On Becoming a Rock Musician

H. Stith Bennett

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231544405
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

In the 1960s and 1970s, becoming a rock musician was fundamentally different than playing other kinds of music. It was a learned rather than a taught skill. In On Becoming a Rock Musician, sociologist H. Stith Bennett observes what makes someone a rock musician and what persuades others to take him seriously in this role. The book explores how bands form; the backstage and onstage reality of playing in a band; how bands promote themselves and interact with audiences and music professionals like DJs; and the role of performance.

Part I

Group Dynamics

1

Introduction

GROUPS AND GOOD MUSIC

Becoming a rock musician is not a process which is steeped in the history, theory, and pedagogy of prestigious academies; nor is it a learning experience which is guided by an informal tradition of teachers and teachings. Becoming a rock musician is not even a process of apprenticeship. In fact, rock music is learned to a much greater extent than it is ever taught by teachers. Where Western European art musicians are created through a formal academic (and by this time “classical”) educational system, and jazz musicians can rely on either the art music process or an apprenticeship in an informal “school” of players, the potential rock musician meets no externally formulated educational institution and relies instead upon resources which are internal to local groups for the experiences of recruitment and learning. Although the spontaneous institution of the local rock band is the typical career route from non-musician to rock musician, it is not conceptualized as an educational form, but as an economically legitimated musical form. In a few words, the career of becoming a rock musician is simply being in a local rock group.

To a great extent this is what is meant by calling something popular. Popular things are widely distributed, things that anyone can come in contact with, things that are shared by entire communities, and things that require no prior training to appreciate. While elite musicians are required to train and pass tests, the status passage to rock musician is easy—anyone who can manage to play in a rock group can claim the identity. In this sense there are no students taking notes in the classrooms of rock, there are simply inexperienced groups. Likewise, nobody “flunks out” of rock music—a situation which is aided by the existence of a highly differentiated set of categories for musician. Rock musicians “bootstrap” themselves into existence, instantaneously invoking an identity which is perhaps only a claim, but a claim which has its own legitimating principle in the form of group and community membership. It is thought, perhaps not completely incorrectly, that social identity is the source of musical skill and creativity. In any event it should be understood that the learning processes which I delineate take place after a person has initiated a self-definition by becoming a member of a rock group.

It is striking, in an age in which much sociological knowledge has become common knowledge, to observe the degree to which initial attempts at group formation by would-be rock musicians ignore the prevailing cultural concerns with the interpersonal problems that groups of any kind are now known to create. This is not to say that such problems do not exist, but rather that the conscious focus of group interaction in this case is sound. And, for those who are just beginning, ideas about sound and ways of making particular sounds are absorbing problems. At first a pool of potential rock musicians is intermingled with a great many non-musicians, and there is no set of experiences upon which to draw for integrating the group in such a way that collective performance is possible. Instead, there are single musicians, musicians with non-musician friends, non-musician “managers” with and without musicians to manage, musicians in twos and threes, some the remnants of previously unsuccessful group formation attempts, most from the immediate region but also some who have moved from other parts of the country. The thread which holds together the interaction of this seemingly disintegrated, usually disenfranchised, and inexperienced pool of musicians is the exchange of ideas about listening to and playing music. The attempt to establish a specialized identity produces the integrative conversational phenomenon of shop talk. It is a consuming interest in elaborate exploratory conversations about how recorded sounds are made that separates beginning rock musicians from their non-musician cohorts—who appreciate listening to music but whose interest is not sustained by the endless ramifications of musical shop talk. Undoubtedly this process is contextualized by the continuing attempts of various media operators to promote sales of recordings and instruments by promoting talk about their latest product, but the specificity and detail of aspiring musician talk goes beyond the anticipations of businessmen. Sometimes it reveals confusion and ignorance, at others hyperbole and heightened expectations of musical success, and at others precise descriptions and demonstrations of musical possibilities. But always it is a revelation of ways to control sound.

This leads to a set of specialized questions: What kinds of sound control knowledge could beginning musicians possibly possess? Where could that knowledge come from? What are the connections between claiming specialized knowledge about sound and the ways in which performances are actually presented? Apparently the musical expertise which is created during the period of transition from non-musician to rock performer cannot be explained through conventional patterns of teaching and pedagogy. Although some enterprising schools of popular music have sprung up in large urban areas,¹ and some longstanding colleges and universities have admitted the study of popular music through “appreciation” and history courses, rock musicians typically combine the availability of instrumental lessons from a private instructor (usually at a music store) and some formal art music instruction (perhaps in high school or at a local college) with the more important resource of a group relationship as the source of skills. Without someone to show them how, rock musicians learn to make music together by talking about “getting a group together,” by finding places to practice, by talking about instruments and equipment and acquiring what materials they consider necessary, by getting gigs, by gaining access to compositions and learning how to play them, and, most importantly, by ceaselessly assessing who and what “sounds good.” The interaction which accompanies the grouping and regrouping of rock bands is itself the critical factor in producing the initial expertise of rock performers.

In this sense, the conduct of rock musicians, like any other form of human conduct, cannot be understood unless some general features of human group life are recognized and respected. Perhaps the most crucial feature of any group is that the definitions and interpretations which comprise its collective knowledge are impelled by and shaped through interactional events. Acts and objects are not endowed with intrinsic meanings; they are, instead, only as meaningful as groups care to make them. The situations in which their music is created and performed and the meanings which come to be attached to the innumerable immediate events of their musical endeavors are, then, the fundamental elements of knowledge that rock musicians share with one another. In the phraseology of W. I. Thomas, rock musicians negotiate a collective “definition of the situation”² in that the things they treat as real are therefore made “real in their consequences.”³ This includes not only interactional events, but “things” such as electronic equipment, ways of transporting personnel and equipment, practice sites, and places to play for money. And it also invests with a special group reality a class of “things” which are usually thought to be exclusively musical in their genesis: notational systems, instruments, and techniques of practice and performance. While these are, indeed, of immense musical importance, they also fall well within the sociological domain, since they comprise the primary interactional form among rock musicians. In contrast to academic music worlds, these objectively real components of the rock music world are subject to renegotiation by all participants at all times. A respect for the intricate and subtle process which makes musical matters real for aspiring rock groups recognizes the existence of an even more complex musical phenomenon: There is more than one way to listen to sounds and, therefore, more than one way to hear them. In actuality, numerous socially produced ways of listening—musical aesthetics—coexist, and even compete as approaches to the perception of any particular musical performance. This idea combines traditional sociological concerns with human definitions and a new sociological concern with musical definitions. It admits the existence of interactionally created aural aesthetics and recognizes that collectivities act as the influences which shape individuals’ styles of sonic attention.

Aesthetic is not a term which is usually associated with popular music, since its most familiar association is with evaluations of “the fine arts” or with philosophical principles dealing with “the beautiful.”⁴ Given this shade of meaning, aesthetic means “good”—but “good” in the special sense of “formally correct” or “proper.” The term has a more generic meaning, however, and, in that sense, is appropriate to the discussion of any type of music, including popular music. This is the sense in which the social appropriateness of music—its “fit” with its audience—is the standard of its “goodness.” In this area sociological insight can provide a corrective to the kinds of cultural understanding (or misunderstanding) which may prevail at any given historical period: The distinction can always be made between an audience’s collective assimilation of a “good” performance (the listeners’ aesthetic) and the musicians’ collective creation of a “good” performance (the musicians’ aesthetic). This dynamic, which in its general form is important in all professions, is certainly operating with respect to musical “standards” and points to the existence, sequencing, and shaping of social change.

Musicians’ aesthetics can often endure social change; listeners’ aesthetics rarely do. For example, the Western European art music tradition supplies its contemporary personnel with the information and skills necessary to perform a huge number of compositions in a variety of styles, yet only a very few of these can be successfully presented to a general audience. However enduring musicians’ aesthetics may be, non-musicians cannot always share them, for, with social change—the disintegration and reintegration of social groups and social identities—comes the reinterpretation and redefinition of innumerable existing objects, among which are the audiences’ rules for “what sounds good.” The possibilities for a lack of “fit” between musician and non-musician aesthetics are more common than established academic musicians care to recognize, even though experienced performers in all genres are resigned to playing for audiences in which only a minority is actually following their artistic intentions—or those of the composer. The majority of the typical contemporary audience is present for reasons other than the activation of careful musical attention, yet this alienated presence in the audience is rarely recognized in polite conversation. Even upon such recognition, it is important to note that, in contrast to the perennial possibilities for feuding among artists, the relationship between musicians and non-musicians is seldom antagonistic. Rather, when the compositions of a music culture become so differentiated from their human origins that they are no longer associated with a living aesthetic, the “goodness” of new materials—a new way of listening—is invited by musicians and non-musicians alike.

Those who perceive the weakening of ties between musicians and their audiences have the opportunity to make an enterprise out of their perceptions by attempting to define new audiences or new music or both. To the extent that there are new found ways of fitting audiences, compositions, and performances together, there is evidence for the existence of cultural entrepreneurs who sense the historical circumstances of potential audiences and convert them into markets for specific musical products.⁵ The case of rock music, like popular music in general, exhibits one of the most recent entrepreneurial efforts at perpetrating a fit between musical performances and the life conditions of contemporary audiences. Significantly, it incorporates comparatively recent technical possibilities for making and distributing sound events in ways that the established music cultures do not utilize. Throughout the history of music new audience attention has been facilitated by technical innovation in sound-making (like putting metal strings on violins), in composing (like the mensural notation system), and in distribution (like the printing press). Music traditions could have survived—that is, new musicians could have been trained to perform—without technical innovation. But the vitality of the fit between musicians and the living, breathing people who might come to hear their music has always been negotiated in the company of technical changes. How the latest manifestations of audience enthusiasm have been managed—how a fit could possibly be negotiated between hundreds of thousands of musicians and many millions of listeners—is, therefore, intertwined with an analysis of sound control techniques and the enterprising people that make use of them.

The concept of greatest importance to this kind of analysis is the idea of a socially negotiated musical reality system. Howard Becker (among many others) has used the idea of convention to refer to the socially constructed aspects of any art form.

People who cooperate to produce a work usually do not decide things afresh. Instead, they rely on earlier agreements now become customary, agreements that have become part of the conventional way of doing things in that art.

Conventions place strong constraints on t...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Legacy Editions
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Foreword to the Legacy Edition
• Preface
• A Guide for the Reader
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Group Dynamics
• Part II: Rock Ecology
• Part III: Mastering the Technological Component
• Part IV: Performance: Aesthetics and the Technological Imperative
• Afterword
• Appendix: Loudness and Equalization
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index