The Role of Music in the Construction of Individuals' Narrative Identities

Many people listen to music on a daily basis. Adolescents and young adults, especially, spend a good amount of their time listening to music. This means that they might use music as a way to crystallize certain moments and specific experiences in their identity narrations Through music, past life experiences are elaborated and adapted to the current context in order to deliver to the self and others a coherent and meaningful story. That is why, this research is set out to explore the role of music in the construction of young adults’ narrative identities by looking at the way they perceive the (changing) role of music in their lives up until their current age. Therefore, it is expected that music is used as an ‘ordering scheme’ to give coherence and unity to one’s identity narration and serves both as a self-reflection tool and as a means to convey a message to the broader socio-cultural environment. In order to examine such intimate processes of memory recollection and identity work, friends and a family member were interviewed. It was revealed that most of them did use music as a temporal container to order the narration of their identity and, within such structure, technology constituted the red thread that characterized and influenced their habits in listening to music and changed participants’ approaches to music experiences. Such experiences are tied up to specific memories of crucial events – or ‘turning points’- that the respondents found relevant and therefore narrated while being interviewed. Starting from their pre-teens years, through their adolescence, up until their current age, their experiences with music changed according to their age and, in most cases, corresponded to a deeper understanding and awareness of who they were and their place in the social world. In some cases, respondents found in music an instrument to grant their identity either a sense of continuity or transformation. In some other cases, music sparkled imaginative practices that allowed some participants to mold and/or escape their identity work. Music, in sum, can be considered as a helpful instrument that contributes to the performance of the choreographies of the lives of the individuals interviewed.