Sociology of music.

The study of the role of music within society, its dynamic as a mode of
human communication and its position within established social structures.
Initially the discipline concerned itself largely with Western art music, but
more recently greater attention has been paid to popular music of all forms
and the role of music within mass culture.
1. The discipline.
2. General considerations, early history.
3. The 1970s and after.
4. The diffuse and political character of the sociology of music.
5. Music as social meaning.
6. Music as social interaction.
7. Music as social identity.
8. Music as commercial and industrial process.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
JOHN SHEPHERD
Sociology of music
1. The discipline.
Sociology has roots going back in Europe to at least the 18th century. The
word, a combination of the Latin societas and the Greek logos, was first
used by Auguste Comte (1789–1857). Sociology was thus conceived as the
science of the history and constitution of human societies. In its early
stages, it drew in its thinking from the natural sciences: societies, like
biological organisms, were seen as systems of related elements in which
the whole was greater than the sum of the parts, and the functioning of the
parts could be understood only in terms of their contribution to the whole.
Thus arose a fundamental and defining characteristic of sociology: the
priority of society over the individual. This was in contrast to much previous
thinking, in which the social order had been conceived as the consequence
of the qualities of individuals and their acts. The sociology of Emile
Durkheim (1858–1917) entrenched and developed the basic concepts,
stressing the role of processes of socialization, through which growing
individuals learnt the norms, values and beliefs of their culture, and that of
internalization, through which these norms, values and beliefs became part
of the individual: an understanding of these roles should provide the means
to ensure the smooth running of society.
However, from its beginnings, sociology has been a creature of social and
historical circumstances: there never has been, nor could there be, only one
sociology. Some forms, most notably those influenced by Karl Marx (1818–
83), have been critical, seeking to uncover the causes of social inequality
and stressing conflict rather than consensus as a fundamental dynamic of
social process. Marx's work was driven in many respects by ‘alienation’, the
phenomenon through which the products of human social activity appear to
take on a life of their own as independent forces which then subordinate
individuals. In the light of the grave social inequalities, ills and injustices of
19th-century European society, Marx came to believe that there was a
hierarchy of alienation, with economic alienation being fundamental. The
outcome was a model of social process in which the development of
material productive forces, together with the relations into which people
entered to utilize them, came to shape if not determine the character of
various cultural institutions: legal, religious and educational systems,
together with the state, were seen as forms of ideological alienation through
which people were led to believe that the social relations of production into
which they were forced in order to earn a living were justified and legitimate.
Through such processes, a dominant class was understood to maintain its
position of superiority and to subordinate others.
The sociologies of Durkheim and Marx were thus quite different: Durkheim's
was consensual and largely ahistorical, concerned with understanding
how, at any one time, different institutions contributed mutually to the larger
social picture, and with an ultimate agenda of liberal, reformist, social
engineering; Marx's was critical, understanding tension and conflict as the
basic engines of social process, deeply historical and with a driving vision
of the redress of social injustice. These sociologies had two important
common characteristics: they assumed the priority of society over the
individual, and they were concerned with uncovering and understanding
dynamics considered basic to social process. Max Weber's sociology, by
contrast, was motivated less by a desire to provide a basic explanation for
the dynamics of social process than to understand social behaviour through
categories of social action. For Weber (1864–1920), sociology was a
comprehensive science of social action. In its terms, he rejected both
Durkheim's idea that collective social forces determined human behaviour
and Marx's concept of the character of economic processes. Drawing on an
examination of the importance of Protestant religions to the development of
industrial capitalism, for example, he argued that cultures manifest beliefs
and values that cannot be reduced to economic factors. For Weber, ‘social
structure’, ‘class’ and even ‘society’ were concepts rather than concrete
entities manifesting real causality or agency. To subjugate the complexities
of social action to the condition of these concepts was to reify them, or to
turn them conceptually into ‘things’, which they were not; the social order
could thus arise and persist only through the actions of real people.
However, in asserting this, Weber did not abandon the defining
characteristic of sociology: the priority of the social over the individual. He
understood people acting socially in four ways: rationally in relation to a
goal; rationally in relation to a value; affectively; and in terms of established
tradition. Modern societies, according to Weber, were characterized by an
increasing dominance of rational action, particularly in relation to a goal.
Marx, Weber and Durkheim have commonly been regarded as the founding
fathers of sociology, and their influence has been both broad and pervasive.
However, other developments have been as formative. Sociology in the
USA, for example, has been less concerned with comprehensive theories
and categorizations and has focussed more on the pragmatic in the form of
demographic studies, studies of social organizations and studies of social
inequality and stratification. An important motivation for sociological
research in the USA flowed from the practicalities of engendering a sense
of nationhood and common culture in populations from widely different
ethnic backgrounds. If European sociology has tended to be more
theoretical, philosophical and distanced, even antagonistic, in its relations
with the long-established societies from which it emerged, American
sociology has on the whole had a more intimate and friendly relationship
with its own society. In common with that of Durkheim, American sociology
has tended to evidence both a liberal, reformist orientation, as well as a
concern with social engineering. A powerful and influential advocate of this
form of normative American sociology during the 1950s and 60s was Talcott
Parsons.
The forms of sociology so far described have been concerned with major
forces and movements: they have represented forms of ‘macro-sociology’. A
distinctive contribution of American sociology has been the development of
symbolic interactionism, a ‘micro-sociology’ that, in concentrating on face-
to-face behaviour and small group dynamics, has shared Weber's concern
with individual social action as the wellspring of social order. Symbolic
interactionism developed from the work of the American philosopher
George Herbert Mead, who distinguished between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’, the
intensely subjective awareness constituted through the temporal flow of
consciousness and the objective awareness of self constituted through the
imaginative projection by the individual into how others might see them. A
fundamental tenet of symbolic interactionism was that individuals behave in
terms of the meanings that society holds for them, in terms of the meanings
proffered to the self by the organized community or social group that Mead
designated ‘the generalized other’ (Mead, A1934). This developed largely at
the University of Chicago: its practitioners have come to be known as the
‘Chicago School’. It has contributed to areas such as deviance (particularly
in youth cultures), work and the professions, and the desire to understand
and contribute to the American cultural ‘melting-pot’. Unlike most forms of
macro-sociology, which have preferred statistical and quantitative methods,
symbolic interactionism has been the realm of qualitative methods:
observation, participant observation, interviews and questionnaires. Its
best-known practitioners have included Erving Goffman and Howard S.
Becker.
Sociology has been, and is increasingly, characterized by a series of related
debates and differences: consensus v. conflict, determinism v. agency,
macro-sociology v. micro-sociology, theoreticism v. empiricism, reformism
v. critique, and so on. Further, sociology, like social anthropology, has not
been concerned with a specific subset of social activities, such as the
political, the economic or the legal. It has in principle been concerned with
all social activities and social relations, even if this concern has on the
whole been restricted to modern societies. Social anthropology and
sociology have had distinct histories, have customarily studied different
kinds of societies (one traditional, the other modern) and have used
different methodologies, social anthropology investing heavily in fieldwork,
sociology more tied to statistics and quantitative methods as well as
interviews and observation. However, the increasingly transnational
character of capital, the increasing interconnectedness of the world's
regions, nations and ethnic communities, and increasing globalization have
drawn the interests of the two disciplines closer. While sociology, like social
anthropology, has a clear object of study, that of the character, order and
consequence of human relatedness, it is as a result a discipline that readily
spills over and contributes to others, while at the same time being easily
subject to developments within them. It has at the same time contributed to,
and been influenced by, developments in interdisciplinary intellectual
trajectories such as structuralism and semiology, cultural studies,
feminism, post-structuralism, post-modernism, post-colonialism and
Foucauldian discourse analysis. Indeed, there was evident towards the end
of the 20th century a split between more established forms of sociology, up
to and including the work of the Chicago School, and ‘post-Chicago’
sociology, strongly critical in orientation, and investing heavily in
conversations with such intellectual traditions. Towards the end of the 20th
century, the discipline was widely seen as entering a state of crisis.
Sociology of music
2. General considerations, early history.
Two characteristics marked work in the sociology of music from the outset.
First, there was no community of scholars dedicated to examining the
subject, and thus no continuity of intellectual tradition. The principal
considerations of sociology lay elsewhere in understanding phenomena
such as social inequality, social cohesion, the logic of mass movements
and of small group interaction. Music has always been regarded within
sociology as of only marginal interest. Those sociologists who did write
about music tended to do so as an extension of their other activities and
their work, as a consequence, was understandably characterized by their
own theoretical and methodological predilections.
Thus, Weber, the only one of sociology's ‘founding fathers’ to write on
music, developed a sophisticated – and arguably too little known and
appreciated – analysis of the finite and closed system of functional tonality
as an expression and incorporation of the rational instincts of modern
Western societies. This work was published posthumously in 1921 (Weber,
B1921). Earlier, in the 19th century, Herbert Spencer and Georg Simmel, in
replicating the earlier, scientific model of sociology, had contributed to what
has been called ‘a somewhat futile debate about the origins of music
(initiated by Darwin's view that musical communication preceded speech in
humans)’ (Martin, B1995; see also Newman, B1905; Etzkorn, B1964).
Much later, Alfred Schütz published an article, ‘Making music together: a
study in social relationship’ (B1951). Nearly 20 years before, he had made
an important contribution to sociology by publishing a volume that, in
drawing on the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, shared some of
the interests of Mead and the Chicago School in the manner in which social
awareness was constituted, but in this case from a more theoretical and
less empirical basis (A1932). Schütz's article argued that an examination of
the micro-social relations of musical performance and listening could
reveal much about processes fundamental to human communication.
Although Schütz draws here on Weber's notion of goal-orientated action and
his definition of a social relation, there is little to connect their writings.
Weber is concerned with a particular musical system as an expression and
embodiment of rationality, while Schütz is attempting to understand the
social constitution of subjective and objective awareness as manifest in the
relations of performance and listening.
A second characteristic to mark work in the sociology of music has been an
unusual preoccupation with Western art music. This concern might seem
warranted, in that it is this form of music, rather than traditional or popular
forms of music, which has been argued to be autonomous, and essentially
divorced in its aesthetic core from the influence of social processes. Here,
in other words, would seem to lie a central problem for sociologists, rather
than in the fields of traditional and popular music, forms whose social
character, on the face of it, seems all too evident. However, such has not
been the case. The preoccupation among many sociologists with art music,
rather than with traditional or popular music, has lain in art music's
privileged position, not only in society in general, but also in the academy,
where there has been an overwhelming tendency – abating during the
second half of the 20th century – to view it as the only form of music worthy
of scholarly treatment.
Thus, scholars such as Supičić (B1964) have understood a lack of interest
in art music on the part of large sections of the population as a problem
requiring resolution through the work of sociologists, and the development
of appropriate policies in the spheres of education and culture. Norbert
Elias's study of Mozart (B1991) clearly ‘places him in the context of the
general “civilizing process”’ (Martin, B1995), while the work of Weber and
Schütz are in their different ways based on the art music tradition. More
recently, Christopher Ballantine's contributions to the sociology of music in
his book Music and its Social Meanings (C1984) rest heavily on critical
examinations of art music, while even more recently, in the related field of
cultural theory, Christopher Norris's collection, Music and the Politics of
Culture (B1989), is overwhelmingly concerned with the art music tradition
as, remarkably, is Edward Said's Musical Elaborations (B1991). It is in
particular difficult to reconcile Said's pioneering work in post-colonial
thought with a book seemingly so indifferent to the music of other groups
and cultures.
Nowhere, perhaps, does the privileged position of the art music tradition
emerge more strongly than in the work of Theodor W. Adorno. Adorno differs
from many other scholars who have written in this area in that music was
his primary though not exclusive interest. He is rightly regarded as the father
of the sociology of music, and his work has succeeded in giving shape – if
perhaps in a somewhat idiosyncratic way – to a rather fragmented field of
study. A trained musician with a minor but not insignificant career as a
composer, his principal contribution was as a philosopher and scholar of
music. On the completion of his academic studies in 1931, he joined the
Department of Philosophy at Frankfurt University and became associated
with the Institute for Social Research, directed by Max Horkheimer. When the
Nazis came to power in 1933, Adorno left Germany, moving first to England,
and in 1938 to New York, where he rejoined the Institute of Social Research
in exile. He moved to Los Angeles in 1941 and then, in 1949, returned to
Frankfurt and became, with Horkheimer, co-director of the re-established
Institute. The influence of the ‘Frankfurt School’, the group of scholars
associated with the Institute, began to grow within Germany and,
subsequently, throughout circles of critical scholarship within English-
speaking intellectual life.
The work and influence of the Frankfurt School can be understood in part as
a reaction to the rise and fall of fascism in Germany, and also in part as a
reaction to the alienation experienced by its members in the face of
American popular culture. Dialectic of Enlightenment, by Adorno and
Horkheimer (A1947), develops a theory of ideology in terms of which the
culture industries are seen to instil in the majority of the population, through
the mass production of cultural commodities, patterns of feeling and
behaviour commensurate with the needs of the dominant social form of
industrial capitalism. Adorno was thus instrumental in developing an
influential theory of mass culture that was pervasively Marxist and critical in
its orientation, and that coloured his understanding of popular music in
particular. Adorno heard popular music – in his experience, apparently the
dance-band music of the late 1930s and 40s – as standardized and
repetitive, hypnotically so in its alienating effects on the mass of people.
However, to Adorno's credit, and unlike many who preceded and followed
him, he paid attention to popular as well as to art music (Adorno, B1941,
B1967, B1991).
Indeed, it was a fundamental assumption of Adorno's work that no form of
music in modern Western cultures could be understood in isolation. His
work on popular music thus formed part of a much larger undertaking in
which he attempted to grasp the significance of the entire contemporary
musical field in its full historical and social dimensions. He was concerned
to tease out from the actual materials of musical works their social and
historical implications. This approach is most clearly evidenced in
Philosophy of Modern Music, first published in 1949 (B1949), in which, to put
it candidly, he saw in the work of the Second Viennese School a vision of a
future, egalitarian and socialist world, and in that of Stravinsky a regression
to the bourgeois, subjective individualism implicit in much 19th-century
music. There is thus apparent in Adorno's work, as in certain
pronouncements of Marx on culture, an idealist strain of thinking according
to which works produced in specific social and historical circumstances
only realize their full significance in the future with the advent of socialism –
a socialism in which the population would have unfettered access to, and
enjoyment of, the ‘highest’ cultural attainments of humankind.
Adorno's work is clearly the product of a troubled and contentious period of
history and of a severely dislocated biography. With the benefit of hindsight,
many of his principal ideas on music are easy to criticize. However, his
legacy can be argued to lie more importantly in the character and scope of
the questions he asked than in the specifics of the answers he provided.
Adorno understood the holistic character of the entire ‘musical-historical
field’; that various musical traditions in modern Western societies could be
understood only through the character of their mutual relations, which were
embedded in extended forms of social organization; and that music needed
to be understood not only in terms of its formal characteristics but also in
terms of the relation of these to the circumstances of its production and
reception. Adorno's work has been much discussed and much debated,
and has been highly influential (see Martin, B1995; Middleton, G1990;
Paddison, B1982, B1993, B1996; and Witkin, B1998).
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, and closer to the idealist and exclusionary
tendencies of historical musicology and music theory. Adorno believed that
it was the business of the sociology of music to make aesthetic judgments
(for which he has been criticized: Martin, B1995). This belief was part of a
critical orientation that had little time for the kind of consensual and
positivistic objectivity claimed by many sociologists. Adorno would thus have
had little time for publications such as Alphons Silbermann's The Sociology
of Music, first published in 1957 (B1957). Indeed, Adorno saw such claims –
which in the case of music pit the aesthetic and the emotional against
social ‘facts’ – as so much ideology, and reasoned that the aesthetic was
necessarily social. But while this critical orientation, grounded in the wider
Marxist project, generated the basis for later approaches to music that
questioned the social and cultural status quo and the role in it of art music, it
also allowed for the persistence of established beliefs concerning the
relative value of art music and popular music. It was this retention of an
aesthetics recognizable as traditional that allowed many musicologists,
faced with the cultural and aesthetic challenges of the 1960s and
afterwards, to reconcile in an acceptable form two realms regarded
previously as incommensurable, the sociological and the musicological.
Sociology of music
3. The 1970s and after.
It can be argued that the cultural and intellectual shifts, first of the 1950s,
and then, more importantly, of the 1960s, marked the beginnings of a
watershed in the academic study of music to which sociological and social
anthropological concerns contributed importantly. In the USA, this
watershed first became apparent in the founding, in 1955, of the Society for
Ethnomusicology. Ethnomusicology was a discipline developed in its initial
formulation in the USA (it has a history that can be traced back to the years
before World War II in Europe as well as the USA: see Ethnomusicology)
from the disciplines of social anthropology and musicology. The advocacy of
this society for the inclusion of traditional music in the curricula of university
faculties, schools and departments of music was to have far-reaching
implications in challenging the exclusivity of art music. Following on from
this, the cultural and political challenges of the 1960s, intimately related as
they were to various developments in rock, folk and popular music, gave
rise to a generation of young people, some of whom, in obtaining academic
positions in a range of disciplines in the 1970s, brought with them their
cultural, political and musical affiliations. A similar phenomenon had
occurred in the USA in the late 1930s and 40s as a younger generation of
scholars raised on jazz entered the academy: jazz, slowly but surely,
became accepted as a legitimate object of academic study.
The preferred music of the 1970s was rock, and its infusion into the
academy had four consequences: the challenge to the exclusivity of art
music posed by ethnomusicology was supplemented by an advocacy for
the inclusion of popular music in education at both the secondary and post-
secondary levels, an advocacy resting heavily on sociological arguments
(see for example Vulliamy, I1976, I1977, I1978; Shepherd and Vulliamy,
I1983, Vulliamy and Shepherd, I1984); the sociology of music itself became
quickly and increasingly concerned with forms of popular music; as a field
of study, it in addition began to manifest a recognizable community of
scholars and, for a short while, a coherent intellectual trajectory (the
foundation, in 1979, of the International Association for the Study of Popular
Music was in part an expression of these trends). However, it also began to
undergo two transformations: it began to be practised as much by non-
sociologists as sociologists and, in the formulation to emerge in the late
1970s, its democratizing and critical instincts spread readily and quickly
outside the borders of its established concerns in conversations with
ethnomusicology, as well as with interdisciplinary intellectual trajectories
such as cultural studies and feminism. Sociology, through its relations with
the study of music as in other areas of endeavour, was by the late 1980s
evidencing both the porous character of its disciplinary borders and its
move towards a perceived state of crisis.
This changed character of the sociology of music became apparent first in
Great Britain (for discussion of the forces behind this development, see
Chambers, G1985, and Shepherd, G1994). 1977 saw the publication of
Whose Music? a Sociology of Musical Languages, by Shepherd and others
(B1977), and Christopher Small's Music–Society–Education (B1977). Both
books cast a critical eye on the social constitution and character of art music
and argue for the serious study of other music, including popular music, in
terms and criteria drawn not from the study of art music but from within the
cultural and social realities of the people creating and appreciating music of
these other kinds. The work of Shepherd and his colleagues was
influenced in particular by Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction
of Reality (A1967) which, in drawing in part on the work of Goffman, Mead
and Schütz, argued for the manner in which both subjective and objective
reality were socially constituted. Together with Kuhn's The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions (A1962), Berger and Luckmann's work laid the
foundations for a more relativistic sociology of knowledge and of culture
than had hitherto been practised, as applied to the study of music.
In The Sociology of Rock (B1978), Frith argued that the social relevance of
popular music in Britain had to be understood as much in terms of
generational as class differences. While ‘pop’ music, chart orientated and
acquiescing in the conditions of its own commercial production, was
relevant to youth culture and subcultures in the formation of their identities, it
was rock music, judged as authentic and as carrying a critique of its own
conditions of production, that more directly served the oppositional stances
of many youth subcultures. The Sociology of Rock (subsequently reworked
as Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock ’n’ Roll, 1983)
combined the methods and instincts of symbolic interactionism with the
insights of cultural Marxism. This combination, characteristic of the
conversation between British sociology and cultural studies at the time,
received clearer theoretical formulation in Willis's Profane Culture (C1978),
which made a case for the structural similarities between early rock and roll
and the lived realities of bikeboy cultures on the one hand, and progressive
rock and the lived realities of hippie counter-cultures on the other, both in
opposition to the conditions of industrial capitalism. Hebdige's highly
influential Subculture: the Meaning of Style (A1979), although hardly
mentioning music, provided insightful analyses of many youth subcultures
in which music had played a constitutive role, including, most importantly,
that of British punk in the late 1970s.
This British sociology of music, oppositional in its stance to the social and
musical status quo, was prefigured in the work of the ethnomusicologist
John Blacking, whose How Musical is Man? (C1973) undertook a
comparative and critical, Marxist-orientated analysis of established attitudes
concerning Western art music, based on his experiences of fieldwork with
the Venda of South Africa. This approach was echoed in Tiv Song (C1979)
by the American scholar Charles Keil, whose fieldwork with the Tiv of
Nigeria during the Nigerian civil war in 1966 served as a stark counterpoint
to the character of Western musical practices. The point of contact between
this sociological and anthropological work was that, despite its different
disciplinary background, it shared a concern with a Marxist-influenced,
critical orientation and, in many cases, the importance of fieldwork and
observation in understanding the construction of specific and different
musical realities.
From this point the boundaries between sociology, social anthropology,
ethnomusicology, cultural studies, feminism and, indeed, some forms of
musicology became less and less clear as the major task seemed that of
constituting a critical, cultural musicology rather than of working within
established disciplinary boundaries. 1987 saw the publication of Leppert
and McClary's Music and Society: the Politics of Composition, Performance
and Reception (B1987), contributed to equally by sociologists,
musicologists, cultural theorists and feminists, and the late 1980s and early
90s witnessed the publication of four important volumes concentrating on
ethnography, interviews and face-to-face interaction as the route to
understanding the social constitution of musical realities. Two were by
social anthropologists (Ruth Finnegan's The Hidden Musicians: Music-
Making in an English Town, D1989, and Sara Cohen's Rock Culture in
Liverpool: Popular Music in the Making, D1991), one by a sociologist
(Deena Weinstein's Heavy Metal: a Cultural Sociology, D1991) and the
other the result of a study, the ‘Music in Daily Life Project’, led by an
ethnomusicologist (Crafts, Cavicchi and Keil's My Music, E1993). Of equal
importance was Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality (C1991),
by feminist musicologist Susan McClary, which occasioned heated debate
within musicology as to the gendered provenance of music.
The connections between ethnomusicology and the sociology of music
discernible in the 1970s and 80s became even closer in the 90s as a
growing community of interest on the part of sociologists and social
anthropologists in questions of ethnicity, difference, identity and
globalization found expression in the study of world popular music –
popular music having been an area in which the study of Western music
had predominated and in which sociology had been more influential than
ethnomusicology. This drew several important contributions to the study of
popular music on a world basis and thus to the sociology of music as
broadly defined (Frith, H1989; Waterman, G1990; Stokes, G1992; Guilbault
and others, G1993; Slobin, G1993; Erlmann, G1996; and Langlois, G1996).
This concern with the way in which ethnicity, difference and identity have
figured in the social constitution of musical realities has also given rise, in
an era of globalization and postmodernity, to an interest in the concept of
‘place’, being understood more in terms of a community of intersecting
musical interests and cross-fertilizations and less in terms of a notion of
physically delimited space; there have been important contributions from an
ethnic studies scholar (Lipsitz, G1994), an ethnomusicologist (Stokes,
G1994) and a geographer (Leyshon, Matless and Revill, G1998).
Sociology of music
4. The diffuse and political character of the sociology of music.
The history of the sociology of music has thus been diffuse as well as
fragmented. A reason for this is the character of sociology as a discipline.
One of its central tenets is that all human action and thought is at the least
profoundly influenced by the character of the social circumstances in which
they occur; some sociologists go further and argue that people, their
thoughts and actions, are all socially constituted. This implies that nothing
that happens in human life is beyond the realm of the social. In one sense
this is true: since ‘the social’, by definition, refers to human relatedness and
its character in any specific situation, and since individuals cannot develop
into recognizable and functioning people independently of relations with
others, either direct or indirect, there is little in human life that can escape it.
Yet this does not mean that people are unilaterally determined by the social.
The social is constituted by human relations, and individuals can contribute
to these as well as be profoundly affected by them. As the work of Weber
and the symbolic interactionists attests, the social may encompass the
creative as well as the scripted.
However, this principal tenet of sociology raises a question: why the need
for sociology if all thought and action are socially constituted? Cannot
various subsets of human activity be covered adequately in the other
disciplines of the arts, humanities and social sciences? More specifically, if
all human thought and action are socially constituted, then why the need for
a sociology or sociologies of music as distinct from other forms of the study
of music? The idea that all thought and action are socially constituted has
not met with easy acceptance, either during sociology's formative times or
more recently. This idea has continued to be resisted within the academic
study of music, a tendency which itself requires historical and sociological
analysis.
Although they may not use these terms or the modes of thinking that
accompany them, in most if not all traditional cultures the endemically
social character of music appears self-evident. The activities that have
come to be understood in modern Western cultures under the separate
linguistic and epistemological category of ‘music’ form an integral aspect of
nearly all other activities in traditional cultures, and are understood
linguistically and epistemologically as such (see for example Keil, C1979).
A related though far from identical claim might be made with respect to
European art music up to the end of the 18th century, at least in the sense
that such music was intended for specific social occasions: it had a social
function. However, an impulse in European culture to treat music as
something apart from other activities, and to understand it as of more
relevance to the individual than to the collectivity, can be traced to the late
Middle Ages. This impulse received an additional and vital emphasis at the
beginning of the 19th century, when European art music came to be thought
of as ‘autonomous’ in relation to other activities, a pursuit that had value in
its own right, and was in this sense ‘pure art’. This move has been
accompanied by the ‘professionalization’ of the artist, whether composer or
performer, who have seen themselves increasingly as governed by the
conventions and norms of their profession, a view symptomatic of a desire
to render themselves as free as possible from the constraints of church,
state, patrons and the public (Supičić, B1964).
From a sociological point of view, such developments have to be
understood as themselves products of social processes, with their
underlying logic grounded in the exigencies of wider social forces
(Shepherd, C1991). The separation of music (or, more precisely, art music)
from society as part of the received wisdoms of modern bourgeois culture
created as a consequence a situation ripe for the sociologist's intervention.
‘Music’ and ‘society’ were seen as separate entities and the problem
became that of understanding how the two might relate. This problem was
more attractive to sociologists than to historical musicologists or music
theorists, since historical musicology and music theory had developed in
part as an aspect of the entrenchment of art music as autonomous. Despite
the initial and continuing tendency within the sociology of music to study art
music, not because of the particularly intriguing sociological problem it
posed but because of its privileged position in society and the academy, the
sociology of music from the time of Adorno onwards nonetheless evidenced
increasingly critical and democratizing tendencies, which in the final two
decades of the 20th century resulted in the mounting of explicit opposition to
the desired exclusivity of art music as an object of study and to its presumed
autonomous character.
The basis of this opposition resided in a critical, sociological instinct.
However, because work resting on this instinct assumed that music, like all
human activity, was socially constituted, it was an instinct whose fruits could
no longer be contained exclusively within the discipline of sociology as
traditionally conceived. There were several other disciplines and intellectual
trajectories to which the politics of music and its study were relevant.
Therein lies the diffuse character of the sociology of music, in particular
during the 1980s and 90s.
This diffusion and its political character have been integrally linked to a
critical impulse that results habitually in the ‘problematization’ of objects of
study. This concern to problematize the world has distinguished critical
forms of sociology from everyday, commonsense reality, and leads to the
sociological enterprise being viewed with suspicion. This arises because,
for the majority of people, the world is something to be ‘lived within’. While
individuals certainly analyse the world and are critical of it, there remains a
great deal that most individuals can take for granted as they lead their
everyday lives. In contrast, the sociologist examines the relational
processes through which people collectively produce and reproduce their
worlds; the sociologist's understandings and explanations are themselves
part and parcel of these processes. There is in consequence little that the
critical sociologist can take at face value. Actions, events, trends, views,
opinions and beliefs: these are the stuff of sociological investigation and, in
order to investigate them, the critical sociologist must enter a state of
constructive scepticism. In many cases, that which seems unremarkable,
mundane and unexceptional has lurking within it a question that needs to
be framed and formulated if light is to be thrown on the character of its
social constitution. Such framing and formulation for sociological
investigation renders problematic the unremarkable, the mundane and the
unexceptional; in other words, objects of study become ‘problematized’
through their very constitution by critical sociologists.
If sociology's object of study seems widely general, if its borders seem
more porous than most, and if its modus operandi involves a suspension of
reality – or at least a suspension of everyday reality – then it may seem
more like a frame of mind, a way of relating to the world, than an academic
discipline as such. This attitudinal as opposed to formal understanding of
sociology as a discipline goes some way to explaining the increasingly
diffuse character of the sociology of music. That sociology is a discipline is
not, however, in question. Yet the frame of mind, the constructive scepticism
and the suspension of reality do give a feel for the character of critical
sociology as a practice. All these things involve what has perceptively been
referred to as ‘the sociological imagination’ (Mills, A1959).
It is the exercise of this imagination which made such a difference in the
academic study of music during the 1980s and 90s. However, more
conventional forms of the sociology of music have nonetheless continued to
be practised. One form approximates to social history in examining the
history of the institutional, political and economic circumstances within
which music has been practised. Here the pioneering work of Henry Raynor
(H1972, H1976) has been important in the context of European art music,
as has the work of Tia DeNora (H1991, H1995). Another approximates to a
more synchronic concern with such circumstances, as well as with the
effects that music itself can have upon them; important in the realm of
concert music have been the contributions of DiMaggio (H1986; with
Useem, H1982), and in popular music studies the contributions of Garofalo
(H1992), Bennett and others (H1993) and Eyerman and Jamison (H1998).
Sociology of music
5. Music as social meaning.
The assumption that all human thought and action is socially constituted
has given rise to the possibility that the structures and sounds of music are
of social significance: that is, the meanings articulated through the
structures and sounds of music may themselves be socially constituted.
This line of thinking, implicit in the work of Weber and Adorno, became
explicit around the 1970s (see Lomax, C1968; Blacking, C1973; Shepherd,
C1977, C1982; Small, B1977; Willis, C1978; Keil, C1979; and Ballantine,
C1984).
All this work, with some variations, rested on the central idea that the
character of social or cultural formations could find expression through
musical structures and sounds, if not be in part constituted through them.
Ballantine's work drew explicitly on that of Adorno yet brought into question
the supposed social importance of avant-garde music and perceived in
some forms of popular music resistance rather than subjugation to
dominant ideological forces. However, Ballantine retained a strong sense of
the importance of aesthetic judgment in distinguishing between ‘good’
forms of popular music, such as that of Bob Dylan and punk culture, clearly
seen as oppositional, and those such as disco, clearly seen as passively
reproductive of dominant ideology.
Lomax's work, by contrast, is more evidently Durkheimian and consensual
in spirit, seeing in the song styles of traditional cultures a reflection of
essential cultural forms as well as a reinforcement of normative behaviour.
This strain is apparent also in the work of Blacking, Keil, Willis and
Shepherd, as is a more critical, Marxist-orientated element. In the work of
Willis and Shepherd, this critical element (as in the work of Ballantine) is
located in the presumed oppositional stances of various genres of popular
music, a stance resting on a perceived homology between the technical
characteristics of the musical genre in question and the character of the
subcultural reality involved with the music. Shepherd (C1982), drawing in
part on the work of Willis and Hebdige, nuanced this element by identifying
in the technical musical characteristics of a wide range of popular music
genres the potential for both social reproduction and resistance.
A rather different and distinctive approach to the question of music's social
meaning has been developed by Philip Tagg (C1979, C1982, C1987,
C1991). Drawing in part on the semiotics of Charles Peirce (Fisch and
Kloesel, A1982–99), and in part on the work of Charles Seeger (G1977),
Tagg developed the concept of the museme as the equivalent in music to
the morpheme in language. As the morpheme in language depends on
phonemes, so the museme depends on ‘musical phonemes’ or ‘basic
elements (not units) of musical expression’ (C1979, p.71). Unlike the
phoneme as a basic and consistently stable unit of meaning in language,
the parameters of musical phonemes as elements of meaning in music
may shift according to the conventions of the musical genre in question and
the perception of listeners. Having determined the existence of a museme
as an agglomeration of musical phonemes through the ‘interobjective
comparison’ of musemes between similar pieces of music, Tagg creates a
hypothesis of meaning for the museme: ‘affectual meaning in associative
verbal form’, which is then tested through a process of hypothetical
substitution or commutation. Unlike language, in which morphemes occur
in a discrete and sequential manner, musemes in music can be heard
simultaneously, thus giving rise to subtle and complex relations of both
denotative and connotative meaning. For Tagg, the notion of ‘museme
stacks’ which thus derives is understood to correspond to the notion of a
‘sound’ in popular music (C1982, pp.50–53).
Tagg's method of analysing social meanings in popular music has been
used to provide extended and sophisticated analyses of the theme from the
television show Kojak and of the ABBA hit song Fernando the Flute (C1979,
C1991). Insightful though these analyses are, the criticism can easily be
lodged that the kinds of music Tagg has chosen – music with strong
associative visual images or lyrics – favour his mode of analysis (Middleton,
G1990, pp.233–6; Shepherd and Wicke, C1997, pp.105–8). The difficulty of
applying the technique ‘to a pop recording with relatively bland, unimportant,
or “musicalized” lyrics’ (Middleton) highlights a second weakness, shared
by nearly all work on the social meaning of music: a silence or lack of
precision on the question of how ‘the social’ gets into ‘the musical’. A
related question that is as difficult is that of how musical materials can have
such meanings in the first place. There are two possibilities. One is that the
meanings are endemic, ‘immanent’ in some way to the specific character of
the musical materials in question. Yet the presumed fixity of relation
between meaning and music precludes the possibility for negotiation
fundamental to the constitution of any social meaning. The alternative is that
the characteristics of the sounds in question are assumed to play little role
in the construction of the meanings articulated through them. This has been
the position of Lawrence Grossberg, who has seen the sounds of music as
little more than a ground of physiological and affective stimulation which can
take on meaning only after being interpellated into the world of language
(E1984, E1987, E1993).
A basic tension in the sociological analysis of musical meaning has thus
lain in the need on the one hand to understand the characteristics of
musical sounds as in some way being implicated in meaning construction,
and on the other to allow that processes of meaning construction through
music are social in character. Martin (B1995) has identified this tension as
a basic difficulty in the work of Shepherd, which in turn has highlighted
another problem: the tendency to reify both social structures and musical
structures in the service of ensuring a smooth analytical fit between the two.
It remains to be seen whether the more recent work of Shepherd and Wicke
(C1997) is to be judged successful in resolving these tensions and
difficulties through its development of an alternative social semiology for
music. Drawing on and critiquing extant work in structuralism, semiology
and poststructuralism of relevance to the understanding of music, this work,
in following that of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (A1972),
problematizes the concept of the social structure, as well as the related
concepts of ‘society’ and ‘the social’. It also engages in a problematization
of the concept of ‘music’, hitherto taken for granted, suggested by the ways
in which many societies and cultures function without this linguistic and
epistemological category.
Sociology of music
6. Music as social interaction.
An interest in music as social interaction at the level of micro-sociology was
first revealed in the work of Schütz. It is also evident in Henry Kingsbury's
important ethnographic study of the social dynamics of life in a music
conservatory (D1988). However, it has been argued for extensively and
consistently by Howard Becker, who has drawn a clear distinction between
a more theoretical sociology of music, concerned with teasing out music's
meanings, and an empirical sociology of music based on an examination of
what ‘people do together’. Sociologists working in this latter mode, he has
observed, ‘aren't much interested in “decoding” art works, in finding the
work's secret meanings as reflections of society. They prefer to see those
works as a result of what a lot of people do together’ (D1989, p.282).
Becker's initial contribution to the sociology of music is to be found in his
book Outsiders (D1963), a seminal contribution to the field of deviance,
where two chapters deal with the distinctive way of life and careers of dance
musicians. Though the activities of dance musicians are formally within the
law, ‘their culture and way of life are sufficiently bizarre and unconventional
for them to be labeled as outsiders by more conventional members of the
community’ (p.79). He gained access to the culture of dance band
musicians in 1948–9 through an almost perfect form of participant
observation. He had played the piano professionally for many years and
been active in musical circles in Chicago; like many other musicians, he
took advantage of the G.I. Bill to attend college, so his status as a student
did not differentiate him from other musicians. Working in a wide variety of
orchestras, he was able to make extensive notes on events in which he was
involved and conversations that he heard. Most of the people he observed
did not know that he was undertaking a study of musicians.
What Becker's research revealed was that dance musician subculture
formed around a tension between the need of these musicians to work as
dance musicians and the desire to perform jazz, the only music that in their
view was worth playing. There was thus a need to choose between the
necessity of engaging in a conventional form of earning a living and the
desire to maintain self-respect and integrity by conforming to artistic
standards as defined by the subculture. In this situation, the outsiders who
listened to these musicians' performances in dance bands were referred to
as ‘squares’, and disliked intensely for their role in representing unwanted
interference in the artistic lives the musicians wished to lead. The
musicians thus saw themselves as essentially different from other people
and felt little compunction about disregarding the norms of ‘square’ society.
They thus behaved in ways regarded as deviant as a means of constructing
a strong subcultural identity.
Becker's Art Worlds (D1982) – a major contribution to the sociology of art,
and thus to the sociology of music – rendered problematic received notions
of art, understanding artistic works and other forms of cultural products as a
consequence of the whole range of activities, hitherto taken for granted,
involved in their production and consumption. For Becker, art worlds are
constituted through the social interactions of a wide variety of players, who
act according to the opportunities, norms and constraints that typify the art
world in question. The products of such worlds are thus shaped through the
character of these actions which, in line with the general tenets of symbolic
interactionism, may involve innovation as well as conformity. The possibility
of understanding the social institutions of art and culture that thus arise as
the ordered playing out of such interactions effectively dissolves the
distinction between ‘the work’ and its ‘context’ that has characterized much
work in the sociology of music, a dissolution also seen in the work of
Weinstein (D1991). In such work, the production and consumption of
cultural commodities is understood as a complex but basically ordered set
of mediations, in which the materials of music themselves also play a role.
This emphasis on mediation has been central to the work of the French
sociologist Antoine Hennion. The sociology of culture as practised in France
during the 1980s was heavily influenced by the tradition of symbolic
interactionism and Becker's work in particular. In a series of publications
(D1981, D1983, D1986, D1996–7; see also Hennion and Meadel, D1986),
Hennion has argued against both an understanding of the art work as an
independent object of beauty and a sociological approach that conceptually
eradicates the specific and distinctive qualities of individual art works by
reducing them to the conditions of reflective social symbols. In stressing the
concept of mediation, Hennion understands the specific and distinctive
character of cultural commodities as complex emanations of the social
interactions that produce them, and the character of the material objects in
and through which they are invested. He has thus striven to transcend a
distinction customarily drawn in the sociology of culture between the
circumstances of production and consumption.
Work on music as social interaction has not only distinguished between its
interests and the more theoretical concerns of work on music as social
meaning; it has also been critical of the latter in failing to demonstrate
through concrete analyses of musical activity how social meanings in music
actually arise. Thus, at the beginning of the 1990s, it was observed that
‘what is particularly missing in the literature [on popular music] is
ethnographic data and micro-sociological detail’ (Cohen, D1991, p.6). In the
same vein, Becker criticized Shepherd's work for an absence of ‘any sense
of the process by which [the] connections [between changes in large-scale
historical forces and in musical forms] actually come about and any
attention to the details of the worlds whose features are given such
explanatory weight’ (Becker, D1992, p.529).
An important contrast between concepts fundamental to the two traditions
has been made in the distinction between ‘musical communities’ and
‘musical scenes’. For Will Straw, a musical community ‘may be imagined
as a particular population group whose composition is relatively stable …
and whose involvement in music takes the form of an ongoing exploration of
a particular musical idiom said to be organically rooted in that community’. A
musical scene, by contrast, is ‘that cultural space within which a range of
musical practices co-exist, interacting with each other within a variety of
processes of differentiation and according to widely varying trajectories of
change and cross-fertilization’. The break with the tradition of work
established in the 1970s on the social meaning of music – both
sociological and ethnomusicological – becomes clear in Straw's
observation that cultural theorists like himself ‘encountering
ethnomusicological studies for the first time after an apprenticeship in the
hermeneutics of suspicion may be struck by the prominence within them of
notions of cultural totality or claims concerning an expressive unity of
musical practices’. The conclusion that the concept of the musical scene is
‘the most appropriate term for designating centres of musical activity today’
stands as a theoretical prolegomena for much work that followed on the
relations between music, ethnicity, difference, identity, place and the forces
of globalization and postmodernity (Straw, E1991, pp.369–73). The notion of
the scene as it developed through the 1990s owed much to Becker's work
on art worlds as well as to Shank's work on music in the city of Austin
(E1994).
Sociology of music
7. Music as social identity.
Towards the end of the 1980s, Frith observed that ‘the experience of pop
music is an experience of placing: in responding to a song, we are drawn,
haphazardly, into affective and emotional alliances with the performers and
with the performers' other fans'; he concluded that the ‘interplay between
personal absorption into music and the sense that it is, nevertheless,
something out there, something public, is what makes music so important
in the cultural placing of the individual in the social’. What he identified in
this article was the way in which popular music in particular serves as a
powerful force of identity for the individual within society, as well as a
powerful force in forming the collective cultural and group identities from
which individuals draw sustenance in constructing a sense of self. As he
concludes, ‘the intensity of this relationship between taste and self-
definition seems peculiar to popular music – it is “possessable” in ways
that other cultural forms are not … other cultural forms – painting, literature,
design – can articulate and show off shared values and pride, but only
music can make you feel them’ (Frith, E1987, pp.139–44).
This interest in music as a basis for the formation of social identities,
whether individual or collective, can be traced back to the late 1960s and
early 70s in work concerned to understand the relations between popular
music and young people's perceived proclivity to challenge the social status
quo (Denzin, B1970; Hirsch, B1971; Robinson and Hirsch, B1972).
Towards the end of the 1970s and going into the 80s, this nascent interest
took on a more explicit character in attempts to understand popular music
as a force for the construction of gender and sexed identities (Frith and
McRobbie, E1978; Shepherd, C1987; see also Taylor and Laing, E1979).
However, the major contribution to the understanding of popular music as a
force for the construction of identities – beyond the largely
ethnomusicological contributions to the study of world popular music and
the related questions of ethnicity and place of the mid- to late-1990s – has
lain in the work of Frith.
Like Grossberg, Frith has maintained a strong interest in what people say
about music as a route to understanding the meanings that music holds for
them. In this, he has demonstrated a strong affinity for the work of scholars
such as Finnegan and Cohen in distancing himself from the more totalizing
claims of studies in popular music emanating from British cultural studies
of the 1970s (E1992) and for the work of Becker (D1982) and Bourdieu
(A1979) in understanding how meaning and value are attributed to music
(E1990). Frith does not understand various genres and styles of popular
music as reflecting cultural and group realities so much as serving to
constitute them in complex ways. A key to understanding his work is the way
in which, as a sociologist, he has refused to take the discourses in terms of
which people talk about music at face value but to problematize them in the
process of getting beneath their surface to grasp how they serve to
constitute meaning and value for people in music. It was Frith who first
importantly pointed out that notions of authenticity as attached to certain
kinds of rock music in contrast to the perceived commercialism of pop
music were in fact ideological in character: ‘the myth of authenticity is,
indeed, one of rock's own ideological effects’ (E1987, p.137). He followed
this by arguing that the discourses of autonomy, authenticity and
commercialism customarily applied to art music, folk music and popular
music respectively were much more slippery than appeared at first sight. In
referring to the way in which ‘in the 1930s jazz was understood, in
bewilderingly quick succession, first in commercial, then in folk, and finally
in art terms’, he concluded that a ‘comparative sociology would reveal far
less clear distinctions between these worlds than their discursive values
imply’ (E1990, p.101). Elements of all these discourses can in fact be
discerned in what people have said about all three of these musical
traditions.
The character of Frith's insights can be traced in part to the dual careers he
has followed, as a professional sociologist on the one hand, and a rock
critic on the other, working at various times for the London Sunday Times
and the Observer. The former career tended to be concerned with the
development of dispassionate but committed social analyses, the latter with
the world of value judgments: they came together in his book Performing
Rites: on the Value of Popular Music (E1996), a series of essays in which,
as an academic critic, he seeks to understand the constitution of personal
taste and emotional response in relation to music. Like Adorno, therefore,
Frith has put aesthetic judgment at the centre of his sociological agenda.
But, unlike Adorno, he does not see the purpose of the sociology of music
as the making of such judgments, but rather their understanding. Other
important contributions to understanding the role of music in constituting
social identities have been made by Walser in respect of heavy metal rock
music (E1993), Thornton in respect of the music of dance clubs and raves
(E1995) and Grossberg, particularly in respect of the situation of rock music
in an era of popular conservatism and postmodern culture (E1992).
Sociology of music
8. Music as commercial and industrial process.
The practice of music, and not just popular music, has, since at least the
middle of the 19th century, become increasingly commercial and
industrialized. Forces of mass production and mass consumption have,
through different forms of mass dissemination (for example radio, film,
television and Mp3 software) and of commodification (for example sheet
music, cylinders, records and compact discs), changed the practice of
music from something necessarily embodied, local, face-to-face and
located in the here-and-now to something as often as not disembodied,
global, impersonal and out of time and space. The influential theory of
mass culture developed by Adorno and Horkheimer viewed these
innovations as having nothing but a deleterious effect on social and cultural
life, although their contemporary Walter Benjamin argued a more positive
case, seeing in the new technologies of mass production and mas s
dissemination creative possibilities for artists and cultural workers (A1961;
see also Middleton, G1990). The stage was set by Adorno's work in
particular for the conventional view that the music industries do little in their
constant search for profits but create fantasy worlds of escapism for the vast
majority of the population, thus serving the ideological needs of industrial
capitalism as a social form and effectively marginalizing any possibility for
opposition. This view, in essence, was replicated in the work of Chapple
and Garofalo (F1977) and, in a more measured way, Wallis and Malm
(F1984).
Much work in the sociology of music since the 1970s has argued for the
oppositional potential of many genres of popular music, while still
acknowledging the undoubted influence and importance of the music
industries in shaping public taste. Further, towards the close of the 20th
century, much work in popular music studies – including, notably, work on
world popular musics – in choosing to concentrate more on the social
interactions giving rise to particular musical scenes and genres than on the
development of all-inclusive theories, began to reveal a more complex and
nuanced understanding of the character of the tensions and plays that occur
between musicians and the music industries than could possibly be
illuminated through an assumed stand-off between the forces of
reproduction and resistance.
Nonetheless, it is important in these contexts to explore the dynamics of the
music industries as a topic sui generis, and in this the work of Richard
Peterson has been influential. He has sought to account for the pervasive
influence of the music industries on the one hand and the fact that, on the
other, the industries cannot actually determine tastes and buying habits:
music sales are manifestly unpredictable, which is why, in comparison to
other commodities, cultural or otherwise, the music industries put out such
a massive variety of product. In 1975 Peterson and Berger developed a
cyclical theory, according to which, during periods of oligarchy in the music
industries – when a small number of major or transnational record
companies command a high share of the market-place – opportunities for
artistic innovation and creativity are low, and a high degree of control over
public taste is maintained (F1975). By contrast, at the other end of the cycle,
when the major companies command a relatively low share of the market-
place, independent record companies are seen to play a more significant
role, and the argument is that artists have more creative freedom and
consumers a wider choice of product.
This work concentrates on the middle part of the 20th century and, during
this period in the history of the music industries, when American companies
dominated, it is arguable that their analysis possessed considerable
explanatory power. Peterson's use of this theory (F1990) to explain the rise
of Elvis Presley and rock and role in the mid-1950s in terms of major
structural tensions and changes in the music industries from approximately
1948 to 1958 is valuable in countering the customary ‘great man’ accounts
of these events, even if his explanation can, on the other hand, be judged
somewhat one-dimensional in discounting wider cultural forces and the
undoubted performing ability of Presley himself.
However, as the 20th century progressed, it became more difficult to draw
clear distinctions between major record companies and independents.
Further, the American command of major, transnational record companies
began to decline. As the role of the traditional ‘artist and repertoire’ men
diminished (they acted as talent scouts, who identified, signed and then
supervised the recording of potentially successful musicians), and the
independent producer became increasingly influential, the major record
companies began, on an increasingly international scale, to use
independent producers and companies as creative partners who assumed
the initial risks in identifying and recording artists. In consequence, the
major companies concentrated more and more on marketing and
distribution and the management of an increasingly complex web of rights.
Thus, although six major record companies accounted for 90% of American
sales and between 70 and 80% of world sales by the 1990s (Burnett,
F1996), it is questionable whether the 1998 takeover of Polygram by the
Canadian alcoholic beverage company Seagrams to form the largest
conglomeration of record companies in the world, with an estimated 22%
share of the world market (Seagrams already owned Universal), can be
understood solely or even largely in terms of Peterson's model. Indeed, this
kind of model has been explicitly challenged by Christianen (F1995).
While rationalization is an undoubted feature of such takeovers, it seems
likely that creative decisions are located at a relatively low level in the
organization and that the conglomeration is more of a complex of
associated record and production companies, many of whom ‘contract out’
work to associated but essentially independent firms. As early as 1992, it
was pointed out that major record companies were becoming noticeably
more decentralized and using more open management techniques (Lopes,
F1992). Added to this, there has been the development of new information
technologies, which, in affecting processes of both production and
marketing, have allowed record companies to become both more flexible
and more focussed in their operations, moving them away from the old
‘mass production’ models (Hesmondhalgh, F1996). It was not until the end
of the 20th century that an attempt was made to provide the first systematic
analysis of the corporate culture and strategies of the major record
companies (Negus, F1999) or a truly international history of the music
industries (Gronow and Ilpo, F1998).
In these discussions, it is important to recognize the contributions of Becker
and Hennion, who have been concerned to render more sophisticated the
analysis of music's relations to its conditions of production and
consumption. These contributions have worked against the view that music
is some kind of ‘object’, which then endures, for example, the ministrations
of the music industries in the manner in which it is produced and
consumed. This standard view has been problematized by both Hennion
and Frith, who have variously argued that music's specific characteristics
are actually constituted through the conditions of their production and
consumption, while at the same time not being reducible to them. The
central flaw of the traditional view, it has been argued, ‘is the suggestion
that music is the starting point of the industrial process – the raw material
over which everyone fights – when it is, in fact, the final product’… ‘the
“industrialization of music” can't be understood as something that happens
to music but describes a process in which music itself is made – a
process, that is, which fuses (and confuses) capital, technical, and musical
arguments’ (Frith, F1987, p.54).
Sociology of music
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3/1914)
M. Weber: Die rationalen und soziologischen Grundlagen
der Musik (Munich, 1921, 2/1924; Eng. trans., 1958)
T.W. Adorno and G. Simpson: ‘On Popular Music’, Studies
in Philosophy and Social Science, ix (1941), 17–48
T.W. Adorno: Philosophie der neuen Musik (Tübingen,
1949, 3/1967; Eng. trans., 1973/R)
A. Schütz: ‘Making Music Together: a Study in Social
Relationship’, Social Research, xviii/1 (1951), 159–78
T.W. Adorno: Versuch über Wagner (Berlin and Frankfurt,
1952, 2/1964; Eng. trans., 1981)
A. Silbermann: Wovon lebt die Musik? Die Prinzipien der
Musiksoziologie (Regensburg, 1957; Eng. trans.,
1963/R)
T.W. Adorno: Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie (Frankfurt,
1962, 2/1968; Eng. trans., 1976)
K.P. Etzkorn: ‘Georg Simmel and the Sociology of Music’,
Social Forces, xliii (1964), 101–7
I. Supičić: Elementi sociologije muzike (Zagreb, 1964);
enlarged Fr. edn as Musique et société: perspectives
pour une sociologie de la musique (Zagreb, 1971;
Eng. trans., 1989 as Music in Society: a Guide to the
Sociology of Music)
T.W. Adorno: ‘Perennial Fashion – Jazz’, Prisms (London,
1967/R), 121–32
N.K. Denzin: ‘Problems in Analyzing Elements of Mass
Culture: Notes on the Popular Song and other Artistic
Productions’, American Journal of Sociology, lxxv
(1970), 1035–8
P.M. Hirsch: ‘Sociological Approaches to the Pop Music
Phenomenon’, American Behavioral Scientist, xiv
(1971), 371–88
J. Robinson and P.M. Hirsch: ‘Teenage Response to Rock
‘n’ Roll Protest Song’, The Sound of Social Change:
Studies in Popular Culture, ed. R.S. Denisoff and R.A.
Peterson (Chicago, 1972), 222–31
J. Shepherd and others, eds.: Whose Music? A Sociology
of Musical Languages (London, 1977/R) [incl. J.
Shepherd: ‘Media, Social Process and Music’, 7–51]
C. Small: Music – Society – Education (London, 1977)
S. Frith: The Sociology of Rock (London, 1978; rev. 1983 as
Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock
’n’ Roll)
M. Paddison: ‘The Critique Criticised’, Popular Music, ii
(1982), 201–18
S. Frith: Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of
Rock (London, 1983)
R. Leppert and S. McClary, eds.: Music and Society: the
Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception
(Cambridge, 1987)
A.L. White, ed.: Lost in Music: Culture, Style, and the
Musical Event (London, 1987)
C. Norris, ed.: Music and the Politics of Culture (London and
New York, 1989)
T.W. Adorno: The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on
Mass Culture, ed. J.M. Bernstein (London, 1991)
E.W. Said: Musical Elaborations (London and New York,
1991)
N. Elias: Mozart: zur Soziologie eines Genies (Frankfurt,
1991; Eng. trans., 1993)
M. Paddison: Adorno's Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge,
1993)
P.J. Martin: Sounds and Society: Themes in the Sociology
of Music (Manchester, 1995)
M. Paddison: Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture: Essays
on Critical Theory and Music (London, 1996)
R.W. Witkin: Adorno on Music (London, 1998)
c: music as social meaning
A. Lomax: Folk Song Style and Culture (Washington DC,
1968/R)
J. Blacking: How Musical is Man? (Seattle, WA, 1973)
[sound cassette also available]
J. Shepherd: ‘The “Meaning” of Music’, ‘The Musical Coding
of Ideologies’, Whose Music? A Sociology of Musical
Languages, ed. J. Shepherd and others (London,
1977/R), 53–68; 69–124
P. Willis: Profane Culture (London, 1978)
C.M. Keil: Tiv Song (Chicago, 1979/R1983 as Tiv Song: the
Sociology of Art in a Classless Society)
P. Tagg: Kojak – 50 Seconds of Television Music: toward
the Analysis of Affect in Music (Göteborg, 1979)
J. Shepherd: ‘A Theoretical Model for the
Sociomusicological Analysis of Popular Musics’,
Popular Music, ii (1982), 145–77
P. Tagg: ‘Analysing Popular Music: Theory, Method, and
Practice’, Popular Music, ii (1982), 37–68
C. Ballantine: Music and its Social Meanings (New York,
1984)
J. Shepherd: ‘Music and Male Hegemony’, Music and
Society: the Politics of Composition, Performance,
and Reception, ed. R. Leppert and S. McClary
(Cambridge, 1987), 151–72
P. Tagg: ‘Musicology and the Semiotics of Popular Music’,
Semiotica lxvi/1–3 (1987), 259–78
S. McClary: Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and
Sexuality (Minneapolis, 1991)
J. Shepherd: Music as Social Text (Cambridge, 1991)
P. Tagg: Fernando the Flute: Analysis of Musical Meaning in
an Abba Mega-Hit (Liverpool, 1991)
J. Shepherd and P. Wicke: Music and Cultural Theory
(Cambridge, 1997)
d: music as social action
H.S. Becker: Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of
Deviance (London, 1963, 2/1973/R)
A. Hennion: Les professionnels du disque (Paris, 1981)
H.S. Becker: Art Worlds (Berkeley, 1982)
A. Hennion: ‘The Production of Success: an Anti-Musicology
of the Pop Song’, Popular Music, iii (1983), 159–93
A. Hennion: ‘La musique est une sociologie: points de
 méthode, à propos des théories musicales de
Rameau’, Sociologie de l'art, ed. R. Moulin (Paris,
1986) 347–54
A. Hennion and C. Meadel: ‘Programming Music: Radio as
Mediator’, Media, Culture and Society, viii (1986),
281–303
H. Kingsbury: Music, Talent, and Performance: a
Conservatory Cultural System (Philadelphia, 1988)
H.S. Becker: ‘Ethnomusicology and Sociology: a Letter to
Charles Seeger’, EthM, xxxiii (1989), 275–86
R. Finnegan: The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an
English Town (Cambridge, 1989)
S. Cohen: Rock Culture in Liverpool: Popular Music in the
Making (Oxford, 1991)
D. Weinstein: Heavy Metal: a Cultural Sociology (New York,
1991)
H.S. Becker: ‘Review of Shepherd, “Music as Social Text”’,
Contemporary Sociology, xxi (1992), 528–9
A. Hennion: ‘Baroque and Rock Music: Music, Mediators
and Musical Taste’, Poetics, xxiv (1996–7), 415–35
e: music as social identity
S. Firth and A. McRobbie: ‘Rock and Sexuality’, Screen
Education, no.29 (1978), 3–19; repr. in On Record:
Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, ed. S. Frith and A.
Goodwin (London and New York, 1990), 371–89
J. Taylor and D. Laing: ‘Disco-Pleasure-Discourse: on
“Rock and Sexuality”’, Screen Education, no.31
(1979), 43–8
L. Grossberg: ‘Another Boring Day in Paradise: Rock and
Roll and the Empowerment of Everyday Life’, Popular
Music, iv (1984), 225–60
S. Frith: ‘Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music’, Music and
Society: the Politics of Composition, Performance,
and Reception, ed. R. Leppert and S. McClary
(Cambridge, 1987), 133–50; repr. in Classic Essays
on Twentieth-Century Music, ed. R. Kostelanetz and J.
Darby (New York, 1996), 340–54
L. Grossberg: ‘Rock and Roll in Search of an Audience’,
Popular Music and Communication, ed. J. Lull
(Newbury Park, CA, 1987, 2/1992), 175–97
S. Frith: Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop
(Cambridge, 1988)
S. Frith: ‘What is Good Music?’, Canadian University Music
Review, x/2 (1990), 92–102
W. Straw: ‘Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change:
Communities and Scenes in Popular Music’, Cultural
Studies, v (1991), 368–88
S. Frith: ‘The Cultural Study of Popular Music’, Cultural
Studies, ed. L. Grossberg and others (London, 1992),
 174–82
L. Grossberg: We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular
Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (London,
1992)
S.D. Crafts, D. Cavicchi and C.M. Keil, eds.: My Music
(Hanover, NH, 1993)
L. Grossberg: ‘Is Anybody Listening? Does Anybody Care?
On Talking about “The State of Rock”’, Microphone
Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture, ed. A. Ross
and T. Rose (London, 1993), 41–58
R. Walser: Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and
Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Hanover, NH, 1993)
B. Shank: Dissonant Identities: the Rock ‘n’ Roll Scene in
Austin, Texas (Hanover, NH, 1994)
S. Thornton: Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural
Capital (Cambridge, 1995)
S. Frith: Performing Rites: on the Value of Popular Music
(Oxford, 1996)
f: music as commercial and industrial process
R.A. Peterson and D.G. Berger: ‘Cycles in Symbol
Production: the Case of Popular Music’, American
Sociological Review, xl (1975), 158–73; repr, in On
Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, ed. S. Frith
and A. Goodwin (London and New York, 1990), 140–
59
S. Chapple and R. Garofalo: Rock ‘n’ Roll is Here to Pay:
the History and Politics of the Music Industry
(Chicago, 1977)
R. Wallis and K. Malm: Big Sounds from Small Peoples: the
Music Industry in Small Countries (New York and
London, 1984)
S. Frith: ‘The Industrialization of Popular Music’, Popular
Music and Communication, ed. J. Lull (Newbury Park,
CA, 1987, 2/1992), 53–77
R.A. Peterson: ‘Why 1955? Explaining the Advent of Rock
Music’, Popular Music, ix (1990), 97–116
P.D. Lopes: ‘Innovation and Diversity in the Popular Music
Industry, 1969–1990’, American Sociological Review,
lvii (1992), 56–91
M. Christianen: ‘Cycles in Symbol Production? A New
Model to Explain Concentration, Diversity and
Innovation in the Music Industry’, Popular Music, xiv
(1995), 55–93
R. Burnett: The Global Jukebox: the International Music
Industry (London, 1996)
D. Hesmondhalgh: ‘Post-Fordism, Flexibility and the Music
Industries’, Media, Culture and Society, xviii (1996),
469–88
P. Gronow and S. Ilpo: An International History of the
 Recording Industry (London, 1998)
K. Negus: Music Genres and Corporate Cultures (London,
1999)
g: popular music studies, ethnomusicology
C. Seeger: Studies in Musicology, 1935–1975 (Berkeley,
1977)
I. Chambers: Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular
Culture (New York and London, 1985)
R. Middleton: Studying Popular Music (Milton Keynes, 1990)
C. Waterman: Juju: a Social History and Ethnography of an
African Popular Music (Chicago, 1990) [sound
cassette also available]
M. Stokes: The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in
Modern Turkey (Oxford, 1992)
J. Guilbault and others: Zouk: World Music in the West
Indies (Chicago, 1993) [accompanying sound disc]
M. Slobin: Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West
(Hanover, NH, 1993)
G. Lipsitz: Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music,
Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place (London,
1994)
J. Shepherd: ‘Music, Culture and Interdisciplinarity:
Reflections on Relationships’, Popular Music, xiii
(1994), 127–42
M. Stokes, ed.: Ethnicity, Identity, and Music: the Musical
Construction of Place (Oxford, 1994)
V. Erlmann: Nightsong: Performance, Power, and Practice
in South Africa (Chicago, 1996) [accompanying
videocassette]
T. Langlois: ‘The Local and Global in North African Popular
Music’, Popular Music, xv (1996), 259–73
A. Leyshon, D. Matless and G. Revill, eds.: The Place of
Music (New York, 1998)
h: social history of music
H. Raynor: Social History of Music: from the Middle Ages to
Beethoven (London and New York, 1972)
H. Raynor: Music and Society since 1815 (New York,
1976/R)
P. DiMaggio and M. Useem: ‘The Arts in Class
Reproduction’, Cultural and Economic Reproduction
in Education: Essays on Class, Ideology, and the
State, ed. M. Apple (London, 1982), 181–201
P. DiMaggio: ‘Cultural Entrepreneurship in 19th Century
Boston: the Creation of an Organizational Base for
High Culture in America’, Media, Culture, and Society:
a Critical Reader, ed. R. Collins and others (London,
1986), 194–211
S. Frith, ed.: World Music, Politics, and Social Change
(Manchester, 1989)
 T. DeNora: ‘Musical Patronage and Social Change in
Beethoven's Vienna’, American Journal of Sociology,
xcvii (1991), 310–46
R. Garofalo, ed.: Rockin' the Boat: Mass Music and Mass
Movements (Boston, MA, 1992)
T. Bennett and others, eds.: Rock and Popular Music:
Politics, Policies, Institutions (London, 1993)
T. DeNora: Beethoven and the Construction of Genius:
Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792–1803 (Berkeley,
1995)
R. Eyerman and A. Jamison: Music and Social Movements:
Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century
(Cambridge, 1998)
i: sociology of music education
G. Vulliamy: ‘What Counts as School Music?’, Explorations
in the Politics of School Knowledge, ed. G. Whitty and
M. Young (Driffield, 1976), 19–34
G. Vulliamy: ‘Music and the Mass Culture Debate’; ‘Music
as a Case Study in the New Sociology of Education’,
Whose Music? A Sociology of Musical Languages, ed.
J. Shepherd and others (London, 1977/R), 179–200;
201–32
G. Vulliamy: ‘Culture Clash and School Music: a
Sociological Analysis’, Sociological Interpretations of
Schooling and Classrooms: a Reappraisal, ed. L.
Barton and R. Meighan (Driffield, 1978), 115–27
J. Shepherd and G. Vulliamy: ‘A Comparative Sociology of
School Knowledge’, British Journal of Sociology of
Education, iv/1 (1983), 3–18
K. Swanwick: ‘Problems of Sociological Approach to Pop
Music in Schools’, British Journal of Sociology of
Education, v/1 (1984), 49–56
G. Vulliamy and J. Shepherd: ‘Sociology and Music Education: a Response
to Swanwick’, ibid., 57–76