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. . . It’s very aspirational, especially among women – so research has told us . . .’ (Cue 1994:69).

This point was born out by the interview data. Many of the interviewees themselves described how, although their (male) partners were mostly interested in music and had particular tastes, that they could take charge of music when they wished:

He wouldn’t know what to put on.

He’s really not that bothered about what I put on.

He’s not as keen on music anyway as me so he generally will go along with what I say . . . he’s probably the most dominant in our relationship, but when it comes to music, I think I probably would win.

I think my tastes are more dominant in the household, period. But my husband has very little interest in music.

Accounts such as these are di cult to evaluate; they may be occasioned expressly for the in-depth interview and its conventional style of rapport between two women. They may, in other words, be part of the doing – the performance – of confidentiality, part of how speaker and hearer collude in producing cultural scripts and images, in this case, for example, of ‘female power’ (on this point, see Frith and Kitzinger 1998). Interviewees may, in other words, slip into what C.W. Mills once referred to as ‘vocabularies of motive’ (Mills 1940). The interview procedure was designed to address this problem by repeatedly leading respondents back to the practical level of real-life examples of who-did-what-when-how, the ‘nittygritty’ level of mundane action that has the capacity to undermine accounts and the various identity claims, posturings and role play that often occur within an interview. Sticking close to the level of respondents’ musical practices helped to reveal how respondents used music rather than their depictions of relations between themselves and others. If, in fact, women are more likely to resort to aesthetic means for configuring intimate occasions, there is an important lesson there for theories of gender and power in close relationships, one that could be further illuminated through more ethnographic research on couple culture and its production over the course of a relationship.

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Jennifer: We had a party a couple of weeks ago. It was supposed to be like a wine and cheese party but it was desserts and mixed drinks! We had candles in here and it was weird because we played Billy Joel and we played a lot of [dance music] at the end of the evening because everybody was going from my party, out to go dancing. We played a lot of pretty things in other languages.

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Particularly at the start of the evening – for music was here used to outline a temporal structure of conduct style over the duration of an evening – Jennifer and her housemates were trying, she explains, to create a relaxed yet refined environment, one in which participants dressed up, consumed desserts and mixed drinks (as opposed to the more usual beer and snack food), and conversed quietly or danced (slowly) to the strains of ‘pretty’ music with lyrics ‘in other languages’, signalling travel and things European (often synonymous with high culture in the United States). Here, music was part and parcel of Jennifer and her friends’ orientation to (what they perceived as) prestigious forms of symbolic capital, forms residing on the perimeter of their usual leisure practices. This form of what Mauss has called ‘prestigious imitation’ (Lash and Urry 1994:45; Mauss 1979:101) delimited the parameters of conduct in ways that were commensurate with their values of glamour, relaxed pace, sophistication and romance. Thus, through the ways it is perceived to be related to a network of other objects, meanings and modes of agency, music can be seen as providing an ongoing tracking device for participants, a cue or template for the formulation of energy levels and conduct styles that can be examined when and/or if uncertainty about appropriate agency arises, when/if one needs to get a handle on how to ‘be’ within a setting. In this sense, music is a template or model for the formulation of emotional, social and embodied agency over the course of real-time interaction. Just as it may be di cult, for example, to reconcile ‘pretty things in other languages’ with beer, or candles with sweatshirts, jeans and trainers, so too it is di cult to engage in some of the earthier modes of intimacy against the background entailments of, say, Celine Dion’s ‘Our love will go on’, the Titanic themesong. The point is not that music delineates modes of subjectivity and embodied action per se, but that actors perceive it as implying (or as associated with) modes of agency; they also feel it to be analogous or homologous to modes of being:

I would have the music on before they [houseguests] come because I like to create an atmosphere. And because – it would depend to some extent on what [the occasion is]. If it were a very elegant little cocktail party then I would probably be going to put on some kind of classical or something like that, although I might make it a little more – what I would think of as informal classical like classical guitar, for example. When it’s around the holidays I always put on music that’s related to the holidays but not singing music, I like instrumental music for that, harps, or whatever. If we’re doing a Friday night dinner, kind of informal with friends, I might put on folk music or light jazz, something like that . . . If I want things to be very lively and a little boisterous, you know, then I am going to play loud or fast-paced music obviously if I want people to dance but just, you know, if you have twenty people there and you don’t want quiet for the conversation which the lower music lends itself to, then I might put on something that would be more, you know,

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something a little hipper [laughs] . . . I think people, they need to know what’s happening to them, we all respond to the emotional tone of music so I think music can be very, very soothing and quiet or it can sort of jazz things up or it can put a cast of utter pall over, you know. Have you ever been to a party where they want people to dance but they put the wrong music on and you just can’t move with it? (Elaine, age fifty-five, United States)

Music is thus part of the cultural material through which ‘scenes’ are constructed, scenes that a ord di erent kinds of agency, di erent sorts of pleasure and ways of being. It is important to underline, as described in chapter 4, that this process and the use of music as a device of scene construction may elide rational consciousness. Without being aware of how they are responding to and interpreting music, actors may latch on to and fall in with musical structures. This falling in with may entail realignment of bodily comportment as discussed in chapter 4 (for example, the tapping of a foot or a shift in physical energy or motivation), a realignment of emotional state (chapter 3) or a realignment of social conduct, as addressed in this chapter. As is discussed in chapter 6, human action is assembled at least in part by a practical appropriation of models and resources for action’s configuration. We see this perhaps most clearly in examinations of situated discourse, for example in how actors may draw upon conventional narratives, registers and manners of speaking to generate a voice and point of view locally, to ‘get through’ the activity of face-to-face communication (Frazer and Cameron 1989). This need not imply the absence of a subject but, rather, that subjects, if they are to realize themselves as speakers, must find the words and so cast about for available and appropriate linguistic techniques. So, too, subjects may find available auditory structures with which to configure themselves, not only as speaking and acting subjects, but as subjects whose speech and action possess an emotional and corporeal dimension – as aesthetic agents. Within social spaces, then, prominent music may allude to modes of aesthetic agency – feeling, being, moving, acting – and so may place near-to- hand certain aesthetic styles that can be used as referents for configuring agency in real time, for the bodily technique of producing oneself as an agent in the full sense of that word (that is, beyond the discursive and cognitive dimensions normally understood within the social sciences).

Music works in this way through two interrelated avenues. First, it may be perceived as carrying connotations or, as discussed in chapter 4, ‘secondary significations’. Secondly, it may profile and place on o er ways of moving, being and feeling through the ways its materials are configured into a range of sonic parameters such as pace, rhythm, the vertical and horizontal ‘distances’ between tones, the musical envelope of particular tones and tone groups – ‘attack and release’ as it is termed in music

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analysis, timbre or volume. For example, when the music ‘hops’ and ‘skips’, so too bodies may feel motivated to move, as it were, like the music. In these cases, music is doing something more than re-presenting or simulating bodily patterns and bringing them to mind; it is providing a ground or medium within which to be a body, a medium against which the body comes to be organized in terms of its own physical and temporal organization (for example, as it springs from the ground in a way that is entrained to the musical pulse). So, aligned with and entrained by the physical patterns music profiles, bodies not only feel empowered, they may be empowered in the sense of gaining a capacity. These capacities are sometimes visible, as, for example, when we can observe the body gestures of people listening to music via headphones or orchestral conductors’ movements; this visibility is heightened when musical materials shift, for example, from slow to fast, from genre to genre, where contiguous but contradictory forms of musical agency rub up against each other.

This tendency to fall in with the music was something that arose repeatedly in all aspects of the music in the daily life study. As a phenomenon, it highlights the capacity, perhaps even the tendency, on the part of human beings, to adopt and adapt, not necessarily consciously, to resources within an environment. At the same time, actors’ nondiscursive, corporeal, emotional, falling in with music does not imply that music works like a stimulus. Actors may have awareness of what music entails and yet also be aware that those entailments feel wrong; they may wish to override music’s perceived implications, to resist or reappropriate music’s force (for example, when the ballad ‘Stand by your man’ is reappropriated as an ironic commentary on patriarchal relations). Melinda, quoted earlier in this chapter, made this clear when she said, about a follow-on track on a CD her boyfriend had chosen, ‘we were like, “No no no, we don’t want that!”’ In short, music’s capacity to serve as a device of social ordering can be seen in the fact that it can serve as the source of social discomfort:

Becky: . . . A lot of the people [at a party] were working together [so] they didn’t like slow music, I got the impression they felt quite uneasy because they felt they had to touch their workmates [laughs] and it didn’t go down very well . . . One chap that I worked quite closely with came over and asked me to actually dance and I felt very conscious, I personally felt conscious that I was dancing to a slow dance and his wife was only over there and it was all very uncomfortable, really.

In this example, tension arose between, on the one hand, the general social value of being polite at a special function for people who were colleagues rather than friends (for example, to refuse an invitation to dance might be read as a snub or as not contributing to the social ‘work’ of geniality and festivity) and, on the other, wishing to avoid what were per-

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ceived as the music’s entailments (intimacy and romance and, more specifically, a range of minute bodily actions associated with these things). Thus when actors ‘dislike’ particular music, it may be because they sense that the resources from which their agency is generated are subject to threat (in this case, preserving certain bodily habits that constitute collegiality versus intimacy). When they speak of music as ‘inappropriate’, then, this ‘troubles talk’ brings into relief respondents’ understanding of what music entails for the constitution of agency and social scene. This is by no means the same thing as suggesting that music causes respondents to behave in certain ways.

On the contrary, as discussed in chapter 2, music’s force is made manifest through appropriation and reception. Within these constraints, however, it is perfectly reasonable to speak of music as a material of social organization, because styles of movement, emotional and social roles come to be associated with it and may issue from it. In the presence of music, actors may take pleasure in falling in with music or displeasure in trying to avoid what they perceive the music to imply in a behavioural sense. Music may indeed be conceptualized as a prospective device of agency, a way of cueing or tuning in to the ongoing formation of order, or, more accurately, ‘pools’ of order, locally achieved. It is in this sense, then, that music may be pre-scriptive (Akrich 1991) of social order(s). Whether or not it is actually used as a referent for producing order in real time, though, is always open to question. There is thus little point in producing an abstract taxonomy of what music will do; certain patterns may emerge over time within particular settings or relationships and these may be specified with degrees of precision, though they are always in process. A stimulus–response model of how music works is simply inaccurate because it elides the meaningful and interpretive acts of music recipients as they draw upon music’s a ordances as part of mundane musical practice.

The point is that although music’s meanings and e ects are constructed and dependent upon how they are appropriated, patterns of appropriation – associated with particular styles within particular settings

– emerge and accrue over time. For example, actors often have a sense of ‘what goes with what how’ – the candles, the mixed drinks and the ‘pretty things in other languages’, the ‘informal’ dinner on Friday night with friends and the folk music, the ‘beautiful . . . calming’ music of the First Night soundtrack and a ‘relaxed’ intimate encounter. The analysis of representations as propounded by mass-distributed culture forms (for example, what music is used to signal intimacy and romance in films) is thus an important component to the study of how specific actors appropriate aesthetic materials as ordering devices because it illuminates many of the available resources for action and experience. Analysis of