Youth Music Bands and Transitional Values in a Trilingual Region

The interconnection between music, identity and relationships is a major issue that sinthesizes many aspects of cultural belonging. According to Firth: “The issue is not how a particular piece of music reflects people, but how it produces them, how it creates and constructs an experience – a musical experience – that we can only make sense of by taking on both a subjective and a collective identity” (Firth, 1996). This paper presents the prosecution of a field research on music in South Tyrol previously carried out on choirs and local traditional music bands; this presentation  regards how music bands of young generations handle multicultural issues, bilingualism debate and the theme of historical ethnic separation in their land. How music can “produce” values through experience? “(…)this definitely involves the often neglected social dimension of musical experience, namely the ways in which having a musical experience inevitably involves one in relationships with others”(Martin 2006), and can overcome social, cultural, even linguistic barriers. In listening to, or performing, music we must, as Schütz (1964) argued, “tune in” our subjectivity to that of others as we follow the succession of sounds in “real time”, thereby constituting the intersubjective “we” which is the foundation of all social experience (Martin 2006).The present field work interact with music as a specific social action carried out by groups. 21 Interviews to 21 different music bands have been carried out to inquire the relation between the choice of a type of music and the outcome of new values, a specific relation to music, a specific relation to and choices of language. Music is inevitably implicated in wider configurations of social actions, thus analizing music action in these configurations can present a variety of “young” approaches to music “sounding” as new responses to political, social and cultural conflictual contexts.