‘Forever piping songs forever new’: The musical teenager and musical inner teenager across the life course

Abstract

Age is a flexible construction. It takes shape in relation to a social distribution of cultural resources for the configuration of age-specific identities. It is spatially and temporally produced. This chapter describes how musical engagement can produce anachronistic enactments of age-linked categories. Studying the ways that music is appropriated for this purpose highlights age-banded categories—adolescence included—as identity performances, constituted through musical practices, tastes, listening habits, and engagement. Music can also facilitate anachronistic age identities and these may offer developmental opportunities as well as opportunities for asylum (shelter from distressing features of daily life). This chapter explores how ‘reverting’ to adolescent musical practices and tastes affords the identity performance of the ‘inner teen’. It concludes that using music for age-band travel can be catalytic for major life change as well as for smaller processes of adaptation and coping.