I found this article related to this question to be fascinating, especially regarding how non-Irish people in the Midwestern United States can become extraordinarily enthusiastic about their membership in traditional Irish music groups.

The answer may differ depending on the kind of music one prefers. As a classically-trained musician with a research interest in national traditional music, I prefer to listen to music that I've encountered throughout my musical life. What I listen to in the privacy of my own home may be predictable to those that know me, but in no sense are my listening choices determined by any sense of community or peer pressure.

Considering early music history, the act of listening to a music performance was mainly a collective experience. Once it became possible to record sound, music also started to be appreciated and consumed by individuals, in their own homes. Also, the memory/meaning of music in someone's life is one aspect of a bigger cultural legacy where the musical experience itself is diluted together with many other previous cultural and personal experiences. A third approach that can be discussed here is the combined effect of musical syntax and culture. In places where musical tradition started by the habit of singing labor songs, the vocabulary and prosody helped building the tradition that's often the basis for the musical constitution of the song. This can be noticed, in effect, in cultures where syncopation became a fundamental rhythm form in popular music.

Hello,

This is more a "sociological" question than "psychological" one. In both of them I'm not a reference !

But, in my opinion I should say that both (individual choice and collective identity) are linked. I do think we cannot forget our culture (for instance, living in Asia but coming from an occidental culture), as well as the family education.

This means that this "collective identity"influences a lot our musical choices.

At the same time, our relations, the way and place we leave, shall influence our musical choices. And this could be more important at the end.

I agree with Frauenfelder Eliane. The association with music is linked with individual and collective identity, which can also be associated to age group. This may be a pedestrian response, but if you consider how music preferences change throughout development: broad as a child, narrow in the early teen years, branching out again in early adulthood and narrowing again in later adulthood. It is a combination of social pressures and expectations as well as personal preference. Focusing on the pre-teen years, where social groups dictate music preference and one listens to the music their peers prefer.

Regarding your post about Midwestern individuals (heavily German populated as well as Czech and others) becoming engaged in traditional Irish music. I believe it's probably because of an interest in world culture, especially in an area with a fairly well-educated population.

I have been a life long musician most of my over 50 years, and I find this an interesting question affecting me personally and professionally, in the ways I relate to myself and to others, and in the ways which those preferences aid and abet my progress through the various communities with which and in which I interface.

More to the point, there is an important function of music preferences which help to maintain my individuality and my sense of my unique and eccentric self, in deliberate opposition against music which I consider boring, counter-productive, stylistically and lyrically offensive, and/or personally unsuitable. I have other considerations which follow; to whit.

As a sidebar, I see my preferences as similar to different styles of language. In the same ways that I speak with different inflections, accent, and grammar depending on the occasions and audiences, my set lists and stacks of DVDs catastrophically teetering all over the house reflect my changing moods and purposes. But, as usual, I digress.

My music preferences are critical in informing myself as a player of many styles and instruments in which I have become a sort of musical Swiss army knife. I often listen to and play those pieces which benefit the professional requirements of the moment, depending on where I play and to whom I am playing. It's not that I have no particular taste as it is a case of playing what will pay. In a documentary on Les Paul, he tells of meeting Miles Davis, who asked Paul what he was doing that was making him popular and selling so many albums. Paul told Davis that he was playing arrangements of songs like "A Tisket, A Tasket" which Davis said he would never play. Paul then said that he was happy to play what sold and made him a success.

My own Les Paul/Miles Davis moment crystallised when I was musically directing a musical adaptation of Barry Broadfoot's Ten Lost Years. The show needed a banjo so I built a banjo kit (my second effort at luthiery, the first being a neck reset on a Harmony 12 string guitar when I was fifteen), bought my first Pete Seeger banjo instruction book, and the rest is history (mythology?). I started listening to musicians who frailed and performed relevant American folk music, which I added to my library, and my repertoire. In this way, I began to understand how my preferences were affected and informed by the demands of my career. Another example of this occurred when I was hired to play bass in a country rock band (and yes, it is a fact that monkeys can be trained to do this). I found it helpful to listen to music I would not have normally noticed which had heavier bass lines so I could pick up on licks, picking patterns, and improve my hand positioning on the neck. This meant adding 80's punk, "classic" rock, Chicago blues, and mainstream country music to my library, my playlists, and my brain.

Music preference can also be affected by the dictates of social surroundings. Having been born in '56, I was listening to all the 60's music when it was new, at a time when I, like most people, was at my most impressionable musical state. Teenage is a very emotionally powerful span of time, where stimuli are so affective as to be overwhelming. I loved The Monkees. More than just digging their sounds, they functioned as an emotional release from domestic violence. I found the show very funny, and the very crazy and absurd presentations of their characters, scripts, and songs made The Monkees a wonderful place to which to retreat and hide. I loved what I saw as their anarchic and chaotic opposition to Authority. I loved the music as it worked to help me create a safe place within myself to protect my personality and soul. On a side note, I still know all the words to "Last Train to Clarksville", "Auntie Grizelda" and "Stepping Stone", and I am not sorry.

In this way, I think music can create and nurture a close but healthy connection between crises and the resulting emotional needs to protect and maintain a healthy or at least functional self. It could even resemble the kinds of self-care more often found in therapy. Maybe music preference IS therapy. It is a damned sight more valid than pop-psych nonsense like Transactional Analyses, I can tell you that much for a quarter.

Non-traditional musical preference could be seen as deliberate non-compliance to a stifling or unacceptable cultural norm, which can aid in the preservation of a sense of individuality, something which is vital to people in their teen years. I see my learning and playing Irish rebel songs in opposition to my parent's Mantovanni as rebellion against my parents generation, their adherence to 50's models of consumption and compliance, and their expectations of me as representative and respectful and passive curator of their values and expectations. I was most definitely not their stepping stone.

This imperative to preserve one's self can supersede cultural demands for compliance in accepting ethno-centric forms of art, of which music is a driving and a powerful force. Growing up in a Jewish cultural matrix meant exposure to Hebrew language (of which I understand next to nothing) songs of struggle and nationalism. I did learn and perform these songs as a song leader for my NEFTY (Northeastern Federation of Temple [Reform] Youth) group. Knowing, singing and leading the music was a very ego-boosting activity, in which I felt special in a way that foreshadowed a life in the performing arts. I didn't necessarily condone the subject matter, but it helped me fit in and gave me an identity I didn't feel I otherwise had. Compliance to an unpalatable music preference was better than anonymity.

"And so to conclude and to finish disputes" (Arthur MacBride, APB Stringband) I see music preferences as having vital functions on a wide variety of levels and for many valid and reasonable different applications. Which ones are yours? This is one of those areas where the subject spans intellectual dialogue, "Mozart may have been somewhat derivative in terms of his adherence to traditional scales, modes, and time signatures but..." to the more direct and heartfelt, "You'd have to be a stupid, f*****g idiot to listen to Apocalypse!"

And since I don't have a smooth, polished, and academically succinct finish, I'll stop here.

cheers,

Danna Waldman. B.A.

I think that, in respect to what is discussed here, music can be a means to discover and understand what others think or perceive and thus reflect in their musical acts. I guess we do tend to listen to music we got exposed to when we were young by mere exposure effect (i.e. it did not harm us, so it was all in all acceptable) or because it let us discover something(s) that we thought could not be expressed otherwise or at least in music. As mentioned earlier, there is definitely a time component in the development of the personal appreciation of music, and group or peer polarization of opinion may play a significant role mostly in early times -- think of collective concert hysteria for teenagers -- as an aid to integrate within circles or even put up some identity of sort. Later on I think we tend more and more to stand on our own and evolve taste according to habit, boredom, specialization, sophistication and other possible twists without much caring for others' tastes except for putting them up when in socially aggregating situations.

Massimo correctly says that as we mature, we are more secure in our own tastes. However, apart from a few teenage occasions when I would play pop-songs on guitar in order to bond with my peers, I cannot recall any occasions before or after that time when my own personal preferences were influenced by "a sense of collective identity". Indeed, I was always conscious that by preferring classical music, I was actually isolating myself from many of my peers, rather than being influenced by any sense of collective identity! Even if I identify myself as a classical musician, I choose what to listen to according to my own preferences, and since it's impossible to kinow what classical musicians collectively prefer, it would be illogical to claim that my choices were influenced by an unknowable collective preference.

It may depend on many variables but one that might be particularly relevant is individual's personality. For instance, some individuals are more open to new experiences and some are more comfortable with following other people discoveries. A second thought is that probably each individual fill a social role in the production-consumption of musical objects, thus complementing each other in a socially distributed cognition context.

In sum, the degree in which human beings are influenced by their context varies from individual to individual, but we could cluster them according to their traits, and habits.

Years ago, a Scottish friend told me that the slow, measured and deliberate rhythms of the Strathspey were intended to expedite the washing of plaids. Funny the things one remembers. Also, sea shanties are sung in time to particular tasks such as the raising of sails and the hauling in of the anchor chain. I suppose one could compare how modern white and pink collar jobs which are made less tedious by easy listening radio and Muzak. But, do work cultures parallel domestic cultures to the point that both are comparable in terms of whether music is as enculturated as language? Apples and oranges?

As far as the propensities to learn language, I recall something to do with Noam Chomsky's writing in this area, where he was presenting his research in the ways that language skills are learned by the young and whether they are inherent or not. Steve Pinker might also have weighed in on this topic.

Danna, I think you are a little confused. "Waulking songs" are for communal pounding of plaids against a table once they've been washed - the verb for this activity being "waulking". Strathspeys are dance tunes, not work songs.

Thousand of new musical pieces are composed every day. On that large number only a small number will be selected/liked by large group of the population and among these only a tiny minority will become classic that new generation will also discoverer. It is both indivisual and group selection.

I would recommend the book "Manifestations of Identity(The Lived Reality of palestinian Refugees in Lebanon) by Muhammad Ali Khalidi, specially chapter 7, in which he takes the theme of music sang by refugees, in camps.

It seems to me that the first question is "what collective identity"? Larry Carlson answer boils down to saying that the collective identity probably depends from circumstances, but not from the baby herself. A Chinese baby living in China is in the same capacity to learn German as one living in Germany, but will have little occasion to do so. A Palestinian Refugee in Lebanon may feel compelled to adopt a Palestinian collective identity, but that is her or his own decision. In less dire circumstances, we may choose to adopt the collective identity around us, or on the contrary to show ourselves "eccentric" (as Danna Waldman wrote).

This all is to say that we probably choose our musical preferences as we choose our individual identity. These choices are of course highly determined by circumstances, and the way in which each of us reacts to circumstances probably varies enormously. I believe that such matters are entirely individual choices -- even if the choice made is to merge in the community.

Hi David and contributors, when I investigated Music Preferences in Malaysia, I found that preferences were influenced by music characteristics (tempo, rhythm, melody etc) and by listener characteristics that included musical training, listener personality (extraversion, neuroticism).

What you have described in some detail, is the 'meaning' the music has for the listener. Yes, that also has some significance. But the main factor I found was 'Familiarity with the music'. Preference increased with familiarity. Other main factors were music characteristics and listener characteristics.

This is a brief comment. Please check the articles that I have uploaded at RG.

Have a great day!

Right, Larry. In fact, the only choice we have is to accept a surrounding cultural identity, or not. I live in a country with very little consciousness of its own identity, and I am surprised to see that expatriates often reject the culture of their adoptive country in favour of a reconstructed national identity that they would not have cultivated if they had remained here.

At any rate, I do not believe at all in innateness. This is more an ethical position than an argumented one, and I am in no way a specialist of education. I think we agree on all points. We may be subject to all kinds of freedom limitations, but none is "hard wired", all are contingent and, in theory ad least (but probably not in practice) could be countered.

[I don't live in France ;-))]

To what extent is music preference a matter of individual choice, and how much is it influenced by group membership?

Work I've done on music preference with students 9-18 years seems to (I didn't ask the question and I'm not sure how one could ask it) indicate group influence is strong (from the rock excerpt response) in 9-12 year olds but then goes down through the 15-18 years. Then again, the 15 year olds might not have 'liked' the excerpt of rock I chose. I was especially interested in responses to the minimal music excerpt which was new, at the time, to most of the participants.

Dear Prof. Meeus,

I think you wrote a very excellent dissertation on a Catalan composer, yet are not Spanish yourself. Obviously you had some preference for Frederic Mompou. Was it the intrinsic melodiousness of his music that attracted you as it does me? This has nothing to do with group preferences.

Dear All,

From someone who has spent the past 26 years living in Asia, and spending much of that time researching the relationship between language and culture, I have come to realize that identity and culture are much more interwoven than we realize, not only through observations of my students, but also my colleagues. Growing up on the west coast, I developed a great fondness for rock, rnb, jazz, cajun, soul, world music, and almost everything under the sun, but I could not stand country music and overly sweet pop music. I have a colleague from the mid-west prairies, and he listens to country, and only country day in and day out. But cultural and self identity are not only geographically defined, but also embody family values and are interactions with the outside world. For example, I identify with the hippy values of the 1960s: I came from a liberal family, and was brought up on west coast folk music.Therefore, you can imagine, I was totally shocked one day on a research trip when we met a researcher in another part of the country who my country-music loving colleague perceived as being hippy-ish and my colleague told me as we were leaving the other researcher's university, "That guy is a f%&ng hippy. I hate hippies". Whoa! To keep the peace, I've become a closet hippy.

Then, there is the aspect of subcultures, or groups within cultures, and the formation of identity. Gender and voice (ie., stance) is quite big here. People tend to identify much more closer with their own gender. In fact, I've been doing some research here.

Finally, there is a vast difference between how westerners and Asian people view music and identity. Confuscius values emphasize group harmony and cohesion, whereas western philosophy born on the shoulders of Aristotle, Plato, and Descartes, emphasizes finding oneself. This greatly effects how we perceive music and how it interacts in the formation of identity. Asian music tends to be more sweet, as it is less threatening. A bi-cultural person such as my 18 year-old-daughter knows the distinctions very clearly, and has formed two identities: Japanese mode when with her Japanese friends, and western mode when with her western friends.

Hope that helps.

Cheers!

PS...I suggest looking at the works of David Elliott

Dear Friends in Anthropology and Music,

If you are interested in Music and Meaning, you have to look at

http://www.musicandmeaning.net/issues/showArticle.php?artID=3.2

Light and Joy to all of you !

Dear Prof. Orringer,

My work on Federico Mompou was but a Master thesis, and its main quality may have been that it was among very rare works devoted to this composer. My interest was mainly in musical analysis, and contingent circumstances made that I could access many of Mompou's scores.

As a matter of fact, one may question Mompou's appartenance to any Spanish or Catalan collective identity. He spent much of his life in France and his inspiration in Catalan folk music was filtered through the availability of already transcribed (and 'corrected') scores.

The same could be said of de Falla, so representative apparently of a Spanish identity, but as a matter of fact of one that he built himself. Falla so to say never transcribed a Spanish folk melody and his Andalusian melodies are based on 19th century transcriptions with piano accompaniment standardizing their harmonic and tonal appearance. I don't know whether Falla was aware that the piano parts were not original, but he used and reworked them in his own melodies, up to the point that he made them paradigms of Andalusian music...

Dear Prof. Meeus,

I wish that the PhD theses that I have directed even approached the quality of your Master´s thesis. Mompou was more akin to Ravel than has been said in his themes. In a book I am trying to write at present, I attempt to prove as much. As to Falla, I believe that he did in fact know that his Andalusian melodies were not original. You can find anthologies of familiar folk melodies in his personal library collected in the Archivo Manuel de Falla (Granada). See M. Christoforidis, "A Composer´s Annotations to His Personal Library: An Introduction to the Manuel de Falla Collection," Context 17 (1999): 33-68, for an exhaustive list of all library holdings there.