Roads To Music Sociology 2019

Musik und Gesellschaft
Alfred Smudits Editor
Roads to
Music Sociology
Series editor
A. Smudits, Wien, Austria
Die traditionsreiche Reihe „Musik und Gesellschaft“ wurde 1967 von Kurt
Blaukopf begründet und widmet sich den Zusammenhängen von Musik und
Gesellschaft.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15551

Alfred Smudits
Editor
Roads to Music
Sociology
Editor
Alfred Smudits
Institut für Musiksoziologie
Universität für Musik und
darstellende Kunst
Wien, Austria
ISSN 0259-076X ISSN 2522-8331 (electronic)

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Contents
Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Alfred Smudits
Music Sociology After Mass Modernity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Alfred Smudits
1 Modernity and Modernisation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2 Mass Modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
3 Sociology of Music and Modernisation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
4 Music Sociology After Mass Modernity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
5 Final Remarks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Musicology, Sociology and Digitisation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Peter J. Martin
1 The ‘New’ Musicology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
2 The Work of Kurt Blaukopf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
3 Popular Music Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
4 Summary and Conclusions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Objects, Belief, and the Sociologist: The Sociology
of Art as a Work-To-Be-Done. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Antoine Hennion
1 Mediation as an Ethnomethodology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
2 A Byway. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
3 Writing ‘from …’?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
4 The Perspective of the Object. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
V
VI Contents
5 Rediscovering Belief?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
6 First Test: Singing Lessons. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
7 Second Test: On the Cutting Edge, the Jazzman’s Improvisation . . . . . . . 55
References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
Exploring Gender in Music … to Better Grasp Musical Work . . . . . . . . . 61
Marie Buscatto
1 Social Stereotypes Shape Musical Reception and Recognition. . . . . . . . . 63
2 Social Networks Play a Key Role in Making Musical
Work Possible. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
3 Musical Work Requires the Full Commitment of the
Artist’s Family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
4 Public Policies and Legal Rules Have a Strong Impact
on Musical Work. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
5 Musical Work Must Be Explored at Its Margins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
6 Conclusions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
7 Potential Limits (to Be Developed) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Musical Cosmopolitanism, Bodies and Aesthetic Cultures. . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Motti Regev
1 Cosmopolitan Bodies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
2 Musical Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
3 Pop-rock. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
4 Musical Cosmopolitan Bodies of Pop-rock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
5 Further Thoughts on Music Sociology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
Musical Language. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
Howard S. Becker
1 Faulkner, Becker and Understanding Contemporary
Working (Popular) Musicians. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
2 Arom and the Music of Central Africa. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
3 A Final Problem. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
Contents VII
The Unsung Work of Music Sociology? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

Tia DeNora
1 Vienna’s Institut—Caldron of Current Music Sociology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
2 Farewell to Dualist Conceptions—Music Sociology’s Irreductions. . . . . . 113
3 To Ask, ‘What Can Music Do?’ Is to Ask,
‘What Can Music Sociology Do?’. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
4 Songs in Praise of Music Sociology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
Music Sociology in the GDR: Under Conditions
of Political Dictatorship, Despite of Political Dictatorship. . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
Christian Kaden
1 History. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
2 Theory. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
3 Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
Introduction
Alfred Smudits
This anthology addresses interested readers not only from music sociology but
also from the broader scholarly field of music research—and for good reasons:
The term ‘music sociology’ is indeed ambiguous since it refers to a subfield of
sociology, though it is often understood as a subfield of systematic musicology in
the German-speaking academic field or as special focus of music research, shed-
ding light on the social embedding and social conditions of musical practices.
There are different selection logics to composing an anthology, so the reader
may like to know why these authors and these topics were chosen. This anthology
goes back to a conference organised in 2015 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary
of the Department of Music Sociology, which was founded in 1965 at the Uni-
versity of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. Furthermore, the anthology is
related to the work of Kurt Blaukopf (1914–1999), a pioneer of music sociology
in German-speaking countries and founder of this department. In some way or
other, the topics included in this anthology are related to ideas that Blaukopf had
envisaged since the 1930s. Mindfully, I do not claim any genealogical relation,
but simply an explanation of the compositional logic of this anthology.
Kurt Blaukopf aimed at a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach and anal-
ysis of music as a cultural phenomenon and as social practice. This commitment
goes nicely with Tia DeNora’s argument in this volume: that the study of music
can nourish sociology as a whole, since this study encompasses almost all of the
pivotal topics of this academic discipline.
A. Smudits (*) 
Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien, Wien, Österreich
E-Mail: smudits@mdw.ac.at
© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 1

A. Smudits (ed.), Roads to Music Sociology, Musik und Gesellschaft,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22279-6_1
2 A. Smudits
Additionally, Blaukopf’s empirical understanding of music sociology, rooted

in Max Weber’s interpretative sociology as well in ideas developed by members
of the Vienna Circle, especially Otto Neurath, is still a key feature of our research
practice in the Department of Music Sociology. The invitation of Howard
S. Becker and Peter J. Martin is in line with this methodological approach.
Blaukopf’s conception of music as social practice implies an emphasis on
sociological categories that are a key for capturing the social embedding of music.
This point is associated with the endeavour of Marie Buscatto to bring the issue
of gender into focus. Similarly, Christian Kaden’s discussion of the ideological
framing of music sociology in the context of the German Democratic Republic
sheds light on this aspect.
Blaukopf recognised that music sociology often concerned itself with the gen-
eral conditions of music, but at the same time, he was aware that music sociology
should not lose sight of music as a creative practice and as a work of art. This
position reflects also his own proximity to music, since he had worked for years
as a music critic and published on musicological topics, including a successful
biography of Gustav Mahler, which was translated into several languages. This
commitment fits well with Antoine Hennion’s and also Howard S. Becker’s plea
that sociologists should not neglect the musical work itself.
Blaukopf’s approaches were closely linked with media developments. He was
a pioneer by publishing a journal about gramophone music even in the 1950s and
he developed the concept of mediamorphoses, meaning that the development of
communication technologies has always had a strong impact on music life. The
argumentation of Alfred Smudits follows that by asking for a modernization of
music sociology, taking into account the most recent media developments of
digitalization.
Finally, as early as the 1960s, Blaukopf was emphatically open to studying
contemporary popular music. Though he was a passionate connoisseur of art
music, he followed Spinoza’s motto: ‘I do not condemn nor praise; I merely
study’. I see the work of Motti Regev in line with this idea. Regev’s analysis of
the aesthetic cultures of cosmopolitism brings music sociology close to the soci-
ology of culture and therefore enforces the comprehensive approach genuine to
our research practice in Vienna.
No doubt, many more topics could have been included in this anthology.
However, an anthology is not a handbook or an encyclopaedia. It is by definition
selective and therefore intends to highlight certain themes. With regard to this
publication, I hope the reader will find some benefit from the following chapters:
Alfred Smudits starts with a discussion of the terms ‘modernity’ and ‘moderni-
zation’, identifying several dimensions of modernization, such as rationalisation,
Introduction 3
individualisation, differentiation, domestication as well as several temporal stages

of modernity. Smudits believes that one of the main issues of music sociology
was the understanding of the modernization of the musical field. Max Weber
argued that rationalisation was, in the beginning of early modernism, the main
characteristic of the specific development of occidental music. The rise of mass
media and in particular of electronic media in the beginning of the 20th century—
that is, the beginning of mass modernity—forced sociological theories of music
to integrate mass media into their concepts. This means a homology, that is to
say, the modernization of society goes along with a modernization in the field of
music. Thus, with the emergence of digitization—the digital mediamorphosis—a
new step of modernization takes place. The sociology of music has to face the
challenges that arise out of this newest step of modernization, which means above
all to keep in touch with cultural sociology and general sociological theories and
to develop adequate sociological concepts.
Peter J. Martin reflects on developments in music sociology during the period
in which two other relevant specialisms—the ‘new’ musicology and popular
music studies—emerged and analyses both specialisms with reference, where
appropriate, to Kurt Blaukopf’s works. With respect to the ‘new’ musicology,
Martin argues that, from a sociological point of view, it looks much like the ‘old’.
As far as popular music studies are concerned, Martin suggests that this approach
developed at a time when the record industry was at its peak, dominating the
music business—that is, in the 1980s. Since then, much has changed: even for-
merly ‘major’ record companies are now themselves part of global corporations
and digitisation has produced the most fundamental challenge to the industry
since the invention of recording. Some of the implications of these changes are
considered in this contribution, including the emergence of new business mod-
els, the changing importance of music for youth cultures as a means of asserting
identity, as well as the competition with smartphones and computer games in this
context.
By elaborating on the concept of mediation, Antoine Hennion tries to bypass
the dualistic opposition between social and musical analyses of music, the for-
mer dealing with everything around music but not ‘music itself’, the latter tak-
ing music for an object existing by and for itself. Musical works and experiences
produce their own worlds; they are not data inside a given space that musicol-
ogists and sociologists could analyse, each in their own way. Music is made of
practices, devices, scenes. Hennion argues that considering those mediations does
not lead to a bric-a-brac mixing of scores, instruments, bodies, performances,
institutions, etc.; rather, while there is no musical event without minute attention
paid to each of them, none of them contains or explains the advent of music. It is
4 A. Smudits
impossible, then, to separate music and its value: music can only be valued after
its effects, it exists as it is praised, loved, sustained. In no way does this imply a
psychological reduction of music: subjects are not given more than works. Both
emerge in an open, never-ending process. Documenting this process empirically
may provide a non-dualistic account of what makes music count.
Marie Buscatto starts by acknowledging that, in the last forty years, interna-
tional scholars have explored the ways contemporary female musicians find it
more difficult to get access, to remain and to be recognized as legitimate profes-
sionals in various musical worlds—classical, jazz, rock, pop, techno or rap—than
their male colleagues. While most musical worlds are quite masculine—rock,
jazz, rap or techno—others are mixed—orchestral music, rhythm & blues or pop.
But in all circumstances, women still face several obstacles and reservations with
regard to their creative contribution, in spite of the fact that (almost) all legal bar-
riers have disappeared and formal equality between the sexes is considered a pri-
ority in cultural industries. Buscatto states that current sociological research has
identified several processes that explain the discriminating effects in the current
musical worlds—gendered norms, conventions, stereotypes, networks, family
roles or socialisations—and explores the ways women progressively overcome
various barriers. Subsequently, she discusses how sociological analysis of such
processes can enlighten our knowledge about music as work, and precisely how
musical work is socially constructed and transformed over time.
Amid the growing sociological interest in cosmopolitanism, Motti Regev seeks
to outline in his contribution the major aspects pertaining to the role of music—
and pop-rock music in particular—in the consolidation and materialization of
cosmopolitanism. Hence Regev explores several dimensions through which pop-
rock music has been a key force in propelling cultural cosmopolitanism, espe-
cially at the micro level of bodily practices and everyday life. Pop-rock musical
styles and genres, as clusters of sonic idioms and as physical entities, have pene-
trated urban spaces and individual human bodies all over the world and constitute
the aesthetic cultures of cosmopolitanism. Regev’s arguments revolve around the
idea of the sonic ‘thingness’ of music, how it turns the cultural body into a cos-
mopolitan body and its effect on various dimensions of culture. Inspiration and
insights in this regard are brought from such areas of research and theory as cul-
tural globalization, sociology and anthropology of the cultural body, as well as
so-called ‘thing theory’ (Material Culture Studies, ANT—actant network theory,
etc.) in order to propose possible foci for investigating how musical cosmopoli-
tanism comes into being and functions as a cultural reality.
The contribution by Howard S. Becker departs from the fact that musical
activity largely takes place through sounds that are often non-verbal. This is
Introduction 5
true even for songs and for other genres where lyrics play an important role in
the creative process. Becker argues that if we want to understand music-making
processes, we also need an understanding of that very musical language. (This
explains why so many sociologists of music have been or still are music-makers
themselves). His argument is even stronger for an ethnomusicology that focuses
on musics that are unfamiliar to ears trained in a completely different musical
culture (e.g. in the Western music tradition based on a twelve-tone scale and all
the other apparatus of conventional western music). To demonstrate this urgency,
Becker explores a classic ethnomusicological work, ‘La fanfare de Bangui’ by
Simha Arom, which contains a remarkable analysis of a kind of music that is very
different from Western music and which had to be studied by particular methods
Arom had to invent for that occasion.
In her contribution, Tia DeNora suggests investigating how the study of music
as a part of what sociology does can nourish sociology as a whole. Sociologi-
cal research on music has already enriched our understanding of how to think
about values, relativism and strong attachments. It has also contributed to studies
of work and creativity and shed light on the intermediaries involved in musical
production, distribution and reception. Equally, music sociology has had much to
say about social identities and their formation in music and through musical prac-
tice, about how our bodily sensations are musically mediated and how well-being
(individual, group, community) can be enhanced through musical engagement.
More recently, the field has addressed the relational character of personhood,
capacity and dis/ability through studies of musical ecologies and described how
social relations and social settings are sometimes—and more often than we might
assume—musicalized. Thus, in her view, music sociology is a vibrant and poten-
tially powerful area that is too often sidelined as a specialist corner of sociology
as a whole.
Christian Kaden, who sadly passed away shortly after the Vienna conference,
refers to his personal experience as researcher under a dictatorship, the former
German Democratic Republic. Often ignored, however, is the fact that scien-
tific activities in such a regime produced remarkable results, not because of the
dictatorship but despite it. The development of music sociology is, according to
Kaden, an example of this. Up to the end of the 1960s, some rights of sociol-
ogy as an independent academic discipline were accepted: the so-called ‘special
sociologies’ got the chance to define themselves as niches where, in contrast to
ideological indoctrination, explicitly positive theories could be formulated and
empirical studies could be realized. Thus, at least during the 1970s and the 1980s,
music sociology succeeded in keeping its distance from the dogmas of the pre-
dominant Marxism-Leninism. In particular, East Berlin musicology developed an
6 A. Smudits
advanced model of interdisciplinary research. The central figure of the scene was
Georg Knepler, who organized an efficient network of private and semi-official
contacts with leading scientists in different disciplines, e.g. from linguistics,
cognitive psychology and ethnomusicology. The functional model of musical
communication represented by Georg Knepler, Reiner Kluge and others, pub-
lished in Kaden’s ‘Musiksoziologie’ in 1984, appeared as a convincing alternative
to the highly conservative structure of German musicology. Kaden’s contribution
is therefore an appeal to remember the scientific strategies which might again be
strategies of the future.
Some of the contributors refer explicitly to the fiftieth anniversary of the
Viennese Department of Music Sociology and some sequences with personal
statements concerning the experiences of the authors can be found as well. We
deliberately included these statements reflecting the individual commitment of
the contributors to music sociology.
Music Sociology After Mass Modernity
Alfred Smudits
The title of this contribution contains some notions that may need to be clari-
fied. What exactly is modernity? And mass modernity? What role does music
sociology play in this constellation? And what role sociology in general? What
precisely are the tasks that an up-to-date sociology—a modern music sociology—
must address?
I will first discuss the terms ‘modernity’ and ‘modernisation’ in particular,
before I go on to make my arguments about mass modernity in general. Then I’ll
consider the role of music sociology in relation to modernisation. Finally, I reflect
on the role of music sociology after mass modernity. I confess that I find the term
modernity problematic. It is both a central concept in sociology and an ideolog-
ical concept at the same time. When I was growing up in the 1950s, 1960s and
1970s, modernity and modernisation were unquestioningly seen as goals to be
attained. Modernity was a hegemonic concept present in everyday life, and some-
how this remains true to this day. We still talk about the necessity to modernise
the school system, the bureaucracy, the labour market system, etc. That means
modernity is not only a theoretical concept but also an ideological, political con-
cept—and a very diverse one. But I don’t intend to discuss the various meanings
of modernity and modernisation in this contribution; that would be a different
article. Let me simply start with the established concepts of modernity, as found
in the relevant literature.
A. Smudits (*) 
Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien, Wien, Österreich
E-Mail: smudits@mdw.ac.at

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22279-6_2
8 A. Smudits
1 Modernity and Modernisation
In the political sense, modernity starts with the Enlightenment and the bourgeois
revolutions; in the economic sense, it begins with industrialisation. In the cultural
sense, it addresses the plurality of values, secularisation and the emancipation of
the individual from traditional concepts of life. In the field of arts, we have talked
of modernity since the Renaissance—or, in the case of Arnold Hauser, since Man-
nerism (Hauser 1979). But in the fine arts, the beginning of modernity is very
often located in the second half of the 19th century, when the work of art became
autonomous. Here the meaning of ‘modern’ can be quite simply something ‘new’,
something that did not exist before. In other words, modernity is a very com-
plex concept, and one that was long seen as positive. The first crisis or critique
of the concept of modernity or modernisation—beyond earlier philosophers like
Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Arthur Schopenhauer—occurred in the early 1970s in
reaction to the oil crisis and went hand-in-hand with the emergence of environ-
mentalism. And yet modernisation is still alive and kicking.
In sociology, four dimensions can be identified that characterise modernity.1
These are clearly linked. From the perspective of ‘structure’ or ‘production’, first
there is something called ‘domestication’, which mainly means control over nature.
Increasing control over nature means modernisation. The more control the world
has over nature, the more modern it is—and that is a goal to aspire to, because it
makes life more worthwhile. Second, in the field of culture, we have the concept
of ‘rationalisation’, which goes together with the increasing power of science, the
process of secularisation, a growing ability to exchange different cultural processes
and efficiency. That in turn is associated with the bureaucratisation identified by
Max Weber (1978), whose final consequence is—in Jürgen Habermas’ (1981)
phrase—the colonisation of everyday life. Obviously, domestication is not possible
without rationalisation, and vice versa.
Third, in society, modernisation is seen as increasing functional ‘differen-
tiation’. This means that society differentiates into larger and larger numbers of
relatively autonomous subsystems, fields, or worlds, which function rationally in
themselves and follow their own logics.
Finally, the dimension of ‘individualisation’, when understood as moderni-
sation, refers to the individual achieving more and more autonomy. These four
dimensions of the process of modernisation are characteristic of development in
1A detailed overview is given in Rosa et al. (2007).

Music Sociology After Mass Modernity 9
the West. Max Weber has underlined this specifically Western way of empow-
erment; he sees rationalisation as its main characteristic. Georg Simmel pos-
ited simultaneous individualisation and differentiation and for Marxist theorists,
it was domestication—to mention only a few of the most important theoretical
approaches to modernisation.
Newer approaches2 add further dimensions. First of all, ‘acceleration’ as a
characteristic of modernity and modernisation: everything becomes faster, easier
to handle and more efficient. Another dimension is ‘globalisation’, such a promi-
nent concept today. Then there are ‘genderisation’ and ‘de-genderisation’, which
mean, respectively, that gender has become a central issue in the process of mod-
ernisation and that social processes are increasingly viewed as independent of
gender. And the final dimension of modernisation is ‘integration’, a process that
accompanies the process of differentiation: legislation becomes more and more
universal, economic regulation becomes compulsory and transnational culture
industries define cultural behaviour to a high degree.
Anthony Giddens (1990) refers to the disembedding of space and time in
modernisation, by which he means that processes of modernisation are charac-
terised by no longer being dependent on the boundaries of space and time. Con-
crete everyday forms of living become independent. He also speaks of reflexivity,
which means de-traditionalisation: everything is reflected and nothing is taken as
given, not even enlightenment. I will come back to Giddens later.
In all these tendencies of modernisation there are contradicting, oppositional
developments. If we want to confront today’s situation adequately, it is absolutely
necessary that we take these into account.
In domestication, we can speak of ‘hedonisation’, an orientation towards
desire. This means letting yourself go, going back to your body and your desires,
having fun. Another process in opposition to the unplanned side effects of domes-
tication is ecology, of course, and sustainability.
In rationalisation, we can also see tendencies towards ‘irrationalisation’. The
keywords include new religiosity and conspiracy theories, as well as the mys-
tification of the legal ‘market’ and the existence of illegal markets: ‘shadow
economies’, piracy on the Internet, criminality. Concerning differentiation, its
counterpart is ‘hybridisation’, which means combining different cultural fields and
codes and styles. With regard to individualisation, there is an emerging tendency
called ‘tribalisation’, which refers to a relatively unreflected, rigid identification
with a specific, fixed group such as soccer fans or pop fans.
2A detailed overview can be found in Degele and Dries (2005).

10 A. Smudits
As for acceleration, a growing possibility of deceleration, or of a force push-

ing towards it, can also be observed. Not only the golfing and yachting elite, but
also the unemployed, who have supposedly nothing else to do but watch free TV
all day long, are indicators for deceleration.
In globalisation, a counter movement towards regionalisation, nationalism and
re-ethnicisation is clearly on the rise.
In genderisation, a tendency towards something like ‘retro-genderisation’ can
be observed.
Finally, with integration, processes of ‘disintegration’ can be identified when
segregation in urban regions becomes a social problem and when there is discus-
sion of a hegemonic ‘core cultureʼ (Leitkultur in German) and parallel societies.
So much for the ambivalences of modernity and modernisation, which are the
bases from which I will start.
2 Mass Modernity
‘Mass modernity’ is a term I have not read or heard before, and I would like to
suggest it now for the following discussion.
There are a number of concepts at work in periodising modernity. Clearly,
each periodisation is arbitrary and, in our case, only relevant for the Western
world. Islamic or East Asian cultures would have different periodisations. The
usual distinction in the West is between early modernity, high modernity and late
modernity. Early modernity starts with the Renaissance and continues with indus-
trialisation. High modernity is the so-called long 19th century from the French
Revolution to the end of the First World War. And late modernity is usually the
time after the Second World War. Incidentally, the catastrophe of the Second World
War and the two preceding decades are not really accounted for by these periodisa-
tions. Clearly barbarism does not fit in with modernity or modernisation—but that
would be another discussion. And we have so called post-modernity, which has
gone somewhat out of fashion nowadays.
My suggestion for periodisation in cultural sociology would be: early moder-
nity from the Renaissance to the French Revolution; bourgeois Modernity for the
long 19th century; and Mass Modernity for the short 20th century from the end
of the Second World War to the fall of the Berlin Wall. After that, in the 1980s
and 1990s, an era of neo-liberalism and digitalisation begins. No real designa-
tion has been found or generally accepted for this yet: Giddens and Ulrich Beck
(Beck et al. 1994) speak of ‘reflective modernity’; Zygmunt Baumann (2000)
calls it ‘liquid modernity’. I have also read the expressions ‘fluid modernity’ and
‘network society’ in Manuel Castells (1996). I have tentatively thought that the
notion of ‘mobile modernity’ could fit. Whatever we choose to call it, this new era
is characterised by processes that make the masses disappear—in other words, by
the end of mass modernity.
Let me now outline the concept of mass modernity. A discourse about the
masses has emerged since the late 19th century, when they became an issue for
many philosophers, psychologists and sociologists, into the beginning of the
20th century: Gustave Le Bon (1895), Sigmund Freud (1921), Elias Canetti
(1960), Ortega y Gasset (1932), Georg Simmel (1917), Sigfried Kracauer (1963),
Walter Benjamin (1935) and, of course, the Frankfurt School. The most interest-
ing fact is that the masses—except in fascist or communist regimes—have been
seen as a threat to culture, especially and specifically to bourgeois culture. In the
masses you lose individuality, and that is not modern. Only a few authors have
tried to arrive at a more differentiated view of the masses: Walter Benjamin and
Sigfried Kracauer, for instance, and later on the literature of cultural studies, e.g.
Raymond Williams.
The following keywords are characteristic of the short 20th century: mass
media, mass consumerism, mass production, mass culture, mass society. But from
the 1970s, these topics have tended to disappear. All of a sudden, there was no
longer a discourse about the masses. Instead, ‘everyday culture’, ‘subcultures’,
‘lifestyle’ and ‘scenes’ became the relevant concepts and categories. There are
still mass events, of course, but their character has changed. The Live Aid con-
certs of 1985, televised worldwide, are a prominent example: they were a mass
event, though not a phenomenon of mass culture. We only have to compare
Woodstock—a concert for the masses to accompany the 1960s’ mass youth move-
ment—with Live Aid, which was not the expression of any mass movement. And
so, finally, I come to music.
3 Sociology of Music and Modernisation
The modernisation of musical life can be discussed in terms of certain keywords.

We talk about participatory music (Umgangsmusik in German), which was char-
acteristic until the end of the Middle Ages. Thereafter, we talk about performance
music (Darbietungsmusik), meaning the division between performers and audi-
ences that is typical of bourgeois modernity. Then we talk about transmission music
(Übertragungsmusik), which is the distinctive feature of mass modernity, radio,
sound carriers and television. These developments, which are regarded as stages of
modernisation, can also be described using the concept of mediamorphosis, which
12 A. Smudits
Kurt Blaukopf (1982) and I (Smudits 2002) have formulated, namely graphic medi-
amorphosis, reprographic mediamorphosis, chemical-mechanical, electronic and
digital mediamorphosis.
In early modernity, it was graphic mediamorphosis which enabled the trans-
formation from participatory to performance music. Bourgeois modernity was
characterised by reprographic mediamophosis: the regime of performance music.
In mass modernity, electronic media gave primacy to transmission music. In our
emerging liquid (fluid, mobile) modernity, a new way of musical practices has
seen the light of day with digital mediamorphosis. Let me tentatively suggest the
designation ‘use music’,3 music for use, which means that any kind of music is
used in any kind of social and cultural setting, independently of the traditional
concepts of emergence, dissemination or appropriation of music.
As a matter of fact, music sociology has always been interested to some extent
in studying the modernisation of musical life. Max Weber (1958), a classic in
the field, has to be mentioned most prominently. Weber studied the development
of musical life in early and bourgeois modernity, especially in the light of new
technical means: namely, the process of modernisation of musical life under the
impact of the invention of musical notation. These are the graphic and repro-
graphic mediamorphoses (Smudits 2002), the outcome of which is the emergence
of the professions of composer and music publisher, the differentiation of musical
life as whole, and so on.4
Kurt Blaukopf (1989) described and analysed this process of modernisation,
starting with mechanic-acoustic media and continuing with electronic media at
the end of the 19th century. He drove the modernisation of music sociology by
being bold enough—that is the term I would like to use: bold enough—to link
and think music, media, mass media and musical life together. He understood
these interconnections as a whole, beyond being a pessimistic, critical saviour
of art music like Theodor W. Adorno (1976). In that sense Kurt Blaukopf was a
moderniser of music sociology.
I will now come back to Anthony Giddens (1990) and his rather successful
suggestions on how to understand modernisation and on how these ideas can be
3In German, there is no generally accepted term for this yet, although Gebrauchsmusik
could fit.
4It is interesting that Weber wrote about this at a time when mass modernity was already
happening. He was a witness to the emergence of the gramophone, but he never mentioned
this new technology of music transmission in his music sociological writings. We can only
guess why he had a blind spot for the new medium—perhaps he was too bourgeois?
transferred to music and musical life. When he talks about the disembedding of
space and time as a characteristic of modernisation, it is clear which phenom-
ena in musical life are responsible for modernisation: those that make possible a
musical practice which is independent of space and time. This means I can record
music or sounds anywhere and then I can make that music and those sounds
accessible everywhere, over long distances, at any time. The media for this are
sound carriers, radio, television, the Internet, streaming, etc.
For Giddens, another prerequisite for modernisation is the development of an
obligatory sign system and a trustworthy corpus of expertism, both of which are
necessary. For musical life, this means the development of musical notation and
Western scales. If I don’t believe in these codes or if I don’t understand them, I’ll
never be modern: I’ll be musically illiterate, in a sense. Furthermore, according
to Giddens, experts are needed to enable people to make relevant contact with
the ‘others’ who make music or listen to music. These experts have to tell me
what is important, what the standards are, what the state of the art is. Usually
experts are participants in a more or less academic discourse. Musicology as well
as music pedagogy plays an important role in this context, but music criticism in
the mass media also needs to be mentioned. All of this began in mid to late bour-
geois modernity, and it is without any doubt still ongoing.
Let me be daring and say that sociology and cultural sociology, especially,
are in a state of crisis. The reasons for this are manifold and have to do with the
end of mass modernity. I cannot go into detail here, because that really would be
another article. I would simply like to state my conviction that the golden age of
music sociology was the middle of the 20th century—the middle of mass moder-
nity. At the time, there was a dispute between Theodor W. Adorno and Alphons
Silbermann, who were music sociology’s most visible proponents, at least in the
German-speaking world.5 Their main point of contention was the question of
whether the proper object of music sociology is the musical work (Adorno) or the
musical experience and all associated aspects (Silbermann). Blaukopf suggested
balancing out the two sides by focusing on musical practice (Blaukopf 1982).
With that, he took a step in a direction where all kinds of musics—plural—can be
objects of music sociology without taking music itself out of the game.
In the 1980s, if not before, the notion of musical practice became widely
accepted in music sociological thinking, whether it was the production-of-culture
5This dispute was settled e.g. in the Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie
in the early 1960s.
14 A. Smudits
approach, cultural studies, popular music research, the field theory of Bourdieu,
neo-institutionalism or neo-pragmatism. However, in my view, music sociology
has lost its quarrels: there are no real conflicts left within the discipline itself.6 At
issue is no longer what real music sociology might be, but what role music soci-
ology can or should play in the face of the ongoing processes of modernisation or
de-modernisation of musical life.
4 Music Sociology After Mass Modernity
I come now to the challenges for music sociology that have been observable since
the beginning of the 21st century. We are in a situation which calls for another
modernisation of music sociology. This would consist of adopting the develop-
ments that have taken place since the 1980s, namely the digitalisation of com-
munications on the one hand and social changes on the other. As sociology has
not found convincing answers or interpretations for the emerging social, cultural,
political and ecological challenges, we can only try in music sociology to identify
the fundamental areas where social and cultural life as a whole and musical life
in particular have been transformed. Just as Blaukopf integrated the process of
transformation that had occurred at the beginning of the 20th century (electronic
mediamorphosis) into his music sociology and modernised research in music
sociology with the concept of mediamorphosis, we now have to incorporate digi-
talisation and the socio-cultural framework surrounding it into our research.
Let me take the dimensions of modernisation as a programme and identify
some areas of research—not exhaustively, but only to demonstrate with a few
examples what could be contemplated.
Domestication and hedonisation

In domestication, we have to underline above all the continually increasing control
and manipulation of electronic phenomena by technical means: the constant
advances in recording technologies, sampling and equipment for music production
as well as music reception.
On the other hand, some deficits need to be acknowledged. The argument
still persists that digital recordings are ‘cold’ and not human: a drum machine is
6There may be some tensions concerning the relationship between music sociology and
musicology, but this topic is beyond the scope of this contribution.
more precise than a living drummer could ever be. On the side of reception, the
smartphone is now a preferred tool for listening to music (Huber 2018), and yet it
could be said that it is a rather poor tool where acoustic quality is concerned.
With regard to hedonisation, a new relation between music and the body is
emerging. To discipline the body was characteristic of bourgeois modernity.
Now this control has been partly taken back, insofar as the control of music over
the body is a legitimate and legitimated—not subversive or discriminated—
experience (Klein 2004). Intensive bodily experiences of music and the corre-
sponding bodily expression—dancing—are regarded as positive cultural factors.
There are obviously connections to tribalisation, to which I will come back later.
Another dimension is the ever-growing professionalisation, especially in
music production; at the same time, a trend towards de-professionalisation can be
observed. On the one hand, very complex competences are expected and required
to handle tools in the most efficient way (Smudits 2007). On the other hand, more
and more people are active in musical life who do not have an adequate music
education, who are in it more for fun than for money, who are hedonistic in the
sense of learning by doing, of a do-it-yourself culture, and who may only be
involved for a short period of their life, not as an orientation toward a lifelong
career in music.
On the topic of domestication, let me also risk a look into the future. When
I presented the mediamorphosis approach at a conference, I was asked in the
ensuing discussion what mediamorphosis might be expected next, after the dig-
ital one. Spontaneously I answered the ‘cyborg mediamorphosis’, that is, the
implantation of chips into the body, brain or nervous system. Here let me quote
an exciting example: a young British-Irish artist, Neil Harbisson,7 has an antenna
implanted in his head and, being colour-blind, can now hear colours (though still
not see them) via that antenna. The light signal goes into his brain and his inner
ear. And now—after some years of headaches and training—he can differentiate
between 300 different colours, meaning that he can hear 300 different sounds.
In 2004, Neil Harbisson became the first officially recognised cyborg when his
photo showing the antenna was accepted for his passport. It sounds like science
fiction, but it is no hoax. Just to compare, who would have thought in the 1990s
that in the 2010s the smartphone would become the central tool for all communi-
cation, and for younger people the central tool for listening to music? The social
7For further information see: Cyborg Arts limited: https://www.cyborgarts.com/.

16 A. Smudits
influences and cultural impact of cyborg reception of music—the next step in

human control over nature—are not accessible to us today, yet in 25 years they
may be a reality.
Rationalisation and de- or irrationalisation

On the one hand, the universal availability of every kind of music is growing.
This leads to trivialisation: what anyone can have at all times and in all places
loses value. Here we have the absolutely crucial question of the value of music,
both symbolically and economically. Modernisation by digitalisation transforms
the value of music. Music is dramatically trivialised. I am not making a statement
about the quality of music, only about the possibility of receiving music. This
liquidity—the liquidising of music as a stream of data without a physical sound
carrier—is a form of rationalisation. But from an economic or administrative per-
spective, it is a serious challenge to the incomes of those who make music. At the
same time, the liquidising of music produces another logic: music can no longer
be a possession or commodity. Instead it becomes a common good, like the air
we breathe. There are people in the musical world who emphasise this position,
mostly young digital natives who argue anti-commercially and anti-bureaucrati-
cally (see e.g. Kusek and Leonhard 2005). The rationality of controlled markets
is thus counteracted by a use of music that is partly seen as criminal—namely
illegal downloads or sampling.
Differentiation and hybridisation

On the one hand, we see an increasingly differentiated musical life with many
sectors of music production or dissemination, which to a large extent function
independently from each other. Orchestras, concert halls, broadcasting, CD pro-
duction, live events, downloads, streaming, merchandising, the production of
musical instruments, etc., make for an ever more differentiated music economy
(Tschmuck 2017).
At the same time, we can also observe that the world of different music styles
and genres continues to grow. Nearly every release—at least in some fields of
popular music, especially in electronic music—creates a new subgenre. Espe-
cially at the margins of the musical mainstreams, the principle holds that a genre
which has a name has been labelled and is thus no longer interesting—because
at the margins everybody wants to make something special or at least listen to
something special.
Where hybridisation is concerned, we have, on the other hand, Web 2.0 where
interactivity is common, where the differences between various scenes and con-
texts in production, dissemination or appropriation are vanishing. They simply
do not make sense anymore. Prosumerism (Smudits 2007)—the combination of

production and consumerism—is a keyword in this context as is prouserism or
produsing, the combination of producing and using. The borderline between pro-
duction and consumption gets increasingly blurred in this hybridisation process,
making it a dramatic challenge to our understanding of authorship and, as a con-
sequence, to the chances of surviving as a musician.
Another form of hybridisation is the mixing of genres and styles which—
before that mix—were at home in very different and often strictly separated fields
of musical life. Here we find exotic preferences, an interest in inter-culture and
poly musicality.
Individualisation and tribalisation

This category concerns tendencies to individualisation in a strictly bourgeois
sense—in other words, tendencies to develop a unique individual style in the
context of production, to develop an individual music taste, to give oneself an
individual profile (Bourdieu 1979). There are also people who ‘listen across the
board’—omnivores, as Richard Peterson and Roger Kern (1996) have coined
them. By listening to everything, they demonstrate a conspicuously tolerant taste
in music and likewise give themselves an individual profile.
And then we have very separate scenes, tribalised scenes, which meet in
exclusive locations and listen to a very specific kind of music in a specific setting.
But cyber scenes, social media, Internet blogs and only communicating via the
web can also be summarised under tribalisation in its more recent form. These
types of tribalised scenes correspond in a very interesting way to the more con-
servative listeners whom Peterson calls ‘univores’ and who have rather restricted
musical tastes.
Acceleration, deceleration
What characterises acceleration is first and foremost the availability of any kind
of music. One hundred and fifty years ago, it would have taken me years to get
to hear a certain piece of music at a live concert; 100 years ago, perhaps some
months to get the record; 30 years ago, in the worst-case scenario, a few weeks to
order a CD. For the past 15 years or so, I have only had to wait a few minutes or
even just seconds for a piece of music to download or stream so I can listen to it.
This goes hand in hand with the acceleration of styles. We have been here
before: on the one hand, the rotation of styles and lifecycles of fashion gets faster
and faster; on the other hand, we have retro communities, which very traditionally
and conservatively concentrate on a specific style of music—rock’n’roll or early
music, for instance. They are loyal to their music and do not chase after every
18 A. Smudits
new fad or live in fear of missing the next Big Thing. This can be seen as a form
of deceleration. The renaissance of vinyl records, which is observable today, also
seems to fit into that deceleration scheme, with listeners having to face the rela-
tively painstaking process of putting a record on the turntable, turning the record
over, etc.
Globalisation and regionalisation

Our eyes are open. The record industry is still the strongest player in musical life,
but the ‘old’ majors (Sony, BMG, Universal, Warner) might soon be replaced by
new ones: Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. (Tschmuck 2017). Yet the principle of
globalised majors will be unchanged; we will still have a strong mainstream of
popular music with the usual modes of production, dissemination and appropria-
tion. Only some technical tools will have changed, as described above.
There are also local music scenes, which increasingly develop over the Inter-
net into a global network and thus become almost equivalent to the mainstream,
at least for those who participate in a specific scene. In this context, it is not
improbable that one and the same person listens to products of the mainstream as
well as to some ‘exotic’ local or regional subgenres.
Finally, regional styles develop as a mix of transnational genres like hip hop,
jazz and hard rock, with local music styles or regional dialects in the lyrics, for
instance German rap, Austropop or rai pop in the Arab world.8
Genderisation and de-genderisation

Sex and gender were and are, of course, one of the main issues in musical life.
When the representation of role models is important, music itself is often only a
medium to communicate a specific form of sexual orientation, the belonging to a
specific stereotype or the overcoming of these stereotypes, whether it is retro-ori-
ented macho behaviour or revolutionary concepts of queerness or androgynity. It
is remarkable that traditional gender attributes seem to be relatively stable in the
music world. If we look at the formation of orchestras, the attributions of gender
roles in popular music scenes, the genderedness of certain musical instruments
or fan cultures, we find rather little in the way of de-genderisation (Kauer 2009;
Villa et al. 2012).
Nevertheless, traditional role concepts of gender and sexuality do seem to
get shaken up in some sections of musical life, for instance when commercially
8See Mitchell (1996), Taylor (1997) and the contribution of Regev in this publication.
successful female artists, such as Madonna or Beyonce, are able to represent

themselves as very contradictory role models of feminism. Perhaps here the
concept of intersectionality (Reitsamer and Liebsch 2015) is more helpful than
the concept of gender.
Integration and disintegration

In many cases, of course, these dimensions are closely linked to some specific
national or regional traditions of music cultures—Vienna and the waltz, England
and pop, the USA and country or rhythm and blues, etc. Furthermore, integration
is provided by a compulsory legal system that sets clear rules for specific phe-
nomena of musical life, like copyright, a social security system, contract law, etc.
On the other hand, there are what we might call parallel worlds, as mentioned
above under the keyword de-rationalisation. For instance, there are subversive
scenes which fight against copyright regulations.
With regard to integration and music, a number of social developments need
to be focused on, such as our aging society or migration. What role can music
play when the integration (or avoidance of disintegration) of elderly persons or
migrants is on the agenda? Here there are dimensions of social policy as well as
education and cultural policy that must be addressed.
All the phenomena and examples discussed so far are just a few observations
to characterise the current processes and developments of musical life and prac-
tices. Several others could be found if we looked more closely at one or another
issue; I simply want to highlight that music sociology has to be aware of the new
challenges emerging from the latest socio-cultural and media developments.
5 Final Remarks
Let me end here, with the following conclusion: without an awareness of the
dimensions that can be observed within the modernisation process, music soci-
ology will not be able to produce satisfying results. These dimensions need the
analytical tools of culture sociology and sociology in general, including their the-
oretical and methodological concepts.
We must have a wider understanding of culture sociology that takes into
consideration all the phenomena that have an impact on musical life, including
technology, law, economy and more. This means that music sociology will not
only need to have a broader knowledge of sociology, but also of neighbouring
disciplines, including—not least—musicology.
20 A. Smudits
Here we loop the loop back to Kurt Blaukopf. He was, and still is, one of the
most convinced and convincing representatives of this approach, which insists on
the necessity of interdisciplinary work. The spectrum has to be as wide as pos-
sible to be able to describe and analyse specific problems of musical life ade-
quately. Music sociology has to face this challenge if it wants to keep abreast of
the times—if it wants to be ‘modern’.
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Musicology, Sociology and Digitisation
Peter J. Martin
The timing of this conference is highly appropriate, as it provides an o pportunity

not only to celebrate the pioneering work of Kurt Blaukopf, but to reflect on the
development of the sociology of music over the last 50 years or so. In doing so,
I will be mainly concerned with the emergence of two closely related fields: the
‘new’ musicology and popular music studies, making reference at appropriate
points to Blaukopf’s ideas.
1 The ‘New’ Musicology
During the 1980s, there began to appear a succession of publications which

seemed likely to bring to an end what Blaukopf himself called the ‘preoccupation’
of musicology with ‘art music’ (Blaukopf 2012, p.15). I wish to argue, however,
that from a sociological point of view, the ‘new’ musicology has accepted many
of the basic premises of the ‘old’. I will focus on three of these.
(a) The inherent meaning of music

The first of the basic commitments of musicology that I wish to deal with con-
cerns the idea that music carries some kind of inherent ‘meaning’. As we know,
this idea was an important element in the analyses of musical works provided by
Adorno, who famously spoke of the way in which musical works carried in them
‘sedimented Geist’ (1949, p. 38), and in particular how the rise and fall of tonality
P. J. Martin (*) 
University of Manchester, Shropshire, England

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22279-6_3
24 P. J. Martin
expressed the ideal of the free individual in early-bourgeois society gradually giving
way to the oppression and enslavement of the individual under advanced capital-
ism. So the task of the musicological analyst becomes that of decoding or decipher-
ing the hidden meanings of works, so that their inherent meaning may be correctly
understood.
In my opinion, the best critique of this way of thinking has already been pro-
vided by Howard Becker (1989). Today, however, I want to draw your attention
to the words of John Shepherd—one of the leading figures in the ‘new’ musi-
cology. It should be said immediately that Shepherd has done much to make us
aware of the extent to which modern culture privileges the visual sense over the
oral/aural ones, and consequently the ways in which sights take precedence over
sounds. The orthodox definition of ‘music’, for example, consists of melody, har-
mony and rhythm—all aspects which can be visually represented, at the expense
of the sound itself, which cannot. However, Shepherd’s general argument—not
unlike that of Adorno—is that tonality encodes the ‘industrial world sense’ of
modern societies (1991, p. 122). Thus it emerged, just like industrialism, from
feudal society, in which ‘the pentatonic structure underlying much medieval
music in itself serves to articulate the ideal feudal structure’ (ibid., p. 109). In
both cases, the music is held to express—or ‘articulate’ in Shepherd’s language—
the ‘ideal’ values of these kinds of societies: pentatonicism, for example, encod-
ing decentralisation and a ‘circular’ sense of time, while functional tonality
expresses hierarchy, centralisation and a sense of progress.
It follows, in Shepherd’s analysis, that the further people are from the centres
of power in industrial capitalist societies, the more their music will deviate from
that which ‘articulates’ the values of the dominant class. And this is exactly what
he does find: the music of African-Americans and popular styles express alterna-
tive ways of being, while the strong assertion of ‘individual identity’ in the latter
acts only as a ‘reinforcement of the traditional gender types that both result from
and serve to reproduce an essentially masculine view of the world’ (ibid., p. 172).
But Shepherd tries to avoid his view of the links between music and society being
taken as a simple ‘reflection’ theory: the relationship—much more complex than
that—is one of dialectic correlation (ibid., p. 126). This has always struck me
(e.g. Martin 1995, p. 148) as being rather evasive: music and society may be said
to be ‘correlated’ when the links are evident and ‘dialectical’ when they’re not.
But that is not the point I wish to pursue. Rather, what I want to emphasise is
the way in which Shepherd’s analysis retains the view that meanings are some-
how inherent in the music itself (e.g. Shepherd 1991, pp. 217, 150). This was cer-
tainly Adorno’s view, as when he talked of the ways in which social messages are
‘immanent’ in musical works. As Paddison has put it, Adorno ‘insists that society
Musicology, Sociology and Digitisation 25
is “inscribed” within art works’ (1993, p. 262). For Shepherd, ‘because people
create music, they reproduce in the basic structure of their music the basic struc-
ture of their own thought processes’ (1987, p. 57). Such thought processes—and
here most sociologists would agree—are not individualistic but ‘socially medi-
ated’ (ibid.). The conclusion, then, is quite similar to Adorno’s premise: that the
meaning of music is inherent within it. For present purposes, I wish to argue that
in this respect, the ‘new’ musicology appears rather similar to the ‘old’.
As I have already suggested, there have been numerous criticisms of this way
of looking at the links between ‘music’ and ‘society’. Musicologists have asked,
with some justification, whether this view does not neglect the inventiveness and
originality of composers, reducing them to puppets whose strings are pulled by
the forces of ‘society’. Sociologists have asked just how ‘society’ gets into the
music. In this context, it is worth recalling Subotnik’s comment that, for all his
theoretical sophistication, Adorno’s view of the relationship between ‘artistic
structure’ and ‘objective reality’ was ‘indirect, complex, unconscious, undocu-
mented, and rather mysterious’ (1976, p. 271).
Indeed, it is doubtful whether any cultural object can have the sort of ‘inher-
ent’ meaning which Shepherd claims for music. In his outline of the Symbolic
Interactionist position, Blumer suggested that meaning arises in the ‘process of
interaction between people’ (1969, p. 4). And in his critique of Marx’s ‘labour
theory of value’, Kolakowski argues that exchange value is ‘not an intrinsic qual-
ity of objects, but derives from their involvement in the social process of circu-
lation and exchange’ (1978, pp. 272–273). Two very different perspectives, then,
but both take meanings as arising through social processes rather than being
inherent in objects. What I am suggesting, therefore, is that Shepherd’s belief in
the intrinsic meaning of musical sounds is questionable from a sociological point
of view. Too often, especially among musicologists, analytical attention has been
focussed on the ‘art object’ at the expense of the social context in which ‘it’ is
produced and heard. I think this point is important and I will return to it. So more
generally my point is that, in assuming the ‘inherent’ meaning of music, the ‘new’
musicology looks rather like the ‘old’.
(b) The significance of musical works

Another way in which the ‘new’ musicology looks like the ‘old’ is in its concern
with pieces which are judged to be particularly original or significant. In this context
I wish to consider briefly the work of Susan McClary. Like Shepherd, and unlike
Adorno, McClary has consistently advanced the thesis, in stimulating and provoca-
tive ways, that Western music is inherently gendered; in this respect her analyses are
subject to the same reservations as those expressed above. For example, the music of
26 P. J. Martin
African Americans, she writes, relies on conventions ‘that carry sedimented within
them a worldview that has proved to be both durable and flexible’ (2000, p. 28). As
this demonstrates, however—also like Shepherd and unlike Adorno—McClary has
always taken an inclusive view of her subject, according ‘popular’ styles the same
respect and analytical attention that musicologists have usually reserved for ‘art-
works’. In this, I suggest, she has moved towards a more sociological view of the
role of music in contemporary societies; this too is a point to which I will return.
However, it is disappointing that much of the music she chooses to discuss is
music which she considers particularly significant, thus displaying her allegiance
to the ideology of artistic modernism which was characteristic of the ‘old’ musi-
cology. Philip Glass, John Zorn, k. d. lang and Prince are all serious and innova-
tive ‘artists’ who are involved in ‘active negotiation with the cultural past’ (ibid.,
p. 168), while in ‘rap’, she argues, we can hear ‘some of the most important and
innovative music of our time’, even if it ‘sounds unpleasant’ (ibid., p. 161). My
point is that by singling out these artists and their works for special attention,
McClary is displaying the priorities and commitments of the ‘old’ musicologists –
regarding them as worthy of special attention because of their significance.
(c) The relation of music and society

As the discussion above has suggested, the ‘new’ musicologists (and others)
remain committed to the notion that music somehow bears the imprint of the
times and places in which it is created. Here is a good example of this way of
thinking, taken from Stuart Nicholson’s influential discussion of the current sit-
uation of jazz: ‘Louis Armstrong’s music reflected New Orleans, Duke Elling-
ton’s music Harlem’ (Nicholson 2005, p. 180), which goes on to consider the
ways in which the recent ‘Nordic tone’ in jazz ‘has its roots in the existentially
open, angst-ridden aspects of Scandinavian culture’ (ibid., p. 197). At first sight,
this sort of idea might be thought appealing to the sociologist; after all, the basic
notion is that the central ‘core’ of a culture is expressed in its music. However,
a moment’s reflection begins to render it problematic. As I have already noted,
accounts of this kind usually fail to specify just how societal elements get into
the music. It is true that Sweden produced the Esbjörn Svensson Trio, who figure
prominently in Nicholson’s discussion (e.g. ibid., pp. 218–221). What is not so
clear is just how the music of this notably eclectic group reflects the core value of
Scandinavian culture. As Blaukopf put it, ‘Relying on an abstract construct such
as “social psychology” … will explain no more than will attributing everything to
a vaguely defined “Zeitgeist”’ (1982 [1992], pp. 52–53).
What’s more, this kind of analysis runs the risk of reifying both music and
society. Sure enough, Sweden produced the Esbjörn Svensson Trio. But it has
also produced ABBA, the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, a notable ‘heavy

metal’ rock scene and an enduring folk music tradition. It is hard to claim that
any one of these represents ‘real’ Scandinavian culture without resorting to an
attribution of ‘authenticity’ which is likely to be contested. Put simply, the point
is that there are various ‘kinds’ of music in a society, so it cannot be justified
theoretically (or any other way) to regard ‘music’ as some sort of homogeneous
entity. Here are the words of Blaukopf once again: ‘various maxims of musical
behaviour coexist within one society. In other words, it is not permissible to talk
of music per se; rather, we are dealing with different musics that hold their own
alongside one another’ (2012, p. 43). Moreover, as Blaukopf emphasised, the
spread of electronic communications has ensured that, in contemporary societies,
a variety of musical styles is likely to be in evidence.
I suggest that it was these sorts of considerations—he certainly had Adorno
in mind—which led Blaukopf to describe efforts to ‘derive the concrete form of
musical artworks from the structure of the society in which these works were
created’ as ‘pseudo-sociology’ (ibid., p. 18). Indeed, ever since the time of Max
Weber, who died in 1920, thoughtful sociologists have viewed societies not
simply as entities exhibiting such properties as ‘core values’, but as constantly
changing patterns of interaction in which diverse and often incompatible interests,
values and ideas are in constant competition (e.g. Martin 2006, p. 50). Even when
people speak the same language, for example, they may have totally opposed
views about their aims and how to achieve them. In the present context, therefore,
I suggest that it may be unjustified to speak—as the ‘new’ musicologists often
do—of societies as relatively homogeneous entities with identifiable ‘core’ and
‘peripheral’ elements. It is far more useful—and empirically accurate—to adopt
Becker’s (1982) use of the term ‘art worlds’ to describe the variety of styles, types
and genres of music to which people are committed, and the traditions which sus-
tain them, without assuming that they all bear some identifiable relation to the
‘core’ of the culture.
It seems appropriate at this point to offer some remarks about the relation-
ship between musicology and sociology. Much of what I wish to say about this
will already have become apparent. I believe that musicology reveals its own
disciplinary commitments in the people and works which are selected for study:
overwhelmingly these are male composers who have produced ‘artworks’ in the
European tradition. And despite valiant efforts to broaden the scope of analyses,
and to display the gender bias implicit in much work, the ‘new’ musicologists still
cling to many of the basic premises of the ‘old’. I have suggested that it is still
presumed that ‘meaning’ resides in ‘works’, that such works and their compos-
ers (and performers) are still selected on the basis of their supposed significance
28 P. J. Martin
or innovative qualities and that there remains an assumption that ‘music’ can be
related to ‘society’. My contention is that while these disciplinary commitments
have been influential, they diverge in important ways from those of the sociology
of music. It is somewhat ironic that the ‘new’ musicologists seem to cling to a
rather ‘old’ version of sociology.
The situation is rather like that confronting Berger and Luckmann many years
ago, when they argued that the sociology of knowledge should move away from
a preoccupation with ‘formal’ ideologies, like political manifestos or religious
doctrines, and toward a concern with ‘whatever passes for “knowledge” in a soci-
ety, regardless of the ultimate validity or invalidity (by whatever criteria) of such
“knowledge”’ (1991 [1966], p. 15). In the present context, what this suggests is
that a genuine sociology of music should be concerned with whatever is consid-
ered to be music in a society—and, as we know, the vast majority of music is
not created in the Western composed tradition. I will return to this point. Among
the implications of this is that sociological interest will be focused on music
that often seems ordinary, routine and mundane. Yet it cannot be denied that this
music is often very important to those who listen to it. As Blaukopf put it when
speaking of the rock music of young people, music sociologists are ‘condemned
to lack of taste in the area of their research’ (1992 [1982], p. 175).
Let me give a little example from my own experience. In the last few years, I
have played in bands which provide music for people who want to dance rather
than listen. And it is evident that much of the material which has caused the great-
est reaction from the audience (often to the frustration of the musicians!) consists
of simple pieces based on a 12-bar blues pattern, often dating from the early days
of rock’n’roll. It would be hard to claim that there is much to interest the musi-
cologist here. Yet it is also clear that something of sociological interest is going
on. Many other examples could be given: the music heard at children’s parties,
or in ‘national anthems’, is usually of little concern to the musicologist, yet may
be of considerable sociological importance. The music of James Brown’s ‘Say It
Loud, I’m Black And I’m Proud’ is a good example of what, from a musicolog-
ical perspective, is not very interesting, yet in its time and place was a song with
enormous social and political significance.
What I am suggesting, therefore, is that there is a considerable divergence
between the research priorities of musicology and sociology. Further, it is impor-
tant to emphasise the ways in which, in these examples, our attention is being
drawn to the social context in which the music is heard, rather than simply to ‘the
work’ itself. In other words, as Blaukopf put it when discussing the differences
between Western notions of music and those of other cultures, we need to pay
attention not only to ‘musical structure’, but to ‘the logic of the event of which it
is a part’ (2012, p. 81). My argument is that this applies not only to the ‘participa-
tory music’ of other cultures, but to all music.
2 The Work of Kurt Blaukopf
Up to now, I have spoken largely of the ‘new’ musicologists, but before offering
some remarks about popular music studies, it might be useful to recall some of
the relevant themes developed in the writings of Kurt Blaukopf. Blaukopf’s inter-
est in logical empiricism and in particular the ideas of the ‘Vienna Circle’ is well
known, so I thought it appropriate to deal with these in a way which reflects some
of the fundamental premises of that group.
First, there is a strong commitment to the idea that research should be
empirically based. I can see no difference between this view and that of modern
sociologists.
Secondly, it follows that there is strong opposition to theories which are not
supported by empirical evidence, which are speculative or indeed ‘metaphysical’.
Again, I can see no reason why a contemporary sociologist would wish to dis-
pute this; indeed I would argue that one of the weaknesses of the social ‘sciences’
as they have developed is a tendency to indulge in theories which are concerned
with things that may happen, or ought to happen, rather than establishing what
actually goes on. It has been shown, for example, that a sense of social order
may be maintained by breaking social rules rather than adhering to them (e.g.
Zimmerman and Pollner 1970). And with this in mind, I think it is clear why
Blaukopf chose to describe Adorno’s efforts to link music and society as ‘more
subjective than demonstrated’ and warned against the tendency to ‘attribute less
importance to what is empirically verifiable than to the internal consistency of
the system’. Such ‘ideological harmonisation must not be allowed to become a
method of socio-musicology. It is, however, a topic of this discipline’ (1992
[1982], p. 220).
However—and here I think there may be some disagreement—we should be
clear about the implications of the effort to banish metaphysical speculation from
the human sciences. One of these is that discussions of the aesthetics of music
are considered as meaningless, and some may find this hard to accept. Let me
give a specific example. Earlier I said a little about Susan McClary’s way of hear-
ing some music and indicated my disagreement with it. But this does not render
McClary’s ideas ‘meaningless’. On the contrary, she has provided us with a par-
ticular, and for many people novel, ‘way of hearing’ some music and given us
30 P. J. Martin
some ‘food for thought’ about it. There may be little to support McClary’s views
empirically, but that does not make them ‘meaningless’.
It is at this point, thirdly, that problems begin to arise, particularly in relation
to the notion of the ‘unity of the sciences’. For the ‘human world’ (Jenkins 2002)
is above all a world of meanings, in which considerations of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’
are not necessarily the most appropriate. Sociologists have to take seriously the
implications of W.I. Thomas’s famous observation that ‘if men [sic] define situa-
tions as real, they are real in their consequences’ (Rock 1979, p. 83). In Weber’s
terms, ‘actual action is influenced by irrational factors of all kinds, such as affects
and errors’ (1978, p. 6). If a person believes in God or Allah or many ‘gods’ or
fairies, it does not matter from a sociological perspective what the true ‘facts’ of
the matter are. What matters is that the conduct of that person, or whole groups of
people, can only be understood in terms of the beliefs which lie behind it.
It is for this reason that I find it difficult to reconcile Blaukopf’s adherence
to the ideas of the ‘Vienna circle’, with his evident respect for Max Weber as a
founder of the sociology of music and as an important figure in its development
(e.g. Blaukopf 1992 [1982], p. xiv). In Blaukopf’s own words, Weber took soci-
ology to be a science ‘that seeks to understand social action interpretatively and
through this to explain it causally in its development and in its effects’ (2012,
pp. 41–42). Few would disagree with this characterisation of Weber’s view;
indeed, in the English-speaking world, it is customary to draw a sharp distinction
between the ‘interpretive’ sociology of Weber and those who have followed him
and the ‘positivism’ of the Vienna circle and logical empiricism more generally.
In Weber’s own words:
In the case of social collectivities, precisely as distinguished from organisms, we

are in a position to go beyond merely demonstrating functional relationships and
uniformities. We can accomplish something which is never attainable in the natural
sciences, namely the subjective understanding of the action of the component indi-
viduals. The natural sciences on the other hand cannot do this, being limited to the
formulation of causal uniformities in objects and events and the explanation of indi-
vidual facts by applying them (Weber 1978 [1921], p. 15).
I think it is reasonable to read this passage as suggesting a clear separation

between the ‘social’ and the ‘natural’ sciences, particularly when Weber goes on
to claim that ‘subjective understanding is the specific characteristic of sociologi-
cal knowledge’ (ibid.).
If this is a valid reading of Weber’s remarks, it follows that serious difficulties
are encountered by the notion of the ‘unity of the sciences’. In short, their subject
matter is different: whereas human beings may be thought to possess consciousness
and free will, atoms and molecules do not. (Further discussion of this point would
take us far from our immediate concerns). It follows, too, that even for the most
empirically oriented sociologist, ascertaining the ‘facts’ is not a simple matter. When
I was a student (!), for example, Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess was considered to be
a stage show, and thus ‘entertainment’; it is now widely thought of as an ‘opera’,
and so ‘art’. It would therefore be hard to ‘classify’ it definitively. A similar pro-
cess seems to be happening at the moment with West Side Story. What will be next?
Indeed, in the 20th century, whole areas of activity—like jazz and photography—
moved into the category of ‘art’. It seems to me that, for the sociologist, the inter-
esting matters to be investigated are the processes of definition and re-definition
which are involved, rather than the attempt to classify ‘facts’ in terms of catego-
ries. In fact Blaukopf himself suggested that such matters should be a ‘topic’ of
socio-musicology (1992 [1982], p. 221).
The fourth theme that I wish to discuss follows directly. The idea of ‘inter-
disciplinarity’ evidently relates to the notion of the ‘unity of the sciences’ if it is
assumed that empirical research will, in time, yield a body of ‘facts’ which add
up to a picture of the real world. Blaukopf was clearly aware of the benefits to be
obtained from an awareness of the results of specialists in other disciplines; thus
we need to develop ‘the will to listen’ to them (2012, p. 111). He held that work
in ‘the sociology of art and music’ requires ‘an interdisciplinary approach’ (ibid.,
p. 2), and that thinking in these fields ‘has clearly evolved in a single direction—
from philosophical speculation to empirically supported science’ (ibid., p. xiii).
Yet, as I have suggested, things may not be as straightforward as this implies;
moreover, it is hard to accept the idea that divisions between the disciplines are
simply ‘artificial’ (ibid., p. 111). While it is true, for example, that psychologists
and sociologists both study human beings, they do so from different perspectives
and with different initial premises. To put things another way, while interdiscipli-
narity is unquestionably a good thing, my contention is that for it to be produc-
tive there have to be disciplines in the first place. Blaukopf quotes with approval
Neurath’s call for ‘a universal scientific language, a “universal jargon”’ which
will allow connections to be made between, say, ‘sociology and physics’ (ibid.,
p. 113). But I am not at all sure that this can be done.
The fifth topic which I wish to take up is one which is central to the scientific
‘worldview’ of the Vienna circle: the idea of ‘value-freedom’. Thus in his exposi-
tion of Weber’s ideas, Blaukopf argues that: ‘Value judgements can be the object
of sociological research, but they cannot become an instrument of research’ (1982
[1992], p. 116) and in his critique of the notion of musical ‘progress’, he refers to
assumptions which ‘hinder the value-free evaluation of facts’ (2012, p. 65). The
issue here is whether Blaukopf’s own work was as ‘value-free’ as the remarks
32 P. J. Martin
quoted above would suggest. Despite asserting at the beginning of Musical Life in
a Changing Society that ‘the verifiable phenomena of musical activity … extend
far beyond art music’ (1992 [1982], p. 3), there is no entry for Crosby or Sinatra
or Presley in the Index. There is a reference to the Beatles in the text—on page
236—but nothing in the Index, in spite of ‘the spectacular development of popu-
lar music’ which has since occurred (ibid., p. 236). So the ‘outside’ reader—or at
least this one—is led to suspect that Blaukopf’s own work was not as ‘value-free’
as it might have been.
So despite his clear recognition that musical practice, rather than just ‘art’
music, should be the subject of the sociology of music, it seems that there is in
Blaukopf’s work a concentration on Western ‘art’ music and its history at the
expense of more ‘popular’ styles. As I will be returning to the subject of pop-
ular music shortly, I will say no more about it. What I do wish to raise in this
context, however, is the notion—implicit in much musicological work—that there
can be a clear separation between ‘art’ and other cultural objects and events. It
is extremely hard to say this in Vienna, of all places, but I wish to argue that,
from a sociological point of view, the concept of ‘art’ is one of the great myths of
modern, secular societies. The concept implies that some objects and activities,
and not others, have mysterious, even magical, powers to influence us. What I
am suggesting is that instead of enquiring into the nature of these powers—that
is for aestheticians to debate—sociologists should be investigating the ways in
which, and by whom, the status of ‘art’ is conferred on certain objects and events.
A moment’s reflection shows how the elevation of so-called ‘classical’ music to
the status of ‘art’ depends on the work of cultural and political authorities, media,
and educational institutions, among others, to maintain the ‘aura’ surrounding it
(which, presumably, is why the late Pierre Bourdieu liked to speak of ‘legitimate’
culture; e.g. Bourdieu and Passeron 1990 [1970], p. 40). Reflection on this topic
also makes clear the extent to which the boundaries between ‘art’ and ‘non-art’
are fluid and constantly contested.
In short, things are not ‘art’ because of their intrinsic qualities, but because
they are socially constructed as such. I can do no better than to quote Blaukopf
on this point: ‘[T]he categories that serve to satisfy [the] need for order should
not automatically be understood as sociological divisions. Rather than being ana-
lytical tools, these categories are themselves phenomena that form an object of
sociological analysis’ (Blaukopf 1982 [1992], p. 55).
Blaukopf goes on to give the (very good) example of the reception of Gustav
Mahler’s music as an instance of the way in which ‘artistic’ reputations are likely
to change over time. In this context I am reminded of the words of the sociologist
and music critic Simon Frith, who in his early days as an academic found that the
distinction between art and popular music ‘made no sense’ to him (Frith 2007).
As I have said, it is not easy to call into question one of the central elements
of Western culture (particularly in this city!). Such an analysis, if successful, is
likely to deprive music of precisely that ‘aura’ which attracted us to it in the first
place. However, there is some consolation in the thought that good sociological
analysis inevitably has the effect of demythologising human conduct; in the spirit
of scientific enquiry, it is an instance of what Weber called the ‘demystification’
of the world. And Blaukopf himself quotes Weber with approval when he writes:
‘The specific function of science … is … to ask questions about these things
which convention makes self-evident’ (Weber, quoted in Blaukopf 2012, p. 49).
3 Popular Music Studies
One of the most interesting developments to affect the sociology of music has
been the emergence, since the 1970s, of popular music studies. Frith’s The Soci-
ology of Rock was published in 1978; the growth of a new field was recognised
by the founding of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music
and the journal Popular Music in 1981, and the establishment of the Institute for
Popular Music at the University of Liverpool in 1987. Two aspects of this devel-
opment, I suggest, were particularly consistent with Blaukopf’s perspective on
music: the fact that popular music studies have been explicitly interdisciplinary
from the start and the widening of the analytical focus to include all kinds of
music. I have mentioned interdisciplinarity already, so I will not revisit the issues
here, except to say that the contributions to Popular Music are commendably
eclectic: there are articles by musicologists, aestheticians, psychologists, histori-
ans, sociologists and many others. However, whether this diversity leads to the
formation of a consensus on any given topic is open to debate.
The widening of the analytical focus, on the other hand, should be welcomed
without reservation by sociologists. After all, the very idea of ‘popular’ music is
something of a residual category, into which all sorts of styles are put if they have
not been defined as ‘serious’ or ‘classical’. (In Britain for many years, the BBC
distinguished between ‘serious’ and ‘light’ music, and paid musicians performing
the latter at lower rates). And—perhaps most important of all—the vast majority
of the activities that Blaukopf called ‘musical practice’ are concerned with ‘pop-
ular’ music. This is not only consistent with our everyday experience, but may be
illustrated by the (admittedly unreliable) statistics generated by sales of records
and downloads. Estimates vary, but it is generally accepted that around 80% of
global sales are classified as ‘rock and pop’. No other category achieves anything
34 P. J. Martin
approaching that percentage: ‘classical’ record sales have been generally less than
10% of the total (10% in Germany and Switzerland, 7% in Britain, 3% in the
USA; Gronow and Saunio 1998, p. 194) while estimates for ‘jazz’ vary between
1% and 5%. For present purposes, what is important is not the actual numbers,
but the fact that ‘art’ music constitutes only a small proportion of all musical
activities. Moreover, it is clear that ‘pop’ music, its performers and personalities,
have become an important part of the culture of ‘modern’ societies; if for no other
reason, it must therefore be taken seriously by sociologists. As I have already sug-
gested, music which is of little interest to musicologists may be very important
from a sociological point of view.
It is evident that Blaukopf, unlike many others, appreciated the cultural impor-
tance of the invention of sound recording in the 1870s: for the first time, music
could be separated from the time and place of its production. This, and related
technical developments, made possible the enormous expansion and proliferation
of ‘popular’ styles which ‘presuppose electroacoustic modification’ (1992 [1982],
p. 171). A ‘wave of activity’ among young people was subsequently evident—a
wave in which, contrary to Adorno’s pessimism, young people’s involvement in
music was active rather than passive (ibid., pp. 174–175). Moreover, the wide-
spread availability of recorded music, and its broadcasting, meant that music
could now be a much more important part of everyday life. It also meant that
Western music—both ‘popular’ and ‘classical’—could be exported to other parts
of the world and held up as a ‘standard’ to which other cultures should aspire. It
should be said that Blaukopf was consistently critical of this notion of ‘progress’,
suggesting that the worldwide acceptance of Western musical conventions had
more to do with ‘processes of industrial technology’ than the ‘inner strength’ of
the music (ibid., p. 256). On the other hand, he recognised that recordings could
help to preserve non-Western musics (e.g. ibid., p. 259) in a way which our nota-
tion could not.
For present purposes, however, the theme I wish to pursue was raised concisely
by Blaukopf, when he wrote that: ‘Together with radio, the recording industry
has brought about an economic transformation in the music publishing business’
(ibid., p. 173). Since about the middle of the last century, the recording industry
has been the dominant part of the music business, growing steadily through the
1960s and 1970s. In the largest market, the USA, records worth $ 687 million
were sold in 1962, but by 1980 this had increased to $ 3682 million; in Germany
47.4 million ‘units’ were sold in 1962 and 199.1 million in 1980 (Gronow and
Sanio 1998, p. 137). The point I wish to make—and to which I will return—is that
it was during this period of unprecedented growth, and the dominance of the LP,
that popular music studies began to coalesce.
Before that, however, it will be useful to consider the effects of some impor-
tant technological developments. Throughout its history, the recording industry
has reaped the benefit of successive technical innovations; these include sound
recording itself, the microphone, magnetic tapes, LPs and CDs, personal ste-
reos and many others. All of these, in various ways, have contributed to the sit-
uation which Blaukopf described when he noted that ‘every kind of music plays
a quantitatively greater role in people’s lives’ (1992 [1982], p. 190). It is some-
what ironic, then, that a further technological development—digitisation—should
have caused the recording industry (and other ‘cultural industries’) to be plunged
into a major crisis. There is no need here to review the technical developments
which have brought this about; suffice it to say that it is now easy to record and
distribute music, even on a mass scale, quite cheaply—without the studios and
expensive equipment, the distribution networks and retail outlets which used to
be owned or controlled by the major record companies. Indeed, what used to be
‘major’ labels (e.g. RCA, CBS, EMI and so on) are now themselves divisions
of international corporations; and increasingly the ‘big players’ in the recording
industry are giant technology companies like Apple and Google, or retailers such
as Amazon and Walmart.
For some, the decline of the record industry is terminal, and some (especially
musicians who recall the industry’s history of bad behaviour) have welcomed
this. Others, often enthusiasts for the ‘new technology’, have argued that digiti-
sation can bring about a new era in which so-called ‘minority’ tastes, often over-
looked by profit-hungry major companies, will be made far more accessible (e.g.
Anderson 2006) and that the new situation will be far more democratic, end-
ing the control of the big companies over what sorts of music get to the market
and enabling individuals and groups to record and distribute their own sounds.
However, those working in the field of popular music studies have tended to be
wary of such conclusions, emphasising instead the ways in which ‘music indus-
try power remains tied to access to capital, financing, and marketing support’
(Hesmondhalgh and Meier 2015, p. 7). In general, the tendency in popular music
studies is to be cautious about the implications of digitisation, placing great
weight on the ability of existing interests to maintain their position of power and
influence in the industry. For example, the declining volume of CD sales, even if
not yet compensated by the increase in ‘streaming’ and digital downloads, is not
the only measure of the industry’s profitability: publishing and licensing deals (as
Frith noted many years ago; Frith 1987) are of increasing importance. As Hes-
mondhalgh has put it, ‘the fate of the music business should not be understood
in terms of sales alone. The music business is founded on rights, and the possi-
bilities for exploiting these rights have grown steadily over time, and continue to
grow’ (2009, p. 65–66).
36 P. J. Martin
Popular music studies, as I have noted, developed at a time when the record
industry was buoyant and sales of LPs were booming. As a result, has it—like the
record industry as a whole—been slow to recognise the implications of digitisa-
tion? Or are the claims of the technophiles exaggerated and the caution of popular
music analysts justified? Certainly, the big technology companies are prospering,
while the vast majority of composers and performers are struggling to ‘monetise’
their music even while it enjoys popularity on the internet.
Even now, it is too early to draw conclusions about the future of recorded
music. Digitisation has brought about the biggest challenge to the music busi-
ness since the invention of recording, and while no one knows what will happen
it is clear that this, right now, is a particularly fertile field for researchers. Further,
there are two theoretical perspectives which, I think, can help us to understand,
sociologically, what is going on. Both of these tend to over-simplify the situation,
but both can be useful at least as an initial orientation. The first was provided by
Marx and Engels in 1859, when in the famous ‘Preface’ to the Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy they spoke of the ways in which existing ‘social
relations of production’ are threatened by the development of ‘material produc-
tive forces’ (quoted from Hughes et al. 2003, p. 45–54). I am not concerned here
with Marx’s ‘grand narrative’ of human history, nor with debates about whether
the technological forces of production determine, constrain, or simply influence
social relations and institutions. However, what this perspective does offer is an
initial orientation to the various ways in which the established social relations of
the music business (including, as Marx put it, its ‘legal and political superstruc-
ture and … definite forms of social consciousness’; quoted from ibid., p. 46) have
clearly been undermined by developments in the technological ‘forces of produc-
tion’. The ‘business model’ on which the record industry depended for more than
a century—turning recorded music into an object, which could then be sold—has
gone, many would say for ever.
The second theoretical perspective which, I suggest, may be helpful in the
present context was one which derives from remarks I heard many years ago in
a lecture given in Manchester by Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, not long before he
died. In his talk, Schumacher discussed some of the effects of advanced technol-
ogy for existing markets; among these, he suggested, was the tendency for the
‘centre’ to disappear—leaving a ‘high-tech’, high-cost but relatively low-volume
sector at one end, and at the other a low-cost, high-volume ‘mass’ market. It is
evident that this model does not fit perfectly; however, I would suggest that it
goes a long way to clarifying many of the aspects of the way the music busi-
ness is developing. Making predictions is always risky, but I do think we are see-
ing the emergence of a ‘high’ end, with specialist labels and retail outlets, and a
‘mass’ market populated by global superstars, with high-volume sales and much
interest from the media. Already we have seen the disappearance—in Europe
and the USA—of ‘general’ record retailers. The analysts in popular music stud-
ies may well be right in that established interests in the music business will find
ways to retain power and control, especially at the ‘mass’ market end; what is not
in doubt, I suggest, is that we are in a novel situation, one that, to repeat, offers
many opportunities to researchers at the present time.
I wish to end this short discussion of popular music studies by making two
more general observations, both of them sociological rather than specifically
musicological. First, there are reasons to think that popular music will no longer
be such a salient element in youth culture as it once was. It is true that, as men-
tioned above, due to the ease with which it is now electronically distributed and
reproduced, there is a great deal of music in our everyday lives—more than ever
before. But it may be that this very ubiquity makes music a less useful means of
asserting one’s identity, and that we may no longer take for granted the valid-
ity of Willis’s claim that: ‘Many young people have a strong investment in the
lyrical themes, imagery and symbolism of popular music’ (1990, p. 68). As Mul-
ligan sees it, there was a significant change during the 1990s: ‘Music still mat-
tered deeply to people, but it no longer had the stage to itself. Younger people had
an increasingly wide and diverse range of media choices and lifestyle options to
identify with’ (2015, p. 44). Moreover, there are now several alternative claims on
young people’s disposable income. Years ago, Peterson and Berger (1990 [1975])
argued that while record companies were doing well in the 1950s and 1960s, their
sales had failed to keep pace with the rise in teenagers’ incomes. What I am sug-
gesting is that we are now in a comparable situation: one in which recordings
must compete with such things as ‘smart phones’ and computer games—both rel-
atively expensive items—for young people’s money. The recordings are likely to
lose out, especially when they can be ‘downloaded’ cheaply or for free.
The second point is more general still: as a means of compensating for the
lost revenue resulting from falling CD sales, companies have—at last—begun to
recognise the possibilities of distribution through the internet and have introduced
‘streaming’ services which give access to a great deal of music in return for a
fairly modest regular fee. The income from such services still does not approach
the former income from the sales of physical ‘products’, but it is growing rap-
idly, and continuing growth seems likely. It may be that there is a significant cul-
tural change here—affecting not just music but many other products—in which
the ‘ownership’ of goods is giving way to the ‘access’ to services. For example,
‘collections’ of books, records and DVDs, which in the past have provided their
‘owner’ with a sense of identity and proclaimed it to others, will no longer fulfil
this function. What’s more, this general movement from the ownership of objects
38 P. J. Martin
to access to services may affect a range of products well beyond those of the
‘cultural industries’—increasingly, for example, cars are not owned but ‘leased’.
Whether these observations are valid or not remains to be seen. What is
certain, however, is that there is scope for much useful and interesting research in
these fields.
4 Summary and Conclusions
It has been argued that, in recent years, sociologists of music have had to take
account of the emergence of two new but closely related specialisms: the ‘new’
musicology and popular music studies. As far as the first is concerned, I have
suggested that, from a sociological perspective, the ‘new’ musicology retains
certain problematic features of the ‘old’: in particular the concern with ‘decod-
ing’ the inherent meaning of ‘works’, the continuing preoccupation with music
which seems significant or original and the persistent concern to relate music to
‘society’. In considering these themes, it has been possible to identify ways in
which the disciplinary concerns of musicologists and sociologists are different.
It has also been possible to consider some of the important contributions of Kurt
Blaukopf to the field, although (to this reader at least) there may be some tension
between his respect for Weber’s sociology of music and his commitment to the
premises of logical empiricism. In relation to popular music studies, I have wel-
comed the more realistic view of ‘music’ which it implies, and raised some issues
concerning the implications of digitisation for the music business.
I have also noted the deliberate eclecticism of popular music studies, its inter-
disciplinary nature, and the fact that this has not (yet) led to any consensus on
what Blaukopf once called ‘the ascertaining of facts’ (2012, p. 105). It appears
that, in this field at least, interdisciplinarity has not led to either the ‘unity of the
sciences’ or a ‘universal jargon’; the implication is that human knowledge is per-
spectival rather than absolute. But to pursue this would take us once again far
from our present interests, and far from my competence.
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Objects, Belief, and the Sociologist:
The Sociology of Art as a
Work-To-Be-Done
Antoine Hennion
This conference combining music and social sciences to celebrate the Vienna
Institute’s fiftieth anniversary invites each of us to re-examine our own trajecto-
ries. In hindsight, I feel that I have not so much worked in music sociology as
written a sociology from the perspective of music. I would like to use this occa-
sion to explore that issue further and revisit the curious relationship that the
sociology of art has with its object. Musical experiences (creating, playing, the
amateur’s enjoyment) are not internal or personal but are the very site of music.
Is it possible to recognize the constitutive relationship between writing about
music and the practice of music by any other means than that of necessary dis-
tancing or personal outpouring? In tackling this difficult question, I would like
to place myself under the benevolent gaze of the late and great authors who have
shaped my work: Michel de Certeau1 and Louis Marin2 in my early days, and
later William James and Étienne Souriau. Of course, putting experiences into
1On his return from the United States, Certeau had no post either at a university or at the
École des hautes études en sciences sociales and was welcomed for a year by the Centre de
Sociologie de l’Innovation (CSI). As a very new researcher at the CSI, I had to critique his
article ‘Croire: une pratique de la différence’ in his presence, which I did by comparing it
with the revival of baroque music.
2Shortly before his premature death, we invited him to the CSI seminar series to discuss his
book L’Opacité de la peinture (1989). I will return to this exceptional work below.
A. Hennion (*) 
MINES Paris Tech, PSL Research University, Paris, Frankreich
E-Mail: antoine.hennion@mines-paristech.fr

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22279-6_4
42 A. Hennion
writing cannot summarize their process, which is constantly renewing. And yet it
is true—as Certeau has shown for history and religion—that this writing contrib-
utes to making the experiences exist in other ways, to prolonging and augmenting
them, just as such experiences have sustained the writings of the music sociolo-
gist that I have also been. I want to experiment by comparing a piece of writing
to the experience that it aims to transcribe within two situations: learning to sing
(based on my own case) and an interview with a jazz improviser. Astonishingly,
the concept of improvisation provided by the jazz musician echoes Souriau’s
powerful and original definition of the ‘work-to-be-done (oeuvre à faire)’, which
I will discuss in my conclusion. By making such connections, I show the possi-
bility and necessity of a sociology of art that is far removed from today’s reigning
scientism—a sociology of art that ensures it is equal to the works produced, and
especially to what those works call for: the worlds whose possibility they affirm.
How could this appeal of the artwork not concern the sociology of art?
1 Mediation as an Ethnomethodology
The ambiguous relationship between sociology and its object is a topic that I have
constantly revisited, with a parallel hope of drawing lessons from music that I
might apply to sociology. Such was the case with the idea of mediation in The Pas-
sion for Music (Hennion 2015a). I have since abandoned the term, without regret. I
had used it less as a theoretical concept than as an ‘ethnomethodology’, a summary
of the actors’ own ways of doing: on the one hand, the myriad means by which
social historians, historians of art and sociologists of art or music establish de facto
relations between their object and the social sphere, and on the other hand, musi-
cians who are the living examples of a modus operandi present and revealed in its
many aspects in their merest gesture. To refer to mediation was to extricate music
from the opposition of internal vs. external analyses. The only causes are partial
and heterogenous and cannot be attributed to clear registers. From these assembled
causes, effects appear suddenly in ways that are partly unpredictable, always to be
renewed and themselves irreducible to the causes that have generated them. Medi-
ation is a necessary crutch which makes it possible to do things and bring them
about. But it also resists, goes against the current, does something different.
Obviously, all of this was more difficult to express in words than a simple rela-
tionship of cause-and-effect. But at the same time, I was not being all that eso-
teric in talking of an ethnomethodology: even sociologists who are not musicians
at all will understand this once they have read Sudnow’s (1978) marvellous little
book about the musician who sits down at the piano. Everything counts, down to
Objects, Belief, and the Sociologist … 43
the least detail: fingers and scores, learning and exercises, genres and styles, past
concerts and the media, but also feeling the atmosphere, the auditorium, knowing
how to follow an emerging idea, etc. And yet nothing guarantees a result. As so
often, theory lags behind common sense: the surprise engendered by the flow of
things or the sense of the fitting gesture in a situation reflect the most ordinary
experiences shared by the professional and amateur alike. It’s the football play-
er’s pass or the painter’s touch of the brush, the pleasure felt by the spectator or
drinker, the mountain climber’s hold, the jazz musician’s blue note, the caregiv-
er’s gesture—to use some examples that I have worked on.
I will not be revisiting the issue on this generalized level, but on the more per-
sonal level of the author’s attachment to the object he is dedicatedly working on.
In fact, ‘the love of art’ produces a tension that (sometimes) inhabits the soci-
ologist. Is this tension the hidden engine behind his research, a subjective bias
to be avoided, or the ferment indispensable for his understanding? Yet he trem-
bles before any analysis of art which sticks too closely to the terms that the art
itself proposes to him. Surely studying an artwork or an artistic practice above all
contributes to making them art? Whether the sociologist invokes axiological neu-
trality or else constructivism to pre-empt this compromise of his principles,3 he
approaches art solely to multiply the evidence that he has not been bewitched by
it; that he treats it ‘as not so very different’, to use Becker’s famous expression4
(1982); even that he battles its pretensions to have its own reality, following the
unilateral conception of the critical perspective imposed by Bourdieu (1984). The
strange result is this: the sociologist’s words are as loud when he critiques notions
of gift, taste or emotion as his silence is deafening whenever he needs to consider
(to even the slightest degree) the experience that is created in all its infinitely
3As commentators on Weber keep futilely reminding us, his famous warning does not
demand that the sociologist stick to the facts and forswear value judgements. It maintains
the opposite: since facts and values are inseparable, the sociologist’s duty is to make her
values explicit and public, thus creating the possibility of choosing other values, rather than
dissimulating them beneath neutral statements that claim to be factual. Thus, I. Kalinowski
(2005) prefers to talk of the ‘non-imposition of values’ while J.-P. Grossein in his discus-
sion of the French translation of Gesinnung as disposition rightly emphasizes the kinship
between Weber and pragmatism.
4‘Treating art as not so very different from other kinds of work’ (Art Worlds 1982,
pp. ix–x).
44 A. Hennion
v aried forms and uses upon contact with artworks.5 How can my discipline speak
of this presence when every word it uses separates, isolates and reduces the living
part of things in favour of a panoply of structures, rules, conventions, beliefs and
determinations—or rather, in favour of everything but paying attention to what is
happening here and now, which cannot be reduced to what makes it possible?
2 A Byway
Yet by tackling head-on the issue of what factors determine my research I risk
remaining too vague about my sociological postures and too specific or flatter-
ing about my self-analysis. In the hope that this mediation will help us to clarify
matters, let me turn to Michel de Certeau as my first go-between in this game.
To do the transport, I will try to ‘poach’ from The Writing of History (1992), his
great book on what writing the history of religion might mean, so that I can refor-
mulate for our purposes the issues that he presented so well in his own relation-
ship with religion, writing and history. My own ‘ruse’—to keep using Certeau’s
vocabulary—will be to translate and betray Certeau into various kinds of music,
song, wine … At the same time, I remind myself that even Certeau, who was so
austere and so uninterested in seeking pleasure, must have felt great pleasure in
minutely inscribing in writing—and thus transforming them at the very instant
that he grasped them again—the successive thought operations that he must have
experienced as a religious historian working on the history of religion under the
initially sceptical or ironic gaze of others (the devout seeing him as a traitor and
the intelligentsia as a parish priest)! Because all his obsessive topics bring us back
to the desk where he wrote. This was true of his most autobiographical topics:
he was a Jesuit and aristocrat from the provinces who, thanks to history, man-
aged to become accepted outside of his milieu while keeping his ‘specialization’
in religion, and he was a favourite of Lacan’s who wrote about psychoanalysis
(in particular Freud’s self-analysis) and who analysed himself while writing. It
also applied to his most theoretical themes: the Other, loss, absence—of God, his
faith, his milieu? Who knows, probably not even he himself—and the writing of
history, which he understood as a doing, an ‘operativity’ that is both a producer of
5L’œuvre de l’art—the ‘work of the art’, and not The Work of Art as the English title (1997)
says—is the elegant title of G. Genette’s book in French, by which he means the ongoing
work, the putting into motion, the ‘getting something done’ that can only be grasped in an
infinite series of revisits and reworkings. I will come back to this theme with Souriau.
content and the content produced. For him, history was a present that ‘retrieves’
the past (which, by definition, is lost) by writing it and burying it with one and the
same gesture.
For Certeau, then, self-analysis is not narcissistic but demanding and rigorous.
It does not ‘replace’ life-as-lived but transforms it into writing through ways of
doing: as it happens, through writing itself, as an activity. He revisits his faith,
perhaps his God, and his membership of his religious order, all the while keep-
ing them at a distance through his writing. And yet he does not take them as an
‘object’. He does not take God, his faith, his past, etc. as objects. Rather, he per-
forms an additional degree of reflexivity by taking as the object of his writing the
very operation of writing, and centring his writing on the effects of every text on
the subject he addresses. He shows writing in the very gesture of writing, which
is to make its object into an object (see his wonderful ideas on speech, which is
always generated by the absence of what it speaks about, and yet makes it present
starting with this very lack and turns it into history). Based on his own work and
his own object, he unpacks what writing-as-operation—or self-‘involvement’, as
he also puts it so well—is. In this, he is not content to apply a scholar’s knowl-
edge to what has taken hold of him as a human being, which would make invis-
ible the link between this initial personal motivation and the public work that he
subsequently realized—a link usually made anonymous by the curious mech-
anism of authority, which transforms the author’s relationship to his work from
one of production into one of ownership. Far from performing independence
or distance, he thus works on what history, religion and writing have produced
between them, on one another and with each other, both in the narrative of Chris-
tianity and its modern secularization, and within himself.
This is where I imagined his pleasure (though without any proof): ‘So, what
do you say, you devout critics who thought you could catch me out by show-
ing that, with the tools of science, I would no longer be able to speak of faith;
you scholars who lay in wait to see when I would return to serve my faith after
these long detours designed to confuse the issue and prove my professional
competence? I speak of religion, I speak of my religion, and of what it means to
speak of it—and yet you are unable to disqualify my discourse either from the
perspective of my faith, or from the perspective of history’. Certeau was trick-
ing, he used ‘ruses’, a word that he liked: tricking his fellow historians and his
comrades in religion, and also himself, so as to remain unsituatable, to be every-
where and nowhere. His writing is all ruse, tricking authoritative positions, which
themselves make way for others that are not situated, not situatable and endlessly
postponed: nonetheless, those positions are the only ones from which can be
uttered the ones that are written. But what else is history? My God, how positivist
sociology looks by comparison!
46 A. Hennion
3 Writing ‘from …’?
What happens if, modestly, I try to transpose these issues to my position of

sociologist ‘of’ music? Oh look, he mostly writes about music. What does that
mean? Is he a musician himself? Does he love music? What kind of music? Does
that change anything? The connection to what I sought in Certeau seems rather
self-evident to me: a love for music that I know will not be expressed in words,
or rather will always be an other, a leftover, an elsewhere to what I might write
about it, but a love that nevertheless is constantly rekindled, reinforced and nour-
ished by writing that ‘starts with’ it, or ‘from’ it. For instance, I could easily iden-
tify the more ‘objective’ moments and stances in my own research, when music
as the appeal of what is ‘missing’ for me retreats, and I write more as a soci-
ologist. Just as I can identify the moments—though I make no claim to speak
‘about them’—when I am driven to write about taste by this desire for what is
untranslatable, other and foreign to all writing, the corporeal, too, this intense and
unintelligible pleasure. I write about others’ taste, of course (and if I sometimes
take myself as an example, that Me is only a trick of writing). So the relationship
between the two is not one of independence, nor one of substitution, but a pas-
sage, a reciprocal writing, a presence in the name of an absence. Otherwise all
we have are two extreme representations, both empty and desiccated: music as
the given object, or music as incommunicable intimacy. Certeau pointed this out
regarding religion when it is no longer anything but sociology or anything but
mysticism, meaning no longer anything but practice or anything but belief. On
the contrary, it ‘works’ not when the two are added6 but when they ‘betray’ each
other, when each is the other’s other.
This interlacing, here seen from the author’s perspective, is even more val-
uable seen from the perspective of the work. To find our way beyond Umberto
Eco (1981, 1989)—who developed a mischievous but linear semiological version
of the spectator’s presence in the work through his concepts of the ‘open work’
and the ‘reader within the text’—let a friend of Certeau’s be another go-between:
Louis Marin. In L’Opacité de la peinture (1989), he proposes fascinating analy-
ses of Renaissance paintings that likewise focus on the representation of absence
6To speak of involving objects without speaking of them, authors in the social sciences
have become virtuoso preface writers in which they reveal their personal considerations
before continuing, in the company of their anonymous reader, an equally anonymous work
that is thus exempted from such considerations.
as presence. He turns the well-named Annunciations into reflexive montages that

are as far removed from a formalistic semiology (which would empty them of
all content) as from a positivist analysis (which would take them to be a con-
tent): starting with the medium employed, they become doubles of their own
theological message. They are angels showing angels so as to rehearse the pres-
ence of absence and the absence of the present. There is nothing in the centre
of an Annunciation but an empty space between two messengers—an angel and
the Mediatrix. The paintings are mediations that are both opaque and transpar-
ent, ‘transitive and reflexive’ (p. 10): to show is to show that you are showing
but above all to show that you are not showing. Further on, Marin comments on
the representation of the women in front of Jesus’ empty tomb. ‘He is no longer
here’: ‘the presence of the message … asserts the absence of this object, the
divine body, here and now; better still, [it] asserts its presence as elsewhere and
already’ (pp. 126–127, original italics). As in Certeau, the event of absence is far
from negative. Painting helps it become a narrative during which writing materi-
alizes and a church is founded. From the theology in several acts that the paint-
ings realize as a commentary on biblical texts to the very angles of the church
walls where they have been hung, Marin lays out the nested strata of works with-
out author or spectator, except for those authors and spectators that the painting
itself produces, with the uncertainty of what can only ever be a proposal. Medi-
ation is not a cause; it does not contain its own effects. It is a passage that opens
up ‘toward’ something; it does not determine. It leads but must be led as well, by
media, gestures and bodies, tools and devices. Finally, it can either fail or succeed
in a situation. In that sense, it has its own effectiveness, which dissolves the oppo-
sition between the work and its means. I think painting has rarely been written
about in such a musical way.
4 The Perspective of the Object
These examples give us a clearer idea of the extent to which the object targeted
by these practices can only ever be manqué, missed: denied or transformed into
an inert challenge by the methodological indifference of the supposedly objective
sociologist. I say ‘supposedly’ because this attitude, far from being an objective
posture, is in fact a way of shrugging off all the world’s objects—with their resist-
ance and opacity but also their capacity to make us what we are—and see them
only as ploys. What should we call this other posture to contrast it with the neu-
tral objectivising posture, in which the scholar writes without leaving any traces
48 A. Hennion
of her presence as the one doing the writing? To call it subjective would be fee-
ble indeed. So—more engaged, more involved, more … believing?7 In any case,
this is the stance I will attempt as I speak of music, starting with my own experi-
ence. It is not a question of ‘speaking about myself’ but rather of keeping in mind
somewhere this love for music, both as a sort of catalyst and as an impossible
challenge. This is what makes us write and yet it cannot be written—at least not
‘completely’, meaning it cannot be written without immediately becoming some-
thing else. As for Certeau, he benefited from the dual meaning of the French word
histoire: the story played by actors and the history created by historians. Both
a produced and producing history: writing is the link between the two. Has any
sociologist ever gone this far?
And yet how acute sociology’s confrontation with the issue has been. Given
that the nuances of writing about something are infinite, as Certeau has shown,
how unsatisfying is the average posture which takes it to be self-evident that the
sociologist’s task is not to say what art is but how its actors ‘construct’ its value!
This is the truly meagre duality of essentialism and constructivism (Hennion
2016).8 Is it realistic to see sociology as a knowing which describes from the out-
side the actors’ game of constructing their values, without them knowing of it?
Who still presents his taste as disinterested, absolute, independent from its ori-
gins, and above the game of social differentiation? When interviewing amateurs,
sociology has become not just a reference horizon shared by the interviewer and
the interviewed but one of the principal pieces of equipment through which the
amateur thinks about and describes his taste and the taste of others. How can we
take into account this unexpected reflexive aspect of our activity: the interviewee
now reflects—often dominantly and sometimes exclusively—an image that soci-
ology itself has created? The classical solution consists of adding to the object
analysis an analysis of the work done by the observer on the object and of his
own predispositions. In this reflexivity, conceived as the fact of taking oneself
as object, we have to keep pushing upward. The risk is twofold. We might open
up a never-ending spiral—because, as a matter of principle, where should such
a regression end? And, more damagingly, we might direct attention to ourselves
7The word is probably fitting, provided that we take it in James’ rehabilitated meaning of
belief as a necessary and primal relationship with the world, including in the scientific
method: see ‘The Will to Believe’ (1897).
8On the origins of sociology as a theory of belief, see Hennion (2015a, chap. 1, ‘Lasting
Things’, pp. 15–38).
more than to the world, objects and others. This runs the risk of achieving the
very opposite of what the reflexive critique aspired to, i.e. closing down observa-
tion rather than broadening its scope.
The solution cannot be found in such a reflexivity of withdrawal but rather in
an openness toward objects that are themselves open. We need commitment and
perspicacity, not distance, to respond to objects’ capacity to respond, to reveal
themselves, to deploy. But it is at this point that experience of the thing becomes
necessary for the sociologist. When I consider my research topics in retrospect—
music as a doing, not an object; taste as an activity (or art of doing? (Certeau
1984)) whose object goes through the body, equipment and scenes, the situation
and others; or Bach as the writer of what we understand by music, as opposed to
music enabling us to give him a place in history (Fauquet and Hennion 2000)—I
tell myself that Certeau’s approach is very suggestive for discussing music. We
do not know what ‘music’ is, or, rather: when it is music, it is already no longer
music, because what ‘it’ has done has been taken up by a different story. Neither
for the pygmy awaiting his initiation nor for the pietist listening to the Sunday
cantata nor for the ’60s rocker discovering his generation is there such a thing as
music. There is something through which bodies, notes and communities jointly
write themselves, but neither a social reading (starting with these groups) nor
a musical reading (taking music for emitted sounds) can tell us much about it.
Articulating a practice and a belief, as Certeau liked to say. Love and the loved
object—is that not a better way forward for speaking of music? Well, you’d better
believe it!
5 Rediscovering Belief?
The expression ‘better believe it’ did not surface for nothing. Whilst the gods of
the heavens have gone, they have not left us in a material and inert world whose
only horizon is a cynical disillusionment or a humanist philosophy miserably
trying to reinfuse it with some spirituality. The gods have left us facing worlds-
in-the-making, in the smallest gesture and the collective choices with the heavi-
est consequences. The social sciences have employed all their ingenuity to make
belief into a sort of useful blindness, the mortar necessary to keep our communi-
ties together. Michel de Certeau, and before him William James in his The Will
to Believe (1979 [1897]), have presented a completely different perspective on
belief: as a hold on worlds still to come, a commitment without guarantee or rea-
son but without which these worlds could never occur.
50 A. Hennion
In my case, it was above all the pragmatics of taste that effected this displace-
ment (Hennion 2004). What amateurs show—those experts in the art of making
the world’s differences come to them—is that objects are not ‘already there’, fully
equipped with their properties and merely waiting to be grasped by a cultural or
social practice. This is not a matter of attributing values to objects but of exist-
ing, of being present in the world. Whether it is music or wine we are talking
about, amateurs’ curious practices are neither a simple learning of the properties
of the object of their passion nor a necessary folklore that allows the community
to warm up objects that are cold, neutral and arbitrary in principle. We have to
actively make the objects of our pleasure emerge in all their differences and make
ourselves aware of those differences. This is something akin to the art of ‘making
something exist’, an art manifested above all by beings and things themselves.9
Everything happens in between, without a clearly defined subject or object, but
that is not the reason why the performance that accomplishes itself is not wholly
due to an unforeseen trait, the felicity of an accent, or the success of a detail that
changes everything. In each case, the extreme precision of what is being played
is striking. The small difference counts for more than the whole from which it
stands out in a sculpture of an experience that is always recreated.
In other words, it is not at all a matter of insisting on the practice, of tracing
backward from the thing done to the act that produces it, which leaves intact the
question of the ‘to-be-done’ that Souriau asks on our behalf. Instead of further
sharpening the opposition between doing and being, we need to make it impos-
sible for the two to lose contact. James was aware of the problem. He was not
excited by the term ‘pragmatism’, sensing a danger that it might be confused with
an accolade for the practice that ignores its object. He insisted on the pragmata
instead. My work with Émilie Gomart and subsequently with Geneviève Teil
on amateurs and their attachments has revisited the notion of agency and high-
lighted the ambiguity that the vocabulary of action has introduced, even though
it attributes this capacity to things themselves (Gomart and Hennion 1999; Teil
and Hennion 2004, 2011; Hennion 2017). Taste is to make oneself love but also
to let oneself be carried along. A precise observation of the amateur’s techniques
calls for an oscillation between activity and passivity to be radically abandoned
in favour of a sort of one-upmanship that blends them tightly and is best rendered
by a series of verbs, admittedly of little elegance. Making oneself love, then, and
9This is the power of the [REP] mode proposed by Latour in his inquiry into modes of
existence (2013).
letting what happens take place. But that is not enough. It also requires doing what
is needed to let oneself be taken in, making ourselves actively available to be car-
ried away, flowing passively into an ongoing action, allowing our own gesture to
happen (Hennion 2007). The techniques used by athletes, singers, yogis and tast-
ers all echo this sentiment. The passive is very active and the active very passive.
They augment each other. They do not alternate. Making yourself available, loos-
ening, listening—all these words are perpendicular to the active/passive axis, as is
the word of passion itself, which no-one interprets as implying p assivity.
This is the precondition for objects to do likewise: to unfold and express them-
selves, to develop their flavours, differences and presence for the senses of their
admirer. As with humans, we should talk about the patience of objects as well as
their agency. What the vocabulary of action separates, the concept of agency hap-
pily and precisely redistributes among devices, bodies and objects.10 But perhaps
agency calls for a double, some expression like patiency—what a shame the word
does not exist. It would be a better way of suggesting attention to the world’s
objects and to the solicitude of all other beings through which these objects are
helped to be, just as Souriau himself will help us to understand.
At this juncture, I will therefore continue on a more personal note. When we
are confronted with the timorousness of a scientistic (which differs from scien-
tific) conception of sociological research, can we speak of the more internal expe-
riences without falling into subjective introspection? That would be nothing but
the complacent reversal of objectivism, which is powerless to account for what
the arts brings to life. First test: can we write a better report of the singer’s expe-
rience based not on the impressions he has ‘lived’ through but on an almost mate-
rial monitoring of what happens during a rehearsal? To accomplish this, James,
the third go-between? of my text, will be decisively helpful (Hennion 2015b).
I will then attempt the same: basing myself on open and pluralist ontologies to
better account for musical experience beyond the opposition of external descrip-
tion versus internal introspection. On this occasion, my example will be a jazz
improvisation, a topic that will lead us to the powerful concept of the ‘work-to-
be-done’ that Étienne Souriau has delineated (2009 [1956]).
10Callon defends the French term agencement, which he takes from Deleuze (Callon 2013,
pp. 425–426), as being greatly preferable to the inert and undifferentiated assemblage used
in English translations (and now used back in French!). Playing a sonata, running a 100-
metre race, cooking, looking after the sick or making a park bloom is to endlessly sculpt
myriad details, each of which enables the others to stand out more, and to serve in their
turn as footholds—all of which is better suggested by the term agencement. Reciprocally,
the precious English word ‘agency’ has no easy French translation.
52 A. Hennion
6 First Test: Singing Lessons
First of all, why James? His main aim is to get us out of a paralysing dualism
(1976 (1912]). If we posit a stable world, a Euclidean space in which objects obey
the laws that govern them, then there can only be human subjectivity to confront
it, equipped with a divine power of creation. But what if we do not suppose the
world to be closed and finished? Each reality that unfolds becomes more and more
original as it sculpts itself. I think this is a beautiful way of formulating the prag-
matist project: it is to accompany the flow of infinite extensions. If there is noth-
ing but flow and ongoing experiences in an open and undetermined pluriverse, as
James (1977 [1909a]) says; if these worlds still in the process of making (1909b,
p. 226) are expanding or retracting heterogenous networks with nothing beyond
them, then the problem is reversed. Every act creates being (or else fails to do so);
it is maintaining a little stability that is the exception. Reciprocally, and without
being possibly reduced to them, every act is founded on a stacking-up of objects
that get something done (‘font faire’): mediations, habits, equipment, all sorts of
‘faire faire’,11 without whose support nothing gets accomplished. It seems to me
that James’ ‘pluriverse’ draws up a topology which can be used as a framework for
a self-description that is not simply the ‘feeling’ of an external event. This is not a
question of psychology but of ontology, including in the physical sense. It is life-
as-lived (le vécu), if you prefer—but the life-as-lived of the object itself.
Overview
Let us put ourselves in the shoes of an amateur singer. I will discuss him
in the third person, but without hiding the fact that I am talking of my own
experience. But to put that experience into words is already to make it into
something else. In particular, it connects to other amateur practices that I
have researched. Let us start right here, then, with the amateur understood
as someone who makes an object exist for himself. The expression is inad-
equate: it emphasizes the amateur, when no-one knows better than he does
that the object creates him to at least the same degree. Artistic work, dance,
singing, or the athlete’s training session: as we carry out these practices,
11English is reluctant to expressions with no subject or object: a ‘make do’ refers both to
objects that make us do something, and to us making things do something (Gomart and
Hennion 1999; Latour 1999).
there is this recurrent idea in their respective vocabulary that we have to let
things happen, let the body, sounds and gestures happen; that to aim at a
specific result prevents that result from coming about (‘Don’t run!’, ‘Watch
out, you’re playing notes!’, etc.). The result is something additional which
is blocked as soon as we want to decide, instead of accompanying what is
occurring. All these practices work on the ‘moment’; they are experiences
in experience. But when we say ‘in between’ or ‘the flow of things’, we do
not mean intentionally vague, an imprecise zone where anything goes—on
the contrary.
The singer is not in an indefinite flow. The slow honing of his voice
is not a cold technique onto which he grafts his emotion to give it some
warmth. He is not transported by some bottomless and borderless vital
chaos from his body to the work he interprets. He confronts extremely pre-
cise surfaces. All his talk is of support, pressure, projection. The flow is not
vague. But plurality is important here—surfaces, not surface. Behind one
stratum there is always another stratum: the diaphragm, stomach, palate,
nasal cavities, which he slowly learns to feel. They are neither physiologi-
cal organs nor purely cerebral images but a stratum of experience that gains
in consistence. The same is true of his breath, sound and voice. Not one
of these elements appears otherwise than under the auspices of a sphere of
resistance that the singer needs to have experienced, a sphere which at once
emerges, provides footholds and support and makes it possible to continue
onward to another stratum.
Each stratum renders the other mute. Once sound has been mastered by
breathing, for example, it no longer resides in the same place either in the
mind or in the body. It is no longer the materiality of the air that makes
the connection between the parts of the body that produce it and the sound
emitted. It becomes a sort of blanket thrown in front of the singer, which
expands or compacts, which turns over on itself or sweeps everything
away. Are these imaginary formulations or palpable realities? What a fee-
ble reduction such an opposition is of what actually happens! Of course,
the teacher uses such imagery to help the pupil in his unceasing back-and-
forth between the impression of doing something and the opposite impres-
sion of being done to by his own song, which in some way takes possession
of him; where ‘all’ he has to do is maintain that song and control it with-
out trying to master it—which, far from reinforcing it, would immediately
block its momentum.
54 A. Hennion
As soon as progress needs to be made, a new frontier emerges. But a

frontier to what? Are we back confronting the work? Yes, but not in the
sense of a great leap into the sublime. My description of what happens
with the singer’s breathing or with sound holds for each of the thresholds
that need to be crossed. Music is not a given any more than the body or
voice are a given. Music too takes the form of successive strata that we
have to uncover one after the other. The ‘same’ notes on the sheet of paper
are not the same when it comes to deciphering them, making them enter
your ears, associating them with words, familiarizing yourself with a piece;
and afterwards, when the music you think you are still reading is in reality
already there, in yourself: that state makes it into quite a different being.
Later, things will be even more radically turned upside down. What seemed
stable—the score in front of the singer—and what seemed to escape in all
directions—his disordered efforts to realize the score by struggling with the
notes, his voice and breathing, sound and expression—are no longer so. As
the singer gets to know the score better, the work slowly moves away from
it. The flat surface of the paper is only a familiar indicator that gives him
pointers. Once again, everything remains to be done. It is less a matter of
‘crossing over’ to the music once the notes have been acquired (as if there
was technique on one side and art on the other) than of slowly letting what
is, only out of convenience, called the ‘work’ take consistence. The ‘work’
in fact resembles a series of openings: sometimes the notes and chords take
on an almost physical reality, like a statue we’re sculpting and the words
are merely the clay. Another day a phrase comes to life that its own notes
had hidden until then, or an echo between lyrics and melody starts to sound
right, and an unknown emotion suddenly appears that is beyond all music.
Or inversely, the singing becomes body, pitch, vocality, performance, and
the written notes are no more than a medium for these transports. Each
time, a new surface of resistance takes shape which the singer can only use
by constituting it, in such a way that we will never know which made the
other. This is the idea of strata, provided it does not suggest a cumulative
progression or even a hierarchy but rather an effect of successive veils such
as in the theatre, where the lighting brings out veil after the other, with each
simply seeming to give its substance to the next.
7 Second Test: On the Cutting Edge12, the Jazzman’s

Improvisation
Souriau’s concept of the ‘work-to-be-done’13 is very different from how we might

interpret its meaning if we compared it too quickly to similar expressions, like the
open or unfinished work which let the reader fill in the voids they display,14 or let
the viewer ‘make’ the artwork (Duchamp), or let the spectator share in the creation
through the solicited, programmed or random acts called for in happenings, instal-
lations, or the ‘practicable’ arts (Bourriaud 1998; Michaud 2004; Chateau 2009;
Fourmentraux 2012).15 In those cases the work must be appropriated, completed,
transformed; it is a receptive device which already contains and calls its receiver
and it is nothing without him or her. This is certainly better than seeing the work
as a fixed object, especially if the idea is also applied to traditional works. But in
this perspective, the artwork—despite being incomplete and ‘to be finished’—is
nonetheless already a work. It is less ‘to be done’ than, on the contrary, expertly
programmed to already include its possible future versions. We need to get the
measure of the immense chasm between these theories (which we might call attri-
butionist) and the question of the work-to-be-done developed by Souriau. His
proposal is not to deal the cards differently so as to make the reader, viewer or
listener into a co-producer of the work, which he or she would update on receipt.
His idea is much more radical. The work is ‘to-be-done’ not because the existing
work needs developing, or the famous ‘intentions’ of its creator16 need updating,
but because we must bring about what does not exist. It is the work that calls for
help to succeed in existing or, more precisely, in existing more.
12The title of a Sonny Rollins’ track, ceaselessly referenced to talk about jazz improvisa-
tion.
13See Hennion and Monnin (2015). I owe much to the young philosopher Alexandre
Monnin in our joint rereading of a difficult author. Monnin was already the source of the
interview reprinted in Hennion (2016). On Souriau, see also the perceptive texts by I.
Stengers (2007) and D. Lapoujade (2011).
14Apart from Eco (1981, 1989), mentioned above, see e.g. Iser (1980) and Jauss (1982).
15On this subject, see the critical review of the use of the term performance in Hennion
(2014).
16‘The work’s complete trajectory, from its first appearance to its achievement (which is
total alienation), cannot be considered an execution or expression or gradual manifestation

of an original project: to believe that would be to be unaware of and abolish the efficacy of
the acts of this dialectical progress by question-and-answers’ (Souriau 1955, p. 257).
56 A. Hennion
In contrast to the idea of Creation, the human who ‘creates’ something does
not start from nothing. This is why Souriau spoke of instauration: the artist is
not the principle and source of her creation; she receives help and support from
the work itself. Souriau called this spiritual form that solicits and questions the
artist ‘the work’s angel’.17 This will unsettle any sociologist trained to show how
people make things, not how things make people. That same sociologist talks of
what makes art, its conditions, effects, institution and practice; he does not talk of
artworks and especially not of ‘the work of art’, in the sense that Genette gives it.
The institution of art versus the ‘instauration’ of the work—now we see that even
the more pragmatic expression ‘what the object does’ carries the risk of reducing
the object to its effects. Souriau’s proposal radically eliminates that risk. This is
the passage that he helps us to cross: from a theory of action to an ontology of
beings always ‘to-be-done’.
If we situated ourselves in the space that has been opened up by Souriau’s idea
of the ‘work-to-be-done’, would it help us understand the improviser’s experience?
Overview
Improvisation, in the precise sense that musicians give to it as a form of
music, is a performance. In principle, it has all the characteristics of a work-
to-be-done. But far from providing the miraculous solution to our ques-
tions, the word performance contains all the ambivalences that we seek to
untangle. It even emphasizes the ambivalences, caught as it is between those
commentators who see improvisation as the freedom of the moment and
those who reduce such pretensions to the combination of known elements
and the application of preconceived patterns repeated at length until—and
this is the height of illusion—they seem to flow naturally: ‘I don’t like those
set expressions saying that improv is the moment, or those constant banal-
ities that put effort and scales on the one side, and then suddenly bingo’, a
saxophonist told me late after a concert. He was expressing his great irri-
tation with the preconceived discourse on jazz improvisation. In his very
different style, his expressions directly echo Souriau’s. If we do not leave
behind this binary opposition between spontaneity and automatism, the
debate will remain signposted and predictable: ‘Personally, I love jazz
17He is referencing Caravaggio’s The Calling of Saint Matthew, which represents the saint
as a stenographer busy writing down an angel’s dictation.
because of this, the fact that you have a frame that’s much more … The pal-
ette of chords and scales, the style … That’s what puts some people off jazz
but not me at all. On the contrary, what excites me is its sense of always
ploughing the same furrow and yet always being more intense’.
Improvisation calls for a theory of situated action that distributes its effi-
cacy amongst the training of bodies, the recourse to tricks and memory aids,
depending on resources and the affordances that present themselves—asso-
ciations, the instrument’s reactions, ideas that suddenly emerge—and finally
the capacity of the act to surpass itself (Hennion 2010). These are necessary
mediations that always remain insufficient to guarantee success. Improv is
performance in both the French sense of the word (which puts it closer to an
athletic feat) and the English sense of the word (which insists more on the
self-staging and the self-realizing effect of accomplishing a role that, even
though it is known, must each time be lived and recognized anew). This
also introduces its public dimension. Improvisation undoubtedly has many
virtues, not least—for our purposes—that of playing at the very edge of a
subtle frontier between, on the side of the work, doing and making-exist
and, on the side of the instrumentalist, doing and letting yourself be car-
ried along: ‘Personally, I don’t like that image of the acquired skill and then
jumping off into the unknown … It’s not like that, you don’t cut anything
off, it’s the opposite. On the contrary, I just see connections, lots of threads
that hold us or rather push us … To begin with, you don’t “have” that acquis
at all, you have to make it come to you, that’s just it. You follow your own
movement, you launch it and follow it at the same time, it’s like layers that
you add, there are waves and then they push you, so you go there, you find
lots of stuff, it works and then it runs out of steam, so you recharge, you
bring back layers, and here it’s true that you more use stuff you’ve acquired
or, even better, that sometimes you just let this stuff come, you feel that
it’s on its way … It takes shape again, you see a turn of phrase, you repeat
it, you’re off again, a bit like the ebb and flow of density … That’s what I
experience in improv!’
If we articulated those improvisation virtues in a way that was atten-
tive to Souriau’s rigorous idea of the work-to-be-done, what would it add?
Well, as the jazz musician paradoxically invites us to do, it would add the
possibility of detaching ourselves more clearly from the perspective of the
‘doer’, of the one who improvises, and even of the listener who lets himself
be captivated, and to insist instead on the perspective of the consistency
of the work thus produced, via breath: ‘Improv isn’t playing, it’s playing
58 A. Hennion
at playing. How can I put it? It’s you staging the fact that you’re playing
or not, more or less, sorting that out at the same time as you play … It’s
more about following what happens than provoking it’. It is not a statue
that we can put aside and pick up again later—that’s true. But this is sec-
ondary compared to the central idea of improvisation: letting yourself be
carried away, of course, tipping over into moments of excess made possible
by momentum from within frameworks, threads, training: yes—but toward
what and, especially, responding to which call (Hennion 2012)? The ques-
tion of improvisation never seems to be more than half-asked by its pro-
ducers (let’s say co-producers and include its spectators and equipment).
Asking the question also from the perspective of the work gives it a totally
different depth: ‘It’s like actors. In one expression they carry everything
with them, all of the theatre, their whole story, their whole body, and that’s
what gives them pleasure and that’s why it gives us pleasure. We have a
“text” too, even if it’s not written down, we follow an object that’s outside
our bodies, our material is all of music’.
Has this improv—not improvisation in general but this improvisation right here—
brought us more than a work endlessly reworked, namely a presence of music
that no interpreted work could have attained? If not, it has only benefited from the
effusion of live music and has dissimulated its state of incomplete sketch instead
of confronting it. This question is asked anew every time. But does Souriau say
anything different? We are less called upon to coproduce a work that needs to be
finished than to help a work that is creating itself to complete its achievement.
It is a strange process—but at the same time, the feeling is familiar to anyone
who is battling with pen, chisel or brush to produce even the most modest work.
Souriau states it rigorously: even though the work self-creates (which is what
makes it a work and can even potentially promote its existence to one of being, if
it attains sufficient consistency18), it still needs not only its creator but all of us to
do so. He refers to ‘that responsibility … which is incumbent on us with regard
to everything unfinished in the world’: whether it is ‘the smallest cloud, flower or
bird, a rock, a mountain, or a wave of the sea’, everything works in this way of an
18‘The power to create oneself and the act of doing so exist even in beings who … seem to
have been created by others, such as works of art’ (Souriau 1955, pp. 279–280).
appeal for more existence, which makes the existence of all of us depend on the
solicitude of each of us (ibid., pp. 215–216).
While Souriau calls for modesty in our discipline, he also elaborates an ambi-
tion that is commensurate with the challenges our discipline faces: like any other
work, the sociology of art remains ‘to-be-done’.
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l’École des Mines.
Exploring Gender in Music … to Better
Grasp Musical Work
Marie Buscatto
In the last forty years, international scholars have explored the ways female
musicians, as compared to their male colleagues, have found it more difficult
to get access, to remain and to be recognized as legitimate professionals in var-
ious musical worlds—e.g. classical, jazz, pop, rock, electronic or rap (Buscatto
2010a). In past centuries, if well-educated women were able to play music as
accomplished amateurs or, in specific circumstances, some women could operate
as professional singers, composers or instrumentalists—as family members or in
some secluded places—men have been favoured overall in becoming professional
and independent musicians, in ‘classical’ music as well as in ‘popular’ music.
Moreover, in present times, while all legal barriers have disappeared and formal
equality between the sexes has become a priority, it is always more difficult for
women than for men to succeed as musicians in contemporary western societies
in ‘masculine’ music worlds—rock, jazz, rap or electronic—as well as in ‘mixed’
ones—orchestral music, R&B or pop. Current research in this field has identified
several processes which explain such differences—gendered norms, conventions,
stereotypes, networks, family roles or socialisations—and have explored ways
women progressively overcome such barriers—schools, producers, practises or
family (Buscatto 2010a).
My objective here will be to discuss how our knowledge of such social pro-
cesses—which produce and legitimate gendered differences as well as ques-
tion and sometimes help overcome them—can enlighten our knowledge about
music as work. Based on my current research on gender in music and arts
M. Buscatto (*) 
University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, Paris, Frankreich
E-Mail: marie.buscatto@orange.fr

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22279-6_5
62 M. Buscatto
(Buscatto 2007a, b, 2010a, b, 2014a; Buscatto and Leontsini 2011a, b; Bus-

catto and Monjaret 2016) as well as on artistic work (Becker and Buscatto
2007; Buscatto 2008, 2012), I intend to show that our knowledge of the ways
in which women tend to be excluded from musical worlds (and of ways they
are more and more overcoming such informal barriers) enables us to better
grasp diverse modes in which musical work is socially produced and trans-
formed over time.
Let us first discuss the two main concepts to be used throughout this piece.
First of all, gender is to be considered as a relational concept which helps
describe how the division between the sexes is socially produced. It helps not
only in describing how men and women are produced as biologically distinct and
irreducibly different, but also are associated with so-called ‘feminine’—passivity,
care, elegance, softness, emotional—and ‘masculine’—virility, authority, leader-
ship, activity, technicality—qualities, which are socially hierarchized in favour of
men (and masculinity):
On peut alors s’accorder à définir le genre comme un concept visant à rendre

compte des processus sociaux de production, de légitimation, de transgression et de
transformation de différences sexuées hiérarchisées entre femmes et hommes, entre
féminin et masculin selon des principes visant à les ‘naturaliser’ et à stigmatiser tout
comportement contraire (Buscatto 2014b, p. 13).
Secondly, when we speak about musical work, we are interested in describing

how music can be created and/or performed over time. Following Howard S.
Becker’s seminal concept of the ‘art world’ (1982), musical work is to be con-
sidered as a collective activity, which happens over time in front of an audience
as well as behind the scenes. And as in Becker’s conception of the art world,
studying musical work then implies taking into account all the actors, scenes and
moments which belong to this activity. All the elements intervening in musical
work are included, from training to performing through rehearsing or looking for
an audience. The ways that works of art are commented on by critics, art histori-
ans or audiences are included in this extensive definition of art worlds and thus of
the description of musical work as a whole.1
1This paper is informed by a special issue on art as work (Buscatto 2008) and a specific
piece on artistic work (2012), a special issue on ethnographies of artistic work (co-edited
with H.S. Becker and Buscatto in 2007), my empirical work on Women in Jazz (2007a,
2010b), special issues co-edited on gender and arts (2011a, b, 2016) as well as individual
papers (2007b, 2010a, 2014a).
Exploring Gender in Music … 63
My key answer—to be developed throughout this paper—is that studying

musical work from a gendered perspective helps to better focus on the social
processes which frame artistic work and success and gives some epistemological
insights about how to study artistic work more efficiently, making musical work a
much broader phenomenon than the act of composing or performing music over
time.
This is not a new thing as such, since those processes, as will be discussed
throughout this paper, were already stated by Becker as well as Bourdieu, even if
in different terms and through different concepts (‘art worlds’ versus ‘champs de
l’art’, ‘artistic fields’). But studying musical work from a gendered perspective
does specifically force us to 1) systematically unveil and describe those invisible
social processes which intervene in musical work and might appear quite second-
ary at first sight and 2) better understand their respective role in affecting artistic
work as well as artistic recognition.
In other words, studying men’s and women’s differences gives us a perfect
methodical comparative and systematic access to unveiling not only the processes
which participate in building musical work, but their impact and importance on
the possibility to create, to be recognized for this creation, to be considered as an
artist and to remain an artist over time.
Overview of Five Key Learnings to be Discussed

• Key learning 1: Social stereotypes shape musical reception and recognition.
• Key learning 2: Social networks play a key role in making musical work possible.
• Key learning 3: Musical work requires the full commitment of the artist’s family.
• Key learning 4: Public policies and legal rules have a strong impact on musical
work.
• Key learning 5: Musical work must be explored at its margins.
1 Social Stereotypes Shape Musical Reception

and Recognition
Studying musical work from a gendered perspective helps to better describe and
explain how social stereotypes affect the ways we value art works and artists.
Works of art are not perceived and valued as such, based on their supposed intrin-
sic artistic qualities, but many stereotypes affect the ways we perceive and value
them and/or their creators over time.
Defining the ways gendered stereotypes (un)consciously affect our ears and
eyes—even those of music experts such as critics, art historians or musicians—
makes us define musical work in much broader ways. Studying musical work
64 M. Buscatto
is not only about analysing scores, performances or discs and the ways they are
collectively built-up over time, but also about analysing how our perceptions
strongly affect what we perceive and how we value those works of art and their
creators—as music or not, as good music or not, as original music or not, as
music worth being remembered or not, etc.
Let us discuss here two main ways gendered stereotypes influence our ears
without us (most of the time) being aware of it.
Gendered Stereotypes and the Musical Canon

First of all, following Marcia Citron’s seminal work on gender and the musical
canon (1993), some musicologists and sociologists of music have shown how,
in the 19th century, a musical canon has been set up which has strongly deval-
ued works of art labelled as ‘feminine’, and often, but not always, composed by
women.
For instance, Florence Launay, in her work on French female 19th century
composers, has shown how music composed by women has been devalued and
how those numerous female composers have been forgotten in current music his-
tory, even when they had been famous in their times (e.g. Loïsa Puget, Louise
Farrenc or Augusta Holmès), due to two major stereotypes.
On the one hand, those women heavily composed romances, light pieces and
melodies using female voice and piano as the main instruments, in relation to
their private training and social education, which made such compositions more
appropriate for well-educated and bourgeois women. But those works have been
considered as minor and second-rate, their ‘feminine’ qualities—lightness, sim-
plicity or smallness—being associated with light and second-rate music. Those
pieces have been lost and/or forgotten over time by historians, even those which
had been successful in the 19th century.
On the other hand, even when some women, such as Louise Farrenc, started
composing ‘masculine’ pieces at the end of this century their works have been
forgotten. The reception could be positive, their success being then considered as
exceptional (for a woman) and an illustration of a ‘masculine talent’. But their
works of art have been erased from dictionaries which could have helped to cre-
ate a more realistic vision of the place of women in classical music at those times.
So as demonstrated by Launay, in line with Marcia Citron’s work on gender
and the musical canon, gendered stereotypes did affect the reception and val-
uation of those female composers’ works of art in two important ways: female
works of art tended not to be valued and easily forgotten since they were labelled
as ‘feminine’ due to their musical qualities associated with lightness, smallness,
simplicity or elegance; female creators and their works of art also tended to be
forgotten even when they were not associated with denigrated feminine qualities
and considered as expressing a ‘masculine’ talent just because they were treated
as female works of art. One may complete this reasoning with Tia De Nora’s
work about the ways Beethoven’s music has progressively participated in creating
this 19th century gendered segregation between feminine and masculine works
of art associated with feminine and masculine qualities, Beethoven’s music being
inappropriate for women to perform while expressing ‘virile power’ as opposed to
Chopin’s or Schubert’s music defined as ‘feminine’ (De Nora 2002).
Gendered Stereotypes and Artistic Recognition

So, as already shown in Launay’s case or De Nora’s demonstration, gendered ste-
reotypes may affect not only the ways female works of art are perceived due to
their association with second-rate repertoires, but they may also influence ways
we think of the creators and of their music, whatever the repertoire is. In other
words, denigrated qualities are attributed to artists and their works of art due only
to the fact that they are created by women and they are, most of the time uncon-
sciously, associated with second-rate musical qualities.
This, too, is of course damaging to women’s long-term commercial, musical
and professional ability to create and perform music and to succeed over time.
Whether the female stereotypes associated with women musicians pertain to sex-
uality, seductiveness, motherhood, creative independence or virtuosity, they often
go along with a disparaging attitude when it comes to assessing women’s profes-
sional music abilities.
Let us consider this time the case of British and American pop music stars
studied by Faupel and Schmutz (2011). Using critical reviews published in Roll-
ing Stone, the authors provide a close, extremely revelatory two-part reading
of the female stereotypes that women musicians have to deal with. Not only do
comparable stereotypes hardly affect these women’s male colleagues, but when
they do, they do not have a negative effect. Faupel and Schmutz’s demonstra-
tion is particularly enlightening in that it bears on major pop rock figures such
as Madonna, Lauryn Hill, PJ Harvey, Janet Jackson, Sinead O’Connor and Janis
Joplin—women we might have thought were immune to such difficulties. Com-
paring reviews of these female musicians’ musical performances before and after
they obtained commercial success, Faupel and Schmutz show not just the nega-
tive power of female stereotypes but also their relative persistence, even when the
women musicians in question are assured of or have already achieved fame.
As close attention to the reviews of these female musicians published in
Rolling Stone makes clear, while pejorative ‘female’ stereotypes about feminin-
ity and sexuality become more subtle (rather than disappear) once artists have
66 M. Buscatto
become famous, the themes of emotional authenticity and dependence on men in

the music field loom larger after fame has been won. Not only are comparable
stereotypes not used when male musicians are reviewed, but gender stereotypes
only negatively affect women musicians’ musical reputation, and therefore their
chances of attaining enduring renown in the field of popular music. The authors
convincingly conclude that, above and beyond musical performances and pro-
duced works, women have to deal with specific obstacles when trying to obtain
full recognition in the world of popular music. Defined as sex objects, assumed
to owe their success to men, judged to have limited professional ability, these
women artists have great difficulty acquiring a recognized, lasting place in the
world of pop-rock.
Another gender stereotype that may come into play is that the artist career is
incompatible with motherhood. Women who are pregnant, already mothers or
potential mothers due to their age (around 30) are assumed to be unable to com-
mit themselves lastingly, seriously, reliably to highly demanding artistic activi-
ties. Analysing the career of the first Swiss woman conductor, Hedy Salquin, in
the 1960s, Philomène Graber (2004) shows how Salquin, regularly photographed
in her domestic space, was perceived by potential employers as an artist who
was not really available or reliable over the long term. Although she very much
wished to practice the profession for which she had trained at the highest level,
and although she immediately said she was available whenever the question was
put to her, Salquin was not hired because of these ‘domestic’ photos and thus
could not practice the activity of an orchestra conductor.
This analysis has been confirmed in different case studies focusing on the dif-
ferent gender stereotypes affecting classical music instrument playing (Green 1997),
female singing and instrument playing in French jazz (Buscatto 2007a, b), French
pop and rock musicians (Rudent 2016), Gabonese rap musicians (Aterianus-Owanga
2016) or Greek traditional musicians (Hatzipetrou-Andronikou 2011).
What we learn here from a gendered perspective as sociologists of music is
that we should be very much aware of how stereotypes linked to gender, eth-
nic, social class, age or colour of the skin strongly affect what we hear, what
we praise, what we remember, what we see—and thus what might be created as
works of art in the end. As shown by those authors, it not only affects how we per-
ceive what is created, but also the chances some works of art may be created at all,
since it influences the ways musicians are paid or not, feel relevant or not, get peo-
ple to play with them or not over time, are forgotten or not over time—and what
we think is worth being played. Music is not only what we hear or read, but also
what we perceive, in relation to all the visual signs we give meaning to, in ways
much disconnected from the real sounds. And thus musical work is enabled, or
not, depending on those meanings attached to many phenomena external to musi-

cal creation or performance.
2 Social Networks Play a Key Role in Making

Musical Work Possible
Studying musical work through a gendered perspective also helps to better

describe and explain how social networks strongly intervene in helping musicians
to get work, to maintain themselves as musicians, to develop specific forms of
music and to become recognized (or not) as artists over time—even after their
death.
Various research studies have demonstrated the importance of social networks
for getting into fluid, open art worlds, staying in them and building a reputation
for oneself in them (Becker 1982; Faulkner 1985 [1971]). Those studies also
bring to light how co-optation, which enables some musicians to play and to com-
pose, is located at the intersection of technical skill criteria and judgments bear-
ing on an individual’s ‘personal’ qualities. Co-optation is also facilitated by the
intervention of close intermediaries: critics and external sources of support.
The proven fact is that music worlds are ‘men’s worlds’ and they prove rela-
tively unwelcoming to women. Women are more likely than their male colleagues
to find themselves ‘naturally’ marginalized and even excluded from networks
of the sort that ensure co-optation and enable them to work and create and per-
form music. At the different stages of career-building in rock music (Ortiz 2004),
‘popular’ music of various kinds (Whiteley 1997), electronic music (Reitsamer
2011), rap (Aterianus-Owenga 2016) or jazz (Buscatto 2007a), artistic social net-
works tend to favour men. In those social worlds, where women are a minority
(and a minority that shrinks as we move up the reputation hierarchy), ‘male’
co-optation modes favour men even when there is no apparent desire to exclude
women. Researchers have not been able to offer a simple, univocal explanation
for this, namely because it appears so ‘natural’ to members of the implicated art
worlds—including women—and the vast majority of observers.
Two complementary explanations do emerge, however, from the body of
afore-cited research studies, though they are difficult to distinguish from each
other in musician interactions. The first reason often put forward has to do with
women’s seductive power over their male colleagues. This power is itself inter-
preted by means of pejorative social stereotypes: it is more difficult to imagine
women (than men) as ‘full-fledged’ colleagues. In fact, to steer clear of ‘bad
experiences’ such as getting a ‘bad’ sexual reputation, suddenly being cut out of a
68 M. Buscatto
project, having to deal with relational ambiguities in what is supposed to be coop-

erative work, women musicians learn early on to ‘turn off’ their seductive power.
They also try to behave irreproachably in professional terms to avoid being deni-
grated for their musical technique—a constant threat. But ‘turning off the seduc-
tion’ and behaving irreproachably seem to imply a certain physical and human
aloofness that works against the development of shared artistic understanding and
mutual trust. Male artists may actually elicit this distancing move on women’s
parts in order to avoid difficulties for themselves, e.g., jealousy from their current
female life partner, which they have to be careful not to provoke. Furthermore,
these studies suggest that women musicians whose dress and behaviour are rela-
tively ‘masculine’ and who strongly assert their views ‘irritate’, bore or otherwise
bother male colleagues and intermediaries suffused with the opposite feminine
ideal.
Complementarily, the fact that women are not as fully integrated into male
social networks as men are is explained by the different types of socialization
that males and females undergo from childhood on (Buscatto 2014b). Differences
in the kinds of behaviour that is expected from and valued and appreciated in
women, on the one hand, and men on the other, and differences between men’s
and women’s interests are understood to play an important role in colleague
co-optation. Though it may be pleasant to speak occasionally with a female col-
league, it is considered preferable to spend significant time with colleagues on the
same ‘wavelength’—usually male ones. This explanation is particularly effective
for music worlds where intense personal relationships and sharing around music
are uppermost. The fact that women may become fed up with working according
to male social modes and have difficulty living their musical life serenely may
be explained in similar terms. Whereas male modes for assembling players and
working together favour self-assertion, female modes are more likely to involve
listening to each other and exchange. Since artists and their intermediaries favour
simple relationships that are easy to construct, they ‘naturally’ tend to construct a
discriminatory, closed group world.
In conclusion, when one is studying musical work from a gendered perspec-
tive, one reveals all those things which intervene in being considered a good
colleague who is worth being recruited, financed, helped out, discussed with, cri-
tiqued in newspapers, etc., which have nothing to do with music as such, but have
a lot to do with being able to produce music in comfortable and easy ways. Musi-
cians, whether they play in orchestras (or create music for them), in jazz clubs, on
the electronic scene or in rock bands, do spend a lot of time living together and
sharing collective settings—travels, meals, rehearsals, concerts—where feeling
comfortable with others and being able to trust them easily become key issues
while musical abilities are only one part of the story. This should be considered
when working on any type of musical work: to understand who is part of it, why
and how—and that criteria which intervene in choosing one’s colleagues, projects
to finance or program or pieces to critique have, more often than not, little to do
with musical abilities, tastes or sensitivities as such. Once again, musical work is
to be studied in relation to all the social conditions which make it possible over
time.
3 Musical Work Requires the Full Commitment

of the Artist’s Family
A gendered perspective does also help reveal the importance of the full commit-
ment of the musician’s family. Not only does the musician devote his or her full
time and energy to creating or performing in a highly competitive, saturated and
precarious environment, but his or her family is key in understanding how this
may happen at different stages of his or her career. If the role of parents and rela-
tives has been well documented in classical music (Wagner 2004; De Nora 1995),
less is known of the role of partners, husbands, wives or companions, while a
gendered analysis reveals how key it is in enabling, or hindering, musical work in
several ways.
This is first demonstrated in those cases when female musicians stop doing
musical work, or stop doing it in a creative and stimulating environment, in order
to better focus on the raising of their kids once they are born. This has been found
for instance as being the case for classical orchestral musicians, where women
more often than men tend to choose teaching or lower-rank orchestral positions in
order to free time for raising their children (Ravet 2011).
But it also helps in understanding why men tend to fare better than women,
even when they do not have kids, as in jazz (Buscatto 2007a). Indeed, men, much
more often than women, find partners or wives who take part in managing their
private as well as their professional lives. Those partners or wives adapt them-
selves to their partners’ schedules, even more so when they have kids and they
mainly take care of them throughout the year. But women also often help to
organize their partners’ professional lives and artistic success, either directly, as
when the woman herself works professionally in music, or indirectly by provid-
ing a great deal of advice—and in some cases financial support—over time. And
this heavy involvement in their male spouse’s or partner’s artistic path explains
their stronger ability to create and perform music over time, with better financial
support, more time to devote to creation and more confidence in themselves.
70 M. Buscatto
Most women artists do not have male partners willing to play this same exten-
sive role for them, meaning that these women artists have to ensure not only that
their own family and professional lives fit together but also that their professional
life dovetails with their male partner’s. The women musicians studied seem sim-
ply not to have met men willing to play the role of accompanying their careers
over time, nor do they seem to expect their men to make themselves available in
this way. Women who have ‘chosen’ not to have kids will not be deterred from
creating due to their domestic roles, but they more often than men do not benefit
from their partner’s heavy involvement in their artistic career.
But then one should not forget that women may also benefit from living in
a stable relationship with a musician (or a partner working in music), which
is quite a common situation in French jazz (Buscatto 2007a), in Swiss ‘popular
music’ (Perrenoud and Chapuis 2016) or in French classical music (Coulangeon
and Ravet 2003). Not only will this situation give them better access to musical
networks, as demonstrated in those studies, but the male companion also happens
to be a constructive musical partner who may then play an active role in helping
the female musician create her own music in better material and subjective con-
ditions. But this makes women highly dependent on such partners and a separa-
tion, quite common in those unstable worlds, is most often paid at a high price by
women (loss of musical partners, musical isolation) as shown in all those cases.
Therefore, thanks to a gendered perspective, a researcher becomes aware of
the significant role partners may play in explaining a musician’s ability to cre-
ate and to perform, the ways she or he will transform his or her creative works
of art or the time which may be devoted to musical work (or not) even in hard
commercial times. One has to take this role into account when studying musical
work, including partners’ roles through time, as well as parents’ or even other rel-
atives (when for instance they are part of the musical world). They help in many
different ways: they connect the musician with efficient musical partners (musi-
cians, critics, producers, etc.), create efficient commercial leaflets or connections,
finance the musician’s activities (through unemployment periods or by financing
specific projects), contribute to the valuation of creative inputs (sometimes sug-
gesting new ideas or evolutions), support the musician’s self-esteem (even more
so in dire times), and deal with many material obstacles to musical work includ-
ing taking care of one’s kids or elder parents.
4 Public Policies and Legal Rules Have a Strong

Impact on Musical Work
Studying musical work from a gendered perspective also helps to unveil the
strong impact public policies and legal rules may have on musical work, in that it
shows how outside intervention on musical structures and institutions may influ-
ence who gets to create or perform music and how. This may be even more nec-
essary since music (and art in general) is open to anyone who is interested—with
the notable exception of classical music, which is part of the school curriculum,
and strictly regulated music contests. Here are some of the findings of gendered
studies on musical work, which call for a better analysis of what public policies
and legal rules may do to musical work.
First of all, women’s access to educational institutions has facilitated their
entry into and maintenance within professional music worlds by making it pos-
sible to remove certain social barriers. Access to education programs ensures the
acquisition of the knowledge and skills necessary to take the entrance examina-
tions and other tests that enable a candidate to advance in the given world. This
is one of the reasons mentioned by Coulangeon and Ravet to explain the fact that
in France, women are present to a greater degree in classical music worlds, which
are organized around educational institutions, than in popular music worlds,
which are founded above all on the principle of co-optation by friends and peer
regulation. Forty-five percent of classical music performers are women, while the
figure in ‘popular’ music is under 20% (Coulangeon and Ravet 2003).
Secondly, in direct relation to the understanding that musical worlds operate
on the basis of active social networks, education experiences work to construct
lasting social ties. This applies to female rock musicians, as they are likely to meet
their playing partners in educational institutions (Ortiz 2004), as well as to women
jazz instrumentalists, who are more likely than their male counterparts to have
‘gone through’ music conservatories and jazz schools. It is in these contexts that
women musicians construct their first practical collective experiences and meet
people in connection with music in a way that proves decisive (Buscatto 2007b).
Thirdly, institutional musical training may give young women the skills nec-
essary to ‘dare’ to venture into this art world, enabling them to feel that they
are skilful enough to give it a try and imbuing them with confidence about their
chances of success. This analysis applies to women’s recent entry into traditional
Greek music, a phenomenon due to their training in Greek high schools, which is
now equal to that of young men (Hatzipetrou-Andronikou 2011).
72 M. Buscatto
Other types of institutional guidance occasionally influence women’s entry

into music worlds, either by facilitating funding for the activities involved—
music festivals, music-related publications, performance production—or develop-
ing cultural spaces that are more open to women. Public policy measures aimed
at fostering the emergence of amateur artistic practice have helped some young
women, and some later manage to go professional, as Laureen Ortiz observes of
women rock musicians, who are much more likely than young men to practice,
rehearse and play in studios or schools that are at least partially publicly funded,
whereas young men play with ‘pals’ (Ortiz 2004).
Lastly, a simple measure such as using screens for auditions when hiring clas-
sical orchestral musicians has a favourable effect on women’s entry into classical
music worlds simply because the jury listens ‘blindly’, ignorant of the instru-
mentalist’s sex. Two American economists have proved that North American
women orchestral musicians owe more than 30% of their increased presence in
major North American orchestras to the systematic use of screens during hiring
auditions, as the screen makes them invisible during those auditions (Goldin and
Rouse 2000).
All those studies show how powerful public policies which finance musical
work, give unprivileged people access to music or help them to be recruited over
time despite negative stereotypes may influence which people get to produce or
perform music, and thus how and where. It is not only about women’s access to
musical work, but also about the opening up of musical work to people who were
not meant to be there, and even more so to people who may create another musi-
cal creative dynamic. Opening barriers may influence the way music is produced,
including working conditions, social stereotypes, patterns of interaction and
works of art produced. A gendered perspective opens the researcher’s mind to the
strong influence public policies and legal rules may have in explaining how musi-
cal work gets done over time—and by whom and in which conditions.
5 Musical Work Must Be Explored at Its Margins
Here is what a gendered perspective might, last but not least, bring to the study
of musical work: underprivileged musicians find ways to produce music and do it
in specific ways which may affect which works of art get to be produced or per-
formed. Such an approach shows the researcher the ways that marginalized peo-
ple can become part of musical work and remain in music in long run, despite all
obstacles which make it easier for some favoured musicians—which is defined
for each musical world, since musicians who are central in rap music do not share
the same social class or colour of skin, for instance, with those who are central in
electronic, classical, R&B, pop or jazz music.
Through a gendered perspective resources are indeed revealed which enable
marginal musicians to get access to musical work, resources which are worth
being mentioned here. They may first ‘reverse the stigma’ (Goffman 1963): some
female musicians have based part of their reputation and access to concerts and
music production on their ‘seductiveness’—‘sexy’ CD covers, attractive perfor-
mances in concerts—in order to get access to musical work in jazz (Buscatto
2007a), in traditional Greek music (Hatzipetrou-Andronikou 2011), in rap in
Gabon (Aterianus-Owanga 2016) or in classical music (Escal and Rousseau-
Dujardin 1999). While seduction tends to be pejoratively associated with a lack of
professionalism, those female musicians reverse the stigma to elicit the attention
of music critics, programmers and producers, since they know that women musi-
cians may ‘seduce’ audiences quite easily and be successful as such. Some female
musicians may also decide to promote a ‘feminine’ music based on intrinsic ‘fem-
inine’ or feminist qualities—including songs dedicated to rape or violence, music
performed in ‘feminine’ ways. This may attract some militant audiences or pro-
ducers who are interested in the promotion of ‘feminine’ art. When reversing the
stigma, female musicians improve their abilities to get access to musical work,
but they also generate other ways to create and perform music.
Another strategy might be to ‘masculinize’ one’s appearance, behaviour or
musical skills in order to neutralize as far as possible the difficulties linked to
the fact that they are viewed and experienced as women. This strategy has been
observed by Perrenoud and Chapuis on the Swiss popular music scene (2016), by
Buscatto on the French Jazz scene (2007a) or by Aterianus-Owango (2016) on the
Gabonese rap scene. Those female musicians learn early on that being perceived
as a woman will get in the way of being co-opted, valued positively and consid-
ered as a real colleague, and they may learn to perform in masculine ways as far
as possible.
Those women may also try to create collective feminine groups or female-only
working conditions in order to either defend a militant feminist position (quite
rare in music, but observed in the US by Schilt (2004) or on the European elec-
tronic music scene by Reitsamer (2011)) or, more often, attract producers who
tend to think of female groups as attractive to the audience and like to hire them
for such a reason, as observed in rock (Tripier 1998), in jazz (Buscatto 2007a) or
on the popular music Swiss scene (Perrenoud and Chapuis 2016).
As already mentioned, public policies and legal rules also help women get
access to musical work, and this is happening not only in classical music, but also
in jazz or rock music.
74 M. Buscatto
Moreover, women who get access to musical work tend to be over-socialized,

i.e. they belong to families which are close to music or the arts or belong to the
middle-upper classes; they have attended high-level music schools or they are
married to musicians or musical intermediary. In all those cases, thanks to this
over-socialization, those female musicians learn professional skills, both techni-
cal and relational, more easily. They share male networks thanks to their fathers,
companions or school friends. They feel more confident in their musical abilities.
In individualistic and complex societies, where all the legal rules prevent-
ing women from being trained and getting access to musical work have disap-
peared, women can find ways to learn musical skills, get hired and recruited and
gain recognition as legitimate musicians despite all the social processes that get
in their way. They create in all musical worlds—and sometimes in quite central
ways—becoming well recognized as artists and/or making a lot of money as pop
stars or famous concert pianists. Therefore, a gendered perspective applied to
musical work shows us that musical work is constructed through time by peo-
ple who may operate to make it despite all obstacles and helps us better under-
stand how complex and varied musical work has become. Even if musical work
is easier to access for those who belong to the mainstream musical spheres of
their specific art worlds thanks to their links to the main networks and musical
groups, counter-strategies can always happen at the margins or at the lower ranks
of those same art worlds, giving space to some people who ‘do not belong’. If
the researcher is to understand musical work, he or she has to expand his or her
knowledge of those margins where other ways of creating or performing art may
be happening, and sometimes even other works of art are shaped which do not
answer to the same rules and criteria as in the upper-level spheres. She will then
have a much more complex image of what musical work is, what is globally pro-
duced, including a hierarchical perspective on what gets done, how, where and by
whom.
6 Conclusions
• Think of musical work as being heavily influenced in its content as well as in

its possibilities and its recognition over time by money, time, inside and out-
side help or valuation.
• Think of musical work as a ‘private’ story in order to better see how personal
connections (notably family, friends or co-optation) affects who works, how
and according to which criteria.
• Think of musical work as hierarchized work, far from the myths of talent or
genius revealed through interaction as currently propagated by famous soci-
ologists such as Menger, in order to better analyse who gets to work and be
recognized as a musician and what gets produced.
• Think of musical work as a long-term reality, since what gets done (or not),
recognized (or not) and valued (or not), even after musicians’ death, is the
result of long-term processes (as shown by De Nora, Becker or Faulkner).
Look for failures, abandonments or fatigue.
• Think of musical work as being much more than musical work, since what gets
heard as such is not what is heard, but what is afforded to music in relation
to external signs such as the musician’s gender, age, social origin or physical
appearance (see De Nora (1995) on Beethoven).
7 Potential Limits (to Be Developed)
But of course a gendered perspective has its own limits, since it may not include
with as much sagacity all aspects of musical work:
• Over-interpret the role of gender as opposed to other social relations linked to

age, ‘race’, social origin, ‘ethnic’ origin, school background, etc. An intersec-
tional approach is then called for.
• A gendered perspective may be less interested in understanding how micro-
activities get organized within musical work or how things get musically
created or performed on stage or behind the scenes, and may tend to over-
interpret the extra-musical realities.
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Musical Cosmopolitanism, Bodies
and Aesthetic Cultures
Motti Regev
Consider three short video clips, picked from YouTube quite arbitrarily1: an
Argentinean commercial, a Thai news-story signature tune and a Japanese detec-
tive series opening tune. There are hundreds, if not thousands, like them. Each of
these clips makes use, for a slightly different purpose, of a musical illustration
whose sonic vocabulary is taken from the musical idioms of pop-rock music. The
makers of these filmic texts take it for granted that local spectators are equipped
with the proper musical knowledge to decipher the mood they are aiming to cre-
ate with these sounds: a staccato electric guitar for casualness, a chirpy synthe-
sizer line for a hint of futurism, a fuzzy electric guitar for drama. This article
revolves around these routine, mundane enactments of musical knowledge stored
in the bodies of individuals around the world, knowledge that pertains to electric,
electronic, manipulated and amplified sonorities.
I want to talk about the cosmopolitan aesthetic culture of pop-rock music and
focus in particular on the impact this musical culture has had on the corporal
knowledge of music. I want to propose that pop-rock music stands as a major
example of how cultural globalization has ushered in the emergence and consoli-
dation of cultural bodies best described as cosmopolitan bodies. The article points
1https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aK2HvBUxsCU; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
I77mwNRHHNc; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAXmTV71XXM. All accessed in

November 2015.
M. Regev (*) 
Open University of Isreal, Raanana, Israel
E-Mail: mottire@openu.ac.il

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22279-6_6
80 M. Regev
to pop-rock as a cultural realm, an aesthetic culture, that weaves into one complex
whole the micro level of bodily knowledge, the physical ‘thingness’ of music and
the macro topic of cosmopolitanism.
The paper is informed by several lines of thought that in a way summarize
some current thoughts on music sociology and that I hope somehow converge
into one coherent statement. I will first outline briefly these lines and then pro-
ceed to talk about pop-rock and musical cosmopolitanism.
Preliminaries
Firstly, I want to address the relationship between music sociology and soci-
ological knowledge in general. These relations are generally characterized by a
one-way mode of influence, inspiration and framing. That is, music sociology is
framed, inspired and influenced by general sociological knowledge, by concepts
and theories formulated and developed in various fields and areas of sociology.
To my best knowledge, the opposite direction of inspiration and influence hardly
exists. The application and implementation of knowledge generated in the context
of music sociology for the purpose of general theorizing and the conceptualiza-
tion of sociological knowledge hardly exists. One notable exception is the notion
of omnivorous cultural consumption that began its career as a major sociological
concept in survey work done by Peterson (Peterson and Kern 1996) on musical
taste. There might be some additional examples I am not aware of, but I am quite
convinced that when compared to other fields of sociology, such as sociology of
the family, of inequality, of deviance, of religion or maybe even sociology of art
in general, music sociology remains quite marginal to the discipline at large. I
can only hope that I am expressing the thoughts of other music sociologists, but
I genuinely believe that sociology at large can benefit from the insights and find-
ings of music sociology. One such contribution, small and modest as it might be,
stems from the exemplary role of music, its agency, in bringing about cultural
changes in the context of cultural globalization.
The second line of thought that informs this paper is then the so-called ‘cos-
mopolitan turn’ in sociology—a term coined by Ulrich Beck (see Beck and
Sznaider 2006) that urges sociological research to leave behind the 20th century
legacy of methodological nationalism, whereby the idea of a society was more or
less identical to national society, and to embrace instead the notion of world soci-
ety as the default premise of sociological research and theory. Judging from the
wealth of sociological literature on cosmopolitanism that emerged in recent years
(Delanty 2012), it seems that, in some quarters of sociological research, Beck’s
call has been followed and a cosmopolitan turn in sociology is indeed taking
Musical Cosmopolitanism, Bodies … 81
place. I should stress that in this recent sociological discourse, at least as I under-
stand it, cosmopolitanism is not a normative ideal, nor a term used in some sort of
celebratory manner for describing contemporary world society, but rather a term
that depicts an existing empirical condition that characterizes many sectors within
national societies in late modernity—or indeed national societies at large. Cos-
mopolitanism, and especially cultural cosmopolitanism, is an empirical reality of
late modernity, to be analysed, studied and explained. Indeed, sociological work
on cosmopolitanism most often addresses issues in the sphere of political and
economic sociology, where theory sometimes tends to slide toward normative or
prescriptive forms of writing. Moreover, sociological studies of cosmopolitanism
tend to concentrate on the institutional and organizational levels. The micro levels
of everyday interaction and bodily conduct hardly receive any attention. Cultural
sociology and the sociology of the arts in particular, seem to lag behind in this
regard, although culture and the arts evidently have a lot to offer to the sociolog-
ical study of cosmopolitanism at all levels. Music is unquestionably a major field
of art that exemplifies the cultural reality of cosmopolitanism at the institutional
as well as the micro levels of cultural performance in everyday life. In the latter
case, music sociology is in a perfect position to generate knowledge about the
mechanisms of cultural cosmopolitanism as mundane and routine cultural perfor-
mance. We may talk, in this regard, about musical cosmopolitanism.
This brings me to another point, namely music sociology itself as a field of
knowledge. Here I want to take a lead from the work of Tia DeNora (2003) and
Antoine Hennion (2011). One thing implied by the lines of work suggested and
exemplified by each one of them is that music sociology should engage more
directly, in one way or another, with the music itself—with the sounds, the sonic
texts themselves as they exist in the cultural performance of countless situations
in everyday life. In addition, however, and echoing work done by Georgina Born
(2010), next to the focus on the micro-social level of music mediation, music
sociology should retain notions of macro-social forms of collective identity medi-
ated by—or in fact culturally performed and enacted through—music.
So finally, to conclude this first part, I want to devote some words to socio-
logical approaches to musical substance, sonorities, the musical text itself.
Music sociology, and especially the sociology of popular music, has consist-
ently avoided involvement with music itself. A silent agreement seems to exist
about the division of labour in music research. Sociologists will analyse and
study extra-musical phenomena, everything that pertains to production, distribu-
tion, consumption, technology and discourse about music, while the musical text
itself will be left to be studied and analysed by musicologists. It is mostly in some
quarters of ethnomusicology that we may observe a certain convergence between
82 M. Regev
the study of cultural or social aspects of music and the analysis of musical form
(see for example Nettl 2008; Turino 2000; Stokes 2010). The widespread neglect
of musical sound by sociologists of music is usually justified by their general lack
of formal musical knowledge, which hinders them from doing music analysis.
But music analysis, as practiced by musicologists, is tied to notation as the
prominent technique to represent music graphically. Notation, however, as repeat-
edly shown by popular music scholars, especially in the work of Philip Tagg
(2012), is a technique that comes short of representing the sonorities of pop and
rock musical styles in their multi layered complexity, not to mention their cul-
tural meanings. This, together with the inscribed elitist stance of musicology
as a discipline towards popular music, has left the study of pop and rock music
in the hands of social science. Given the division of labour just mentioned, the
sonorities of music, in the case of popular music studies, have been approached
for research only by a handful of musicologists (Brackett 2000; Moore 2001;
Middleton 1990).
I believe that music sociology should challenge this situation and attempt to
develop cultural tools for examining the music itself. There is a whole repertoire
of terms, vocabularies and jargons that ordinary listeners, music critics and other
actors use in order to describe musical sounds, relate to their sonic characteristics
and discuss their meanings. I do not see why sociologists, working within frame-
works of interpretive methods, cannot make use of such terms and jargons in
order to offer insights about the functioning of music in social and cultural real-
ity. Philip Tagg (2012) has indeed pointed the direction of such research in some
parts of his work. Also notable is the recent work by Doehring (2015) and others,
who propose new directions for socio-cultural music analysis.
Taken together, these lines of thought inform the major thrust of this piece.
I want to propose that pop-rock music can and should be studied as a prom-
inent manifestation of cultural cosmopolitanism in our era, and that one major
element of this manifestation is the impact of pop-rock sonorities, the physical
‘thing-ness’ of music, on corporal musical knowledge among modern, mostly
urban individuals in various parts of the globe. Pop-rock music is a major, if not
the major manifestation of musical cosmopolitanism in the world today. In this
regard, pop-rock music, as a sonic entity, and therefore as a physical thing in this
world, can be envisaged as a prime agent in propelling the consolidation of the
type of cultural bodies for which I do not have a better label other than cosmo-
politan bodies. This is where my work connects with so-called ‘things theory’ in
sociology, as most famously exemplified by ANT (Latour 2005; Law 2008) but
also by material anthropology.
1 Cosmopolitan Bodies
A few words about the notion of cosmopolitan bodies. Taking my keys from the
work of Elias (2000 [1939]), Mauss (1973 [1934]) and Goffman (1961) about the
body as a site of habitual cultural knowledge, I understand the current cosmopol-
itan condition as the most recent phase in the long historical process of civiliza-
tion. Such an understanding calls for a detailed sociological inquiry that examines
bodily practices, or ‘techniques of the body’ as Mauss refers to them, as routine
performances of cosmopolitanism. It is a type of analysis that aims to detect the
impact of cultural globalization on habitual enactments of corporal knowledge in
everyday life, enactments that continuously re-create a sense of taken-for-granted
reality, of being culturally at home, of membership in a given national, ethnic or
any other collective entity.
Cosmopolitan bodies are then bodies capable of recognizing, accepting and
adapting themselves to otherness, to dispositions and practices associated with
cultural materials other than those familiar to them from their native culture.
They are bodies whose articulation of local identity involves elements that have
been incorporated from alien cultures. Alien cultural elements could be those
identified as originating in specific ethnic or national entities other than one’s
own. They can also be cultural materials perceived as part of universal moder-
nity, detached from any particular ethnicity or culture, yet ‘foreign’ to most tradi-
tional cultures on earth. Cosmopolitan bodies are bodies whose very corporeality
is inscribed with cultural dispositions and sensibilities, skills and forms of kno-
whow, schemes of perception and evaluative criteria shared by many other bodies
across the world, in national and ethnic settings other than their own. Once bod-
ies of modern individuals adapt their senses and incorporate elements from other
cultures into the experiential repertoires and routine practices through which they
articulate and perform cultural locality in everyday life, a mundane experience
of their ethnic or national identity, their bodies become cosmopolitan bodies. In
cosmopolitan bodies we find, quite literally, embodiments of the growing over-
lap between different cultural settings around the world and enactments of world
culture as one entity. One realm of cultural practice and performance that exem-
plifies the propagation of cosmopolitan bodies is the enactment of musical knowl-
edge, and especially pop-rock knowledge.
84 M. Regev
2 Musical Knowledge
Musical knowledge (I have in mind especially pop-rock knowledge), in the sense

of cultural information stored and inscribed in the bodies (including thereby the
minds) of individual human beings (not necessarily music professionals of any
kind) and enacted through bodily motion, sensory and affective experience,
or simply through talk about music, consists of three basic layers. One layer of
knowledge is informative in essence, or rather, it is a database type of knowledge,
which consists mostly of names of musicians, albums, songs, genres, genealogies
of styles and periods and some additional details or items. It most often consists
also of an acquaintance with the institutionalized evaluative hierarchies of pop-
rock in general, or of a specific aesthetic culture; that is, knowledge about which
bands and musicians are the sanctified master artists, and which musical works
are the masterpieces of pop-rock and of its specific styles. This layer of knowl-
edge is discursive and cognitive by nature. One can obtain it by reading texts,
listening to lectures or talks or through conversation. Thus, at the most obvious
level, countless individuals across the world know by the early 21st century the
names of musicians such as Michael Jackson, Madonna, Elton John, the band
ABBA and probably also Enrique Iglesias. Numerous persons are most proba-
bly also aware of the conventional aesthetic hierarchy that grants higher artistic
value to the musical output of Bob Dylan or the Beatles. Sharing such informative
knowledge, in itself, without necessarily being acquainted with the sounds of the
music produced by these names, mark such individuals as participants in current
cultural cosmopolitanism.
Another layer of musical knowledge consists of acquaintance with musical
works, with their actual sounds. This type of knowledge is affective and expe-
riential, and closely connected to auditory memory. The only way to obtain this
type of musical knowledge is by listening to musical works. It usually takes more
than one listen in order to acquire a sort of cognitive and affective ownership of
such knowledge, gaining thereby a familiarity that allows one to say that he or
she knows, likes or enjoys a particular musical work. Once such knowledge is
acquired, an individual is able to identify a specific piece of music and anticipate
its continuity when the work starts playing. Such knowledge also affords hum-
ming a work. It should be stressed that in the case of pop-rock music, being an
art of recorded works, such knowledge pertains not only to melody lines or rhyth-
mic progression, but to actual sonorities as performed on the specific canonized
recording of a given work. Thus, for example, knowledge of the song ‘While my
Guitar Gently Weeps’ by the Beatles incorporates a detailed acquaintance with
the exact sonic textures and melodic progression of the guitar solo in the record-
ing of the song that appeared on the White Album of the band in 1968.
A third layer of musical knowledge is also experiential and affective, but con-
sists of a rather basic form of acquaintance and a familiarity with forms of musi-
cal sound. At its most essential level, we might say that this type of knowledge
allows making the distinction between musical sounds and noise, or between
musical and non-musical sounds. At a different level, this type of knowledge
allows making a distinction between musical sounds one identifies as alien to her
or his own sense of cultural home, and sounds perceived as integral elements of
cultural domesticity. In other words, it is a form of musical corporal knowledge
that simply allows individuals to identify, recognize and accept certain musical
idioms as elements of their routine and mundane cultural environment, where
they feel culturally at home. While not necessarily entailing recognition of spe-
cific musical works, enactments of this layer of musical knowledge are nothing
but routine, intuitive deciphering of affective meanings as these are evoked by
familiar musical sonorities. This is indeed the type of musical knowledge targeted
by most kinds of functional pieces of music such as signature tunes of television
programs, non-diegetic music in film, commercials and certain forms of back-
ground music.
In late modernity, substantial amounts of similar musical knowledge in all three
dimensions are shared by individuals across the world. Such sharing pertains to
various aesthetic cultures of music, including Western art/classical music. How-
ever, in quantitative terms, measured by sales of music and by presence in public
cultural spheres of media channels, as well as in qualitative terms relating to the
use of music for purposes of collective identity, I think that pop-rock is by far the
aesthetic musical culture that all forms of knowledge pertaining to it most clearly
represent the role of music in propelling the proliferation of late modern cosmopol-
itan bodies. In pop-rock music, we find the epitome of musical cosmopolitanism.
3 Pop-rock
This is the point where I should say a few words about what I mean by ‘pop-
rock music’. Pop-rock is not a musical style, but rather an aesthetic culture. That
is, it is a realm of production and consumption of music organized around musi-
cal sound generated by electric and electronic instruments, manipulation of sonic
textures by recording and other electronic devices, and by practices of listening
to music through amplified equipment. It is a realm of music in which creativity
is targeted towards the sonic materiality of recorded products. From the angle of
meaning and aesthetic value, pop-rock is organized around a genealogical narra-
tive, a lineage of inter-connected styles and genres whose discourse points to a
86 M. Regev
mythical beginning in the mid-1950s and an initial formative period in the 1960s.
Paraphrasing Knorr Cetina’s notion of epistemic culture (2007), the aesthetic cul-
ture of pop-rock may be envisaged as a cluster of practices, arrangements and
mechanisms bound together by affinity and historical coincidence which, in the
area of the artistic and professional expertise of late modern popular music, make
up how we experience, evaluate and sense the world of objects that convention-
ally belong to the form of musical art known as pop and rock music, and what
we know about it. The aesthetic culture of pop-rock is a culture of creating and
warranting criteria of evaluation, modes of worshipping, cognitive and emotional
dispositions pertaining to a certain world of musical objects. This world includes
songs, albums and musicians connected by the field’s discourse to a long line
of styles, genres, forms, periods, fashions, trends and fads of music known by
such names as rock’n’roll, hard rock, alternative rock, punk, progressive rock,
power pop, soul, funk, disco, electro-dance, house, techno, hip-hop, heavy metal,
extreme metal, reggae, country rock, folk rock, psychedelic rock, singer-song-
writers, pop and many others.
A major aspect of the aesthetic culture of pop-rock music is that due to its
reliance on technology and its appeal to youth cultures through an ideology that
combines rebellion, hedonism and artistic exploration, it has been globally insti-
tutionalized as a signifier of universal modernity in the field of popular music.
Consecutive generations of musicians and fans in many parts of the world have
insisted since the 1960s on indigenizing it as a project of modernizing and
updating local musical traditions, as a cultural strategy for joining and partici-
pating in what such musicians and fans believed, and still believe, are the con-
stantly evolving creative frontiers of innovation in popular music. By the end of
the 20th century, pop-rock music became an integral element of local, national
and ethnic musical cultures in many, if not most, countries in the world (Regev
2013). There are by now numerous studies that point to the global proliferation of
styles and genres associated with pop-rock and how they affected cultural life in
national societies and in countries in various parts of the world. Some recent stud-
ies include work on pop-rock in countries and regions such as China (de Kloet
2010), Spain (Del Val et al. 2014; Martínez and Fouce 2014), Italy (Fabbri and
Plastino 2014; Varriale 2015), France (Looseley 2003), Turkey (Karahasanolu
and Skoog 2009), Brazil, Argentina and Latin America in general (Magaldi 1999;
Pacini Hernandez et al. 2004; Ulhôa et al. 2015), Mali (Skinner 2015) and Soviet
Russia (Yurchak 2003). Additional work has been done on specific styles and
genres such as hip-hop in Indonesia (Bodden 2005) or Japan (Condry 2006), elec-
tronic dance music in Hong-Kong (Chew 2010) or India (Saldanha 2002), punk in
Bali (Baulch 2007) or in Spain and Mexico (O’Connor 2004), chart pop in Japan
(Mōri 2009) and South Korea (Shin 2009) and metal all over the planet (Wal-
lach et al. 2011). The above are but a sample of the work on pop-rock phenom-
ena covered by sociological and cultural research that hardly leaves a doubt about
the global presence and impact of pop-rock aesthetic culture. The overwhelming
majority, if not all of these studies, focus on topics such as the historical emer-
gence of styles by tracing careers of musicians and bands, on generational cohorts
and their musical tastes, on phenomena such as scenes and subcultures relating
to specific genres, on various aspects of the music industry and on struggles by
the cultural mediators of pop-rock to gain artistic respectability and national
legitimacy. Pointing to isomorphic processes in the worldwide proliferation of
pop-rock genres and related phenomena, these studies, as a whole, provide firm
evidence about the cosmopolitan nature of pop-rock.
4 Musical Cosmopolitan Bodies of Pop-rock
The continuous and expanding presence of pop-rock music around the world is
nothing but the global spread of all three forms of musical knowledge that pertain
to this aesthetic culture. In the case of informative knowledge, as already stated
above, we may point to the global acquaintance of individuals around the world
with the likes of the Beatles, Michael Jackson, Madonna, or Bob Marley, to name
the most obvious. At a slightly narrower level of expertise or connoisseurship we
may point also to some widespread knowledge about pop-rock musicians from
specific genres, or from countries other than the US and UK. One notable exam-
ple for the first decades of the 21st century consists of the relative popularity
of Tuareg bands and musicians from the Sahara Desert, such as Tinariwen and
Bombino. In the case of familiarity with musical works, songs by the likes of the
names just mentioned again come to mind, to which I would add, in the context
of given national or regional settings, knowledge of canonical works of national
pop-rock. That is to say, for example, that by the early 2000s, songs by the likes
of Alejandro Sanz or Andres Calamaro are known to individuals across the Span-
ish speaking world, while songs by the likes of Cui Jian or Faye Wong are known
to millions in China and East Asia. It is however the third form of knowledge that
I want to focus on.
This is because, for all the genres and styles related to the notion of pop-rock,
it seems, in retrospect, that one major cultural thrust brought about by this musi-
cal realm consists of its palette of typical sonorities, its vocabulary of typical
tones and timbres. Regardless of the specific styles and genres, youth subcultures,
scenes or other forms of fan culture, the accumulated effect of pop-rock music in
88 M. Regev
the successive presence of its styles, genres and works in their Anglo-American
form, but especially in their localized and indigenized forms, has been to natural-
ize into the cultural environment of countries all over the world the electric, elec-
tronic, manipulated and amplified sonorities associated with it. Put differently,
and in a rather grandiose statement perhaps, I would say that following more
than half a century during which pop-rock music became the prominent musical
culture of our time, and in terms of socio-cultural history of music, we live in
what might be called the age of electro-electronic-manipulated-amplified musical
sonorities. As the major cultural realm or aesthetic culture in which these sonori-
ties have been explored, formulated, defined, given stylistic and generic shape as
well as indigenized and legitimized for the purpose of expressing various forms
and types of generational, lifestyle, ethnic, national and other forms of collective
identity in many parts of the world, pop-rock music has acted as a major agent of
cultural change in this regard.
Either as active fans of specific genres and styles, or as passive listen-
ers exposed to music in media channels and all over the cultural public sphere,
individuals in most parts of the world have been engaged with pop-rock sonor-
ities, with the physical ‘thing-ness’ of pop-rock music, for over fifty years now.
Absorbing these sounds and their connoted meanings into their auditory memory,
the bodies of successive generations of individuals across the world came to be
equipped with musical knowledge pertaining to the sonorities of pop-rock. Indi-
viduals in all parts of the world became capable of deciphering, routinely and
intuitively, conventional meanings connoted by the musical phrases of electric
guitars and synthesizers, electronic beats, constructed studio sounds of overdubs
and other sonic textures, insertions of sampled sounds, electronic or amplified
manipulation of vocal delivery and the overall sound of pop-rock ensembles.
The cultural transformation encapsulated in the sonic vocabulary of pop-rock
therefore means, at the individual level, an alteration of the corporeality through
which memberships in nations or ethnicities are performed in everyday life. With
the growth of sectors within national societies who adopted national pop-rock
styles as the music that expresses and symbolizes their collective identity, and
with the sonorities of pop-rock becoming ever more ubiquitous and omnipresent
all over the public cultural sphere, the bodily experience and routine cultural per-
formance of national identity as a mundane sense of simply being culturally at
home in a given territory has been transformed. It became a performance based
on enactments of bodily dispositions that afford experiences of cultural domes-
ticity through sonic vocabularies that are at the same time native and imported,
indigenous and alien, local but also shared by numerous other cultural settings
across the world. Put differently, once the bodies of individuals across the world
came to identify and experience their sense of cultural home, as this is mediated
through musical sound, with the sonic vocabularies of pop-rock, they became aes-
thetic cosmopolitan bodies.
Toward a conclusion, I want to turn back to the music itself for illustrating,
verbally, the cosmopolitan currency of certain musical phrases originating in pop-
rock. Consider the following four types of sonic expression, all emitted by elec-
tric guitars: Short or extended solos, especially as explored and formulated in the
context of the form known as the ‘rock ballad’, as expressions of emotional eleva-
tion and transcendence; syncopated riffs, that is, short chords separated by a sec-
ond or less of silence, most prominently associated with the genres of soul, funk
and disco, that came to signify a sense of rhythmic energy or ‘groove’; A slightly
distorted but mostly pleasant-sounding chord progression often referred to as a
‘chiming’ or ‘jangling’ guitar that signifies a melodic, warm dimension of electric
guitar sound, conveying a feeling of joy or energetic warmth; and finally, the fuzz
and distortion effects most often used to deliver a sense of drama or to signify
anger. Each of these forms has gained widespread global cultural currency for
transmitting their connoted meanings. They can be found in abundance in many
pop-rock songs in all languages and cultures, as well as in fiction film scores or
filmed advertisements. Their prevalence in and across national and ethnic settings
testifies to the widespread presence of capabilities for deciphering them in bodies
of individuals in such cultural locations.
These phrases are but a tiny sample of the rich and diverse repertoire of musi-
cal phrases that originated in the aesthetic culture of pop-rock and gained world-
wide currency for signifying a whole range of moods and emotions. The global
ubiquitous presence of these phrases testifies that pop-rock musical knowledge
is stored in cultural bodies across the world, shared by individuals in numer-
ous national and ethnic settings and enacted routinely for performing mun-
dane, everyday experiences of being culturally at home. But given the globally
shared nature of pop-rock musical knowledge, such enactments are always also
performances of cosmopolitanism as a lived, routine and mundane cultural real-
ity of our era. It is a cultural reality in which the experience and perception of
‘
otherness’ between societies has greatly diminished (although not altogether
disappeared). One could say that with cosmopolitanism, and especially with our
bodies becoming cosmopolitan bodies, cultural otherness is always already famil-
iar to some extent, and that total cultural otherness hardly exists anymore.
In other words, with the auditory perceptual schemes of individuals all over
the world becoming accustomed to the distorted sounds of electric guitars and to
the indefinable timbres of electronic music; with the tones and timbres of pop-
rock being absorbed into the canonical auditory knowledge of listeners across the
90 M. Regev
world; with the sonic phrases of pop-rock becoming familiar and recognizable
as musical elements by listeners in almost any culture, ethnic group, and nation;
when all the above became elements in the cultural performance of contemporary
musical nationalism, we may assert that pop-rock music has constituted its listen-
ers as aesthetic cosmopolitan bodies, that is, as bodies inscribed with musico-aural
knowledge that affords a sense of being local and translocal at the same time.
5 Further Thoughts on Music Sociology
Turning back, in conclusion, to points discussed in the first part of this article, it
seems that in the study of pop-rock music we find a convergence of some recent
streams of theory and research in sociology. Such convergence carries a promise
for music sociology to take a more central place in sociology at large by provid-
ing evidence and insights pertaining to streams.
The first two decades of the 21st century have seen rising interest in (some
might rightfully call it a return to) several sociological topics and lines of thought.
These include an invigoration of work on the role of materiality in sociality;
research on the body, largely conceived to include movement, appearance, cog-
nition, emotions and the senses; routine, habitual practices, or everyday life as
cultural performance; and cosmopolitanism as the current state of world soci-
ety. Building on the above, music sociology should be based on the premise that
social life and cultural reality in the early 21st century are unprecedentedly satu-
rated with musical sounds in various guises and multiple functions. Music, either
as specific musical works, genres and styles, or as sonic textures in numerous
contexts, has become more than ever before an essential building block of cul-
tural reality in almost all spheres of social life. Music sociology therefore is in
a perfect position to contribute empirical evidence and theoretical insights per-
taining to each of the lines above separately, or to all of them combined, and to
general sociological knowledge. I conclude by pointing to some possible contri-
butions along these lines. Some of them are hardly new, but taken together, they
indicate the potential strength of music sociology.
The materiality of music as an agent of sociality might be traced along two
paths: the ‘thing-ness’ of musical sound itself, as it exists in aesthetic cultures,
in musical idioms, genres and styles; and the cultural performance of music by
musical instruments and listening devices or gadgets. Tracking the attachments of
individuals to these forms of materiality and the types of interactions with them
can lead to insights about the role of music in assembling various forms of social-
ity and about mechanisms of sociality in general.
Music can also serve as a key for understanding the body as a cultural site of
knowledge, for exploring the cultural aspects of emotions and sensual experience
and for observing bodily movements as cultural in essence. In other words, gen-
eral sociological knowledge about the embodiment of collective identities, how
such identities are inscribed in and performed through perceptions, emotions, the
senses and bodily movement can greatly benefit from insights provided by music
sociology.
The ubiquitous presence of music in countless situations of everyday life,
from the most casual background to highly attentive listening, is also a poten-
tially fruitful terrain for exploring the constitution, definition and maintenance of
such situations. Either when it functions as sheer soundtrack to routine activities
or as a trigger for emotional elevation and transcendence through attentive listen-
ing in public or private spheres, music is used by individuals and by all types of
authorities to construct and regulate the nature of social situations. More than just
pointing to the role of music in such cases, music sociological research can con-
tribute to a general understanding of the social and cultural grammar of countless
situations in everyday life.
Taking all the above and implementing such lines of inquiry into the prolifera-
tion of specific musical cultures may prove highly efficient as a research strategy
for exploring the cultural performance of boundary work by members of collec-
tive identities—and indeed how collective identities are enacted and become vivid
realities.
Late modernity is characterized by the intensified fragmentation of modern
social formations, their decomposition into small, fluid, ever-changing and evolv-
ing social units or collective identities, and especially into groupings differenti-
ated by nuances of life style. Bringing about a constantly increasing demand for
cultural materials around which such groupings can organize their sense of dis-
tinction and perform boundary work, this development closely corresponds with
the accelerated pace of stylistic innovation in all forms of art and expressive cul-
ture, including music. Some of these processes have already been examined by
music sociology through notions of taste and consumption. Much more work,
however, can still be done regarding the cultural performance of boundary work
in music-related cultural practices. One path of inquiry would be to trace the
embodiment of particular sonorities and specific musical genres or styles in sen-
sual experience, in emotional states and in bodily movement. Given that members
of social units adopt such sonorities or genres as markers of identity, such inquir-
ies can reveal much knowledge about the relationship between aesthetic cultures
and the performance of collective identities.
92 M. Regev
Of particular interest in this regard are genres, styles and sonorities, or aes-
thetic cultures of music—of which pop-rock is but one example—whose global
diffusion constitutes a basis for cosmopolitan identities. The role of musical
sounds in assembling such identities, and in their enactment or cultural perfor-
mance through various bodily practices, can amount to a substantial contribution
to the sociological understanding of contemporary cosmopolitanism.
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Musical Language
Howard S. Becker
In the early 1950s, when I was a graduate student supporting myself playing
piano, I substituted one night for someone who played in a trio that had a regular
weekend job in a neighbourhood bar. The leader, a tenor saxophone player, was
worried; he didn’t know me but had had to accept me because I was the only
pianist he could find on short notice. After we played the first set, he bought me
a beer and then asked, casually (but I suspected something was going on), ‘Are
you married?’ I said I was. After a pause, he asked, ‘Got any kids?’ I said I did.
He asked, ‘How many?’ I said one, which gave him the opening he was looking
for. ‘If you had three kids, like me, you wouldn’t be playing all those modern
chords, because people don’t like that stuff, you know what I mean? I need to
keep this job, let’s see if we can get the right sound’. Like most young piano play-
ers around town, I habitually embellished dominant seventh chords with raised
and lowered fifths and ninths—to my ears a richer sound, to his ears a potential
danger to his livelihood. I cooled it for the rest of the evening, because I did, in
fact, know exactly what he meant. I understood that a few altered notes in a chord
carried just such meaning for him.
When we go to another country, where people speak another language, we
know we’ll do better research if we understand that language and even better
research if we speak it ourselves. If we go to a place, as no one knows where we
come from, we understand that we have first to learn the language.
We often fail to realize that we face the same problem within our own socie-
ties, where all sorts of sub-groups speak specialized languages most of us don’t
H. S. Becker (*) 
San Francisco, California, USA

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22279-6_7
96 H. S. Becker
know. Some ethnic groups speak the language of their country of origin, or per-
haps a dialect not even all people from that country speak. Social classes in the
same country, or people from different regions of that country, often speak in sub-
stantially different dialects, too. So our research requires us to do some linguistic
study first.
We encounter similar problems studying occupational groups, which ordinar-
ily have, at the least, a substantial technical lexicon, referring to things, opera-
tions and situations the rest of us seldom or never encounter. When I interviewed
schoolteachers in Chicago for my dissertation research, I had no such problems.
I had never taught in a school for children, but I had been a student in those
schools, so we had common referents for the words they used describing their
work situations and career strategies to me, especially when those words referred
to matters most adults in the society they worked in were familiar with.
When I studied medical students, I had more trouble. The students, and their
teachers, used a lot of words I wasn’t familiar with, many of them technical terms
referring to things I’d never seen (organs, muscles, nerves, bones) or conditions
I knew by lay names. So I learned the medical names of some of those physical
structures and learned to call a runny nose ‘rhinitis’ and what I knew as hives
‘urticaria’.
I had to learn those things because what really interested me—the forms of
collective activity that embodied ‘medical practice’—took place in that lan-
guage. Sociologists know they learn a great deal about unfamiliar activities when
something ‘goes wrong’. The reaction to someone’s ‘mistake’ or ‘bad behaviour’
reveals some of the tacit rules and common understandings members of that
group accept as how they should behave. Something ‘wrong’ tells you, by impli-
cation, what’s ‘right’. When a student or, better yet, a doctor ‘made a mistake’, I
was less interested in the mistake than I was in what made it a mistake, which I
found out by understanding the language people used to describe it.
Which brings us to music. Musicians talk about music in a language quite
divorced from common language: special words for the physical and aural objects
they use to make music, and for the sounds, and the kinds of sounds they make
when they’re ‘making music’. And the sounds themselves carry important mean-
ing. Players make those mistakes so valuable to us as sociologists in musical lan-
guage, and their colleagues describe their errors in musical language. If you want
to find these sociological gems, you must know musical language, both to hear
what participants are referring to and to understand why they think it’s ‘wrong’.
Everyone here knows all this. Many, probably most, of the people who write
about music sociologically play or have played professionally or as serious ama-
teurs. They read music, can discuss music in the technical language of the trade,
Musical Language 97
and are also, commonly, familiar with the contingencies of musical careers and
the intricacies of the organization of musical life. When they study music, they
know what the words and the musical sounds they hear mean.
I’m going to present two bodies of ‘data’ to illustrate how this works in prac-
tice, the first from the research Robert Faulkner and I did on players of American
popular music, the second from Simha Arom’s classic ethnomusicological study,
La fanfare de Bangui. Both studies describe, in different settings, how having or
getting some musical knowledge made the research possible and productive.
1 Faulkner, Becker and Understanding

Contemporary Working (Popular) Musicians
Faulkner and I centred our research on this question: how can several players
who have never seen each other before or, at least, have never played or rehearsed
together before, play for several hours for a more or less attentive audience with-
out getting into serious trouble? We both had had plenty of experience in such
situations, but now we wanted to understand it as a form of social activity.
The usual answer to our question—in fact, what we thought was the correct
answer—says that musicians rely on culture, a shared body of knowledge and
practice, to supply what’s needed to pull this trick off. But we knew that answer
wasn’t correct, because Faulkner occasionally observed situations in which, when
someone ‘called a tune’, someone else in the group said that they didn’t know it.
That created a problem which the player who didn’t know the song often solved
by saying ‘That’s alright, you play the first chorus, then I’ll play the second one’.
Which only pushes the problem back a step. How do musicians play songs they
don’t know?
I found the answer to that, which I more or less suspected (having often done
it myself) but had never really thought about, when I spent an afternoon playing
with Don Bennett, a very experienced bass player, in his San Francisco studio.
At one point, I asked him if he had ever had to play a tune he didn’t know at
all. He said that of course he had, everyone had to do that sometimes. When I
asked how he did it, he looked puzzled and finally said that he wasn’t sure. ‘But,
I’ll tell you what, let’s try it and see what happens. Play something I don’t know
and I’ll follow you and tell you what’s going on’.
I thought for a minute and picked a very obscure tune from the 1940s (I had
probably learned it from hearing the Glenn Miller orchestra play it on the radio),
‘I’m Stepping Out with a Memory Tonight’. No jazz great had ever recorded it,
so it wasn’t likely anyone would know it that way. I told Don the name and he
98 H. S. Becker
confirmed that he’d never heard it. I started to play, in the key of F. Don, as any
bass player would, watched my left hand closely, to see what bass notes I was
playing that he could pick up on. He had no trouble with the first four bars, a
standard I-VI-II-V progression. The fifth bar goes from the major chord on the
tonic—in this case, F Maj7—on the first two beats, to the same chord with an
E in the bass. As soon as I played the E, Don said, ‘Stop right there. That’s a
clue’. I said, ‘What’s a clue?’ ‘That E. When you play that, I know almost for sure
that the next note is going to be an E-flat going down eventually to a D. And that
means the harmony is almost surely going to be F7 going to B-flat Maj7, maybe a
G m7. Then I’m home free’.
As soon as he said this, I knew exactly what he was talking about, knew that
I would have made essentially the same analysis of the possibilities that he had
made, and would have come to the same conclusion. And thus would have been
able to play at least that part of the tune as he then did. (Although, being a bass
player, he did not have to be able to play the melody).
He added, ‘You know, there are clues to things like not only what the next
chord will be but when you’re going to play a big Las Vegas ending’ (Faulkner
and Becker 2009, p. 80).
The understandings he called on to perform this analytic feat deal with more
subtle matters as well. Musicians, such as we were, often have a ‘feeling’ that
something ‘isn’t right’, that there’s something unfamiliar and awkward in some-
thing they’re playing. These awkwardnesses, like the mistakes I spoke of earlier,
show the kinds of understandings and interpretive strategies make it possible for
strangers to play together proficiently.
Faulkner came to California while we were working on the book and, of
course, brought his horn with him. We spent an afternoon exploring unfamiliar
tunes with Don Bennett. One was with ‘I Can Dream, Can’t I?’ All three of us
felt that there was something a little off-centre about this tune when we played
it from the music, something that made us uncomfortable, but couldn’t put our
fingers on it. Don finally said that the problem was that the tune kept feeling like
it was really in three (i.e. three-quarter time), instead of four, so that when he
played four beats to the bar behind us, the way the melody was laid out made it
sound like it was ‘really’ a waltz. We all agreed that that was what made us feel
uncomfortable, unnatural, awkward and made the tune hard to play. If we didn’t
pay attention, we started drifting into playing it as a waltz.
He solved the problem by playing the first chorus in two, which interrupted
the easy flow that made three seem natural, like what wanted to happen. As
soon as he did that, everything fell into place and we all felt comfortable with it.
Except for the very last bar, where the melody comes to rest on the second beat,
Musical Language 99
rather than the first beat, where we all felt it ‘should’ end. That is, where the nor-
mal expectations that made it easy for strangers to play together would have had
it end.
The other tune that seemed especially interesting was Tadd Dameron’s ‘For-
getful’, a tune I brought to our attention because I remembered it from an old
Boyd Raeburn recording, and then discovered in one of the fake books I had, so
that we had a lead sheet to play from. What’s particularly interesting about this
tune is that its last section—it’s essentially AABA’, so I’m talking about A’—is
twelve bars long instead of eight, but it doesn’t feel like the last four bars are a
tag. We all recognized that there was something odd but didn’t discuss it a lot
because, despite this anomaly, it flows absolutely naturally and you don’t feel a
hitch or a lurch there when you play it.
Here’s why ‘Forgetful’ seemed strange. Ordinarily, when a song has four extra
bars at the end, it takes the form of a ‘tag’. The song comes to a perfectly ‘natural’
end in a standard cadence that indicates ‘finished,’ but at the last minute prolongs
the end by modulating to, say, the VI7 chord (if you’re in C, the final C major
chord descends to an A7 and then around the circle of fifths to a final cadence
ending on C major). ‘Forgetful’ doesn’t do that. It has no false ending turning into
a dominant seventh somewhere else. Its extra four bars are inserted earlier in the
last strain, in a way that seems natural, so that the last section of the tune consists
of three four bar phrases, all of equal importance. There’s no tag and yet there are
four extra bars you can’t ‘account for’ in any conventional way. They don’t cre-
ate a ‘problem’, because they don’t throw you off and make you uncertain about
where you are. But they do feel ‘unusual’ and perhaps a little disquieting.
Ordinarily, the tunes we played came in a few standard sizes and shapes.
There’s the AABA or AABA’, four eight bar phrases, the first two alike, then the
‘bridge’, back to some version of the first eight. The A sections differ only in the
turnarounds (‘turnaround’ deserves a little essay of its own); the bridge is usu-
ally quite different. Some of the tunes that players liked involved substantial key
changes in the body of the tune: leading up to the bridge or in the first few bars
of the bridge, sometimes later in the bridge, or sometimes two key changes in
the bridge. Other tunes have a slightly different version of this 32-bar format, for
instance, ABAB or ABAB’, with similar possibilities for key changes.
None of these confused anyone with even minimal experience of the conven-
tional 32-bar structure of most popular songs of that era. When you improvised,
you always knew where you were in those 32 bars; similarly with the even sim-
pler twelve-bar blues form. But an occasional song wasn’t like that. A subclass
of songs perfectly normal in other respects was only 20 bars long (‘Bidin’ My
Time’, ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face’, ‘Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now’),
built up in segments of four, rather than eight, bars. We played these less often.
100 H. S. Becker
Something similar happens in ‘I Can Dream, Can’t I?’ The construction of

‘ordinary tunes’ puts the accents on beats where we expect accents to fall (1 and 3),
and so doesn’t mislead players about the time signature. ‘I Can Dream’ proceeds
in phrases including triplet quarter notes which, while they are written in 4/4, have
a natural 3/4 rhythm. If we let ourselves be lulled by ‘what’s natural’, we end up
with a different (and, in the context, confusing) time signature.
Well, so what? You can’t play tunes that don’t fit the standard forms inatten-
tively, the way you can play more ‘normal’ songs. If you aren’t careful, you get
lost and that makes it difficult to sound like the band knows what it’s doing. To
play together ‘professionally’, in a way that will not reveal that we have never
played together before, all the players have to know just such things as which part
of the song they’re playing now and what time signature they’re playing in. If I’m
playing solo and change time signatures or get lost in an unfamiliar structure, few
listeners will notice, but if I’m playing with others, that kind of problem makes
it hard for us to play together as though we had done this before, which is the
impression we want to give to bystanders.
So, to summarize, we found out what was going on musically that allowed us
to play together without problems in several ways. Most importantly, we got peo-
ple to explain to us how they did things that they had never verbalized explicitly
to themselves. And then we analysed, again with the help of our colleagues, what
was going on when we felt ill at ease, felt that something was ‘not quite right’,
and used those analyses in classic fashion to understand what we were doing
when we played together unthinkingly in unproblematic situations.
And we could not have done those things, made those analyses, without
understanding the conventional musical language—of time signatures and keys
and chords and circles of fifths—that our colleagues and we used to accomplish
these small minor miracles.
2 Arom and the Music of Central Africa
Faulkner and I could arrive at our understanding of the conventions that let us
play with others we hadn’t played with before because we had learned all those
things in another part of our lives where we weren’t sociologists. Does that mean
that no one can study music and musicians who doesn’t know all that? No, it
doesn’t. But it does mean that if we don’t know the relevant musical language
when we start we should know it by the time we’re through.
Which is what ethnomusicologists have to do: find out how some other
group’s very different way of organizing musical collaboration works. They
Musical Language 101
have to find out all the things we did, prominently among them the basic musi-
cal language, that allow people to collaborate easily and gracefully in a system
completely different from the Western tradition. Ethnomusicologists’ problems
resemble those Faulkner and I had, but they solve them differently and the ana-
lytic problem is far more difficult.
Years ago, I read a book, very relevant to these concerns, called Le fanfare
de Bangui, written by Simha Arom, a horn player in the symphony of the Israeli
broadcasting system, who had unexpectedly and unintentionally found himself
required to become an ethnomusicologist (a field in which he turned out to be
highly gifted).
The title of the book needs a little explaining. In French, fanfare refers to what
English speakers call a brass band. The president of the Central African Repub-
lic (whose capital is Bangui) had heard a brass band during a visit to Israel, and
he wanted to have one just like it. He told his friends in the Israeli government
what he wanted and for their own geopolitical reasons (they weren’t interested
in spreading that form of musical culture for its own sake) the Israelis decided to
help. Somehow, Arom the horn player seemed to some responsible party to be the
person who could go to Bangui and satisfy the president’s wish.
And so Arom found himself there, where he quickly learned that the job
couldn’t be done. What he needed to do it—instruments, musical scores and parts
to play from, a pool of trained instrumentalists to play them—didn’t exist in Ban-
gui. But there he was for a year, so he looked around for something else to do and
soon learned that no one was collecting the indigenous musics of the many ethnic
groups that made up the country’s population. He easily persuaded the President
that a museum of the country’s music made a fine substitute for the fanfare and
Arom’s adventure began.
It’s a long and wonderful story, but I’ll concentrate here on the major prob-
lem he had to solve: how to understand the music of an ethnic group called the
Ngbaka (and eventually others like them). He finally learned to understand the
music as the result and embodiment of a complicated system of understandings,
simultaneously social and musical. Here’s how he got there.
He asked some of a village’s singers to sing a song for his recording machine,
but what he heard puzzled him. The song ‘seemed to have no regular accents, I
had no markers of the organization of the beats: I felt that there were measures
(that is, the durations of the notes were proportional to one another), but I didn’t
understand the standardization of the tempo’ (Arom 2009, p. 78).
The singer he asked to record the same fragment again not only began in a
different place, he didn’t sing the same thing at all. Was it the same song? The
other musicians told Arom it was the same song, but he couldn’t hear it. He later
102 H. S. Becker
learned that the songs were cyclic. You could start anywhere, and in fact singers
usually did start anywhere at all. The words, being partly improvised, gave no
clue to the form either. The singers’ descriptions and examples of what they were
doing were even more confusing:
If the first singing of a song gave you four phrases (A-B-C-D), when you asked the
same singer to repeat what he’d sung you’d hear C-A-B-B and D had disappeared.
The next time he’d sing C-B-A-D and a day later, with him or someone else, it
would be D-A-D-D. But all the singers in the village agreed that these were all the
same song (ibid., p. 79).
Arom transcribed what he had recorded, but he couldn’t find where the pulse,
the beat, was. When he asked the musicians to clap the rhythm with their hands,
though, they always started in a different place in the song. He was looking for
one stable version of the song but couldn’t find such a thing.
Finally, he recorded one version and then asked the musician to listen to what
he had played and clap his hands in time, while Arom recorded the two together
on a second machine. That showed him that there was a beat underlying the song,
though it was not expressed audibly.
On later visits to other ethnic groups in the country, using newly available
multi-track recording equipment, he elaborated the idea into a complex method.
First, he recorded an ensemble. Then, having learned the order the players
‘entered’ into the playing of that piece, he put earphones on the one who entered
first, and had him play his part while hearing what the group had played together.
Then he had the next one to enter listen to the player before him while playing his
part. Arom recorded that and each succeeding pair until he could hear how each
new entrant found his way into the developing ensemble. Then he had each player
clap along with each of the parts. Which finally revealed to him the underlying
regular pulsation which had remained implicit throughout. Though no one played
it, they all (including Arom) felt it. He found what he was looking for in the pulse
of the dance the music accompanied.
But the recordings taught him more. When two singers began to sing what they
said was the ‘same’ melodic line they quickly diverged, going in quite different
directions, not just mere variations. There seemed to be an endless number of pos-
sibilities without any observable system organizing them. But the musicians them-
selves felt completely at ease with this apparently infinite variety, knew ‘where
they were’ at every moment, started and stopped playing at appropriate places.
He finally learned where to look for, and so discovered, the basic units: the
‘parts’ (as in soprano, alto, tenor and bass, although they were not based on
pitches), the four kinds of things that couldn’t be left out, which were assigned
to specific people. And he discovered how to ask the people responsible for sing-
ing those parts to tell him which elements were ‘basic’, always had to be sung,
and thus were what had to be respected—the way a jazz player might refer to the
underlying ‘changes’ of a song. As when jazz players would say, when they told
someone who didn’t know ‘Ornithology’ not to worry, it was ‘really’ the changes
for ‘How High the Moon’.
Arom used variants and extensions of this method to arrive at a more detailed
and nuanced understanding of a variety of musics from around the country, many
of which operated on more or less similar principles.
Here’s another example, taken from a later, more streamlined and knowledge-
able study of the horn music of the Banda Linda, a music played by ensembles of
eleven to eighteen players on horns made (for the upper registers) from antelope
horns and (for the lower registers) from flared tree roots. Young boys learn from
the older players and Arom was sure that as a horn player himself he could learn
to play them. He asked to be taught as young boys were taught.
Each player entered separately and each seemed to play a different part. So he
recorded the player who entered first, then asked to be taught that part, but asked
the teacher to play its simplest version, the one they would start the child with.
Then he asked the teacher to remove some notes, to simplify it even more, until
the teacher refused, saying that if he took any more notes out it would no longer
be his part of the song. Arom went through the same procedure for every part,
until he had a complete, simplified model of the entire piece. From which he pro-
duced a score, on which he could mark the essential notes, those that appeared in
these minimal versions of all the parts.
He learned from this exercise and from further questioning around it that the
horns were arranged in families of five, each member starting on one note of the
pentatonic scale, and each family tuned in the same way an octave higher. As
long as each note could be played somewhere, you had a sufficiently complete
ensemble.
Then he had a large group play a piece, recorded it, and spent a long day tran-
scribing each part. The next morning, he announced that he was going to play
the piece with them and, playing it many times, play each of the parts he had
transcribed in turn. Since the players came in consecutively, one after the other,
he knew that he could start playing the first part and know he had it right if the
second player could then come in correctly. Then he played the second part to see
if the third player would enter correctly. And so on until he had played every part
correctly. All the players carried him around in triumph and then he bought a case
of beer and they partied.
104 H. S. Becker
3 A Final Problem
Suppose that, like so many of us who study music sociologically, we’ve learned
the relevant language for describing the musical activities we’ve investigated, the
musical understandings the people we’re studying routinely rely on to coordinate
their playing. We’ve used that knowledge to gather data, make observations, col-
lect all the materials we’ll use to write a useful account of what we’ve learned.
When we write our articles and books, we’ll necessarily use the musical materials
we gathered as evidence for what we have to say. (For this reason, I’ve included
in an appendix lead sheets for the two songs discussed in the first part of this
essay so that readers who know how to read such a document can inspect the evi-
dence in their own time).
If our readers understand the relevant musical languages as we do, we can tell
the story easily. It’s a conversation among adepts. But if we want our work to
reach a larger audience than those who already know enough to understand the
technical matters we have learned—the musical forms and the notes, the written
code we’ve expressed them in—we somehow have to convey the technical knowl-
edge that audience doesn’t have so that our argument will resonate for them. And
I don’t speak here only of the lay public, but also of our sociological colleagues
whose eyes also glaze over when they see bars of music in a text. How do we tell
them what we’ve learned?
Some writers have a technical musical language with metaphorical descrip-
tions. A well-known passage in E.M. Forster’s novel Howard’s End (1910)
describes the andante in Beethoven’s Fifth symphony in a way that non-musicians
understand. I’ll quote a small piece of it:
[T]he music started with a goblin walking quietly over the universe, from end to
end. Others followed him. They were not aggressive creatures; it was that that made
them so terrible to Helen. They merely observed in passing that there was no such
thing as splendour or heroism in the world. After the interlude of elephants danc-
ing, they returned and made the observation for the second time. Helen could not
contradict them, for, once at all events, she had felt the same, and had seen the relia-
ble walls of youth collapse. Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! The goblins
were right.
Her brother raised his finger: it was the transitional passage on the drum.
For, as if things were going too far, Beethoven took hold of the goblins and made
them do what he wanted. He appeared in person. He gave them a little push, and
they began to walk in a major key instead of in a minor, and then he blew with his
mouth and they were scattered! (Forster 1910, p. 29)
Similarly, the American critic Whitney Balliet became famous for his lyrical,
imaginative descriptions of jazz soloists’ playing in his essays in the New Yorker
magazine’s non-musician readers. Here’s a sample, his description of the pianist
Art Tatum playing something in the ‘flashy, kaleidoscopic style’ he used when
playing for the public:
He would play a four- or eight-bar introduction, made up of an oblique variation

of the melody. … Then he would go into eight bars of ad-lib melody, using sin-
gle notes in his left hand and loose chords in his right, break this with a two-bar
descending arpeggio, return to the melody for four more bars, insert a two-bar dis-
sonance, and pick up the melody again. The eight-bar bridge would consist of a see-
sawing left-hand figure overlaid with a winding, ascending arpeggio, which, when it
reached its top, would pause, then fall down the other side of the mountain, landing
in a flush of single notes and a two-bar double-time coda (Balliet 1986, p. 206).
The elegant metaphors of these excerpts give a reader very little factual musical
information. If your research deals with the kind of cooperative musical activ-
ity my earlier examples described—if you reported how the members of a string
quartet discussed and decided on the bowing of a difficult passage—you couldn’t
convey your results in this kind of language.
But, if you describe a musical event or conversation in the technical detail
needed to understand what the people in those examples mean, you lose readers
who understand neither the problem the musicians are talking about nor the solu-
tion they arrive at. And so they don’t—can’t—understand the point of the exam-
ple or its analysis.
I won’t say that these passages convey no information, but they don’t report
the detailed technical understandings that infuse musicians’ talk as they negoti-
ate the day-to-day contingencies of performing in public, the kinds of things
Faulkner and I, and Arom, had to report.
The alternative is to explain the technical matters in simple language that
non-musician readers will understand sufficiently to grasp the sociological points
they contain. Faulkner and I made that choice in when we chose, as an exam-
ple of how unfamiliar harmonic patterns destabilize jazz players and create dif-
ficulties in achieving concerted action, John Coltrane’s well-known composition
‘Giant Steps’, which, we said,
creates just such a problem for players accustomed to II-V-I sequences because,
though its harmonic structure builds on the same II-V-I sequences, it does so in an
unfamiliar way. Consider the first three bars of “Giant Steps”:
106 H. S. Becker
The first harmonic move, from a tonic chord to a dominant seventh chord a minor
third above it (B to D7 here), is not unknown in standard tunes, though not very
common. (The move to the dominant 7th a major third above, leading to a circle-
of-fifths sequence arriving at a conventional final cadence in the original key, occurs
more frequently). The second move, from D7 to GMaj, completely conventional in
itself, however, doesn’t end on a dominant seventh, leaving the cadence unresolved.
Instead, ending on a major chord, it firmly changes the key to GMaj, and then
immediately repeats this move, going up a minor third to B♭7, and changing keys
again, V-I, to E♭ (Faulkner and Becker 2009, pp. 126–127).
We were not surprised that many readers found this heavy going, and feared
that such extended remarks would frighten potential readers, but could think of
no other way to explain and exemplify a key component of our understanding
of what lay beneath and fuelled some of the conflicts and discomforts musicians
experienced in the historical shift from bebop to post-bebop performance.
A few final observations: we can, of course, approach many topics in the soci-
ology of music—studies of audience participation in musical events, studies of
the organization of the industries built up around music, for instance—without
any of these problems. As long as the participants in the actions that interest us
communicate in ways that don’t require technical language, neither do our reports
and analyses. Nor does a sociology of music have a monopoly on these problems.
The sociology of science shares many of these difficulties, requiring as it often
does a substantial understanding of scientific procedures, specialized vocabularies
and mathematical knowledge we cannot count on our colleagues to have. This is
probably an inevitable concomitant of the growth and increasing specialization of
sociological research.
Musical Examples
108 H. S. Becker
References
Arom, Simha (2009) La fanfare de Bangui. Paris: La Découverte.
Balliet, Whitney (1986) American Musicians: 56 Portraits in Jazz. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Faulkner, Robert R. / Becker, Howard S. (2009) Do You Know … ? The Jazz Repertoire in
Action. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Forster. E. M. (1989) Howards End. First published in 1910. London: Penguin Classics.
The Unsung Work of Music Sociology?
Tia DeNora
Music sociology has anticipated so many major developments in sociology

writ large but in ways that remain, mostly, ‘unsung’. Our shared field will, I
believe—eventually—influence sociology profoundly and for the better. But it is
up to us to sing the praises of what music sociology can do. Hence the immodest
title of this paper.1
Where then to begin? Where else but with the Institut and its visionary
founder, Kurt Blaukopf. By the time I present this paper, Peter Martin will

already have spoken about Blaukopf’s contributions. I want, however, to add a
few more notes (or, perhaps, to echo Pete’s comments) and to add that it is excel-
lent to see a growing body of Blaukopf’s work translated into English and shared
with a wider reading public (e.g., Zembylas 2012).
1Itis worth noting that over the past ten years, well-established sociologists are turning to
music research after making their mark in other areas (e.g., Atkinson 2008 and beyond;
Crossley; Roy; Eyerman). Their reasons for doing so usually accord with an interest in a
‘core’ sociological topic (collaboration and mutual orientation, embodiment, social move-
ment activity) and they have helped to introduce our subfield to wider audiences.
T. DeNora (*) 
University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom
E-Mail: T.DeNora@exeter.ac.auk

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22279-6_8
112 T. DeNora
1 Vienna’s Institut—Caldron of Current Music

Sociology
In 1993, I was asked by the editors of Contemporary Sociology to review the

English translation of Professor Blaukopf’s, Musical Life in a Changing Society
(Blaukopf 1992). In my review, I noted the richness of the ‘Musiksoziologie’
paradigm (we need to recall that Blaukopf’s volume had originally been published
in 1982), in particular its powerful combination of music analysis, ethnomusico-
logy, empirical sociology and sociological theory. This was a perspective open to
so much more than, as we called it in English, sociology ‘of’ music: it embraced
the realm of the socio-musical holistically and not merely as a kind of ‘system-
atic musicology’ (still corralled in the more restricted realm of musicology) but in
terms of built environment, sonic studies, media, reception, theory, aesthetics and
change. It did not omit the so-called ‘music itself’ from consideration.
In that review, I said:
[Blaukopf’s] book permits us to recover certain aspects of the sociology of music

side-stepped in more recent work. For one thing, it attempts to pull sociomusical
studies back into an explicit concern with the musical object itself, and this is surely
crucial to any ‘strong’ sociology of music … Blaukopf’s concern with the inter-
relationship between music and perceptual systems, and with music as ideological
in its configuration, marks his work as anticipating some of the current debates wit-
hin cultural studies as practiced both by musicologists and sociologists (DeNora
1994, p. 317).
It is worth pausing for a moment to reflect on Blaukopf’s prescience. In parti-

cular, I want to highlight three important contributions from Blaukopf and the
Vienna School more generally which have fed into and/or complemented current
music sociology internationally. These contributions have stimulated the growing
focus on what is done with, to, for and in the name of music and, conversely,
simultaneously, what music does to us. That paradigm has been linked to the dis
solution of three interrelated (and I believe false) dichotomies. These d ichotomies
are deeply entrenched in ‘traditional’ sociology (and older music sociology),
though they have also been rejected by some approaches in or adjacent to
sociology (such as ethnomusicology, cyborg studies and actor network theory):
(a) macro-micro, (b) music-society, and (c) subject-object.
The Unsung Work of Music Sociology? 113
2 Farewell to Dualist Conceptions—Music

Sociology’s Irreductions
(a) Macro-micro: in Blaukopf’s work there is an abiding concern with the need
for developing ‘medium-range’ theory. This concern was, as I will discuss in a
moment, both complemented by and developed in Howard S. Becker’s Art
Worlds, published in the same year as the German edition of Blaukopf’s book
(and discussed by Blaukopf in the introduction to the 1992 English version).
The focus on complex, cooperative networks through which art happens offe-
red a window into the question of artistic value, development and change. It did
this by asking exquisitely prosaic questions about how people engage in art-
making and art-valuing practices with other people and how that activity is cons-
trained and enabled by available materials, conventions, technologies, discourses,
opportunities, money and time. This perspective was one devoted to process
not product, and thus to history in-the-making. It deals in cases (Becker 2014).
As such, and because it went right to the very middle, or heart, of how art and
music get made—where, when, how, with what, by whom—it also offered a
model for doing sociology more widely that showed us what sociology—ironi-
cally, given its status as the science of human sociability—often ignored, namely,
people doing things together!
This focus on worlds (Becker 1982), midst, middles or meso (Maines 1979)
neatly sidesteps the problems associated—both sociologically and musicologi-
cally—with the micro-macro, individual-society dichotomies. As Tasos Zembylas
has observed, the focus on practice—on process rather than product—‘makes it
possible to analyse sets of activities and discourses on micro and macro levels
simultaneously’ (2014, p. 2). There is no need, within this paradigm, to reify
either society or music. And no need to limit agency artificially to the exercise of
will or choice. There is also no need to sever structure ‘from’ agency in ways that
preserve the dualism of individual/society, freedom and constraint. Instead, these
boundaries become, as my beloved mentor, Bennett Berger, put it (1995, p. 158),
‘merely theoretical’. The notion of ‘social structure’ is, as Berger puts it, ‘after
all, an idea … [and] there is a great deal of research space for empirical disco-
veries’ (Berger 1995, p. 158). In short, these dichotomies dissolve and ‘society’
can be understood in the more homely sense of ‘people doing things together’, to
quote a title of a well-known book (Becker 1986) and music is (as music thera-
pists, musicians and music lovers already know) a way of doing, a modality, a
register for and a way of being.
114 T. DeNora
Methodologically, it becomes possible to trace the movements and transfor-

mations of musical materials (tones, passages, rhythms, songs, connotations) as
music travels and is drawn into contact with many things. And within this para-
digm, ‘society’, ‘the social’, ‘social structure’ is understood (more realistically,
in my opinion) as a cluttered, busy and dynamic realm, as a series of activities,
as patterned and variegated to different degrees (and as perceived by differently
positioned observers).2 That realm includes, among and in tandem with many
other things, music—musical modalities and materials. Within this paradigm,
sociology is reanimated. It becomes the study of the ‘hybrid constructs which are
interspersed between human beings, between things, and between human beings
and things’ as Hennion puts it (2015, p. 294). It becomes the study of social life.
(b) Music-society: Around 2003, I published an article in a special issue of
Poetics, co-edited by Richard ‘Pete’ Peterson. I was going to call the piece
‘Historical Perspectives and Music Sociology’. Pete immediately said, ‘don’t use
the “and” word—it’s weak’. As Pete observed, that word (‘and’) immediately
suggests that there is one thing and (or ‘as opposed to’) another thing, that both
things are distinct entities and that they are (somehow) related. That notion of
music ‘and’ society informed a great deal of early music sociology. It was scho-
larship at a distance, somewhat passive, a kind of ‘pointing out’ form of observa-
tion and one that could do little more than say things like, ‘this [musical form]
looks like that [social form]’.
As I have described elsewhere, this essentially structuralist search for parallels
between musical forms and societal patterns does not take explanatory sociology
very far. It leaves gaps or blind spots at just the points where it could address
questions of process, mechanism and change (DeNora 2000, p. 4). Epistemolo-
gically, moreover, it is dubious, for how might it be confident that the patterns it
observes are not merely an artefact of the analyst’s way of seeing? A ‘this goes
with that’ account of music ‘and’ society is what ethnomethodologist Harold
Garfinkel used to call ‘stories for the telling’. As I describe later on, moreover,
macro, systems theory and structuralist accounts are clumsy when they have to
account for social change. They either ignore the historical dimension, hypo-
statize structure or turn to overly abstracted accounts of how change occurs,
accounts that do not attempt to show the mechanisms of change in action and in
time. This is where Blaukopf helped to steer a better course.
2An approach that resonates with some articulations of Actor Network Theory (see
Latour 2005), with Figuration Theory, Ethnomethodology (DeNora 2014) and with some
forms of symbolic interactionism.
In the opening page of his introduction to the English version of Musical Life
in a Changing Society, Blaukopf quotes Howard S. Becker’s own Introduction to
John Shepherd et al.’s classic book, Whose Music:
To say that art or music is a social product, or that they are affected by social forces,
or that they reflect the structure of a society—to use any of these common platitu-
dinous formulae—is simply to claim the domain of the arts for sociology in return
for a promissory note for an analysis to be delivered, if all goes well, on some later
occasion (Blaukopf 1992, p. 1).
Like Becker, Blaukopf (and like the Vienna School today) was not impressed
by promissory notes, not enamoured of ‘armchair sociology’ and not willing to
engage in the kind of music sociology that confined itself to pointing out paral-
lels between music ‘and’ society. As with the macro-micro dichotomy, the
music-society dichotomy tended to leave in shadow all the questions that the
‘worlds’ perspective illuminated, namely, the production of socio-musical history
and music-social relations. Perhaps most importantly, the ‘music “and” society’
approach lacks ecological validity (DeNora 2013b), by which I mean that its way
of explaining mutual connections and influences between music ‘and’ society is
so far removed from the terms and experiences of those involved with music ‘in’
society as to be unintelligible.
Consider, for example, Susan McClary’s famous notion that the extended
cadenza of the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto reflects the emergence and increa-
singly activist (rebellious) character of the emerging bourgeoisie circa 1719 (and
bourgeois musicians in particular). That ‘theory’ has become virtually legend in
music history, reappearing in many a popular account in print and in the media
(e.g., Gaines 2010). In brief, the account goes like this: the role played by the
harpsichord in this concerto, specifically its break from the more subservient,
‘continuo’ role, symbolically repositions the ‘servant’ of the ensemble as the star,
the real ‘aristocrat’. But would Bach himself—or any of his contemporaries—
recognise the validity of this account? And might a richer, more ethnographic
understanding of Bach’s world and his practices lead to a more robust explanation
of that cadenza?
My own answer (DeNora 2005) is yes: this piece was written to inaugurate a
new harpsichord (by Michael Mietke) which had been delivered to the Köthen
court, and that the musical conventions of the day entailed the thorough tes-
ting of new instruments, the colouristic and extended virtuosic passages can be
perhaps better understood as just what Bach would do to showcase and test the
instrument’s powers. The ‘star’ of the show, in other words, was not the uppity
116 T. DeNora
musician as a member of an emerging class but the technically and potentially

powerful instrument which was run through its paces in this piece (DeNora
2006) and which, as it also happened, offered a fine opportunity for the musician/
performer (Bach) to engage in technical display.
Such an account may not hold all the water (there are other accounts that
could be added, also linked to Bach’s world of musical production), but it is cer-
tainly closer to the lived experience of those involved. Without this focus on the
middle or meso level of practice, we remain at a loss to comprehend the ‘how’
of how music and some other thing(s) come to take the shapes they do, how
music and other things interact. Without the meso level, there is no possibility of
viewing history in-the-making, of people in action, people doing things together
with, and in the name of, music. As Blaukopf put it (1992, p. 1):
Weber taught us not to direct our attention exclusively toward the musical work of
art in its notated form (in order to decipher its relationship to ‘society’), but to train
our sights on musical activity—activity which may or may not lead to a notated
work of art. Ethnomusicologists have always been dedicated to it. And if a sociolo-
gist who is also a musician describes art as activity, he is simply steering the same
course that others may have learned from Max Weber. Here I allude to Howard
S. Becker, who pointed out that works of music and the performing arts music also
be understood as directions for social activity: ‘Many art works exist in the form
of directions to others telling them what to do to actualize the work on a particular
occasion’ (Becker 1982, p. 210).
Blaukopf’s use of Becker’s words points us to the third dichotomy that music
sociology after Blaukopf, and Becker, has eschewed, namely, the subject-object
dichotomy. It has reformulated our understanding of what kind of object music is
and how people—listeners, musicians, scholars—confront, experience and come
to know about it.
(c) Subject-object: Peter Martin very aptly described (twenty years ago) the
issue I have just been discussing (music ‘and’ society) and in ways that lead into
an alternative ontology of the musical ‘object’. He argued that too much of what
passed for music sociology employed the analytical technique of contrasting
microscopic analyses of musical detail with sweeping conclusions about their
relation to large scale social trends (Martin 1995, p. 115; DeNora 2003, p. 31).
This strategy was based on the assumption that the musical ‘object’ (whether text
or performance) was already formed and waiting to be interpreted, decoded or
otherwise correlated with social trends by the (all-knowing) interpretive socio-
logist/analyst. Ironically, and despite the anti-positivist claims of the once ‘new’
musicology, critical musicological ‘readings’ of musical texts or performances as
texts so as to ‘reveal’ their sociological significance was a strategy that engaged

in a double reification, of both music and society without, again, examining how
the two were linked.3 The question of ‘what does it mean’ is, in other words, mis-
guided, although it is certainly one that invests music’s analysts with considerable
authority. As I have described elsewhere (DeNora 2003), this is a shortcoming of
Adorno’s work, important though it is.
By contrast, the music sociological focus on the middle, the meso, on worlds,
practices, networks and activities (the ones in which we can locate actual human
beings), made a space for an ontology of music in which the musical object was
rendered flexible and emergent. In this new ontology, music became understood
as a medium of action rather than an object, and a medium that mediates by offe-
ring potentially varied, perhaps contrary, and by no means fixed or pre-determi-
ned even if regular, affordances. Music’s affordances emerge, in other words,
according to how music is handled, approached, rendered and re-rendered in
actual social contexts and in time and in ways that include music analysis in this
equation. This understanding of what kind of a ‘thing’ music is made a space for
the study of talk or writing about music as part of the activity associated with
music worlds. As the musicologist Nicholas Cook has described (2003, 2013),
as the sociologist Lisa McCormick describes (McCormick 2015), music is social
performance; the musical object is always in motion, always modifiable and in
ways that, as Cook has described, produce social relations (Cook 2012).
Engaging with music takes many forms and configures what counts as ‘music’
in many ways. Increasingly, this engagement takes place outside the concert
hall (see Huber 2013) and in ways that need to be characterised by, as Alfred
Smudits’ chapter describes, a ‘modernization’ of music sociology and an adequate
conception of ‘music’. However musicking occurs, it is a process that makes us
and makes our worlds. That is what we are doing with our musicking (Small 1998)
and that is why people often feel passionately about music, that music is shared,
made and broadcast in ways that seek to furnish worlds and, when worlds become
overwhelming or overbearing, that music is used, as so much scholarship on
3That examination could, of course, have included a focus on how music analysis is itself
a form of musicking (doing things with music), a narrative appropriation of music for the
purposes of some other thing (altering the space or discourse or values of academic musi-
cology, making a space in the canon for something new, juggling values, engaging in acti-
vism through musical critical means).
118 T. DeNora
mobile music has demonstrated, as a form of coping and escape (Skanland 2011).4
It is why around the world and under different circumstances, people and groups
have taken steps to silence music (censorship, regulation) and musicians.
Thinking about music as an emergent ‘object’, observing musical situations
at the meso level and thinking about music ‘in action’ helps us to see what music
‘does’ in social life and what we do with music. Thinking about what music ‘does’
to us is thinking about what Zembylas (2012, p. 15) has called the ‘internal’ aspects
of music making (see also Acord and DeNora 2008 on ‘implicit’ culture)—artistic or
musical ways of knowing, creative experience (understanding all music participants
to be ‘creative’ in their actions), aesthetic trajectories (where musicking ‘takes us’)
and changed capacities and competencies in and through musical endeavours.
It is about these things that music can do, then, that I wish to ‘sing’ in this
paper. To do so, I will use an extended example about singing. This example is
one I have described elsewhere (DeNora 2013a). It comes from a collaborative,
longitudinal study with a music therapist (Ansdell and DeNora 2016). It is lin-
ked to my current interest in music and wellbeing. I will use this example to
address three increasingly central topics in current sociology: change understood
as process, identity, and embodiment. In all three cases I hope to show how music
sociology has enriched our understanding of these topics and, simultaneously,
how lessons from music sociology advance our understanding of the ‘internal’
features of social order writ large.
4Indeed, we need to pay close attention to new practices of musical engagement and the
changing landscape of what counts in our western cultures as musical participation. Even
in Austria, a country perhaps stereotypically associated with the love of ‘live’ music and
classical music in particular, those patterns are shifting. Michael Huber’s research, for
example, highlights how patterns of musical engagement in the digital age mean that, in
Austria circa 2009 one quarter of 1042 Austrians surveyed in a representative sample never
attend live music events and yet music listening is nonetheless the favourite leisure pas-
time (Huber 2013). The lesson here is salutary: we need to separate our notion of ‘music’
from our familiar, and often comfortable, concepts such as symphonies, pop tunes, diatonic
major and minor scales, genres, styles and famous musicians and also from less familiar
categories and understand the importance of tuning into emic and ethno specific features of
musical practice. We also need to be cautious when asserting any ‘universal’ attributes of
what might count as ‘music’.
3 To Ask, ‘What Can Music Do?’ Is to Ask, ‘What Can

Music Sociology Do?’
Music sociology has made enormous contributions to our understanding of how

change happens. I mentioned earlier that macro theories are ham-fisted when it
comes to explaining change historically (they hypostatize social structure, they
are overly abstract, they ignore the mechanisms through which change occurs).
Whereas macro sociology considers change in terms of contrasts—first A, later
B (think of political structures, modes of production, epochs and periods)—
meso-level music sociology examines changes in-the-making through an in-depth
focus on the present moment and, as David Stern has called it (Stern 2004), the
temporal architecture of that moment. There is no black-boxing of process here.
Rather, the focus is on temporal activities and tendencies, on the laying down of
pathways, on fold-upon-fold of transmutations and iterations, on negotiation and
contestation both subtle and brutal and, above all on practices—material, symbo-
lic, crafted. Change is never discontinuous; it never just ‘happens’ (as if a switch
is thrown) but rather it emerges out of what is there, what came before. Even
when it is seemingly sudden, it comes out of a process and has, in other words, a
history. That history consists of the mobilization of many things, rearrangement,
appropriation, repetition and, often, the consolidation through talk and/or text
about what has happened. And the movement from A to B is probably most often
not made in a leap, but in lots of little steps, each of which making space for the
next.
Within this purview there is no difference between changes that take place on
the seemingly micro level (what happens to you or me, here, today) and s o-called
‘larger’ changes at the macro level (what happens to Politics, The Economy,
Science). Rather, each is wrought iteratively and consolidated within networks
and settings and all are produced through, as the philosopher of science Nancy
Nercessian has described it (Nercessian 1990), through a kind of practical boots-
trapping operation, a process that taps cultural resources and draws them into the
field of action where they become props, levers and vehicles that become impli-
cated in the movement from A to B. And just as the difference between macro
and micro, or big and small, is dissolved in this equation, so too is the difference
between a ‘long’ time and a short time. ‘The moment of the rose and the moment
of the yew-tree are’, as Elliot said, ‘of equal duration’ (Elliot 1943, p. 38).
Consider the following extended example of ‘Pam’ (a pseudonym), her voice
and her songs over time. This is a story about change as it transpires over many
‘moments’ that accumulated over a period of more than six years. I will begin
120 T. DeNora
with a 4 min interval which occurred during a music therapeutic encounter. Pam
is someone we came to know well. She became one of the ‘pathway’ case studies
(person-centred case studies) in Gary Ansdell and my Musical Pathways (2016),
the book that reports on a longitudinal, six-year study of community music
making in and around a large urban mental health centre known as SMART, in
Chelsea, London. At the time the encounter occurred (before our research pro-
ject began), Pam was a hospital patient in the mental health unit of Chelsea and
Westminster Hospital. The music therapist Gary Ansdell described the encounter
as follows (the description is taken from a video tape made of the event):
Pam hits the xylophone hard with the beaters and throws them towards the piano,
which they hit, causing the piano strings to vibrate. She shouts ‘This fucking life!’
and becomes very upset. (The therapist [Gary Ansdell] later finds out that the
outburst was caused by her seeing the letter names on the xylophone spelling out
abusive messages to her from an internal voice). Immediately after the blow-up the
therapist encourages Pam to come to the piano, to sit beside him, and encourages
her back into musical engagement again. She begins playing a few notes on the top
of the piano, which leads into a short piano duet and then into shared singing with
the therapist. Pam takes over the singing herself after a short time (accompanied by
the therapist on the piano), becoming involved and expressive. The music seems to
take her somewhere else. After the music cadences she sighs and says ‘That’s bet-
ter!’ The entire episode has lasted just over four minutes (Ansdell et al. 2010).
In the seemingly brief interval of 4 min as described here, a mental health client
dis-engages abruptly (and somewhat violently) from music and becomes musically
re-engaged in ways that (in her own words) made a change (of mood, respective
statuses, situation and music) for the ‘better’. This transformation or ‘turn’ can be
closely documented. That documentation suggests that the ‘change’ was music-
led, it was collaboratively achieved and it mobilised environmental materials and
music-historical conventions so as to effect ‘change’. As Ansdell et al. put it, that
change resulted from the real time manifestation of ‘communicative musicality’
(see also Kaden 2013 on the many forms of musical communication):
Trevarthen (2002, p. 21) defines communicative musicality as ‘… the dynamic sym-

pathetic state of a human person that allows co-ordinated companionship to arise’.
Such active musical communication happens through the largely non-conscious
mutual negotiation between interacting partners, using three music-like dimensions:
(i) shared timing (through pulse), (ii) shared shaping of the melodic contour, texture
and intensity, and (iii) shared overall narrative form (Ansdell et al. 2010).
It is worth considering in more detail here just how musical culture (existing
conventions, meanings, associations and musical codes) came to be invoked in
ways that made a change for Pam (and Gary). In the 4 min episode just described:
(a) music’s instruments were changed (Pam ‘drops’ the seemingly insidious xylo-
phone,5 distancing herself from it by actually throwing the beaters away from
her—they hit the piano and cause it to sound). After this and part of a (literal
and symbolic) re-orchestration, Ansdell encourages Pam to sit beside him at the
piano which requires and affects …
(b) a physical repositioning (sitting together at the piano and facing the piano rather
than each other). This new positioning has historical resonances back to the
18th century (note the historical resonance and its mobilization here, with or
without Pam’s acknowledgement of it)—the classic ‘four hands at piano’ format
in which, conventionally and as happened here, the male partner sits on the left
side of the keyboard (thus playing the lower pitched notes and, in music thera-
peutic terms, being the one to provide both rhythm and bass, thus in the musical
‘driving seat’). This format change in turn also enabled …
(c) the musical and institutional relationship between therapist and client to be
both literally and figuratively re-positioned as music-instrumental ‘equals’ (both
seated at the biggest, most expensive and most ‘high status’ instrument in the
room), as collaborators and as companions who become engaged in, as Ansdell
puts it, ‘a short piano duet’ and ‘shared singing’/playing and eventually moving
into Pam’s solo, with Ansdell’s accompaniment. Thus, in 4 min of musical time,
moment-by-moment, Pam and Ansdell move away from the crisis of the xylo-
phone and toward increased possibilities of musical companionship (both facing
the keyboard and performing a duet together, both piano and vocal). This trans-
formed relationship in turn leads to …
(d) a narrative account or definition of the situation: When the music comes to a
close (and Ansdell remains silent) Pam sighs and then describes what has happe-
ned and where they are ‘now’. (‘That’s better!’) Her words offer an abbreviated
narrative cap for, or frame around, what went before (the beaters of the xylo-
phone). Those two words (‘that’s better’) project both backward and forward to
collect events into a before-and-after account of what has happened, and what
has been achieved, prioritising events and interpretations. It also takes precedence
over her earlier account or micro-narrative (‘this f*****g world’).
5The xylophone’s broader cultural and historical connotations include images and
eanings associated with death and the supernatural. Musically, its ‘hollow’ timbre is often
m
exploited to create macabre effects, the sound of bones in particular, in, for example, Saint-
Saëns’ Danse Macabre, but also Walt Disney’s 1929 cartoon Skeleton Dance, where the
xylophone being played is the backbone of a ‘live’ skeleton.
122 T. DeNora
Thus, in the space of 4 min Pam has offered two definitions of the situation, at
Time A and at Time B, from one place and set of stances (laden with psychia-
tric implications and roles—Pam’s psychosis, Ansdell’s role as a representative of
the mental hospital) to another ‘better’, and noticeably calmer stance (Pam sighs
before she speaks, they are now in the role of co-musicians). Her second spoken
contribution is explicitly oriented to her first and intended to modify the former.
The situation has been turned around, from a, ‘f*****g world’ to ‘better’, offi-
cially marked by her words but her words have taken shape, been afforded by,
the shape of music that came before. The point being that music, then, in this
case embodied, shared communicative musicking, can cue or elicit alternate nar-
rative or discursive registers and thus offer what Simon Procter has spoken of as
‘proto-social’ resources for ways of being and being together (Procter 2011).
It is worth exploring this notion of ‘proto-sociality’ more closely. In this case,
real time musicking brought into the scene of action a range of affordances and
possibilities for aesthetic relating, for emotional condition and energy levels, for
situation definition, and thus for identity and role relationship. This ‘new place’
and set of stances in turn offered potential action trajectories and resources for the
future—albeit with no guarantee that the newly turned features of interaction and
identity will be replicable. Nonetheless, in the moment, Pam has managed to do
new things and that new experience and new capacity might be brought off again
in other scenes at later times. The point is that in this moment, a new feature of
Pam and Gary’s history has been crafted, and it is one that has important poten-
tial for Pam and her future action opportunities (such as when she will be released
from the mental health unit, when she will no longer require medication linked to
unpleasant side-effects [to which she refers elsewhere]).
Thus, the music (its instrumentalities, its embodied relational stances and
forms of comportment, its format) has ‘acted’. It has acted in concert with other
practices (not least Ansdell’s considerable craft, his long-experience working
with mental health clients and his great familiarity with this client in particular).
The practices by which this musical craft is mobilised and has cleared a space
for situation re-definition are not achieved, and could not have been achieved, by
Pam acting on her own. On the contrary, as should be clear, the materials she was
given to work with were structured and managed by the musically knowing and
‘crafty’ Gary. In this case that structuring was benignant and wellness-meaning;
it was oriented to helping Pam develop musically, to recover from the outburst,
and to find a ‘better’ way of being there, in the real time moments, and of course,
through that tiny change, potentially later in other moments.
Historically speaking, within these 4 min, musical engagement (mobilising
prior conventions, positioning, ways of relating and roles, verbal contributions)
resulted in a ‘better’ situation musically defined (playing entrained, mutually

oriented to conventions, achieving a shared sense of musical closure) and in ways
that ‘made history’. They created a shared history of what (musically and beyond)
these two may achieve and what other things (psychotic moments, words spelled
out by the xylophone) can or might be put behind them. In so doing, the m usical
interaction and its history offered the premise for the narrative cap, the turned
definition of the situation (‘that’s better’). Here, then, it is possible to see a small
example of how musical materials in tandem with musical practices thus come to
afford new situations in ways that direct the course of history—for participants in
these meso structures.6 This musical-verbal-practical spiral can continue and be
‘repeated’ at the time and later at other times. Through repetition, role relation-
ships can continue to be redirected and elaborated. The social is or can be enacted
through and in relation to music.
This 4 min ‘moment’ (from ‘this f*****g life’ to ‘that’s better’) was, of
course, connected to previous moments and, of course, the boundaries around
one moment and another are artificial—they could be bundled in different ways
with different results. Methodologically, the decision to bundle this ‘moment’ as
of 4 min’ duration is linked to Pam’s own remark about what changed over time
(from her first utterance to her second).
This was not Pam’s first encounter, musically speaking, with Gary. When the
two first met, Pam, who had been an active musician before becoming ill, had
smashed her guitar and lost her voice. (Her illness was, among other things, her
loss of capacity as a musician.) When she and Gary first met in the context of
a potential music therapy session, Pam was unable to sing. Unperturbed, Gary
suggested that she whistle instead, and proposed a song they could share, Stephen
Sondheim’s ‘Anyone Can Whistle’. It was not long before her voice returned and
she performed this song at an event in the hospital, one that, for Pam, becomes
emblematic of her recovery.
Much later, and on the strength of her accumulating ‘better’ moments in music
therapy sessions, Pam joins the first-ever group music making session in the com-
munity centre (SMART) opposite the courtyard from the mental health hospital.
In that group musicking, there is much mutual support and a great deal happens
6The music therapy research literature offers many examples of how key or heightened
musical ‘moments’ or events may instigate ‘turning points’ in clients’ medical, psychia-
tric and general wellbeing trajectories. These ‘turning points’ are marked by such things
as ‘the first good sleep’ or ‘the first time the pain did not result in screaming’ (for a striking
example of music and change in pain management, see Edwards 1995).
124 T. DeNora
within the context of a collaboratively performed song (as illustrated in Fig. 1).

Not only does Pam’s voice occasionally appear solo (see bolded font in Fig. 1)
but music is interlaced with talk, with real-time evaluation, with experimentation
and with forms of embodied movement and gesture as these people are making
music together (Schütz 1962).
The index reproduced in Fig. 1 is able to capture only some of the rich detail
involved in SMART musicking. It inevitably simplifies the multi-modal hap-
pening of that event. Within it, and from event to event at SMART music, Pam
can be seen to take varied roles and to experiment with various musical mate-
rials. There, time after time (DeNora 2013b), Pam develops musical ‘form’: she
becomes attached, and attaches herself, to certain songs that become ‘her’ songs,
part of ‘her’ musical territory. She can be seen to do things at Time A that are
brought into the field of action at Time B that gain purchase and ‘act’ within that
setting and again at Time C (see DeNora 2003, 2013b). And indeed, the ways
that she varies her musical interventions (different renditions of the ‘same’ song,
for example) provide clues to Gary about her state of wellbeing (for example,
when she is more fragile, her musical embellishments become greater, her voice
becomes more tentative). In each of these cases, aspects of what, musically/
socially, Pam and her collaborators brought to a previous action are carried over
into future actions, and in ways that allow her/them to assemble and reassemble
music/themselves/their mutual musical/social relations/definitions of situations.
Over time, this assembly work afforded many positive things for Pam: (a)
access to the floor and a chance to perform and receive attention; (b) to develop
musically and as a type of musician (linked to repertoire and identified in certain
ways within SMART); (c) to be occupied in ways that, though they do not ‘cure’
(perhaps because mental illness is not or not only a disease [DeNora 2013a]), cer-
tainly eclipse some of the things that are associated with or produce her ‘illness’
such that, for all practical purposes, Pam is more ‘well’. For Pam, then, music is
part of the way she develops a pathway (or, in Zembylas’ terms, a trajectory) out
of the hospital and away from the features and identity associated with mental
illness. Her narrative is of course not ‘data’ about ‘what music does to her’ but
rather, drama, performance, a part of how she does things to music that in turn,
reflexively, do things to her, as here where she can be seen to perform the music’s
(performative) force ‘over’ her, ‘for’ her (DeNora 2012):
Interviewer: What do you feel after a music therapy session?

Pam: It’s a good feeling … a spiritual feeling … it helps me to concentrate on something,
not to hear silly voices in my head that don’t belong to me. It also helps relax me, and
give me an incentive to come here. It’s so enjoyable!
Musical Paramusical / Background
background chatter + tinkle

of tea-cups...
chatting... [conversation
about selecting this song]
0:10 - few quiet notes of a violin tuning-up
0:12 - female voice (Pam) quickly tries out first
phrase ‘...over the rainbow...’, which overlaps
with... Gary scans front-row
people...
0:14 - piano plays intro to song strongly, pauses....
‘front-row’ participants look
0:20 - Gary sings first line of verse ... When all the
towards Gary for an entry
world is a hopeless jumble...
cue...
0:24 - other voices join him in a jumbly fashion,
peripheral talking audible,
with characterful individual voices emerging in the
someone calls “Dave?”
texture (not a blend); slightly out of pitch and
timing... faint violin in background Gary looks around, gathers
as many people as possible
1:02 - Chorus: Somewhere Over... more voices
through eye contact and head
enter, stronger singing... different registers, but
movement to join the
more focused pitch
chorus...
1:10 - violin audible in texture; shadowing melody
(helping group pitching) + and clarinet providing
counter-melody. Overall texture = thick, messy, more coughs, chair
interesting... scraping...
1:56 - C section: Someday I'll wish upon a star -
violin helps singers pick up phrase...
‘Ooh, Hello there!’ (A
2:18 - Bit of a strain for all voices at the climax, shouts to B – singer to friend
...that's where you'll find me... clarinet covers with just coming in, timing
a little twiddle at end speech in the pause between
two sung phrases)
2:20 - final Somewhere... strong singing, with
clarinet now confidently doing decorative motifs Gary looks up to singers,
between songs, helps bind it together as singers says ‘sing up!’... (they do!)
flag a bit...
2:48 - coda section – If happy little bluebirds fly...
Bobby makes a face at Gary
people don’t know this so exactly, so it goes a bit
& others as if to say ‘What's
messy with pitch and rhythm again. Gary, violin,
this bit?’
clarinet to the rescue with emphatic playing...
People looking towards each
2:50 - ...why oh why can't I... slows down and
other to time final note...
leans into the final phrase – full singing + violin
and clarinet doing flourishes up and down to Clapping, cheers...
embellish the final note...
‘Not bad...’
‘Very good Simon, nice...’
‘Very good Rob!’
Fig. 1  Index of SMART’s first performance of Rainbow

126 T. DeNora
Over a ten-year period, Pam increasingly uses her songs for a variety of purpo-
ses: to show people how she is, to achieve something, to dedicate her thoughts to
other people who are ill; and then one day to indicate her love for Tim, another
Smart member with whom she’s started a relationship. Pam and Tim sing a duet
to show this to others.
Paradoxically, as Pam’s mental health gets more stable, her physical health
declines (perhaps with the impact of 30 years of antipsychotic medication?).
She’s unable to get to the group for three weeks, but decides to do some music
therapy at home for herself and Tim. She gets her guitar out (she’s not told us that
she’s taken this up again) and plays and sings ‘Greensleeves’. She leaves a mes-
sage on the hospital ansaphone telling about this to music therapist Sarah. It turns
out that this is the night she dies. Sarah hears the message the next day: at the
end, Pam is reunited with her guitar. She uses it to sing the lyrics ‘Now farewell,
adieu … I am still thy lover true, Come once again and love me’. Ansdell and I
could be wrong (one often is when stating what one wishes to believe!), but we
understand Pam’s last musical engagement to be a form of knowing and telling
(diagnosis, remedy, prognosis musically mediated?), a statement about healing,
a tribute to music (and music therapy) and a way of presenting that ‘knowledge’
(felt, aesthetic) in and facilitated by musical means.
This minute case study raises many issues about how change (change in well-
being, change in musical orientation, change in the ‘moral career of the mental
patient’, as Goffman called it (1961)) occurs. This isolated event in which things
‘got better’ (then, there) was never a ‘cause’. Change is richer, more messy, more
contingent. It may or may not have come to be connected to anything further, it
may or may not have been continued to hold its form over time and/or space. In
this case, Pam’s musicking accumulates and is an important part of how, over a
decade, she (in concert with others—Gary, Tim, various others involved with her
and with SMART Music) lays down musical tracks (in both senses of the word
‘track’) that steer (mostly, though not always and sometimes with unintended
consequences) away from triggers, symptoms and places associated with being
‘ill’ and toward those associated with wellbeing and with being musical (there
is, however, no simple, uni-directional ‘progress’ though there is an overall trend
toward being musical). This laying down involves a kind of fusing with music
which is a process of metamorphosis: she and the music fuse at the time of music
making and later that process marks her in new ways, lends her new features and
capacities, musical and para.
Those new features include musical skill, musicalized identity (she becomes
or returns to being a musician, a type of musician, associated with certain s tylistic
stances and repertoires) and cultural repertoire more generally and in ways that
are linked to spin-offs (Finnegan 2007), new events, new skills, new r elationships
from the music and changing occupational locations in the collective map of
musical techniques, repertoires, performances and styles within SMART (see
DeNora 2013a, p. 117, Fig. 6.1). For Pam, the spin-offs include network growth
(new friends, acquaintances). They include new musical features within SMART
and elsewhere. They include the attitudes of others (SMART members, music
therapists, researchers, staff at SMART, psychiatrists, members of the public) not
only toward Pam, though of course this is part of it, but toward more abstract
things such as mental illness, its aetiology and treatment, and music therapy and
how to do it or what it is (as reported here, now, in this paper). They also include
the status and reputation of SMART music outside the hospital and SMART
community centre itself as SMART musicians form a choir and a band and begin
to perform semi-professionally in other venues (most recently the band performed
at the 606 Club, under the banner, ‘mad in Chelsea’; see: http://www.606club.
co.uk/606club_Pair/whatson2015/april.html).
These spin-offs also include changed discourses about what counts, in this
‘tiny public’ or small group and its civic engagement (Fine 2012), as ‘beautiful
music’ (see also McCallum 2011)7 and these altered discourses themselves travel
(e.g., through this paper) as they are carried from one location to another. For
example, in the case of Pam’s musicking, her very fragile voice, which under
some circumstances might be labelled ‘weak’ or ‘faltering’, is reconfigured as
‘gossamer’ or ‘delicate’ or ‘vulnerable’ and all the more beautiful for it—and the
music’s beauty in turn is linked tightly with our new/changed awareness of what
mental illness means, does not have to mean, can mean (see Chap. 7 in DeNora
2013).8 What is upheld in the frame of ‘music’ (art) changes our sense of what
7McCallum describes how the ‘voices’ that make up the so-called ‘public sphere’ may
‘come from micro public spheres that are “bottom-up, small scale” public spheres
consisting of maybe “dozens, hundreds or thousands” of people’ (Keane 1998, p. 170,
quoted after McCallum 2011, p. 179).
8As Hennion says in his abstract for the fiftieth anniversary conference at the Viennese
Department of Music Sociology: ‘It is impossible, then, to separate music and its value:
music can only be valued after its effects, it exists as it is praised, loved, sustained. By
no way this implies a psychological reduction of music: subjects are not given any more
than works. Both emerge in an open, never-ending process. Documenting empirically this
process may provide a non-dualistic account of what makes music count’.
128 T. DeNora
there is to know, what there is to love. The identity of the voice, the person, the
illness—all are transfigured by the practices that occur within this world and by
what this world, or way of singing, valuing, operating, can show other worlds in
terms of new aesthetics and new orientations.
In short, a lot has changed in and through Pam’s developing career at SMART.
That change has occurred in 4 min intervals, but also over all the 4 min over at
least six years (i.e., an available total of 3,153,600 min—which is not to prioritise
the minute as an appropriate interval!). Pam’s changing musicking over time is
reflexively linked to SMART’s changing musicking (and its own changing musi-
cal identity as the SMART musical space expands and grows more complex).
These identities are mutually constitutive and they highlight identity as musically
mediated and as emerging in relation to musical practice. Music’s creation, in
other words, in terms of how it operates, what it requires and what it comes to be
attached to, also creates types of people and people as persons with entitlements,
opportunities and capacities. And in this respect, it creates relational classification
schemes for types and differences, for relational identity. I will say slightly more
about music and identity now, specifically in relation to capacity and wellbeing
and in a manner that will push it on into embodiment and feeling.
A very wide swathe of work in music sociology has focussed on identities
in and through music (MacDonald et al. 2017). Many music sociologists have
contributed to this area. It spans considerations of individual identities and their
recognition (DeNora 1995, 2000) to collective identities and their connection
to forms of collective action in the contexts of social movements (Roy 2012)
to urban settings and scenes (Bennett 2004) to religious identities and forms of
worship (Wuthnow 2003) to literally competing ways of performing musicianship
(McCormick 2015). This work has shown us how music can provide an exemplar
or model for thinking about future action, and how it can galvanize groups to act
and to think self-consciously about themselves as a group.
We have seen, through the case of Pam, how people become different kinds of
people through the ways that they become music-human hybrids, from the ways
they attach themselves to music. What is equally interesting is how identities, and
types of people and the opportunities open to them can be enhanced and diminis-
hed through musical practices (see Buscatto 2011). This recent focus on m usical
identities has been especially important in relation to forms of (dis)ability, the
social allocation of praise and valuation and forms of social inclusion and even
recognition as a person can be realized through musical means.
For example, I have written about how the kinds of keyboard performance
practices that Beethoven’s concertos required and celebrated undermined embo-
died notions of feminine decorum (women in music were not meant to huff and
puff, to be overly energetic or to otherwise show their bodies in motion) and

thus edged women further away from the centre-stage of piano life in public as
Beethoven’s works became increasingly prestigious and central in the repertoire.
Musical activity, in other words, whether production or consumption, can
reposition people in relation to other people and can rearrange people, and types
of people, hierarchically.
As Antoine Hennion has shown (2007), it is possible to follow people (such
as Pam) as they attach themselves to music and, simultaneously, configure that
music so that it facilitates both their attachment and themselves as selves. Once
again we see how the musical object, its meanings, the so-called ‘music itself’
and what the musician/composer ‘stands for’ is only completed through these
practices such that any given work, or musician, takes on many and sometimes
contradictory hues of meaning as it comes to be attached to people and situations.
Consider the love of the music of J. S. Bach, for example. Hennion and Joel
Marie Fauquet have shown us how the ‘glory’ of Bach is an historical cons-
truction (2000, 2001), following the ways in which different actors appro-
priate ‘Bach’ for different purposes. So too do choral singers, as Singrun Lilja
Einarsdottir (2012) has described in her research with a Bach choir. For these sin-
gers, Bach and Bach’s music carry myriad connotations and in ways that allow
these singers to use Bach the man, and Bach’s music, as a kind of magic mirror
within which to see, and develop, themselves:
[I]t’s probably me projecting from my scientific background but he seems very logi-
cal music, everything precise, everything fits in the right place so project that about
his personality. I think a lot about this … (Irene) (Einarsdottir 2012, p. 177).
I would say first and foremost that he was a Christian and that is something that I
connect to because I am too and I think that it comes across very strongly and not
composers of his era who were composing masses and masses and other religious
stuff where I would say believers really are doing it as a job. But I would say that
his belief comes across very strongly in in the way the music is written—passion
of course which is important to be honest and so—I would think he was somebody
who had a passion about his music—as well as passion about his faith (Catherine)
(ibid., p. 179).
A good deal of the research on musical identity focuses on how individuals gain
identity and self-identity through or in music and how that identity can be linked
to social boundaries. While much of this work is concerned with socio-economic
status or with lifestyle, there are other important strands that this research theme
130 T. DeNora
addresses that highlight the ways musical arrangements can minimize difference
and further social inclusion.
For example, in her study of a singing group for people with dementia and
their carers, Mariko Hara has shown how, with careful crafting of musical events
and careful choice of repertoire, it becomes difficult, during music making, to
distinguish between people with dementia, their carers, friends and family mem-
bers, and singing group volunteers. Musical activity redistributes salient characte-
ristics of identity such that difference based on ‘having dementia’ is temporarily
invisible and irrelevant while the similarity of engaging in musical activity is
foregrounded.
So, too, with Pam discussed above: increasingly, Pam became more of a musi-
cian, less of a mental health client. Staff at SMART often described how, once
SMART music began, they found themselves re-evaluating individuals and the
SMART venue itself against the emerging musical ground—seeing individual
clients less as vulnerable or ‘ill’ and more in terms of musical abilities, musical
persona and repertoire; seeing the organization increasingly as the stage upon
which all this musicking occurred. (The very rich theme of how musical practice
can allay social and political, in part because of activity in common over time, in
part because of how that activity provides a new foil against which to understand
other and self, has been explored in recent studies of music and conflict trans-
formation; see e.g., Bergh 2011; Bergh and Sloboda 2010 and Robertson 2011).
The organization itself became musicalized and increasingly prioritized musi-
cal activity. This musicality not only affected how people perceived each other,
however. It went more deeply than that; it also got, as it were, under the skin of
SMART participants, into their feeling forms and embodiment at SMART during
music and in between music and this is the final topic of this paper.
There was a time when sociology had discovered ‘the’ body. More recently,
sociological focus has shifted to a more open-ended, less presumptive concept,
namely, embodiment. The latter term calls attention to how there is no ‘one’
human body but rather a set of materials that are more plastic, subject to being
moulded and changed in and through cultural practice. On this topic, music
sociology has excelled. Music sociologists have shown us, for example, how
music can be understood as a prosthetic body technology—enabling people to do
physically what they could not do without becoming attached to music in cer-
tain ways (forms of movement, endurance, even styles of bodily conduct (DeNora
2000). So too, music sociologists have taught us about how music ‘gets into’
embodied orientation and is thus part of what creates the interaction order. In
his work on cosmopolitics, Motti Regev describes how engaging with music is
linked to embodied style and stances, how it organizes people’s embodied styles
and stances through ‘sonic idioms’. The various members of SMART could fre-
quently be seen to organize themselves in relation to sonic idioms—in Pam’s
case, her idiomatic ‘fragile’ voice (high pitched, occasionally breaking or hal-
ting, quiet) and her relatively demure stance while performing a solo (no wide
gestures, no attempt to move to a rhythm). Other participants’ bodies held on to
music’s parameters in other ways, for example, Robbie’s ‘blues-type’ posture
(slightly hunched forward) and his ‘cool jazz’ voice (low, relaxed vocal chords,
slowly paced, downward inflected) when announcing his next number in solo
performance.
But music not only leaves its traces on and in bodies in ways that help us to
identify others, and ourselves. Music can also remediate embodied experien-
ces, even deep experiences and sensations, and recent work in music sociology
has helped to develop this theme. For example, interdisciplinary work in music
therapy, neuroscience and psychoneuroimmunology (Hanser 2010; Fancourt et al.
2014) has developed our understanding of the bio- and neuro-mechanisms by
which music is ‘effective’ in pain management. Research by Kari Batt-Rawden
takes this focus into people’s everyday lives in terms of how music can be unders-
tood to function as a salutogenic medium and as a medium that can be used expli-
citly to manage pain. Focused on the day-to-day practices and lay expertise of her
participants, all of whom were coping with long-term forms of illness, Batt-Raw-
den’s research emphasized music’s role in relation to the alleviation of pain as
a process and set of practices. Music is by no means ‘like a drug’ but rather is a
material that is drawn into pain relieving practice, and thus into social situations
in ways that enable those situations to be transfigured. In this respect, her work
overlaps with a focus in music therapy on music ‘in action’ and on socio-musical
process of making music together. An account by music therapist Jane Edwards
(1995) illustrates this point and helps to highlight ‘health musicking’ as social
practice.
Edwards describes the case of a 12-year old boy, ‘Ivan’, who was recovering
from severe burns. Ivan’s treatment involved an excruciatingly painful process
termed ‘debridement’ (the removal of the dead skin in a bath). Ivan had conti-
nually resisted this therapy (having experienced its pain and thus coming to it
primed to expect pain), and each time the treatment was conducted he had screa-
med and cried. In an attempt to intervene with music, Edwards (acting as medical
music therapist) played guitar and sang to Ivan during the process (improvising
lyrics to one of his favourite songs, ‘I get by with a little help from my friends’).
In relation to this musical environment and musical interaction, Ivan was better
able to endure the treatment (assessed in terms of what he could tolerate during
the procedure and his levels of distress as indicated by such things as his cries).
132 T. DeNora
Moreover, during the treatment it was possible to see Ivan adopting a different
role or identity, that is, shifting out of being a patient in severe pain and shifting
into being a participant (and critic of) a musical performance: he told Edwards at
one stage ‘you are singing beautifully’. After the event, Ivan reported that he had
felt little pain during the actual procedure. Moreover, as the nursing staff later
reported to Edwards, the musical event/musicalized treatment provided a waters-
hed moment in Ivan’s recovery. After it, Ivan slept better, was more willing to
submit to subsequent debridement procedures and more rapidly began to heal.
The story of Ivan and Jane highlights three intertwined ways in which music
can transfigure situations of being in pain. The first two of these seem, at first
glance, to be neurological and biological, though on closer inspection it beco-
mes clear that the neuro-chemical and biological ‘effects’ of music were not in
response to the music per se but were part of something more holistic and more
social.
First, the music provided distraction (we could, if we wished, say that Ivan’s
brain processes were diverted) and in ways that may have triggered dopamine
release. Second, the musical encounter probably helped to reframe Ivan’s antici-
pation of the debridement event. As part of this reframing, to the extent that Ivan
(mind/body) was drawn into engagement with the music, Ivan’s mind/body became
entrained with the music (shifting body postures, blood pressure, heart rate, muscle
tonicity) and in ways that allowed him to relax. Third, these physiological and
neurological functions may have been linked to the ways in which the provision
of music was coupled with other factors that ‘empowered’ the music to work for
Ivan in the two ways just described. For example, Ivan’s relationship with Edwards
was articulated in and through his response to her music (he assumes the role of
music critic, for example, complimenting Edwards on the fact that she was ‘singing
beautifully’). Ivan became part of a musical situation that was greater (but which
encompassed) the debridement situation. In that transfiguration, unpleasant and
frightening features were now to some extent diluted by the new and larger, richer,
more complex, social solution. They were put in musical perspective, pushed just a
bit toward the periphery of what was happening here.
Thus, it is possible to see how, musically contextualized, Ivan became not
only a person in less pain, but a person better able to cope with pain—his iden-
tity was both transformed and enriched in ways that enhanced his agency as a
hospital patient and burn victim. What happened with Ivan was not something
that the music itself ‘caused’. Rather, music was paired with many other factors
that in turn enhanced its utility for pain modification and that this enhancement
had as much to do with the music’s aesthetic and social meanings—and speci-
fically for Ivan—as it did with the fact that it was music per se. Here then we
see music humanly applied and humanly accepted in ways that highlight music’s
mechanisms of operation on behalf of health promotion as involving an intermix
of biology and cultural praxis. Getting out of a situation of pain was simulta-
neously about getting into a situation of shared musical action, and in ways that
shifted pre-reflective (‘warm’) consciousness away from negative sensations. Pain
modification was in other words simultaneously the configuration of self into an
alternative social role, and that configuration involved a shift in or recalibration
of bodily orientation in ways that predisposed Ivan to play the role of ‘strong’
patient during the debridement operation. Music, in other words, is a medium that
can instil courage and with it a different attitude to pain. The physical and the
social, the embodied and the cognitive preparation for action and/or endurance,
are thus intermixed in this example of music’s use in modulating proprioceptive
awareness away from pain. Musicking, in short, creates deep realities. Music can
literally get under our skin. In so doing, and by observing the ‘how’ of this pro-
cess, music sociology can explain in detail what it means to speak of the social
organization of even physical realities understood in terms of how we perceive
and come to know/experience them, even first-hand as forms of sensation. Music
does not ‘cause’ these things (see DeNora and Ansdell 2014) but it is complicit in,
it affords, their manifestation.
4 Songs in Praise of Music Sociology
I have attempted to ‘play the trumpet’ for music sociology because I believe that
our field has been disappointingly ‘under-sung’. Music sociology has shown us
how musical engagement, as a specific type of cultural engagement, as tacit and
aesthetic practice, changes things—it changes moods, definitions of situations,
identities and their recognition, ways of being embodied and experiencing embo-
diment. Music sociology has shown how musicking can prioritise types of people,
it can enhance or diminish differences between people, it can buffer irritants and
deflect the sense of pain and suffering, mental and physical, for individuals, as we
saw with Ivan, and also for collectives, as Trever Hagen (2012) has described in
his work on music in underground culture in Czechoslovakia. Linked to this last
point, but also extending beyond it, music can structure embodiment in often very
deep ways. Music is, in other words, most assuredly a medium of social orde-
ring, a dynamic and powerful ingredient of social life. and music sociology has
documented this point, and therefore offered powerful contributions to sociology
writ large.
134 T. DeNora
Music sociology also shows sociology how and where to look if it is interes-
ted in explaining how culture ‘gets into’ action. Understood as a middle-range,
meso-level form on inquiry focused on practice and on social life, and as a form
of inquiry that can address the ways in which non-verbal and tacit forms of prac-
tice are world-making, music sociology arguably leads the way to a richer unders-
tanding of what holds us together, socially speaking. And music sociology offers
case after case of how things are made ‘in action’, how entities and identities are
not pre-given, fixed or ‘in’ people or things but emerge in and through tempo-
ral practice, process and procedure. In short, the study of what can be done with
music points us to a new way of pursuing sociology’s core questions and one
that follows culture as it gets into action, emotion and perception (the ‘internal’
aspects of sociation) in ways that make our worlds and the realities that are about
them. We should sing about these achievements! I hope our voices will be raised
and heard increasingly further afield and thank the Vienna Institut for helping
conduct us in this project.
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Music Sociology in the GDR: Under
Conditions of Political Dictatorship,
Despite of Political Dictatorship
Christian Kaden
1 History
It is an irony of history that the first academic chair for ‘Musiksoziologie’ was
established in East Berlin: at Humboldt University, in 1948. Two years before,
Walther Vetter had become full professor there and director of the musicological
department. But the political administration in the Soviet-occupied zone did
not trust him; he was even regarded as a ‘bourgeois’ scholar (Meischein 2005).
Therefore, a second chair had to be installed as an ideological counterbalance; it
should be held by a Communist professor, and a member of the SED, the Social
ist Unity Party. The denomination of the chair as ‘Musiksoziologie’ was mislead
ing. In its ‘deep structure’ it aimed at the adoption of Marxism to music; in its
‘surface structure’ it was seemingly (!) open to sociological approaches which
had a long philosophical tradition in Germany. In fact, a candidate for the p osition
was found who had merits in musicological research—but at the same time was a
reliable representative of Stalinist ideology. His name was Ernst Hermann Meyer
(Köster 2004). One of Meyer’s outstanding qualities was the fact that he did
not come directly from East Germany or even from the Soviet Union, but from
England: as a German-Jewish emigrant and a British citizen. In addition, he had
Christian Kaden died before he could revise this text for publication. Our sincere gratitude
goes to Mrs Ingrid Kaden, who allowed us to publish his speech in its version of September
2015.
C. Kaden (*) 
Humboldt-Universität Zu Berlin, Berlin, Deutschland

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22279-6_9
140 C. Kaden
studied with Heinrich Besseler during the twenties (Meyer 1934) and was one of
the leading persons of the Freie Deutsche Kulturbund (Free German Association
of Culture), a political organisation of emigrants in Great Britain.
I would not like to be misunderstood: Meyer was a well-trained historian, and
his book on English Chamber Music (1946) was an example of (let me put it this
way) a decent social history of music. Meyer’s role in the East German scientific
development, however, became a completely opposite one: he had to fight for the
Communist ideology and to affirm Stalinist aesthetics, especially the so-called
‘Theory of Socialist Realism’. Thus the label ‘Musiksoziologie’, I repeat it, was
an element of political deception. What Meyer postulated, as a full professor, was
never free from ideological prejudices and it was never oriented to the priority of
empirical data. It was ruled by Stalinist mysteries. If you read Meyer’s book on
Musik im Zeitgeschehen (Music in the Events of the Day) (1952) you would hesi-
tate to believe that this narrow-minded author was the same person as Meyer, the
excellent connoisseur of English music of the 17th century. Up to 1968, Meyer
was teaching at Humboldt University. I was among his students. I never learned
from him anything about the real social actions and interactions in which music is
involved.1
The described situation was characteristic of the destiny of the social sciences
in East Germany during the first decades after World War II. Sociology, in gen-
eral, was evaluated as Anti-Marxist thinking (GfS 1990). It was highly suspicious.
The Communist Party’s leaders argumentation itself appeared to be sophisticated;
there was no need for an independent ‘sociology’, because a completely devel-
oped general sociology was already available, in Historical Materialism (ibid.,
p. 475). The practical consequences would have been absurd: ‘sociological’ theo-
ries became a triviality. And they were reserved for the celebration of 100-year-
old dogmas, far from empiric reality. Even more, empirical research, in a broader
sense, was incompatible with the ruling Leninist ideology. Consequently, schol-
ars like Karl Popper were denounced as political enemies (Schleifstein 1982).
Inversely, the East European ideologists were the enemies of an open society—
and an open sociology.
But there was one crucial point, contradicting all dogmata: the economy of
East Germany proved to be insufficient. That is why Walter Ulbricht, leader of
the Communist Party during the ’50s and the ’60s, seriously tried to reorganize it,
1Asignificant exception is Meyer’s contribution to a Music History conceived by himself:

Musik in der Urgesellschaft (1977).
Music Sociology in the GDR: Under Conditions … 141
with the help of internationally advanced scientific disciplines. Among them were
cybernetics, general system theory and information theory. Strangely enough (and
no banality at all), Ulbricht followed the advice of competent scientists. One of
them was Erich Apel, the head of the Staatliche Plankommission from 1963 to
1965. He had been working with Wernher von Braun at the Peenemünde Project,
and after the war, he served in the Red Army as a rocket specialist.2 Another lead-
ing scholar was the East Berlin philosopher Georg Klaus. Klaus wrote several
books on self-organizing systems, on semiotics, on data processing and on infor-
mation theory (Klaus 1963, 1964, 1968, 1969). His intention was to modernize
philosophy by implanting elements and methods of natural sciences into Marxist
theory.3 But Ulbricht’s conception was even more ambitious: he wanted to ‘save’
the GDR economy with cybernetics, systemic heuristics and so on. And he strived
for the whole country to become a partner on equal footing with the Soviet
Union, developing its own concepts in political communications with Western
Germany. Remarkably the ‘‘Neue Ökonomische System der Planung und L eitung
der Volkswirtschaft’’ (NÖSPL = New System of Planning and Managing the
Economy) was rather successful for several years (Podewin 2012; Taubert 2013).
Production increased; the standard of living grew step by step. Therefore, it is
more than pure speculation that the way chosen could have improved East Ger-
many’s international position gradually, and to an unpredictable degree. Moscow,
of course, did not like such a policy at all. And finally, Brezhnev decided to ‘kill’
Ulbricht because of his success (Taubert 2013, p. 3). Nevertheless, Ulbricht’s ‘last
idea’, the idea of an effective economic reform, opened the doors for the recep-
tion of modern system theory in East Germany, and even in Eastern Europe gen-
erally. This theory was adopted not only by technical and biological disciplines,
but also by social sciences and the humanities, particularly psychology, linguis-
tics and anthropology.
Just in this context, the role of sociology was reconsidered: as an auxiliary
discipline of acquiring social data, which could support the new economy of
Ulbricht’s time. And exactly this reconsideration implied the chance of working
2Erich Apel, cf. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Apel. It was a symptom of the serious-

ness of his thinking that he committed suicide when the failure of his policy became evident.
3Today some ‘left-wing’ thinkers tend to evaluate Klaus’ activities as ‘verborgene Theorie-
Revolution’, or even as a ‘Revolution von oben’ (http://www.helle-panke.de/topic/3.html?

id=1729). Of course this perspective is naive. The ‘import’ of cybernetics, nevertheless,
was a breakthrough in Marxist thinking, and one element to overcome it in its fundaments.
142 C. Kaden
out an independent, or at least a rather original, profile of sociology itself

(Bollhagen 1966). Let me repeat this: a canon of sociological theorems valid
for the GDR in general did not exist, apart from Historical Materialism. But this
situation was helpful for establishing several ‘special sociologies’. Rather early,
a sociology of medicine rose (Winter 1973; Zimmermann 2002); the same was
the case with a sociology of education (Meier 1974). One of the first surveys
of the discipline was undertaken by scholars specialized in industrial sociology
(Aßmann and Stollberg 1977). And some pioneering texts in music sociology go
back even to the end of the ’60s (Niemann 1968, 1974; Kaden 1969). These soci-
ologies defined themselves, more or less, as niches. At the same time, they were
islands for explicitly positive theories and explicitly positive empirical research.
But then Ulbricht’s power was taken over by Erich Honecker. One of his first
‘achievements’ was the destruction of the new economy and the installation of his
own ‘Wirtschafts- und Sozialpolitik’ (economic and social politics) (Taubert 2013,
p. 4). These politics were not at all original; its ‘popular’ basis consisted of stim
ulating consumer behaviour by low prices and a lot of subventions. On the other
hand, chronic deficits grew, above all the lasting lack of foreign currencies; this
was compensated by a brutal body trade with political prisoners for more than
twenty years (Diekmann 2012). And: general system theory was out overnight, at
least officially. In social practice, and in scientific practice, there existed different
scenarios. In too many disciplines, cybernetics had become deeply rooted since the
60s—mentally, but also in technical equipments. Consequently, many scientists
solved the problem with the help of a verbal masquerade. They did not use the
word ‘system’, but they continued their research in cybernetic structures. This was
the case in cognitive psychology and in social psychology. The same happened in
advanced linguistics which practiced structuralism—although Claude Lévi-Strauss
and his combatants were personae non gratae. Similar developments took place in
musicology—because of two events, one of which was a political sensation.
The sensation first: Georg Knepler, the leading music historian of East Berlin
and Humboldt University (Knepler 1961), had protested against the occupation of
Czechoslovakia by the Red Army in summer 1968. Immediately he was punished
by the ruling party and ‘fired’. Officially, he was said to have gone to pension
(and Knepler himself celebrated the decision as his own choice). In fact, he was
compelled to do so. His successor, Heinz Alfred Brockhaus, even ordered him to
stay away from the Musicological Institute of Humboldt University in general.4
4According to Gerd Rienäcker.

Knepler however—and this was a new quality in the Stalinist tradition—did not
give up. He prepared a new book on the evolution of music in the process of
anthropogenesis. The result was a Marxist draft of an anthropology of art and of
aesthetic behaviour, comparable to the best writings of Helmuth Plessner (1982).
The book was published under the title Geschichte als Weg zum Musikverständ-
nis (History as the Way to Music Comprehension) (Knepler 1977), and its main
provocation was the thesis that music history had its roots in the history of animal
behaviour.
At first glance this approach seems to be naïve, but it was not a work of
Knepler’s individual inspiration. It came up in comprehensive discussions with
leading representatives of respective sciences. One could say that Knepler, being
a member of the GDR Academy of Sciences, organized a network of private or
semi-official contacts which helped him to consolidate his own thoughts. This
type of interdisciplinary communication was essentially new for musicology, in
the East and the West, because of its open character. Knepler established a dia-
logue based on the ideals of Wilhelm von Humboldt: scientists met each other
as independent, free individuals, motivated by their interests in the subject of
research—and not at all driven by personal competition. Paradoxically, this pro-
ject was realized without any remarkable economic fundament. Interdisciplinary
discourse, under the circumstances described, proved to be extremely cheap.
No wonder, that the GDR secret service, the Staatssicherheitsdienst (‘Stasi’),
became aware of this ‘organization’. They called it the ‘K-group’ (Knepler-
Gruppe). Directly denounced by name were the following persons5: Harry
Goldschmidt, Jürgen Mainka, Günter Mayer, Hans Gunter Hoke, Reiner Kluge,
Christian Kaden, Frank Schneider, Erich Stockmann, Doris Stockmann and Klaus
Mehner. The summary of the spy reads in German: ‘Prüfen, ob man K. aus der
5‘Information betr.: Prof. em. Dr. phil. Georg Knepler insbesondere über das Verhalten, die
Entwicklung und die vermutliche Taktik einer direkt von K. angeleiteten/gesteuerten/organ-
isierten Gruppe von Musikwissenschaftlern in der DDR, insbesondere in Berlin [Informa-
tion regarding Prof. em. Dr. phil. Georg Knepler, particularly on actions, development and
presumable tactics of a group of musicologists directly led/controlled/organized by K.]’
In: BStU, ZA, MfS AIM 4952/89 Teil II, Bd. 1, Bl. 14–18. 13. 05. 1980. The document
was written by IM JOHN (=Heinz Alfred Brockhaus) and discovered and published by
Klingberg, Lars: ‘IMS “John” und Schostakowitsch. Zur Stasi-Karriere von Heinz Alfred
Brockhaus [Agent “John” and Shostakovich. On Heinz Alfred Brockhausʼ secret service
career]’. In: Musikgeschichte in Mittel- und Osteuropa, Heft 7 (2000), pp. 82–116 (the
document cited, pp. 106–110). ‘IMS’ is short for ‘informeller Mitarbeiter für Sicherheit
(‘informal security contributor’, i.e. agent).
144 C. Kaden
angemaßten Führungsfunktion verdrängen kann; verhindern, daß die genannten

Leute seiner Gruppe Führungsfunktionen beibehalten oder übernehmen oder
zu Prof. ernannt werden’.6 In the cases of Hoke, Kaden, Doris Stockmann and
Mehner, these ‘Maßnahme’ (measures) became reality. Up to the decay of the
GDR, none of the persons mentioned was appointed to a professorship.
But this circumstance was, if you ask me, not at all a tragic one. As you have
noticed, music sociology and ethnomusicology were well represented in the
K-group. I personally had the opportunity to participate in several broadcast dis-
cussions of such a high standard that Carl Dahlhaus regularly listened to these
talks.7 The most prominent members were, besides Knepler:
1. Günter Tembrock, a renowned biologist who was an expert in the acous-

tic communications of animals (Tembrock 1971, 1976, 1978); with his help,
I became familiar with the mechanisms of ‘affine’ and ‘diffuge’ structures in
music, and with analysing acoustic signals by means of diversity measures.
2. Manfred Bierwisch, the most prominent linguist of the GDR and a master of
‘hidden’ structuralism in the East German scene. His treatise on ‘Musik und
Sprache’ (Music and Language) (Bierwisch 1979) became famous for adopt-
ing Ludwig Wittgenstein’s dichotomy of ‘Sagen und Zeigen’, telling and
showing, to artistic communication, with music as a system of ‘Zeigen’ (show-
ing), of gestural meaning.
3. Friedhart Klix, director of the Psychological Institute at Humboldt Univer-
sity. If I remember correctly, he was president of the International Union of
Psychological Sciences (IUPsS) from 1980 to 1984, as the first German after
the Second World War. His book on ‘Information und Verhalten’ (Information
and Behaviour) (Klix 1971, 1985) was a breakthrough in the application of
mathematical information theory to a discipline of the humanities. The dis-
cussions with him were focussed on the problem of music being a system of
concepts. Klix’s wise proposal was to respect not only ‘sharp’, well-defined
categories, but also ‘weak’ terms, weak concepts overlapping with other
categories.
6‘Check whether K. can be blocked from his arrogated leading position; prevent the named
people of his group from keeping or assuming leading positions or from being appointed to
professorships’.
7I am speaking about the ‘Radio DDR Musikklub’, which was broadcasted by Radio DDR
II and mostly presented by Dieter Boeck.

I am not going to underestimate my own contribution to these discussions, direct-

ing them to concrete aspects of historically specific music (Kaden 1977, 1981).
But I am extremely thankful that I got the chance to take part in the discourse,
face to face. And insofar as I developed a theory of musical communication dur-
ing those years—it became the fundament of my book, Musiksoziologie (Kaden
1984)—it seems clear that the inspirations from colleagues in disciplines ‘far
from musicology’ were responsible for the open horizon of my own conception.
The second aforementioned event was a more academic one, but nevertheless
it was another breakthrough in the history of musicology. Going back to Guido
Adler’s differentiation of historical and systematic musicology (Adler 1885), a
new understanding just of systematic musicology was proposed. The author of
this draft was Reiner Kluge. He had been qualified as a sound engineer, then he
had studied mathematics and, at the same time, musicology. Knepler regarded
him as the most promising young scholar to overcome the gap between natural
sciences and the humanities. In fact, Kluge’s argumentation was highly attrac-
tive: systematic musicology, in his opinion, should not be defined as a logical
complement of music history but as a discipline with a specific perspective. For
this purpose, he understood the word ‘systematisch’ in the sense of ‘systemic’,
concerning the qualities of self-organizing systems. Kluge, who had been work-
ing in the management of the computer centre at Humboldt University for sev-
eral years, was among the pioneers of cyber science, installed by Ulbricht and
damned by Honecker. He was simply going to continue scientific developments
which he thought to be useful. Exactly in this way he propagated a deep innova-
tion of musicology, concerning its organization and division of labour. And above
all, the traditional dichotomy between historical and systematic thinking became
completely meaningless—since history, or evolution, is an inevitable quality of
material systems (Lange 1969).
Kluge unfolded his idea in a comprehensive article in 1977 (Kluge 1977,
1980). However, his special merit was that he succeeded in institutionalizing the
approach for research projects at Humboldt University and for curricula valid at
all universities of the GDR. Thus, Kluge founded an interdisciplinary team of
young Berlin scientists: with himself as a specialist in acoustics, statistics and
computer assisted musical analysis (ibid., 1974); with a psychologist, Michael
Cienskowski, who was educated at the Klix institute and who tried to introduce
concepts of Gestaltpsychologie into musical analysis (Cienskowski 1985); with
Helga Thierbach, who was a pioneer in transferring questions from neurosci-
ence to musicology (Thierbach 1988); and last but not least, with me, engaged in
music sociology of a new type.
146 C. Kaden
By the way, my position on the team was a little bit strange. Because there did
not exist any sociological curriculum during the time of my studies (from 1965
to 1969), I could not have studied sociology at all (Wollmann 2010). Indeed, I
was a specialist in ethnomusicology, and I had had four years of anthropologi-
cal training at Humboldt University. My academic teacher there, Frederick G. G.
Rose, was an Englishman, member of the Conservative Party (because his father
had bought him a lifelong membership) and at the same time member of the Aus-
tralian Communist Party. He had been living as a meteorologist and ethnologist
among the aborigines of Groote Eylandt (Rose 1960; Munt 2011) and as far as
he professed communist ideology, his career was repressed and he had to emi-
grate from Australia to the GDR during the ’50s. He was the first professor who
confronted me with the professional standards of field research, the collection
and interpretation of empirical data, with statistics and with modelling family
systems, practically spoken: with structuralism in its outlines. My dissertation on
shepherd signals in the GDR mountains, in Thuringia and the Harz region, was
nothing more than such a field work in a seemingly well-known country, with
seemingly well-known ‘aborigines’ (Kaden 1977, 1981),8 and it produced the
documentation of a culture which quickly died out. For me, it was a first step
in modelling communication systems between human partners, but also between
the shepherds and their animals. Knepler regarded the project as essential for the
investigation of relations between music and labour, and for music in daily life.
I finished the work in 1972 with the receipt of my PhD.
But there were severe difficulties in getting a job as an ethnomusicologist in
the GDR. Trying to do fieldwork in Africa, or Asia or South America had political
risks. Due to the absence of any financing from independent foundations, a young
scientist would have been confronted with the danger of sharing auxiliary projects
8The subject was proposed by Erich Stockmann and, following his advice, by Georg
nepler. In this context I should note the spectacular circumstance that I received in the
K
opportunity for ‘private’ studies with Doris Stockmann and Erich Stockmann at the
renowned Institut für Deutsche Volkskunde at the GDR Academy of Sciences for several
years. Doris and Erich trained me comprehensively for ethnomusicological research: in the
ory and method, problems of transcription and even in Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism, in the
basics of information theory and its first applications to musicology (Stockmann, D. 1970,
1976; Stockmann, E. 1964). To this day, I remember these contacts as the results of an
unforgettable scientific friendship. In the mid-’80s, after having been elected president of
the ICTM, Erich Stockmann became a kind of cultural diplomat with permanent access to
the GDR ministry of culture, and, as I felt it, too much familiarity with the ruling adminis-
trations. That is why our ways separated.
in countries with a communist inclination—and to be misused as a scout or even

a spy. From the beginning of my career, I decided that I would never accept such
a risk, and never becoming a member of the Communist party or its secret ser-
vice. That’s why I worked from 1972 to 1973 as a dramaturge for opera, musi-
cals and dancing at the Landestheater Halle.9 And when Kluge called me back to
Berlin,10 I was asked for the first time in my life if I dared to treat music sociol-
ogy as part of his team. It was a long way to Tipperary.
Rather quickly, I tried to define what music sociology could be in a rational
sense. I concentrated on three fundaments of research:
1. The professional use of empirical methods and the formulation of theories or

hypotheses which have to be falsified or verified (Popper’s demands);
2. An extension of empirical studies from actual to historical research (in this
respect, I was influenced by Georg Knepler, but also by Kurt Blaukopf (1982)
in whose works I never noticed any gap between history and sociology);
3. A striving for comparative, and for intercultural perspectives, thus validating
the findings in European cultures against the background of world-wide pro-
cesses of enculturation and socialisation.
Once more: this concept, vaulted by Kluge’s systemic approach, was thought of
as an interdisciplinary structure. And perhaps one question from Knepler—it was
a joke—characterized the intentions correctly: Knepler asked me, ‘Christian, do
you think that music sociology should be something like a holding company of
musicology?’ My answer was: ‘No, as far as you are thinking of the hierarchical
position of a holding, for instance as the mother of other sciences. But yes, if
you consider the holistic character of music sociology, bringing together what the
division of labour in musicology had separated’. In German words, I pleaded for
Musiksoziologie als ganze Musikwissenschaft. Some years later, I found a simi-
lar argumentation in Ulrich Beck’s book on Risikogesellschaft (Risk Society)
(1992 [1986]). Beck advised a reconstruction of sciences, and of scientific meth-
odology. He accentuated the fact that there was always an essential need for spe-
cialists engaged in special objects and special fields of reality. But he added that
we also need specialists for relations and connections (ibid., p. 295). It is such a
9Even this was only possible with the help of a generous colleague: Gerd Rienäcker. He left
the position in Halle to me, although he was interested in it himself.
10It is a special point of irony that this call was officially realized by Brockhaus, Knepler’s
intimate ‘enemy’.
148 C. Kaden
p erspective in which I see music sociology up to the present day. And it was this
perspective which encouraged me to develop a theory of musical communication,
already under the conditions of a non-communicative Communist society.
2 Theory
Whether music is a system of communication remains an open question up to the

present day. Marxists tend toward a clear answer: as art in general had to reflect
reality (Kagan 1969; Kuczynski and Heise 1975) in a more or less iconic way,
these icons and expressive gestures were able to be transported from one person
to another, from a composer (or a performer) to a listener. Thus, the model of
Shannon, Claude (1976) which implied a transfer of information between sender
and receiver could easily be implemented into the Marxist Abbild-Theorie, the
so-called reflection theory. At the same time, this theory was focused on referen-
tial meaning, on relations from musical to non-musical parts of reality.
This well-known conception was criticized by the Berlin K-group in its basic
elements. At first, it was Knepler himself who argued that musical meaning
was no monolithic complex at all, but an interaction of various kinds of seman-
tic elements and different types of information processing. One sort of elements
he called ‘biogenic’ (Knepler 1977, p. 582), corresponding to body motion and
rhythmic structures, essentially controlled by the human motor system and the
motor mind. In Peirce’s terminology, these elements would correlate to indices
or symptoms. Another kind of meaning, according to Knepler, was established by
‘logogenic’ (ibid., p. 587) elements, which were related to the genesis of language
and to cortical structures of mind. In conclusion, Knepler postulated different
procedures of ‘Semantisierung’ (semanticizing) (ibid., p. 98 f.) which relied on
specific mental and social functions, and on specific needs of human evolution,
which is to say history.
A second idea, from Friedhart Klix, became crucial for my own semiotic
thinking. Klix demonstrated that already the recognition of an object and its clas-
sification involved the production of meaning. To learn that an acoustic event
was a tone, or a tune, or simply just noise, that a man was a man, a girl was a
girl, etc. implied the discovery of a world of things, persons and events which are
relevant to human beings—but not necessarily in a referential way (Klix 1971,
p. 547). That is why I characterised such non-referential meaning as ‘classifica-
tory meaning’ (Kaden 1998). Essential for classification is the fact that a thing, a
person, etc., is belonging to a class of similar events—and not that the respected
elements are representing other entities, subordinated to them. Connections to the

case of operative meaning (which had already been important for Georg Klaus;
cf. Klaus 1965, p. 133) or to Leonhard B. Meyer’s ‘embodied’ meaning are evi-
dent (Meyer 1956). In my book on Musiksoziologie, the type of ‘classificatory
meaning’ was unfolded as an explanatory model of Eduard Hanslick’s aesthet-
ics and his preference for ‘tönend bewegte Formen’ (sounding and moved/moving
forms), for the operative moving of formal elements (Kaden 1984, pp. 166–169).
A third idea was introduced to the discourse by me when I was confronted
with Niklas Luhmann’s theory of communication. Luhmann generally refutes
Shannon’s channel scheme, proving that there is no technical way at all to trans-
port information from the sender to the perceiver. The ‘correct’ description had
to respect an autopoietic construction of meaning by the sender in confrontation
with another autopoiesis on the side of the listener (Luhmann 1987, pp. 192–
241). This involves not a transfer of meaning but—as I would put it—some
resonance of correlating semiotic systems the criterion of which is a successful
consecution of behaviour ‘(Anschlußverhalten’), as Luhmann says (ibid., p. 199).
When I first became acquainted with this theory, I was convinced that the
classical models of information processing should be revised—and replaced by
Luhmann’s insights. But when I thought it over practically, and with the experi-
ence of an anthropologist, I found out that it would be extremely complicated to
live with and under the Luhmann condition—and that it was so ‘bureaucratic’ that a
human being would be completely discouraged from acting at all. Luhmann’s com-
plexity, in sum, seems to be true, but most people do not behave like this. There-
fore, I made the following proposal: a sociology of music which is interested in
people’s actions and motivations should consider communicative concepts not only
from a logical perspective (as Luhmann does) but from a pragmatic perspective (as
an ethnologist would be inclined to do). For example, during the second half of
the 18th century, there existed a consensus that music could be ‘physically’ trans-
ported from one person to another, face to face, or in German words: ‘von Herz zu
Herzen’, from heart to heart. Robert Schumann was even convinced that music was
based on streams of magnetism. Luhmann would say that these conceptions were
‘wrong’ and nothing more than an illusion. But at the same time, we know that peo-
ple of the 18th and 19th centuries were organizing their behaviour exactly corre-
sponding to the perspectives described. They did it from their native point of view.
This category of a native perspective, which Bronislaw Malinowski introduced
to ethnology (1953), could be a methodological issue of music sociology, too, in
the sense of a historical anthropology or a cultural anthropology which takes seri-
ously the phantasies, the norms, the beliefs, the social rules of the culture inves-
tigated. This does not necessarily prevent the sociologist from commenting on
150 C. Kaden
the native perspectives from the experiences of his or her own perspective. What
should happen in music sociology is a dialogue between scientist and native—
also in history, because persons who have died need not to be mute. Sources
objectified by them enable the scholar to reconstruct a real contact (Kaden 2009).
It is the same problem as in ethnological studies: to bridge the gap between emic
and etic meanings, between OUR culture and THEIR culture (Noetzel 1993).
During the last three decades, I have been working out these ideas. In my 1984
book, Musiksoziologie, I tried to outline a first summary. Today, I think it neces-
sary to distinguish between at least three types of communication which play a
significant role in communication history.
1. Linear Communication
This type corresponds directly with Shannon’s scheme of sender, channel (or
medium) and receiver. Sociologically, it is based on the assumption that part-
ners in communication have vital contact with each other, and that this personal
contact is regulating the behaviour of the partners involved. Of course, the ele-
mentary chain of two partners may be extended by more complicated networks
of mediation, but the structural ideal is nevertheless a confident communication
from man to man, from individual to individual, by encoding meaning, by decod-
ing meaning and by giving feedback.
2. Concentric Communication
The priority of this structure is the focus on things which are circulating between
individuals, not the focus on persons themselves. Already in primitive cultures
we find such orientations: in the practice of silent trade (Grierson 1981 [1903]).
People of tribe A go to the rain forest, laying down some goods at a well-defined
place, then they disappear. Meanwhile, members of tribe B have reached the
meeting point and offer their goods, laying them beside the goods of A. As soon
as the people of tribe B have retired, the people of tribe A come back and (if they
are content with the offer) take the goods of B. The exchange is completed when
people B in their turn accept the goods of A. Consequently, there is a clear rela-
tion between the tribes A and B, following explicit norms. But the members of
the tribes never meet personally and they do not speak to each other. Commu-
nication is ruled by compatible behaviour concerning the exchange of goods in
the ‘middle’ of the social structure. This very concentration on things, and not on
the personal qualities of the communicators, seems to be the deeper essence of
the capitalist distribution of commodities, too. Marx referred to this process with
the term Verdinglichung (reification). In music, reification has become s ignificant
since the 16th century, with a special accent in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The aesthetics of works, and not of musical actions; the scientific interest in writ-
ten objects or in taped acoustic events; the praise of an opus perfectum et absolu-
tum (absolved from the musician, absolved from the musician’s spirit): all of these
are driven by a kind of religious belief in the stability of things which are able to
conquer death (Kaden 2004, p. 202; 1984, p. 238). As far as the predominant rule
in the classical concert hall, at least on the part of the public, is silent devotion in
face of the masterpiece performed, musical communication is estranged as well. It
is ruled by a medium—similar to commodities in the economic era.
3. Participant Communication
This type seems to be essential for ritual and ceremonial cultures. Cum grano
salis participant communication is the structural inversion of concentric com-
munication, or vice versa. The focus is not music itself, in a centripetal move-
ment of perception. It is the world as the totality to which music is related, in a
centrifugal manner. The best description of this structure was given by Jacobus
Leodiensis (James of Liege), who postulated: ‘musica ad omnia extendere se
videtur’ (Leodiensis 1955–1973). That means: ‘music’—in its proportions, in its
sound values, and even in its liturgical functions—may be understood as a bridge
to God, or a bridge to the universe. When the clerics in medieval times sang the
chant, obviously a relation to the community of lays in the nave of a church was
established. But this relation only secondarily indicated a linear type of com-
munication. A model that better fits the circumstances described is the model of
participation: of participation in a common worship. Again, we can define com-
munication as a set of compatible behaviours between different persons whose
attention is directed to a tertium comparationis: the tertium of the universe. Thus,
the sentence of Boethius becomes clear: that instrumental music should be consid-
ered as an exemplification, and as an explanation, of heaven—in Latin, as ordinis
distinctionisque caelestis exemplar (Boethius 1867). This exemplification, how-
ever, was never a simple act of speculation, but of musical practice. Imagine the
famous organa at Notre Dame of Paris around 1200 (Wright 1989). The singers—
two for the chant voice, one for the duplum, one for the triplum and if neces-
sary, one for the quadruplum—were clerics. They were paid for their singing,
and their attention was attracted by a sophisticated counterpoint which they had
to produce, but these aspects were, in a holistic sight, rather marginal. No orga-
num was considered as an opus perfectum, although one of its composers, Peter
or Pierre, must have been publicly prominent, as we learn from his nickname
Perotin (Little Pierre) (Flotzinger 2000). On the contrary, the organs were under-
stood as sounding actions, as an active praise of God. Similarly, the inside of a
cathedral, from the native’s point of view, did not symbolize Heavenly Jerusalem:
152 C. Kaden
it was the p aradise, in Paris, in Soissons, in Reims (Simson 1956). Musical sounds
were parts of a theological system—as were the columns, the vault, the stained-
glass windows, the light. And listening to music was not confined to the use of
ears; at the same time, the eyes had to be opened, and even the noses for smelling
the incense. The complete mechanism is explained by Roger Bacon, a philosopher
of the second half of the 13th century, in his Opus tertium, namely: ‘Ut completa
delectatio habeatur, non solum auditus sed visus’ (Bacon 1859, p. 232). Music
was thought to be in a systemic connection with other kinds of behaviour. And
it seems to me that medieval musicians as well as medieval listeners were never
musicians and listeners alone but complete human beings, complete gentlemen:
with lifted spirituality, lifted sensuality, as participants of a transcendent life.
Perhaps you have noticed that the categories proposed are no meagre abstrac-
tions but are loaded with historical reality. In my book, Musiksoziologie (Kaden
1984, pp. 140–170), and more up to date in an article for the Routledge Hand-
book of Communication History (Kaden 2013), I have tried to demonstrate that
the very historical development of communication is a change of systems, a
change of interactive structures.
I will refer to one last example: to the deep transformation of a prominent pub-
lic genre around 1750, i.e. the genre of oratorio. Generated in parallel to opera at
the beginning of the 17th century, it is a good paradigm for what I call ‘epic com-
munication’ because its essence and function is to narrate. There are even special
singers who are nothing else but storytellers; in the Italian tradition, their name is
testo; in the Protestant passion, they are equal to the evangelist. It is completely
clear that the person of the singer is different from the narrated figure or from the
narration itself. This ‘doubling’—as Brecht would have said—even became rel-
evant for the genuine opera seria: The actor played a dramatis persona, a figure
of the drama. At the same time, he got the opportunity for some self-presentation
as a musician. The type of the air, significant for opera and oratorio, material-
izes this duplication in the da capo-structure A1–B–A2; that means as a musical
form. A1 is reserved for the affects of the dramatic person, A2 for the roulades,
the thrills, the bel canto of the artist. Two different personal identities!
It is fascinating that all of the theatre reforms, and equally all the opera
reforms, in the middle of the 18th century explicitly negated such an epic struc-
ture of doubling. You might remember the postulates of David Garrick, Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, Ranieri de’Calzabigi and last but not least Christoph Willibald
Gluck Particularly in the latter’s Orpheus, the refutation of duplication became an
aesthetic law. The actor playing Orpheus, Gaetano Guadagni, was forbidden to
respond to the applause which he arrived on the scene. He was only allowed ‘to
be’ Orpheus, and not the castrato (Kaden 2013, p. 168).
And what happened to the oratorio in this context? It was muted, as Johann
Georg Sulzer’s Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste (General Theory of Fine
Arts) proclaimed, to a lyrical genre (Sulzer 1793). Narration of stories, as we
are told there, did not interest the audience—because they were well known, as
myths, as biblical events. What could be fascinating, on the contrary, was the feel-
ing of fictive persons, caused by these events.
The difference becomes evident when you compare the structure of the genu-
ine oratorio and the structure of the younger one, e.g. the schemes of J. S. Bach’s
Passion of St. Matthew and Haydn’s Seasons. In the case of the Passion, you
can detect at least four ‘layers’ of history: at first, the time of the Holy Bible,
which is denoted by the evangelist. This mythic past is contrasted with Bach’s
present time of the 18th century, with spiritual meditation and lyric reflection
by the s inging soloists. At the same time, these ‘vocal souls’ of the 18th century
may function as biblical actors: as Jesus, Jude, Peter, etc. The vocalists are dou-
ble-bound: in ancient history and in present history. Equally multifaceted is the
role of the choirs: sometimes they are incorporating the vox populi in Old Jerusa-
lem; sometimes—when singing protestant chorales—they remind us of actions in
Lutheran church history. And at the very beginning of the Passion, Bach includes
a Gregorian chant (‘O Lamm Gottes unschuldig’) which is sung by a special can-
tus firmus choir. In its historical perspectives, the Passion is exogamic; it tran-
scends thousands of years, different cultures, different systems of belief. It is a
model of a Big World, in so far as it is continuing the cosmological tendencies of
participant communication.
The structure of Haydn’s Seasons is less complicated; it corresponds with the
demand of aesthetical simplicité (Mackensen 2000). Specialized narrators, as the
testo or the evangelist, are missing and their roles are occupied by lyrical per-
sons: Simon, Lukas, Hanne, who report on their feelings. The story itself is bor-
ing: snow in winter, flowers and joy in springtime, gaining corn and potatoes in
summertime, successful hunting in autumn. The most important actor seems to
be the choir, praising God, ever and ever—to the pure triviality. And most impor-
tantly, there is only one horizon of history: the horizon of Haydn’s contempo-
raries. Ancient history is not relevant; therefore it is cut away. The Seasons, in
regard of historical relations, are endogamatic. But what Haydn refers to is not
only ONE EPOCH but also ONE WORLD. This one world is the subject of his
second famous oratorio: the Creation. In most cases, it is overlooked that this
very creation appears as a special one: without Fall, with godlike human beings.
And it is not the creation of THE WORLD per se, but (see Air No. 1) the creation
of A NEW WORLD, a monolithic world. Linear communication from one heart
to another, which becomes a norm between 1750 and 1800, seems to correspond
154 C. Kaden
immediately with this ‘One-World code’. On the other hand, a monolithic world
guarantees the best trade; the global village of today is a precondition of a maxi-
mum of profit. The ‘origin’ of linear communication in music, besides and in par-
allel to concentric communication, which is focussed on things, may be regarded
as an essential artistic contribution to the definition of modernity and modern
productivity.
3 Epilogue
Perhaps you may ask what happened to the East Berlin team of systematic musi-
cology I was talking about earlier. The answer is simple: It was destroyed during
the so-called Change. The first to be fired was the psychologist, Michael Cien-
skowski. He lacked a doctoral degree compatible with musicology and the new
academic structures were not ‘interdisciplinary enough’ to realize that he had
done a lot for the development of musicology. Helga Thierbach, the specialist for
neurophysiology, died in a tragic, and enigmatic, way. Reiner Kluge, who had
been a member of the Socialist Unity Party (in a leading position), was in danger
of being fired, too. But since he was accused of things which he could never have
committed, he won a lawsuit and was rehabilitated. He lost his chair but not his
title as professor—and he taught at Humboldt University until recently.
The only one who was able to continue systematic musicology in a systemic
manner was me. In 1993, I became a professor with my own teaching field, the
denomination of which was sociology and social history of music. You can have a
look at the homepage of the chair. And you will realize in the list of publications,
as well as in the list of BA, MA and PhD degrees, that in this field, interdiscipli-
nary research is practiced without compromise. A special goal was to reduce the
gap between systematic musicology and music history. This approach—although
quite a lot of younger scholars have accepted it—was not welcome on the peaks
of German musicology, and especially not in the top floors of the Society for
Research in Music. Today, we can observe a clear reproduction of the border-
lines between systematic and historical concepts, together with a reproduction of
respective myths and irrational denunciations.
Another problem which could not be foreseen by the East Berlin team was
the hostile competition between people who seemed to be engaged in similar
projects. The best example was the publication of a Handbook for Music Sociol-
ogy at the Technical University of Berlin (Neuhoff and Motte-Haber 2007). This
volume not only ignored the historical conceptions of music sociology, it was
treated as a secret project—and carefully hidden from the eyes of any colleague
at Humboldt University. At the same time, by the way, Karsten Mackensen and I
celebrated public discussions on the reader Soziale Horizonte von Musik (Social
Horizons of Music) (Kaden and Mackensen 2006). That means what had been
beyond dispute under the dictatorship of the SED—the solidarity of scientists
who were working to the advantage of ONE discipline, and to the advantage of
a fair interdisciplinary dialogue—exactly this option seemed to have no chance
in brutal competition, under the conditions of freedom. Today there is no real will
for cooperation in German musicology. And the discipline as a whole is governed
by the feudalist tendencies of establishing domains of scientific power (Finscher
2000). Perhaps in this context it is no wonder that the chair for music sociology
was eliminated after my retirement in 2012. That is why the presentation of expe-
riences under the repressive conditions of dictatorship in this talk could paradoxi-
cally serve as the memorializing of a possible scientific future.
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Musik und Gesellschaft

Alfred Smudits Editor

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15551

ISSN 0259-076X ISSN 2522-8331 (electronic)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018948616

This Springer VS imprint is published by the registered company Springer Fachmedien

The Unsung Work of Music Sociology? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 1

Additionally, Blaukopf’s empirical understanding of music sociology, rooted

individualisation, differentiation, domestication as well as several temporal stages

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 7

1A detailed overview is given in Rosa et al. (2007).

2A detailed overview can be found in Degele and Dries (2005).

As for acceleration, a growing possibility of deceleration, or of a force push-

3 Sociology of Music and Modernisation

The modernisation of musical life can be discussed in terms of certain keywords.

4 Music Sociology After Mass Modernity

Domestication and hedonisation

7For further information see: Cyborg Arts limited: https://www.cyborgarts.com/.

influences and cultural impact of cyborg reception of music—the next step in

Rationalisation and de- or irrationalisation

Differentiation and hybridisation

do not make sense anymore. Prosumerism (Smudits 2007)—the combination of

Individualisation and tribalisation

Globalisation and regionalisation

Genderisation and de-genderisation

successful female artists, such as Madonna or Beyonce, are able to represent

Integration and disintegration

The timing of this conference is highly appropriate, as it provides an o­ pportunity

1 The ‘New’ Musicology

During the 1980s, there began to appear a succession of publications which

(a) The inherent meaning of music

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 23

(b) The significance of musical works

(c) The relation of music and society

also produced ABBA, the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, a notable ‘heavy

2 The Work of Kurt Blaukopf

In the case of social collectivities, precisely as distinguished from organisms, we

I think it is reasonable to read this passage as suggesting a clear separation

3 Popular Music Studies

Becker, Howard S. (1982) Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press.

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 41

1 Mediation as an Ethnomethodology

3 Writing ‘from …’?

What happens if, modestly, I try to transpose these issues to my position of

as presence. He turns the well-named Annunciations into reflexive montages that

4 The Perspective of the Object

6 First Test: Singing Lessons

As soon as progress needs to be made, a new frontier emerges. But a

7 Second Test: On the Cutting Edge12, the Jazzman’s

Souriau’s concept of the ‘work-to-be-done’13 is very different from how we might

total alienation), cannot be considered an execution or expression or gradual manifestation

Becker, Howard S. (1982) Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press.

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 61

(Buscatto 2007a, b, 2010a, b, 2014a; Buscatto and Leontsini 2011a, b; Bus-

On peut alors s’accorder à définir le genre comme un concept visant à rendre

Secondly, when we speak about musical work, we are interested in describing

My key answer—to be developed throughout this paper—is that studying

Overview of Five Key Learnings to be Discussed

1 Social Stereotypes Shape Musical Reception

Gendered Stereotypes and the Musical Canon

Gendered Stereotypes and Artistic Recognition

become famous, the themes of emotional authenticity and dependence on men in

1A detailed overview is given in Rosa et al. (2007).

3 Sociology of Music and Modernisation

4 Music Sociology After Mass Modernity

The timing of this conference is highly appropriate, as it provides an o pportunity

1 The ‘New’ Musicology

2 The Work of Kurt Blaukopf

3 Popular Music Studies

1 Mediation as an Ethnomethodology

3 Writing ‘from …’?

4 The Perspective of the Object

6 First Test: Singing Lessons

7 Second Test: On the Cutting Edge12, the Jazzman’s

1 Social Stereotypes Shape Musical Reception

2 Social Networks Play a Key Role in Making

3 Musical Work Requires the Full Commitment

4 Public Policies and Legal Rules Have a Strong

5 Musical Work Must Be Explored at Its Margins

7 Potential Limits (to Be Developed)

4 Musical Cosmopolitan Bodies of Pop-rock

5 Further Thoughts on Music Sociology

1 Faulkner, Becker and Understanding

2 Arom and the Music of Central Africa

1 Vienna’s Institut—Caldron of Current Music

2 Farewell to Dualist Conceptions—Music

3 To Ask, ‘What Can Music Do?’ Is to Ask, ‘What Can

Trevarthen (2002, p. 21) defines communicative musicality as ‘… the dynamic sym-

within the context of a collaboratively performed song (as illustrated in Fig. 1).

Fig. 1  Index of SMART’s first performance of Rainbow

4 Songs in Praise of Music Sociology

2Erich Apel, cf. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Apel. It was a symptom of the serious-