Tia DeNora: Music in Everyday Life (2000)
Filed under book | Tags: · ethnography, everyday, music, music therapy, popular culture, sociology, sociology of music
The power of music to influence mood, create scenes, routines and occasions is widely recognised 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 experience. 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 organisation in late modern societies.
• The first book to show how music is used in daily life as a structuring device • Novel in its application of recent perspectives from the sociology of technology and material culture • Develops recent concern with the aesthetic dimension of social action
Publisher Cambridge University Press, 2000
ISBN 052162732X, 9780521627320
181 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-8-23)
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