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My Music
Explorations of Music in Daily Life
Susan D. Crafts, Daniel Cavicchi, Charles Keil , Music in Daily Life Project
Series: Music / Culture
Sales Date: 1993-05-01
A first-hand exploration of the diverse roles music plays in people's lives.
My Music is a first-hand exploration of the diverse roles music plays in people's lives. "What is music about for you?" asked members of the Music in Daily Life Project of some 150 people, and the responses they received — from the profound to the mundane, from the deeply-felt to the flippant — reflect highly individualistic relationships to and with music. Susan Crafts, Daniel Cavicchi, and Project Director Charles Keil have collected and edited nearly forty of those interviews to document the diverse ways in which people enjoy, experience, and use music.
CONTRIBUTORS: Charles Keil, George Lipsitz.
Foreward by George Lipsitz
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Children: Heather, "I dance to 'Dude Looks Like a Lady'."
Johnnie, "You have to have a lullaby before you sleep."
Carley, "I just play with my songs…"
Billy, "I was stuck in the snow cave, and I felt like listening to music."
Jennie, "They teach us so that we know what to do with our kids when we grow up."
Molly, "I like to look for things that people don't really recognize."
Teenagers: Lisa, "What would the human ear do…?"
Matthew, " They play weird songs you have to be so old to know."
Connie, " Rap is things you say fast."
Edwardo, "Sometimes I think about life, and all the problems I have."
May, "I still have my violin from when I was five."
Anita, "I listen to other music and then I go see the Dead."
Young Adults: Beth, "It's the first remedy for trying to get out of my boredom."
Mabel "… if I were to cuss someone out right after church, what does my singing mean?"
Alan, "I'm not gonna sit there and worship someone."
Abby, " It's about aggression."
Rhonda, "Roger Waters is really it for me."
Gail "It's hard to explain…it's all feelings and emotions…"
Victor, "They feel it more because they created the instrument."
Chad, "It is not the making sound…it is how one nation expresses its opinion."
Adults: Neil, "Music is just part of life, like air."
Ralph, "It's a kind of critiquing…an enjoyable critiquing."
Betty, "…I can't wait to come home and get back to my Neil Diamond."
Carl, " I can't give it up."
Charles, "To be the creator of it is to participate directly in that point of coherence of the earth, of the universe, of humanity, of meaning; all else is darkness."
Karen, "I like mood tapes, subliminals, and new age music. That really sets me free."
Keith, "As I developed from childhood to adulthood, the music developed with me."
Wanda, "…if I don't think of music in terms of dance, I'll think of it in terms of colors."
Stan, "…if I don't know it perfectly, I won't do it."
Older Adults: Richard, "I actually become what I hear."
Stella , "…country and western is the only… adult music"
Sally, "It can make you cry, and then other times it can really perk you up."
Frances, "…the types of music that sells today is for that age group that really doesn't care about the words."
Violet, "…if I were home cleaning by myself during the day I might put Pavarotti on and have it shaking to the rafters!"
James, "Regardless of what it is, somebody likes it."
Steve, "I would say thirty percent of what I know about life today was gleaned from songs."
Elders: Ken, "…when I was in the service, when we had the band playing, it instilled a lot of things in you."
Anthony, "When you sing, you pray twice."
Elaine, "…if anybody wanted to dance at a party I was at the piano."
Helen, "Well, I was beautiful then and, boy, could I dance."
Samuel, "It takes the fear away from you."
Apendix: Music in Daily Life Guidelines by Charles Keil
Index
Daniel Cavicchi is an associate professor of American studies and head of the Department of History, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences at Rhode Island School of Design. He is the author of Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum, Tramps Like Us: Music and Meaning among Springsteen Fans and coeditor of My Music: Explorations of Music in Daily Life. His public work has included "Songs of Conscience, Sounds of Freedom," an inaugural exhibit for the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles.
Charles Keil is author of Urban Blues (1966) and Tiv Song (1979), and co-author (with Steven Feld) of Music Grooves (1994). Angeliki Vellou Keil is the compiler/editor of the Autobiography of Marcos Vamvakaris (1973). Steven Feld is Professor of Music and Anthropology at Columbia University. His sound recordings include Voices of the Rainforest (1991) and Bosavi: Rainforest Music from Papua New Guinea (2001). Papua New Guinea (2001).] His newest recording, Bells & WinterFestivals of Greek Macedonia (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings), is a perfect accompaniment to Bright Balkan Morning, and is available at http://www.folkways.si.edu/catalog/50401.htm. Ian Hancock is Professor of Linguistics, Asian Studies and English, and Director of the Romani Archives and Documentation Center, at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also Romani representative member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.
"Not surprisingly, people listen to music for many different reasons and in many different ways, but the authors express pleasant surpise at most respondents' keen interest and intelligence about popular music in general and the astonishing range of individuals' interests despite the narrowcasting principles of radio specifically and the media in general."
~The Washington Post
""My Music presents a lively cross-section of lay commentary on music... The interviews are very rich, and not only for their musical content. There are miniature psychodramas, and some clouded glimpses into private lives... My Music is unique in its use of open-ended, more-or-less nondirective interviews, and its focus on the voices of ordinary people...I suspect it will prove especially useful in the classroom.""
~Postmodern Culture
""Not surprisingly, people listen to music for many different reasons and in many different ways, but the authors express pleasant surpise at most respondents' keen interest and intelligence about popular music in general and the astonishing range of individuals' interests despite the narrowcasting principles of radio specifically and the media in general.""
~The Washington Post
""The subjects here are the weirdest of the weird: ordinary people. The project interviewed people aged four to 83 on what music meant to them, using relatives, friends, ex-employees, and neighbors as questioners so that the answers wouldn't be the usual lies we tell about our tastes. It's staggering.""
~SF Weekly
"My Music captures the day-to-day and moment-to-moment experience of perfectly ordinary people. In revealing their keen interest in and their intelligence about popular music, it shows them to be the proper subject of musicology and cultural research."
~Paul Buhle, editor of Popular Culture in America
"Whether they think [music is] occasional background, the meaning of life, or some unique amalgam of both, few of these informants pigeonhole neatly into one of those taste subcultures beloved of marketers, programmers, sociologists, and rock critics . . . With the most uncommitted users attesting to some degree of saturation, what comes through is how uncontrollably each bends music to his or her own semiconscious needs or well-conceived purposed.""
~Robert Christgau
"My Music captures the day-to-day and moment-to-moment experience of perfectly ordinary people. In revealing their keen interest in and their intelligence about popular music, it shows them to be the proper subject of musicology and cultural research."
~Paul Buhle, editor of Popular Culture in America
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