Doing sociology with musical narratives

This article explores the productive intersection between artsbased research and the sociology of music education. The field of music education has been influenced in various ways by artsbased and arts-informed methodologies and methods; however, music-based methods are slow to be taken up by scholarship in general. As an attempt to redress this, I explore how creative music-making - primarily musical composition - can be deployed as an (auto)ethnographic method when conceptualised as a critical and multilayered form of narrative. I describe how I examine my pre-service primary school teachers musical identities and tease out some of their taken-for-granted notions about musicality by analysing the self-making performances in one student s digital music composing. This discussion of her experiences raise fresh questions about how notions of musical creativity relate to our subjectivities and supports the broader argument that doing sociology with music has much to offer performance-based methods.