Scholar Tia Denora, in the book Music in Everyday Life, draws upon a series of ethnographic studies, including in-depth interviews with a group of fifty-two British and American women aged eighteen to seventy-seven, and in doing so, examines how the subjects utilize music in a wide variety of different settings. The book is thus a social phenomenology of music, which is something that interests me very much.
Another study, Thinking inside the box: In search of music-video culture is a 2005 doctoral dissertation by Patricia L Schmidt, a scholar at the University of Surrey. Schmidt's dissertation is based upon an ethnography she conducted with teenagers in the eastern United States "to examine the development of music-video cultures and to discuss the medium's overwhelming influence on the adolescent imagination." From this, she put together a "working definition of music-video culture and cultural practice." Her work challenges ethnomusicologists to think differently about participant-observation, fieldnotes, and other traditional anthropological methods.
From Amazon.com Music, Space and Place, edited by Sheila Whiteley, Andy Bennett, and Stan Hawkins, examines the urban and rural spaces in which music is experienced, produced and consumed. The editors of this collection have brought together new and exciting perspectives by international researchers and scholars working in the field of popular music studies. Underpinning all of the contributions is the recognition that musical processes take place within a particular space and place, where these processes are shaped both by specific musical practices and by the pressures and dynamics of political and economic circumstances.
Important discourses are explored concerning national culture and identity, as well as how identity is constructed through the exchanges that occur between displaced peoples of the world's many diasporas. Music helps to articulate a shared sense of community among these dispersed people, carving out spaces of freedom which are integral to personal and group consciousness. A specific focal point is the rap and hip hop music that has contributed towards a particular sense of identity as indigenous resistance vernaculars for otherwise socially marginalized minorities in Cuba, France, Italy, New Zealand and South Africa. New research is also presented on the authorial presence in production within the domain of the commercially driven Anglo-American music industry. The issue of authorship and creativity is tackled alongside matters relating to the production of musical texts themselves, and demonstrates the gender politics in pop.
Underlying Music, Space and Place, is the question of how the disciplines informing popular music studies - sociology, musicology, cultural studies, media studies and feminism - have developed within a changing intellectual climate. The book therefore covers a wide range of subject matter in relation to space and place, including community and identity, gender, race, 'vernaculars', power, performance and production.
Sociologist and jazz musician Howard Becker offers the following analysis called jazz places. This is a starting point for those interested in looking at jazz from a sociological standpoint. Here too are Becker's notes on improvisation.
Finally, here are some links to ethnomusicology.
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