132 Notes

Goffman, from whom I earned a PhD at Berkeley, transformed myadolescent Bronx street smarts into an adult ethnographic facility. Hislectures and writings made it clear that a glance or handshake couldbe as systematically described as a class structure or the concentriczone theory of urban growth. Erving first showed me what mundanesociological detail could be. His many extraordinary books are widelyavailable.

Sacks, a lawyer, sociologist, and founder of the discipline of con-versation analysis, was a close friend and then teaching colleague,from graduate students days at Berkeley in 1961 until his fatal autocollision in 1975, while on the faculty at UC Irvine. Its impossible toattribute particular indebtedness for particular inclinations, so perva-sive was his influence. But especially important were his elegant meth-ods of warranting the relevance of social facts as matters that aremethodically known about and produced by the members of a soci-ety, first and foremost, well before sociology comes along; and thesheer range of his discoveries of orderliness in the most minute forms.Goffman first showed us what details might be like, but he was a sortof ethologist, while Sacks was the microbiologist. Notwithstandingmy misgivings about using transcripts to study the activities of talk-ing, as he did, whatever acumen I have for appreciating the possibil-ity of order in the tiniest details was substantially nourished by mylong association with him. His monumental, two-volume, posthu-mously published Lectures on Conversation (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,1991), brilliantly sculpted from his tape-recorded Irvine lectures byDr. Gail Jefferson, is unquestionably among the most innovative,comprehensive, and rigorous documents of twentieth-century socialscience.

Garfinkel developed a sociological perspective called ethno-methodology. Its theoretical speculations furnish a useful point ofdeparture from which to simultaneously address the classical prob-lems of an objective social order while affording the actors perspec-tive a definitional priority. I owe the general concept of a productionaccount to him, and my initial thoughts about ways to study musicwere influenced by our conversations. See his Studies in Ethno-methodology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), andEthnomethodologys Program, Social Psychology Quarterly 59, no.1 (1996), 521.

7. This and the diagrams to follow are necessarily crude. In fact,keyboard topography is characterized by a very rarely noted and yetextremely consequential feature: the distances from each white key