Las encomiendas en la Administración Local de Navarra

Growing up in a working class family in Malta and being highly involved in the classical music scene, I went through different phases in my relationship to music. As a child, studying classical music as well as being a very diligent student at school, set me apart from my school mates in such a way that I was not considered as one of them by my peers. I was different in that I was not up to date with the latest releases and because of long hours of practicing music I could not hang out with them. Till my early teens, I had a love- hate relationship with classical music. I loved it deep down, yet it was the cause of a lot of pain in that I felt I was not like the others, and was not completely accepted by them. As I grew up, I learnt to disregard what others thought of me and took pride in my musical achievements, aspiring to become an orchestral player and work in an environment where others shared the same passion for classical music. Within this environment I found colleagues who were highly involved in both classical music and rock music, for instance, or classical music and jazz. I myself started exploring several types of music and reflecting on the sociological side of all this.

In my dissertation for MA in Youth and Community Studies ‘Life’s Soundtracks’ (2007), I researched why rock musicians and classical musicians had chosen this particular genre of music as their favourite music and as the music they perform. The study revealed that the most influential factors had been the parents and siblings and what they listened to during the respondents’ childhood. Peers also had some influence on them but this started towards adolescence. Moreover, it was highlighted that capital accumulated through music was a very class-based form of capital. Classical music was considered as cultural capital which, combined with social capital, was considered as having a possible role in social mobility. In this dissertation I referred to North’s (2006) quantitative research on people’s musical preferences reflecting their lifestyle. My critique was that quantitative research on its own was not adequate for this type of study since respondents were limited to

preconceived responses when describing their own characters in relation to the their preferred music, what types of drug they used, how often and so on. Quantitative studies like North’s do not give the opportunity to the researcher to understand the participants in their own terms but rather tries to understand participants’ actions and choices through preconceived ideas formed by the researcher. These ideas might be limited, leaving out areas which might be significant to the participants. They can also be rather rigid, making fluidity in participants’ choices problematic to be reflected in the findings.

The focus of the present research developed through a number of stages. Having taken the MA research as a spring board, originally I started with the idea of highlighting gender differences in the way young men and young women consumed leisure and how it affected them. I became engrossed in reading literature about leisure, particularly Veblen’s work on conspicuous leisure and its connections with social class and Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural and social capital. The limitations of this present study made it impossible to keep leisure general so the focus needed to be on specific leisure. The idea was that respondents would be from four specific genres of music, which might be considered as music subcultures: classical, pop, rock and jazz. These particular subcultures were chosen because of their diverse styles and because of their popularity with different sections of Maltese society. After critically reading literature about subcultures and their characteristics, I conducted some pilot interviews with both young men and young women and through these interviews, it became evident that my research question needed re- viewing. Firstly, the notion of subcultures needed re-thinking in Maltese contemporary society, in a similar way as it did in other European countries. Cultural items that signify particular subcultures are continuously being absorbed in mainstream cultures, since the distinct features of subcultures are adopted by mainstream consumers as well. Moreover, members of subcultures are increasingly adopting a stance of preserving individuality as well as committing themselves to a subculture. Therefore, respondents could not be placed into clean cut categories of such specific subcultures or types of music they listened to, since they very often liked more than one type of music simultaneously and very often these were very different types of music. People also changed their music preferences over time, at times going back to liking music they used to like, or liking completely different music to what they used to like. Thus, Maltese society was characterized by fluidity and hybridity of tastes since young people seemed to like more than one type of music and their identity was a combination of several influences and lifestyles. Therefore, a different

way of categorisation needed to be deployed: that which considered the way young people make meanings of the music they listen to, rather than the type of music they listen to. Secondly, I found that research in this area was most commonly based on male participants. Since there were no other studies to my knowledge which researched the identity of young Maltese women, the focus of this study developed into researching the way young women in the Maltese context, incorporate the music they listen to, into their everyday discourses and identities.

In this study, the term ‘young women’ refers to adolescent and young adult females and reflects the age group that will be researched. ‘Young women’ was preferred to ‘girls’ since the term ‘girls’ usually refers to children and adolescents and as feminists and others have argued, it is important to be respectful of young people (Batsleer, 2008, pp.85-86; Batsleer, 2013). The term ‘girls’ can be considered as slightly demeaning by some. Although both terms are culturally loaded with meaning, ‘young women’ will be consistently used in this study simply to refer to the section of society that are female and young adults.