“The music is so important for the dance … You can’t really separate them” : A study of active and passive music listening within the genre of dansband.

Abstract: This is a study about active and passive music listening within the culture of dansband. The purpose of my study is to analyze how the concepts of active and passive music listening operate within the dansband genre and to shed light on the significance of dansband music for its listeners. In addition, I look at the dansband culture to explore how practitioners understand and motivates their engagement with dansband. To this end, I construct a theoretical framework building on previous literature about active and passive music listening. The data consists of qualitative interviews conducted with people who dances and are engaged within the dansband culture. According to the informants, there are a few themes that are more central than others within the dansband culture. I have presented these thematically under the headings “Dansband gives a kind of joy that otherwise is not experienced”, “The question of alcohol”, “Is it possible to separate the dancing from the music and vice versa?”, “Dansband music = music that you can dance to?” and “Skill level in the dance affects the role of music” in an attempt to contribute to a more complex picture of dansband. The results show that the concepts of active and passive music listening could be of better use within dansband if the definitions were wider, seen as a continuum where the concepts could be fluid, and more inclusive when it comes to contextual factors. This is also supported by previous research done in a context of music listening in everyday life.