Evert Bisschop Boele's PhD research project, carried out within the Prince Claus Conservatoire/research group Lifelong Learning in Music and the Arts of Hanze University of Applied Sciences, Groningen, focuses on the way individuals talk about the uses and functions of music in their daily life in current Western society, i.c. in the Dutch province of Groningen in the years 2010-2011.

The research project uses narrative/biographical interviews as its main data. The interviews are carried out with a wide variety of over thirty individuals: male and female, young and old, living in towns or rural areas, with a variety of educational, social and economic backgrounds, musicians (amateur and professional) and music listeners, music lovers and music haters, and related to any genre of music: from hardcore punk via classical music and Latin music to Dutch-language schlager.

The research is in a sense an attempt to give an ethnographic account of what makes music worthwhile in people’s lives today. It focuses on the stories people themselves tell about what music means for them, and about how they have used music in everyday life throughout their lives. Through focusing on these very specific individual stories and linking them to more general `stories’ about music in journals, the internet or on television, Evert Bisschop Boele hopes to show which various discourses about what music really `is’ are at play in our late-modern Western society.

The ultimate aim of the research project is to enable musicians to reflect on their role as musicians in society, and on their connection to their (possible) audiences. The research does this by making available an ethnographic account which may help professional musicians and music students to reflect on their reason(s) for being (or wanting to be) a musician, on their personal relation to the various discourses on music circulating in society, and on the roles they, as musicians, can play in other people’s lives. Given the change of the music profession towards more and more flexible and portfolio careers, as well as the more and more pressing questions from society-at-large in the direction of music and the arts, these kinds of reflections will probably grow in importance the coming decade.

The PhD research project is supervised by prof. dr. dr. Peter Alheit of the Georg August Universität Göttingen (Germany).