sociology essay on music

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Sociology of Music

Introduction.

• Reference Works
• Anthologies
• Bibliographies
• Online Sources, Databases, and Data Sets
• Classical Sociology
• The Production of Music
• Bourdieusian Accounts
• Music Consumption and Omnivorousness
• Sociology of Musical Genre, Musical Classification, and Musical Diversity
• Sociology of Popular Music
• Sociology of Less Commercial Music
• Music and the “Art Worlds” Perspective
• Sociology of Music and Cultural Economics

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• Bourdieu’s Concept of Field
• Consumption
• Cultural Omnivorousness
• Pierre Bourdieu
• Sociology of Culture
• Visual Arts, Music, and Aesthetic Experience

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Sociology of Music by Siobhan McAndrew LAST REVIEWED: 07 January 2019 LAST MODIFIED: 24 May 2017 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756384-0198

Music is central to cultural life and therefore also often perceived as central to social life. The study of music in society has been of interest to canonic social thinkers, including Weber, Simmel, and Adorno, since the establishment of sociology. The study of music has also concerned scholars in adjacent disciplines, particularly musicology, cultural studies, and economics. In the landmark Distinction , Bourdieu argued, “nothing more clearly affirms ones ‘class,’ nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music” ( Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste [London: Routledge, 1984], p. 18). Sociologists of music have accordingly been concerned with the importance of musical taste for signifying status and distinguishing cultural hierarchies. Sociologists have also been concerned with the socio-demographic correlates of musical preference, how musicians and the music industry organize to provide music and influence taste, and the education and working conditions of musicians. What tends to distinguish sociology of music from other disciplines is a commitment to the sociological imagination or the use of social research methods—but not necessarily both. And many sociologists of music work across disciplines. Sociologists have also coalesced around the study of different genres, and those contributing in the sociology of particular genres often do so not as sociologists but as music, folklore, or history scholars whose interests have extended to the sociology of music. The American sociology of music tradition has arguably been influenced more heavily by symbolic interactionism and rational choice theory than the European, where critical theory has been more influential. Nevertheless, conceptual and methodological interchange is growing, particularly with the increasing influence of Bourdieu in US sociology. The sociology of race, gender, and sexuality has also influenced the field significantly. This conceptual and methodological diversity means the field has low paradigmaticness. However, this diversity does lead to productive exchange and synthesis of ideas and methods. Notably, there is growing interest in music as a social technology and insights from science and technology studies. As in cultural sociology more broadly, attention is turning to “the music itself,” music as mediating social interaction, and artists and works embedded in wider socio-musical systems using computational tools, particularly network analysis. Data proliferation is generating innovative quantitative work. Qualitative research is also being reinvigorated by new technologies enabling new interview methods, digital ethnography, and computational methods for processing textual data.

General Overviews

A sociology of music tradition can be traced back to the birth of the discipline, although single works providing a comprehensive overview of this tradition are relatively few. The field exists because methodological sociology offers a distinct perspective on how music is created, received, and used in everyday life. The contributions of Weber, Simmel, and Adorno (see Classical Sociology ) established a sociological pedigree for the subdiscipline. From the United States, Howard Becker began publishing on musicians in the early 1950s (see Music and the “Art Worlds” Perspective ). Bourdieu’s place in the canon is assured, although his best-known analysis of music is based on data now half a century old ( Bourdieu 1984 ). There was rapid increase in academic interest from the late 1970s and the publication of Becker’s Art Worlds in 1982. Bringing occupational and organizational sociology into the sociology of popular music, Richard A. Peterson demonstrated the internal logic of cultural production in terms of risk and reward (see Anthologies ). The work of Peterson and Kern 1996 on omnivorousness also generated a rich empirical research agenda in the area of taste, consumption, and participation. Together, Becker, Bourdieu, and Peterson have made programmatic statements dominating the discipline, if not individually achieving dominance or providing general overview. Disciplinary fragmentation and the penetration of other disciplinary approaches have been noted by Shepherd and Devine 2015 and by Marshall (see Sociology of Popular Music ). Nevertheless, useful and compelling overviews of the subdiscipline do exist. Martin 1995 , although disavowing any claim to providing a comprehensive sociology of music due to the inchoate nature of the field, does present an authoritative definition of the sociology of music and an account of its evolution. Shepherd and Devine 2015 fills a notable gap in providing exhaustive coverage of both classic statements on the sociology of music as well as contemporary empirical and conceptual studies. DeNora 2000 has established a case for “music sociology” and researching music as a social force. Roy and Dowd 2010 also provides an exhaustive introduction to the contemporary literature.

Becker, Howard S. 1982. Art worlds . Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press.

Jazz musician and Chicago School sociologist Howard Becker analyzes art worlds as involving collective action on the part of producers and consumers. Amidst a varied career involving the study of deviance, work, methodology, and art, relatively little of Becker’s published output is purely about music. While this addresses the arts in general, it provides case studies from a variety of musical genres and a conceptual framework that has influenced sociologists of music.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste . London: Routledge.

A tour de force in the “grand theory” tradition, this is one of the 20th century’s most important sociology texts. Based on empirical research conducted between 1963 and 1968, this text argues that occupational status, sociocultural taste, and practice are closely associated (although eschewing strong causal explanations) and predictable from members’ economic, social, and cultural capital. More broadly, Bourdieu argues that cultural capital related to musical taste and knowledge reinforces economic and social capital, social reproduction, and inequality.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. The field of cultural production: Essays on art and literature . New York: Columbia Univ. Press.

A collection of ten essays on art, literature, cultural works and the importance of culture for intellectuals. Field is conceptualized as the social space where agents—producers and audiences—take different positions that should be understood in relational terms. Art works are endowed with symbolic value through restriction and sacralization on the part of producers. Increasingly influential among sociologists interested in the production of music who reject a purely economic paradigm.

DeNora, Tia. 2000. Music in everyday life . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511489433

Draws on ethnographic evidence from four different settings and interviews with fifty-two British and American women. Assesses the affective and embodied aspects of music and analyzes music as an independent force in structuring women’s inner and social lives.

Martin, Peter J. 1995. Sounds and society: Themes in the sociology of music . Manchester, UK: Manchester Univ. Press.

First major monograph-length work written in English on the sociology of music: its production, distribution, and consumption. Sympathetic to interactionist approaches and interprets the creation and performance of music as essentially collaborative. Challenges the dichotomization of the subdiscipline between those concerned with “musical meaning” and those with “music in social context,” by highlighting the inadequate treatment of meaning on the one hand and tendency to treat society as a black box on the other.

Peterson, Richard A., and Roger M. Kern. 1996. Changing highbrow taste: From snob to omnivore. American Sociological Review 61.5: 900–907.

DOI: 10.2307/2096460

Seminal paper advancing a “highbrow omnivorousness” hypothesis, challenging the then-orthodoxy that elite and lowbrow cultural forms were socially incompatible and introducing the concept of the “cultural omnivore.” Analyzing the 1982 and 1992 waves of the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, they found that those who consume the “high” arts tend to consume a wide variety of popular culture rather than eschewing the tastes of the less advantaged.

Roy, William G., and Timothy J. Dowd. 2010. What is sociological about music? Annual Review of Sociology 36:183–203.

DOI: 10.1146/annurev.soc.012809.102618

Comprehensive overview of the sociology of music, considering how it is particularly sociological. Reaffirms music as involving activity and interaction rather than existing as an object. Reviews the literature on musical meaning and music as a technology of the self and establishes the unique importance of music for both social differentiation and integration.

Shepherd, John, and Kyle Devine, eds. 2015. The Routledge reader on the sociology of music . London: Routledge.

A recent anthology of central source readings for student sociologists of music serving as the first such edited collection. Selections from Spencer, Simmel, Weber, Adorno, Susan McClary, Pete Martin, Lisa McCormick, Andy Bennett, Peterson, Marion Leonard, William Weber, and Sara Cohen. Also provides an incisive account of the evolution and current state of the subdiscipline, identifying a shift to mixed-method approaches, the rise of digital humanities, and reaffirmation of the “sociological imagination.”

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27 Music Sociology in a New Key

Lisa McCormick is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Haverford College. She earned her PhD in Sociology from Yale University. With Ron Eyerman, she is co-editor of Myth, Meaning, and Performance: Toward a Cultural Sociology of the Arts (Paradigm 2006). Her article “Higher, Faster, Louder: Representations of the International Music Competition” won the SAGE Prize for Excellence and Innovation for the best paper published in Cultural Sociology in 2009.

• Published: 06 June 2017
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This article examines how scholarship in the sociology of music has been dominated by an economic framework known as the production/consumption paradigm. It first traces the history of the production/consumption paradigm through its appearance in key texts, showing how it changes as it passes from Theodor W. Adorno and Pierre Bourdieu to the American production of culture perspective. It then presents a thematic overview of the literature and highlights the strengths of established research agendas as well as the blind spots that reveal the need for a more cultural approach. It also considers music as a text, as a resource, as a product, and as performance before proposing an alternative to the production/consumption dichotomy. The article argues that the growing interest in performance presents an opportunity not only to advance the study of music, but also to engage with the core theoretical issues in sociology.

Music is often referred to as a “performing art” along with theatre and dance. This is because music is commonly defined as organized sound, real or imagined, that is perceived to unfold in time rather than in space ( Boorman 1999 :405). Some would go so far as to claim that music “does not exist until it is performed” ( Britten 1999 :177). And yet one seldom gets this impression from the literature in the sociology of music. The problem is not that performers have somehow been overlooked. Scholars have produced an abundance of empirical studies that analyze musicians in their social contexts across an impressive range of genres, historical periods, and geographical locations. The conspicuous absence I am pointing to is the issue of performance. This concept has been central to social theories of action from Parsons’ role theory to Goffman's dramaturgical metaphor, as well as postmodern theories of gender. Yet it remains curiously underdeveloped in the study of cultural forms, even for performing arts such as music.

My contention is that this is not a mere oversight, but a symptom of a more fundamental theoretical problem. Since Adorno, scholarship in the sociology of music has been dominated by an economic framework which I call the “production/consumption paradigm.” This orthodoxy has had its benefits. It triggered a growth spurt in sociomusical studies by affording insights into previously unexplored aspects of music-making. The economic vocabulary also helped legitimize research on music in the eyes of those more inclined to promote a positivist sociology at a distance from the humanities. But the paradigm has serious limitations that must be addressed, especially now that it has started to creep into other disciplines, even musicology. The major shortcoming, in my view, is that this analytic framework can only construe music as a static object, rather than as a dynamic and inherently social process. The more obvious targets for this accusation are Bourdieu and the production of culture perspective. But I will demonstrate that the same logic defines Becker's art worlds approach, despite its association with symbolic interactionism. While the production/consumption paradigm has generated important research, it is rarely about the music and is usually only cultural in a weak sense. Having relegated culture to merely a dependent variable or a residual category, its central role in musical life has yet to be fully explored.

In this chapter, I explain how we have arrived at the current state of affairs. I begin by tracing the history of the production/consumption paradigm through its appearance in key texts, showing how it changes as it passes from Adorno and Bourdieu to the American production of culture perspective. The next section is a thematic overview of the literature where—to offer an alternative to the production/consumption dichotomy—my survey is structured using common operational definitions of music, namely, as a text , as the product of a social world or industry, as a resource in social action, and as performance . Through a discussion of representative studies in each vein, I identify both the strengths of established research agendas and the blind spots that reveal the need for a more cultural approach. Among the most promising new developments in this direction is the growing interest in performance that presents an opportunity not only to advance the study of music, but also to engage with the core theoretical issues in sociology.

The Production/Consumption Paradigm

The sociology of music is hardly a new development. Since the beginning of the discipline, scholars have found music not just “good to think with,” but good for thinking through some of their most celebrated theories. Georg Simmel ([1882] 1968 ), who wrote extensively about culture and aesthetics over the course of his life, published his first essay on the origin of music. Max Weber ([1924] 1958 ) frequently wove in musical examples into his essays on religion, and he devoted an entire treatise to a comparative historical study of rationalization in music. Maurice Halbwachs ([1939] 1980 ) included a piece on musicians in his seminal work on collective memory, which Alfred Schutz ([1951] 1964 ) later critiqued to develop the concept of the “mutual tuning-in relationship” that he believed was fundamental to all human communication (p. 161). And in his later years, Elias (1993) examined the life and personality of W. A. Mozart in the context of his work in court society and the civilizing process.

But it was only with T. W. Adorno that a “sociology of music” proper took shape. He was the first to promote music from the status of an off-beat “case study” to a primary research focus in its own right. 1 Adorno was a prolific writer, and of his sizeable published oeuvre, over half was about music. This includes studies of specific composers such as Mahler ( Adorno [1960] 1992 ), Berg (Adorno [1968] 1991) , and Wagner (Adorno [1952] 2005) , as well as the programmatic Introduction to the Sociology of Music ( Adorno [1962] 1976 ) published later in his career. But his genre of choice was the polemic essay, and those that are best known among sociologists are those that do not cast him in the most favorable light. His criticism of jazz (Adorno [1933] 2002 ; [1936] 2002 ), popular music (Adorno [1938] 1991 ; [1941] 2002 ), and the culture industry ( Adorno [1963] 1991 ; Horkheimer and Adorno [1944] 2000 ) are easily—and regularly—read as elitist and reactionary. The tendency to see him as an infuriating embarrassment, along with the musicological complexity of his writing, have compromised Adorno's sociological legacy. This is regrettable because it has prevented us from recognizing how much we have inherited from him. Not only did he outline many of the issues that continue to fascinate researchers in the field, but he also provided the framework scholars still use to investigate them.

In the very first essay he published with the Institute for Social Research, Adorno ([1932] 2002 ) invoked the language of production and consumption to analyze the social situation of modern music and understand how industrial capitalism had completely transformed musical culture. Not only had distinction between “serious” and “light” become less important than music's relation to the market; the tension between art and popular genres had also been ratcheted up to twist what had previously been a relationship of renewal and exchange into a radical antipathy. The first part of the essay concerns production, which refers mainly to composition, while the second part focuses on its complement, consumption, which occurs when music is heard by an audience. But equally important for understanding music's social role was “reproduction,” a term he uses instead of “performance” to refer to the realization of the musical score:

The alienation of music from society is reflected in the antinomies of musical production: it is tangible as an actual social fact in the relation of production to consumption . Musical reproduction mediates between these two realms. It serves production, which can become immediately present only through reproduction, otherwise it would exist only as a dead text or score; [reproduction] is further the form of all musical consumption, for society can participate only in the reproduced works and never only in the texts. (p. 411)

For Adorno, the capitalistic process had effectively ensnared both the composer and the performer, forcing each to side either with society (the market) or the music. For the composer, resisting commodification amounted to self-imposed exile; society simply had no use for noncommercial music. For the performer charged with realizing the reified work, commodification could only be resisted by stifling artistic licence and strictly executing the score. The “reproductive freedom” that had been integral to musical culture even through the nineteenth century had disintegrated into the “interpretive personality” who manipulated the audience through creating the illusion that music could still be an “expression of individual human dynamics and private animation” (p. 416).

By the end of the 1960s, Adorno had fallen out of favor in sociological circles. But the economic framework he had employed in his analysis was not abandoned with him. Instead, it soon found new life in the hands of Bourdieu. Although he would have described himself as more of a Weberian than a Marxist, Bourdieu's repertoire of wordplay regularly exploited “production” and “consumption,” with “capital” added into the mix as well. Nowhere is this more masterfully displayed than in his work on the arts that he analyzes as “fields of cultural production ” (Bourdieu 1993 , 1996 ). As it was for Adorno, the artist's orientation to the market is of key importance. “Producers of cultural goods” (artists) can invest in strategies to gain the economic capital that comes from commercial success in large-scale markets. But the rewards are potentially greater where the market is restricted and economic logic is inverted or “disavowed.” Here agents operate in a “market of symbolic goods” where they compete for the prestige and recognition that brings more authority (and better economic return in the long run).

Bourdieu extends the economic analogy to the audience, as is clear from the opening lines of his magnum opus on the social determinants of taste:

There is an economy of cultural goods, but it has a specific logic. Sociology endeavours to establish the conditions in which the consumers of cultural goods, and their taste for them, are produced, and at the same time to describe the different ways of appropriating such of these objects as are regarded at a particular moment as works of art …. ( Bourdieu 1984 :1)

He goes on to say that the fields of production and consumption are intimately related; the hierarchy of the arts, from ennobling to stigmatized, corresponds to a social hierarchy of consumers with varying degrees of “cultural capital,” or competence in the codes necessary to decipher high art works. To illustrate how taste is used to create distinction and legitimize social differences, Bourdieu uses survey data that covers a broad range of cultural activities from food to furniture to film. But of them all, he singles out music as the best marker of social position: “Nothing more clearly affirms one's ‘class’, nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music” (p. 18).

Performance, however, is completely absent from Bourdieu's adaptation of the production/consumption paradigm. He speaks of “reproduction,” but to describe the perpetuation of social inequality inadvertently accomplished through cultural consumption. What Adorno had tried to capture with the same term was lost. Had he been more interested in more “performative” fields of cultural production than literature and visual art, he might have at least confronted this as an empirical issue. But the main reason for this blind spot is rooted in his theory of social action and the concept of habitus . Cultural producers and consumers navigate their respective fields according to their habitus, the “systems of durable, transposable dispositions” acquired through family upbringing and formal education. Embodied and largely nonreflexive, the habitus is often described as the “feel for the game”; they are the cluster of deep-seated inclinations that drive the actor's methods of accumulating symbolic or cultural capital. In this way, all action for Bourdieu is “unconsciously strategic”; the normative order and rational action are collapsed ( Alexander 1995 ). Consequently, modes of communication, such as performance, which require external affective-symbolic environments and normative standards of evaluation, can only be seen in terms of exchange.

The production/consumption paradigm lost all its critical traces when it was taken up by the American “production of culture” perspective (for an overview see Peterson 1994 ; Peterson and Anand 2004 ). This “neutral position” toward culture industries was deliberate; they were to be approached as social facts rather than social problems (Santoro 2008a , 2008b ). The economic framework was also stripped of any grand theoretical pretensions and recalibrated for a solidly empiricist and unapologetically middle-range research agenda. “Production” here is taken quite literally. As the central proponent of this perspective, Richard Peterson (1994) explains, the focus is on how cultural objects like music are shaped by the way they are manufactured and marketed, that is, on “how the content of culture is influenced by the [institutional and organizational] milieux in which it is created, distributed, evaluated, taught, and preserved.” Less concerned with the intended meanings of a cultural object, this approach employs methods from industrial sociology and the sociology of organizations that are designed to “facilitate the uncovering of the so-called ‘unintended’ consequences of purposive productive activity” (pp. 164–165). For the last thirty years, the production perspective has been the mainstream in American sociology of culture. It has also been gradually making headway in Europe ( Santoro 2008a ).

Many of the classic studies from this perspective are, unsurprisingly, about the production of popular music (Peterson 1978 , 1990 ; Peterson and Berger 1975 ). But the consumption side of the dichotomy has not been ignored. After Bourdieu, Peterson set out to glean “patterns of choice” from survey data to find relationships between social stratification and musical preferences. This exercise produced the “cultural omnivore” thesis ( Peterson 1997b ) that has gained considerable traction, having been observed longitudinally in the United States ( Peterson and Kern 1996 ) and in other national contexts ( Chan and Goldthorpe 2007 ; Sintas and Alvarez 2002 ; Sullivan and Katz-Gerro 2007 ). What is striking about this approach to consumption is that interpretation is again sidetracked. Peterson prefers to think of the individual consumer, taste groups, and even subcultures as producers , actively selecting and radically recombining cultural elements to symbolize identity. “Auto-production,” as he came to call it, comprises an important phase of the production cycle, as what was created informally is eventually reappropriated and commodified by the culture industry ( Peterson 2000 ). This, along with the anti-Parsonian stance, helps explain why the issue of performance fails to emerge even in his analysis of authenticity in country music ( Peterson 1997a ). Because “culture” is defined in terms of fabricated objects rather than shared value commitments, Peterson reaches for concepts like “invented tradition” ( Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983 ) rather than “impression management” ( Goffman 1959 ) to discuss how the image of the authentic country singer has changed over time.

In each of its manifestations, the production/consumption paradigm has been attractive because it offered the analyst a way to think and talk about music that could challenge the commonsense view. For a truly sociological study of art to emerge, it was believed imperative first to jettison the ideologically loaded vocabulary of “art” and its corollaries “artist” and “artwork” and replace them with more neutral terms like “cultural forms,” “cultural producers,” and “cultural consumers.” By adopting this vocabulary, sociologists thought they had effectively rejected the ideology of art, liberated themselves from its terms of analysis, and made these the very object of study ( Inglis 2005 ). What I am arguing is that the production/consumption paradigm is neither as different nor as effective as it is held to be. Music's ontology is as much an object as it was for the aestheticians; the only difference is that sociologists prefer to explain this object in terms of real social forces rather than read or interpret it. The economic framework might help sociologists avoid the issues of meaning and performance, but it does not make them go away.

How, then, should the sociology of music proceed? I agree with DeNora (2004) that it is time to start taking music seriously. This would entail thinking about how musical properties enter into social processes. It would also involve paying “attention to the role of musical sound and its performance in social ordering in general and, more specifically, to the role of organised sound as a dynamic medium in relation to historical process and to cultural and political change” (p. 213). A good place to start is by looking at current research in a way that makes music the analytic focus. With this in mind, I have divided the discussion of the literature into sections that emphasize how music is defined—as a text, as a product, as a resource, and as performance. A further benefit of this arrangement is that it is easy to see how methodological choices follow from this presupposition. My hope is that this reorientation to the burgeoning field of music sociology will initiate a modulation out of the production/consumption paradigm and toward the “new key” alluded to in the title.

Music as a Text

For scholarship in this first category, “music” is primarily understood as a text created by an author. Through the formal analysis of its structure, the analyst attempts to demonstrate how musical properties can carry social meaning. Adorno's shadow looms large in this category. As we can see most clearly in his analyses of Bach and Schoenberg, he sought to demonstrate how musical form did more than just reflect or represent society; it reformulated social contradictions through musical materials. For this reason, composition for Adorno was as much a moral category as intelligence; composers were under “obligation to illuminate the truth of the subject's condition” in their historical moment through musical means ( Witkin 1998 :3). Those who abdicated this responsibility were guilty in his eyes of serving the forces of totalitarianism.

It is not all that surprising that Adorno's textual approach faded from sociology, not just because it demanded considerable knowledge of music theory, but also because the field lost its taste for this kind “grand theorizing” about the music/society nexus. What is more surprising is that musicology, a text-based discipline by definition, did not see fit to pick up his dropped thread until the 1990s (Subotnik 1991 , 1996 ). The rediscovery of Adorno helped provide some impetus for the research program that came to be known as the “new musicology” that aims to find patterned similarities between musical and social structures. 2 Also in keeping with Adorno is the critical edge that often flavors analyses, if not from a Marxist angle, then from a Foucauldian, queer theory, or feminist perspective (see, e.g., Brett, Wood, and Thomas 1994 ; Leppert and McClary 1987 ; McClary 1991 ).

Not content to stay within the comfort zone of high art genres like opera, new musicologists have also investigated popular music including the blues ( McClary 2000 ), heavy metal ( Walser 1993 ), and rap ( McClary 1998 ). They have also expanded the methodological kit to include such sophisticated tools as narrative analysis ( Maus 1997 ) and semiotics ( Agawu 1991 ). While it is now an established wing of the discipline, the “turn to the social” was initially met with hostility from more traditionally minded scholars (e.g., Rosen 1994 ; van den Toorn 1995 ). One might have expected a more enthusiastic response from music sociologists, but the reception has been lukewarm at best. Among the most damaging criticisms are an ignorance of developments in sociological theory directly relevant to their concerns and a failure to articulate the mechanisms through which music has social effects (see DeNora 2003 ; Martin 2006a ).

Music as a Product

In many respects, scholarship in this vein positioned itself in opposition to that described in the first category. Leaving the “decoding” of texts to the humanities, the task here was to bring sociological analysis to bear on the social relations through which cultural objects are produced. This entailed importing insights from nonmusical theories and applying them to the social contexts in which music is created ( Dowd 2004b ). Those who favored a meso-level analysis assembled under the banner of “the production of culture.” Many took Peterson's lead and analyzed the popular music industry (e.g., Dowd 2004a ; Dowd and Blyler 2002 ; Lena 2006 ). But others found this a fruitful approach to art music, especially in combination with Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital. One of the classic studies of this kind is DiMaggio's (1982) institutional analysis of the founding of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Museum of Fine Arts in the nineteenth century. Another is DeNora's (1995) first book on the social construction of Beethoven's genius.

A different but sympathetic approach rooted was articulated by Howard Becker. Building on Everett Hughes’ sociology of work and occupations, more than Herbert Blumer's symbolic interactionism ( Chapoulie 1996 ), the “art worlds perspective” ( Becker 1982 ) proposes that art is a form of collective action ( Becker 1974 ) and that the artwork should be seen as the result of a complex division of labor. Recently, Becker (2006) has taken this insight to its most radical conclusion to argue that the “work itself” does not actually exist. He prefers to see the artwork as an endless series of choices made by actors, each of them selected from a range of possibilities defined by the art world. He calls this “the Principle of the Fundamental Indeterminacy of the Artwork”:

[I]t is impossible, in principle, for sociologists or anyone else to speak of the “work itself” because there is no such thing. There are only the many occasions on which a work appears or is performed or read or viewed, each of which can be different from all the others. (p. 23)

Like the production perspective, the art worlds approach stresses the importance of the social context, especially the occupational structure, in shaping the aesthetic values, interactions, status hierarchies, and personal identities of musicians. Another quality it shares with the production perspective is the aversion to “grand theory,” offering instead methodological and analytical resources for empirical qualitative research. These have been fruitfully applied to a diverse range of musical worlds, including concert music ( Gilmore 1988 ), American country and British punk ( Lewis 1988 ), amateur orchestras, choirs, and bands ( Finnegan 1989 ), barbershop singing ( Stebbins 1996 ), jazz ( Becker 2002 ; Lopes 2002 ), and blues clubs ( Grazian 2003 ). In addition to securing canonical status in the United States, the art worlds approach has also been a successful export to Europe, finding passionate advocates in the United Kingdom (Martin 2006a , 2006b ) and in France ( Becker, Blanc, and Pessin 2004 ; Pessin 2004 ).

In terms of its analytical resources, the central concept in the art worlds approach is “convention.” As Becker (1982) explains:

People who cooperate to produce a work of art 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. (p. 29)

To participate in an art world, one must learn how things are done so that action can be oriented accordingly. That does not mean, however, that there is no room for innovation. Convention might limit the range of possibilities, but it does not dictate choices:

Conventions make collective activity simpler and less costly in time, energy, and other resources; but they do not make unconventional work impossible, only more costly and difficult. ( Becker 1982 :34–35)

In other words, commonly shared principles and norms constrain and enable action in the art world. It is in reference to them that choices are made at every phase of the artwork's construction, even if it is to deviate from them. But when it comes right down to it, conventions are really just labor-saving devices. For Becker, these norms guide social action, but in a purely pragmatic, nonsymbolic sense; they have more to do with efficiency than with meaning. Martin ( 2006b ) praises this as a virtue that follows from dislodging musicians’ activities from the discourse of art and relocating them in the discourse of work, allowing Becker to see “musicians’ culture as a consequence of their occupational contingencies and problems (rather than considering the supposed qualities of the musical works themselves)” (p. 98, emphasis added). But I see this as an odd position for a symbolic interactionist to take. Culture does not participate in the definition of the situation, but is determined by it.

The unmasking of the artist as an ideological mirage is a fruitful analytic move; it brings into view the part of music-making that is an everyday, mundane job rather than the purely transcendent creative endeavor it is often made out to be. But because he is motivated more by a “congenital anti-elitism” than value-neutrality, Becker goes too far. He diminishes the moral valence of the social conventions that govern aesthetic activity, reducing everything to instrumental action. Becker's musicians do not act on the basis of the meanings social objects have for them; to the extent that they “take the role of the other” to select unusual materials or depart from conventions, it is to anticipate whether their deviance will be greeted as welcome innovation or resisted for fear that it might destabilize the existing network and threaten established positions. 3

But this is not the only reason why, much to his dismay, the art worlds approach is sometimes mistaken for a more optimistic version of Bourdieu's field theory ( Becker and Pessin 2006 ). Echoes of the habitus concept can also be found in his description of how aesthetic practices become so deeply internalized that action is sometimes nonreflexive:

Conventions become embodied in physical routines, so that artists literally feel what is right for them to do …. They experience conventional knowledge as a resource at a very primitive level, so deeply ingrained that they can think and act in conventional terms without hesitation or forethought. (p. 203–204)

Becker might come at it from a different direction, but the art worlds perspective winds up so close to the production/consumption paradigm that it is easily absorbed into its ranks.

Music as a Resource

In this category, music is seen as a resource for accomplishing a social action, a tool for achieving an end. For Martin ( 2006a ), looking at music in this way is the defining quality of the “sociological gaze”; what sociology explains that other disciplines cannot is how “music is used in a whole range of social situations, and the consequences of this” (p. 1). A major figure in this category is Bourdieu, who saw both the production and consumption of art as instrumental in the project of status accumulation and the legitimization of social hierarchies. While some scholars have built on Bourdieu's field theory in their studies of working musicians ( Moore 2007 ; Prior 2008 ; Toynbee 2000 ), others have extended his work on the social functions of taste (Lizardo 2006a , 2006b ). One of the more intriguing findings is that dislikes for particular musical genres can be just as important as preferences in drawing symbolic boundaries and enforcing social divisions ( Bryson 1996 ; Savage 2006 ).

British cultural studies has also defined music as a resource. But rather than reproduce the class hierarchy as Bourdieu did, here it is utilized in “rituals of resistance” through which working class youth subcultures enact their rejection of the dominant class and resolve the hidden contradictions in the parent culture ( Hall and Jefferson 2006a ). Subcultures are defined through their lifestyle that, according to Cohen (1980) , has two components: “plastic forms” (dress and music) and “infrastructural forms” (argot and ritual). While both are symbolic structures used to articulate what members stand for, music is said to be “plastic” because it was not produced by members themselves; it is a commodity that is selected for its resonance with subcultural values. In his ethnographic study of post-war “profane cultures,” Willis (1978) explained this resonance in terms of “homology,” the degree to which the “structure and content” of cultural items “parallel and reflect the structure, style, typical concerns, attitudes, and feelings of the social group” (p. 191). He articulated this symbolic fit by supplementing traditional ethnographic analysis with a sophisticated musicological one, identifying specific musical properties that facilitated the appropriation of early rock n’ roll by the motorbike boys and progressive rock by the hippies. Hebdige's (1979) classic study also stands out for the unusually detailed analysis of the musical traditions that combined to create the “punk” style.

The golden age of subculture research in the Birmingham tradition was short-lived. After a burst of activity in the mid-1970s, it came under attack, most aggressively from within, for overestimating the importance of class, overlooking the role of women, overstating the strength of subcultural boundaries and members’ identification, and ignoring the range of meanings cultural items can carry. 4 The emergence of rave culture in the mid-1980s provoked scholars to revisit the concept of subculture. But its reconsideration only served to pull it away from its Birmingham roots. Subcultures were sometimes reconceptualized as “club cultures,” whether it was through the introduction of Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital ( Thornton 1996 ) or postmodern theory ( Muggleton 2000 ; Redhead 1997 ). A case was also made for abandoning the term entirely in favour of concepts like “neo-tribe” ( Bennett 1999 ), which better reflects the unstable affiliations and flexible boundaries of groups centered on musical taste, and “scene” ( Bennett and Peterson 2004 ), which better describes the texture of contemporary urban life, connections between geographically defined music communities and patterns of fan activity online. The “subculture” concept still has its defenders, however, who insist that inequality must remain central in studies of youth culture, music, and identity ( Shildrick and MacDonald 2006 ).

Music has also been a tool in political projects. Cerulo (1993) has investigated how national anthems “constitute a nation's identity, the image of the nation projected by national leaders both to their constituents and to the world at large” (p. 243). The Eurovision Song Contest was created by the European Broadcasting Union to promote a pan-European identity, although nationalism, ethnicity, and sexual identity have regularly surfaced during this annual media event ( see, e.g., Raykoff and Tobin 2007 ). High art genres have also been appropriated to serve ideological ends. Stamatov (2002) has shown how interpretive activists imposed political meanings on Verdi's operas in the 1840s, while Buch (2003) has traced the complex history of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony that includes being selected to celebrate Hitler's birthday and serve as the anthem for the European Union. Whether political by design or politicized through social processes, music is often used to mobilize social movements and promote social change. Eyerman and Jamison (1998) have explored how songs can act as a cultural resource for collective action, whether as a repository of collective memory, a device to learn the values and goals of a movement, or as an expression of protest. Similarly, Roy (2002) has examined how academic elites and political activists created the genre of American “folk music” in an attempt to overcome racial boundaries institutionalized in the commercial music industry and in the broader society. The flipside of solidarity, however, is antagonism. The use of music as a weapon of interrogation in the global war on terror ( Cusick 2008 ) reminds us that the state sometimes harnesses its power to incite, arouse, and inflict violence ( Johnson and Cloonan 2008 ).

On a micro-level, music is used as a technology of the self, helping actors to focus attention, shift energy levels, reconstitute past experiences, and channel emotion in everyday life ( DeNora 2000 ). It is also a resource in cognition, an instrument of control, and a material for social ordering ( DeNora 2003 ). Music provides temporal structures for the experience of aging ( Kotarba 2002 ) and narratives for fashioning gender identity ( Rafalovich 2006 ; Whiteley 1997 ). Urban dwellers and commuters turn to iPods and other sound technologies to transform the urban environment, infusing nonplaces like highways, subway platforms, and airport terminals with meaning ( Bull 2005 ). As these studies demonstrate, music can serve a function in every facet of social life.

Music as Performance

An emerging category in music scholarship focuses on the performativity of music. Small's (1998) terminology is instructive here; to discourage the tendency in Western culture to think of music as a thing, he suggests that we speak instead of “musicking,” that is, as an activity that can take many different forms. Approaching music as an object has afforded great insight, but it has its limitations. Adorno ([1932] 2002 ) himself warned that a composer's “text is merely a coded script which does not guarantee unequivocal meaning” (p. 412). The realization of this “script” is an embodied action that necessarily involves interpretation. Even in traditions that use precisely notated scores, there are always ambiguities, omissions, and contingencies to which the performer must adjust, in the moment, in every encounter with a piece. Defining music as a product, even in the “art worlds” variant, also comes short of the mark, despite the promise of the “Principle of the Fundamental Indeterminacy of the Art Work.” The creative process is not adequately described in terms of the division of labor; just as DeNora (2003) found that that production is intricately tied up with reception, neither can composition be completely untangled from performance. When music is defined as a resource in social action, there is performance, but not musical performance. Music remains a thing, and it is considered important only to the extent that it has produced measurable effects in a realm considered relevant to sociology, such as political protest, the construction of self-identity, or social stratification.

In the lifeworld of music-making, performance is of central importance to practitioners not just on the practical level, but on a philosophical one as well. As Dunsby (1995) astutely remarked, “getting all the right notes in the right order at about the right time is a good start,” but beyond those initial steps, any “entanglement with music” involves facing a series of “riddles” that require reflection, rumination, and risk (pp. 7–8). Musicians spend countless hours in the rehearsal studio not just to improve their odds on a particular performance occasion, but also because it is through their interpretive stances that the “sonic self” ( Cumming 2000 ) is constructed, displayed, and judged by various audiences.

Studying performance empirically presents considerable challenges because of its ephemeral nature. In musicology, this problem is compounded in the study of historical performance practice, where evidence is both sparse and contradictory. 5 The few primary sources that survive are suggestive at best because they were only ever meant to supplement, not replace, practical instruction and the cultivation of taste gained through experience. Nonetheless, scholars have spilled rivers of ink arguing over what might appear to outsiders as the minutiae of execution, including issues of unwritten notes, sonority, tuning, and tempo. Often described as a “movement,” performance practice research has institutionalized itself in academia and transformed the way baroque and classical repertoire is performed and recorded in spite of the controversy surrounding it (see Butt 2002 ; Taruskin 1995 ). Scholars of nineteenth-century music have studied the discourse of music criticism in an effort to understand the cult of the virtuoso ( Gooley 2004 ; Kawabata 2004 ). With the advent of recording and digital computer technology, new quantitative measures have been developed to analyze performance styles systematically ( Clarke 2004 ). But only Cook (2001) has recognized that a shift from a text-based to a performance-based approach would shake musicology to its core, which is why he turns to interdisciplinary performance studies and ethnomusicology for conceptual models.

In sociology, a few studies of performance have come from the micro-traditions of symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology. In Ways of the Hand , Sudnow (1978) provided an account of learning jazz improvisation at the piano showing that music is best understood as an embodied “process of doing.” But like Schutz before him, Sudnow denies the centrality of the text and ignores the macro-level cultural codes that structure musical occasions to focus exclusively on the phenomenological experience of playing an instrument. Faulkner (2006) also draws on his own experience to analyze jazz improvisation that he describes as the interplay between organization and imagination. The organization comes from “shedding,” the disciplined work accomplished alone in the rehearsal studio, while the imagination comes in the moment of “playing,” when musicians break free of routines and “shed” ingrained templates to spontaneously explore possibilities. Because he is examining the creative process, Faulkner cannot avoid confronting the false dichotomy imposed by the production/consumption paradigm:

My own work as a jazz improviser suggests that the distinction between culture producer and receiver or consumer is an analytic division that needs empirical investigation. Each “agent” in the culture production process of improvised playing is capable of, indeed even constituted by, being both player and consumer. (p. 105)

But he still does not manage to break free of it. Instead, he switches to the discourse of music as a resource and makes a futile effort to stretch its conceptual reach:

[S]hedding via imitation indicates the practical way recorded productions of “cultural objects” by other musicians are “used”—or appropriated—by a jazz musician. As these solos or productions are thought about, worked on, worked over, imitated and transformed, they become “new” cultural objects. (p. 105)

While jazz has been the most popular choice, it is not the only genre to have been considered. In his ethnography of karaoke bars, Drew (2001) describes how amateur singers gradually develop a “performing self” by taking many factors into account including: the culture of a particular bar; the gendered, classed, and racialized expectations that come with particular songs; one's self-image; and one's technical abilities as a vocalist. He points to the performative element that makes music such a powerful means for defining the self and articulating collective identity: “Songs do things in karaoke bars, they seduce and repulse, embolden and embarrass, connect and divide” (p. 25). Recently, DeNora (2006) returned to the topic of Beethoven, not just to identify cultural developments that participated in the construction of his genius, but also to investigate why his piano compositions played a central role in creating gender segregation at the keyboard. She argues that his music made new demands on the performer's body that were not compatible with notions of aristocratic femininity. Just as women started to avoid this repertoire, it became strongly associated with images of heroism and genius, further restricting the opportunities for women to enact the form of agency configured by this music.

Hennion (2001) has argued that musical taste should be understood in terms of performance. Like Small, who included all forms of musical activity in the term “musicking” from composing to dancing, Hennion does not distinguish between listeners and performers. Instead, he investigates how “music lovers” (amateurs in the positive sense) form attachments and cultivate passions. In contrast to Bourdieu, he does not see taste as determined by one's social background. Drawing from pragmatism, he conceives of taste as a reflexive activity, often accomplished through carefully staged ceremonies designed to increase the likelihood of being taken over by sound (see also Hennion 2005 ). It is also in returning to pragmatism that Vannini and Waskul (2006) have made a case for music as performance, but by making the argument in the reverse direction. They propose that symbolic interaction be understood as music. Dramaturgy has illuminated the moral dimensions of everyday life while narrative analysis has revealed the logical structure of events. A music metaphor, however, can sensitize the analyst to what Pierce called the iconic dimensions of meaning, as well as the aesthetic quality that Dewey insisted was “the condition for unity of all experience” (p. 13).

In my own work, I have developed a multidimensional “performance perspective” ( McCormick 2006 ). The advantage of understanding music as a mode of social performance is that the strengths of structural and pragmatic theories of meaning can be combined, bringing the analysis of text, context, and interaction into one framework. While the production/consumption paradigm has tended to dwell almost exclusively on social power, social performance theory expands the explanatory apparatus to include five additional elements: the layered system of collective representations, actors, the audience and other observers, the means of symbolic production, and mise-en-scène ( Alexander 2004 ). A musical occasion can achieve a ritual effect when all the elements of performance are aligned and become “fused.” But the fragmentation and differentiation of contemporary society, along with the contingencies of performance environments, have made “fusion” more unlikely and difficult to achieve.

To examine the problems of performance in the realm of classical music, I have studied the controversial institution of international music competitions (see McCormick 2009 ). On a superficial level, competitions resemble public recitals; highly skilled performers play similar repertoire in the same venues for an appreciative audience that follows standard concert etiquette. But in contrast to recitals, a distinguished jury declares a winner at the conclusion of a competition that has a profound effect on how musicians play and how audiences listen. To understand how this event is culturally constructed, I used discourse analysis to trace the interpretive frameworks invoked in media coverage and publicity materials. Among the most common metaphors is the “musical Olympics” that implies that the event is a democratic mechanism for identifying the best among the musical champions assembled. While this framework resonates with the general public, it does not sit as well with critics and other professional musicians who try to undermine it through ironic commentary and debased metaphor.

I have also investigated the forms of musical agency available to competitors in this public labelling ritual. The programming of repertoire can be understood as a technique of impression management; musical scripts and other symbolic equipment are chosen carefully by competitors not only to display musical values and technical mastery, but also to embody popular images of genius, such as the prodigy or the fire-breathing virtuoso. These performances can only achieve fusion, however, if they are embraced by an audience that is both stratified and fragmented. Judges, critics, music students, patrons, host families, and professional musicians are differently engaged and differently positioned for interpreting competitors’ performances, which helps explain why they frequently disagree about who deserves to win. Ultimately, I argue that competitions are more than just mechanisms for distributing symbolic capital, as a conventional sociological analysis would contend; they provide a forum for a critical musical public to debate performance ideals and question aesthetic authority, thereby renewing their cultural commitments to beauty, justice, and their art.

That sociologists have generally failed to pick up on the centrality of performance exposes a troubling discontinuity between matters of importance to inhabitants of the music world and those matters that preoccupy analysts. This inconsistency stems from the choice of theoretical frameworks adopted, especially the production/consumption paradigm. But it is also because scholars tend to develop research agendas based on the most powerful conceptual tools in their arsenal such as networks, occupational structures, and institutions, leaving to one side the more thorny issues of performance and meaning.

There are signs that the tide is starting to turn. Those of an ethnomethodological persuasion have succeeded in bringing embodiment and emotion back in, and DeNora's work (2000, 2003), particularly her notion of musical affordance, has made a persuasive case for seeing music as an active force in social life. But for sociomusical studies to become cultural in the “strong” sense ( Alexander and Smith 2003 ), it needs to progress beyond conceiving of music as a social practice, which tends to reduce meaning to concrete circumstances, material interests, or social needs. It must recognize nonrational motivations for action and develop virtuosity in interpreting musical and social texts, equal to that already demonstrated in analyzing social structures and institutional settings. To return to the musical metaphor in the chapter title, the “new key” to which the field could transpose need not be distant and unrelated. A cultural sociology of music does not so much refute the production/consumption paradigm as build on the solid empirical grounding it has provided. Neither is it necessary to deny that music is a resource in accomplishing various social actions. It would be more accurate to say that this logic is extended a step further: Music does not only facilitate, but itself constitutes, a social action. It would follow that musical performance must be acknowledged as sociologically significant and culturally meaningful in its own right. The time has come for the sociology of music to become literally, and culturally, musical.

For critical discussions of Adorno's work from a sociological perspective, see Witkin, Robert W., 1998 , Adorno on Music , London and New York: Routledge; and DeNora, Tia, 2003 , After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology , Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press.

For commentary on this vexed term and the future of this research program by one of its leading figures, see Kramer, Lawrence, 2003 , “Musicology and Meaning,” The Musical Times 144(1883):6–12.

Artworlds focuses on artistic production more than its reception, but the listener is disenchanted by extension. I find it telling that in his recent analysis of the initiation process of opera fans, Benzecry (2009) draws on Becker's earlier work on becoming a marijuana user and not the artworlds approach. Moreover, Benzecry's addition to the model is an affective element, the passion or “instant of revelation,” that is absent from both. See Benzecry, Claudio, 2009 , “Becoming a Fan: On the Seductions of Opera,” Qualitative Sociology 32(2):131–151.

For a reply to these criticisms, see Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson, 2006 , “Once More around Resistance through Rituals,” pp. vii–xxxii in Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain , London and New York: Routledge.

For an overview, see Lawson, Colin, and Robin Stowell, 1999 , The Historical Performance of Music: An Introduction , Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Adorno, Theodor W. [1932] 2002 . “ On the Social Situation of Music. ” Pp. 391–436 in Essays on Music , edited by Richard D. Leppert , translated by Susan D. Gillespie. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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The Importance of Exploring How Culture and Society Impact on Music Learning and Teaching

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Music is heavily influenced by the society and culture in which it is produced. Consequently, the ways in which music is taught and learnt are also impacted on by social and cultural values and beliefs. Acknowledging how music traditions are guided by such socio-cultural processes and knowledges is important as the modes and methods of transmission and acquisition may differ from context to context. In institutionalised settings such as schools and universities the value of knowing what modes are privileged over others, and why, means that teachers can better address diverse students’ understandings and values attributed to music learning. There are a multitude of ways that music can be acquired and this chapter introduces how society and culture can shape these approaches. The chapter also provides a synopsis of the following chapters and purpose of the entire volume.

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Barton, G. (2018). The Importance of Exploring How Culture and Society Impact on Music Learning and Teaching. In: Music Learning and Teaching in Culturally and Socially Diverse Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95408-0_1

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What is Sociological about Music?

2010, Annual Review of Sociology

The sociology of music has become a vibrant field of study in recent decades. While its proponents are well aware of this field’s contributions and relevance, we focus here on demonstrating its merit to the broader sociological community. We do so by addressing the following questions: What is music, sociologically speaking? How do individuals and groups use music? How is the collective production of music made possible? How does music relate to broader social distinctions, especially class, race, and gender? Answering these questions reveals that music provides an important and engaging purchase on topics that are of great concern to sociologists of all stripes---topics that range from the microfoundations of interaction to the macro-level dynamics of inequality.

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The sociology of music has enjoyed a notable boom during the final decade of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first century. This is partly evident in the rising number of publications that address music in some capacity, be it the creation, dissemination, or reception of various musical genres. In this chapter, offer an overview that attends to the three domains of production, content, and consumption. These domains represent analytical stinctions that may blur in both sociological scholarship and contemporary experience. Nevertheless, distinguishing among these domains provides a convenient way to organize the vast works known as music sociology. To employ a musical metaphor, this chapter surveys substantive themes and variations that occur when sociologists turn to music.

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The Nigerian music industry has witnessed several prodigious changes since its inception and at every phase of its development. The social processes attached to music composition and consumption have equally varied. Although the history of music has been discovered to be synonymous with that of every society from where it emanates, yet the influence of diffusion and globalization in musical construct cannot be undermined as to how it has affected the musical components, artists, instruments, audience and meaning system universally. In Nigeria, the mélange of styles, beats, rhythms, lyrics and artists that have recently flooded the Nigeria musical scene have attracted a lot of questions as to how the musical contents translate the social realities of the Nigerian society, aided the continuity of socialization function within social institutions, bridge the gap between several social classes and generations of people in the society and usher in social change. The current musical trend in Nigeria has also brought the question about the role of music in culture archiving and the socio-economic motivations and derivations from the current music terrain and the social processes of music among Nigerian youth who are mostly at the receiving end. This paper aims to explore the current state of music in Nigeria with emphasis on the Yoruba ethnic group of south-western Nigeria and the social changes that have occurred and social processes of music among the listening audience most especially the youth with the view to exploring the effects of music on the society and vice versa; it also aims to examine the sociological relevance applicable to music, social change and social processes in Nigeria using the Structural Functionalist perspective, Evolutionism, Cyclical, Diffusionism, Symbolic Interactionism and Social Learning theories. Keywords: Music, Social change, Social process, Sociological theories and Youth. Word count: 282

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Cultural Politics

This essay stages an encounter between two different ways of thinking music’s relation to the social. One of these is historical materialism. The other is what might best be described as a neopragmatist current in music sociology, exemplified by Tia DeNora’s influential studies of music’s use as a “technology of the self,” as a means for regulating mood, modifying conduct, and inducing changes to one’s physiological state. Motivating the dialogue fostered between these frameworks are three objectives. First, this dialogue extends the insights of neopragmatist approaches beyond the microsociological level to which they are typically confined, elucidating how the work music performs in mundane social interactions is shaped by shifts taking place within the broader political economy. Second, taking seriously the proposition that music is itself a technology offers a way past some of the impasses of older Marxian accounts of music. Rather than treat music as part of the ideological superstructure, rather than ruminate on the processes whereby music has been progressively commodified (or resisted commodification), the argument advanced here highlights music’s productivity. This points to the essay’s third and most important aim, which is to use the insights generated from the encounter of neopragmatist and materialist approaches as a way of shedding light on music’s changing functions within contemporary neoliberalism. Above all, music’s utility as a “technology of the self” has made it ripe for conscription as a technology of social reproduction, especially as new technologies of music distribution promote (and normalize) its therapeutic, prosthetic, and self-regulatory uses through the activity- and mood-based playlists that popular music streaming services. Coupled with the downward pressure that digitization exerts on music’s price (to say nothing of artists’ compensation), these developments have transformed music into a cheap resource that can be harnessed to replenish the cognitive, affective, and/or communicative energies increasingly strained by neoliberalism’s “crisis of care.”

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Sociomusicology or Sociology of music: Overview

S0ciology of Music: Music is the art of arranging sounds and includes components such as melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre. Music at its core has a social nature. Various theorists have used sociology to interpret the meaning of music. Symbolic interactionism looks at how shared meaning is constructed through music whereas the Gestalt perspective understands it through the embodiment of meaning. Music plays an important role in society especially as a form of resistance. This paper looks at how music is used as a political tool across time and culture.

Introduction: Music akin to spoken language can be understood as a form of communication. Individuals create, consume, and use music to construct meaning actively. Sociologically, music can be deconstructed as either an object- a timeless creation- or an action- something people do, as it always exists in a constant (Roy & Dowd, 2010). Given its intrinsically social nature, music is an area that can and must be studied analytically. A manner of analysis is sociomusicology, or the sociology of music, which examines the interactions revolving around music in everyday life ( Sociomusicology 2021).

Overview: Lévi Strauss discusses how music evolves based on its environment. Its everlasting and genuine nature can be attributed to the social world. Culture, therefore, is relevant when talking about the components of music. This can explain why protest music was an important tool used to spearhead revolutions across time and space. The Vietnam War showed a rise in resistance music- the people would march down the streets singing songs such as “We Shall Overcome” and “The Times They Are A-Changing,” supporting Simmel’s argument that music, whether vocal or instrumental, is a form of communication (Carr-Wilcoxson, 2010).

“The battle outside ragin’

Will soon shake your windows

And rattle your walls

For the times they are a-changin’”

Lyrics such as these sum up the anti-establishment sentiments that were particularly strong during wartimes. A possible interpretation is that Dylan is expressing his distaste for the government- the battle outside that saw the light because of the government will soon shake their windows because the people are changing; they are against the war.

Key Theorists: Symbolic interactionism analyses the creation and construction of shared meaning through the exchange of language and symbols. This perspective can be used to deconstruct Simmel’s conception of music. Music is the raw and direct expression of human emotion. Resistant music accurately describes how a shared experience is created to provide meaning individually and collectively. It differs across history and culture, therefore, the meaning of a song depends on the learned emotions of its social group (Hunt, 2017).

Meyers understands the nature of music from a Gestalt perspective. He proposed the concept of embodying meaning. According to him, music has a psychological significance that is created from context and references. Artists and composers transfer the abstract image and messages from their minds onto their songs. The words they chose to sing have a connotative meaning attached to them, and the social context helps uncover the meaning behind the lyrics (de Arce, 1974).

Role of music: Traditionally, music played the role of bringing people together, but with the industrialisation of society, music became a commodity. Weber argues that the rationalisation of music standardised its creation, and capitalism along with it led to the commodification of music. Adorno took a similar approach and was afraid of the detrimental consequences music as an art form would face. The introduction of charting could push artists to create music that would definitely become a ‘hit’ at the cost of authenticity. Coming to present society, this is something that can be observed, especially in mainstream western music. Albums were initially designed to narrate a story, but increasingly more and more artists package an album that can deliver a hit single or title track.

Tying Simmel’s explanation of music with Weber’s analysis of commodification describes how music helped create and maintain social distinctions. Genres arguably exist in a value-laden hierarchy wherein the upper echelon consumes ‘tasteful’ music, which is rich in value and production, and the commoners listen to music that is ‘rebellious’ and considered distasteful. There is a connection between the social and the aesthetic, which plays a role in constructing social identities. Bourdieu proposed that the bourgeoisie convert their cultural preferences for art into cultural capital, which allows them to distinguish themselves from the ‘lower’ classes of society (Hunt, 2017). The same can be said for subcultures. Roy describes aesthetic identity as the cultural alignment of artistic genres to social groups that separate the “us” from the “them” by giving the group collective representativeness. It can be contested that genre boundaries become social boundaries.

Subcultures use art, fashion, slang, and other social markers to construct their identity and give meaning to this identity. Musi plays a significant role in this process. Punks would listen to alt-rock and heavy metal music, while hippies were more into folk and rock music. Similarly, orchestral and other forms of classical music were associated with the richer parts of society. However, these distinctions are no longer static. With the evolution of streaming services and charting, the music industry changed. Previously, one had to buy a physical copy of an album or song in order to listen to it. However, with streaming services such as Youtube and Spotify, this is no longer necessary.

The shift from buying physical copies to digital ones allows individuals to experience a diverse range of artists. This meant that genres were no longer limited to a certain subgroup of a society. Individuals from Canada could access Japanese city pop, R&B migrated to different parts of the world, cultures worldwide merged hip-hop with their music, and so on. The globalisation of music heavily influenced the popularity of mainstream pop music and what counted as ‘pop’ music. A critical analysis is required at this juncture because who gets to decide what is and is not popular music, and how does music become popular? These are questions that can be answered by dissecting the evolution of streaming and charting. Before MTV popularised music videos, listeners relied on physical copies and radio stations to listen to music. The introduction of MTV revolutionised the music industry as artists relied on the visual aspect of their music to attract an audience. From there, music streaming has gone from Napster to Limewire to the pioneer of streaming- Spotify. These streaming services influence what counts as popular music. The Billboard Hot 100, for example, is dependent on the filtered US streams of Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube, and Amazon music.

Depending on what is considered a ‘hit’ and popular music, more and more people across the globe will be exposed to it. The focus on new artists or the spotlight these streaming services provide lesser-known artists allows for more people to discover them from various parts of the world. Genres and artists are no longer limited to a particular audience. What’s more interesting is the fact that artists and producers have taken it upon themselves to experiment and explore different genres, more often than not combing different genres into one. It is rare to see a pop artist make music that strictly adheres to the definition of ‘pop’. This has led to the blurring of genres- a pop artist might make music drawn from jazz and r&b or takes elements from alt-rock and indie music. Music still plays a role in creating one’s social identity; however, the divisions that were once distinct have become more fluid.

Mainstream music and politics: Art has always been political. As mentioned earlier, music was used to channel the emotions the people felt during politically unstable times. They would take their stance through the art that was produced. It could be said that music played a particularly important role during times of war. The apartheid was a difficult period for Black people, and throughout their struggle, they incorporated rhythm and sound. One of the earliest songs during this period, titled “Ndodemnyama we Verwoerd” (“Watch Out, Verwoerd”), was very influential in the struggle movement. The lyrics translate to ‘Here is the black man, Verwoerd! Watch out, here is the black man, Verwoerd! ’ It directly calls out Hendrik Verwoerd, who was the South African prime minister from 1958 until his assassination, he was often called the ‘Architect of Aparateid’ because of his role in implementing the system (Vershbow, 2010).

Other powerfully resistant music during this period include Killing in the Name by Rage Against the Machine, Fight the Power by Public Enemy, and The Revolution Will Not Be Televised by Gill Scott Heron, to name a few. Music was raw and was unapologetic in calling out the system. However, fast-forward to Bush’s reign, there was a visible decline in the release of political music. Artists were afraid to speak out, and this ties back in with the evolution of streaming and charting. The changes made dictated how popular an artist would be, and in order to become popular, they needed ties with the industry and the appreciation of the public. Saying the ‘wrong’ thing had the potential of taking down their career.

The Dixie Chicks are a great example of this. In 2003 they made a statement criticizing the Bush government, and the public found this incredibly controversial. Their CDs, albums, and merch were destroyed, and people actively boycotted their performances and releases, which damaged their career to the point of no return. This marked the Dixie Chicks as a cautionary tale for artists of all kinds who tried to speak out against the government. The importance of charting must not be neglected because artists who did produce songs post the Dixie Chicks rage that was critical of the government were not remotely close to the top 40.

In 2004 Green Day released American Idiot, which took the people by storm. The punk rock song brought back elements of protest music of the earlier days and unabashedly called out Bush and his response to the 9/11 attacks. Along with American Idiot, System of a Down released B.Y.OB (Bring Your Own Bombs), which was arguably one of the most popular rock songs of the year. The lyrics “ Why don’t presidents fight the war, why do they only send the poor” particularly stood out and neatly pens down the anger and frustration felt at that time.

Rhythmic resistance across the globe: Protest music is a global phenomenon. One can see residues of resistance through these timeless pieces. During the CAA protests in India, people took to the streets singing Hum Dekhenge , a lyrically powerful protest song. A line from the song translates to “ When the mountains of oppression and cruelty will float away like carded wool, we will see .” The kind of emotional catharsis that such songs give is incredible, they tie individuals from all over the country together, and the sole focus is on resisting the system. Given India’s diversity, it is to be expected that protest music exists in different languages, each holding its own story and shared meaning. Arivu, a South Indian rapper, criticizes the system and calls out their abuse of power through his rap piece Hashtag Justice. It is in direct response to the custodial killings of a father and son who hailed from Sathankulam, a town in Tamil Nadu.

Ebright, a Mexican musician, uses his platform to speak against the atrocities the Trump administration has committed against immigrants and Mexicans in particular. A part of his song Dreamers goes like this: “So I say to make America great, my friend / They’re gonna have to make America Mexico again / All of these DREAMers could contend that they / Never crossed the border, the border crossed them !”. In order for America to be great again, it must return lost territories (during Mexico-America War) back to the people of Mexico.

Throughout their career, BTS, an idol group hailing from South Korea, has spoken out against the inherently oppressive nature of the South Korean government, which has led to a number of their songs being flagged as ‘controversial’.  Am I Wrong is one such song that directly attacks the elite. The lyrics “We’re all dogs and pigs” are in reference to a political scandal with an official from the Ministry of Education, and “Hey, shout it out MAYDAY MAYDAY” calls out the now impeached president on her disastrous management of the Sewol Ferry tragedy. The song questions the unjust dynamic that exists between the elite and the commoners. It is interesting to note that on-stage performances are reflective of this as well.

Conclusion: Music continues to grow, and the kind of importance it has in individual’s and the collective’s lives differ with context. Songs can tie people together because of their unflinching political stance or because it provides comfort and healing properties. With the growth and evolution of technology, no single genre is contained with a specific social group. The distinctions which were once strikingly clear have become blurred. This not only allows the general population to explore more styles but also allows artists to experiment with sounds and genres. So to answer the question ‘what is sociological about music?’, it is everything.

Carr-Wilcoxson, A. (2010). Protest music of the Vietnam War: description and classification of various protest songs (thesis).

De Arce, D. M. (1974). Contemporary Sociological Theories and the Sociology of Music. International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music , 5 (2), 231. https://doi.org/10.2307/836566

Hunt, P. (2017). The Sociology of Music. In K. Korgen (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Sociology: Specialty and Interdisciplinary Studies (pp. 304-310). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781316418369.032

Roy, W. G., & Dowd, T. J. (2010). What Is Sociological about Music? Annual Review of Sociology , 36 (1), 183–203. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.012809.102618

Vershbow, M. E. (2010, June 1). The Sounds of Resistance: The Role of Music in South Africa’s Anti-Apartheid Movement . Inquiries Journal. http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/265/the-sounds-of-resistance-the-role-ofn-south-africas-anti-apartheid-movement .

Wikimedia Foundation. (2021, April 25). Sociomusicology . Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociomusicology#:~:text=Sociomusicology

Prathyusha Madhu

Prathyusha Madhu is a student at FLAME University, currently pursuing Psychology and Sociology. Her interests lie in poetry and music.

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Essays on Music

• by Theodor Adorno (Author) , Richard Leppert (Editor) , Susan H. Gillespie (Translator)
• August 2002
• First Edition
• Hardcover $78.95,  £66.00 Paperback $41.95,  £35.00

Title Details

Rights: Available worldwide Pages: 760 ISBN: 9780520231597 Trim Size: 6 x 9 Illustrations: 1 music example

Introduction

Adorno was a genius; I say that without reservation. . . . [He] had a presence of mind, a spontaneity of thought, a power of formulation that I have never seen before or since. One was unable to grasp the emerging process of Adorno's thoughts; they emerged, as it were, finished. That was his virtuosity. . . . When you were with Adorno you were in the movement of his thought. Adorno was not trivial; it was denied him, in a clearly painful way, ever to be trivial. But at the same time, he lacked the pretensions and the affectations of the stilted and "auratic" avant-garde that one saw in George's disciples. . . . By all notable standards, Adorno remained anti-elitist. Incidentally, he was a genius also in that he preserved certain child-like traits, both the character of a prodigy and the dependence of one "not-yet-grownup." He was characteristically helpless before institutions or legal procedures. Jürgen Habermas, "A Generation Apart from Adorno"

They saw themselves as Jews, as left-wing intellectuals and as critical sociologists in an environment which had been more or less completely purged of people like themselves, and in which all the signs had long since been pointing clearly to the restoration of the old order. The unique symbiosis represented by German-Jewish culture [whose liberal traditions had been a marked feature of Frankfurt University prior to Nazism] had been irreversibly destroyed. Apart from Horkheimer and Adorno, none of the distinguished lecturers or professors from the heyday of Frankfurt University—the last years of the Weimar Republic—returned. Horkheimer, Adorno and Pollock could count on being met with patience and good intentions precisely because they were, and remained, the exceptions. 28

Whoever doesn't entertain any idle thoughts doesn't throw any wrenches into the machinery. Theodor Adorno, "Meaning of Working through the Past"

About the Book

Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969), one of the principal figures associated with the Frankfurt School, wrote extensively on culture, modernity, aesthetics, literature, and—more than any other subject—music. To this day, Adorno remains the single most influential contributor to the development of qualitative musical sociology which, together with his nuanced intertextual readings of musical works, gives him broad claim as a continuing force in the study of music. This long-awaited collection of twenty-seven essays represents the full range of Adorno's music writing. Nearly half of the essays appear in English for the first time; all of the essays are fully annotated; and the previously translated essays have been corrected and missing text restored, making this volume the definitive resource on Adorno's musical thought.

About the Author

Richard Leppert is Samuel Russell Distinguished Professor of Humanities and Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. His previous books include Art and the Committed Eye: The Cultural Functions of Imagery (1996) and The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body (California, 1993).

“Adorno is a great stylist.” — The Wire

"To understand the significance of music for the musicians who created it and the society in which it was produced is therefore a challenge to music-lovers. Perhaps no writer on music devoted more energy to this task than Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, and the translations into English of his writings on philosophy and music and their diffusion have been multiplying in recent years while, at the same time, his ideas have become widely influential in the US and Europe." — New York Review of Books

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments Translator's Note Abbreviations Introduction (by Richard Leppert) 1. LOCATING MUSIC: SOCIETY, MODERNITY, AND THE NEW Commentary (by Richard Leppert) Music, Language, and Composition (1956) Why Is the New Art So Hard to Understand? (1931) On the Contemporary Relationship of Philosophy and Music (1953) On the Problem of Musical Analysis The Aging of the New Music (1955) The Dialectical Composer (1934) 2. CULTURE, TECHNOLOGY, AND LISTENING Commentary (by Richard Leppert) The Radio Symphony (1941) The Curves of the Neddle (1927/1965) The Form of the Phonograph Record Opera and the Long-Playing Record (1969) On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening (1938) Little Heresy (1965) 3. MUSIC AND MASS CULTURE Commentary (by Richard Leppert) What National Socialism Has Done to the Arts (1945) On the Social Situation of Music (1932) On Popular Music [With the assistance of George Simpson] (1941) On Jazz (1936) Farewell to Jazz (1933) Kitsch (c. 1932) Music in the Background (c. 1934) 4. COMPOSITION, COMPOSERS, AND WORKS Commentary (by Richard Leppert) Late Style in Beethoven (1937) Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa Solemnis (1959) Wagner's Relevance for Today (1963) Mahler Today (1930) Marginalia on Mahler (1936) The Opera Wozzeck (1929) Toward an Understanding of Schoenberg (1955/1967) Difficulties (1964, 1966)

Bibliography Source and Copyright Acknowledgments Index

• Finalist, Otto Kinkeldey Award, American Musicological Society

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