Marc Perlman

Department of Music
Tufts University
perlman@pearl.tufts.edu

 

Crafts, Susan D., Daniel Cavicchi, Charles Keil and the Music in Daily Life Project. My Music. Foreword by George Lipsitz. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Wesleyan University Press, 1993.

 

Cultural Studies frequently constructs popular music as a particularly disruptive sort of object, a form of resistance (Frith: 179). Part of the resistance displayed by consumers of popular culture has been seen in their reinterpretation and creative appropriation of mass-marketed products. Though the best-known examples of this process have been literary (e.g. Radway on the romance, or Penley on K/S zines), Frith sees popular music consumption “becoming the model for ‘active’ popular cultural consumption in general” (Frith: 180).

 

The book under review features ‘active’ consumption as resistance, though in a way not limited to popular music. In this book the disruptive moment of consumption is generalized beyond pop: here it is the moment of listening across genre borders. In a world where the music market and musical institutions impose strict boundaries between styles, people resist by having eclectic tastes. The “most important message” of this book is that there is “far more complexity and far more self-directed searching, testing, and experimenting than either music schools or commercial market categories can account for.” People find their way to “an astonishing range of musical choices, despite the inhibiting constrictions of the music industry” (Lipsitz: xiii). Their tastes are broader than the “confines imposed upon them by marketing specialists” (xiv).

 

That is the book’s message; but My Music is much more than an illustration of a thesis. Whatever the plausibility of this view of eclectic listening–and I shall add my reflections on this subject below–the book presents a lively cross-section of lay commentary on music. My Music is an edited selection of 41 interviews out of 150 conducted in Buffalo, NY. The interviewees range in age from 4 to 83. Most are white Americans, though five African-Americans, one Hispanic, and one Asian-American are included, as well as one Bolivian and one Ethiopian.

 

The Music in Daily Life Project started in 1984, when Carol Hadley, a student at SUNY Buffalo pursuing an independent study project, asked a few people about the role of music in their lives. She found people with unsuspected combinations of tastes (for example, one woman’s listening revolved around a Bette Midler/Allman Brothers/Joni Mitchell configuration) or striking trajectories (a woman who moved from classical music to Neil Diamond). That was the stimulus. Two undergraduate classes carried out further interviews, and three graduate seminars edited and organized the results. The result is this kaleidoscope of individual voices, too diverse and specific to be easily grouped into subcultures.

 

My Music is a portrait of particularity. As Keil puts it in his Introduction, “Like your fingerprints, your signature, and your voice, your choices of music and the ways you relate to music are plural and interconnected in a pattern that is all yours, an ‘idioculture’ or idiosyncratic culture in sound” (2).

 

The interviews illustrate Keil’s notion of musical idioculture. A few seem to fit common stereotypes, but just as many defy such caricatures. May, for example, is an overachieving high school violinist who attends Julliard on weekends. Her favorite listening music is Italian opera, but she grew up on the Rolling Stones and the Who, has tapes of Talking Heads, and can play Grateful Dead tunes on request.

 

The editorial choice to present whole (edited) interviews was made to spotlight the interviewees, many of whom prove to be trenchant observers and witty conversationalists. Molly (age 11) comments on how music videos interfere with individual visualizations, “because you just think of what you saw on TV and not what your mind sees” when you listen (31). The insufferably cute Lisa (age 12) listens to the radio while studying for a test: “when it comes to the test, I remember the song, I remember the question, and I remember the answer” (40). Ralph, the polymath truckdriver (113-16), notices the “Ride of the Valkyries” in an Elmer Fudd cartoon, holds forth on the connection between the Jewish diaspora and polka music, likes the Beach Boys (“all a rip-off of black music … but white fun”) as well as the Mahavishnu Orchestra, but draws the line at opera (“Well, ‘Madam Butterfly’ is okay, but that’s the only one I really appreciate”). Stella, who emigrated from Greece thirty years ago, doesn’t consider Greek music to be her music: “It’s not mine, it’s a couple million other people’s” (159). She thinks country and western is the only adult music–not the “male bonding party songs,” but the ones where “the cliches are given reasons as to why they became cliches” (161).

 

In short, the interviews are very rich, and not only for their musical content. There are miniature psychodramas, and some clouded glimpses into private lives. Betty, for example, converted from classical music to Neil Diamond. The reader involuntarily wonders about the significance of this conversion when Betty tells us it accompanied her divorce from a classical-music-loving husband. There are also bits of intergenerational sitcom. Nineteen-year-old Abby, interviewed by her father, mentions Grace Jones. Her father, in a follow-up question, mistakenly refers to the singer as Grace Slick, which elicits this putdown: “Grace Jones, honey. Grace Slick? For-give me. Never in a million years” (87).

 

Nevertheless, while I applaud Crafts et al.’s decision to focus on people’s own words, I wonder if it was perhaps too zealously implemented. My Music is half of the book the authors originally envisioned; it lacks the planned set of essays reflecting on the interviews. In the end they chose to include more voices rather than reserve space for their own pronouncements. As one of the student members of the Project put it, “Isn’t the main point to hear from more people rather than from the critic and expert types again?” (xxii).

 

It is indeed good to hear from so many people, but there is much we would like to know about them that they do not tell us. We know their age, sex, and (sometimes) ethnic identification. We are given their occupation in a few words: “pastor”; “student”; “music teacher”; “heavy truck salesman”; “works in her husband’s office”; “works at Allstate.” Some seem to be housewives. We know little else about their lives except what they choose to tell the interviewers. Crafts et al. refrain from fleshing out the picture, even when extra information would significantly alter our reading of the interview.

 

For example, Beth does not tell us that she plays music. We only learn this from Keil, who mentions it in order to make a point about the possible negative effects of the dominance of mediated music in our lives (2). We are told that Charles is a music teacher and composer; he is obviously also a performer, probably a pianist. But it would help us to interpret his diatribes against commercialism, his admiration for Beethoven and Jimi Hendrix, and his quotations from Plotinus, if we knew a bit more about him. Is he a classically-trained pianist performing in a general business band? An aspiring Frank Zappa–or Glenn Branca?

 

Crafts et al. minimize contextualization and all but abstain from comment. Keil invites us to make our own correlations and interpretations (3), but we can hardly do so without knowing more about these people. Their voices remain only voices, and we remain eavesdroppers on invisible conversations. (Other sorts of contextualization would be helpful, too. For example, some readers will be unable to understand some of the references to specific performers–Rick James, David Sylvian, etc.)

 

It is instructive to compare this collection of ordinary people’s voices with the results of a somewhat similar project, another book organized around quotations from listeners: Music and Its Lovers, by Vernon Lee (pseudonym of Violet Paget). Whether or not it is a unique precursor of My Music, it is surely the first such study to appear in America: published in 1933, it is based on research conducted before World War I. The two books draw on samples of similar size, but apart from that the differences are striking. Lee used a questionnaire, and usually collected written responses. She worked in French and German as well as English, and reached many of her respondents through a periodical. Her sample seems to have included a disproportionate number of musicians, poets, essayists, critics, and PhDs. She seems to have asked only about ‘high art’ music. In her presentation, too, she kept a firm authorial grip on the material: her respondents’ voices are dispersed throughout her text, surfacing as a sentence here, a paragraph there. Though she was interested in individual responses to music, her questions were narrowly focused: she wanted to know if people listened to music for “a meaning which seems beyond itself, a message,” or if they heard it as “ just music” (Lee: 25).

 

In other words, Lee was preoccupied with the aesthetic problems of her time: the question whether music was an “absolute” art, inhabiting a realm of its own, independent of programmatic content. As a result, her book has a fairly strict psychological focus. We learn about the inner worlds of her respondents, but hardly anything about their external, practical concerns. (Except in the case of an unnamed suffragette, who disliked Brahms because of the masculine self-satisfaction she heard in his music [211, 531].)

 

The interview format of My Music insures that it escapes Lee’s overriding tendentiousness. However, it too is clearly a child of its time, and its framing essays show its relationship to some recent themes in the study of popular music.

 

I have already mentioned the idea that eclectic, exploratory listening represents resistance to the market-imposed pigeonholing of musical styles, the “inhibiting constrictions of the music industry” (xiii). This notion is the main source of celebratory energy in the book. (Though Keil dampens the parade with a light drizzle of cultural criticism: “Aren’t all these headphoned people alienated, enjoying mediated ‘my music’ at the expense of a live and more spontaneous ‘our music’?” [3].)

 

My Music seems to show that musical tastes cannot be predicted by the usual demographic categories: as Keil puts it, the “Billboard Charts view” of people’s musical worlds is a tremendous oversimplification (2). But is Keil’s notion of “idioculture” the only alternative to the Billboard Charts view? [18] The entire question of cross-genre listening as musical resistance surely needs to be discussed in a larger socio-economic and historical context. The marketplace does not inherently solidify genre or style categories. Under certain circumstances it can collocate diverse styles as well as differentiate them. Indeed, Max Weber argued that the market declassifies culture: presenters seeking large audiences try to provide something for everybody. This does seem to explain the behavior of for-profit, privately owned firms in some circumstances (DiMaggio: 36). Under other conditions (demand uncertainty, high competition, etc.) firms prefer to target narrowly-defined taste bands. This is evident (for example) in the fragmentation of radio formats.

 

We should recall that the decline of eclectic music programming on commercial radio is a relatively recent phenomenon, hastened by the migration of the radio audience to television in the early 1950s, the proliferation of stations in major markets, etc. (Peterson and Davis: 169-71). With increased competition, stations had more incentive to narrow their appeal to specific demographic groups–those attractive to advertisers.

 

The fractionalization of radio was noted at the time, and even greeted as evidence that the prophets of massification were wrong: the mass media could be “a vigorous force working for cultural diversity” (Honan: 76). In retrospect, it is clear that radio’s commitment to cultural diversity was contingent on changes in industry structure and market conditions that made it more profitable to differentiate tastes than to agglomerate them.

 

Finally, it is true that the interviews in My Music show the subtlety, variety, and depth of meaning music has in the lives of 41 individuals. This book represents a welcome complement to the macro-results of survey-based research; as such, it justifiably emphasizes the moment of autonomy in musical reception. Unfortunately, it could easily be read as a romanticized portrait of musical individualism. Aside from a brief mention of the “constraints” and “broader systemic practices” (xiv-xvi) within which listeners operate, My Music does little to avert such a reading. Its micro-vision needs to be articulated with a macro-vision. Recent developments in the sociology of cultural choice should make this articulation especially fruitful.

 

The past few decades have been marked by two paradigm shifts in the study of popular culture: first, by a drift away from the Adornoesque view of musical massification to an acknowledgement of plural “taste cultures” defined by demographic parameters (class, race, age, geography, etc.); and second, to a view of “culture classes” less tightly bound to social class, defined instead by consumption patterns (Lewis 1975; Peterson and DiMaggio 1975; Peterson 1983; DiMaggio 1987). Turning away from Bourdieu’s Durkheimian correlations of musical taste with position in social space (1984), recent writers reject earlier assumptions of isomorphism between taste and class.

 

The insistence of Crafts et al. on individuals’ unique configurations of musical taste, it seems to me, is consistent with these sociological results, and could even enrich them. But My Music‘s resolutely idiographic stance seems to forclose the possibility of a sociological account of eclecticism.

 

In fact, we already have at least one such account. DiMaggio (1987) suggests that broad tastes correlate with high socio-economic status, assuming that those in high positions have wider social networks and hence need to be familiar with a wide range of artistic styles. Might the patterns of musical choice revealed in My Music be explicable in these terms?

 

We badly need a study of musical taste that combines My Music‘s attention to detail with panoramic views of the social, economic, and historical context. Until one appears, however, we do well to appreciate this book for what it is. It is unique in its use of open-ended, more-or-less nondirective interviews, and its focus on the voices of ordinary people. I don’t know if this book is part of an “emancipatory cultural project” (xvii), but it is valuable in its own right. And I suspect it will prove especially useful in the classroom.

 

Works Cited

 

• Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Sociological Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.
• DiMaggio, Paul. “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America.” Media, Culture and Society 4 (1982): 33-50.
• “Classification in Art.” American Sociological Review 52 (1987): 440-55.
• Frith, Simon. “The Cultural Study of Popular Music.” Cultural Studies. Ed. L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P. Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992.
• Honan, William H. “The New Sound of Radio.” New York Times Magazine 3 Dec. 1967.
• Lee, Vernon. Music and Its Lovers: An Empirical Study of Emotional and Imaginative Responses to Music. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1933.
• Lewis, George H. “Cultural Socialization and the Development of Taste Cultures and Culture Classes in American Popular Music: Existing Evidence and Proposed Research Directions.” Popular Music and Society 4 (1975): 226-41.
• Peterson, Richard A. “Patterns of Cultural Choice.” American Behavior Scientist 26 (1983): 422-38.
• Peterson, Richard A., and Russell B. Davis, Jr. “The Contemporary American Radio Audience.” Popular Music and Society 6 (1978): 169-83.
• Peterson, Richard A., and Paul DiMaggio. “From Region to Class, The Changing Locus of Country Music: A Test of the Massification Hypothesis.” Social Forces 53 (1975): 497-506.