“I can trace my life by the music I’ve loved” : anintersubjective phenomenological study of music and identity acrossthe life course

This study considers the intersections of music and identity development in the lives of individuals, centered on their understanding of music’s role and presence from their earliest memories of music to the ways they listen to music today. An ideographically-oriented life course approach informed the development of a qualitative methodology for this study, which I call an Intersubjective Phenomenological approach, foregrounding acknowledgement of intersubjectivity and including intersubjective interpretation as part of analysis. In this study, six individuals between the ages of 19 and 65 years old were each interviewed three times using a revised phenomenological interview method, inviting autobiographical narratives focusing on the salience of their musical preferences as part of their understanding of themselves and their social worlds across the life course. Analysis began with a layered framework based on interpretive strata that bridges interpretation and analysis in alignment with principles of hermeneutic phenomenology and semiotics, looking to signifiers and signifieds in discourse. Analysis exposed six articulations of identity triangulated with intersubjective narratives, forming a continuum leading from the retrospective understanding of identities within personal and historical memories to those that occurred in the recent, present moments of the interviews themselves. Separately, each articulation has its own meaning and ability to signify identity; together, on this continuum, they each support and align to one of the three primary theoretical elements of identity development guiding this study: individual identities are historically and socially contingent, characterized through rhetoric, and intersubjectively negotiated within social or reflexive discourses. Discussing preferred music is a catalyst for individuals to understand and orient themselves within actual or assumed life-worlds, creating frameworks from which contingent identities may be articulated intersubjectively and negotiated in discourses through engagement with an Other. I term the degree to which an individual perceives a possibility of a shared life-world with that Other as the degree of intersubjective congruence; the greater the perception of the Other to share in my life-world, the higher the degree of intersubjective congruence and the greater the capacity for intersubjective reification of identity.