Tia DeNora

Music and informal learning in everyday life

In this paper, we focus on informal learning as it is situated in and derived from everyday life experience (Lave, 1988; Lave and Wenger, 1991). Our concern is with informal musical learning and its link to health, well-being and the care of self, an area that has already received some attention from research in music therapy, especially the new and growing area of community music therapy (Stige, 2002; Pavlicevic & Ansdell, 2004). In what follows, we deal with two interrelated themes. In Part I we focus on the broad area of music in everyday life and in Part II we focus on music and informal learning. These themes are then drawn together to focus on musical learning and its role in healing and health promotion. Theme 1*/musicking (Small, 1998)*/is an often-overlooked but extremely powerful medium of world making. Through musicking, social worlds, identities, bodies and situations are constructed. This is a theme initially broached in philosophy*/e.g. Plato’s statement that in music, ‘the guardians will build their guardhouse’. It is also a theme that lends itself to empirical investigation, to the extent that musical world-making practices and their consequences can be tracked and documented. Theme 2*/learning or being taught how to musick*/includes learning and being taught the complex skill of how to use music*/what music does, what it can do and how it can be tapped for social purposes. This kind of learning involves enculturation; it is the accumulation of social competences. Simultaneously, it is learning how to use culture to ‘make’ the social world, through the making of possible scenarios and affordances for human being.

Music sociology: getting the music into the action

Music sociology has addressed the history of the musical canon, taste and social exclusion. It has also addressed issues of musical value and the perceptual politics of musical reputation. More recently, it has developed perspectives that highlight musics ‘active’ properties in relation to social action, emotion and cognition. Such a perspective dispenses with the old ‘music and society’ paradigm (one in which music was typically read as distanced from and ‘reflecting’ social structure) and points to core concerns in sociology writ large and to educational concerns with musics role as a socialising medium in the broadest sense of that term.

Music into action: performing gender on the Viennese concert stage, 1790-1810

Abstract Studies of music tend to emphasize either “what” music means or “how” music is produced. They often leave in shadow music as it comes to serve as a formative medium of social life. By contrast, I propose that we consider music in terms of what it may “afford” users, by which I mean how music may provide resources for structuration. I develop this argument with a case study of music and gender formation in the 19th century, focusing in particular on work in progress that deals with the performance of Beethovens piano music and its association with masculine musical aesthetics circa 1800–1810.

Music Asylums: Wellbeing Through Music in Everyday Life

Contents: Preface Introduction In sickness and in health: defining the ecological perspective Learning from Erving Goffman, part I: agency and culture Learning from Erving Goffman part II: reconfiguring the concept of asylum Music asylums, part I: disconnections, reconnections and removal Music asylums, part II: making musical space together, furnishing and refurnishing worlds Musicalizing consciousness: aesthetics and anaesthetics Where is good music? Conclusion: what makes us well and when? And how to know if music helps? References Index.

Evidence and Effectiveness in Music Therapy: Problems, Power, Possibilities and Performances in Health Contexts (A Discussion Paper)

Adopting a knowledge-based controversy perspective, this article considers critically the ‘fit’ or appropriateness of the so-called ‘gold standard’ of assessment – the Randomised Controlled Trial. It sets the growing dominance of this method within music therapy in the contexts of medical work and the changing social relations of medical expertise, the importance of local practice in music therapy (and healthcare more widely), and the politics of representation as they apply to medical modes of accounting and measurement. I then consider what is overlooked when experimental models are used as the prime mode of perceiving the music therapeutic process and suggest that they may not provide a good or appropriate way of observing, accounting for and assessing music therapy. I suggest that they are not amenable to the observation and documentation of temporal and local craft practices and that these practices provide the active ingredients of music therapys effectiveness. I conclude that music therapy is poised to highlight the radical performative and social features of health status and that these features have far-reaching implications for our concepts of illness and the aetiology of illness and, most importantly, for the ways in which we conceptualise and implement therapeutic procedures of all kinds.

Music and Emotion in Real Time

There has been a venerable history, perhaps especially in popular music studies, of ‘reading’ music for its social content and, by implication, for the ways that it ‘constructs’ emotions and the body. This work, which is often defined as part of the ‘new musicology’ (begun circa 1980s so no longer ‘new’) may be understood to have provided the basis for more recent focus on music’s actual and dynamic involvement in the formation of subjectivity and emotion within specific social settings and in real time and on the processes through which music’s producers and recipients draw music into the vortex of their on-going subject formation. In short, music does much more than depict emotions. It is a condition of affective experience. In this respect, music works in real time, as it is heard and overheard, produced, remembered, and imagined. Music is part of the basis of our social experience; it is a resource in actual formation of social reality. How then does music ‘get into’ daily life and daily experience, and how is it a resource through which social, mental and emotional structures are produced and reproduced as part of our natural normal work as social beings? To introduce these ideas, I will present three examples, drawn from earlier research. In all three cases musical experience may be understood as eventful experience (DeNora 2003: 49), that is, as taking place in real time and space, and as involving change and outcome over time.

Resounding the great divide: theorising music in everyday life at the end of life

Abstract Music in contexts of death and dying is an important but often-overlooked aspect of music in everyday life. In this article I develop an ecological perspective for end of life experience that takes account of the temporal-cultural complexity of being gravely ill and, by implication, being well. This perspective views wellness and illness as inextricably linked and relationally determined. To develop these ideas I use auto-ethnographic examples from a case study of ‘everyday’ musical interaction in a domestic context of death and dying over a three-year period. I suggest that this domestic musical praxis illuminates the cultural and situational figuration of end of life experience, in particular how situations, moods and social ties can be refigured and transfigured, although not without potential uncertainty and risk. I conclude that music opens up opportunities for action and social relation at end of life. Music is a dynamic medium for the collective performance of what it means to be well or ill, and what it means (and can mean) to be alive, dying or dead.

Music listening evokes implicit affiliation

Recent empirical evidence suggests that – like other synchronized, collective actions – making music together with others fosters affiliation and pro-social behaviour. However, it is not yet known whether these effects are limited to active, interpersonal musical participation, or whether solitary music listening can also produce similar effects. This study examines the hypothesis that listening to music from a specific culture can evoke implicit affiliation towards members of that culture more generally. Furthermore, we hypothesized that listeners with high trait empathy would be more susceptible to the effects. Sixty-one participants listened to a track of either Indian or West African popular music, and subsequently completed an Implicit Association Test measuring implicit preference for Indian versus West African people. A significant interaction effect revealed that listeners with high trait empathy were more likely to display an implicit preference for the ethnic group to whose music they were exposed. We argue that music has particular attributes that may foster affective and motor resonance in listeners.

‘‘Time after time’’: A Quali-T method for assessing music's impact on well-being

This article considers the question of how to produce ecologically valid assessments of musics role as a health technology. To address this question, I consider critically some of the standard quantitative instruments used to assess well-being and quality of life. I suggest that these instruments do not lend themselves well to the production of ecologically valid assessments and understandings for two reasons: (1) the process of data elicitation is removed from everyday meanings and practices and therefore risks producing data that is an artifact of the situation in which it is elicited (2) standard, quantitative instruments are not neutral but are rather discursive texts that are inevitably imbued with a politics of expertise and an image of the health care client. For these reasons, I suggest that we consider the question of how to develop ecologically valid, client-centered assessment measures. To that end, I introduce a third critique of the standard quantitative instruments, namely that they are associated with, and promote, an ontology of wellness/illness that downplays the temporally variable and situationally emergent nature of both wellness/illness and musical interventions themselves. As an alternative mode of assessment, I suggest that we reconsider the value of singular case studies and I describe a set of principles that can assist researchers to produce ecologically valid assessments. To this end I introduce the concept of the musical event as a more ecologically valid means for illuminating the specific mechanisms by which music aids well-being. I suggest that the case study approach is temporally sensitive, that it lends itself to an emergent ontology of wellness/illness, and that it is client-centered (and can also be user-led).This article considers the question of how to produce ecologically valid assessments of musics role as a health technology. To address this question, I consider critically some of the standard quantitative instruments used to assess well-being and quality of life. I suggest that these instruments do not lend themselves well to the production of ecologically valid assessments and understandings for two reasons: (1) the process of data elicitation is removed from everyday meanings and practices and therefore risks producing data that is an artifact of the situation in which it is elicited (2) standard, quantitative instruments are not neutral but are rather discursive texts that are inevitably imbued with a politics of expertise and an image of the health care client. For these reasons, I suggest that we consider the question of how to develop ecologically valid, client-centered assessment measures. To that end, I introduce a third critique of the standard quantitative instruments, namely that they are associated with, and promote, an ontology of wellness/illness that downplays the temporally variable and situationally emergent nature of both wellness/illness and musical interventions themselves. As an alternative mode of assessment, I suggest that we reconsider the value of singular case studies and I describe a set of principles that can assist researchers to produce ecologically valid assessments. To this end I introduce the concept of the musical event as a more ecologically valid means for illuminating the specific mechanisms by which music aids well-being. I suggest that the case study approach is temporally sensitive, that it lends itself to an emergent ontology of wellness/illness, and that it is client-centered (and can also be user-led).

MUSICIANS MAKE MARKETS

ABSTRACT Arts markets are not ‘neutral’. Rather, they are inevitably coloured by socio-cultural practices and regularities, some of which are embedded in and afforded by aesthetic forms and the values and images associated with these forms. The stabilisation of distribution and consumption patterns over time may thus be linked to, and structured by, often tacitly delineated meanings, values and practices associated with artistic products (musical works and their performance, in this case). These associations afford emotional attachments and identity-stances that may become integral to artistic distribution and in ways that are socially consequential. To the extent that distribution and consumption are inflected in these ways, markets may be understood to be culturally inflected. Market processes, in other words, can be seen as structures that are both shaped by, and shape, the flow and exchange of passion, emotion and often unremarked forms of sensibility. I explore these themes through a case study of the production and distribution of Beethovens keyboard concertos in early nineteenth century Vienna. I describe how the distribution of Beethovens works offered gendered ‘object lessons’ about music producer/distributers (composer/performers) and music consumers. Through these lessons, the market for high culture music came to be associated with exhibitions of physical prowess, a heroic mien, and, almost exclusively, performances by men.