IDENTITY IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE?

In the continuing search for music and identity I have come across a book by three authors David J. Hargreaves, Dorothy Miell and Raymond MacDonald.

Hargreaves

Miell

Professor David Hargreaves is Professor of Education (amongst many other things) at University of Roehampton; Professor Dorothy Miell is Vice Principal and Head of the College of Humanities and Social Science at The University of Edinburgh (no doubt knows Miss Keelin Murray - see blog 6^th Feb 2013 Music and Identity) and Professor Raymond MacDonald is Professor of Music Psychology and Improvisation at Glasgow Caledonian University School of Health and Life Sciences.

MacDonald

Their work is entitled What Are Musical Identities and Why Are They So Important? In their précis of the book they state, inter alia:

“ 'Nicholas Cook, in Music: A Very Short Introduction (1998 - Oxford University Press) states succinctly: ‘In today’s world, deciding what music to listen to is a significant part of deciding and announcing to people not just who you “want to be” . . . but who you are. “Music” is a very small word to encompass something that takes as many forms as there are cultural or sub-cultural identities'.

This concept of identity enables us to look at the widespread and varied interactions between music and the individual. The concepts of identity and the self have undergone some radical changes in psychological theory in recent years, to which we will return later in this chapter. The idea of the self   as a kind of focus, or relatively unchanging core aspect of individuals’ personalities, has given way to a much less static and more dynamic view of the self as something which is constantly being reconstructed and renegotiated according to the experiences, situations and other people with whom we interact in everyday life. Globalization and technological advance have led to rapid recent changes in many people’s lifestyles, and our self-identities are changing correspondingly in ever more complex ways.

This book is about the role that music plays in this process, and we introduce the concept of musical identities as a crucial means of doing so.”

As you can see, my proposal of writing identity in conjunction with music is out of time. Do I go on? Professor Hargreaves comments that the object of a Phd, in exploring a particular subject, is to provide some new incite into what has been done before. One has to know what has been done to know what is new. That is why it takes so long to develop a thesis. I have some doubts about my perspective of identity from the point of view of ‘performance writing’.

If you can imagine standing at the top of the Grand Canyon observing the landscape:

If you were to move one inch to the left or right, would you be looking at a different landscape? The performance writer would say that you were, indeed you would be looking at a different landscape every time you blinked. So perhaps my take on the writing of music and identity will be a mere blink of some new insight. Do I go on?