Minnets spelrum : Om musik och pensionärskap

Sammanfattning: The aim of this study is to explore how pensionerhood is formed through music-making. What are the building blocks of pensionerhood in musical contexts, and which values are included and excluded? In the study pensionerhood is defined in terms of cultural position, the term forming is used to define conditioning, limiting and enabling forces and the term music-making denotes a wide set of activities from arranging venues to performance. Taking a phenomenological social constructivist point of departure, the study combines analyses of musical sound, social practice and memory. Field work was first conducted intermittently between 1995 and 1998, and then during a continuous period from november 1999 through april 2000. The first two chapters are based on material gathered in and around Stockholm during the first period, and discuss place, space and memory politics in commercial, organization-related pensioner music, and musical settings in institutional care. The following three chapters build on material from the second period of field work in a southern Sweden industrial town, discussing in turn aesthetics, sound and social life in associations, formations of generational memory in musical narratives, and the limitations and possibilities that govern performances of age and generation in various musical and expressive performances. The final and concluding chapter restates and develops the main results of the study. Pensionerhood is musically formed in a set of possibilities and limitations. A specific timespace is elaborated in musical settings, whereby pensionerhood is organized as a kind of ethnicity that stresses historical difference, what is here termed chronocity. But pensionerhood also emerges as a social movement that depends upon a cognitive praxis musically developed in a residual structure of feeling characterized by the social modes nostalgia and happy get-together. Finally, pensionerhood is understood as a retrospective interface where interaction in music is defined by memory. To conclude, the thesis argues that the concept of position and interface might translate to a concept of identity whose understanding requires attention to questions of style and aesthetics.