My Music: Explorations of Music in Daily Life (Music / Culture)

For what it is, this study of music in the lives of a diverse collection of people is hard to beat. The authors allowed individuals to speak about what they loved and didn't, in their own voices and in real time, so to speak. This is far richer material than you would imagine; don't be misled by the sniffy commentary offered by the library reviewer above.The trick is that you, the reader, are left free to wander among these interviews and then construct your own hypotheses, make your own connections, draw your own conclusions. You may find a fundamental unity in the variety of human experiences described here. Or you may be struck by the ways in which the influences of age, gender, race, or historical context (the study was done several years ago) manifest themselves here.I often recommend this book to college students struggling to find a focus for their introductory fieldwork in ethnomusicology. Will this reading help them narrow their focus? Will it provide them with ready-made theoretical models? No and no. It does enable them to see the value in NOT putting on one's analytical blinders too early in the process. It does remind them NOT to ask leading questions, NOT to stifle their garrulous or digressive respondents, and NOT to hesitate in changing their approach if the situation suggests it. And those are good lessons for any student, of almost any subject, to absorb.