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Tia DeNora is Professor of Sociology of Music at the University of Exeter and director of the SocArts Research Group at Exeter. Her main research focus is sociology of music, especially music's uses and powers in social life. With a PhD in Sociology from the University of California San Diego (1989), she has worked at the University of Wales Cardiff (1989-1992) and then at the University of Exeter. She has been chair of the European Sociological Association Network on Sociology of the Arts and Vice President of the International Sociological Association Research Committee on Sociology of the Arts. She has served as co-editor of the Manchester University Press series, Music and Society and the Ashgate Series on Music &#38; Change. She also serves on the editorial boards of Qualitative Research, Methodological Innovations, Cultural Sociology, British Journal of Music Education, Radical Musicology and Music and Arts in Action (edited by a team of current and past students of SocArts research group).She has recently completed a longitudinal study on mental health, in collaboration with Dr Gary Ansdell, which has given way to a three-volume publication with Ashgate (Vol. 1 Music Asylums: Wellbeing Through Music in Everyday Life (2013); Vol. 2 How Music Helps in Music Therapy and Everyday Life; Vol. 3 Musical Pathways in Recovery). She is the author of Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: musical politics in Vienna 1792-1803 (1995, Fayard), After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology (2000, Cambridge University Press), Music in Everyday Life (2000, Cambridge University Press), Music-in-action: essays in sonic ecology (2011, Ashgate), and, more recently, Making Sense of Reality: culture and perception in everyday life (2014, Sage). Interview by Nuné Nikoghosyan (February 2016)How did you decide to take on the academic path and become a researcher?From the moment I took ‘Intro to Sociology’ with an amazing teacher at West Chester University I knew I wanted to combine music studies with sociology. But I never made a clear ‘decision’ to be a researcher. In fact, I almost did an MA in Creative Writing! I was offered a place and funding to specialize in poetry! (Perhaps it’s just as well it was the road not taken.) Instead I went to University of California, San Diego, got exposed to the most wonderful mentors, eventually got a fellowship (first job) at Cardiff and, as it usually happens, just got stuck in thereafter!How did you become involved in studying music, in particular? I was seriously involved with music during high school and early university (my instrument was flute; nowadays I only play the baroque recorder at home for pleasure – Bach, Telemann, that sort of thing). When I got to university we had to study every instrument, to get a feeling of what each was like to play. We also studied conducting, voice (I was terrible!), and piano – just at a basic level but it was a splendid all-around education.In your experience, have there been major changes or tendencies in the field of sociology of music since you started your career? I like to think so! I’ve written a lot about this but the gist is that increasingly there’s a focus on (a) music in action and (b) the specifically musical features of socio-musical activity and engagement. I think people are realizing just how active a medium music is and – under some circumstances of use – how powerful. In many ways these developments build upon earlier work in the production of culture. Another part of this move has included growing respect for the pioneers of the ‘everyday’ perspective and the ‘popular music’ focus, e.g., as laid out in the early work of Simon Frith, Paul Willis, Howard S Becker and Antoine Hennion, and more recently (I like to think) in the work we do here at Exeter in SocArts. We've come a long way from the focus on homologies or parallels between music and social structure!In your latest publication, Making Sense of Reality: culture and perception in everyday life (2014, Sage) you call for a “slow sociology”. How is it different from and/or more rewarding than “fast” sociology? I think I said that “slow sociology” involved attention to detail and sustained involvement with what happens locally and in real time. The method typically associated with this involvement is ethnography and that takes time. It’s different from the “quick” methods of finding out about things. For example, a survey may take no more than fifteen minutes to complete and, if the results are entered into a spread sheet, analysis can be done in seconds! But it isn’t that I’m anti-speed; there may sometimes be good reasons for running surveys! The question is rather what can spending more time achieve? For me the answer has to do with ‘ecological validity’. In other words, does what we think we think we have “found” as social researchers match up with people’s actual experience and how can we know? Well, as Paul Atkinson’s put it in his recent book For Ethnography (Sage 2015) ethnography means being with people as time unfolds and as social action develops. This way of making knowledge doesn’t presume too much in advance about why, when and where people act and experience in the ways they do. The so-called structural causes of action can be often over-stated, and action over-simplified. It’s complexity that we want to tease out in our study of social life. One of my mentors, Bennett Berger once said, that the notion of ‘social structure’ is, ‘after all, an idea…[and] there is a great deal of research space for empirical discoveries’ (Berger 1995: 158). We don’t want to deduce too much without actually exploring and, worse, we want to take care not to say we’ve seen or visited a form of world when our encounter was so rushed that all we do is affirm our preconceptions. It can take a lot of time before we begin to see what’s new or different from that which we expect to see.What, in your opinion, can the study of culture in everyday life teach sociologists more generally? That culture is – as Raymond William’s discussed in Keywords – a verb as well as a noun. We need to look at how we humans make culture, just as culture makes us. I think the study of culture in everyday life helps us to see the reflexive relationship between action, culture and experience. And, as I’ve already said, the study of everyday life can challenge our presumptions and expectations by confronting them with the actual stuff that people do and often do without thinking.According to Howard S Becker, sociology and photography share a common goal – exploring society. Would you say that sociology and music also have something in common?Absolutely. I love to introduce my students to Becker’s writings for this reason. Becker continually calls our attention to what sociology, perhaps ironically given its status as the science of human sociability, often ignores and that is people doing things together! This doing together involves lots of things. It’s rich and multi-textured and full of happenstance. It involves specificities - materials, conventions and adaptations, and forms of practice that are embodied and, usually, situated in place and time. (I only wish I could say all this as plainly as Becker does!) As to whether sociology and music share a common goal (or perhaps goals), yes they do. As John Blacking once put it, ‘music is not an escape from reality; it is an adventure into reality’. In other words, as I see it, and in Becker’s sense, sociology and music seek to explore the world using different media and different practices. But both are involved in bringing that world to light (and thus to our attention) and that means that both are involved in helping not only to explore the world but also to make it. The trick in either case is to find ways of doing this making that comprehend complexity and that – at different times, to different groups of people – feel valid and help us in the project of living and getting along together. So sociology, photography, and music all offer ways of knowing, and all are, and offer possibilities for, aesthetic and cognitive experience. Whether that experience involves coming to think of yourself as a member of a group (e.g., a man or a woman, young or old) or as affiliated with or expressed through a kind of music, the process is – if not identical – then similarly oriented.What other ongoing or future projects could you somewhat tell us about? I’ve just finished a long-term project on community music therapy and mental health. This was an ethnographic study in collaboration with Gary Ansdell, a most extraordinary music therapist and a key figure in of Community Music Therapy. I think our book comes out in February 2016 (from Routledge). If it’s ok to promote it here, the title is, Musical Pathways in Recovery: Community Music Therapy and Mental Wellbeing. I’ve also just got involved with a potential project in company with one of my colleagues here at Exeter, Giovanna Colombetti, a philosopher whose done some brilliant work on embodied cognition and extended mind/emotions. Joel Kreuger, another wonderful philosopher here is also involved in this work. And I took part in a small project last year with Eric Clarke and Jonna Vuoskoski at Oxford on music, empathy and understanding. Longer term I’m hoping to take part in an ethnographic study of music in hospital settings and Gary and I have further ideas in the pipeline. I’m also very open to new opportunities for collaboration. I love collaboration! (Though I also really love the so-called loneliness of archival research and writing!) Probably the thing that gives me greatest happiness is the work I do with other members of SocArts here at Exeter. This is a remarkable group of early to mid-career scholars. You can learn more about them at this url: https://socialsciences.exeter.ac.uk/sociology/research/culture/socarts/Image: by consent from Tia DeNora