My Music: Explorations of Music in Daily Life

by Susan D. Crafts, Daniel Cavicchi, Charles Keil

My Music is a first-hand exploration of the diverse roles music plays in people's lives. "What is music about for you?" asked members of the Music in Daily Life Project of some 150 people, and the responses they received -- from the profound to the mundane, from the deeply-felt to the flippant -- reflect highly individualistic relationships to and with music. Susan Crafts, Daniel Cavicchi, and Project Director Charles Keil have collected and edited nearly forty of those interviews to document the diverse ways in which people enjoy, experience, and use music.
CONTRIBUTORS: Charles Keil, George Lipsitz.

Genres: Music

244 pages, ebook

First published May 1, 1993

Reviews

[Thomas Richardson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nice and breezy collection on interviews about what music means to people all conducted by a team around Buffalo NY in the late 1980s. Problematic that the interviews ranged in skill and their was no real connective threads drawn by the editors. Ultimately it seems like the basis of a project, a foundation, but not a full project. Big miss that even as media was shifting from LPs to cassette tapes no questions addressed how people receive music (except with references to radio) and so it feels very stuck in time rather than illuminating the moment. Worthy of a follow up companion.

[Joel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a wonderful little book, consisting solely of interviews with everyday people about the role music plays in their lives. The interviewees range from 5 year-old kids to 85-year old nursing home residents. Taken together these interviews say something powerful and profound about this ineffable presence in our lives.