Music and Talk in Tandem: The Production of Micro-Narratives in Real Time

In this text I explore the interrelationship between musical encounters and the selfperception, and self-report, of health-status and self-identity.1 I describe how music can be seen to interact and offer a basis for the type of action with which sociologists are most familiar—verbal action as a means of narrating, telling and consolidating social realities. For this task, I present two ‘worked examples’, the first illustrating how musical activity can prime, cue, or trigger forms of self-report, the second illustrating how wellness identities and wellness orientations can be built from the ways in which musical activity and self-reporting about that activity (for example in the form of narratives) make mutual reference. Overall, my aim will be to consider how music offers resources for making a change in wellness situations. As I will describe in the conclusion, the topic of musically-linked micro-narrative connects with a growing body of theoretical work devoted to the question of where and how music can ‘help’ as a medium of relational health (DeNora, 2007; Aasgaard, 2001; Ruud, 2010; Stige, Ansdell, Elefant & Pavlicevic, 2010; Ansdell & DeNora, 2012). In particular, the focus on micro-narratives and music can tell us about practical consciousness and its formation.