Music Sociology

Value, Technology, and Identity

Raphaël Nowak, Andy Bennett

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780429559877
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Médias et arts de la scène
• Categoria: Musique

Music Sociology critically evaluates current approaches to the study of music in sociology and presents a broad overview of how music is positioned and represented in existing sociological scholarship. It then goes on to offer a new framework for approaching the sociology of music, taking music itself as a starting point, and considering what music sociology can learn from related disciplines such as critical musicology, ethnomusicology, and cultural studies.

As a central form of leisure, consumption, and cultural production, music has attracted significant attention from sociologists who seek to understand its deeper socio-cultural meaning. With case studies that address sound environments, consumption, media technologies, local scenes, music heritage, and ageing, the authors highlight the distinctive nature of musical experience, and show how sociology can illuminate it. Providing both a survey of existing perspectives the sociology of music, and a thought-provoking discussion of how the field can move forward, this concise and accessible book will be a vital reading for anyone teaching or studying music from a sociological standpoint.

1Situating the Sociology of Music

DOI: 10.4324/​9780429264856-2

Auguste Comte, who is often and mistakenly thought to have coined the term ‘sociology’ that gave its name to the discipline¹, told us that music is ‘… the most social of all arts’ (in Shepherd and Devine, 2015a: 2). It is music’s ontological character to be a social form of culture. The social life of music includes – but is not limited to – collective labour in its production, negotiations of its meaning and conventions by a range of cultural intermediaries, and processes of inclusion and exclusion in the diffusion of music and expression of a taste for it. Yet, although the ‘social’ would evidently be thought to be sociology’s primary object of research, and despite music’s social nature, music and sociology have made for an odd couple for quite a long time. The sociology of music is often regarded as a subfield of sociology and/or cultural sociology. As such, its aim often consists of deploying the tools of sociological investigation and social theory to the field of (popular) music. However, the discipline still largely lacks properly defined boundaries. By and large, the sociology of music borrows many of its conceptual tools from a range of disciplines (Bennett, 2008; Marshall, 2011; Shepherd and Devine, 2015a, 2015b), such as popular music studies, cultural studies, musicology and ethnomusicology, music psychology, media studies, gender studies, and music journalism. This multidisciplinarity means, first, that the sociology of music is ‘… a rapidly developing and dynamic area of intellectual activity’ (Shepherd and Devine, 2015b: xi) because of its renewal through the addition of other disciplines’ concepts. Moreover, this is justified by the fact that ‘… sociology is not merely the application to music of established sociological theories and empirics’, but rather ‘… an invitation to a cross-disciplinary conversation’ (Shepherd and Devine, 2015b: xi). However, the sociology of music’s multidisciplinarity also means for others that the discipline has not ‘fully realised’ itself (Marshall, 2011), which brings us to our second point, which is that ‘no coherent field of music sociology has developed’ (Peterson and Dowd, 2004: 195). The sociology of music is, therefore, traversed by a contradiction: it is a vibrant and yet poorly contoured field of research.

Throughout this book, we do diligence to the cross- and multi-disciplinary conversations that define the discipline and which enrich our approach to generate an understanding of the diffusion of music in the social. Many of the authors we reference and draw on in this manuscript hail from various academic disciplines, as their inputs have enlightened what we know about music. However, our aim is also to attempt to provide a perspective that is sociological, and which, in its own fashion, contributes to further define the conceptual boundaries of the discipline. As such, we do not wish to suggest that the multidisciplinarity of the sociology of music is per se an issue. Instead, we note in this chapter that some of the disparities in knowledge production in the sociology of music are based on different disciplinary influences. Of course, every scholarly field is defined by theoretical disputes. What possibly denotes the sociology of music from other sociological fields for instance is that its very multidisciplinarity could well be the source of different foci on the social life of music, and, in the end, of different conceptual perspectives on what music is as a sonic and/or cultural object. In other words, these disparities, rooted within different theoretical paradigms, can be the source of contention within the sociology of music, while at the same time, not actually shedding light on the same phenomena around, or aspects of, music. In that regard, music can be described as a ‘boundary object’ (see Star and Griesemer, 1989; Bowker and Star, 1999; McSherry, 2001; Law, 2004; Strathern, 2004; Star, 2010; Nowak and Whelan, 2014, 2016), in the sense that the word carries enough shared meaning for authors to debate over it whereas they might be highlighting different aspects of the social life music. We come back to this notion in the first section of this chapter. We also note in this chapter that the sociology of music, and particularly the sociology of audiences, has become increasingly divided within separate paradigms – one that is ‘constructivist’ and another that is ‘structuralist’. We critically analyse both of these paradigms in Sections 1.2 and 1.3 of this chapter. Then, in Section 1.4, we defend our approach to music as a cultural object. Overall, this chapter aims to situate the sociology of music as a discipline and it provides a critical evaluation of the sociology of music, of its different orientations and paradigms.

1.1 A brief perspective on the discipline

Let us begin with the following remark by Andy Bennett: ‘An immediate problem facing anyone committed to the task of mapping out a conceptual territory for cultural sociology in relation to popular music is where to begin’ (2008: 419). One – maybe arbitrary – way to start such mapping consists here of exploring and analysing what music sociologists say of, and about, their own discipline. Because of the blurriness of the sociology of music, some principles are sometimes laid out by authors themselves, in an attempt to cohere a conceptual perspective in the discipline. In this section, we critically review some of the critical statements and arguments that have been made about the sociology of music, as a way to understand its inner disciplinary logic. We also attempt to trace a rapid genealogical perspective on the development of the discipline in order to demonstrate how its multidisciplinarity manifests in various degrees across sociological accounts on music. This will lead us to consider music sociologists’ relationship to music as text, before we point out how music is in fact a ‘boundary object’, due to its evasiveness and to the generalisation of claims made about it.

Music is a human and social activity (Small, 1998; Hennion et al., 2000). As we noted in the introduction to this book, it is borne out of human labour, often collaborative, and it is produced with the intention of meeting an audience (see, for example, Hennion, 1981). It is, therefore, only logical that music makes for a particularly relevant sociological object. However, the type of object of sociological investigation that music is remains quite contentious among music sociologists. In exploring the literature, we note that music sociologists have provided a plethora of principles when it comes to defining the discipline and its boundaries. In a special issue of the scholarly journal Poetics entitled ‘making music sociology: an introduction’, Richard A. Peterson and Tim Dowd (2004: 195) state that ‘… music has been a research site for answering a wide range of sociologically important questions’ (see also Peterson, 2000). Or elsewhere, we find that ‘The sociology of music illuminates how sociologists examine various dimensions of social life more generally’ (Roy and Dowd, 2010: 198). Typically, music becomes an entry point for sociologists to explore other domains of social life. That is because sociologists ‘… highlight the shared cognition that lies behind and enables musical life’, and they ‘explicate how musical life is imbedded in larger contexts’ (Dowd, 2002: 1). Peterson (2000) thus highlights six main questions for sociologists of music: the links between societal structure and music, the shaping of music worlds, the social construction of musical aesthetics, the institutionalisation of music fields, the use of music in status distinction making, and musical components of identity formation. The type of research that ensues from such questions locate ‘… the social shaping of art works much closer to prosaic matters involved in getting things (any sort of things) done – the interaction order, materials, patterns and institutions of music making, gatekeepers and arbiters, technologies’ (DeNora, 2004: 212). Those are certainly among the main concerns and topics of research that sociologists of music have in mind. In that regard, the sociology of music has greatly extended its reach since its inception.

Music appeared as a sociological object in the writings of Max Weber (1958 [1921]; see also Martin, 1995) in relation the rationalisation of music, or in Georg Simmel’s (1911; see also Etzkorn, 1964) call for empirical sociological work on music. It is, however, with the writings of Theodor Adorno (1973, 1976, 2009) that music becomes a core focus of attention for sociologists. Writing from a Marxist perspective, and a prolific contributor to the Frankfurt School of critical theory, Adorno is certainly the most iconic example of a critical thinker on music. To some (Shepherd, 2001), he is the ‘father’ of the sociology of music. Tia DeNora (2003: 3) adds to this by stating that ‘Adorno did, arguably, more to theorise music’s powers than any other scholar during the first half of the twentieth century’. Adorno was interested in both ‘art’ music and popular music (Shepherd and Devine, 2015a). He considered that ‘[c]ultural products, in so far as they evinced particular modes of praxis in their formal arrangements, could, for example, heighten or suppress human critical, perceptual, and expressive faculties’ (DeNora, 2003: 10). In that regard, popular music was regarded as commodified and standardised, with consumers knowing what to expect from what Adorno referred to as ‘pre-digested’ rhythmic and melodic formats, and predictable song structures. As a consequence, argued Adorno, audiences became passive recipients of popular music, which held no surprises and thus presented no intellectual challenge for the audience. The context in which Adorno wrote was one where, according to Robert Hullot-Kentor (2009: 6), the editor of Current of Music, ‘… culture was still thought to be a human privilege marked by, but no less distinguishable from, class privilege’. Shepherd and Devine (2015a: 4) conclude: ‘A reason for the influence of Adorno’s work lies in the way in which, as a sociology of music, it can be positioned away from the more democratizing instincts of the discipline’. The appeal in Adorno’s analysis lies in its ability to be relatable. Although Adorno’s analysis is often critiqued for his rigid views on music (Shepherd and Devine, 2015a), DeNora (2003), for instance, argues that he can be rescued from both ‘devotees and detractors’ by implementing his ideas empirically. We add to this that Adorno serves as an interesting focal point for issues of aesthetics (see Chapter 3).

Although Adorno has inspired many devotees and detractors, the sociology of music seems to have moved on from his critical stance on popular music. While it is not our interest to draw a complete history of the sociology of music (reade...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Music in (the Context of) Sociology
• 1 Situating the Sociology of Music
• 2 The Techno-Cultural Transformations of Music in the Digital Age
• 3 Aesthetics and Value in Music Sociology
• 4 Sound Environments and Everyday Music Listening Practices
• 5 Music Taste: What Is Liking Music?
• 6 Music, Identity, and Ageing
• 7 Popular Music Heritage and the Obsession with Preservation
• Conclusion
• Index