Making music work Culturing youth in an institutional setting

Abstract: This thesis is based on two years of participant observation in a municipal youth club in a Swedish city suburb. In focus is a group of 14-19 year old boys and their relations to peers and to the staff of the club. Rock music playing, the activity they engage in, is studied as a part of the youth club practice, and seen as a communicative process in which relations are lived out. Two approaches are identified; "to go for it" and "to have fun" both of which become important in the boys´ musical awareness, as well as their attitude to life.The youth club is seen as a place where a particular kind of democratic dilemma is grappled with. The club has the pedagogical aim of creating meaningful leisure time on the visitors tenns, but also of disciplining them and functioning as an instrument of guidance into adult life values. Questions of power-relations and institutionalization are discussed through notions of the dialectic of control (Giddens); of authority (Sennett), and of Goffman's analysis of life within public institutions. In this setting, the complexity of power and of growing up in modem society are studied. Both groups; the staff and the visitors, are seen as jointly shaping and recreating a communicative practice through interaction, with music playing as the medium through which relations are transformedand hierarchies seemingly overturned at the same time as social control is cemented and protest limited.