»It's that music you listen to in the underground without headphones!«. Musical evaluation practices of young people in Vienna

Abstract

This article provides a sociocultural and musicological perspective on the question of how and whereby adolescents negotiate their musical preferences and rejections. The aim of the underlying research is to explain what students in Vienna intuitively grasp and evaluate regarding the music they are listening to in the context of their shared musical experience. An analysis of group discussions, which were conducted with 16- to 18-year-old students, is the core of the article. It displays the adoles­cents' conjunctive musical knowledge and aesthetic opinions. Further, group discus­sions showed that the currently successful genre of Deutschrap (German rap) has a high discursive relevance. The results are discussed with reference to pat­terns of orientation in music evaluation, assuming that the adolescents' music-re­lated legitimation processes take place along a rather narrow borderline between conformity and deviance.