Joe Kotarba
Professor of Sociology
Honorary Professor of International Studies
Texas State University
I want to thank Dirk vom Lehn for inviting me to discuss my recent book, Music in the Course of Life (Routledge, 2023) on the SI Journal blog. I would like to use this opportunity to address general issues about a symbolic interactionist approach to music. Some of these issues were suggested by J. Patrick William’s review of my book in SI. I appreciate the time and thought Patrick put into his constructive review.
MCL is a culmination of many years of qualitative research on music. The thrust of that work has been my analysis of audiences’ and other participants’ experience of music as a source of meaning for everyday life. This focus is a general feature of interactionist studies of music, not the music per se. As I note in the introduction to the book, there are two organizational features of my book that shape my analysis. The first is the iconic concept in interactionism, the self. As Patrick also suggests, George Herbert Mead’s notion of the self is seminal to interactionist thinking, whereas my use of the concept clearly follows the more recent use of the self as a sensitizing concept as proposed by Herbert Blumer. Sensitizing concepts are suggestive of methodological paths to follow, musical phenomena to explore, and in general the evolving shape of interactionist questions as the study progresses. An example from my book is my presence at a Billie Eilish concert at the Austin City Limits music festival several years ago. In a very inductive/grounded theory way, I really did not know what to expect at the concert except for her many fans and her very popular songs. The many very young, pre-adolescent girls circling around the stage and comparing their green and yellow colors with Billie’s led me to explore topics related to appearance and peer group relations in further conversations with fans and parents. I also modify Mead’s and Blumer’s ideas by introducing a key idea from existential models of the self: the idea that people do not passively absorb meanings for who they are from their socio-cultural environments, but actively seek meaning, especially during periods of self-questioning and growth.
The second organizational feature of my book ties my work to the literature on life course theory. This is important scholarship because life course is very interdisciplinary although heavily inspired by behavioral psychology. As many critics have also noted, I critique life course theory for being too stage-determined and linear. When assembling my book, the notion of a life course seemed to be a constructive way to tie my various individual studies together. I converted the life course model into a sensitizing concept itself, arguing that everyday life situations can be a stronger determinant for seeking, applying, rejecting, and/or enjoying music’s contribution to making sense of a problematic situation or one’s self-needs than one’s generation, prior music experiences, gender, or any other single socio-demographic characteristic. I ordered the chapters in my book accordingly, in terms of the varieties of music-selfs described.
I’m happy that Patrick Williams enjoyed my anecdote about my students claiming that my mastery of popular music ended with jump from Van Halen’s 1984 album–the last of the great L.A.-based power-pop bands I would argue. My good friend’s contention that heavy metal music is my favorite style and overwhelms the book is a bit overstated–an issue that should probably be resolved over a beer. He overlooks my references to many and various styles of popular music when relevant to the music-self in question, including Billie Eilish among preadolescent girls–and me, I like her work a lot; heavy if obnoxious metal music from GWAR among 82-year-old male fans; Andrea Bocelli singing the Ave Maria to elderly residents in assisted living centers during COVID; mothers and their little girls listening and dancing to Elmo, Peppa Pig and Baby Shark on TV; and young adults dancing to electronica at rave parties. Let me cite the concluding paragraph:
All this is an argument for why assembling sociological interpretations of music is so important: our theories and research methods can rapidly adapt in order to keep up with the rapid changes always taking place in culture. Our books, including mine I hope, allow us to take snapshots of everyday life along the way and to savor everyday life. As I conclude my book, I’m sitting at my desk, in Woodcreek, Texas, with a black and white poster of the Rolling Stones in front of me. An autographed picture of Katy Perry, gifted to me by my first M.A. student at Texas State University, is positioned on the wall to my left and an autographed picture of Dion, gifted to me by my fifth student, is to my right. The soundtrack for the task at hand is Channel 66, “Watercolors,” on Sirius XM. Dave Koz is playing “Definition of the Beautiful” on his heavenly saxophone. This very mellow music is freeing my attention to be drawn to the herd of deer passing through our yard on their way to the field across from us where they will find their dinner in the high grass. For the moment, I am ageless. Music always does this to and for me–and you, I’m sure. I’m not growing old, but like Billie and her fans, I’m growing up.
Patrick’s comment suggests an important issue. How do we, as interactionists, select styles, types, categories, and issues in our work? I would bet 90 per cent of us choose phenomena we experience ourselves, have grown up with, suffered through, know something about commonsensically, or can experience again in formal research. In my research on music, I have been lucky: I like all kinds of music, but like John Irwin, I am attracted to scenes–those situations where observable social life takes place. Of course, some scenes are decided for us, for example, when I was contracted by the State of Texas Attorney-General’s office to investigate, almost journalistically, the rave scenes gaining popularity but causing chagrin for parents whose 15-year-old daughters disappear at 2 in the morning to attend rave parties under the guise of “all-ages shows.” We need to make our research categorical and conceptual, using individual little projects as case studies for the preferred design of grounded theory/inductive research that culminate in and fulfill Blumerian sensitizing concepts.
Patrick’s rhetorical suggestion that I should have included more international examples of music in my book can be resolved quite simply: don’t I wish! Float me a grant to visit those distant locations and I’ll be there next week. Seriously, Patrick is really suggesting the value of culturally comparative research on topics like mine. More realistically, assembling an international team to follow the same sensitizing concepts would be a super project. As is, I’m very happy to have assembled a complete chapter on popular music experiences in Sweden and Poland, based upon direct ethnographic observation provided by a Fulbright award. The more general issue in Patrick’s suggestion is the question of whether an interactionist/sociological interest in music should focus on the music or the participants in the music. I clearly prefer the latter. I did not intend my book be an encyclopedic survey of music styles that is a journalistic strategy, nor a history of popular music that is a quite common style in the scholarly literature, especially social science textbooks. As interactionists, our focus should be on audiences, artists and others who “perform” the music we love.
My final comment is on perhaps the nicest observation Partick made of my book. He wrote that “… the writing is refreshing. Kotarba provides a diversity of styles… that together exemplify the strength of ethnography as a primary tool in the existential sociologist’s toolkit.” That observation is worthy of a beer, on me.
The broader issue to which Patrick is alluding is the value–no, necessity–of good writing in ethnographic/ qualitiative research. We should never forget that our reports are stories. We tell stories about our research friends. We sometimes tell stories about our friends’ stories, as the phenomenologists and ethnomethodologists among us do so well. The worlds we create with our words need to be clearly framed, meticulously painted with appropriate metaphors, and (hopefully) concluded with the reader exclaiming, “Hey, I’m there, too!” We should thank writers like Carolyn Ellis and, bless his heart and spirit , Norm Denzin, for nurturing the life of the story in symbolic interaction in terms of the narrative. My point is that forging our ideas in terms of stories is a great way to share our work with all our audiences, scholarly and lay.
I had the pleasure to present the initial story in my book at the Wimberley Valley Arts and Cultural Alliance’s Storytellers event last year up in the Texas Hill Country. The story is about two Vietnam veterans spending time in a hospice center during their caretakers respite break. They could not talk much, so they communicated through the “tap code” they made up while imprisoned in Hanoi during the war. Their code clearly was a song I interpreted as “Ain’t Wasting Time No More,” an anti-war song recorded by the Allman Brothers Band. The veterans in the audience told me later that, yah, it was like that in ‘Nam. The younger rock music fans in the audience were impressed with the two veterans’ musical creativity while in captivity. And, a few much older audience members simply shared, “God Bless America.” with me. What better audience response could I have asked for?
By the way, I developed my ideas on conducting interactionist research on music in the forthcoming edition of Studies in Symbolic Interaction, volume 60.
REFERENCES
Kotarba, Joseph A. 2022. Music in the Course of Life. 1st edition. Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge.
Williams, J. Patrick. 2024. ‘Two Approaches to the Study of Music and Meaning in Everyday Life’. Symbolic Interaction n/a, no. n/a. [Accessed 30 July 2024]. https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.717.
Symbolic Interaction Music Blog 