Even if Felipe Trotta's decision to devote a thorough study to the vague notion of ‘annoying music’ may appear as somewhat frivolous, his book Annoying Music in Everyday Life proves that the subject deserves serious attention, at least for two reasons. On the one hand, reflecting on ‘annoying music’ may prompt music scholars to reconsider the limits of the concepts of ‘music’, ‘noise’ and ‘sound’, though the author also underlines that ‘this book is about music, not sound or noise’ (p. 16). In contrast to other attempts to think of music as unpleasant disturbance – for instance, Marie Thompson's Beyond Unwanted Sound (Reference Thompson2017), which challenged the pair ‘music vs noise’ – Trotta's research focuses on how ‘music’, ‘noise’ and ‘sound’ are used in everyday discourses on ‘annoying music’, ‘revealing hierarchies between the words and the concepts that define their [people's] experience’ (p. 21). The analysis of this usage necessarily leads to the listeners, their positions and dispositions, since ‘[t]he terms people use to classify and judge sound-music experiences provide at the same time a framework of this judgement and a subjective perspective through which the auditor is feeling and processing the experience’ (p. 39). These topics are discussed primarily in Chapter 1, though they resurface throughout the book, as a kind of conceptual bass.
On the other hand, studying ‘annoying music’ implies studying social conflict caused by music, as ‘music annoys mainly because it makes us face the other, against our will’ (p. 14). Thus, ‘annoying music’ provides an excellent entry point for observing and evaluating many of the aspects that constitute music experiences as social experiences, including the use of public and private space, race ideologies, social class, gender, differences in musical taste, etc. This second aspect is key to the dialogue that Trotta entertains with the book from which he takes inspiration, Tia DeNora's Music in Everyday Life (Reference DeNora2000). Indeed, as he argues, the innovative value of her work ‘lies in the emphasis applied to the individual’, and most of the cases she explores are ‘about music experiences controlled by the interviewees, which allows an overtly positive approach to music's powers’ (p. 178). Instead, Trotta's research emphasizes that music does not only ‘produce the self’, but also ‘challenges the self’ (p. 179), as it plays in the borders of individuals and society.
As DeNora's Music in Everyday Life, this book is based on interviews with individuals about their music experiences. Thus, in the course of two years (2017 and 2018), Trotta (and a few collaborators) did seventy-three interviews in Rio de Janeiro and Edinburgh. Although they tried to achieve a balance among age, gender and social background, in the author's own words this is ‘not a representative corpus, but rather an exploratory qualitative survey’, also considering that the interviewees ‘were selected randomly, first through friendship links and then through recommendations’ (p. 7). It would be easy to criticize the claim (implicit in the title) that the book discusses ‘annoying music’ in general, while it draws on the words of just seventy-three Rio and Edinburgh citizens – a seemingly arbitrary choice. Yet, DeNora's title, Music in Everyday Life, was not less general than Trotta's, even though it drew on interviews done ‘with women of different age groups in metropolitan areas and small towns in the United States and United Kingdom, and four ethnographies of music “in action” within specific social settings’ (DeNora Reference DeNora2000, p. xi) – a corpus that may appear as less exotic, but that is actually not less reduced. In contrast to DeNora, in Annoying Music in Everyday Life we do not find any ethnographies of music ‘in action’, and no field observation, and so readers can only reconstruct the conflicts caused by ‘annoying music’ through the words of its ‘victims’, and through Trotta's thoughtful, sometimes brilliant commentaries on them. Yet, these never quite compensate for the obscuration of the differences between Rio's and Edinburgh's social, cultural and musical contexts, which now and then can be deduced or imagined from interview passages but are only partially addressed (mainly in Chapter 6). Are ideas of ‘home’ the same in Edinburgh and Rio? Is social etiquette, what can be said to others or not, similar in both places? Here and there we get hints that this is actually not so, but the author is primarily interested in constructing a general discourse on ‘annoying music’ based on the data he has collected: differences are either ignored or dealt with in a way that does not challenge the book's main purpose.
The objections that I have just formulated, however, are not exactly aimed at Annoying Music in Everyday Life, but at the uncritical acceptance of empirical research methods in popular music studies, where invoking ‘qualitative research’ too often prevents from asking further methodological questions. However, in this book Trotta presents plenty of evidence for the usefulness of ‘annoying music’ to address a wealth of interesting topics, including the challenges to privacy posed by music intruding from outside (Chapter 2), musical conflicts in sharing public and private spaces (Chapter 3), the relationship of music and violence (Chapter 4), the conflicts caused by differences in musical taste and the moral values attached to certain music genres (Chapter 5), and a final consideration of ‘annoying music’ as a way to deal with others (Chapter 6). Generally speaking, the book's interest increases as the author focuses less on conceptual problems and digs instead in the thick surface of social conflicts triggered by music, demonstrating that no music is ‘just music’. While Trotta's discourse is based on the individual voices of interviewees, who mostly present themselves as ‘victims’ of the music of others, readers are mostly left in the dark about the motives of those who may inadvertently disturb others with their music or may even want to disturb others to reclaim a space in the world. Yet, in the dialogue the author establishes with the interviewees’ words, he succeeds in bringing in the social aspects involved in individual listening experiences, going beyond ‘the idea of “individual” rights and the self’ that ‘is usually overemphasized’ (p. 179) in complaints about music. In this sense, it is worth noting that, like DeNora's Music in Everyday Life, this book refers to ‘music’ as a category that would encompass all musical genres, including both live and recorded music practices, whereas most of the reported examples involve recorded music. A chapter or section dealing with differences between human reactions to annoying recorded music and annoying live music would have been a useful addition to this volume.
Although Trotta cannot possibly deal, in just one book, with all the potentially infinite situations in which music may disturb somebody, Annoying Music in Everyday Life hopefully will inspire other authors to further explore some of them, or other contexts. As the author recognises (p. 6), his work adds to a series of more or less recent publications that investigate what he calls the ‘negative’ side of music experience and practice, including its association with violence (Johnson and Cloonan Reference Johnson and Cloonan2009), or with historical ideas of disease (Kennaway Reference Kennaway2012) – a research line that effectively contrasts the regular (though trite) appreciation of music as a universal force for good. This book is also a rare example of scholarship in that it combines the usual Anglo references with very interesting ones by Latin American researchers, written mostly in Portuguese and Spanish.
