Interviews

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121 found out that many people, while working in the music live in Milan, lived far away from the city and attended the city only for professional reasons or for the music entertainment. In some cases I managed to meet them before or after music events while in others it was impossible. However, the possibility of conducting interviews via Skype became quite important, especially when I related it with some reflections about the importance of mediated communication practices played in the practices of independent music producers. The interviews were conducted mostly between the period of my fieldwork which lasted from January 2011 to July 2011. 3 preliminary interviews were conducted before the fieldwork started, and 2 interviews were conducted in September 2011 with 2 people I didn’t manage to interview before.

I used semi-structured interviews, meaning that a grid of relevant questions (which can be found in the Appendix) was used as a guide interviewees were given scope to elaborate on particular issues they considered to be important. This grid has been used as a flexible tool and has been adjusted and refined in the course of fieldwork when significant issues have emerged.

The interview usually started as a life story interview (Bertaux, 1976), since my initial input to my interviewees was: “I’d like you to tell me something about your story and your experience in live music in Milan...”. This input enabled me to take into account a diachronic perspective, emphasizing the importance of looking at social relations, and logics of actions.

The life stories are meant as “stories of practices” (Bertaux, 1976), and therefore serve as a way to find out practical knowledge, providing descriptions of personal experiences and their contexts. It was my starting point in order to explore people’s backgrounds, life and career trajectories and personal and professional relationships. Interviewees often described important events, places or people, explained reasons why they changed jobs, why they came to or left Milan.

Hence, while in the initial part of the interview I encouraged my respondents to talk about their own experiences, later I tried to investigate the social discourses gravitating around the meaning of independent music. Talking about the narratives existing around the independent, DIY attitude enabled me to understand the relationships existing between the music industry and with the local state. In this way I wanted to bring out whether the narratives and discourses gravitating around the independency from a local state or from the music industry were still playing a pivotal role in defining the actions, interactions and non-interactions of the respondents. On this concern, one of the issues my respondents were more eager to talk

122 about was the problem the live music sector was facing in Milan, due to restricting measures adopted by the City Council. And as I have explained earlier, this topic became of particular relevance after the closure of several venues and because it was part of the political agenda of the electoral campaign of the left wing party.

In these sense I followed Howard Becker’s (1982) idea that in order to study the conventions of an art world, which are usually taken for granted, the best way is to encourage people to complain about this world. Complaints are in Becker’s idea the best way to bring out conventions.

The assumptions that rely upon this choice is that people are not always able to reflectively talk about their conventions which become customary, while they can be reconstructed by taking into account their complaints and the problems they see in the art world.

Therefore because of the great diversity of people I interviewed, interviews didn’t work always in the same way but instead depending upon the interviewees.

For instance for the two Councilors I interviewed, the idea of using a life story approach was rather impossible, because of the little amount of time they could devote to the interview, and because of the institutional roles they were covering. I opted therefore for a more structured set of questions about the different projects and policies, and their opinions about the situation of live music in Milan. The outcome of these two interviews suggested to me that it was better to study institutional practices from document analysis rather than interviews in which these people were actually giving me a set of standardized answers. As I mentioned before, for example, participant observations I undertook in the municipal offices were of great help in understanding some regulations and bureaucratic constraints music producers face much more that any account I could have received from an interview.

Other methodological challenges in the choice of the interview as a method of inquiry related to the fact that some of the people interviewed were commonly used to the journalistic kind of interview, often being interviewed (especially musicians) or conducting interviews themselves (music journalists and radio speakers) .

Therefore I have to make some differences in the interviews I undertook considering the diversity of my respondents. Interviews worked well in the case especially of venue managers, promoters, and booking agents, people who were not commonly interviewed and who were eager to talk about the problems they were facing with live music.

On the contrary, it was difficult to conduct interviews with radio journalists. In this case of musicians instead, the most established, were commonly used to be interviewed by journalists

123 and I had therefore to differentiate my position from the one of a music journalist, explaining to them the different level of conversation I was trying to establish from a traditional journalistic interview, which is usually shorter and .

6.3.2 Ethnography: Participant Observation, Conversations and Document