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Music in Everyday Life, by Tia DeNora. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 181 pp. $54.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-521-62206-9. $19.95 paper. ISBN: 0521-62732-X.
With Music in Everyday Life, DeNora has crafted an important cultural analysis of the consumption of music. However, this study goes beyond the typical sociological work on music consumption that seeks merely to quantify the kinds of music people prefer and how often they listen to them. If you are looking for raw statistics-tables and charts, cross tabulations and regression models-that tell you how consumption patterns of rock, rap, jazz, classical, and country music vary by age, race, gender, or social class, do not read this book. Music in Everyday Life is a qualitative exploration of how people actually use music as a significant part of their meaningfully structured and organized lifeworlds. Its findings are based on a combination of ethnographic studies of four different settings and in-depth interviews with 52 women in England and the United States. DeNora's study is both data driven (in the best sense of the term) and theoretically grounded (ethnomethodology, structuration theory). It is also one of the rare attempts to analyze how music is used at both the individual and collective levels.
The author's central argument is that music is more than just a cultural product. It has both power and organizational properties. On one hand, people use (consume) music as they reflexively construct emotional states and social selves/identities. On the other hand, music is used as a constitutive feature of social situations and gatherings to frame and give meaning to many types of social interactions. Music in Everyday Life demonstrates convincingly 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 often unrecognized, resource of social agency" (pp. 152-53).
The opening chapter focuses on how music is reflexively tied to human constitution and action, and how it gains its power from the contexts of its use. DeNora uses three short vignettes to illustrate her position. In the first, her experience of the passage of time and the rhythm with which she hits the Enter key on her computer keyboard are changed as she hums the...