Music and Inter-generational Relationships

Matt Connell has recently published an article in Popular Music based on his work on music and inter-generational relationships. His paper explores ethnographic findings gathered during his work as a DJ and academic, particularly in relation to a community arts project called Talking About Old Records. This project brings together teenagers and older people from a range of backgrounds at collaborative workshops using DJ technology and old records. These facilitate conversations about what music means to the participants.

This paper puts the emphasis on the older people, exploring the emergence of generational

musical identities from the 1940s onwards. Relationships between the spread of personal listeningtechnologies, ‘youth music’ and the birth of the teenager in the 1950s are explored in the context of older people’s fears about a loss of musical sociality, fears which are articulated against a background of cyclical manifestations of intergenerational musical conflict and scandal.

Matt Connell ‘Talking About Old Records: generational musical identity among older people’ in Popular Music (2012) Vol. 31/2, Cambridge University Press, pp. 261-278. doi: 10.1017/S0261143012000074