

to an opera and look like I’d just stepped oﬀ the pages of a very conservative, you

know [laughs], nice young lady type book, so yes and I enjoy that. When I was in

my twenties I used to puzzle o

ver this quite a bit and think I don’t know who to be.

‘Which is my New York?’ I would think Am I a Village person or am I a Fifth

Avenue person . . . and then I came to this wonderful saying that I could be all

these selves and I could choose one so I rather liked just exactly that, being able to

play into any role, it’s fun.

Q. Do you ever experience a diﬃculty in deciding on which role, or a sense of

between roles? Or is that not a problem?

Elaine: No, not a problem. It’s – an unconscious sense almost, of who you need

to be and who you are that day and what feels right and, yes, even in a way some-

times you don’t understand, you just get dressed and look in the mirror and say

this – you could have worn it a week ago and it felt right, but it isn’t ‘working’

today and so you change or put diﬀerent earrings on . . .

Musically composed identities 71

Elaine, when asked to account for her self-identity, deﬁnes it in terms of

its multi-faceted character; she is a person with many dimensions, and

her musical tastes and practices demonstrate this diversity, this range of

personae that make up her ‘self ’. Indeed, Elaine was one of the most

musically explosive respondents in the study, engaging in a great deal of

‘bursting into song’:

I’m always singing. My kids – one thing I know this is something I always do, if

somebody sa

ys something I say, ‘Oh, that reminds me’ because it will remind me

of a song and I’ll say, ‘Oh there is a song about that’ and then I insist on singing a

few lines so they – it’s kind of a little joke thing that I do. ‘Oh, Mom always knows

a song about that.’ It can be rather loosely related, but it’s just a fun thing that we

do, or that I do.

And here, she describes how she musically ‘dominates’ her household:

Q. So if we can just go back for a moment .

. . Would you be putting that kind of

music on for the whole family or just you and your husband?

Elaine: Whole family.

Q. Whole family. Now do the kids or does your husband ever put music on or is

this something that you do?

Elaine: Something I do.

Q. Do you think within the dynamics of the family that you tend to be the most

likely person for putting the music on in communal areas?

Elaine: Absolutely. If it’s communal, I put it on.

Q. Is that because you are most interested in doing tha

t or is it that you are

maybe more dominant in terms of taste?

Elaine: Yeah, I think my tastes are more dominant in the household, period.

But my husband has very little interest in music . . . The kids wouldn’t put music

on because their music would be intolerable to me [laughs].

Q. OK. That’s one of the things I’m getting at. OK. So there’s a certain kind of

negotiation process then going on here.

Elaine: And I win [laughs]. Because I think it goes without saying that as the

mother, as the woman, I have the right to set the mood for dinner, even though I

don’t cook – my husband does all the cooking.

Here, Elaine describes how a range of music provides her with material

markers of her multi-faceted ‘personality’, that allow her to spin the tale

of ‘who she is’ to herself and others. And she is able to project these

markers or anchors into her domestic and interpersonal environment

through singing and through choosing background music. She is in

command of her aesthetic environment, the environment that reminds

her of and helps to hold on to the citadel of self-identity. Her environment

is furnished – because she is active in this decoration work – with

mnemonics of her self. Within this environment she is strong, easily able

to ‘ﬁnd the me in life’. This dominant position with regard to the politics

of aesthetic determination is taken up again in the following chapter,

72 Music as a technology of self

where music is explored as part of the furnishing of the collective environ-

ment.

Elaine describes a diverse array of music in relation to her self-identity

and its social-cultural situation, but she does not describe any examples of

lapsed or dropped music in relation to identity. For many respondents,

though, identity work is achieved in and through the music to which they

have stopped listening. Vanessa, for example, describes how she no longer

listens to Brian Ferry: ‘I haven’t play

ed him for years. But I was obsessed

with him . . . I’m not interested at all now . . . I think that’s a phase of life

that’s over and – I simply lost interest, I think . . .’ At the end of the inter-

view, she elaborates in more detail why she no longer listens to the music

(her current favourite at the time of the interview was George Michael’s

‘Older’):

I think they had a certain style which you wanted to try yourself. Maybe that’s why

I liked Roxy Music at that particular time. The high heels, the siren look, the diva

vamp – you know, that type of thing. Roxy Music conjured up all that type of

thing. I think you go through, you know – now I like jazz – because of my age [ﬁfty-

two] maybe – I don’t know.

Like Lucy, Vanessa was able to locate the ‘me in life’ musically. Unlike

Lucy, that location took as its semiotic particle the complex of music and

performer image. Also unlike Lucy, Vanessa can be seen to ha

ve dropped

a particular musical mirror or representation of self when it no longer

seemed tenable, when it no longer reﬂected with the terms with which she

could engage in self-description. Thus, in turning to diﬀerent musics and

the meaningful particles that ‘reﬂect’ and register self-identity, that

provide a template of self, individuals are also choosing music that

produces self-images that are tenable, that seem doable, habitable.

Respondents seem to access the music of ‘who they are’ through an elec-

tive aﬃnity, through a feeling for what seems comfortable and what is

exemplary. For example, Lucy’

s behavioural tendency in social situations

resonates with and is reinforced by her avoidance of ﬂashy solo arias.

Elaine, by contrast, enjoys just such arias (‘[In the car] I can play it as loud

as I want, I can sing to it, every last note of it, you know, that I can without

being worried about anybody else’s response, so I love it’ and, ‘By the way,

I mostly only like the ones where everybody dies, I don’t like – you know –

the ones where little shepherd girls poke around, I couldn’t care less, I

don’t like that kind of frippery stuﬀ . . .’). Similarly, Vanessa no longer

listens to music that no longer resonates with her self-image.

In this chapter, music has been portrayed as a temporal structure, as

oﬀering semiotic particles, as a medium with attendant conventional or

biographical associations – in action as a device for ordering the self as an

Musically composed identities 73

agent, and as an object known and accountable to oneself and others.

Music may be understood as providing a container for feeling and, in this

sense, its speciﬁc properties contribute to the shape and quality of feeling

to the extent that feeling – to be sustained, and made known to oneself

and others – must be established on a public or intersubjective plane.

Music is a material that actors use to elaborate, to ﬁll out and ﬁll in, to

themselves and to others, modes of aesthetic agency and, with it, sub-

jective stances and identities. This, then, is wha

should be meant when we

speak of the ‘cultural construction of subjectivity’ – and this is much more

than an idea that culture underwrites generic structures of feeling or aes-

thetic agency as is implied in so many post-structuralist writings and by

musicologists trained in semiotic analysis of texts. Such structuralist per-

spectives remain distanced from the heart of the ma

tter, from how indi-

viduals not only experience culture, but also how they mobilize culture

for being, doing and feeling. Anything less cannot address and begin to

describe or account for the mechanisms through which cultural materials

get into social psychological life. Accordingly, the next chapter pushes

these issues further by exploring music’s role in the constitution of

the body – not the overt and highly deliberate, overtly ‘performed’ body

of dance, but rather the physiological, non-conscious and micro-

behavioural body. Through this exploration a perspective is developed for

thinking about embodiment as it is musically structured. This perspective

is then applied, in chapter 5, to the matter of how music may be seen to be

used and have eﬀects in interaction and in public settings.

74 Music as a technology of self

4 Music and the body

The sociology of the body

In the realm of common sense,

the body is paradoxical. At once self-

evident and mysterious, biologically ‘given’ yet modiﬁable, the body is

characterized through contradiction. Exploring these contradictions

helps to open many deeper questions concerning the relationship

between bodies and the material-cultural settings of their existence.

Perhaps the best place to beg

in is by exploring the questions of where

‘body’ ends and ‘environment’ begins. What kind of a line should be

drawn, for example, between ‘endogenous’ and ‘exogenous’ bodily fea-

tures?

This deﬁnitional conundrum is by no means merely academic. On

the contrary, it has bearing upon the very questions that can be posed

about bodily matters. In recent years it has been given new impetus

through studies that focus on the reﬂexive relationship between body

and society. Calling into question the axiomatic status of ‘the’ body, and

its associated dualisms (mind/body, culture/nature, particular/universal,

subject/object), recent perspectives within sociology, history and cultural

studies have proposed a conception of the ‘body’ as a socialized entity,

conﬁgured at – and serving also to demarcate – the interstices of nature,

culture and technology (Birke 1992a; 1992b; Featherstone et al. 1991;

Haraway 1985; Jaggar and Bordo 1992;

Turner 1984). These per-

spectives oﬀer great potential for medical science, but do not square with

medical institutions and institutionalized practice as these are currently

conﬁgured. They interact well with complementary medicine (Sharma

1992), however, through their focus on the body as a construction. This

focus shifts away from what the body ‘is’ (and what can be done ‘to’ it), to

a focus on what the body may become as it is situated within diﬀerent

contexts and viewed from within diﬀerent terms of reference.

Thinking about the body as a construction involves much more than

thinking about how, in the superﬁcial sense, it is ‘represented’ (see

Shilling’s critique of social constructionism and body matters, 1993). At

its most powerful, it leads to the question of what the notion of the body-

as-culturally-constructed actually means in the real time and local space

of social practice. There is little work to date on the cultural and micro-

social processes through which bodies are conﬁgured in the here and now

of social life. And yet, if the body is indeed a hybrid or ‘cyborg’ of some

kind, if its physical properties are ‘made’ through interchange with

materials that lie outside it, then should we not be able to observe this

process and to document the mechanisms of this making? T

o do so is to

theorize the matter of how culture works at the level of embodied action

and to develop theory that can be applied to practical bodily problems

and procedures. In short, by moving away from discourses of the

body and moving towards a focus on body–culture interaction, on tempo-

ral body practices,

a grounded theory of the body’s cultural constitution

has the capacity to move well beyond semiotic readings of bodily mean-

ings. This capacity is potentially profound in so far as it is able to ‘enter’

the body in ways that articulate with (and even at times transform)

medical and physiological perspectives.

By its very nature, though, the exploration of body–culture interac-

tion cannot proceed hypothetically. Instead, the pursuit of body–

culture interaction entails a slower kind of work; it is built up case by

case, through empirical attention to the explicitly temporal matter of

bodies in action (in real time). This project entails a grounded theory of

the body as social and it depends upon intimate observations of bodies

as they interact, from moment to moment, with the materials that come

to ‘discipline’ them. Thus, just as the previous chapter featured the

intersection of culture and action as it generates emotional and bio-

graphical dimensions of agency and action trajectories, this chapter

deals with the ‘musical composition’ of agency’s embodied features.

These features include energy, comportment, co-ordination, timing,

arousal, motivation, endurance, and homoeostatic features such as

breathing, heart rate and blood pressure, and the self-perception of

pain and bodily pleasure. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it

serves to highlight some of the many features normally excised from

sociological conceptions of agency and agency’s parameters. The fol-

lowing discussion seeks to illuminate some of these features as they

emerge in and through reference to aesthetic and, in this case, musical

materials and as they provide a map or framework against which the

body is organized. It is linked to a theory of culture as something much

more than a decorative overlay for bodily phenomena but as intrinsic to

the constitution of the body and its physical processes, as something

that can enter into and formulate bodily realities. With regard to music,

such a theorization of cultural power extends well beyond the usual

76 Music and the body

concern with the meanings of art objects as it conceptualizes their

power at a more existential level of human being where body,

consciousness and feeling intertwine.

To develop this perspective for music and embodiment, we may begin

at the beginning of the human life-cycle, with the medical sub-ﬁeld of

neonatology (infants of thirty-seven weeks of age or less) and the recent

turn, within that area, to music as a therapeutic medium (Hicks 1992).

Considering music’s active role in the promotion of neona

tal ‘state

integrity’ (that is, the normalization and regularization of bodily pro-

cesses) helps to illuminate music’s role as a device of corporeal ordering,

at all stages of human life, as a medium that may have eﬀects long before it

is ‘meaningful’ in a cultural sense. Accordingly, examining music’s ‘force’

at this early stage in the life-cycle simultaneously points to new w

ays of

conceptualizing the links between human and non-human members of

the animal kingdom (Birke 1995).

Getting into the rhythm of life

The ﬁrst music we hear is inside the w

omb:

The sound that domina

tes the unborn child’s world is its mother’s heartbeat.

Other voices and familiar sounds add harmony to the already progressive

composition of the uterine symphony. From the 24

week on, the unborn child

listens all the time. He or she has lots to listen to, as the pregnant abdomen and

uterus are very noisy places. (Hicks 1995:31)

This ‘intrauterine symphony’, as it has been termed in the medical litera-

ture, consists of the mother’s heartbeat, her voice as she speaks or sings,

and any other sounds from the outside world, such as the voices of others.

In the sonic foreground of this sound environment is what has been

described within the literature as a ‘rhythmic “swooshing” of the blood as

it rushes through the placental vessels’ (Collins and Kuck 1990:24).

One of the key indicators of health is an inf

ant’s ability to achieve

homoeostasis, the regularization of physical and behavioural processes

such as breathing, blood pressure, heartbeat and sleep. Increasingly, neo-

natologists have come to conceptualize this ability as linked to environ-

mental factors. ‘State organization’, as it is called in the literature, is

described as the result of ‘both its own internal endogenous processes

and exogenous inﬂuences from the environment’ (Thoman et al. 1981).

In this respect, neonatology is in the medical vanguard with its emphasis

on holistic perspectives.

One of the key mechanisms for establishing homoeostasis is entrain-

ment, the alignment or integration of bodily features with some recurrent

Getting into the rhythm of life 77

features in the environment. This point is made repeatedly in the litera-

ture on neonates. For example:

Not only must the environment be conducive to physiologic homeostasis, but,

according to Keefe, ‘the pattern of infant state cycles must become harmoniously

integrated with the salient recurrent features of the environment’. (Kaminski and

Hall 1996:46)

In recent years, neonatologists have begun to pursue the matter of how

to produce an en

vironment conducive to entrainment and regularization,

an environment that helps infants achieve homoeostasis. Within this set

of concerns, there has been a growing emphasis on music and its potential

in the neonatal unit. In particular, music is thought to facilitate state

organization by encouraging entrainment.

Musical entrainment

Perhaps the most straightforward example of musical entrainment in

relation to the body can be found when music is used as a basis for march-

ing in step or otherwise synchronizing bodily movement, such as skipping

rope (with lessons about ‘normal’ adult sexual orientation literally

drummed in via the text!):

I like coﬀee, I like tea,

I like the boys

And the boys like me. (Children’s skipping song)

Musically entrained, the body and its processes unfold in relation to

musical elements (in these examples, its regular pulse); they are aligned and

regularized in relation to music, they are musically organized, musically

‘composed’. A more complex example can be found in dance, where the

body is not only entrained rhythmically (the 1-2-3 of the waltz, for

example) but also engages in stylistic manoeuvres in orientation to the

music (the clenched ﬁsts in relation to some rock or pop

music, the angle of

the neck and chin in ballet, or the pelvis during the cha-cha-cha).

This alignment, between music and body, often occurs subconsciously

or unconsciously and it may entail normally imperceptible micro-

movements, such as how one holds one’s eyebrows, cheekbones or shoul-

ders, the tension of one’s muscles. As a series of bodily gestures, then, dance

and more mundane and subconscious forms of choreography are media for

the autodidactic accumulation of self and gender awareness. Movement –

aesthetically oriented – is, as Irigaray put it in her essay on ‘The Gesture in

Psychoanalysis’ (1989), a means for constructing the spaces of the subject.

It is the source, as Angela McRobbie put it in her pioneering essay on

gender and dance, of bodily aesthetics in everyday life (1991:191).

78 Music and the body

In much the same way that bodily movements can be produced – con-

sciously or semi-consciously – in relation to musical properties, so, too, a

range of bodily processes can be entrained in relation to other temporally

organized environmental media. Entrainment may involve regularizing

and/or modifying physiological states (for example, oxygen levels in the

blood or heart rate), behaviour (at any level of detail – for example, blink-

ing, ﬁdgeting, jumping or sleeping), the temporal parameters of mood

and feeling (as described in chapter 3), and social role and action style,

which are discussed in chapter 5. Musical entrainment and its observable

character thus provide a clear example of how environmental materials

and their properties may be said to aﬀord or provide resources for partic-

ular kinds of bodies and bodily states, states that are regularized and

reproduced over time.

Of special interest here, in relation to the neonatal

body, is the way in which music is currently being employed to mediate

tensions between endogenous (bodily) and exogenous (environmental)

processes within neonatal intensive care units. Examining this issue, via

the neonatology literature, advances the conception of ‘human–music

interaction’ and musical ‘aﬀordances’ as dev

eloped in previous chapters

and applies it to the earliest phase of human life.

Paradox of cure in the neonatal unit – the body’s sonic

resources

Neonatal infants are often state-disorganized. In extreme situations of

bodily distress, they thrash their extremities and head, they grimace,

exhibit ﬂuctuations in heart rate, blood pressure and skin coloration, they

may be intolerant to feeding, their muscles may be ﬂaccid or rigid, they

may cry, and the oxygen levels in their blood may be low. All these things

are taken as symptoms of ‘state instability’, that is, ill health. In the face of

this instability, a range of neonatal devices are deployed to regularize

physiological processes and behavioural states. Within the neonatal ICU,

mechanical ventilators, hear

t monitors and intubation (for administrat-

ing drugs and nourishment) are, often literally, life supporting.

A neonatal infant is exposed to few stimuli, apart from those that derive

from medical devices. Conﬁned to crib or incubator, unable to be

touched, the neonatal infant may also not yet be able to see, and if even if

she is able to see, she is not at liberty to move her head freely, to direct her

gaze freely. Given these limitations, it seems reasonable to suggest that the

sonic dimension of the neonatal environment is heightened.

Like temperature or lighting, the sound of a unit – with or without

musical intervention – is a ubiquitous environmental feature; it is also one

that the infant cannot escape. And yet, the routine sound of a neonatal

Paradox of cure in the neonatal unit 79

intensive care unit is frequently cacophonous; it consists mainly of sounds

that are the random byproduct of medical technologies (for example, the

sound of respirators or the sounds of bottles clanking on the incubator

top), the sounds of other infants in distress, or, perhaps worse,

ampliﬁcations of the infant’s own disorganized state through devices such

as the heart monitor, whereby an infant’s (possibly erratic) heartbeat is

ampliﬁed and mirrored back as an audible beeping.

Paradoxically, then, the very environment in which neona

tes exist, and

upon which they are dependent for life support, may also serve to inhibit

an infant’s autonomous capacity for, as Kaminski and Hall put it (1996,

quoted above), ‘harmonious integration’ of body with environment in a

way that can produce state regulation. Not only is the infant’s auditory

environment lacking ‘salient recurrent features’

(that is, sonic resources

for embodied regularization), but the very machinery of life support may

lead to the disruption of state lability, biorhythms and sleep (Kaminski

and Hall 1996:46). The ‘cure’, in other words, brings some problems in

its train.

The neonate’s paradox is not unlike the situa

tion faced by creative

music therapeutic clients such as Gary, described in chapter 1, or Mandy

in chapter 3, for whom the unassisted elaboration of identity and

entrained (mutually co-ordinated) interaction was problematic. Gary’s

and Mandy’s distress is related to and exacerbated by their inability to

appropriate environmental-cultural materials for self-organization (iden-

tity, comportment, physiology). Neither can engage in the normal modes

for co-ordinating and interacting (such as verbal communication).

Moreover, because they have other disabilities (for example, Gary is visu-

ally disabled), the mundane environment presents a barrage of stressful,

often apparently chaotic, events (for Gary, having his incontinence pad

changed can be, according to how it is undertaken, a frightening ordeal).

Music therapy sessions, on the other hand, oﬀer a means of mitigating

distress in so far as the therapist is engaged in strategic manipulations of

music so as to enable them to ‘compose themselves’, constructively mir-

roring their gestures and engaging in musically ‘supportive’ activity.

Within the sessions, their self-composition arose from their production of

musical gestures that spanned time; engaging in this production they also

produced themselves as actors – that is, as actors who were engaged in

continuous activity – the activity of producing music. Within the realm of

music therapy, then, they were able to form and hold themselves as pro-

ducers of expressive forms, to engage in symbolic interaction. Thus the

musical therapeutic environment allowed them to achieve something

denied to them in daily life. Without this kind of musical support, as

oﬀered by the therapeutic session, Gary and Mandy are caught in a

80 Music and the body

vicious circle within which the environment and its perceived lack of

regularity impede the process of self-composition.

A similar vicious circle typiﬁes the situation of the neonatal infant.

It is well known to clinicians and well reﬂected in the literature. For

example:

neonates must synchronize their behavioral states and physiologic adjustments

with an environment where there is no clear, pronounced diurnal rhythm in noise

level or in caregiving activities. This is signiﬁcant because, for the neonate, one of

the primary biorhythmic elements is the distribution and ﬂow of sleep–wake

states over a 24-hour period. In the nursery environment, continuous noise aﬀects

neonatal biorhythms, and this aﬀects sleep regulation and state lability. (Kaminski

and Hall 1996:46)

For a neonate, this contrast is stark. Prior to birth, the infant’s environ-

ment is characterized by sonic regularity, by rhythm. Moreover, the audi-

tory environment was probably not associated with traumatic events. As

some researchers ha

ve remarked, ‘one of the most stressful changes that

occurs during the transition from intrauterine to extrauterine life is the

loss of rhythm that the foetus has become accustomed to through months

of being exposed to maternal movements, breathing, and heartbeat’

(Collins and Kuck 1990:24).

This is where music can make a diﬀerence, can be used to break out of

the vicious circle of a neonate’s dependency upon technology, much as it

does for creative music therapy clients. First, auditory stimuli, which can

waft through the unit or be employed through pillow or mattress speak-

ers, can actually ‘reach’ the infant where other types of entrainment

materials, such as touching, may not. Music is simply an available, practi-

cal medium in the intensive care unit for delineating a patterned and

stable or predictable environment. In addition, it can be used to mask the

unit’s auditory baseline of technical equipment and other ‘stressing’

noises. It is with these ends in mind tha

t recent innovations in neonatal

care have involved musical interventions. Music is increasingly seen by

neonatal professionals as an eﬀective means for modulating the array of

physiological states and micro-behaviours associated with instability into

an array associated with stability – stable heart rate, blood pressure,

colour, feeding, changes in posture,

muscle tone, less frantic movements,

rhythmic crying, cessation of grimacing and an ability to sleep and/or

become animated and intent. For example:

Baby B, a 2,665 gm, 34-week gestational age male . . . exhibited respiratory

distress at birth ...Fentanl[arespiratory depressant] was given every two to

four hours as needed for agitation associated with the mechanical ventilation.

Baby B’s response ...consisted of brief periods of apparent sleep, which did

not last more than 30 minutes. To provide comfort ...weplayedthe

Paradox of cure in the neona

tal unit 81

‘Transitions’ tape for periods of one to two hours. During these periods, Baby B

was able to use his paciﬁer for self-quieting, and he appeared to be sleeping.

(Leonard 1992:47)

The introduction of music (a combination of intrauterine sound and

synthesized female vocals, produced by Placenta Music Inc.) to the neo-

natal unit would thus appear to create, with minimal cost or eﬀort, a

modiﬁed and regularized environment. According to the medical criteria

and medical observations, this musical environment helped to regularize

the sleep patterns of the neonatal infant.

Such use, of which this was an instance, is increasingly common within

neonatology. It is becoming more common in other realms of medicine as

well; Cheryl Dileo Maranto has delinea

ted music’s use in a range of

medical procedures. These include surgery, where music listening has

been linked with, among other things, a reduction of stress hormone

levels, diminished need for anaesthesia, lowered pulse and stable blood

pressure rates, reduction in postoperative pain and the need for analgesic

medication (1993:161). Music has also been used in conjunction with

respiratory care, for entraining respiration, in burn care, and in labour and

delivery to compress time during labour, to distract or serve as a focal

point, to regulate breathing, to enhance Lamaze procedures, to enhance

the ‘euphoria’ of birth and to decrease the length of labour. It has also

been used widely in the area of pain management,

to increase pain thresh-

old and tolerance levels and to enhance relaxation. In relation to joint

mobility, music can be used to proﬁle movement. (For example, waltz

music may be used to encourage ‘ﬂuid’ movements and dexterity,

whereas disco numbers will be used when the client needs to build up

strength through more powerful and energetic movements (Bunt 1997).)

There would appear to be little doubt that music therapy holds consid-

erable promise for clinical medicine. To be sure, it has received increasing

attention in recent years, spurred on by the fact that it is highly cost

eﬀective (Maranto 1993). At its present state of development, however,

music therapy still lacks a theoretical base and has a relatively undevel-

oped explanatory vocabulary for specifying how music operates – as

opposed to what it can produce – in relation to body organization.

How does music work? Key questions

For example, how does music come to have ‘eﬀects’ upon body composi-

tion? With regard to neonatology, what exactly does it mean to speak of an

infant’s interaction with the recurrent sonic features of his or her environ-

ment? Indeed, is it music’s regularity that leads to self-regulation, to an

infant’s ability to shift her/himself to a more stable state? Or is it simply

82 Music and the body

that music is a distraction or a way of masking other more noxious

sounds? And if musical regularities do play an active role in physical

entrainment, just what are the mechanisms through which environmental

regularities come to be related to, and indeed foster, bodily regularities?

Finally, what is the nature of the body–environment relationship? For

example, do musical-environmental regularities simply ‘cause’ bodily

eﬀects? Is the realm of the corporeal, particularly at this very early and

uncultured stage of life, therefore an exception to the argument tha

t has

been made in the previous three chapters against a ‘stimulus’ model of

music’s eﬀects?

In answer to this last question, no. There is no reason why a per-

spective devoted to human–music interaction, to the reﬂexive appropria-

tion of musical materials for the constitution and regulation of agency,

does not also apply to the matter of embodied agenc

y and its constitu-

tion, to the organization of the corporeal, at any stage of the life-cycle.

True, such an application may require rethinking conventional notions

of sentience and intentionality (an infant does not exercise the same type

and degree of aesthetic reﬂexivity demonstrated, for example, by Lucy in

the previous chapter), but this need not imply an inf

ant who is a

ﬀected

by (but does not interact with) the materials that surround him or her.

Indeed, speculation on the issue of infant–environment interaction pro-

vides a starting point for an elaboration of an area within the human

sciences that is as promising as it is somewhat sketchy – the ‘tacit’ or non-

propositional, non-discursive forms of awareness and action.

Embodied awareness and embodied security

The literature on neonatology suggests that the auditory environment of

the neonatal intensive care unit does not aﬀord entrainment. A neonate’s

situation is perhaps akin to that of someone attempting to skip rope who

encounters an arhythmically turned rope. Without being able to locate

some kind of rhythmic regularity (the pace, as discussed above, is nor-

mally set by the jumping chants,

sung by the rope twirlers), entrainment

is impeded. Instead, one must react to each and every fall of the rope,

instant upon instant; a ‘routinizable’ relationship with the environment is

not possible since at no level of awareness can one establish a sense of

what will happen next. The environment thus produces insecurity, albeit

not necessarily recognized as such consciously; it is constantly startling; it

does not provide a ground against which one may, with whatever degree

of consciousness, regulate self or body. Again, this is the problem

discussed above in relation to Gary and Mandy. One cannot locate

and employ as resources environmental patterns. These comparisons,

Embodied awareness and security 83

between the phenomenological situation of the neonate and the rope

skipper are, needless to say, highly speculative, but they are none the less

heuristic; they are useful as a way of beginning to explore the bio-

pragmatic embodied features of human being at all stages of the life

course. This point requires development.

The notion of how one locates or tunes in to environmental proper-

ties and how this may have consequences for embodied agency is

crucial to any

understanding of how music works as an organizing

device of the body, how it facilitates ‘embodied awareness’. By this term

(‘embodied awareness’) I mean a non-propositional, non-cognitive,

creaturely orientation and expectancy towards the physical environ-

ment. All of us are bodily aware as we organize our actions and behav-

iour, for example,

in our response to water (as something to drink or to

be avoided in order to remain dry), ice underfoot, cliﬀ faces, or sunlight

versus shade. This kind of awareness is part of what we casually refer to

as ‘common sense’, ‘horse sense’ and so on. Our capacity for this ‘sense’

is something we share – to some degree – with other species, as for

example when we recognize the cat stretching out on a sunny step, the

sheep who avoids a cliﬀ edge, the cattle who avoid electric fences, the

caribou who ﬂee when they sense impending danger and so forth.

Indeed, there is plenty of evidence that animals are aware of and orient

to the sonic environment. Traditionally, for example, Scottish Highland

milking songs and rhythmic ‘charms’ had their place in the cow-byre,

where they were thought to increase milk yield, and there are numerous

references to music’s use for this purpose today. If anything, music’s use

in the service of animal welfare and/or agricultural productivity seems

to be undergoing reappraisal among researchers. For example, a 1998

study, conducted by the National Farmers’ Union and the Roslin

Institute of the University of Edinburgh concluded that ‘playing the

radio to chickens is an easy practicable way of enriching their environ-

ment and, perhaps, of helping to reduce their fear of new noises’ ( Jones

and Rayner 1999). (Such a practice might, however, also mask the

sounds of animals in distress.)

Bodily awareness of environmental properties would appear to be a

pragmatic, semi-conscious, matter. It need not involve any reﬂection or

articulation as propositional ‘knowledge’, though at times it also may do

so. For example, those who are able to walk – or walk on a slippery surface

– need not think or talk about the physics or physiology of how walking is

accomplished and yet they may produce walking as a matter of course.

Beings of diﬀerent kinds thus orient to and organize themselves in rela-

tion to environmental properties – for example, the waking–sleep cycle

may come to be mapped on to the cycles of daylight and darkness. In this

84 Music and the body

way, environmental patterns come to aﬀord patterns of embodiment and

behaviour through the ways they are responded to as entrainment

devices.

Music and bodily security

We are now at the point where it is possible to begin to address the ques-

tion of music’s mechanisms of operation, how music may be understood

to aﬀord bodily entrainment. I suggest that the creaturely ability to locate

and anticipate environmental features engenders a kind of corporeal or

embodied security, by which I mean the ‘ﬁtting in’ or attunement with

environmental patterns, fostered by a being’s embodied awareness of the

materials and properties that characterize his or her environment.

Embodied insecurity, by contrast, is what happens when one is unable to

locate and appropr

iate such materials, when, like the jump roper, the dis-

tressed neonate, or the music therapy clients described above, one is

unable to locate resources with or against which to ‘gather oneself’ into

some kind of organized and stable state. Embodied security involves one’s

ability to ﬁtin, or situate oneself, bodily, with an ergonomic environment.

This ﬁtting in is fostered by embodied awareness of the patterns and

textures that are to be found in an environment and the opportunities

these aﬀord for embodied security, for ﬁnding some kind of synchronous

connection with an environment. Consider the example of how an infant

learns to take nourishment. In order to feed, he or she must ‘latch’ on to,

appropriate, a nipple. An infant’s location of the ‘right’ thing to latch on

to for this purpose may involve some trial and error. In light of this locat-

ing or appropriation, infants (and animals) may have a similar capacity for

embodied awareness of other environmental regularities, including audi-

tory regularities, and that they may come to latch on to these, rather as

they do to the material devices of nourishment. With regard to both kinds

of latching, a way (note, not necessarily the way) is found of synchronizing

body with environment; the body and its processes must be articulated

with some properties aﬀorded by materials that lie outside it. It is in and

through this approximation process tha

t music comes to have e

ﬀects

upon the body, to function as an entrainment device for bodily processes

and embodied conduct.

In music, pattern is engendered through regularized relationships

between tensions and resolutions, sounds and silences (in Western tonal

music through harmony, melody, texture, timbre), and rhythmic arrange-

ments over time that aﬀord expectancy. It seems likely that, for neonates,

as for adult humans, latching on to aspects of an auditory environment is

aﬀorded by – among other things – perceptible sonic patterns (signiﬁcant

Music and bodily security 85

patterns for cultured humans), as found in music and in many other

soundscapes – diurnal, cyclical and so forth. (Indeed, feeding is itself a

rhythmic activity, one in which baby and mother are entrained.)

Moreover, it must be remembered that music is a physical medium, that it

consists of sound waves, vibrations that the body may feel even when it

cannot hear. The aural is never distinct from the tactile as a sensuous

domain.

If music aﬀords a kind of auditory device on to which one can latch in

some way or other, in relation to some or other bodily activity or process,

then it is a resource for the constitution of embodied security and its

properties may aﬀord such security. Just as a feeding event may be struc-

tured to encourage or aﬀord latching on to nipple or bottle – upon which

feeding is dependent – so, too, a music therapist may structure the

environment so that it aﬀords latching on to environmental recurrences –

upon which entrainment is dependent. For example, in the case of Baby

B, described above, the music used was the ‘Transitions’ tape, from

Placenta Music Inc., an actual recording of the ‘intrauterine symphony’

overlaid with other sounds

As an aside, most of the music used so far with neonates has featured

gentle rhythm and soothing, low-energy materials. It is interesting to

speculate, however, about how ‘heavy metal’ or serial music would work

in relation to neonatal state organization! By way of comparison, heavy

metal and jazz were viewed, by the poultry farmers surveyed by Jones and

Rayner, to be less eﬀective in the henhouse than chart and easy-listening

music – as the authors note, the next step in testing this issue involves

allowing the birds an ‘opportunity to “switch [music] on and oﬀ ”’ ( Jones

and Rayner 1999). There are, it would appear, certain cultural assump-

tions about what is appropriate within these settings that are at work in

shaping the musical choices made.

Music has long been used for similar purposes by parents in the form of

lullabies, quieting songs and the like (Unyk et al. 1992). Thinking in this

way of what the auditory environment ma

y a

ﬀord for embodied aware-

ness, and for latching, entrainment and its aﬃliate, embodied security,

brings us somewhat closer to unpacking Raymond Williams’s intriguing

and oft-quoted statement:

rhythm is a way of transmitting a description of experience, in such a way that the

experience is re-created in the person receiving it, not merely as an ‘abstraction’ or

an emotion but as a physical eﬀect on the organism – on the blood, on the breath-

ing, on the physical patterns of the brain. We use rhythm for many ordinary pur-

poses, but the arts . . . comprise highly developed and exceptionally powerful

rhythmic means, by which the communication of experience is actually achieved

. . . the dance of the body, the movements of the voice, the sounds of instruments

86 Music and the body

are, like colours, forms and patterns, means of transmitting our experience in so

powerful a way that the experience can literally be lived by others. This has been

felt, again and again, in the actual experience of the arts, and we are now begin-

ning to see how and why it is more than a metaphor; it is a physical experience as

real as any other. (1965:40–1)

More questions 87

space. To speak of body/environment interaction in this way is by no

means to depict actors (bodies) as ‘conscious’ or ‘deliberate’ in their

mobilization of environmental properties and aﬀordances; to the con-

trary, as illustrated in the case of music therapy clients and neonates,

bodies and agents are often caught within circumstances where they have

to make do with available environmental properties and, under some cir-

cumstances and for some purposes, these properties may be useless,

unconducive. Thus, the body’s states are reﬂexively linked to the settings

where the body is created, maintained and changed. Such a perspective is

by no means new – it is, in fact, merely a cultural constructivist extension

of the idea that bodies continually appropriate environmental materials

(air, water, temperature and so forth) for a myriad of state maintenance

activities, normally classiﬁed under headings such as biological and social

psychological. This perspective is one that points to the active role of cul-

tural materials in rela

tion to state constitution and maintenance,

one that

seeks to develop a cultural-ecological perspective for the sociology of the

body conceived as a continually renewable, temporal, conﬁguration.

Still, there is a way to go before the ‘key questions’ alluded to earlier,

concerning music’s role in relation to the body, are addressed properly.

We need more extended examples of what it means, at the level of real-

time, spatially located existence, to speak of musical latching, and we

need to illustrate in far greater detail what it means to describe music as

an ordering device of bodily process. One way to begin to explore this

process is through an investigation of body–music interactions as they

occur in real time. Indeed, there have been calls for this investigative strat-

egy from within music therapy (for example, ‘future research should also

consider moment-to-moment interactions with the music and the eﬀect

of this on physiological process’ (Maranto 1993:167)). Only here can we

begin to observe bodies as they latch on to and become entrained by

musical devices.

To further these issues I now turn to an exceptional venue for pursuing

music’s role as an entrainment device, as a means for organizing the body:

the realm of music and movement exercise. I look, in particular, at aero-

bics, where music is overtly emplo

yed as a device of state regularization, a

means for structuring and restructuring motivation, movement, energy

and the self-perception of fatigue in relation to predetermined aims and

over time. My discussion draws upon an ethnography of music’s role

during the forty-ﬁve-minute period of an aerobic exercise class. This

work was carried out by Sophie Belcher, the research assistant on the

music and daily life project between 1997–8 at Exeter (Belcher and

DeNora forthcoming; Belcher and DeNora 1998). Over a year, betw

een

1997 and 1998, Belcher attended aerobic classes in South Devon (mainly

88 Music and the body

‘hi/lo’ but also ‘step aerobics’, ‘toning’ and ‘total body workout’), con-

ducted in-depth interviews and quick questionnaires and interviewed

production managers from leading (United Kingdom) aerobic music

ﬁrms. We began by posing the following questions: does music aﬀord

aerobic agency and, if so, what does it take, musically, to create and

sustain that body over the course of a forty-ﬁve-minute aerobic exercise

session? Do some types of music provide better organizing devices for

aerobic order than others?

A naturally occurring experiment

One way of knowing what it takes to produce forms of organization is

through perspective by incongruity, by looking at the conditions associ-

ated with disorder, with breakdown. The value of ‘troubles’ and break-

downs of order within the social sciences is mostly untapped in this

regard, at least outside the areas of conversation analysis, ethnomethodol-

ogy and, more recently, participatory design (as applied, for example, to

software systems).

In recent years, the study of breakdowns has been used to bring to light

many non-discursive, non-propositional and embodied practices that

computer users may not be able to describe verbally (Ehn 1988;

Winograd and Flores 1986; Bødker and Grønbaeck 1984). The study of

breakdowns has also been used to identify the ways in which organiza-

tional cultural materials come to aﬀord work and organizational knowl-

edge.

Transferred to the study of aerobics, a focus on breakdowns is a route,

from the so-called ‘natural world’, into the question of music’s role as an

ordering device of embodied agency. We can compare, for example, the

music of ‘good’ (that is, aerobically organized) sessions with sessions of

aerobic disorder to explore music as it contributes to ‘disorder’ and to

‘order’. In this way it is possible to illuminate the musical characteristics

that aﬀord aerobic embodied agency, tha

t enable the particular bodily

movements, endurance, motivation, arousal and co-ordination, and that

constrain the perception of fatigue. These features are what characterize

good or orderly aerobic execution, the situation where bodies are able to

maintain and pass through vigorous and varied movement styles over the

course of a forty-ﬁve-minute session. Aerobic disorder, by contrast, is

characterized by bodies that trip themselves up, cannot reproduce the

correct steps, get exhausted and have to stop, or are otherwise distracted

from the competent execution, ideally with gusto and with pleasure, of

the dance routine. For example, consider this example from the ﬁeld

notes of one of several sessions where ‘breakdown’ occurred.

A naturally occurring exper

iment 89

[T]he moves were incredibly simple yet somehow nearly all of us just couldn’t get

it together . . . when I scanned the room there were people totally out of synch with

the routine and the music . . . about a third [of the] way into the class . . . the group

was all over the place, not following the routine, out of synch, standing still and

generally looking perplexed. It was also soon after this that I noticed the two

women in front of me, who were regulars who usually took things very seriously,

were having a conversation with one another and laughing. (Belcher n.d.)

Thus, as with neonatology and its checklist of physiological and

micro-behaviours that characterize stable state organization, aerobics,

too, has its checklist. Because of its high degree of rationalization (the

highly gendered character of aerobics and its ‘totalizing’ character has

been well remarked upon elsewhere (Mar

tin 1997; Whitson 1994)), it is

possible to specify versions of aerobic ‘order’ – bodily and situational – in

some detail. This distinguishes aerobics from most of the situations and

scenes that constitute daily life and, indeed, most other sports where ‘in

play’ details (for example, how or whether a footballer achieves a goal)

are not ﬁxed in advance.

By contrast, the body–temporal parameters of

aerobic order are pre-scripted and deviations from that order are cen-

sured by a (typically) vigilant session leader and her or his continual calls

and prompts. These pre-scripted parameters consist, within ‘hi/lo’ aero-

bics, of choreographed movements (for example, individual kicks or

steps) that are in turn grouped into chunks and then into an overall

sequential structure or aerobic ‘grammar’. This grammar consists of

basic phases, which are in turn characterized by the speed of the exer-

cise, its degree of vigour, its style of movement and its mode of aerobic

subject/body, that is the mode of embodied agency required for the

‘good’ execution of the phase. Thus, most forty-ﬁve-minute sessions

(the equivalent of one side of a ninety-minute cassette tape) are divided

into sequentially organized stages, each characterized by a speciﬁc form

of movement and energy level. To the extent that each of these compo-

nents is associated with a mode of embodied agenc

y, the aerobic actor is

reconﬁgured as an agent in real time as he or she passes through the

various stages of the session. This is to say that, at diﬀerent times during

a session, actors are conﬁgured as diﬀerent types of subject/bodies, with,

for example, greater or lesser degrees of cognitive awareness, emotional-

ity and gender identiﬁcation. In the terminology of aerobics, these com-

ponents are:

Warm-up (slower, gentler lower impact movements, designed to

get the body moving, literally warming up and heart rate

slightly elevated), roughly ten minutes.

Pre-core (music that shifts into faster higher impact movements),

roughly ﬁve minutes.

90 Music and the body

Core (faster, more vigorous, involving higher impact, for

example, leaping – the ‘hardest’ part of the session), roughly

ﬁfteen minutes.

Cool-down (slowed movements, less vigorous leading to very slow

ﬂoor exercises such as sit ups at the end of the session), roughly

ﬁve minutes.

Floor exercises (slow toning exercises, such as stomach crunches

and sit ups), roughly ten minutes.

Comparing a good (that is, aerobically ordered) and highly typical

session with a session (with the same class members) where aerobic order

was subject to decay highlights many of the ways in which music is a

device of aerobic ordering. Using this quasi- or natural experimental

format helps to bring into relief some of the ways that music provides a

device of bodily ordering in real time, as described in the following sec-

tions. First, ho

wever, it is necessary to describe the ways in which the

aerobics music production companies orient to aerobics’ generic

grammar and try to embed particular scenarios of music use within the

musical product itself.

Composing (for) the users – commercial musical proﬁles

of music use

To be sure, music is prominent as an orientational device within any

aerobic session. Produced and distributed by commercial music outlets

such as Pure Energy, Music Xpress, Power Productions, Koreography

Klub and Muscle Mixes, the music used in aerobic classes is oriented to

highly speciﬁc circumstances, to particular segments of aerobic grammar.

Perhaps not surprisingly, not unlike the Muzak corporation and other

ﬁrms that produce music for ambience, aerobic music companies cata-

logue their stock by aﬀect and intended use and in ways that make

music’s position within the aerobic grammar clear. Moreover, it is stan-

dard to involve ‘ﬁtness professionals’ in the production process where

they may select particular numbers and advise about where in the aerobic

grammar such numbers are best placed.

For example, cassettes entitled ‘Motivation’, which are designed for

use in the warm-up, maintain a beats-per-minute rate of 130–8, while

‘Body Blitz’ or ‘Energy Workout’, with a bpm of 140–6, are employed

during the core. Cool-down numbers tend to hover at around 130 bpm

and are classiﬁed under the heading ‘Relaxation’.

Beyond beats per minute, aerobic music ﬁrms select and tailor the

musical and stylistic features of individual numbers. One of the ﬁrst

things they try to do is heighten rhythmic clarity. Rhythm is typically

Commercial musical proﬁles 91

positioned in the musical foreground, with vocals often relegated to the

background. Features that might detract from this clarity (for example,

complicated transitions) are deleted. The music is also entirely syn-

thesized, which also adds to its sometimes almost surreal or hyperreal

clarity (for example, no real group of musicians could produce the almost

sterile sharpness of attack and release, of rapid tutti passages). These

ﬁrms also try to match musical materials such as melodic patterns or for-

mulae, genre, orchestration or particular gestural devices to particular

phases and movement demands within a workout. Thirdly, most of the

vocal tracks in aerobic music are sung by female voices, often pitched at or

near the top of the female vocal range. A related point, the upper or higher

dimensions of melody and harmony are typically positioned as the

musical telos; melodies and harmonies press up and lift in ways that are

homologous with the gravity resistant physical practices of aerobics.

Played at full volume throughout nearly the whole of a session, the

musical features of aerobics are thus designed to provide much more than

mere ‘backdrop’ to aerobic proceedings, and they contribute much more

than the all-impor

tant grounding of beats per minute. In aerobics, music

is expressly designed to be placed in the foreground as a device of body

constitution and bodily organization, a device upon which body co-

ordination and conduct may be mapped. Not only ‘good to think with’,

music is also ‘good to embody with’. This capacity of music, to aﬀord

bodily agency, draws upon certain ‘exosemantic’ correspondences, as

Richard Middleton calls them, conventional within Western music and

capitalized upon by aerobics ﬁrms:

Music is often felt to ‘symbolize’ awareness of time (through tempo and rhythmic

structure) and space (through pitch-height relationships, and intensity and tex-

tural contrasts). We think of pitch going ‘up’ and ‘down’; sounds being ‘closer’ or

more ‘distant’; rhythm as being ‘in time’, ‘late’, ‘out of phase’, and so on.

Connotations relating to other senses are often attached (thus ‘high’ sounds are

‘light’, ‘bright’, ‘clear’) and so are emotions (usually related to tension/relaxation

schemas); and images of movement are usually involved, too: we have already met

many ‘gestures’, and equations of musical rhythms and body rhythms (walking,

breathing, heartbeat, and so on) are commonplace. (Middleton 1990:225)

In aerobics, music deﬁnes the components 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. This proﬁle is achieved through the ways that musical

materials – melody, rhythm, gesture, genre – are deployed. In this sense,

music is a device in the foreground, a means of aﬀording aerobic entrain-

ment. Here, music works at what Richard Middleton refers to as the level

of ‘primary signiﬁcation’ (1990:220–32). Drawing upon Jakobson’s

92 Music and the body

theory of syntagmatic equivalence (1960) and Eco’s (1984) notion of

syntactic or grammatical signiﬁcation, Middleton refers here to music’s

internal references and relationships, its arrangement of structural ele-

ments, to the ways in which its relationships become terms in which to

map, frame and conﬁgure (in this case) the ﬁgure of the body (‘as this

note is to that note, as tonic is to dominant, as ascent is to descent, as

accent is to weak beat (and so on), so X is to Y’ (1990:223)). Music here is

a medium of describing ‘how’ – how to move, how to think, how to

include, how to begin, how to end, how to mingle.

But music also works at the level of what Middleton calls, ‘secondary

signiﬁcation’ – its connotative level – where it serves as a motivational

device of bodily conduct, and where it may be said to proﬁle a range of

subject positions associated with aerobic grammar – modes of being as

described in chapter 3, above, characterized by levels of arousal, emo-

tional-stylistic orientation and bodily-gestural action such as the pace,

force and style of movements and its stages of embodied agency. Thus,

and this point is key, over the course of a session, the musically implied

aerobic body is conﬁgured, reconﬁgured, composed and de-composed as

it is passed through and transformed by the series of changes that consti-

tute aerobics and its grammar. Following aerobics’ musical changes and

the ways in which real bodies interact with prescripted 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. (This

music is, moreover, expressly designed to conﬁgure the body in speciﬁc

ways.) To illustrate this point, the following discussion describes music as

it can be used to facilitate and/or hinder the body’s passage through the

components of aerobic order and its grammar, from warm-up, to core, to

cool-down. The discussion draws on one typically good aerobic session

and its music, which is laid out in ﬁgure 4, and makes reference to one –

also typical – session as described above, where aerobic order broke

down.

‘Let the music move you up and down’ – the warm-up

‘Let’s say I’m doing the warm-up,’ says Sarah, the instructor whose

weekly classes we studied and videotaped over the course of a year. ‘You

want quite catchy music because some of them [the class] are just not in

the mood and if you’ve just got the drumming noise then you think, “Oh,

what the hell’s going on.” But I do it to motivate people.’ L

ater in the same

interview, she elaborates this point: ‘Let’s say I’ve had a load of people

who aren’t really up for it and I’ve chosen a tape that’s like OK, you ﬁnd

them just lolling around . . .’ Sarah says here that at the beginning of a

The warm-up 93

session, when the body has yet to ‘get going’ (that is, moving vigorously

and repetitively), class members are less receptive to music that is consti-

tuted primarily by a vigorous, ‘up top’ beat. Coming in (literally) cold and

oﬀ the street, class members are more readily aroused by catchy music

that appeals to them on a variety of planes simultaneously: lyrics,

melodies, rhythms, orchestration. This is one reason why Sarah makes

use of several (relatively short) numbers within the warm-up phase of a

session, on the principle that a variety of musical devices will provide at

least one that participants will relate to, that will ‘tune them in’. Akin to

the function of an antipasto course in a Mediterranean meal, good warm-

up music provides a kind of transition between two social scenes, and two

diﬀerent kinds of bodily energies, namely aerobic (‘geared up’) and

everyday.

As with the start of a meal, the initiating materials of the warm-up

(recall that the aerobic music catalogues refer to this music as ‘motiva-

tional’) are meant for what Michel Callon (1986) calls interessement.

These pieces aim to interpose class members between aerobic and extra-

aerobic realities and so lead to their enrolment into the former, to launch

them, imaginatively and physically, upon an aerobic trajectory, along the

rhythm of aerobic grammar. (For a non-theoretical but highly informa-

tive discussion of this issue from within sports science, see Gluch 1993.)

94 Music and the body

‘(What if God was) One of us’

110

Beats per minute

‘Shine in the spirit of life’

‘Say what you want’

‘Yodel in the canyon of love’

‘Don’t worry’

‘Everybody (get on up and dance)’

‘Nothing I won’t do’

‘Do you know where you’re going to’

‘I know him so well’

‘When I’m good and ready’

‘Cuba’

‘Star People 97’

120

130

140

150

160

51015202530354045

Minutes of class time

–3

Figure 4. A ‘good’ aerobics session – music and beats per minute over

time. ⫺3 to 0 is ‘prep-time’.

Another way of talking about this is to speak again of latching – the multi-

dimensional appeal of warm-up music is designed to encourage a class

member to latch on to the beginning of the aerobic trajectory, to arouse

the class member aerobically, in a manner similar to the way in which the

antipasto ‘wakes up’ the palate and arouses gustatory faculties.

In breakdown sessions where aerobic order was not strongly estab-

lished, one of the greatest problems was class members’ inability to latch

on to the music, to ‘get into’ or locate its aerobic aﬀordances in ways that

produced musical entrainment. For example, in the ‘disordered’ session

described above, where the regular instructor, Sarah, was ill and was

replaced by a substitute, the warm-up track began in the same way that it

continued, with a low-key melodic ﬁgure that repeatedly moved from the

tonic of the scale (that is, ‘do’ of ‘do, re, mi’) up to the subdominant note

of the scale (‘fa’) and then back again in a syncopated rhythm. The vocal-

ist (female) was not introduced until a few minutes into the track (not the

usual introduction of, say, 20–30 seconds maximum before a singer

begins).

Commenting on this music in an inter

view (we played a number of

examples that had been used in previous classes and asked for comment

on each), a regular class member said she thought the example (which she

did not recognize) would probably be best suited to the earlier part of the

class because of its tempo (‘more, sort of towards the warm-up, maybe,

but not part of the main bit’). But she added that the piece was ‘quite

repetitive, I can imagine doing something repetitive, but because the beat

“changes” [she emphasizes this word], if it wasn’t something repetitive

[that is, a repetitive form of movement] I’d just get lost’. She also sug-

gested that aspects of the syncopated rhythm would have to be ignored

because they would lead to confusion, because they did not proﬁle move-

ment clearly. This point raises an issue revisited below: class members are

not passive recipients, acted upon by music, but are active sense-makers

trying to use or appropriate music, agents who try their best to work with

available materials, who are engaged in human–music interaction.

Aerobics instructors also contribute to this interaction, through their

varying levels of knowledge and practical skill. Like the women discussed

in the previous chapter who engage in musically reﬂexive practice for the

projection of self, aerobics instructors, too, employ musical reﬂexive

skills, they mobilize and deploy musical materials for speciﬁc purposes.

These skills will vary from instructor to instructor. Some instructors

engage minimally with the music, simply putting on a prerecorded tape

and letting it play at a constant volume. Others (such as the one who led

the disastrous session) hardly think about the role played by music – they

just put on a tape and begin. Yet others (such as Sarah) switch tapes

The warm-up 95

frequently, often employing a dual tape machine so they can blend one

number into the next. They may, also like Sarah, alter the volume over the

course of a session, use their voice tone and rhythm (when giving instruc-

tions) in ways that are also rhetorical (for example, ‘Keep-it UP’ (shouted

with rising voice tone)), and give considerable thought to the links

between music and choreography. (It was also not uncommon for Sarah

to stop a particular track, shouting out to the class, ‘Bad music!’ and

quickly substitute a diﬀerent number when she sensed that the music was

not working, not having the desired eﬀect on the class and its movement.)

The point here is that music does not just act on the body. Its eﬀects

are the result of a lot of work oriented to ﬁtting musical material to move-

ment style. First, music production ﬁrms draw upon scenarios of use as

they produce individual tracks and tapes

. Secondly, instructors draw

upon those tapes in practical circumstances and modify them through

devices such as those described above. Thirdly, class members may ‘do

their best’ to work with the musical materials they are given, ignoring

some confusing aspect or focusing on something that keeps them in step

or gets them going.

Thus, to say that music will ‘cause’ things to happen,

that it makes the body do things or that its objective properties will auto-

matically entrain the body in particular ways, is to miss the collaborative

dimension of how music’s eﬀectiveness is achieved, for it is always in and

through the ways that it is appropriated that music provides structuring

resources – devices that enable and constrain the body. Music provides

environmental materials that may be used in ways that ‘aﬀord’ diﬀerent

bodily capacities. But, at the same time, diﬀerent types of musical

materials themselves may aﬀord the entrainment processes associated

with aerobic exercise to varying degrees, as aerobic music ﬁrms are

well aware. What, then, do some of these devices look like and how do

they work?

Packaging and repackaging music; packaging and

repackaging bodies

It is signiﬁcant that breakdowns were more likely to occur when the music

used was not expressly designed for aerobics sessions. For example, the

music used by the substitute teacher described above (and classiﬁed as

‘diﬃcult’ by class members) came from the instructor’s private collection

of dance tracks. As one of the class members put it, on the actual evening

when the ‘bad’ session occurred, ‘I ﬁnd, like music tonight, I ﬁnd very

diﬃcult because there were lots of diﬀerent beats going on at once . . . and

I’d be subconsciously listening to one and then I’d switch to another and

I’d lose what we were doing’ (conversation reconstructed from Belcher’s

96 Music and the body

ﬁeldnotes). The music was not providing, this member suggests, a clear

signal, one upon which the exercise moves could be mapped. As sug-

gested earlier, what went wrong here was that the music did not aﬀord

latching; it did not make it easy to organize physical movement, to entrain

and align that movement with music. The key reason for this was that the

musical materials themselves did not overtly proﬁle movement. The

musical tracks provided no mnemonic rhythm for movement; they did

not proﬁle the movement of the routine. And without this rhythm, not

only was co-ordination diﬃcult; movement was laboured, uninteresting

because it was not lodged in any devices of musical-aerobic arousal.

(Another reason, and one that highlights how music’s eﬀects are pro-

duced through human–music interactions, was that the instructor did not

use her voice to highlight music’s rhythmic and stylistic aﬀordances. She

did not, for example, bellow out commands in synch with the music’s

rhythm or to tide o

ver musical sections as Sarah did.)

A related feature of the problem session’s music was monotony. This

problem was perhaps most acute with the onset of fatigue, during the core

of the session. Unlike the music normally used by Sarah, the music used

here did not ‘package’ itself into interlinked modules; that is, it did not

present a collection of diverse and interesting sonic sub-structures.

Instead, the repetitiveness of the movements was underlined by the

repetitiveness of the music, a strategy that opened the session to the per-

ception of grinding on. Moreover, the repetition helped to construct a

sense of not going anywhere. Qualitative musical features, then, such as

repetition versus variation, would appear to have implications for the self-

perception of bodily states. In the context of aerobics, ‘sameness’ did not

divert, did not help take one’s mind oﬀ discomfort and fatigue. Its failure

to oﬀer virtual diversions (to create a sense of varied musical terrain)

resulted in the construction of ‘real’ fatigue.

This point has been discussed within sports medicine. Within the liter-

ature on cognitive strategies (see Okwumabua 1983), it has been sug-

gested that less-seasoned athletes perform better when they employ

‘dissociative cognitive strategies’, that is, when they are able to move away

from continual monitoring of their inter

nal states (Spink and Longhurst

1986) and focus instead on a ‘non-performance’ related activity or topic.

Dissociative strategies and their eﬀects highlight ‘energy’ as at least in

part a function of bodily self-perception (of fatigue and of expended

eﬀort). Cultural materials, music in this case, can serve to frame or

refocus self-perception and body awareness such that fatigue and eﬀort

are minimized or fade into the background. In relation to physical exer-

tion, then, ‘the body’ is a performative entity; what is not self-perceiv

(for example, fatigue) does not, for all practical purposes, exist.

Packaging and repackaging music 97

Returning to the issue of musical repetition versus variation, dissocia-

tion from the repetitive and tiring movement involved in exercise can be

achieved by using music that has been ‘chunked’ or bunched into inter-

related movements or musical units. Such units in tur

n package exercise

moves into temporal and (perceived) spatial components (‘current to

next’, ‘here to there’); they have the capacity to tuck or enfold a series of

repetitive movements into a rhythmic package that translates their per-

ceived eﬀort. Indeed, this is one of the standard features of professionally

produced aerobic music

. These components are, at

the musical level,

interlinked such that one leads to the next and such that one is musically

fulﬁlled in the next. These structures are achieved, for example, through

cadences and closures, through the generation and resolution of har-

monic suspense, through upward or cyclic melodic movement (see ﬁgure

5) and through modulation upwards to higher keys. Interlinked series of

tonal and rhythmic structures in turn may be used to seduce bodies to

keep moving, to move on up or move on into the next level, the next unit.

This is one way that they proﬁle movement and present that movement as

being musically attainable and desirable (for example, ‘this bit is inter-

esting, let’s move on to try the next bit’). Through such interlinked but

varied sections, aerobic actors are oﬀered musical materials that aﬀord

continual relatching and ongoing re-enlistment as musical-aerobic

agents.

Another way of conceptualizing this re-enlistment is to think of music

as a contrast structure (Smith 1987; 1992; Woolgar 1988) against which

the ﬁgure of one’s own body is conﬁgured such that the reality of each and

every movement (and the ways these subtract energy) is recontextualized

as part of a greater structure (the musical structure) that one wishes to

complete. The musical contrast str

ucture, and the body’s role within this

structure, then translates the self-perception of fatigue and converts it

into energy; the musical background ‘tricks’ that perception in a manner

not unlike the way in which perception of movement may be tricked when

one is on a stationary train and the train on the adjacent platform begins

to move. Against the contrast structure of the moving train, one may have

a virtual sense of moving. Similarly, bodily perception, fostered by the

contrast structure of chunked music, translates and minimizes the sense

98 Music and the body

Don’t wor ry . . . .

= 140

Figure 5. ‘Don’t worry’ (aerobics music)

of ‘eﬀort expansion’ in an aerobic session and magniﬁes the sense one has

of power (for example, moving in the virtual, musical, space, one may

have the sense of moving continually upward, or of taking ‘giant’s steps’).

This musically translated sense is enabling, empowering; it has a direct

eﬀect on the bodily properties of energy, motivation and endurance.

Here, then, is how music may be understood to have power over bodies:

it aﬀords materials – structures, patterns, parameters and meanings – that

bodies may appropriate or latch on to (mostly semi-consciously). Music

is, in short, a material against which to shape up bodily processes,

whether these are physiological states (such as exhaustion or arousal),

behavioural movements (such as kicking or jumping), co-ordination in

some setting (dance steps), self-perception of bodily state (pain or

fatigue, pleasure), or motivational levels (being predisposed, in some

embodied way, to a particular line of activity, such as, moving faster,

jumping higher, slowing down and so on). Music accomplishes none of

these things in its own right – it is not a ‘force’ like gravity or wave power.

It is rather a potential ‘source’ of bodily powers, a resource for the genera-

tion of bodily agency. Music is, or rather can serve as, a constitutive prop-

erty of bodily being.

Gearing up and staying up – musical devices

One of the most crucial stages in an aerobics workout is the pre-core or

transition phase, where class members ‘change gear’ and begin to engage

in the strenuous ‘power moves’ characteristic of the core of the session. It

is in this pre-core stage that class members must, if they conform to the

preordained aerobic order, leave behind the more workaday movements

and gentler, ﬂuid patterns of the warm-up. In the course of the ethnogra-

phy, it became clear that some music was especially suited to this

purpose. One of these was a number entitled, ‘Yodelling in the canyon of

love’. This piece, a paragon of postmodern aesthetics with its jumble of

cultures and musical discourses (the piece features a mélange of Latin

rhythm, yodelling and cow bells), makes copious use of a cha-cha-cha

ﬁgure (see ﬁgure 6). Although this repeated ﬁgure passes each time in an

Gearing up and staying up

= 138

Figure 6. ‘Yodelling in the canyon of love’ (aerobics music)

instant, its eﬀects were powerful. Like a hinge or switch, the ﬁgure shifted

class members into a mode of moving and orienting to musical materials

commensurate with the core. Its use illuminates clearly music’s ability to

proﬁle movement style and to instigate movement trajectory.

In tandem with Sarah’s choreography at this stage, the ﬁgure oﬀers a

kind of musical ‘hop’ (the cha-cha-cha ﬁgure) that in turn encourages the

body, which, according to the preordained choreography, is required to

hop in synchrony with it. The rhythm thus provides a model for bodily

action, one that also entrains the body and encourages it to begin a ‘hi-

impact’ routine. In this respect, the cha-cha-cha ﬁgure places on oﬀer to

class participants a type of motivational material qualitatively diﬀerent

from that used in the earlier warm-up music. In the latter, the antipasto of

the session, lyrics, melodic-associative ﬁgures and musical colour are

characteristic. Here, by contrast, the source of motivation is relocated at

the level of a contag

ious rhythm and this relocation may be understood as

a shift away from the more sentimental (and more cognitive), physically

less demanding modality of aerobic agency aﬀorded by typical warm-up

music, where lyrics (often about romance or about the idea of movement,

such as, ‘Everybody get on up and dance’) are most likely to be positioned

in the foreground – the musical foreground and the foreground of atten-

tion. In the music of the aerobic core, focus is deliberately shifted to the

physicality of the musical beat. This shift in focus from imagery to beat

and rhythm is a deliberate design feature of aerobic music for the core. It

is in turn appropriated by instructors in their attempts, at the end of the

warm-up, to transform – or in Callon’s (1986) terms, ‘translate’ – class

members into fully committed exercisers, into bodies who will execute,

for a gruelling ten or ﬁfteen minutes, ‘power’ moves.

The ‘Yodelling’ track thus aﬀords a conversion from ‘warming up’ to

‘warmed up’. It helps to induce in class members the embodied desire to

‘hop’ – that is, to put, for the ﬁrst time in the session, a bounce or skip in

their step. In so doing they become less self-conscious, more meditatively

engaged in the exercise, and as this happens, the musical materials

become increasingly rhythmical, less melodic, so that for part of the

number they are little more than a clear and relentless beat. If the music

has done its work at this stage, class members are most fully enlisted

or conscripted as aerobic agents; here the ‘doing’ of aerobics is all-

encompassing: as the Zen expression has it, ‘not a thought arises’. At this

moment, within ‘good’ aerobics, music facilitates, in Mauss’s (1979

[1934]) sense, techniques of the body (Lash and Urry 1994:45–6).

In sum, over the ﬁrst half of the aerobics class the music’s quality

changes: speciﬁc musical devices are introduced, gradually and

imperceptibly, to induce participants to ‘get into the rhythm’ so that they

100 Music and the body

come to do what the earlier warm-up music told them to do with its lyrics

(‘let the music move you up and down’). Class members are aware of this

at some level. As one woman put it (in an interview), ‘[music] can make

me work harder . . . if it’s just a simple strong beat then it’s easier to work

with . . . and if it very slowly gets faster [see again ﬁgure 4 to note tempo

changes over time] I don’t sort of realize it’.

Cooling oﬀ and shifting down – from ‘body’ to ‘heart’ to

the ‘calculus’ of the crunch

‘Shiﬁting down’ is an important phase in the grammar of good aerobics,

as important as ‘shifting up’ into the core. Here, too, music aﬀords this

bodily process. At this stage, well-known ballads often make an appear-

ance, albeit remixed by the aerobic music ﬁrms, so as to possess a rhyth-

mic pulse that moves at twice the pace of the original melody (the result is

a slow melody in the foreground, set against a background that moves in

double time). The tempi of these ballads are not only slower than the

numbers within the aerobics core;

they can also be seen to a

ﬀord a shift-

ing of motivational focus yet again, from the meditatively ‘bodied’ mode

of the core (little thinking or feeling and much moving) back to a more

self-conscious, and more sentimental, mode post-core. Their elements

are repositioned: familiar melodies and lyrics are brought back to the

fore, and rhythm is relegated to the background. Through this, and

through the use of musical and lyrical sentiment (recognizable and

overtly sentimental ballads whose lyrics describe philosophical matters –

‘Do you know where you’re going to?’ – or ‘relationship’ issues, such as ‘I

know him so well’ from the musical Chess), bodies are, as it were, encour-

aged to cool oﬀ physically and to recalibrate emotionally. The aim, here,

overtly stated within the prescribed order of an aerobics session, is to

prime class members for the ﬁnal stage of the workout where they must

engage in a highly calculative mode as deliberate, rational executioners of

precision-engineered exercises such as ‘the cr

unch’ (for abdominal

ﬁrming) and other ﬂoor exercises such as sit ups, reverse curls, triceps

dips, ski squeezes, press ups and leg raises. All of these moves are exe-

cuted in conjunction with copious instructions from the class leader.

Slowing down and cooling down are, according to Sarah (and also as

discussed in aerobic exercise manuals), prerequisites to doing ﬂoor exer-

cises. Because precision is required (if injury is to be avoided), musical

arousal, so crucial during the core, and especially late core, becomes,

during ﬂoor exercises, a liability. Accordingly, at this stage, the music’s

volume is lowered, not, as one might think, for the simple reason that

instructions can be heard (Sarah’s voice projects exceptionally well, and

Cooling off and shifting do

wn 101

has been heard throughout the session) but, rather, to dampen class

members’ motivation to move quickly and vigorously, and so to enable

the mental calculation about what the body is doing (for example, ‘Am I

moving in precisely the right way?’). Here is how Sarah explains it:

Q. When you turn the volume down, when you are at the end and you do the

stomach work, why do you do that?

Sarah: Because you don’t need it, you don’t want them as motivated do you?

Q. Right.

Sarah: When they’re doing sit ups also you need a lot of teaching points with

the sit ups as well [i.e., you need them to be oriented to your verbal utterances]

and you just need it for a beat not to motivate them or any way really so [i.e., just

to keep in a regular rhythm, not to generate and sustain high energy].

Even Sarah’s voice is modulated in this section to emphasize the

‘mental’ modality of cool-down. Throughout the core of the session she

typically uses a loud voice, one that makes use of a good deal of long,

drawn-out tones,

snappy rhythms and latching-type

ﬁgures to spur on

class members. Here, by contrast, she speaks, rather than bellows, in an

ordinary voice tone – one that sounds low-key, authoritative, even clin-

ical. This return to cognitive consciousness is also a returning of the class

member to the embodied modality (the tension levels, energy and exer-

tion levels and motivational levels) of everyday life in modern societies

(Witkin 1995:206). Many of them, for example, will be driving home

from class.

Thus, over the course of forty-ﬁve minutes, music is used in an aerobic

session to conﬁgure and reconﬁgure bodies and emotional-cognitive

modalities as the aerobic agent is initially enlisted by the warm-up tracks

(that feature emotional, romantic and ﬂuid musical materials), launched

on a trajectory of ‘pure’ movement during the core (where the beat occu-

pies nearly all of the musical space) and ‘cooled down’ (recognitivized,

resentimentalized, slowed down) into the more cognitiv

e and less ener-

getic mode associated with the precise forms of exercise at the end of the

session.

Music as a prosthetic technology of the body

Music is an accomplice of body conﬁguration. It is a technology of body

building, a device that aﬀords capacity, motivation, co-ordination, energy

and endurance. In the case of aerobic exercise, it is possible to identify

some of the speciﬁc musical materials that work, in real time, upon the

body, materials that have been designed and can be appropriated for

speciﬁc bodily ends. As speciﬁed in the discussion of a real-time aerobic

session, these devices assume the guise of tempi, ﬁgures and gestures

102 Music and the body

(rhythmic and melodic), harmonic structures, voicing, rhythmic/melodic

packaging and chunking, genre. Observing them at work over forty-ﬁve

minutes shows how music is much more than a mere accompaniment to

aerobic movement, how it is constitutive of aerobic agency. To the extent

that musical ﬁgures can be seen and documented, in real time, as

conﬁguring aerobic agency, music may be understood as having active,

structuring properties on and for the body. Within an aerobic workout,

music disciplines the body’s performative character, conﬁguring and

transﬁguring the body over the course of a session. Musical materials

may, on the one hand, aﬀord aerobic order, that is bodies that are aero-

bically disciplined, entrained, meditative, motivated and energetic, or, on

the other hand, they may aﬀord aerobic disorder, where bodies are undis-

ciplined, unentrained, fatigued and unco-ordinated.

As a primary and predominant aesthetic material, music may be con-

ceived, following Ehn’

s (1988:399) discussion of Weizenbaum (1976), as

a ‘prosthetic technology’. Prosthetic technologies are materials that

extend what the body can do – for example, steam shovels, stilts, micro-

scopes or ampliﬁcation systems enhance and transform the capacities of

arms, legs, eyes and voices. Through the creation and use of such tech-

nologies actors (bodies) are enabled and empowered, their capacities are

enhanced. With such technologies, actors can do things that cannot be

done independently; they are capacitated in and through their ability to

appropriate what such technologies aﬀord.

Music prosthetic technology and daily life

Neither aerobic workouts nor life in a neonatal intensive care unit are

ordinary circumstances. Both are totalizing. The aim of aerobics is to

inculcate a high degree of physical and emotional conformity. As in ballet

or in a military parade, aerobics’ parameters of experience are globally

imposed. Body discipline in aerobics is stringent. In neonatal ICUs,

bodily order is also globally imposed through a range of medical tech-

nologies that modify and substitute for normally autonomous bodily pro-

cesses. Music’s role in the ICU is to aﬀord state organization, to pro

vide a

ground against which embodied awareness, orientation to and entrain-

ment with the environment may occur.

Most of everyday life and its scenes and situations resemble neither

aerobics classes nor intensive care units. None the less, music can be seen

to function as a prosthetic device, to provide organizing properties for a

range of other embodied experiences and in ways that involve varying

degrees of deliberation and conscious awareness on the part of music’

conscripts. One of the most interesting areas here involves music’s role in

Music technology and daily life 103

the world of work. To be sure, music’s role at work has changed under

industrialization, and this is a crucial issue for critical sociology. (These

critical issues are discussed in the next chapter.)

Music has, historically, been deeply implicated as a way of specifying

not only the time it takes to conduct work processes, but also in proﬁling

the physical manner in which tasks are executed. Examples of music’s

role in relation to daily tasks abound in non-Western cultures. For

example, Nkeita (1988 (see also Gregory 1997:125)) describes the way in

which Ghanaian grass cutters work to musical accompaniment. There,

music actually enhances the speed with which the work is accomplished.

In Western culture, one of the best examples of music’s prosthetic capa-

bility can be found among Hebridean weavers. On the isle of Harris,

music was clearly an instrument of tweed production in so far as it was

used to regulate production processes (Lomax 1968; Nettl 1990:67). So-

called ‘waulking’ songs, for example, were sung while going through the

motions of hand-shrinking the cloth, a process that involves pulling and

beating the cloth, moving from one end of the bolt to the other. As in

aerobics, repetitiv

e movements are inserted into a larger rhythmic struc-

ture, a structure that, potentially, can diminish the weaver’s perceived

eﬀort and also helps to organize production’s schedule (how long to

handle the cloth for, the qualitative and quantitative dimensions of han-

dling). There are numerous waulking songs in the Hebridean repertoire

(far more than there are songs for other stages in the tweed production

process, such as raising the pile of the wool). The volume of songs is

related to the weavers’ belief that imperfections would result if the same

song were sung twice over one piece of cloth. While this belief is often

regarded as mere superstition, there may also have been practical reasons

for the custom. The songs not only governed the time it would take to

deal with a whole piece of cloth but also proﬁled bodily motions; the

music proﬁled the rhythm and style of movement over the length of the

cloth. Altering the song for each repetition back along a length of cloth

would ensure that the strength,

pace and distance of the moves were

varied, that hands did not simply repeat their movements in reverse along

the cloth. Varying the songs thus provided a way of distributing move-

ment over the cloth and hence ensuring an even texture in the ﬁnished

product. In this way, music aﬀords both production and skill; the worker

is able to constitute herself as an embodied, productive agent and to

engage in the skilled production of her work in and through reference to

the music and the way in which it aﬀords these things.

Another area of traditional work where music can be seen to provide a

prosthetic technology is on the high seas. ‘To the seamen of America,

Britain, and northern Europe’, writes Stan Hugill, ‘a shanty was as much

104 Music and the body

a part of the equipment as a sheath-knife and a pannikin’ (1961:1).

Shanties were used for a variety of specialized tasks on board a ship –

hauling sails and heaving heavy weights such as the anchor. As with

weaving and aerobics, these songs mapped or proﬁled bodily movement

so as to entrain the physical process of work. (‘Blow the man down’, for

example, is composed of alternating solo and chorus lines. During the

solo line, the crew rested. They pulled or hauled as they sang the refrain,

thus engaging in ‘strength’ moves while exhaling.) Hauling songs, such as

‘Blow the man down’, were set traditionally in 6/8 time, whereas heaving

songs were typically in 4/4 or marching rhythms. Songs with longer

verses, such as ‘Shenandoah’, were used for lengthy tasks. Here, too,

superstitions abounded; there were traditional prohibitions against

singing these songs on land. Again, there may have been practical reasons

for this prohibition; perhaps, sung too frequently out of the physical

context of ship work, the songs might have been altered and their

aﬀordances compromised. Perhaps, too, their motivational force would

have been numbed through over-familiarity.

As an interesting aside,

and in light of the aerobics songs, it is worth

mentioning that many of the shanties had ribald lyrics (especially on

cargo ships where the consideration of passengers or troops was not at

issue – or after passengers had been landed). These works have been

described by one folklorist as ‘jovial, forthright, almost wholesome

obscenity’ ( Joanna C. Colcord, quoted in Hugill 1961:33). It is inter-

esting to speculate on the interaction between lyrics and music and the

eﬀects of this interaction on generating motivation to keep moving. To be

sure, these were no more lewd than the lyrics to many aerobics numbers,

whose quasi-pornographic titles are legion. Certainly, both in aerobics

and on the high seas, it would seem that music’s role as a prosthetic tech-

nology involves much more than rhythm and physical entrainment, much

more than the synchronization of movement. To say this is to suggest that

bodily agency is not purely physical or mechanical; arousal, motivation

and emotional orientation are all cr

ucial to physical agency. Thus music

aﬀords bodily agency in at least two ways. First, particular types of move-

ment are aﬀorded by music’s ‘primary signiﬁcations’, as Middleton terms

it (discussed above), through the musical structures that proﬁle move-

ment and lodge it within larger structures that in turn may also aﬀord

pleasure in their completion and that help actors to locate their move-

ments within wider schemes. An explanation for this is that this more

overtly physical level applies to the neonatal infants discussed in the ﬁrst

part of this chapter. Secondly, music also aﬀords subject positions, and so

generates emotional stances and scenarios associated with particular

physical forms – sentimentality, romance, anger, rage, calculation and so

Music technology and daily life

105

forth, as well as types of embodied actors (for example, graceful or force-

ful). These two types of aﬀordance are not distinct; to choreograph move-

ment is also to organize associated forms of feeling, of subjectivity (for

example, it may be more diﬃcult to be tender with clenched ﬁsts (that is,

one would need to innovate, culturally and bodily, to develop new modes

of expression), or to feel angry with a slackened jaw). This is to say that

music’s recipients may draw links between particular musical devices and

what Middleton refers to as their ‘secondary signiﬁcance’ or recognized

connotations of emotional styles or forms. They may then shape up their

action and self-perception in relation to these forms, becoming, for

example, sentimental at one musical moment, and roused for vigorous

action at the next.

This is precisely what happens in the forty-ﬁve minutes of an aerobic

workout where aerobic agency is aﬀorded by the music, where it is

conﬁgured and reconﬁgured over time as music speciﬁes a series of emo-

tional and physical modalities, as it changes from warm-up, to core, to

cool-down. In aerobics, these changes entail shifts in motivational levels

and in physical orientations, in energy levels and in consciousness. The

aerobic agent – as a being in a particular state – is transformed and trans-

formed again over the course of a session and can be seen to run the

gamut from person-in-the-street, to aerobically enlisted and motivated to

hone one’s body (for example, desiring to be ‘feminine’, constructed as

thin), to non-conscious, powerful moving being, to sentimental and reim-

bued with consciousness, to cognitively engaged in precision toning

moves. Aerobics is by no means the only social province where actors

engage in constant gear changes of emotional and embodied agency. On

the contrary, this ability to shift and respond to semiotic cues is part and

parcel of socialization into any institution, where one takes on organiza-

tionally sponsored feeling and action modes. This aspect is perhaps espe-

cially clear in the military. Consider the following statements, from a

veteran of the Second World War (DeNora n.d.):

I remember boarding a ship in New York – they had a band while we walked up

the gangplank. It was both sad and inspiring.

Band music is wonderful to march to – it puts a bounce in your walk and makes it

sparkle, especially in a parade. Marching to music is so diﬀerent; it’s almost auto-

matic. The music almost carries you on air and the beat keeps perfect step.

I was thinking about the ﬁrst night I heard taps, very touchy. I cried and so did

many more . . . you think they could be playing them for you.

Although the degree of musical-corporeal discipline demanded by

aerobics and by the military is not typical of the bulk of daily life and its

experiences, the molten and fragmentary character of embodied and

106 Music and the body

emotional agency as it is conﬁgured and reconﬁgured within these

enclaves as diﬀerent states of being (throughout the aerobic grammar, as

illustrated in these quotes describing diﬀerent modes of military agency)

is by no means atypical of the way in which agency is conﬁgured across

social time and space in many less formal settings. Music’s role just

happens to be made more overt in aerobics and in some aspects of the

military where its use is deliberate and in the foreground. But the aes-

thetic ﬂexibility involved in both these settings can be found in many of

the settings of modern life as individuals pass through varied relations

and circumstances in institutions, organizations and encounters. Indeed,

the aesthetic conﬁguration of subjects is what gives the scenes and occa-

sions of daily life their speciﬁcity, their particular forms of order, com-

posed and sustained by acting subjects, whether these be weavers, sailors,

soldiers, those taking part in aerobics, or other sorts of social actors.

In chapter 3, the ways in which individuals conﬁgure themselves as

subjects who act and feel things in relation to music, how music is a

resource for producing and recalling emotional states, were considered.

In this chapter,

music’s link to the body, its role as a prosthetic device of

bodily order, has been considered. It should be clear at this stage that

these two matters are interlinked. On the one hand, music is a prosthetic

technology of the body because it provides a resource for conﬁguring

motivation and entrainment, enabling the body to do what, without

music, it could not do. On the other hand, the bodily movements that

music proﬁles may lead actors to identify, work-up and modulate emo-

tional and motivational states. For example, marching music may put

listeners in mind of bodily states, and in mind of the movements proﬁled

by that music, even when they remain seated. It may, in other words,

rouse them because of the movement it implies and, more fundamentally,

because it is doing movement in a similar manner, because the materiality

of how notes are attacked and released, sustained and projected partakes

of similar physical movements and gestures. In music therapy, for

example, a therapist may structure g

roup music-making so as to quiet the

group and encourage them to listen to and pay attention to each other,

deliberately playing with tempo, slowing down and speeding up a drum

beat or instigating imitative games to get clients to focus on the move-

ments and musical expressions of others.

Music’s role as a resource for conﬁguring emotional and embodied

agency is not one that can be predetermined (because it is a resource that

must be appropriated by music consumers). Music is not an objective

‘force’ or a ‘stimulus’, but it is real in its eﬀects and its speciﬁc properties

provide mechanisms for achieving those eﬀects. Music not only aﬀects

how people feel emotionally; it also aﬀects the physical body by providing

Music technology and daily life

107

a ground for self-perception of the body, and by providing entrainment

devices and prosthetic technologies for the body. How, then, are these

structuring properties of music appropriated within institutions, organ-

izations and situations so as to have organizing eﬀects on social and

embodied action? And how does music work at the interactive level where

institutions, organizations and occasions are sustained and reproduced

over time? These issues are explored in the following chapter.

108 Music and the body

5 Music as a device of social ordering

‘Pools of order’, writes John Law, ‘are illusory, but even such illusions are

the exception. They do not last for long. They are pretty limited. And they

are the product, the outcome, or the eﬀect, of a lot of work – work that

may occasionally be more or less successfully hidden behind an appear-

ance of ordered simplicity’

(1994:5). Law is writing about a research lab-

oratory at a time of stress, but his observations perfectly introduce the

concept of social order as an achievement, an eﬀect of temporal action,

and as his description of scientiﬁc work makes clear, such action draws

upon (and is in turn shaped by) media and materials of all kinds – objects,

discourses and technologies.

In daily life, as we have seen, music is one of these materials. This

chapter considers music’s role as a device of collective ordering, how

music may be employed, albeit at times unwittingly, as a means of organ-

izing potentially disparate individuals such that their actions may appear

to be intersubjective, mutually oriented, co-ordinated, entrained and

aligned. This social calm and the conductivity for social navigation that it

facilitates is akin to Law’s notion of order’s ‘pools’. This notion captures

the temporal and achieved dimension of ordering. It gives sociological

conceptions of order a tilt towards the ethnomethodological focus on

order as an eﬀect of work. At the same time, it creates an important space

for culture as a medium of and for this work.

Adding music to the catalogue of cultural materials or devices of order-

ing contributes a whole new dimension to the focus of human–non-

human interaction. It dispenses with the notion tha

t society is merely

‘people doing things’. It brings into relief the expressive and aesthetic

dimension of ordering activity, a topic too often ignored in favour of cog-

nitive and discursive ‘skill’ (Lash and Urry 1994; Mestrovic 1999). It

highlights agency as consisting of feeling, as a corporeal and stylistic

entity, and as something that may possess ceremonial features (Strong

1979). This vision of action has been taken up recently within social

movement theory (Eyerman and Jamieson 1998; Melucci 1996a;

Hetherington 1998; Tota 1999), where questions of aesthetic being and

109

non-propositional paradigms for action have been broached. These issues

are discussed below.

Such an approach orbits around action-as-practice. It is less concerned

with depicting actors as ‘knowing’, that is deliberate or instrumentally

rational subjects, and more concerned with exploring the matter of how

forms of social life are established and renewed, albeit at the often sub-

conscious levels of practice, habit, passion and routine. In so far as cul-

tural forms are, within this perspective, seen to get into or inform social

action and social relations, the production or creation of culture is politi-

cized (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Fyfe and Law 1992; Zolberg 1996).

Aesthetic materials may provide paradigms and templates for the con-

struction of non-aesthetic matters, styles of productive activity in the paid

workplace, politics and statecraft, for example.

Chapter 2 made the point that sociologists have been reluctant to con-

sider the aesthetic dimensions of social organization and that aesthetic

materials can be understood to aﬀord modes of action, feeling and

embodiment. Chapters 3 and 4 developed this argument by showing how

music is a device of emotional,

biographical and corporeal regulation. It

was necessary to begin with these topics in order to theorize agency in a

way that brings to the fore feeling, body and energy. Accordingly, in this

chapter, the aim is to advance that perspective by considering music’s role

as a resource for social ordering at the collective and collaborative levels.

Focus is on materially and aesthetically conﬁgured spaces that are created

– by actors themselves or for those actors by other actors (such as retail-

ers, social planners or employers) – prior to and as part of action’s scenes.

Concern with this topic leads to the matter of music’s role in the produc-

tion and structuring of agency in real time. It articulates with a panoply of

‘postmodern’ issues – interactional or micro-politics, the construction of

subjectivity, intersubjectivity, co-subjectivity, the virtual and the tacit.

Such matters emphasize the rich domain of the precognitive, embodied,

emotional and sensual bases of social action and order as it is produced by

reﬂexive aesthetic ordering activity

. These issues are broached by consid-

ering actors themselves as they may be seen to mobilize musical materials

in an attempt to deﬁne the parameters of social scenarios, to provide cues

for crafting agency in real-time social settings. Examining this issue helps

to show how music is a device of social occasioning, how it can be used to

regulate and structure social encounters, and how it lends aesthetic

texture to those encounters. Music provides, in other words, a resource for

establishing the prospective parameters of agency’s aesthetic dimension.

One of the clearest illustrations of this issue lies in individuals’

attempts, within the domestic sphere and among friendship groups, to

create musical ‘pre-texts’ for action. To this end, it is worth returning to

110 Music as a device of social order

ing

the in-depth interview data discussed in chapter 3, to consider how the

women interviewed described their eﬀorts to set the social scene with

music. Through the prism of this data, it is possible to see music being

used and working as a device for clarifying social order, for structuring

subjectivity (desire and the temporal parameters of emotion and the

emotive dimension of interaction) and for establishing a basis for collabo-

rative action. In particular, we can see music as it is used as a resource or

template against which styles and temporal patterns of feeling, moving

and being come to be organized and produced in real time. Chapter 3

considered music’s role as a part of routine identity work, and how it pro-

vides a means for the regulation of feeling, mood, concentration and

energy level. So, too, music operates on an interactive plane, and so, too,

music can be used to regulate the parameters of collaborative and collec-

tive aesthetic agency. At both individual and collective levels, these para-

meters encompass feeling, mood, energy, comportment and styles of

awareness (for example, cognitive and propositional, embodied and

tacit).

Musical prescription? Music and intimate culture

Daily, all around the world, individuals attempt to ‘orchestrate’ social

activity. As discussed below, at times this work resembles the activities of

marketing professionals who seek to structure conduct in public and

commercial settings such as terminals, restaurants and shops. It is aimed

at the creation of scenic speciﬁcity, at rendering places and spaces hospit-

able to some types of action, inhospitable to others. Through these forms

of musical ‘work’ (and certainly many other forms of work), actors

produce the aesthetic textures of social occasions, situations and action

styles. The audio-environment is thus part of what actors refer to in their

reﬂexive monitoring of situations; it is one of the things that actors may

consider to determine what is, should or could be going on. To address

this issue I begin with music’s role as an activ

e ingredient in close rela-

tionships and intimate settings. Such relationships exhibit collaborative

action at the face-to-face level and in an emotionally heightened form

where two actors are mutually engaged in producing an intimate mode of

communicative, embodied, expressive action.

For example, Melinda is a twenty-year-old American student, complet-

ing a description of music as it had featured in her life on the day before

the interview. In the following extract, she describes how the end of the

day involved going to her ‘new person’s’ house (she had been ‘going out’

with him for roughly a week), and how they had chosen music to listen to

in his room:

Music and intimate culture

111

Melinda:

I think, last night, it was really funny, it was like ‘mood setting’

in a way.

’Cause he had Enya on, and as people call that ‘chick music’ [that is, ‘women’s’

music that young men may choose to play when entertaining women because they

think it is what women prefer] . . . and he was trying to produce a relaxed atmos-

phere and I think in a way it does promote physical, or just intimacy in general

because it’s just like certain music’s more calming and, I remember . . . I think

Stigma or Hyper came on and we were like, ‘No no no, we don’t want that!’ and

we tried to get this piece, like I had him play the First Night soundtrack, which I

love, and there’s like, a lov

e song I, there, that’s so beautiful,

but everything else is

like, ‘bu bu de bah’ [she sings here a triplet followed by a whole note the interval of

a ﬁfth higher than the triplet ﬁgure] and I’m like, ‘No, no, this is not good’ but I

do, I think it was just very, it’s very calming, very intimacy . . .

Q. So it’s part of what creates an intimate atmosphere?

Melinda: Yeah, deﬁnitely. I think it’s . . . setting is very important, and music is

a very big part of that.

Q. Now, do you choose the music, also for those settings, or does he tend to

choose them?

Melinda: I think he originally chose them but then I said, um, we heard Enya

and then I was like, ‘All right, let’s change it’ and he was like, whatever I wanted,

he was just like ‘Sure’, so we both picked out some stuﬀ. He’s got a ﬁfteen million

CD changer. I’m like ‘I didn’t know they existed!’

Melinda’s account of how she and her ‘new person’ negotiated the

musical backdrop of their time together highlights not only her under-

standing of what is musically appropriate to the occasion, but also her

apparent equality, perhaps even leading role, in articulating the aesthetic

parameters of the occasion, that is, for specifying that occasion’s scenic

speciﬁcity. Certainly, her friend, who was also her host (they were in his

room, listening to his CD collection, on his machine), was concerned

with pleasing Melinda musically (‘he was like, whatever I wanted, he was

just like “Sure”’). Melinda persuades him, for example, to change the

music when it seems ‘wrong’. She refers to Enya as ‘chick music’ because

she perceives it as a generic form of seduction music within the university

scene. She rejects Stigma and Hyper, previously cued up (‘we were like,

“No no no, we don’t want that!”’) in favour of a ‘love song’ from the First

Night soundtrack (‘I had him play the First Night soundtrack, which I

love’). She also then rejects a louder and energetic number (‘and I’m like,

‘No, no, this is not good’) that was characterized, as she illustrates by

bursting into song in the interview, by a ‘fanfare’ ﬁgure (not relaxed,

calming or beautiful, but public, militaristic, energized).

Given that Melinda and her friend are students, the material-cultural

settings of their domestic lives are somewhat constrained. Conﬁned to

one room with only basic furnishings, some candles, posters and the like,

music is one of the few available materials for altering and specifying the

scenes in which their encounters occur. It is a way of establishing a sense

112 Music as a device of social ordering

of setting the stage, as it were, of the encounter, structuring the parame-

ters of the happening. ‘Setting’, as Melinda puts it, ‘is very important and

music is a very big part of that.’

What, then, are Melinda and her partner doing with music? How is

music an active ingredient here in the ongoing conﬁguration of their

encounter and, within it, themselves as social agents? The answers to

these questions involve reference to music’s material and symbolic prop-

erties, its parameters as they are invoked and selected during musical pro-

duction, performance and distribution.

Melinda’s preferred music here gives prominence to conventional

representations of love, relationships and romance, through lyrics and

through melodic conventions (for example, soft and sensual – colour,

texture and slow tempi). Moreover, the music she describes as ‘good’

occasionally alludes to romantic and exotic locations and cultures, again,

through lyrics (for example, Enya’s ‘Caribbean blue’, ‘The Celts’, ‘China

roses’, ‘Storms in Africa’) and through musical conventions such as

‘Celtic’ melodies. Melinda also prefers music that is characterized by only

mild dynamic shifts and where rh

ythmic pulse is not a prominent feature.

Finally, Melinda prefers music that features female voices and performers

who cultivate a ‘feminine’ image or who occupy, within the context of the

lyrics or Broadway show story-lines, ‘feminine’ roles. Indeed, Enya’s big

hair, lace and velvet aptly exemplify these stereotypically feminine,

romantic values. In short, Melinda and her partner were engaging in the

aesthetic reﬂexive activity of conﬁguring, via their musical choices, the

prospective structure of their encounter: a time for relaxing, being

sensual, slowing down, being romantic and celebrating things ‘feminine’

– softness, slowness, quiet, decoration. In this respect we can see,

expanded on to the local, real-time interactive plane, music’s role as a

device for conﬁguring aesthetic agency. Music provides, in other words,

an exemplar for styles of being; it may be perceived as representing, or

making accessible to awareness various parameters of emotional and

embodied conduct and, in this wa

y, it enables the possibility of (at least

apparently) intersubjective, entrained physical conduct as an ongoing

accomplishment.

Although this discussion has focused on individual cultural practice,

Melinda’s musical preferences are by no means unique; on the contrary,

they are typical of what other writers have observed in relation to gender

and musical taste (Peterson and Simkus 1992; Bryson 1996; Frith and

McRobbie 1990 [1978]). Less obvious, perhaps, is that the stylistic trap-

pings of intimacy preferred by Melinda conform to what previous studies

of gender and sexual conduct have revealed: that women value the tempo-

ral structures and embodied practices commensurate with slowing down.

Music and intimate culture

113

Perhaps this is because leisurely pace, whether as a feature of music,

speech or action, aﬀords equivocation, interruption, languor, redirection,

digression and so is commensurate with narratives of intimate conduct

that feature the liminal and the non-purposive, that ‘get down oﬀ the

beanstalk’ as McClary has put it in reference to the upward mobility often

used to signify sexuality in Western cultures (McClary 1991:112–31).

Given that young women often ﬁnd it diﬃcult to verbalize tastes and dis-

positions to their partners (from lack of experience and general diﬃdence

(Holland et al. 1994)), the salience of non-verbal, aesthetic means for

pre-scripting scenes, for instigating scenarios and associated desires and

conduct forms, is heightened. ‘Setting is very important’, as Melinda

says, perhaps because getting the music right is a way of trying to make

the action right, not merely in the embodied and technical sense, but as a

way of prospectively calling out forms of agency that are comfortable and

preferable, that feel right in emotional and embodied terms.

Intimate conduct is often bodily conduct. It is therefore worth bearing

in mind issues raised in chapter 4, particularly those that relate to the

conﬁguration and reconﬁguration of embodied energy

, tempo and

consciousness style, as discussed in relation to the body and the trans-

formations it undergoes over forty-ﬁve minutes of aerobic exercise.

There, the body could be seen to be organized musically, and aligned with

a preconﬁgured aerobic grammar or sequential order of how the body is

meant to be during an aerobic session. In an aerobic session, slower and

more sentimental ballad forms were used to cool-down participants, to

bring them back from the mind-less and more physically encompassing

forms of movement that they had engaged in during the core of the exer-

cise, to bring them back into a more conscious and reﬂective mode of

attention. In relation to the real-time intimate encounter, so, too, slower,

less rhythmically and harmonically forward-moving, more textural and

tonally ambiguous musical materials may be preferred by women because

they aﬀord a less mechanical and more sentimental mode of bodily

conduct; they also work, in a manner akin to the w

arm-up music of aero-

bics in its celebration of the ‘feminine’, to maintain the intimate

encounter as an aesthetic encounter, as involving more than bodily pro-

cesses and techniques. Moreover, as with aerobics, slower and more

sentimental music may be commensurate with low-impact forms of

movement.

Observations such as these may be (too) quickly taken to imply

essentialist conceptions of ‘female desire’. But essentialist perspectives on

‘women and music’ preclude consideration of the aesthetic-pragmatic

dimension of women’s musical practice, for example, women’s attempts

to renegotiate stereotypical representations of intimacy (representations

114 Music as a device of social order

ing

that have been made and initiated perhaps mostly by men), and to inter-

ject nuance or alternative practice into the proceedings. Essentialist read-

ings also preclude the ways in which desire is culturally constituted in and

through reference to scripts, representations and a variety of cultural

materials, one of which is music (DeNora 1997). The desire for a back-

drop of slow or romantic music is thus not necessarily linked to ‘female-

ness’ per se, but rather to a perceived need for relaxation and/or a desire to

sentimentalize interaction, to hold it as an object upon which to reﬂect

(and change). Slow, relaxing music, then, may be deployed so as to slow

action and to open its course to the possibility of negotiation. The follow-

ing excerpt, concerning a situation where the male rather than female

participant makes recourse to ‘romance’ music as a backdrop for intimate

interaction, shows how, for men too, music may be used as a means for

slowing intimate interaction, for conferring a degree of sentimentality on

to it and thus for reconﬁguring intimate possibilities by raising its level of

consciousness, its degree of sentimentality:

Q. Another question I ask everybody, some people sa

y yes, some people say no, in

a romantic context do you ever use music for, kind of, intimate situations or how

do you ever, or does anyone ever, put on music as a complement to seduction or

intimacy?

Becky: Yeah, I do, ’cause I tend to, although the last boyfriend I had I didn’t

actually put the music on, he did, he was in my house so he sort of took the initia-

tive to put the music on and, I think he actively took my CD player upstairs so he

quite sort of . . . [pause]

Q. . . . Do you remember what he chose? . . .

Becky: I think it was, I think it was – I’ve got the lo

ve albums; I’ve got the com-

plete [set]. I think it was [volume] two or three and he chose that. Which took me

by surprise, I must admit at the time I thought ‘Oh, cheeky so-and-so’ [laughs].

Taking my CD player . . . [from the living room to the bedroom]. There is a funny

story behind it but please don’t laugh. Afterwards I found out, well it sort of devel-

oped into just a friendship because there wasn’t, there was no spark there and it

turned out that he was actually homosexual and he didn’t know how to come out

and he was trying to convince himself he still liked women and in the end I sort of

helped him through it and he now lives in Manchester with his boyfriend [laughs].

He was very eﬀeminate and I was always a little bit suspicious but didn’t sort of let

on so that might have something to do with why he chose the music . . . At the

time it wasn’t, I can tell you, it was shell-shock with that one, and I’m getting the

standing jokes like ‘That’s what you do to men is it? Put them right oﬀ women’

[laughs].

Q. And if you’re in a position to chose music for an intimate situation what

might you chose?

Becky: I tend to go for more relaxing CDs. I go more towards that because I em

– I mean since I’ve been separated, or divorced now, for ﬁve years – and I tend to

go more towards that because it’s been a long time, I’ve only had three relation-

ships since then, I must say this last one, which was last year, was so brief I’m

Music and intimate culture 115

always very nervous when I meet somebody new so I tend to try and sort of relax a

bit with them. I might have even known them for several months but they still feel

[inaudible] [laughs].

Q. Now, how have they responded to this relaxing music, do they like it? It

doesn’t bother them, they don’t say ‘Turn that oﬀ’ or anything?

Becky: No, nobody, they haven’t said anything, they’re probably amused, sort

of humour her, leave it on [laughs], keep the woman happy [laughs].

Of the ﬁfty-two women inter

viewed for the music and daily life study,

not one indicated fast-paced or high-volume music as something they

associated with intimacy (for example, heavy metal, dance music or aero-

bics music), but many reported enjoying and employing in intimate situa-

tions ‘romantic’, ‘relaxing’ or ‘smoochy’ music – the terms are theirs –

and some bemoaned the f

act that the music they ‘would’ like to hear as a

prelude or accompaniment to intimacy was disdained by their partners.

As suggested above, these preferences are perhaps best viewed as non-

discursive strategies, ones that open up intimate encounters, slow them

and conﬁgure them as sentimental (that is, conscious) occasions. Such

practical work then f

acilitates a negotiation of the situation and its hap-

penings. Music is thus a device of sexual-political negotiation or, put less

combatively, a device for conﬁguring the intimate environment. But

women’s musical preferences – at least those espoused by the women

interviewed here – also tap into gender-stereotypical scripts of intimate

conduct, ones within which feminine desire is,

in bodily terms, not

urgent, and, in behavioural terms, laced with romance, a quasi-sacred

occasion.

For example, Jennifer’s partner likes ‘Gangster Rap’, which she dis-

dains (‘The things that I listen to are more feminine, more like Girl music.

That’s what I call his music – Boy music’). She goes on to speculate that

he does not actually ‘like’ this music but feels obliged, within his ‘boy’

peer group, to espouse a taste for it. None the less, at times of physical

intimacy they listen to the music of her choice:

Jennifer: I like things that are, kind of, maybe a little mystical.

Q. Is there any special reason for that? I can imagine some.

Jennifer: I guess because when I’m alone with my ﬁancée it’s kind of a magical,

mystical type thing, we’re both very into non-traditional religion.

She goes on to describe the music in more detail as ‘classical music with

nature sounds ...aTchaikovsky CD with nature sounds [thunder

storms, rain, birds] put into the music . . . a CD with like ocean sounds,

it’s really nice . . .’.

Conversely, as Nancy describes, a musical backdrop for intimacy is not

always welcomed by both partners:

116 Music as a device of social order

ing

Q. If you were going to have people around, I’m just going to jump ahead a bit, for

a meal or a drink or something, would you put music on for that?

Nancy: Yeah, I think for a meal, at Christmas we had a Christmas meal and we

had the Christmas tape on in the background, that sort of thing.

Q. Do you ever use any other kind of music to set the mood in any circum-

stances?

Nancy: Um – I try quite often with my boyfriend [laughs] but he never . . .

[breaks oﬀ ]

Q. Can you tell me about that?

Nancy: Yeah, we’ll watch telly before we go to bed, which is what we like to do

to relax, and then we turn it oﬀ and as I said, I don’t really like silence that much

anyway so I say, ‘Oh, can we have a CD on?’ and every single time it’ll be ‘No, why

do you want a CD on?’ [laughs]. So he’s not very big on having the mood set with

music, which if it’s at my house I might put a tape on to relax to.

Q. He’s the one with the CD [player] though?

Nancy: Yes.

Q. What kind of a CD would you be wanting to listen to at that stage of the day?

Nancy: Ah, it would have to be something quite relaxing and quiet, I think.

Q. Could you give me some examples of what from his collection you would

choose?

Nancy: Probably, he hasn’t got much, he’s got the Beatles, which I like, so prob-

ably something like that would suit me. And the sort of thing I think would be a

compilation of female singers.

Q. Can you, I’m going to press, can you be as speciﬁc as possible, what kind of

music and what kind of female singers?

Nancy: I guess any sort, really. You know it could be sort of background music,

not the sort you have to really listen to.

Q. How would you describe what is the mood that it evokes if you are putting

them on?

Nancy: Relaxation, I think, is the main one. Also because I don’t like silence too

much I feel relaxed because there is a noise in the background. I think it’s quite

relaxing to have all sorts of love songs, something like that.

Q. Actually, one of the questions I ask everybody is,

do you ever like to have

music on in the background as a prelude to, you know, ‘romance’?

Nancy: Yes, well I try to [laughs].

Q. If it’s not for going to sleep but is background for intimacy, why do you think

he doesn’t want it and you want it?

Nancy: I don’t know – I can’t really think. I have thought about it, I sort of lie

there thinking ‘Why can’t we have the CD on?’ I think maybe males see music or

hear music diﬀerently to us, maybe a romantic soundtrack to them would be too

soppy and a bit too stereotypical, I think.

Nancy, a twenty-year-old English university student, would like to dec-

orate the auditory spaces in which relaxing and being intimate with her

partner occurs. But she perceives her partner as non-co-operative in this

regard. She goes on to describe how, if she puts her tapes on in other less

intimate circumstances, such as while driving, ‘He’ll have a little snigger

Music and intimate culture

117

when I’m in the car [laughs]. So I think he probably ﬁnds them quite

amusing. So we probably are quite diﬀerent, actually.’ When I go on to ask

her if she thinks this is because her musical choices connote the ‘roman-

tic’ and that perhaps he doesn’t care for overtly romantic conﬁgurations

of intimacy and couples, she says (echoing McRobbie’s (1991) discussion

of the downplaying of ‘romance’ in young women’s culture): ‘It may be – I

think men tend to avoid sort of typical romantic situations. They don’t

really like [them]. I guess they get a lot of stick for being too romantic now

and it’s a bit naﬀ to be over the top and romantic.’

It would be misleading to jump to conclusions about female sexuality

on the basis of this (non-representative, exploratory) data. Indeed, within

the sample of women discussed here, not all described using music as a

device for intimate occasioning. None the less, the responses of the

women in my sample give rise to some fruitful speculation concerning

why music may be w

oven into the fabric of an intimate encounter. For

instance, respondents who did not use music in intimate circumstances

were typically involved in a longer-term relationship and/or in a relation-

ship where they seemed to have less need to prestructure or to negotiate

the parameters of intimacy, where less uncertainty existed and where the

need for relaxation was not felt as pressing. Ulrika, for example, a twenty-

year-old university student – originally from Sweden – said that there was

‘no time’ before intimate encounters for setting the scene with music, ‘it

all happens too fast’ with her boyfriend. She was clearly not complaining

about pace but was rather trying to underline how her relationship was

characteristically passionate; she meant they felt no need for musical

enhancement in their physical relationship. Indeed, love songs and senti-

mental pop tunes were not part of her repertoire of musical tastes and

practices (she tended to listen to high-energy dance music and, fre-

quently, to go out to clubs with the express purpose of dancing). And for

ﬁfty-something Elaine, playing music as a backdrop for intimacy would

be like ‘a signal to the household’ and so is avoided, though she recalls

using music for such encounters in her youth.

In short, when music was used as a backdrop for intimacy, it was

because it contributed to intima

te interaction – for example, it served as an

aid to relaxation, a signal about style, a motivator, an occasioning device.

Music was a resource one could turn to as one engaged in the collaborative

production of an intimate scene, rather as it was in other types of circum-

stances, such as when one wanted to get psyched up for a particular task,

as described in chapter 3. Perhaps, for this reason, it is not surprising that

the use of slow music, new age music, nature sounds, ‘spiritual’ music,

sentimental and romantic ballads and the like, as used for intimac

y, is

more common among the young, among those who are still getting to

118 Music as a device of social ordering

know each other, the nervous and the uncertain, and those who wish to

reconﬁgure otherwise pregiven, stereotypical or routine intimate prac-

tices. These musical materials seem, for the respondents, to aﬀord senti-

mentalizing, slowing down and deconstructing teleological grammars of

intimate conduct. They also reﬂect a conventional and gendered division

of musical taste, a diﬀerence between what men versus women may feel is

appropriate for them to espouse and play in social situations, or between

what men and women come to associate with familiarity and musical

security. In our ethnography of karaoke, for example, when women per-

formed they usually chose love songs, lyrical songs that dealt with the topic

of relationships. When men sang, they opted for a wider range of musical

material – hard rock, rap, Elvis hits, famous Sinatra classics such as ‘My

way’. They rarely performed romantic numbers. Investigating the actual

musical practices of intimate encounters thus echoes Walser’s observa-

tions about music’s role as a resource for gender display (1993:114–17,

‘No girls allowed’), and provides ethnographic data in line with Frith and

McRobbie’s semiotic reading of music’s erotic aﬀordances in their pio-

neering essay on rock and sexuality:

Cock rock performers are aggressive, dominating, and boastful, and they con-

stantly seek to remind to audience of their prowess, their control. Their stance is

obvious in live shows; male bodies on display, plunging shirts and tight trousers, a

visual emphasis on chest hair and genitals . . . mikes and guitars are phallic

symbols; the music is loud, rhythmically insistent, built around techniques of

arousal and climax; the lyrics are assertive and arrogant, though the exact words

are less signiﬁcant than the vocal styles involved, the shouting and screaming.

(Frith and McRobbie 1990 [1978]:374)

Frith and McRobbie were clear at the time that they were not suggest-

ing that the rhythmic ‘insistence’ of rock was equated with ‘natural’

sexuality; rather they were attempting to observe – rather as one might

observe the properties of conversation – how rock’s ‘thrusting’ musical

character ‘can be heard as a sexual insistence’ (1990 [1978]:383) and, as

such, can be contrasted with musical materials that conﬁgure hesitation,

feeling as opposed to action. For example, Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering

heights’ has the following character

istics:

Both her vocal and her piano lines are disrupted, swooping, unsteady; the song

does not have a regular melodic or rhythmic structure, even in the chorus, with its

unsettling stress – the words that are emphasized are ‘nervous’, ‘desperate’,

‘nobody else’. . . . The music contradicts the enjoyment that the lyrics assert. Kate

Bush’s aesthetic intentions are denied by the musical conventions she uses. (Frith

and McRobbie 1990 [1978]:386)

Frith and McRobbie were concerned with how music could be used

to represent sexuality, with how its structures could come to inform and

Music and intimate culture

119

engender desire. This project is akin to Susan McClary’s, as discussed in

chapter 2 – we can see, for example, musical structures mapped on to

gendered action such that musical conventions and materials may come

to connote gendered meanings. Frith and McRobbie’s concerns are

adjacent to but diﬀerent from the project outlined here, which is con-

cerned with how actors mobilize musical materials and conventions as

resources for constituting agency and its locations. A focus on how

music is mobilized in the course of action is linked to the ethnographic

realm and to the question of what actors actually do with music, how

music is implicated in what they do and how it may structure what can

be done.

Richard Dyer (1990) was also concerned with this question, which he

addressed, in autobiog

raphical mode, in his 1979 essay ‘In Defense of

Disco’, where he compares the ‘disembodied’ eroticism of pop songs with

the ‘thrusting’ eroticism of rock and the ‘whole body’ eroticism of disco.

Dyer’s essay is valuable today because it oﬀers an account of how, for a

particular individual, music may aﬀord conﬁgurations of desire and

erotic agency.

As in the case study of aerobics discussed in chapter 4,

music can be understood as an accomplice for bodily entrainment; it can

heighten or suppress cognitive forms of awareness and the tendency to be

emotional or sentimental; it can interest the body such that it is drawn

into a temporal trajectory (a rhythm, a pulse, a corporeal grammar and

style of movement); it can enlist the body to forget about itself; it can serve

as a non-verbal accomplice for certain forms of action. This is why the

question of who puts what on the record player as a backdrop for intimacy

is of necessity a question of intimate politics.

Increasingly, music distribution companies have tapped this market for

what they refer to as ‘romantic compilation albums’. A 1994 issue of Cue

magazine devoted a feature to these albums and describes the growing

market as follows:

[It is] the idea that for a few quid you can kit yourself out with a completely legal

mood-manipulator which, together with soft lights and optional bearskin rug, will

work hard on your behalf before, during and after making the beast with two

backs. Ambience to go. (Cue 1994:68)

The albums are produced in consultation with focus groups and are

advertised on national television. They are aimed expressly at the so-

called ‘light purchaser’, the individuals with little knowledge about music

who buy no more than three music CDs a year. According to Nick

Moran, of Dino Records (who lead the market with a ﬁve-volume ‘That

lovin’ feeling’ series): ‘We do try to steer clear of clichés, but this very styl-

ised image of love and happiness is what is expected to go with the songs

120 Music as a device of social order

ing

. . . It’s very aspirational, especially among women – so research has told

us . . .’ (Cue 1994:69).

This point was born out by the interview data. Many of the intervie-

wees themselves described how, although their (male) partners were

mostly interested in music and had particular tastes, that they could take

charge of music when they wished:

He wouldn’t know what to put on.

He’s really not that bothered about wha

t I put on.

He’s not as keen on music anyway as me so he generally will go along with what I

say . . . he’s probably the most dominant in our relationship, but when it comes to

music, I think I probably would win.

I think my tastes are more dominant in the household, period. But my husband

has very little interest in music.

Accounts such as these are diﬃcult to evaluate; they may be occasioned

expressly for the in-depth interview and its conventional style of rapport

between two women. They may, in other words, be part of the doing – the

performance – of conﬁdentiality, part of how speaker and hearer collude

in producing cultural scripts and images, in this case, for example, of

‘female power’ (on this point, see Frith and Kitzinger 1998). Interviewees

may, in other words, slip into what C.W. Mills once referred to as ‘vocab-

ularies of motive’ (Mills 1940). The interview procedure was designed to

address this problem by repeatedly leading respondents back to the prac-

tical level of real-life examples of who-did-what-when-how, the ‘nitty-

gritty’ level of mundane action that has the capacity to undermine

accounts and the various identity claims, posturings and role play that

often occur within an interview. Sticking close to the level of respondents’

musical practices helped to reveal how respondents used music rather

than their depictions of relations between themselves and others. If, in

fact, women are more likely to resort to aesthetic means for conﬁguring

intimate occasions, there is an important lesson there for theories of

gender and power in close rela

tionships, one that could be further illumi-

nated through more ethnographic research on couple culture and its pro-

duction over the course of a relationship.

Music and collective occasions

Jennifer: We had a party a couple of weeks ago. It was supposed to be like a wine

and cheese party but it was desserts and mixed drinks! We had candles in here and

it was weird because we played Billy Joel and we played a lot of [dance music] at

the end of the evening because everybody was going from my party, out to go

dancing. We played a lot of pretty things in other languages.

Music and collective occasions 121

Particularly at the start of the evening – for music was here used to outline

a temporal structure of conduct style over the duration of an evening –

Jennifer and her housemates were trying, she explains, to create a relaxed

yet reﬁned environment, one in which participants dressed up, consumed

desserts and mixed drinks (as opposed to the more usual beer and snack

food), and conversed quietly or danced (slowly) to the strains of ‘pretty’

music with lyrics ‘in other languages’, signalling travel and things

European (often synonymous with high culture in the United States).

Here, music was part and parcel of Jennifer and her friends’ orientation to

(what they perceived as) prestigious forms of symbolic capital, forms

residing on the perimeter of their usual leisure practices. This form of

what Mauss has called ‘prestigious imitation’ (Lash and Urry 1994:45;

Mauss 1979:101) delimited the parameters of conduct in ways that were

commensurate with their values of glamour, relaxed pace, sophistication

and romance. Thus, through the ways it is perceived to be related to a

network of other objects, meanings and modes of agency, music can be

seen as providing an ongoing tracking device for participants, a cue or

template for the for

mulation of energy levels and conduct styles that can

be examined when and/or if uncertainty about appropriate agency arises,

when/if one needs to get a handle on how to ‘be’ within a setting. In this

sense, music is a template or model for the formulation of emotional,

social and embodied agency over the course of real-time interaction. Just

as it may be diﬃcult, for example, to reconcile ‘pretty things in other lan-

guages’ with beer, or candles with sweatshirts, jeans and trainers, so too it

is diﬃcult to engage in some of the earthier modes of intimacy against the

background entailments of, say, Celine Dion’s ‘Our love will go on’, the

Titanic themesong. The point is not that music delineates modes of sub-

jectivity and embodied action per se, but that actors perceive it as implying

(or as associated with) modes of agency; they also feel it to be analogous

or homologous to modes of being:

I would have the music on before they [houseguests] come because I like to create

an atmosphere. And because – it would depend to some extent on what [the occa-

sion is]. If it were a very elegant little cocktail party then I would probably be going

to put on some kind of classical or something like that, although I might make it a

little more – what I would think of as informal classical like classical guitar, for

example. When it’s around the holidays I always put on music that’s related to the

holidays but not singing music, I like instrumental music for that, harps, or what-

ever. If we’re doing a Friday night dinner, kind of informal with friends, I might

put on folk music or light jazz, something like that . . . If I want things to be very

lively and a little boisterous, you know, then I am going to play loud or fast-paced

music obviously if I want people to dance but just, you know, if you have twenty

people there and you don’t want quiet for the conversation which the lower music

lends itself to, then I might put on something that would be more, you know,

122 Music as a device of social ordering

something a little hipper [laughs] . . . I think people, they need to know what’s

happening to them, we all respond to the emotional tone of music so I think music

can be very, very soothing and quiet or it can sort of jazz things up or it can put a

cast of utter pall over, you know. Have you ever been to a party where they want

people to dance but they put the wrong music on and you just can’t move with it?

(Elaine, age ﬁfty-ﬁve, United States)

Music is thus part of the cultural material through which ‘scenes’ are

constructed, scenes that aﬀord diﬀerent kinds of agency, diﬀerent sorts of

pleasure and ways of being. It is important to underline, as described in

chapter 4, that this process and the use of music as a device of scene

construction may elide rational consciousness. Without being aware of

how they are responding to and inter

preting music, actors may latch on to

and fall in with musical structures. This falling in with may entail realign-

ment of bodily comportment as discussed in chapter 4 (for example, the

tapping of a foot or a shift in physical energy or motivation), a realignment

of emotional state (chapter 3) or a realignment of social conduct, as

addressed in this chapter

. As is discussed in chapter 6, human action is

assembled at least in part by a practical appropriation of models and

resources for action’s conﬁguration. We see this perhaps most clearly in

examinations of situated discourse, for example in how actors may draw

upon conventional narratives, registers and manners of speaking to

generate a voice and point of view locally, to ‘get through’ the activity of

face-to-face communication (Frazer and Cameron 1989). This need not

imply the absence of a subject but, rather, that subjects, if they are to

realize themselves as speakers, must ﬁnd the words and so cast about for

available and appropriate linguistic techniques. So, too, subjects may ﬁnd

available auditory structures with which to conﬁgure themselves, not only

as speaking and acting subjects, but as subjects whose speech and action

possess an emotional and corporeal dimension – as aesthetic agents.

Within social spaces, then, prominent music may allude to modes of aes-

thetic agency – feeling, being,

moving, acting – and so may place near-to-

hand certain aesthetic styles that can be used as referents for conﬁguring

agency in real time, for the bodily technique of producing oneself as an

agent in the full sense of that word (that is, beyond the discursive and cog-

nitive dimensions normally understood within the social sciences).

Music works in this way through two interrelated avenues. First, it may

be perceived as carrying connotations or, as discussed in chapter 4, ‘sec-

ondary signiﬁcations’. Secondly, it may proﬁle and place on oﬀer ways of

moving, being and feeling through the ways its materials are conﬁgured

into a range of sonic parameters such as pace, rhythm, the vertical and

horizontal ‘distances’ between tones, the musical envelope of particular

tones and tone groups – ‘attack and release’ as it is termed in music

Music and collective occasions

123

analysis, timbre or volume. For example, when the music ‘hops’ and

‘skips’, so too bodies may feel motivated to move, as it were, like the

music. In these cases, music is doing something more than re-presenting

or simulating bodily patterns and bringing them to mind; it is providing a

ground or medium within which to be a body, a medium against which

the body comes to be organized in terms of its own physical and temporal

organization (for example, as it springs from the ground in a way that is

entrained to the musical pulse). So, aligned with and entrained by the

physical patterns music proﬁles, bodies not only feel empowered, they

may be empowered in the sense of gaining a capacity. These capacities are

sometimes visible, as, for example, when we can observe the body ges-

tures of people listening to music via headphones or orchestral conduc-

tors’ movements; this visibility is heightened when musical materials

shift, for example, from slow to fast, from genre to genre, where contigu-

ous but contradictor

y forms of musical agency rub up against each other.

This tendency to fall in with the music was something that arose

repeatedly in all aspects of the music in the daily life study. As a phenom-

enon, it highlights the capacity, perhaps even the tendency, on the part of

human beings, to adopt and adapt, not necessarily consciously, to

resources within an environment. At the same time, actors’ non-

discursive, corporeal, emotional, falling in with music does not imply that

music works like a stimulus. Actors may have awareness of what music

entails and yet also be aware that those entailments feel wrong; they may

wish to override music’s perceived implications, to resist or reappropriate

music’s force (for example, when the ballad ‘Stand by your man’ is

reappropriated as an ironic commentary on patriarchal relations).

Melinda, quoted earlier in this chapter, made this clear when she said,

about a follow-on track on a CD her boyfriend had chosen, ‘we were like,

“No no no, we don’t want that!”’ In short, music’s capacity to serve as a

device of social ordering can be seen in the fact that it can serve as the

source of social discomfort:

Becky: . . . A lot of the people [at a party] were working together [so] they didn’t

like slow music, I got the impression they felt quite uneasy because they felt they

had to touch their workmates [laughs] and it didn’t go down very well . . . One

chap that I worked quite closely with came over and asked me to actually dance

and I felt very conscious, I personally felt conscious that I was dancing to a slow

dance and his wife was only over there and it was all very uncomfortable, really.

In this example, tension arose between, on the one hand, the general

social value of being polite at a special function for people who were col-

leagues rather than friends (for example, to refuse an invitation to dance

might be read as a snub or as not contributing to the social ‘w

ork’ of

geniality and festivity) and, on the other, wishing to avoid what were per-

124 Music as a device of social ordering

ceived as the music’s entailments (intimacy and romance and, more

speciﬁcally, a range of minute bodily actions associated with these

things). Thus when actors ‘dislike’ particular music, it may be because

they sense that the resources from which their agency is generated are

subject to threat (in this case, preserving certain bodily habits that consti-

tute collegiality versus intimacy). When they speak of music as ‘inappro-

priate’, then, this ‘troubles talk’ brings into relief respondents’

understanding of what music entails for the constitution of agency and

social scene. This is by no means the same thing as suggesting that music

causes respondents to behave in certain ways.

On the contrary, as discussed in chapter 2, music’s force is made mani-

fest through appropriation and reception. Within these constraints,

however, it is perfectly reasonable to speak of music as a ma

terial of social

organization, because styles of movement, emotional and social roles

come to be associated with it and may issue from it. In the presence of

music, actors may take pleasure in falling in with music or displeasure in

trying to avoid what they perceive the music to imply in a behavioural

sense. Music may indeed be conceptualized as a prospectiv

e device of

agency, a way of cueing or tuning in to the ongoing formation of order, or,

more accurately, ‘pools’ of order, locally achieved. It is in this sense, then,

that music may be pre-scriptive (Akrich 1991) of social order(s). Whether

or not it is actually used as a referent for producing order in real time,

though, is always open to question. There is thus little point in producing

an abstract taxonomy of what music will do; certain patterns may emerge

over time within particular settings or relationships and these may be

speciﬁed with degrees of precision, though they are always in process. A

stimulus–response model of how music works is simply inaccurate because

it elides the meaningful and interpretive acts of music recipients as they

draw upon music’s aﬀordances as part of mundane musical practice.

The point is that although music’s meanings and eﬀects are con-

structed and dependent upon how they are appropriated, patterns of

appropriation – associated with par

ticular styles within particular settings

– emerge and accrue over time. For example, actors often have a sense of

‘what goes with what how’ – the candles, the mixed drinks and the ‘pretty

things in other languages’, the ‘informal’ dinner on Friday night with

friends and the folk music, the ‘beautiful . . . calming’ music of the First

Night soundtrack and a ‘relaxed’ intimate encounter. The analysis of

representations as propounded by mass-distributed culture forms (for

example, what music is used to signal intimacy and romance in ﬁlms) is

thus an important component to the study of how speciﬁc actors

appropriate aesthetic materials as ordering devices because it illuminates

many of the available resources for action and experience. Analysis of

Music and collective occasions

125

popular forms and media representations is not, however, a substitute for

the analysis of cultural practice and everyday life. To conﬂate the two is to

return to the problems faced by scholars such as Adorno when the bases

for their claims about the level of experience and what music causes are

exposed to critical examination. The individual experience of culture is a

topic that cannot be encompassed by the homology concept as it is tradi-

tionally conceived. Nor can it be addressed by the idea that music incul-

cates, instigates or nurtures particular mind-sets. The level of musical

practice, of appropriation – of what music may oﬀer as a resource for the

practical matter of world building – is a matter in its own right and it may

be best to work upwards from it to so-called ‘larger’ questions about

music and social structure.

Music as a touchstone of social relations

This last point can be seen perhaps most clearly when we consider how

music is used not only to reinforce but also to undermine particular rela-

tions between friends and intimates. Here, for example, Lesley describes

how a shift in music listening habits and tastes at home was associated

with the deterioration of her relationship with her partner.

Lesley: In the ’80s I sort of got distanced from music. My [children] were little

and my husband didn’t really like a lot of music going on – he w

asn’t particularly

keen on the radio being on all the time, probably – I suppose the bands I didn’t

identify with at the time were Dire Straits – those sort of bands. I liked some of the

things they did but I think it was more excitable and so my ex-husband liked them

and didn’t mind them being put on, whereas some of the other music I’d put on he

thought would upset the [children] and of course then they got to identify with

some of the things I liked with being morose, like the Leonard Cohen. So it

tended to be more popular jiggly music . . . Normally if I listened to Leonard

Cohen I wanted to be in my own space listening and of course so normally I

would have been in a bit of a strange mood in comparison to how I would be, and

I suppose he picked upon that and maybe the [children] did as well . . . When we

ﬁrst got married we used to listen to the radio a lot, and within nine months I was

listening to Radio 4 rather than Radio 1 because he just didn’t like Radio 1 at all.

When the boys w

ere young, babies, occasionally I’d put something on raucous or

heavy metal or something and his attitude was that he deﬁnitely didn’t want it on

because it was too noisy. But I think the [children] picked up on that as well

because if I put anything on that was a bit loud – [here she gestures that they

would act up] . . . during the ’80s I didn’t really bother with music because I

thought it would cause friction – be upsetting or whatever – so I stopped . . . The

late ’80s I started listening to Beehive and the Thompson Twins, which of course

my husband didn’t identify with at all . . .

Lesley describes how she began to make a deliberate musical move away

from her relationship, replacing the ‘popular jiggly’ music that she per-

126 Music as a device of social order

ing

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 disapproval. Lesley

goes on to describe how, near the end of her 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).

She would play the track at high volume so that it would be audible from

any room in the house. As she puts it, ‘It was a hint really’, but admits that

she is not sure her husband understood (‘He didn’t say anything’).

Lesley used music to convey a message (perhaps about her evolving

aesthetic and stylistic stance) that she had not yet formulated in words –

she was formulating a sense of how she was ‘diﬀerent’ from her partner,

thinking through musical practice about leaving that partner. Via music,

Lesley may also have been undermining the aesthetic basis of their rela-

tionship, prepar

ing the aesthetic ground for her departure, creating an

aesthetic trajectory for the agency of her departure. The ﬁrst step in this

process was to move away from the music that had hitherto been located

in the centre of their relationship (albeit a weak centre – music was never

particularly important to them as a couple). The second step was to turn,

instead, to the sort of music her husband had always frowned upon,

‘raucous or heavy metal or something’, as she puts it, or else something

conducive to introspection (and alienation), such as Leonard Cohen or

Susanne Vega, to the sort of music that did not signify, from her partner’s

point of view, ‘happy families’. In a sense, Lesley presaged her leap from a

social relationship – her marriage – by trying it out ‘virtually’ in the aes-

thetic sphere. Changes in musical practice provided, in other words, a

practice genre for the ‘real’ or social and economic move that was to

follow – leaving home.

Within an intimate relationship, even minute aesthetic turnings may

cause distress, albeit without any accompanying recognition of why

things seem uneasy (one may say, ‘I can’t put my ﬁnger on it but I sense

something is wrong’). Non-negotiated aesthetic changes may cut oﬀ

access to the aesthetic resources from which relationships and modes of

being are generated and sustained.

In this regard, denying access to aes-

thetic resources within micro- or idiocultural settings can illuminate the

social dynamics of artistic censorship in wider collectivities, the suppres-

sion of seditious songs, of instrumental music in Cromwell’s time, of the

Welsh harp or of local variants of medieval plainsong. The materials that

had hitherto provided the tacit reference points for collective identity

work, for entrainment and for the shaping up of embodied aesthetic

agency, are removed. With this removal, actors are depriv

ed of a resource

for the renewal of a social form and the modes of arousal, motivation and

Music as a touchstone of social relations 127

readiness for action that go with these forms. Is it any wonder, then, that

actors may go to extraordinary lengths to preserve their access to aes-

thetic materials – the cryptic portraits of Bonny Prince Charlie, the ‘cried

down sangs’ (that is, proscribed songs) of the Jacobite rebellion that reap-

peared in encoded form, for example Bonnie Prince Charlie reappears as

‘our guideman’ or as a blackbird or a ‘bonnie moorhen’:

My bonnie moorhen has feathers enew

She’s a’ ﬁne colour

s, but nane o’ them blue;

She’s red and she’s white and she’s green and she’s grey.

My bonnie moorhen, come hither away.

Come up by Glenduich and down by Glendee

And round by Kinclaven and hither to me;

For Ronald and Donald are out on the fen,

To break the wing o’ my bonnie moorhen. (STR 1981 [1960])

Echoing Victor Turner’s discussion of paradigms (1981), Ron

Eyerman and Andrew J

amieson have recently begun to specify this partic-

ular type of action in relation to music and social movements:

To the categor

ies of action discussed by sociologists we wish to add the concept of

exemplary action. As represented or articulated in the cognitive praxis of social

movements, exemplary action can be thought of as a speciﬁcation of the symbolic

action discussed by Melucci and others. The exemplary action of cognitive praxis

is symbolic in several senses; but it is also ‘more’ than merely symbolic. As real

cultural representations – art, literature, songs – it is artefactual and material, as

well. What we are attempting to capture with the term is the exemplary use of

music and art in social movements, the various ways in which songs and singers

can serve a function akin to the exemplary works that Thomas Kuhn character-

ized as being central to scientiﬁc revolutions: the paradigm-constituting entities

that serve to realign scientiﬁc thinking and that represent ideal examples of funda-

mentally innovative scientiﬁc work [Kuhn 1970]. The diﬀerence between culture

and science, however, is that the exemplary action of music and art is lived as well

as thought: it is cognitive, but it also draws on more emotive aspects of human

consciousness. (1998:23)

In the examples discussed so far in this chapter, actors can be seen to

have used music so as to call out or call ahead manners of conduct, value,

style and mutual orientation. Music, in this sense, whether or not it actu-

ally works as such, is a prescriptive device, a cue for social agency. Within

music’s structures, its perceived connotations, its sensual parameters

(dynamics, sound envelopes, harmonies, textures, colours and so on),

actors may ‘ﬁnd’ or gather themselves as agents with particular capacities

for social action. These speciﬁc examples thus help us to see how, to

varying degrees, actors are engaged in tacit aesthetic activities that

produce their action, in laying down potential aesthetic grounding for

future conduct. Aesthetic materials here may be seen as akin to what

128 Music as a device of social order

ing

Robert Witkin once referred to as ‘holding forms’ (Witkin 1974). They

provide motifs that precede, and serve as a reference point for, lines of

conduct over time. In this way their function is similar to that of memory

artefacts, as discussed by Urry (1996) and Radley (1990), described in

chapter 3. Such motifs are seen by actors to somehow encapsulate and

provide a container for what might otherwise pass as a momentary

impulse to act, or a momentary identiﬁcation of some kind. Holding

forms thus provide a touchstone to which actors may return as they

engage in expressive activity. They are resources against which future

agency takes shape.

Seen in this light, the study of how music is used in daily life helps to

illuminate the practical activity of casting ahead and furnishing the social

space with material-cultural resources for feeling, being and doing. This

is part of how the habitat for social life – its support system – is produced

and sustained. And aesthetic reﬂexive action, that is the reference to aes-

thetic materials as a means for generating agency, is a crucial aspect of

structuration. It is a keystone for the project of knowing what to say, how

to move, how

to feel. In short, music is a resource for producing social life.

Critical then is the issue, as was discussed at the end of chapter 1, of

how the production of an agency-sustaining habitat is itself controlled –

for example, constructed, maintained, deconstructed. Within social set-

tings, particular musical materials may place on oﬀer some aesthetic

resources for the production of agency while they make others inaccess-

ible (for example, the loud rock and the beer versus the ‘pretty things in

other languages’ and the ‘mixed drinks and desserts’). And if music is a

device of social ordering, if – in and through its manner of appropriation –

it is a resource against which holding forms, templates and parameters of

action and experience are forged, if it can be seen to have eﬀects upon

bodies, hearts and minds, then the matter of music in the social space is, as

discussed above, an aesthetic-political matter. This is why matters of taste

have, throughout history and across cultures, often been contentious.

What, then, of situations – so common in la

te-modern societies – where

the circumstances of music’s deployment are beyond actors’ control?

Music for strangers

For the most part, the unit of analysis in this book has been the individual

and the small social group. With the exception of aerobics, moreover, this

focus so far has been directed at individuals’ own – albeit at

times con-

tested – music practices, with the ways they mobilize music – primarily

mechanically reproduced, mass-distributed music – as a backdrop or

soundtrack for their private lives. It was necessary to begin at the level of

Music for strangers 129

individual practice because it is there that music’s links to identity and

subjectivity can be seen most clearly. But the project of exploring how

music works as an organizing device of human social life would be incom-

plete without moving beyond this level to consider music’s organizing

role in more impersonal and socially diﬀuse circumstances in public set-

tings. Indeed, music’s link to the regulation of self and the conﬁguration

of subjectivity and agency is of concern to a range of economically and

politically interested actors – manufacturers concerned with ‘worker sat-

isfaction’, motivation and ‘fatigue’, marketeers interested in ‘purchase

behaviour’, political parties and their desire to win over voters, nations

and regimes concerned with fostering belief in their legitimacy, churches,

cults and sects seeking to inspire and reinforce ‘devotion’, and municipal-

ities who wish to suppress hooligan forms of behaviour and crime. All of

these actor groups are collectivities who at times have exploited music’s

powers in their a

ttempts to structure motivation, energy and desire. The

burgeoning of the background music industry (Lanza 1994) further

attests to the way in which music is increasingly considered as a ‘solution’

to the ‘problem’ of social control and management.

Empirical studies, primarily within psychology (North and Hargreaves

1997a; 1997b) and market research (Alpert and Alpert 1989; 1990;

Eroglu and Machleit 1993; Kellaris and Kent 1992), have suggested that

music can be used to structure conduct in public – feeling, comportment,

behaviour, energy, conduct style and identity formation. These studies

suggest that music is a device for focusing conduct, drawing conduct into

channels associated with a range of organizationally sponsored aims.

There is an impressive body of data so far. On-site experiments suggest

that background music can inﬂuence the time it takes to eat a meal

(Milliman 1986; Roballey et al. 1985), drink a soft drink (McElrea and

Standing 1992), the average length of stay in a shop (Milliman 1982;

Smith and Curnow 1966), the choice of one brand or style over another

(North and Hargreaves 1997b) and the amount of money spent (Areni

and Kim 1993). In short, in the commercial sector, where results are

assessed by proﬁt margins, considerable investment has been devoted to

ﬁnding out just what music can make people do

Most sociologists have been slow to appreciate the signiﬁcance of these

ﬁndings. In part, this reluctance is linked to the behaviourist discourses in

which most studies of ‘what music causes’ are couched. Those sociolo-

gists who have considered the world of marketing, however, have

observed that there is much more at stake than the question of how to

‘manipulate’ consumers. Indeed, what appears to be behaviourism when

viewed from a distance is far more complex upon closer scrutin

involving questions of meaning, appropriation and interpretive work, as

130 Music as a device of social ordering

described in chapter 2. Moreover, applications in marketing provide

access to ‘the question that philosophers have posed as the cornerstone of

their most complex theoretical ediﬁces: the relationship between subject

and object’ (Hennion and Meadel 1989:191). To interrogate this rela-

tionship is to delve into the sociologically profound matter of how a

species of organizationally sponsored agency – mood, energy, desire,

action – is informed by and shaped up with reference to organizational-

aesthetic materials. How and to what extent, then, is music, as one of the

more subtle of these materials, a building material for the production of

consumption?

Music in public places – the case of the retail sector

One of the most appropriate settings for investigating music’s ‘public’

powers is the retail sector, where, in recent years, the nature of consump-

tion has undergone development and change. As it is characterized, the

shift consists of a move from a utilitarian acquisition of needed objects

(such as, when shoes w

ear out or when a forthcoming social engagement

demands ‘appropriate’ dress) into a key component – particularly for the

young, but increasingly the middle-aged as well – of identity construc-

tion. Indeed, identity construction and maintenance has become a leisure

pursuit in its own right, through the various activities of self-care and

cultivation such as body shaping, grooming procedures, therapy and the

appropriation of ‘style’, where a good part of the pleasure associated with

these pursuits is linked to the playing out of fantasy life (Bocock 1993;

Holbrook and Hirschman 1982; Zepp 1986; Friedberg 1993; Bowlby

1985; Williams 1982). In short, the role of expressive action has

expanded in late modern culture. At the level of practice, identity is now

construed as put together in and through a range of identiﬁcations with

aesthetic materials and representations, perhaps most clearly visible in

the consumer realm where shopping is now about much more than status

distinction (Campbell 1987; Baudr

illard 1988; Featherstone et al. 1991;

Bocock 1993). It is perhaps best encapsulated by Baudrillard’s, ‘I shop,

therefore I am’, but also exempliﬁed in the ways individuals interact

with self-help literature (Lichterman 1992), museums (Macdonald

1998; Zolberg 1996) and new social movements (Hetherington 1998;

Rojek 1995).

At the level of social theory, the Enlightenment tradition upheld by

Max Weber’s (1970) belief that the realm of feeling and the romantic were

perilous to proper citizenship (which also deeply concerned the critical

theorists such as Adorno) has been counterposed, in recent years, to a

Durkheimian emphasis on the cultural and aesthetic bases of the subject

Music in public – the retail sector

131

who is conceptualized as standing well inside the frame of cultural struc-

tures and is interpolated by them (Hetherington 1998:41–59). To delve

into this matter in relation to the retail sector is to speak about the matter

of how identities are constructed from within the technologically

conﬁgured ‘landscapes of power’ (Zukin 1992), which in turn merges

with the more general concern with the interface between material

culture, social action and subjectivity as discussed in chapter 2.

Interest in the interaction between environment and emotional action

is by no means new with regard to consumption; as Anne Friedberg has

observed, nineteenth-century commentators viewed the large depart-

ment stores as ‘machines’ for producing consumption, a metaphor that

lives on in the discourse of 1990s shopping mall planners and their pre-

occupation with ‘generators, ﬂow and pull’ (Friedberg 1993:112). With

regard to music, it was not uncommon in the department stores of the

early twentieth century for live music to be performed (for example, the

pipe organ at the Philadelphia store, John Wannamakers). However, it

was not until the advent of mechanically reproduced ‘muzak’ that in-store

sound was conv

erted from overt ‘entertainment’ to more subliminal

‘ambience’. Studying music’s in-store presence thus raises the question of

how retail spaces may make designs upon the shopping subject, and how

consumer agency is produced locally, in-store. Moreover, consideration

of retail environments’ dependence upon and attempts to advance emo-

tionally ﬂexible, pliable consumer-subjects (as described below) draws

together the otherwise incongruous disciplines of critical social theory

and marketing research. It is in this context, then, that we need to

conceptualize in-store music; it is deployed as a device of social ordering,

an aesthetic means through which consumer agency may be articulated,

changed and sustained. In this sense, the sociology of consumption

cannot aﬀord to ignore the soundtrack of consumer purchasing.

Music is a ubiquitous feature of shopping. Wafting discreetly from con-

cealed speakers or blaring from a prominent VDU, it is as integral to the

artiﬁcial environment of the retail sector as clima

te control, lighting and

interior design. Yet music’s presence has passed virtually unnoticed

within the social sciences, where attention has been devoted to the ﬁeld of

vision in-store, to the mobilization of desire via ‘displayed’ objects. This

‘visualist’ conception of in-store subjectivity and its construction (Buck-

Morss 1977; Friedberg 1993) implicitly conceives of shopping as involv-

ing the gaze and the mobilization of the gaze.

Perhaps this is because the ears of sociologists, like those of the general

public, are, as Adorno once observed (1976:51), passive. The eye, by con-

trast, attends selectively – it can close, rivet, avert itself – and so, Adorno

suggests, it is linked more closely to consciousness. By anatomical design,

132 Music as a device of social order

ing

the ear is ‘always open’, less, as Richard Middleton puts it, ‘subjectively

organized than the eye’ (1990:94). Moreover, sound objects are ﬂeeting,

mercurial; without musical training, it is diﬃcult to ‘point’ to them or

‘see’ them, it is more diﬃcult to be aware of and remember sound objects,

as they are conﬁgured and reconﬁgured within an instant. Our concep-

tual vocabulary for music’s eﬀects and the mechanisms through which

these eﬀects are produced is undeveloped. For these reasons music’s

powers remain invisible and often fall into a residual category of analysis.

(For example, one of the international chain stores we studied handled

in-store music under the rubric of ‘Visuals’ (that is, store design).)

The sound of consumption

The ethnomusicologist Jonathan Sterne (1997) has developed this line of

thinking in his study of a U

.S. mega-mall, the Mall of America. Sterne

conceives of music as a sonic ‘framing’ device, one that helps mall man-

agement to deﬁne and diﬀerentiate and link together mall spaces through

manipulations of the auditory environment. Following the notion that

daily life poses a heterogeny of opportunities for existence, Sterne speaks

of music as, ‘one of the energy ﬂows (such as electricity or air) which con-

tinually produce . . . social space’ (1997:29). This idea is promising, but it

does not go far enough to illuminate the actual mechanisms and

moments through and within which such ‘ﬂows’ are appropriated and get

into action. If, moreover, we adhere to the concept of agency, in the sense

that has been used so far in this book – as a capacity for emotional,

embodied and cognitive being, the shaping up of action in relation to aes-

thetic parameters – we can apply that concept to the study of the retail

sector by investigating the matter of how that sector engages in the activ-

ity of helping to sponsor or structure the materials with which agency is

constructed in-store.

To be sure, the music of the retail space is organizationally sponsored;

it is one of a range of devices by which forms of aﬀective agency can be

understood to be placed on oﬀer to shoppers who not only try on or try

out goods, but who use the retail space to tr

y on or try out new subject

positions, identities and stances. Key, then, is that the shop can be seen

to provide a ‘natural laboratory’, one within which actors may be fol-

lowed as they are acted upon by aesthetic materials, that is, as those

materials are deployed with particular organizational designs on the

structure of its object – the structure of the consuming subject. We can

also track actors as they enter, move around in and exit the aesthetic ﬁeld

of the retail scene, and we can observe, throughout that time, actors’

interactions with the material environments of those scenes. In short, the

Sound of consumption 133

retail environment is a place where subjectivity and action may be exam-

ined as they are constituted in real time and in a sonic setting the para-

meters of which lie for the most part outside of actors’ control. The retail

outlet is a useful enclave, then, for considering the matter of how music

may function as an organizing device and the related issues of so-called

‘people management’ and ‘social control’. Here, music serves as part of a

collection of cultural resources that can be used to create scenic

speciﬁcity, and to place on oﬀer modes of being. Deliberately and de

facto, retail outlets seek to foster particular in-store cultures and images

of implied clientele.

Clothes have always been carriers of meaning (Davis 1985; Lurie 1992;

Mukerji 1994) and key resources for identity work, but their role as

resources for identity work varies across age lines (Vincent 1995).

Whereas the older women typically make fewer excursions to the shops

and have in mind aims and objectiv

es when they do and do not enjo

being distracted, younger women are more likely to view shopping as a

leisure-time pursuit, more likely to visit a shop with no speciﬁc purchase

in mind. The clothing purchases of older women are more likely to be

linked to speciﬁc needs (professional and social) or to their household

budgets. For these women, identity will be further removed, than for

younger women, from how they look and its signiﬁcance. It will be linked

to matters such as professional standing, children, social roles and obliga-

tions. By contrast, younger women purchase things that help them

expand and alter their self-perceived identities and images. Entities far

more complex than clothes are being tried on in the changing rooms,

where a dress becomes something that ‘ﬁts’ or may be ‘grown into’ in a

symbolic as well as a physical sense. Young women purchase things they

believe to be ‘cool’ (this word was used repeatedly by shoppers observed

in our study) or somehow expressive of how they feel or of images to

which they aspire. In our own ﬁeldwork, we viewed, time and time again,

young people trying things on as an end in itself, as part of the formation

of group culture, and as part of the project of identity work.

These are the kinds of shoppers most likely to make ‘impulse pur-

chases’, unplanned, on-the-spot spending.

Market researchers describe

many of these impulse buys as ‘experiential purchases’, that is, purchases

accompanied by emotional reactions such as ‘sudden desire to purchase,

feeling of helplessness, feeling good, purchasing in response to moods

and feeling guilty’ (Piron 1993:341). Key to the concept of the ‘experien-

tial purchase’ is that the arena where desire is formulated as desire ‘for’

something is the in-store environment. The emotional dimension of shop-

ping and the unplanned purchase is thus of major interest to market

researchers, who suggest that up to 60 per cent of all purchase decisions

134 Music as a device of social ordering

are not premeditated but arise as a result of in-store browsing (Yelanjian

1991). If this is so, it helps to highlight the extent to which at least some

forms of action are locally organized and so illuminates the notion that

subjectivity may be constructed in and through reference to cultural

materials as these are encountered during a course of action.

Bearing in mind the signiﬁcance of the browser, then, the project of

conﬁguring consumers and enrolling them into certain emotional states

commensurate with displayed goods – seducing consumers – is therefore

of paramount importance to retailers. As the ‘food of love’, music is

perhaps the medium par excellence for igniting such passions and for

structuring in-store subjectivity. In conjunction with window displays,

décor, assistants dressed in employee-discounted merchandise and,

indeed, the merchandise itself, music is a means of delineating retail

territory, a way of projecting imaginary shoppers on to the aesthetically

conﬁgured space of the shop ﬂoor.

Case study: music on an English high street

From January to September 1998, Sophie Belcher and I conducted par-

ticipant observation and interviews in and around the high street shops in

a small city in England. The study considered a total of eleven shops –

eight national or international ‘chain’ shops and three ‘independents’. In

the discussion that follows (and in accordance with the wishes of outlet

managers) these shops are referred to by pseudonyms.

Canyon: Global chain with U.S. headquarters, specializing in

casual wear and cotton goods for men, women and children

(T-shirts, shorts, jeans, jackets, small selection of casual skirts

and dresses).

Mistral: U.K. company, branches throughout United Kingdom

and Europe; clothes for women and children. Dresses, skirts,

jackets and trousers in natural materials (silk, linen, cotton,

wool), rich colours and ﬂoral prints – exotic or ethnic in style.

Elysium: U.K. chain, trendy clothes aimed at aﬄuent young

women. Hip-hugger trousers, coats with feather collars, lumi-

nous and neon-coloured dresses, shrink-ﬁt T-shirts and sweat-

ers, club wear.

Axiom: U.K. chain, suits, dresses, career clothes in synthetic

fabrics, evening wear, shoes. Separate ‘Petites’ section and

men’s section.

Linea: U.K. chain, suits, dresses, career clothes, jeans, under-

wear, bathing suits; men’s, children’s and furniture sections.

Large mail-order department.

Music on an English high street

135

Meadow River: Global chain. Floral pattern dresses, skirts, straw

hats, some tailored items, furnishings and home décor.

Babe: U.K. chain. Trendy mini-dresses, basque tops, hip-hugger

trousers, crochet tops, lower price range.

Directions: U.K. chain. Lower-priced sports wear for young

women. Trendy.

Persuasion: Independently owned shop for women. Club wear,

quasi-designer labels. ‘Funky’ type clothing.

Euphoria: Independently owned, trendy menswear, mainly for

men in their twenties. Disco clothes; street wear.

Naked: Regional chain selling clubby trainers, platforms,

sandals, boots, Doc Martens for men and women.

At the most basic, musical materials serve as ‘welcome mats’ and ‘keep

out’ notices, depending upon how they are received. Some shops, such as

Mistral, may be more lenient about disciplining retail space with musical

devices (‘The music is a bit of everything for the clientele because they are

not one speciﬁc age group’ (interview with manager)), yet at the same

time attempt to construct themselves as a ‘style-conscious’ store with

music in the foreground. Others use music merely to present a bland but

recognizable retail identity, such as Canyon, where the music is barely

audible and where a policy of playing music in changing rooms was can-

celled because, according to the branch manger, ‘Clients found it inva-

sive.’ Still other shops use a narrower range of overtly prominent music to

ﬁne tune their image, broadcast their market niche and heighten their

exclusivity. At Babe, for example, music is used to ‘encapsulate the corpo-

rate identity of young, modern, female and let the customers know that

they are in tune with what’s going on in the music industry’ (interview

with manager).

At the locally based independent shops, music’s role as a way of speci-

fying store identity – and hence target consumers – is more overt. In these

stores, catering to particular market niches and to local clientele in a

highly personal manner, the managers expounded upon the importance

of sound to the retail environment. For example, Janice, owner and

manager of Persuasion, told us,

‘Music is essential to the shop image. It

creates an environment. When you have come from the hustle . . . it marks

a distinct space.’ She described the commercial music that plays in most

shops as boring, counterposing her own music as, ‘more alternative, like

my shop . . .’. But she was not in favour of high volume levels for her small

shop space. She told us how she aims for subtlety: ‘You want it to be

mellow, have rhythm . . . not be obtrusive . . .’. The manager of Euphoria,

whose target clientele are ‘predominantly lads’, told us, ‘You have to

know what will work, and at Euphoria you don’t want anything too

136 Music as a device of social ordering

“soulful” – certainly no classical, but not even jazz’ (the shop sticks to

drum-and-bass and club numbers). At Naked, the manager described

how music ‘gives the store an image’. For the young, club-oriented clien-

tele, ‘cheesy pop tunes, jazz and classical would be a no-no’. (The shop

plays a steady diet of drum-and-bass.)

How and where are store music policies made?

According to the type of store, we found that shop workers had diﬀerent

degrees of autonomy in developing music policy. At the large national and

international chain stores, local or branch variation was minimized, in

favour of homogeneity. The manager of Canyon told us that they had the

idea that in any branch within the same time zone, one should be able to

hear the same music at the same instant. Canyon’s head oﬃce in the

United States chooses the music for the United Kingdom, United States

and Canada. Supplied by the Muzak corporation, it is changed roughly

every two months. The cassette decks are designed to play tapes on auto-

reverse, so that store employees cannot play tapes of their own choosing,

and company music policy is thus technologically enforced. The staﬀ,we

were told by the manager, get bored hearing the same tape over extended

periods of time and ‘can’t wait for a new tape to arrive’. As one staﬀ

member put it, ‘I hardly ever listen to it. Somehow I switch oﬀ, sometimes

there are parts that obviously are much more pleasing so you can notice

that, but very often I, I suppose when you work in there you have to switch

oﬀ somehow [i.e., ignore the music].’ At Babe, tapes come down from

head oﬃce every two weeks, two at a time. They have four tapes per deck

and every two weeks half of these are changed. At Linea they get a tape

each month from head oﬃce. At Mistral, tapes come from head oﬃce,

two per month, but they also keep a backlog of old tapes that they feel

they can use since they are not oriented to current chart numbers.

Other stores encourage a form of partial autonomy, in collaboration

with record shops from whom CDs are borrowed or purchased. For

example, Directions receives a memo every month from its regional head

oﬃce listing a range of music options

. The manager then chooses from

this list and borrows tapes from MVC. They usually borrow two a week,

one that is ‘quite funky/clubby’ and one that is ‘more mellow’.

While Directions has to work within management-speciﬁed parame-

ters, at Naked and Elysium staﬀ enjoy greater autonomy, purchasing, at

their own discretion, music from HMV. Both have a monthly budget for

music and the manager decides what should be played, though all staﬀ

can make suggestions about what should be purchased and played.

This,

the manager told us, is because the staﬀ are culturally very like the shop’s

Store music policies 137

target consumers, they function like ‘lead-users’ for the product lines.

Finally, at the local independent shops, staﬀ have the greatest degree of

autonomy; they do not need to work within budgetary or policy con-

straints. At Euphoria, for example, staﬀ decide what will be played,

though when the boss is in, he does the choosing. Staﬀ also bring in music

from home. At Euphoria, the manager told us that he chooses music on

the basis of what he knows of his customers, that you get to know them

and know what they like. At Persuasion, Janice chooses music on the basis

of what is going on in the club scene (her partner is a local DJ). She

chooses it and changes it every two weeks.

These local and quasi-local music marketing practices are character-

istic of newer and more ﬂexible patterns of employment. They also

reduce costs by drawing upon skills that are allowed to go unrecognized.

Instead of supporting an entire marketing department for music produc-

tion and policy, retailers can delegate the responsibilities to local staﬀ.

These staﬀ, because they are chosen in part for their similarity to target

consumers, perform the tasks otherwise allocated to a brand manager,

simply by drawing upon their o

wn tastes and preferences in choosing in-

store music. They are, in eﬀect, prototypical target customers. They also,

occasionally, spend their own money on music for the shop. Similarly at

HMV and MVC, the local record shops where clothing retailers go to buy

or borrow their music, the ‘advisory service’ that record shop staﬀ provide

is unacknowledged (and not remunerated). For example, Dave, from

HMV, told us how he tries to be ‘reactive not proactive’ when giving

advice about what music might work in a retail space, and Peter, at MVC,

said he wishes he could oﬀer more advice because, in his opinion, many of

the shops get their music wrong.

Creating scene, creating agency – music as ambience

In all the stores we studied, music was employed as a resource for creating

and heightening scenic speciﬁcity, for imparting a sense of occasion and,

therefore, for placing modes of agency on oﬀer. For retailers, these

aﬀective dimensions of agency are critical because ‘point-of-purchase’ or

‘impulse’ sales are typically transactions that involve consumers’ emo-

tions, for example, ‘purchasing in response to moods’ (Piron 1990; 1993;

Rook 1987; Rook and Hoch 1985). For this reason, retailers are con-

cerned, as noted above, to structure the aesthetic environment and,

through this, the emotional conduct of consumers. This structur

ing of

agency – in particular, emotional agency – applies to shop staﬀ as well as

shoppers. Indeed, in the marketing literature, concern with manipulating

the moods of employees is common. With regard to staﬀ, the idea is that

138 Music as a device of social order

ing

music helps them to do ‘emotional work’ (Hochschild 1983), enter into a

mode of agency conducive to the emotional features of their job – that is,

acting like a lead-user (of shop goods) and generally ﬁtting in, in terms of

appearance and temperament, with the shop’s ambience. With regard to

shoppers, the idea is that music helps to enrol them into an appropriate,

or institutionally sponsored, mode of agency, that is, a mode of agency

that is oriented to purchase behaviour. Certainly during the ethnographic

phase of our research we noted numerous examples of staﬀ behaving as if

they were co-shoppers, ‘confessing’ to consumers their own shopping

diﬃculties and dilemmas in a cosy, gossipy manner (‘I’m tempted to

spend all my salary on clothes here,’ for example (overheard in the chang-

ing room of Mistral)).

Each shop is engaged in structuring agency through its attempts to

create a sense of occasion and a type of scenic speciﬁcity. The use of

musical means for these pur

poses is perhaps most visible through music’

use in helping to instil temporal speciﬁcity to the in-store environment.

All the stores we studied, even those with globally organized music poli-

cies, such as Canyon, tailored their music to ﬁt temporal trends, and to

construct and reinforce temporal realities, whether daily, weekly or sea-

sonal. These constructions were aimed at both staﬀ and shoppers. For

example, morning in all the stores is when as one manager put it, ‘laid-

back’ music is played, typically at lower volume levels. In Euphoria, relax-

ing music is standard for morning. In Naked, Rick described how a

typical day begins with ‘quite a slow tempo in the morning which rises

throughout the day and begins to slow again near the end of the day.

That’s for staﬀ as well . . .’ At Directions the manager described how more

‘clubby, up-tempo’ music is used at lunchtime and ‘always on Saturday’

(their busiest day). In fact, all the stores provide louder, more up-beat

music for Saturdays – the time when shoppers are oriented to ‘The

Weekend’ and going out. Even at Canyon, where the music is changed

roughly every two months, diﬀerent tapes are used on Saturday: ‘more

up-tempo music when . . . people [young women] are shopping for outﬁts

for that evening’ (quote from interview with manager). At Mistral they

begin the day with ‘more ambient’

tunes, ‘more gentle, as loud music

would be oﬀ-putting’. As the day wears on, from around 11.30 to 12.30,

music ‘gets more soulful’, with cuts from the Brand New Heavies and

Ella Fitzgerald, for example. And at Elysium, the music for Saturdays is,

as the manager puts it, ‘brighter, funkier’ though not strictly more up-

tempo. This is because, as it was explained to us, there are more young

people on a Saturday and the music helps to get everyone in high spirits.

Some of the stores also use music to mark seasonal changes and events.

For example, Babe used the soundtrack to the 1997 Romeo and Juliet for

Music as ambience 139

their Valentine’s Day promotions, and in December Linea and Canyon

used Christmas music. Directions, on the other hand, whose choice of

music from the local MVC is made from within regional oﬃce stipulated

parameters, were given a Christmas option but rejected it because, ‘shop-

pers were sick of Christmas music . . . to entice them [to] stay we played

club and party music, so [it was] seasonal without being Christmassy’

(interview with manager). Elysium, by contrast, did use Christmas music

and made a point of using special, more ‘light-hearted, up-tempo’ music

during the summer. At the time of Princess Diana’s death, Elysium

played music that the manager felt, ‘matched the mood of the nation’,

including Diana Ross tapes. (At the time of Diana’s funeral, Mistral fre-

quently played the reworked version of ‘Candle in the wind’.)

That music is a resource for the temporal construction of occasion is

reﬂected in company music policies, most clearly visible perhaps when

those policies are ar

ticulated and broadcast downwards in terms of

options to local branches where a degree of autonomy is available. For

example, at Directions, the instructions sent down from regional head-

quarters describe how diﬀerent options are linked to diﬀerent musical

‘eﬀects’. The 3 December memo reads:

Chosen tapes for December:

(1) ‘The No. 1 Xmas Album’

I’m afraid there’s no escaping Bing Crosby’s White Xmas, but this tape is a new

release and includes more recent Xmas hits. This tape will be particularly eﬀective

on Sundays & late nights.

(2) ‘Best Party in the World Ever’

This tape is excellent and includes new mixes of old and new hits. Customers have

reacted very well to this. Suitable for every day . . .

It goes on to suggest the following as ‘other suitable tapes if you borrow

or buy as an individual, which can be played’ and describes both when the

music will be most eﬀective and also the type of mood it will foster:

(1) ‘Best Club Anthems (2) Ever’ – Clubby, released last week.

(2) ‘Funky Divas’ – Very girl power, released today. Varied and upbeat.

(3) ‘Wham! The Best Of ’ – making a huge impact and is predicted to be top 3 for

Xmas. Suitable for during the week.

Music is a ﬂexible but powerful interpretative resource

Compared to the other aesthetic materials in-store, music is easily con-

trolled. With the ﬂick of a switch, it can be added, removed, adjusted,

altered. Not surprisingly, therefore, music is one of the most frequently

altered aspects of in-store environments and, because of its ﬂexibility, it is

140 Music as a device of social ordering

an ideal medium for temporal deﬁnition. Through its ongoing variation,

music provides an aesthetic contrast structure, against which more sta-

tionary materials can be contextualized and recontextualized. For

example, music may lead consumers to attend selectively to some kinds of

goods more than others. In Mistral, for example, at the time of Christmas

and seasonal parties or summer balls, party and dancing music is played

to reinforce the goods displayed at the front of the shop, the party dresses.

The slower and more dreamlike numbers are not featured and the ‘day

wear’ is moved to the back of the shop.

What music does when it acts as a clarifying material is to serve as an

index for a whole style or gestalt of in-store conduct. According to how it

is perceived, music may serve as a referent for the formulation of such

diverse matters as how to move, how to imagine one’s self-identity, how to

browse (and thus, perhaps, what to purchase), how to mould one’s

appearance, and how to think, feel and act. Music is ‘there’ if and when it

is needed for these non-cognitive purposes; if it is not needed it can and is

often ignored as, for example, when a shopper becomes engrossed in a

particular item.

(Music may not, however, be ignored by all – style and

volume levels may intervene, as discussed above.) Moreover, particular

kinds of music – their perceived genre, their actual materials such as

tempo or orchestration, their perceived secondary signiﬁcations – may

carry social and behavioural entailments. These entailments may be

active in the public sphere just as they are in the realm of private life

within intimate encounters and social gatherings as discussed at the start

of this chapter.

In this regard, the wine outlet has received particular attention from

environmental psychologists. Recent studies have suggested that music

may be particularly eﬀective under conditions of uncertainty, when

customers have less knowledge about a product, and are unsure how to

discriminate between diﬀerent options or where the actual choice

between diﬀerent products is not greatly important. For example, when

‘classical’ (Mozart, Vivaldi, Mendelssohn) music w

as alternated with

‘pop’ in a wine outlet, customers exposed to the classical selections

bought more expensive items (Areni and Kim 1993). Most of the custom-

ers who visited a wine outlet studied by Areni and Kim confessed to

having little experience of wine. Given that inexperience, and customers’

associated ‘vague expectations and intentions’ (1993:338), Areni and

Kim suggest that ‘background music may have operated independently of

the expected purchase experience’. By this they mean that:

consumers, consciously or unconsciously, sought external cues as to appropri-

ate behaviour. The classical music may have communicated a sophisticated,

upper class, atmosphere, suggesting that only expensive merchandise should

Music as interpretativ

e resource 141

be considered. Customers may even ha

ve felt pressure to conform to the

setting implied by the music by purchasing expensive wine. A second possibil-

ity is that the background music communicated to shoppers the price and

quality of the merchandise in the store . . . a high prestige, high price image . . .

(1993:338)

Following from this work, Adrian North and David Hargreaves have

suggested that music can be used to structure product choice (1997b).

Using an Asda wine department, they arranged a display featuring two

wines, one German, one French, both at the same – relatively inexpensive

– price. When background music featured French accordion music,

French wines sales rose signiﬁcantly over German, and when German

‘Bierkeller’ music was played, the opposite occurred, leading the authors

to conclude that music is a referent to which consumers may turn to

clarify choice (albeit unconsciously – few admitted, when questioned

upon exiting the area,

to having ‘noticed’ the music). Product choice, in

other words, is ‘ﬁtted’ to the aesthetic atmosphere in-store, that is to what

MacInnis and Park (1991:162) have described as, ‘consumers’ subjective

perceptions of the music’s relevance or appropriateness’.

These studies are exciting from the sociological perspective because

they emphasize the importance of ‘the symbolic meaning underlying each

purchase experience’ (Areni and Kim 1993:338). They emphasize shop-

ping as a form of social action, meaningfully oriented in its course and

characterized by a range of interpretive activity. (Incidentally, they show,

too, how carefully constructed, reﬂexively administered experimental

methods – long snubbed by cultural sociologists – can be used with

beneﬁt by sociologists.) This environmental psychological work also

underlines consumption as aesthetic activity and illuminates the impor-

tance, particularly in relation to browsing activity, of the local aesthetic

environment as a ground against which purchase behaviour is conﬁgured;

as discussed above, the point-of-purchase sale is increasingly signiﬁcant

within the retail trade. And the rise of point-of-purchase activity in turn

points to the increasing tendency of consumers to visit shops as if they

were galleries whose displays are also repositories of identity, modes of

aesthetic being. Consumers may enter shops,

in other words, simply to

‘try on’ ideas, goods, as opportunities arise. Given this characteristic form

of consumer uncertainty – one goes to a shop to see what the experience

will bring, rather as one might go to a park, ﬁlm or gallery – the salience of

in-store aesthetics is heightened. The shop thus provides an ideal case in

point for the study of organizational aesthetics. Consumers may also

orient to in-store aesthetics as a routine part of their eﬀorts to place or

recognize a shop’s style and the possibilities for agency that it oﬀers or

implies.

142 Music as a device of social ordering

What does music do within organizational settings?

It has been suggested above that music can be usefully conceived of as a

device of scenic placement. It provides contextual cues (Gumperz 1977;

DeNora 1986b) that can be used to shape up the meaning of character

and situation. It works, within the scenes of ‘real life’ as it works in the

cinema, bestowing meaning upon the actions and settings that transpire

within its sonic frame (Brown 1994; Mundy 1999; Flinn 1992). As the

manager of Persuasion put it during an interview, ‘When you’re trying

something on, you picture yourself in a place where they are playing this

kind of music.’ In similar vein, the manager of Directions opined, ‘The

music is to get people into the mood of the style of the clothes and the

store image.’ In retail settings, then, music can serve as a cultural material,

a resource to which customers and staﬀ can turn when, with varying

levels of discur

sive awareness, they articulate and execute forms of

agency, perhaps particularly under conditions of uncertainty. For

example, customers may attend to the shop environment – music and

décor – so as to form an overall impression of the setting and the goods

purveyed, and also of themselves. Thus music’s secondary signiﬁcations

have an impact on the cognitive and interpretive dimension of consumer

agency.

But the fact that music is, by deﬁnition, a temporal medium, and that it

is capable of ﬂuctuating from moment to moment, song to song, and tape

to tape, means that music is also an ideal medium for corporeal and social

forms of entrainment. Music adds rhythm and pace to settings, temporal

qualities with which consumers may, perhaps mostly without conscious

awareness, interact, to which they may adapt in (non-cognitive) embod-

ied and emotional ways. Here, through its links to bodily conduct, music’s

relationship to the ‘motional’ and emotional aspects of agency are often

visible.

One of the most obvious topics in this regard is the connection between

musical tempo and movement style. At Babe, fast-paced music is used to

create activity and also to reinforce activity, to match fast ﬂow. There, and

in other stores, the staﬀ we spoke with believed that f

ast music encour-

aged fast shopping. At sale time, when it is host to greater numbers of

customers and more goods crammed into the shopping space, Mistral

uses faster-paced, snappier music, the kind that may serve as inspiration

and template for snappy bodily movements and – implicitly – snap deci-

sions. In this regard, consumption behaviour can be understood – at least

sometimes – as a kind of dance.

At other times, when business is slow, shops may attempt to hold

customers in the store, to encourage them to look at things slowly, and to

Music within organizational settings 143

seduce them, ultimately, into handling the goods, trying them on and

making a purchase. As the manager of Elysium put it, ‘Slow music creates

a slower mood among staﬀ and shoppers.’ There are a number of experi-

mental studies of commercial or catering environments that have also

reported correlations between ‘slow’ music and ‘slower’ patterns of

behaviour (Milliman 1986; Roballey et al. 1985).

Beyond the link between music and bodily pace, however, are yet more

intriguing issues concerning what one could think of as mundane chore-

ography. These issues concern the interrelationship between musical

rhythm, motional and emotional form. In a discussion of parallels

between musical structures and choreographic structures perceived in

dance performances, the music psychologists Carol Krumhansl and

Diana Lynn Schenck have suggested that dance may express the ‘basic

“kinetic feel” or “energy shape” of the music’ (1997:65). At the more

workaday level of mundane movement, we observed in our ethnography

of the retail scene a similar phenomenon that we came to term ‘brief body

encounters with music’. These were moments – sometimes of only a

second’s duration – where shopper

s could be seen to ‘fall in’ with the

music’s style and rhythm and where music was visibly proﬁling con-

sumers’ comportment, where it had an impact on the mundane choreog-

raphy of in-store movement. Some of the ‘brief encounters’ we witnessed

consisted of snapping the ﬁngers or nodding the head (to jazz), waving

the hands, palms outwards (to show tunes), slowing movement, making it

more ﬂuid and putting the body in balletic postures and subtly raising the

chin and head (to slow-paced, languorous music). All the managers we

interviewed told us that they commonly observed customers engaging

bodily with the music. In Euphoria, the manager told us it was common

to see the young male customers ‘singing and dancing in front of the

mirrors’. In Babe, young women frequently danced, especially in the

changing rooms when they were trying on outﬁts. In Directions, ‘People

dance around the store, especially when they are trying on stuﬀ ’, the

manager told us. The manager of one of the local record shops w

as also

quick to speak of how he saw people ‘singing and dancing all the time’. He

described how he saw a variety of imitative behaviour, for example, when

he plays a Tom Jones CD he sees male customers putting ‘a swagger in

their walk’. (Conversely, he told us about ‘a certain country and western

artist who, when played, empties the store, because it’s so depressing. So

we don’t play him.’)

Dancing, toe-tapping, moving about in front of the mirrors, even

singing, were all common occurrences in our study. Indeed, the matter of

‘mundane choreography’, or micro-stylistic changes in comportment and

its relationship with social and cultural settings, is an area ripe for

144 Music as a device of social order

ing

development within the ﬁeld of sociology of everyday life. For how the

body is entrained – the motional character of the body in music – may

provide a basis for the formulation of emotional matters, energy levels

and action styles; in other words, how one moves may provide, through

gesture, as discussed in chapter 4, media for the autodidactic process of

self-constitution in real time. Dance and/or mundane choreography are,

in Scruton’s (1995) sense (and also discussed by Frith 1996:265–7), pro-

viding a means of grasping the (perceived) aesthetic character of music.

‘We should not study listening,’ Scruton argues, ‘which has so much in

common with reading and looking, but dancing, which places music in

the very centre of our bodily lives’ (quoted in Frith 1996:266). How one

moves one’s body – and the connotations that one ascribes to those move-

ments (‘funky’ or ‘graceful’) – is a resource that, once generated, can be

used in turn to clarify or constitute the connotations of the merchandise

displayed and its ‘desirability’

– cool versus uncool, sexy versus cheap, for

example.

This bodily ‘falling in with’ music was evident in our ‘consumer shad-

owing expeditions’ (we shadowed a volunteer shopper such that both

shopper and shadower wore clip-on microphones: the shopper was asked

simply to ‘think out loud’ and the shadower commented on the volun-

teer’s activities. Tapes could be synchronized because they shared the

same in-store soundtrack (see DeNora and Belcher 2000)). We found

that, irrespective of what the volunteers said (and irrespective of what we

said about the volunteers we were observing!), how they spoke turned out

to be as important as what they said in so far as it seemed to correlate,

noticeably, with the in-store aesthetic environment. For example, on a

shopping expedition with a volunteer that included a spacious shop, dec-

orated with fresh ﬂowers, furniture and laid-back music from George

Michael, both volunteer and shadower, who were some distance from

each other, commented on how ‘nice’ the shop was, the volunteer com-

mented that the shop was ‘quite relaxing’ and, on both tapes, voices

audibly slowed, became less clipped and lowered in pitch.

Here, then, we can begin to get at possible connections between

musical style and bodily conduct on the one hand,

and bodily conduct,

browsing and purchase activity on the other. According to the manager of

Euphoria, ‘Music helps [customers] buy.’ What he means by this is that

customers purchase products that have stylistic aﬃnities with the back-

ground music and with the kind of corporeality that comes to be associ-

ated with that music – for example, ‘If drum-and-bass music is playing,

they will buy street wear, if “clubby clubby” music is playing, they are

more likely to purchase tight tops.’ Similarly, at Naked, the manager told

us that the music may not increase the market niche that his store occupies

Music within organizational settings 145

locally (it is a specialist shoe store featuring ‘club wear’ style shoes and

there are only so many members of the local population interested in this

kind of shoes) but that it may ‘enhance’ his market share because the type

of customers who come to him like the music and return to his store for

the music (they are more intensely loyal to his store’s culture, and making

a purchase in his store is a cultural act in its own right – that is, the store

has a high semiotic proﬁle). Conversely, the music provides a mechanism

for sharpening his client image by repelling customers whose personal

style would be less ‘cool’.

In all of these circumstances, the retail outlet produces potential

sources of identiﬁcation for the consumer, who may visit such a location

as a kind of identity repository, as a storehouse of possible ways of being

and possible stances. By making a purchase, the consumer is exporting a

way of being from the shop and importing it into her or his personal

repertory of modes of being

, where it becomes a resource for the produc-

tion of self-identity. In this sense, the shop, like the art gallery and the

temple, is not only a distributor of fashion and trend, not only a promoter

of commodities, but an instrument of social stability, of a particular

version of order and its associated modes of consciousness and aesthetic

agency. The retail outlet pro

vides cultural resources that in turn struc-

ture agency; it is a setting in which the public – goods, images and ambi-

ences – is transposed on to and serves to construct the private realm of

subjectivity, value and expressive action. In this sense, music is employed

to tune the spirit, to remind the faithful of its value commitments and to

align agency with organizational images of model actors. It has the

potential to operate at the connotative level and can put its recipients ‘in

mind’ of other social situations, scenes and relations. This is precisely

why there have been so many controversies about liturgical music over

time. For example, when J.S. Bach was reprimanded in 1730 for includ-

ing ‘new and hitherto unknown’ hymns in the liturgical service, ‘such an

arbitrary procedure is not to be tolerated’, wrote the members of the

Consistory of the Elector and Prince of Saxony to Bach’s boss, Dr

Salomon Deyling, the Superintendent of the Thomas-Schule in Leipzig

(David and Mendel 1966:118–19).

Thus, just as Janice, owner of

Persuasion, put it in reference to music’s role as a medium that fosters

the mental and emotional tuning in a context where one might be

wearing the garb one is trying on (‘When you’re trying something on you

imagine yourself in a place where they’re playing this kind of music’), so,

too, in situations ostensibly devoted to worship it is possible that music

helps actors to picture their relation to God and to religious values. In

both cases, sacred and profane, music helps to order consciousness,

imagination and memory.

146 Music as a device of social ordering

The sounds of silence

During the music and daily life study we visited a number of U.S. and

U.K. cities and towns to record the ‘sound of shopping’. At the end of one

of these ﬁeld trips, we visited a traditional ‘ladies’ outﬁtters’, whose clien-

tele, with the decline of transgenerational merchandising, has dwindled

to (primarily) elderly women. Wending our way through racks of A-line

skirts, ﬂower-patterned frocks and good woollen cardigans, we com-

mented on the incongruous silence, strange to us after the relentless

soundtracks of ‘young people’s shops’. Our very footsteps were annulled

by thick pile carpeting. In the course of the study we came to realize that,

to shoppers two or three generations older than ourselves, the very idea of

background music is abhorrent as the following excerpts from exit inter-

views make clear:

I don’t like it when it’s jumping because I’ve got a hearing aid, you see, so it’s

pretty awful . . . [Besides] I’ve got other things on my mind, you know. I’m not

thinking about music. I’m thinking where am I going to get this skirt I’m looking

for.

I call that pollution . . . I don’t like any music in shops or in lifts or anywhere.

Reﬂecting on this matter in the context of the cross-generational inter-

views with women about music in their lives, and also on 128 exit inter-

views conducted outside the shops we studied during our ethnography,

we concluded that, for older women, local passages in and through music

(as, for example, when one encounters music in a social setting) are less

signiﬁcant as a resource for the constitution of self and social setting. This

is not to say that music itself was less signiﬁcant as a cultural medium of

agency’s constitution, but that the older women with whom we spoke

were more likely to conceive of music as something that one stops and

listens to with intent. To be sure, the mobilization of electronic music

equipment is a cultural practice associa

ted with youth and middle age,

but, as the discussion in chapter 3 began to illustrate, the older women

who were interviewed for the music in daily life study were less likely to

engage in the music-reﬂexive practices of managing mood through music

programming. Music was not something they ‘used’ to get them into, or

get them adjusted to, appropriate or desired emotions, nor was it some-

thing they used to structure social scenes and settings within which they

acted in concert with others. Indeed, most of them were less reﬂexive

about the production of their agency, and less self-conscious about their

self-identity. While it would be misleading to speak of them as more

‘secure’, they seemed to be less preoccupied with self-monitoring, with

observing themselves as feeling, being subjects. They were, perhaps,

Sounds of silence 147

therefore more impervious to music’s deployment as a part of the furni-

ture of public space. They were not so overtly objects of knowledge to

themselves, less likely to speak of what they might ‘need’ to hear and less

likely to be ‘inﬂuenced’ by music (apart from music with special bio-

graphical signiﬁcance). They were also most likely to do nothing but listen

when they put music on the stereo, whether or not they had musical train-

ing. These age-linked uses of music in private life and in the retail clothing

sector therefore should be explored in relation to the history of conscious-

ness. Are they in line with what some have suggested is an historical trans-

formation of the relations of production and self-production of social

agency? To be sure, the social world is more variegated, more complex

and contradictory than at any time in the past. Given the discussion above

of music’s heightened salience under conditions of uncertainty, might

this suggest, pace recent thinking within social and cultural theory, that

agency’s conﬁguration has taken on,

under late modernity, an increas-

ingly ‘other directed’ dimension? In what way may the study of music in

daily life address these issues?

‘Sounds’, John Cage once said, ‘when allowed to be themselves do not

require that those who hear them do so unfeelingly. The opposite is what

is meant by response ability’ (Cage 1961:10). The point here is that,

increasingly, within organizational sectors sounds are not allowed to be

themselves or to arise spontaneously (as, for example, when someone

bursts into song). Instead they are planned and programmed with the aim

of aﬀording organizationally speciﬁc ends. In many of the spaces inhab-

ited by younger people – shops, clubs – music is oriented to an agency

constituted in real-time and in relation to locally provided audio-aesthetic

materials. This form of agency is formulated in relation to mood, ambi-

ence and image. In keeping with more recent modes of ‘ﬂexible’ produc-

tion, this agency is one that is constituted in relation to the aesthetic

materials at hand, here and now; it is adaptive, receptive to being

moulded by a range of sensory stimuli. It is not only an aesthetically

reﬂexive mode of agency; it is also aesthetically responsive.

Some commentators have suggested that this new emotional ﬂexibility

and the aesthetic reﬂexivity to which it is linked is libera

ting (Lash and

Urry 1994:3, 31). Others, such as Donald M. Lowe (1995), view the con-

suming subject in its post-commodity phase as having rescinded auton-

omy. Today, Lowe argues, retailers no longer cater to pre-existing

‘lifestyle’ groups but actually instigate the image of such groups by fabri-

cating and placing on oﬀer images of agency that are achievable in and

through participation in retail scenes, in and through the purchase of

signiﬁcant items ( pace the present Archbishop of Canterbury’s thesis that

malls are becoming sites where the sacred is constructed and wor-

148 Music as a device of social ordering

shipped). In a similar critical vein, Stjepan Mestrovic (1999) has sug-

gested that emotional ﬂexibility is a sign of an advanced ‘other directed-

ness’ (cf. Riesman 1950), an increasingly characteristic tendency, in late

modernity, to experience emotion vicariously and according to the para-

meters of feeling that are placed on oﬀer within speciﬁc situations (the

classic example here is surely the new brand of ‘talk shows’).

In a recently translated essay on the ‘sociology of music’, Adorno

observes that, ‘[w]hat should be close at hand, the “consciousness of

suﬀering”, becomes unbelievably alien. The most alien thing of all,

however, the process that hammers the machinery into men’s conscious-

ness and has ceased to contain that which is human, invades them body

and soul and appears to be the nearest and dearest thing of all’ (1999:14).

Like Adorno, Mestrovic is concerned with the proliferation of a particular

kind of emotionality proﬀered by and in the interests of administration:

What appears to be postmodern disorder or the circulation of random ﬁctions, as

depicted by Jean Baudrillard, turns out to have a hidden order of its own, and to

be highly automatized, rehearsed, and planned. (1999:2)

There is little doubt tha

t the retail organizations we studied were

overtly, deliberately oriented to the deployment of symbols within the

social spaces of their shops; there and in many other public social spaces –

transport terminals, dentists’ chairs, clubs, pubs, restaurants, ﬁtness

studies. Indeed, ﬁlm, television, video and virtual reality as representative

‘visual’ media all make ample use of music to enhance and sometimes

substitute for more overt depiction.

Whether or not one agrees with Mestrovic’s neo-Orwellian diagnosis of

late modernity, it is easy to see music’s role in relation to the processes of

administration he describes; indeed, music’s role in relation to the ‘dialec-

tic of enlightenment’ was the subject of Adorno’s life work. As an

ephemeral and subtle medium, one that can be changed in an instant,

music’s role is key here in helping to instantiate scenarios of desire, styles

of (momentary) agency, and in fostering a new and ‘postmodern’ form of

communitas – a co-subjectivity where tw

o or more individuals may come

to exhibit similar modes of feeling and acting, constituted in relation to

extra-personal parameters, such as those provided by musical materials.

Such co-subjectivity diﬀers in important ways from the more traditional

(and modern) notion of ‘inter-subjectivity’, which presumes interper-

sonal dialogue and the collaborative production of meaning and cogni-

tion. Inter-subjectivity – even if understood in the ethnomethodological

sense where it is only apparent and ‘for all practical purposes’(Garﬁnkel

1967) – involves a collaborative version of reﬂexivity. By contrast, co-

subjectivity is the result of isolated individually reﬂexive alignments to an

Sounds of silence 149

environment and its materials. There is no doubt that in situ studies of

music in relation to the constitution of subjectivity and agency are crucial

to understandings of ‘post-emotional’ society, and it is all the more

strange, therefore, that music has scarcely featured so far in these litera-

tures. For surely it is easy to discern the nucleus of Disneyland in Wagner

and the legacy of both in the Gesamtkunstwerk of the modern shopping

mall?

150 Music as a device of social order

ing

6 Music’s social powers

Music has organizational properties. It may serve as a resource in daily life,

and it may be understood to have social ‘powers’ in relation to human

social being. The previous chapters have moved from music’s connection

to what are generally thought of as the innermost recesses of the self –

emotion, memory, self-identity – through music’

s interrelationship with

the body, to music’s role as an active ingredient within the settings of inter-

action. Music is but one type of cultural material; volumes could also be

written about the role of many other types of aesthetic materials – visual,

even olfactory – in relation to human agency. And music’s ‘powers’ vacil-

late; within some contexts and for some people, music is a neutral medium.

At other times, music’s powers may be profound. In a footnote to his

famous study of encephalitis lethargica survivors, Oliver Sacks speaks of

music’s liberating ‘power’ in relation to Parkinsonism suﬀerers:

This was shown beautifully, and discussed with great insight, by Edith T., a

former music teacher. She said that she had become ‘graceless’ with the onset of

Parkinsonism, that her movements had become ‘wooden, mechanical – like a

robot or doll’, that she had lost her former ‘naturalness’ and ‘musicalness’ of

movement, that – in a word – she had been ‘unmusicked’. Fortunately, she added,

the disease was ‘accompanied’ by its own cure. I raised an eyebrow: ‘Music,’ she

said, ‘as I am unmusicked, I must be remusicked.’ Often she said, she would ﬁnd

herself ‘frozen’, utterly motionless, deprived of the power, the impulse, the

thought, of any motion; she felt at such times ‘like a still photo, a frozen frame’ – a

mere optical ﬂat, without substance or life. In this state, this statelessness, this

timeless irreality, she would remain,

motionless-helpless,

until music came: ‘Songs,

tunes I know from years ago, catchy tunes, rhythmic tunes, the sort I loved to

dance to.’ (1990:60n, emphasis in original)

Upon hearing or imagining music, Edith T. explained to Sacks, her ‘inner

music’ – the capacity to move and to act – was returned. ‘It was like’, she

said, ‘suddenly remembering myself, my own living tune’ (1990:60n).

Sacks refers to Kant’s conception of music as ‘the quickening art’, a

means for arousing a person’s liveliness. For Edith T., as Sacks puts it,

music aroused, ‘her living-and-moving identity and will, which is otherwise

151

dormant for so much of the time’ (1990:61n). He goes on to say, ‘this is

what I mean when I speak of these patients as “asleep,” and why I speak of

their arousals as physiological and existential “awakenings,” whether these

be through the spirit of music or living people, or through chemical

rectiﬁcation of deﬁciencies in the “go” parts of the brain’ (1990:61n).

This link between music and ‘awakening’ is not metaphorical, it is

ﬁduciary, in the sense that music provides a basis of reckoning, an animat-

ing force or ﬂow of energy, feeling, desire and aesthetic sensibility that is

action’s matrix. The study of music and its powers within social life thus

opens a window on to agency as a human creation, to its ‘here and now’ as

existential being. This vista abounds with life; it has vibrancy, a busy or

tapestried quality.

In his introduction to his phenomenology of everyday experience,

Alberto Melucci eloquently defends the importance of this realm:

Each and every day we make ritual gestures, we move to the rhythm of external

and personal cadences, we cultivate our memories, we plan for the future. And

everyone else does likewise. Daily experiences are only fragments in the life of an

individual, far removed from the collective events more visible to us, and distant

from the great changes sweeping through our culture. Yet almost everything that

is important for social life unfolds within this minute web of times, spaces, ges-

tures, and relations. It is through this web that our sense of what we are doing is

created, and in it lie dormant those energies that unleash sensational events.

(1996b:1)

The playing out of social change, politics, social movements, relations

of production is experienced and renewed from within this ‘web’, as

Melucci calls it; it is from within the matrix of ‘times, spaces, gestures and

relations’ that these ‘larger’ things are realized. Put diﬀerently, the theatre

of social life is performed on the stage of the quotidian; it is on the plat-

form of the mundane and the sensual that social dramas are rendered. In

a chapter devoted to the body, Melucci observes, as he puts it, the ‘earthly

consistency’ of emotions, ‘fed as they are by moods and sounds, by

odours and vibrations. Fear and joy, tenderness and sorrow are not

merely ideas but tears and laughter,

warmth and trembling’ (1996b:72).

In this book I have sought to illuminate but a few of the ways in which

music features in this life-web. My aim has been to delve into the matter

of how music is constitutive of agency, how it is a medium with a capacity

for imparting shape and texture to being, feeling and doing. I have tried to

show how music works in this regard through speciﬁc circumstances and

for particular individuals. Moving between so-called ‘normal’ and ‘dis-

abled’ individuals, across settings and life stages, I have tried to show that

music is not about life but is rather implicated in the formulation of life; it

is something that gets into action, something that is a formative, albeit

152 Music’s social powers

often unrecognized, resource of social agency. In this ﬁnal chapter I want

to dwell upon the matter of how music works, how its powers come to be

harnessed for and converted into action, and how this process can help to

illuminate our understanding of social agency.

‘Sleepers awake’ – music as a resource for human being

In 1731 J.S. Bach wrote the famous cantata, ‘Wachet auf, ruft uns die

Stimme’ (BWV 140) for the twenty-seventh Sunday after Trinity. The

opening of this work exhorts those who have been sleeping to ‘wake up’

and quickly join the procession of the Trinitarian King. Underpinned by

dotted – agitated? – rhythms, the sopranos sing the three-syllable message

(‘Wachet auf’) on three sustained notes of the E ﬂat major triad, and this

tonally centred, authoritative ‘call’ is underpinned by a busy counterpoint

of the altos, tenors and basses and a ‘rushing’, forward-moving obliggato

in the treble instrumental accompaniment. (The opening is illustrated in

ﬁgure 7.)

The metaphor of using music to call ‘sleeper

s’ to action is apposite. For

agency is perhaps the opposite of social ‘sleep’. To possess agency, to be an

agent, is to possess a kind of grace; it is certainly not merely the exertion of

free will or interest. It is, rather, the ability to possess some capacity for

social action and its modes of feeling. Judith Butler makes this point clearly

in her conceptualization of gender as an outcome of recurrent cultural per-

formance, as the result of how actors mobilize cultural forms and dis-

courses such as language. As she puts it, we need not ‘assume the existence

of a choosing and constituting agent prior to language . . . there is also a

more radical use of the doctrine of constitution that takes the social agent

as an object rather than the subject of constitutive acts’ (1990:270–1,

emphasis in original). To be an agent, in the fullest sense, is thus to be

imbued – albeit ﬂeetingly – with forms of aesthesia. Feeling and sensitivity –

the aesthetic dimension of social being – are action’s animators; they give

action and actors a life spark and a par

ticular energy shape that burns, like

a comet or a ﬁrecracker, for a time and along a trajectory or path. Following

the etymological sense of the word, to be aestheticized is to be capacitated,

to be able to perceive or to use one’s senses, to be awake as opposed to

anaestheticized, dormant or inert. It is also to be awake in a particular

manner, to possess a particular calibration of consciousness, an embodied

orientation and mode of energy, a particular mixture of feeling. It is in this

sense, then, that aesthetic materials such as music aﬀord perception,

action, feeling, corporeality. They are vitalizing, part of the process through

which the capacity to articulate and experience feeling is achieved and

located on a social plane, how it is made real in relation to self and other(s).

Music as a resource for human being

153

What, then, does it mean to speak of entering into or identifying with

music such that one may become aestheticized? If music is a ‘quickening

art’, then how does it work? And how does an understanding of music’s

mechanisms of operation help to advance sociological conceptions of

agency? To address these questions properly requires consideration of

how our very concept of social order and its basis is historically speciﬁc.

154 Music’s social powers

Viol. I

Ob. I

Ob.

Ob. II, III

Viol. II

Ob.

Str.

Ob. I, II

Corno

Taille

Viol. picc.

Viol. I, II

Continuo

Figure 7. Johann Sebastian Bach, Cantata BWV 140, ‘Wachet auf, ruft

uns die Stimme’

Non-rational orderings

Just as it is customary within sociology to distinguish between ‘tradi-

tional’ and ‘modern’ societies (Beck et al. 1994), conventional distinc-

tions are also made between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ musical

practice (see, for example, Nettl 1990:1–3; Bebey 1975; Crozier

1997:124). In the latter form, characterized by a commercial and pro-

fessional mode of music production, and also a pop–serious music aes-

thetic divide, the activity of music consumption or use is depicted as a

relatively private aﬀair, and the predominant category of analysis

devoted to this topic is the idea of taste, value and the aﬃliation of

musical predilection with social standing. By contrast, musical use

within ‘traditional’ societies is portrayed as deeply embedded in tem-

poral and ritual custom and in communal practice. The implication is

that musical exper

ience is impoverished in modern cultures; this

assumption often derives from a tendency to romanticize ‘exotic’ and

‘folk’ cultures, to imply, pace Weber, that aesthetic and aﬀective bases of

action have declined in relation to bureaucratic and rational modes of

ordering. Sociological discourse itself is biased against the perception

of the aesthetic

dimension in modern life. Instead, the sources of

orderly conduct are depicted as residing in rules, knowledge, skills and

sanctions. This aspect of sociological discourse separates individual

from society, subject from object, and culture from agency. It achieves

this separation through its use of concepts such as ‘interest’, ‘rational-

ity’ and ‘free will’.

The notion of ‘disenchantment’ so pervasive in Weber and Adorno

(Greisman 1976), and which usually trails this discourse, orbits around

the idea that the aesthetic and sensuous bases of human subjectivity and

human activity have been eroded by the tide of rational administration

and rational, calculative modes of consciousness. This notion may,

however, be an artefact of ‘modernistic’ sociological discourse, a part of

the discourse’s tropes rather than an accurate description of social and

aesthetic practice. Indeed, as was discussed in chapter 5, the notion of

disenchantment has been subject to revision in recent y

ears (Campbell

1987; Hetherington 1998). In its stead, culture’s role in modern soci-

eties has been made more central in relation to the structuring of social

action. The study of musical practice in modern societies – what one

might refer to as an ‘ethnomethodological ethnomusicology’, if it were

not so clumsy to enunciate – has the potential to enhance signiﬁcantly

this neo-Durkheimian strand of thinking about culture and agency.

Contrary to received notions about music’s waning role within moder

cultures:

Non-rational orderings 155

in advanced industrial societies music is all around us, a major element in our

culture, in contrast to the situation in pre-electronic times when it was a much less

pervasive medium, and a much smaller part of most people’s experience. It is this

contrast, though, that may serve to arouse our sociological curiosity: instead of

just taking music for granted, we might begin to ask why it has come to occupy

such a prominent place in our world. (Martin 1995:1)

A sociology of music concerned with the ground level of musical prac-

tice (Weber’s (1958 [1921]) w

as not), quickly leads to the idea that it is

probably more reasonable to propose that music’s relation to forms of

social order within Western cultures is not inactive, but, rather, usually

unnoticed by social scientists. This is not to say that there are no cross-

cultural and historical diﬀerences in music’s social position, its functions

and uses; there are man

y. But the central di

ﬀerence between so-called

‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ music cultures, probably does not reside in

music’s disembeddedness from social practice, its disjuncture from social

‘function’ and its reinstatement as an object of ‘listening only’, from the

processes of putting together subjects and situations. By contrast, the

major diﬀerences between music in moder

n versus traditional cultures

can be seen to lie in the relations of music’s production – how and where

music is created, how musical forms undergo change, how music is per-

formed and the quality of the performer–consumer relationship (for

example, modes of attention, spatial relationship, who may count as a

musician and how ev

aluation takes place and how music is distributed –

such as many to many, one to one, one to many, many to one). Key, here,

is the issue of how music distribution is controlled and, in modern soci-

eties, consolidated, as with the large record production ﬁrms and the bur-

geoning empires of music distribution. Key, too, are the social relations of

how music is deployed within settings and the degree to which sound-

tracks for settings are negotiated.

There are many informal ways in which music is employed as an order-

ing device in social life within modern societies. This book has only

scratched the surface of this topic

. At the level of individual experience,

these practices may not be overtly regulated at the communal, collective

level (apart from criticism, professional or lay), though they are typically

oriented to imagined communities and imagined (and often aspirational)

scenarios – peer groups, idealized situations, conventional images and

associations. A given individual may turn to a wide gamut of recorded

music for any task and at any hour of the day and, if using a Walkman,

may listen to music nearly anywhere. At the same time, musical practice is

by no means individuated; regularities of musical use abound, as for

example when retail outlets draw upon conventional notions of musical

energy levels at diﬀerent times of the day or week, or when transport sta-

156 Music’s social pow

ers

tions employ Vivaldi, Mozart and Delius to soothe irate travellers and to

disperse potential hooligans. A thorough examination of these practices

would have the potential to illuminate the (typically overlooked) aesthetic

structures of social action, structures that undergo constant revision and

renegotiation at the level of action. Seen in this light, the recent theoriza-

tion of aesthetic reﬂexivity only serves to reveal matters that are – in more

traditional cultures – more explicitly recognized as central to aesthetic

ordering and its practice. How, then, might we account for the invisibility,

within daily life, of music’s powers to produce order?

Ever since Beethoven uttered the notorious phrase, ‘I will not play for

such swine’ (in response to some aristocratic listeners who talked through

one of his performances), Western music has been encumbered with the

paraphernalia of ‘high art’; ‘good’ music has become, and been designed

as, an object upon which to reﬂect, an object for rapt contemplation. This

ideology has also been projected backward on music tha

t was originally

designed to be heard within social contexts: Telemann’s Tafelmusik is

perhaps the most famous example, but even Mozart was often heard

amidst cries from the sausage sellers. The august music patron Baron van

Swieten was described by one of Mozart’s nineteenth-century biogra-

phers as exerting:

all his inﬂuence in the cause of music, even for so subordinate an end as to enforce

silence and attention during musical performances. Whenever a whispered

conversation arose among the audience, his excellence would rise from his seat in

the ﬁrst row, draw himself up to his full majestic height, measure the oﬀenders

with a long, serious look and then very slowly resume his seat. ( Jahn 1882,II:385)

Within the modern institution of ‘serious’ listening, to listen ‘correctly’

is to be ‘transported’, to abandon, albeit temporarily, the realm of material

and temporal being, to allow oneself to be taken o

ver by music’s textual

time. In this sense, ‘serious’ music may have been the earliest and most

elaborated form of virtual reality. The abstraction of music from the ﬂux

of daily existence, and its excision of the body – both in terms of bodily

rhythms in compositions and in terms of the motionlessness stipulated as

appropriate listening conduct – have served to obliterate the none the less

vital tradition of other music and its role in social life outside the concert

hall, its role as it is woven into the tapestry of social life through the

informal singing of songs, the pop concert, the car radio, the jukebox,

ambient music, organizational music, amateur music production, singing,

whistling and humming, and the playing of records, tapes and CDs. It is in

all of these locations – from gilded concert hall to mega-mall, from bus

terminal to bedroom – that music makes available ways of feeling, being,

moving and thinking, that it animates us, that it keeps us ‘awake’.

Non-rational orderings 157

Reprise – what does music do?

Auden once said of poetry that it ‘makes nothing happen’, but rather that

it survives as, ‘a way of happening, a mouth’ (1940). Music, too, is a way

of happening, it issues as an audible channel, a series of audible articu-

lated signals. In this sense, music is not ‘about’ anything but is rather a

material that happens over time and in particular ways. Music is a

medium, par excellence, of showing us how happening may occur; its forms

and gestures stand, in Eyerman and Jamieson’s (1998) sense, as exem-

plars. One against many, all together, fugal, homophonic, softly, loudly,

gentle or abrupt, legato, staccato, relaxed, tense, juxtapositions, varia-

tions, monotony – music is a medium that shows us ways of happening

and, in common with dance, drama and cinema, music moves through

time; indeed, it creates its own time and its own history, cyclical, linear,

recursive. Music is also a ph

ysical medium, one that in and through its

production shows us actors as they are engaged in forms of embodied

production – the alarmingly extended cheeks of Dizzy Gillespie, the

‘throaty’ voice of Louis Armstrong, the apparent ease of Joan Baez’s

upper range, the oarsmen-like approach of a tutti string section. Just how

these things are perceived, what they are taken to mean and what they

may aﬀord cannot be speciﬁed through musical analysis, traditionally

conceived. These matters are, as was argued in chapter 2, best pursued

through ethnographic investigation.

In the earlier chapters of this book, examples were provided where

music was seen to work as a model – for conception, for a range of bodily

and situational activities, and for feeling, whether as emotional work or as

a way of heightening particular modes of feeling. We have also seen how

the appropriation of music as a model often occurs at the semi-conscious,

non-rational level of human existence even as and when its appropriation

may be understood as aesthetically reﬂexive action. Music may serve, for

example, as a model of self, a resource for articulating and stabilizing self-

identity (‘the me in music’, as Lucy put it). One can ﬁnd one’s self in

music’s ways of happening, draw parallels between it and one’s self such

that one may say to self and other

s, ‘as this music happens, so do I’. One

can also recall one’s self on rehearing music (for instance, ‘as this music

happened, so did I’) and music is a key resource for the production of

autobiography and the narrative thread of self. We have also seen how

music may serve as a model of where one is, is going, or where one ‘ought’

to be emotionally (‘it gets you in the mood’), such that an individual may

say to him or herself something on the order of, ‘as this music is, so I

should or wish to be’. Music is one of the resources to which actor

s turn

when they engage in the aesthetic reﬂexive practice of conﬁguring self

158 Music’s social powers

and/or others as emotional and aesthetic agents, across a variety of

scenes, from quasi-public (a ‘buzzy’ barbecue or a ‘sophisticated’ cocktail

party) to intensely private (an intimate encounter). In public, music may

be most eﬀective at times when individuals experience social and aes-

thetic uncertainty, such as that described in chapter 5, where music may

proﬀer cues and models for ‘appropriate’ agency within a setting. There,

too, we saw music as providing a way of modelling future action and inter-

action, ‘setting the scene’, so to speak, by exemplifying action styles and

ways of happening. Music’s capacity for exempliﬁcation arises from its

primary and secondary signiﬁcations; actors may refer to music’s sensu-

ous properties as well as to the connotations they perceive within its

structures. As a model, music serves as a resource for the generation and

elaboration of ways of happening in many other realms. In this capacity it

also serves as a means of melding present to future in so far as it may be

applied in ways that permit cultural innovation in non-musical realms. As

music is seen to be organized, so too can people and institutions be orga-

nized. In this sense, music may serve as a resource for utopian imagina-

tions, for alter

nate worlds and institutions, and it may be used

strategically to presage new worlds. As Pelle Ehn describes this role of

‘sensuous knowledge’ in the workplace (Ehn 1988:449), so, too, music

provides a fund of materials that serve as paradigms, metaphors, ana-

logues, hints and reminders of activity, practice and social procedure.

But music’s powers extend beyond its capacity to serve as a paradigm.

Its temporal dimension, the fact that it is a non-verbal, non-depictive

medium, and that it is a physical presence whose vibrations can be felt, all

enhance its ability to work at non-cognitive or subconscious levels.

Indeed, to speak of music merely as a kind of exemplar is to remain com-

mitted to a cognitivist conception of agency, one that is organized around

the notions of mental skill and interpretive practice. Such a conception

stops short of the more profound levels on which music also operates, the

levels on which we do not turn to music as a resource but are rather

caught up in it, ﬁnd ourselves in the middle of it,

are awakened by it.

Victor Turner, whose work oﬀers one of the most extensive theorizations

of culture-as-performance, has himself emphasized this point, suggesting

that the notion of the cultural paradigm, ‘goes beyond the cognitive and

even the moral to the existential domain’ (1981:149).

In the discussion of music and aerobic exercise this point is perhaps

most strikingly illustrated. There, when music is used successfully to

conﬁgure the aerobic embodied subject over forty-ﬁve minutes, we can

actually see music as it conﬁgures, reconﬁgures and transﬁgures subjects,

their modes of consciousness and their embodied capacities. There,

music works as a prosthetic technology of the body, heightening and

Reprise – what does music do?

159

extending bodily capacities. There, too, diﬀerent types of music enable

diﬀerent relocations and levels of awareness, heightening and suppressing

bodily energies and capacities, modes of attention and feeling. In the

examples where actors used music to facilitate concentration, to vent

unpleasant emotions, to manage and modulate emotional states, and to

relive past emotional states, we can see music getting into action in ways

that elide conscious reﬂection. In the retail realm, where music is used to

instigate modes of orienting to goods, actors also enter into musical

moods and rhythms. In these examples, music is much more than a

model, much more than an object upon which to reﬂect and from which

to get ideas or take inspiration. Rather, music can be seen to place in the

foreground of perception an ongoing, physical and material ‘way of hap-

pening’ into which actors may slip, fall, acquiesce. This passing over into

music, this musical mediation of action, is often observable, often known

to self as a feeling or energy state. It is also a local phenomenon,

some-

thing that occurs in the here and now of action’s ﬂux, as actors interact

with music’s presence in an environment or social space. This aspect of

music illuminates the body as an entity conﬁgured in relation to its mate-

rial-cultural environment. It speaks directly to medical and physiological

concerns.

Musical power and its mechanisms

There is little evidence in favour of a behaviourist conception of music’s

powers in respect to agency, though, as discussed in chapter 2, it is

perhaps to be expected that certain, to some degree predictable, associa-

tions between music and action have come to be established and main-

tained to varying degrees. Arguments such as those advanced by Aristotle

or the Parents’ Music Resource Centre, that certain melodies are ‘con-

ducive to virtue’ or destructive of well-being are non-explanatory; they do

not oﬀer any account for the mechanisms through which music comes to

produce its alleged eﬀects. On its own, music has no more power to make

things happen than does kindling to produce combustion. In both cases,

certain catalytic processes need to occur

. Theorizing the catalyst that

conjoins music and human being is, however, no easy task.

One entry to this topic can be found via the concepts of embodied

awareness and latching, as described in chapter 4. These terms were used

in relation to non-cognitive, non-conscious, embodied engagement with

music that is the ﬁrst step to becoming a musically enlisted, musically ani-

mated agent. Latching, which is a kind of musical version of Callon’s

interessement (1986), is always a local process; it occurs in relation to

music as it is encountered in the here and now of social life. The simplest

160 Music’s social powers

example of such latching involves movement to music, whether toe

tapping or ﬁnger snapping, or more complex movement styles that merge

into what we would normally refer to as dance. In these examples, the

body actually engages in movements that are organized in relation to, and

in some way homologous with, music’s properties, its ways of happening,

such as tempo, rhythm or gestural devices, and so becomes entrained with

the music. Certainly, no music will reliably move all listeners. But for par-

ticular listeners and perhaps types of listeners, certain musical ﬁgures,

devices, genres, forms or works may serve as triggers or latches that draw

music’s recipients into the process of entrainment and hence into particu-

lar modes of agency. ‘Juicy chords’, cha-cha-cha rhythms, slow ‘smoochy’

vocals, biographically signiﬁcant pieces, formal developments – features

such as these were able to move particular actors in or on to particular

states or trains of feeling, moving and acting. These features will be

signiﬁcant for actors;

they will stand out in some way.

Tuning in to music also involves a kind of identiﬁcation, a recognition,

at a sympathetic and embodied level of the various shapes and textures of

‘happening’, of, as discussed above, the body in music (in Barthes’s ter-

minology, the ‘grain of voice’ (1977)) and of the ways in which music

handles itself. Perhaps music has the capacity to be socially powerful as a

resource for agency because, as a way of happening that moves through

time, it allows us, should we latch on to it, to engage in a kind of visceral

communion with its perceived properties. We can imagine and ‘feel’, for

example, the close-knit texture of dissonant polyphony, or the ‘wide-open

spaces’ of ﬁfths and fourths, or the ‘depressed’ character of the minor

triad. Perhaps the clearest and most dramatic example of this process can

be found in medical-based music therapy, where music is employed as a

template for bio-feedback, where one may, in and through identiﬁcation

with particular musical properties, alter physiological and emotional

states and bodily awareness. Under such circumstances, music can be

said to reformulate parameters of embodied experience, to alter pulse or

breathing, for example, to diminish awareness of pain. One’s pulse

‘becomes’ – is modiﬁed in relation to – that of the music; one’s pain

‘replaced’ by the state of music

. Examples such as these, where music is

employed deliberately so as to reformulate embodied agency, show

music’s formative powers in relation to agency across the ﬂux of social

existence. Music’s recipients may not become the music per se, but they

become music ﬁltered through themselves and it is this that should be

meant by the concept of music’s powers to mediate and to inform.

In all of these examples, articulations are made, within the web of daily

existence, between musical procedures and social and social psycholog-

ical ones; in all of these examples, music serves as a medium in, through

Musical power and its mechanisms 161

and against which feeling, perception, attention, consciousness, action

and embodied processes are produced. At times, actors may engage in

this appropriation process with deliberation, knowing how certain music

works on them from past experience. But at other times, music may take

actors unaware. The matter of how music is distributed is thus inextrica-

ble from concerns about social control, from the matter of how a citizenry

or a workforce is constituted, and from the issue of how desire may be

manufactured.

Politics of music in the public space

In his pioneering history of background music, Joseph Lanza quotes

Howard Martin, a researcher at the forefront of background music

design, who, rather alarmingly, compares music to a drug (and so echoes

Jimi Hendrix’s view that ‘music is . . . a safe kind of ﬁx’):

He is among a new generation of thinkers interested in advancing the background

music philosophy further: ‘People will start to look at music the way they used to

look at dope. They will see music for its speciﬁc psychological eﬀects. Music has

the power to change moods and attitudes. Using music with these applications

makes more sense now with the time crunch everyone’s in.’ (1994:231)

Lanza goes on to report on recent trends in Japanese oﬃce music provid-

ers who have now expanded the concept of muzak to the total oﬃce

environment – ‘Sense Business’ or ‘New Oﬃce’ – dedicated to creating

‘the good human environment of sound, vision, and aroma’ (1994:231),

reviews the dis-utopian objections to such a vision but concludes that:

A world without elevator music would be much grimmer than its detractors (and

those who take it for granted) could ever realize. This is because most of us, in our

hearts, want a world tailored by Walt Disney’s ‘imagineers’, an ergonomical

‘Main Street U.S.A’, where the buildings never make you feel too small, where the

act of paying admission is tantamount to a screen-test – and where the music

never stops. (1994:233)

In this passage, Lanza glosses over a key issue, one that lies at the heart

of why music is, more than ever, a topic for sociology. If music is a

medium for the construction of social reality, then control over the distri-

bution of the musical resources in and through which we are conﬁgured

as agents is increasingly politicized and the movements, such as

Pipedown in the United Kingdom, against piped background music, have

been spawned in reaction to what is perceived as the commercial domi-

nance of the public sonic sphere.

At issue here is the matter of consciousness itself and how actors

come to connect with the musical resources which are agency’s building

162 Music’s social pow

ers

materials and how this process transpires across a variety of social scenes

and settings. There is a signiﬁcant diﬀerence between employing music

that one makes oneself (performing or composing) for this purpose and

employing music that just happens to occupy a social setting; that

diﬀerence consists of the degree to which one may negotiate the aesthetic

parameters of action. As was described above, there are times when the

ability to control one’s aesthetic environment is crucial to individuals – in

intimate settings, at times of stress, to aﬀord concentration, to vent

aggression, to avoid painful music. To the extent that music can be seen to

get into or inform subjectivity and action, then, the issue of aesthetic

control and its relation to the constitution of agency is serious, particu-

larly as organizations and marketeers are becoming increasingly sophisti-

cated in their deployment of music. Further explorations of music as it is

used and deployed in daily life in relation to agency’s conﬁguration will

only serve to highlight what Adorno, and the Greek philosophers,

regarded as a fundamental matter in relation to the polis, the citizen and

the conﬁguration of consciousness; namely, that music is much more

than a decorativ

e art; that it is a powerful medium of social order.

Conceived in this way, and documented through empirical research,

music’s presence is clearly political, in every sense that the political can be

conceived.

Politics of music in the public space

163

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