Musicians and the lifetime soundtrack
Creation and perception of musically motivated autobiographical memories
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/prbt.30703Keywords:
musician, autobiography, memory, performance, embodiment, identityAbstract
In addition to encountering music in everyday situations, musicians perform, compose, arrange, contemplate, and study music in a way that is integral to their everyday lives. This paper draws together ideas of autobiographical memory and musicianship via an examination of the ways in which musicians create and interpret musically triggered autobiographical memories. Using original interview narratives, the paper argues that the dual roles of producer and consumer typically played by musicians contribute to a specialised relationship between music and memory for this group. This includes discussions of concepts of identity, creative labour, emotion, and embodiment that combine to produce particular interactions for individuals.
References
Anderson, Ben. 2004. ‘Recorded Music and Practices of Remembering’. Social and Cultural Geography 5/1: 3–20.
Barton, Rebecca. 2004. ‘The Aging Musician’. Work 22: 131–38.
Becker, Howard S. 1951. ‘The Professional Dance Musician and His Audience’. American Journal of Sociology 57/2: 136–44. https://doi.org/10.1086/220913
Bennett, Andy. 2000. Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity and Place. New York: Palgrave.
—2013. Music, Style, and Aging: Growing Old Disgracefully? Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Brewer, William. F. 1988. ‘Memory for Randomly Sampled Autobiographical Events’. In Remembering Reconsidered: Ecological and Traditional Approaches to the Study of Memory, ed. Ulric Neisser and Eugene Winograd, 21–90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cady, Elizabeth. T., Richard Jackson Harris and J. Bret Knappenberger. 2008. ‘Using Music to Cue Autobiographical Memories of Different Lifetime Periods’. Psychology of Music 36/2: 157–78. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735607085010
Clayton, Martine, Rebecca Sager and Udo Will. 2005. ‘In Time with the Music: The Concept of Entrainment and its Significance for Ethnomusicology’. European Meetings in Ethnomusicology 11: 1–82. Romanian Society for Ethnomusicology.
Cohen, Sara. 1991. Rock Culture in Liverpool: Popular Music in the Making. New York: Oxford University Press.
Conway, Martin A., and Christopher W. Pleydell-Pearce. 2000. ‘The Construction of Autobiographical Memories in the Self-memory System’. Psychological Review 107/2: 261–88. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.107.2.261
DeNora, Tia. 2000. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511489433
Drummond, John D. 1990. ‘The Characteristics of Amateur and Professional’. International Journal of Music Education 15/1: 3–8. https://doi.org/10.1177/025576149001500101
Faulkner, Robert R., and Howard S. Becker. 2009. ‘Do You Know…?’ The Jazz Repertoire in Action. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226239224.001.0001
Finnegan, Ruth. 2007. The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town, 2nd ed. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Fivush, Robyn. 2011. ‘The Development of Autobiographical Memory’. Annual Review of Psychology 62: 559–82. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.121208.131702
Frith, Simon. 1981. Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock’n’Roll. New York: Pantheon Books.
—1987. ‘Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music’. In Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception, ed. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary, 133–49. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gembris, Heiner. 2008. Musical Activities in the Third Age: An Empirical Study with Amateur Musicians. Second European Conference on Developmental Psychology of Music, University of Roehampton.
Hesmondhalgh, David, and Sarah Baker. 2011. Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries. Oxon: Routledge.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2003 [1983]. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, 2nd edn. California: University of California Press.
Istvandity, Lauren. 2014. ‘The Lifetime Soundtrack: Music as an Archive for Autobiographical Memory’. Popular Music History 9/2: 136–54. https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v9i2.26642
—2017. ‘Music and Autobiographical Memory: The Soundtracks of Space and Place’. In Sound, Memory and the Senses: Intimate Cultural Histories, ed. Paula Hamilton and Joy Damousi, 213–44. London and New York: Routledge.
Janata, Petr, Stefan T. Tomic and Sonja K. Rakowski. 2007. ‘Characterisation of Music-evoked Autobiographical Memories’. Memory 15/8: 845–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658210701734593
Jennings, Ros. 2012. ‘It’s All Just a Little Bit of History Repeating: Pop Stars, Audiences, Performance and Ageing—Exploring the Performance Strategies of Shirley Bassey and Petula Clark’. In Rock On: Women, Ageing and Popular Music, ed. Ros Jennings and Abigail Gardner, 35–51. Farnham: Ashgate.
Juniu, Susana, Ted Tedrick and Rosangela Boyd. 1996. ‘Leisure or Work?: Amateur and Professional Musicians’ Perception of Rehearsal and Performance’. Journal of Leisure Research 28/1: 44–56.
Kassabian, Anahid. 2013. Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Listening. Berkeley: University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520275157.001.0001
Keightley, Emily, and Michael Pickering. 2006. ‘For the Record: Popular Music and Photography as Technologies of Memory’. European Journal of Cultural Studies 9/2: 149–65. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549406063161
Kotarba, Joseph. 2002. ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Music as a Timepiece’. Symbolic Interaction 25/3: 397–404. https://doi.org/10.1525/si.2002.25.3.397
Maslen, Sarah. 2013. ‘“Playing Like a Girl!”: Practices and Performance Ideals at the Piano’. Performance Enhancement & Health 2/1: 3–7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.peh.2013.01.001
McMillan, Paul Andrew. 2016. ‘Why Cover? An Ethnographic Exploration of Identity Politics Surrounding “Covers” and “Originals” Music in Dunedin, New Zealand’. MEDIANZ: Media Studies Journal of Aotearoa New Zealand 15/1: 35–53. https://doi.org/10.11157/medianz-vol15iss1id136
Morrow, Guy. 2006. ‘Selling out or Buying in? The Dual Career of the Original and Cover Band Musician’. In Access All Eras: Tribute Bands and Global Pop Culture, ed. Shane Homan, 182–97. Berkshire: Open University Press.
Nijs, Luc, Micheline Lesaffre and Marc Leman. 2009. The Musical Instrument as a Natural Extension of the Musician. The 5th Conference of Interdisciplinary Musicology, LAM-Institut jean Le Rond d’Alembert.Nijs, Lesaffre and Leman
Pickering, Michael, and Emily Keightley. 2015. Photography, Music and Memory: Pieces of the Past in Everyday Life. New York: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137441218
Pugliesi, Karen. 1999. ‘The Consequences of Emotional Labor: Effects on Work Stress, Job Satisfaction, and Well-Being’. Motivation and Emotion 23/2: 125–54. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021329112679
Schulkind, Matthew D., Laura Kate Hennis and David C. Rubin. 1999. ‘Music, Emotion and Autobiographical Memory: They’re Playing Your Song’. Memory & Cognition 27/6: 948–55. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03201225
Seitz, Jay A. 2005. ‘Dalcroze, the Body, Movement and Musicality’. Psychology of Music 33/4: 419–35. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735605056155
Stebbins, Robert A. 2014. Between Work and Leisure: The Common Ground of Two Separate Worlds, 2nd ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Strong, Catherine. 2011. Grunge: Music and Memory. Farnham: Ashgate.
Van Dijck, Jose. 2006. ‘Record and Hold: Popular Music between Personal and Collective Memory’. Critical Studies in Media and Communication 23/5: 357–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/07393180601046121
Van Zijl, Anemone G. W., and John Sloboda. 2010. ‘Performers’ Experienced Emotions in the Construction of Expressive Musical Performance: An Exploratory Investigation’. Psychology of Music 39/2: 196–219. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735610373563
Woody, Robert H. 2002. ‘Emotion, Imagery and Metaphor in the Acquisition of Musical Performance Skill’. Music Education Research 4/2: 213–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461380022000011920
Woody, Robert H., and Gary E. McPherson. 2010. ‘Emotion and Motivation in the Lives of Performers’. In Handbook of Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, Applications, ed. Patrik N. Juslin and John Sloboda, 401–424. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Barton, Rebecca. 2004. ‘The Aging Musician’. Work 22: 131–38.
Becker, Howard S. 1951. ‘The Professional Dance Musician and His Audience’. American Journal of Sociology 57/2: 136–44. https://doi.org/10.1086/220913
Bennett, Andy. 2000. Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity and Place. New York: Palgrave.
—2013. Music, Style, and Aging: Growing Old Disgracefully? Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Brewer, William. F. 1988. ‘Memory for Randomly Sampled Autobiographical Events’. In Remembering Reconsidered: Ecological and Traditional Approaches to the Study of Memory, ed. Ulric Neisser and Eugene Winograd, 21–90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cady, Elizabeth. T., Richard Jackson Harris and J. Bret Knappenberger. 2008. ‘Using Music to Cue Autobiographical Memories of Different Lifetime Periods’. Psychology of Music 36/2: 157–78. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735607085010
Clayton, Martine, Rebecca Sager and Udo Will. 2005. ‘In Time with the Music: The Concept of Entrainment and its Significance for Ethnomusicology’. European Meetings in Ethnomusicology 11: 1–82. Romanian Society for Ethnomusicology.
Cohen, Sara. 1991. Rock Culture in Liverpool: Popular Music in the Making. New York: Oxford University Press.
Conway, Martin A., and Christopher W. Pleydell-Pearce. 2000. ‘The Construction of Autobiographical Memories in the Self-memory System’. Psychological Review 107/2: 261–88. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.107.2.261
DeNora, Tia. 2000. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511489433
Drummond, John D. 1990. ‘The Characteristics of Amateur and Professional’. International Journal of Music Education 15/1: 3–8. https://doi.org/10.1177/025576149001500101
Faulkner, Robert R., and Howard S. Becker. 2009. ‘Do You Know…?’ The Jazz Repertoire in Action. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226239224.001.0001
Finnegan, Ruth. 2007. The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town, 2nd ed. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Fivush, Robyn. 2011. ‘The Development of Autobiographical Memory’. Annual Review of Psychology 62: 559–82. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.121208.131702
Frith, Simon. 1981. Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock’n’Roll. New York: Pantheon Books.
—1987. ‘Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music’. In Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception, ed. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary, 133–49. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gembris, Heiner. 2008. Musical Activities in the Third Age: An Empirical Study with Amateur Musicians. Second European Conference on Developmental Psychology of Music, University of Roehampton.
Hesmondhalgh, David, and Sarah Baker. 2011. Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries. Oxon: Routledge.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2003 [1983]. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, 2nd edn. California: University of California Press.
Istvandity, Lauren. 2014. ‘The Lifetime Soundtrack: Music as an Archive for Autobiographical Memory’. Popular Music History 9/2: 136–54. https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v9i2.26642
—2017. ‘Music and Autobiographical Memory: The Soundtracks of Space and Place’. In Sound, Memory and the Senses: Intimate Cultural Histories, ed. Paula Hamilton and Joy Damousi, 213–44. London and New York: Routledge.
Janata, Petr, Stefan T. Tomic and Sonja K. Rakowski. 2007. ‘Characterisation of Music-evoked Autobiographical Memories’. Memory 15/8: 845–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658210701734593
Jennings, Ros. 2012. ‘It’s All Just a Little Bit of History Repeating: Pop Stars, Audiences, Performance and Ageing—Exploring the Performance Strategies of Shirley Bassey and Petula Clark’. In Rock On: Women, Ageing and Popular Music, ed. Ros Jennings and Abigail Gardner, 35–51. Farnham: Ashgate.
Juniu, Susana, Ted Tedrick and Rosangela Boyd. 1996. ‘Leisure or Work?: Amateur and Professional Musicians’ Perception of Rehearsal and Performance’. Journal of Leisure Research 28/1: 44–56.
Kassabian, Anahid. 2013. Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Listening. Berkeley: University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520275157.001.0001
Keightley, Emily, and Michael Pickering. 2006. ‘For the Record: Popular Music and Photography as Technologies of Memory’. European Journal of Cultural Studies 9/2: 149–65. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549406063161
Kotarba, Joseph. 2002. ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Music as a Timepiece’. Symbolic Interaction 25/3: 397–404. https://doi.org/10.1525/si.2002.25.3.397
Maslen, Sarah. 2013. ‘“Playing Like a Girl!”: Practices and Performance Ideals at the Piano’. Performance Enhancement & Health 2/1: 3–7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.peh.2013.01.001
McMillan, Paul Andrew. 2016. ‘Why Cover? An Ethnographic Exploration of Identity Politics Surrounding “Covers” and “Originals” Music in Dunedin, New Zealand’. MEDIANZ: Media Studies Journal of Aotearoa New Zealand 15/1: 35–53. https://doi.org/10.11157/medianz-vol15iss1id136
Morrow, Guy. 2006. ‘Selling out or Buying in? The Dual Career of the Original and Cover Band Musician’. In Access All Eras: Tribute Bands and Global Pop Culture, ed. Shane Homan, 182–97. Berkshire: Open University Press.
Nijs, Luc, Micheline Lesaffre and Marc Leman. 2009. The Musical Instrument as a Natural Extension of the Musician. The 5th Conference of Interdisciplinary Musicology, LAM-Institut jean Le Rond d’Alembert.Nijs, Lesaffre and Leman
Pickering, Michael, and Emily Keightley. 2015. Photography, Music and Memory: Pieces of the Past in Everyday Life. New York: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137441218
Pugliesi, Karen. 1999. ‘The Consequences of Emotional Labor: Effects on Work Stress, Job Satisfaction, and Well-Being’. Motivation and Emotion 23/2: 125–54. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021329112679
Schulkind, Matthew D., Laura Kate Hennis and David C. Rubin. 1999. ‘Music, Emotion and Autobiographical Memory: They’re Playing Your Song’. Memory & Cognition 27/6: 948–55. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03201225
Seitz, Jay A. 2005. ‘Dalcroze, the Body, Movement and Musicality’. Psychology of Music 33/4: 419–35. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735605056155
Stebbins, Robert A. 2014. Between Work and Leisure: The Common Ground of Two Separate Worlds, 2nd ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Strong, Catherine. 2011. Grunge: Music and Memory. Farnham: Ashgate.
Van Dijck, Jose. 2006. ‘Record and Hold: Popular Music between Personal and Collective Memory’. Critical Studies in Media and Communication 23/5: 357–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/07393180601046121
Van Zijl, Anemone G. W., and John Sloboda. 2010. ‘Performers’ Experienced Emotions in the Construction of Expressive Musical Performance: An Exploratory Investigation’. Psychology of Music 39/2: 196–219. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735610373563
Woody, Robert H. 2002. ‘Emotion, Imagery and Metaphor in the Acquisition of Musical Performance Skill’. Music Education Research 4/2: 213–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461380022000011920
Woody, Robert H., and Gary E. McPherson. 2010. ‘Emotion and Motivation in the Lives of Performers’. In Handbook of Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, Applications, ed. Patrik N. Juslin and John Sloboda, 401–424. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Published
2017-05-03
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Istvandity, L. (2017). Musicians and the lifetime soundtrack: Creation and perception of musically motivated autobiographical memories. Perfect Beat, 18(1), 48-67. https://doi.org/10.1558/prbt.30703
