Born (2012) Music and The Social.

CHAPTER 23
MUSIC AND THE SOCIAL

GEORGINA BORN
November 2010: a telematic music performance is taking place linking the

Sonic Lab of the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen’s University, Belfast, to
venues in Graz and Hamburg. Internet connections sustain for an hour or
so live transnational interactions between performers in three remote set-
tings—musical interactions that amount to a real-time distributed sociality.
The composer has orchestrated interactions such that each group drops
periodically in and out of the others’ hearing, eruptions of disconnection
and absence. The audience in Belfast, where I am sitting, strains to catch the
socio-musical and gestural theater between the performers, perceptible live
in the room and projected on giant screens. Another arena of sociality is
engendered between performers and audiences, one that follows the con-
ventions of silent and immobile audiencehood that for two centuries
have governed the concert hall. The technical dimensions of the event are
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experimental; they depend on a further vector of sociality: a division of labor

between technicians, composers, and musicians manifest in the room and
in the event’s networked infrastructure.
The musical sounds emitted and the constellation of corporeal, social,
technological, and discursive mediations in which they are embedded, as
well as the venue’s architecture, all locate this event generically: it belongs
to the genre of computer art music, although part of its experimentation
consists in the way that it mixes this heritage with adjacent genres—free
improvised music, sound installation and new media art. The genre is, then,
reanimated by the event and projected as an evolving entity. Musicians,
composers, and many audience members have a tacit understanding of this
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262 • Georgina Born
generic location and share an identification with the genre: an affective

relation—whether fascination, burgeoning or passing interest, or sceptical
engagement—which has brought them to SARC this evening. This is an
affective identification that is at one and the same time musical, cultural, and
social; the genre, as an aggregation of the affected, forges a heterogeneous
musical public (Warner 2005) or imagined community (Anderson 1983;
Born 1993a). And while it is manifest in the event, this imagined community
predates and will outlive it. At the same time audience members, perform-
ers, and technicians bear the demographic inscriptions of their individual
histories such that the socialities of this event are crossed by the social
identity formations to which they belong by affiliation or involuntary asso-
ciation. Being an art-music-technology scene of the global North, a palpable
if “unmarked” race, class, and gender profile characterizes those who make
and listen to the music: white middle-class men predominate. SARC is
itself a complex social form. Part of the public University, connected to the
departments of Music, Engineering, and Anthropology, as well as interna-
tionally to other computer music and media arts centres, its ethos, staffing,
and funding are also hybridized through links to industry. Through its
population, organization, and technical resources, SARC proffers a set of
social-institutional conditions that afford certain kinds of musical practice,
while discouraging others.
July 1989: a recording is taking place in a studio in Johannesburg.
Alton Ngubane and his band are recording a cassette of Inkatha Freedom
Party songs . . . Tom, the [white sound] engineer, sets up the mikes, pre-
pares the console for the backing tracks, and programs a drum track. . . .
Bongani [the bass player] lugs the amp into the little booth. He starts to
plug in. “No”, says Tom, holding down the talkback button. Bongani looks
up. He plugs in anyway. He starts twisting the amp controls. “No”, says
Tom. Tom calls Bongani back into the control room. “The bass must go
directly into the console. Much cleaner sound”, he explains. “Sorry, no
half-assed sound is going out of this studio”. The band wants the bass
amped and miked. Period. [But] “We’re dedicated to sound quality in this
studio”, Tom insists.
(Meintjes 2003, 144)
Cut to February 1992:
[G]uitarist Nogabisela is warming up in his booth. He has set a stinging

sound on the amp alongside him, just the way he likes it. . . . Lee [a
white engineer] is trekking in and out of the recording booths, moving
microphones. In passing, he cuts Nogabisela’s amp settings to zero,
dry. Then he returns to the control room to set initial sound levels and
Music and the Social • 263
EQs. . . . While Lee is preoccupied, Nogabisela turns his mix back up on

his amp.
(p. 106)
Through such ethnographic moments, in which white sound engineers who

know little about black styles are setting up to record black musicians, Louise
Meintjes captures how recording in South Africa becomes a site of struggles
over musical gestures. These are struggles in which black musicians employ
tactics to wrest back musical control from the white engineers. Probing the
social relations of the studio, Meintjes stresses that “The layering of techno-
logical mystification onto the South African social matrix . . . empowers
white men in the mbaqanga studio” (p. 104).
In terms of genre, Meintjes shows how such struggles extend to aesthetic
judgments in the mediation by white engineers of Zulu styles and sounds for
the much-sought world music markets. Infinitesimal shifts in intonation
or timbre determine whether a track is deemed to merit international dis-
tribution. She shows also how aesthetic imperatives issued by producers
serving international markets can tempt musicians to proffer Zulu stereo-
types, pandering to essentialist and primitivist imaginaries. The racialized
dynamics of the studio thus mediate the sounds that will circulate globally
as “authentic Zulu” music. The institutional conditions for these events are
provided by the existence in South Africa at the end of Apartheid of a white-
controlled recording industry, itself enmeshed in an avalanche of social and
political transitions: “studio processes, industrial politics, civic organisation,
and state negotiations produce a context within which [these sounds] take
on particular characteristics” (ibid., 5). By shifting analysis across scales,
Meintjes makes plain how the recording studio is a locus that produces its
own irreducible social relations, manifest in the division of labor and the
hierarchization of technical skills, while these relations are themelves
refracted by the wider social inequalities of race and class of the South
African polity, inequalities that intimately mediate musical sound.
In both the ethnographic scenarios described I have drawn attention to the

social, and the socio-technical, in music. In both cases the social is not
singular but multiple. Music is socially mediated, but this social mediation
occurs on a number of distinct and mutually modulating or intersecting
planes. Such an analytics can be taken to historical as well as present-day
musical assemblages and events. It departs from previous frameworks,
which tend to foreshorten music’s social mediation, reducing it to one or
other plane or to simple determinations between them. The complexity
evident in the two scenarios raises the critical question: how should we
understand the social in music? In what follows I suggest that music poses
generative challenges to social theory, challenges that are symptomatic of an

urgent felt need to reconceptualize the very notion of the social. Music,
it seems, indicates fertile new lines of enquiry, catalyzing the wider debates.
The interdisciplinary perspective opened up by rethinking the social
through music is one that abandons older notions of coherent social total-
ities, as well as the reductive theories of determination or articulation with
which these concepts are often associated.
Two writers, Marilyn Strathern and Bruno Latour, have been at the fore-
front in articulating the “crisis” of the social, and in proffering theoretical
alternatives. Strathern develops a comparative stance that enables her to
supersede the twin reifications—society or social structure on the one hand,
asocial individual on the other—that underpin Durkheimian social theory.
As she puts it, in this line of thought
“society” was reified as an individual thing, set up as an entity in antithesis

to entities of a similar conceptual order: society versus economy, the mate-
rial world, even biology or nature. . . . The theoretical task then becomes
one of elucidating “the relationship” between it and other entities.
(Strathern 1990, 5)
Instead she proposes to “retain the concept of sociality to refer to the creat-
ing and maintaining of relationships.” For Strathern,”‘Social life consists in
a constant movement . . . from one type of sociality to another” (Strathern
1988, 13–14), and she enjoins us to trace how such socialities are constituted
by the creation of relations and aggregations, whether by the elimination of
difference and resulting unities or by the elaboration of heterogeneity.
Latour also rejects the reductive Durkheimian or Marxian “sociology of the
social” and advocates instead a “sociology of associations,” a nonteleological
focus on the action of assembling the social, where this is conceived as
multiple. Highlighting the “many . . . contradictory cartographies of the
social” (Latour 2005, 34), Latour insists on the contribution of nonhuman
as well as human actors in making social connections, mediations that com-

pose an assemblage. Together these writers suggest a new analytical topos
of the social that can be taken to music; they pose, without solving, the
question of the interrelations between plural socialities.
It is a similar dissatisfaction with reification and reductionism that stoked
the questioning in music sociology, ethnomusicology, and popular music
studies of Durkheimian and Marxian models that portrayed the link
between musical style and social formation in terms of homology or reflec-
tion. In sociology the departure from such models is evident in the work of
Tia DeNora and Antoine Hennion. Their concern is with the bidirectional
nature both of music’s mediation and of human and nonhuman agency:
music constituting human subjectivities and socialities, while music is itself

constituted in discourse and practice and through its copious socialities and
socio-technical relations. As DeNora puts it, “Music is active within social
life: just as music’s meanings may be constructed in relation to things
outside it, so, too, things outside music may be constructed in relation to
music”(DeNora 2000, 3). Hennion, for his part, dwells on the intimate
mediation between music lover and musical sound in the co-production
of taste, where taste is understood as a transformative relation cultivated
through heterogeneous practices and techniques (Hennion 2001). There is
great merit in these perspectives, which are influenced not only by Latour
but by ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism. At the same time,
there is a risk of privileging a singular and micro-social conception of medi-
ation, neglecting other dimensions of the social in music.
Alternative directions are evident in ethnomusicology and popular music
studies. Steven Feld proposed to overcome the music–social dualism by
analyzing musical cultures as immanently social, “sound structure as socially
structured” (Feld 1984). To achieve this he called for ethnographic enquiry
into such matters as whether cooperative or competitive social relations
emerge in performance, how expressive ideology and performance mark
social differences and social inequalities, and whether there is a stratification
of musical knowledge. In his research on ethnicity, identity, and music,
Martin Stokes suggested in turn that “music does not . . . simply provide a
marker in a prestructured social space, but the means by which this space
can be transformed” (Stokes 1994, 4). Stokes argued that music can act
variably as a medium for both negotiating social identities and enforcing
dominant social categories; hence, the musical performance of ethnicity
“can never be understood outside the wider power relations in which [it is]
embedded” (ibid., 7). These writers attend not only to the socialities of
musical practice and how they are freighted ontologically but also, crucially,
to how such socialities are entangled in and mediate wider social relations
and modalities of power.
Popular music studies have seen further generative developments.

Through detailed critique, Richard Middleton undermined simplistic
accounts of a homology between social group or subculture and musical
style. Drawing on Gramscian theories, he proposed a model of their articu-
lation. While he extended the analysis of social formations beyond a focus
solely on class to gender, age, ethnicity, and nationality, and employed exten-
uating terms (such as relative autonomy), Middleton retained a Marxian
insistence on the primacy of class or of overdetermination by “ruling
interests” (Middleton 1990, 10) in framing processes of articulation. It
was a break with this framing that underlay the next decisive move. In
Will Straw’s theory of musical scenes, exemplified by alternative rock and
electronic dance musics, music is detached from any grounding in a given

social ontology. Instead, “scene” captures music’s capacity to create “affec-
tive alliances” (Straw 1991, 374), engendering musical collectivities that are
irreducible to prior forms of social identity. Scene points to the significance
and the autonomy of two planes of sociality produced by music: the
immediate socialities of musical performance and practice—which Straw
portrays through the engrossing corporeal activity of the dance floor—and
the diverse musical publics conjured into being by musical tastes and
experiences, which he invokes through the “coalitions” created by certain
dance musics in the late 1980s between “black teenagers, young girls
listening to Top 40 radio, and urban club-goers” (ibid., 384–385). But scene
recognizes also the importance of their mutual mediation: how the intimate
socialities of performance catalyze music’s imagined communities, just as
those imagined communities imbue the socialities of performance with
collective emotion. Straw makes two further moves. Having established their
autonomy, he reconnects these two planes of sociality to wider identity
formations—whether class, race, or gender—which may be marked or
unmarked by the actors, arguing that the politics of popular music stem
from music’s capacity to create affective alliances that traverse such pervasive
social differences. He then introduces a further plane: the institutions—
dance clubs, radio, record stores—“within which musics are disseminated,”
providing “the conditions of possibility of [those affective] alliances” (ibid.,
384). Although incipient, then, Straw’s theory of musical scenes recognizes
and traces connections between four planes of music’s social mediation. The
point is that each—performance socialities, imagined communities, social
identity formations, institutions—has an autonomy. By opening up each
plane to enquiry, as well as their interrelations, they can be analyzed as
contingent, as taking a variety of forms—and as the potential conduit for a
politics.
It is now possible to advance the core argument of this chapter. It is that
music necessitates an expansion of previous conceptions of the social; that
if music engenders myriad socialities, it is productive to analyze them in

terms of four planes of social mediation. In the first plane, music produces
its own diverse socialities in the guise of the intimate microsocialities of
musical performance and practice, the social relations enacted in musical
ensembles, and the musical division of labor. In the second, music has
powers to animate imagined communities, aggregating its listeners into
virtual collectivities or publics based on musical and other identifications,
collectivities that may be more or less unified or heterogeneous. In the
third, music refracts wider social identity formations—formations of
class, race or ethnicity, gender or sexuality, nationality or locality. In
the fourth, music is entangled in the institutional forms that enable its
production, reproduction, and transformation, including nonmarket or

market exchange, elite or religious patronage, public or subsidized cultural
organizations, or late capitalism’s multipolar cultural economy. In short, as
demonstrated by scene theory as well as the opening ethnographic vignettes,
all four planes of social mediation—which are often disassociated in dis-
cussions of music and the social—enter in dynamic ways into the musical
assemblage. The first two planes amount to socialities and social imaginaries
that are assembled specifically by musical practice and experience. In con-
trast, the last two planes amount to wider social formations and institutions
that condition music, affording certain kinds of musical practice. Such
conditions do not amount to an inert “context”: they are folded into musical
experience; they both permeate and are permeated by music’s intimate
socialities and imagined communities.
A number of propositions follow. To begin with, the four planes of music’s
social mediation are irreducible to one another and are articulated in
contingent and nonlinear ways through relations of affordance, condition-
ing, or causality. Strikingly, the first two planes—music’s microsocialities and
imagined communities—are irreducible to and have a certain autonomy
from the last two—music’s social conditions. Moreover, all four planes can
be the locus of significant and unpredictable transformations. It is the
complex potentialities engendered by both the autonomy of and the mutual
interference between the four planes that are particularly generative of
experimentation, transformation, and emergence in musical assemblages,
whether this entails experimentation with the socialities of performance or
practice, with the aggregation of the musically affected, with the crystal-
lization via musical affect of novel coalitions of social identities, or with
music’s institutional forms. That is to say, the irreducibility and the complex
interactions between the four planes of music’s social mediation—their
capacity to synergize and compound—afford spaces of agency and exper-
imentation in the musical assemblage. This is why all four planes have
the potential to animate music’s aesthetic, ethical, and political operations.
At stake is an analytics of the social in music that acknowledges openness

and experimentation in the musical assemblage, and thereby the potential
for a micropolitics (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, ch. 9). This is a politics
“played out at the molecular level in terms of social affinities . . . and varieties
of communal belonging” (Patton 2000, 43); music’s affordances stem from
its capacity to destabilize and re-orchestrate not only affect and desire
but criteria of belonging and affiliation, and therefore new collective
solidarities.
The concept of assemblage invokes another influential lineage of social
thought. For Deleuze an assemblage is a “multiplicity which is made up of
heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them
. . . [where] the assemblage’s only unity is that of a co-functioning” (Deleuze

and Parnet 1987, 69). Moreover, an assemblage is characterized by “relations
of exteriority” such that its component parts may be detached from it and
plugged into different assemblages in which their interactions will be dif-
ferent. Each component therefore has a “certain autonomy,” while the
interactions between them are nonlinear and mutually catalyzing, “only
contingently obligatory” (DeLanda 2006, 11, 12). Taken to music, the notion
of an assemblage allows not only for music’s social mediation but for its
multiple simultaneous forms of existence. It suggests that music has no
essence but a plural and distributed socio-material being, enabling music to
be cognized as a constellation of mediations of heterogeneous kinds: sonic
and social, corporeal and technological, visual and discursive, temporal and
ontological (Born 1993b, 2005, Forthcoming). Scale and temporality also
characterize musical assemblages. In the analytics of music’s social media-
tion developed in this chapter, although scale differentiates the four planes
of the social, they defy any linear or nested organization (cf. Delanda 2006,
18–38); instead, the focus is on their cross-scalar interrelations (Strathern
1995), including the potential for disjunctures. And in as much as media-
tion refers to transformational processes, it ineluctably signals questions of
temporality: the relative endurance or stability of certain socialities or aggre-
gations, as against the unstable or fleeting quality of others. In the telematic
concert at SARC, these issues were signaled on several planes—concert
socialities, musically imagined community, demographics, institution—all
of which, while reanimated by the event, predate and outlive it. An analytics
of music’s social mediation must therefore be attuned to the temporalities
immanent in the assemblage, which are differentiated; some mediations will
exhibit historical depth and stability—albeit that their “contents” are con-
stantly in formation—achieving a type of “mobile stasis” (Born 1995, 326),
while others will be transient.
In this final section, I take the preceding analytics of music and social
mediation to three areas of existing work. In each case, the aim is show the
anti-reductionist gains of analyzing both the autonomy of distinctive planes
of music’s social mediation and, thereby, cross-scalar relations between
them—including the potential for disjuncture or contradiction. The first
area concerns the socialities of musical performance. A number of writers
take these intimate socialities as the sole locus for theorizing the social in
music. Commonly, they are idealized through a metaphysics of musical co-
presence (e.g., Schutz [1951] 1971; Attali 1985, ch. 5; Small 1998, 13). Such
accounts contrast with studies that provide a more empirically informed
rendering of performance socialities by examining the interaction between
the first and third planes of the social: how the socialities of performance are
traversed by wider social relations. Examples are Charles Keil’s Urban Blues
(Keil 1970), Ingrid Monson’s Saying Something (Monson 1996), and Louise
Meintjes’s Sound of Africa! (Meintjes 2003), all of which address how per-
formance socialities refract formations of race and class. Keil’s description
of the relations enacted between blues singer Bobby Bland, his band, and
their audience captures the ways in which social solidarities and collective
catharsis are performed moment by moment through voice, gesture, humor,
and innuendo, all of them riffing on the “stylistic common denominators”
(Keil 1970, 143) linking blues performance and preaching in the lives of
black Chicagoans in the 1960s.
A crucial further stage is evident in studies focused on how performance
socialities are not only entangled in wider identity formations but have the
capacity to catalyze or act on them. Thus, Jocelyne Guilbault stresses the
transformative capacities of live soca performance in Trinidad as it produces
“public intimacies”: social interactions between artists and audience that
“reiterate identities,” while enabling “new points of connection [to be]
developed (for example among artists and audience members of different
ethnicities, nationalities and generations, and across musical genres)”
(Guilbault 2010, 17). The socialities enacted in performance, she says, can
either reinforce or work against social intimacies and social antagonisms.
Equally striking is Marina Roseman’s account (Roseman 1984) of how the
gender relations and cosmologies immanent in the musical performances of
the Temiar people of peninsular Malaysia invert the hierarchical gender
relations that characterize their everyday social lives. Indeed, historical and
anthropological research suggests repeatedly that it is the autonomy of the
socialities of musical performance and practice that enables them to pro-
mote experimentation, in the sense that they may enact alternatives to or
inversions of, and can be in contradiction with, wider hierarchical and
stratified social relations. These are performed contradictions that con-
tribute powerfully to the nature of socio-musical experience by offering
a compensatory or utopian social space—one that fashions experience
differently even as it may fail to overturn wider social relations (although

such an outcome is not foreclosed).
A second area enhanced by the analytics proposed in this chapter is that
of music and genre; here, insights derive from attending to the interrelations
between the second and third planes—musically imagined communities
and wider identity formations. Indeed genre is commonly taken to be
the primary mechanism for the mutual articulation of social identities
and musically imagined communities, communities that are often taken to
derive from those same social identities. Already obvious here is how genre
theory risks teleology. In his work on corporate genre cultures, Keith Negus
emphasizes their contingency, given that “the genre boundaries associated
with commercial markets, radio or media formats and wider cultural

formations do not coincide in any straightforward way” (Negus 1999, 29).
Yet at other times, despite his exemplary concern with “how corporate
organization actively intervenes in the production . . . of genres” (ibid., 28),
Negus closes down contingency, noting “how genres operate as social
categories; how rap cannot be separated from the politics of blackness, nor
salsa from Latinness, nor country from whiteness and the enigma of the
‘South’” (ibid., 29). In this way he threatens to elide conceptually what must
strenuously be held apart: the mutual mediation between musically imag-
ined community, on the one hand, and identity formations, on the other.
Here David Brackett’s stress in his work on black popular musics on the
“paradoxes (and tautologies) of genre” (Brackett 2005, 82) is salutary:
“the notion of genre speaks to transitory divisions in the musical field that
correspond in discontinuous and complex ways to a temporally defined
social space.” Brackett indicates how historically labile have been the appar-
ently established links between black musical genres and African-American
social formations; yet he cautions against over-arbitrary accounts of genre
categories as mere “social constructions” (ibid., 75).
Brackett’s studies underline the insights afforded by focusing on both the
temporalities and the attempted teleologies of genre. That is to say, genre
works by projecting temporally, into the cauldron of evolving social identity
formations, potential reconfigurations of those formations coded as musical
transformations that are proffered as analogous to the social. When the
teleology works, music may effect either the reproduction of identity
formations, or a redirection or novel coalition of such formations. Brackett
illustrates these processes through Isaac Hayes’s 1969 hit crossover soul ver-
sion of Jimmy Webb’s 1967 ballad “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” arguing
that Hayes’s musical gestures reveal “how intersubjective awareness of the
audience . . . is in play” (ibid., 86) and results in the attachment of new audi-
ences. Genre can therefore be understood as a process enabling potential
convergence or translation between musical figure (and thence musically
imagined community) and social identity formations. Genre should be

analyzed not as embodying any assured linkage, but as an evolving con-
stellation constituted by the mutual mediation between two self-organizing
entities (music, identity formations), both reliant on the collective pro-
duction of memory as well as the anticipation of futures (Born 2005, 20–23);
conceiving of genre in this fashion—as a radically contingent process that is,
however, oriented to the production of teleology and thus the erasure of its own
contingency—enables us to understand the way that wider social formations
are refracted in music, and that musical genres entangle themselves in
evolving social formations. In this light, genre theory can illuminate how
music’s creation of affective coalitions mediates wider identity formations,
but in the anti-teleological terms of affordance, catalysis, and contingency

as opposed to determination or singular articulation.
The final area that I want to address through the social analytics of music
outlined in this chapter is the fourth plane: music’s institutional forms. This
can only be indicative, but the goal is again anti-reductionist: to indicate the
autonomy and heterogeneity of these forms, as well as the benefits of
analyzing interrelations between this and other planes of social mediation.
Certainly, there is a continuing salience in distinguishing between two broad
spheres of music’s institutional forms that evolved over the twentieth cen-
tury: between those musical activities afforded by capitalist industrialization
and internationalization, and those oriented primarily to state subsidized or
patronage-endowed institutions—the sphere of art, academic, and nation-
alist musics (Born 1987). However a primary focus on the inequities and
disorders of capitalist music markets can entail a neglect of surprising
features of both spheres: the progressive potential of the corporate music
industry, as well as the repressive or inequitable tendencies of statist and
subsidized music institutions (e.g., Wicke and Shepherd 1993; Baker 2011).
On the former: Chris Lawe Davies gives an exemplary analysis of the entry
of Australian Aboriginal rock groups into the industry mainstream in the
late 1980s and early 1990s, stressing how effective this was in exposing a
“massively heterogeneous audience” to a “social narrative of Aboriginality”
(Lawe Davies 1993, 262) that is systematically denied in Australia’s public
culture. At issue is the uncertain capacity for novel engagement across the
third and fourth planes: between subaltern group and corporate industry.
On the latter: in my study of a globally influential, state-funded Parisian
institution, IRCAM, oriented to the future of Western art music (Born
1995), I chart how IRCAM hosted a gendered and racialized (if “unmarked”)
division of labor while proving unable to revivify its modernist musical
idiom—efforts predicated on a kind of aesthetic involution, alongside a
repression of “other,” nonmodernist musics and musical ontologies.
Analysis of the fourth plane must also entail a focus on experimentation
and transformation in music’s institutional forms, and thus on their auton-

omy and heterogeneity. Here I want to effect an important conceptual
reorientation. I take my cue from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s critique of the
totalizing flavor of Marxist theories of global capitalism in which, from
a postcolonial standpoint, he develops a distinction between “histories
‘posited by capital’ and histories that do not belong to capital’s ‘life process’”
(Chakrabarty 2000, 50). His intention is to resist “the idea that the logic of
capital sublates differences into itself ” (ibid.) by disturbing universalizing
and teleological readings of noncapitalist lifeworlds as remnants destined for
capitalist incorporation, or, if unincorporated, as residual or insignificant.
Martin Stokes takes these ideas to music: drawing on ethnographies of the
circum-Mediterranean region, he shows how music and musical labor are

variably commodified, arguing against any “teleological, historicist assump-
tion about the [inevitable . . .] ‘incursion’ of money into musical worlds”
(Stokes 2002, 139). Stokes contrasts two successful Turkish popular musi-
cians from the northeastern area of Trabzon: the first with a strong sense of
music and musical labor as commodities, keen to see them “circulate freely
[and] fluidly, . . . in a system of generalised commodity exchange” (ibid.,
143); the second exhibiting “extreme indifference to the cash economy”
in favour of an economy of hospitality and honor, communal pleasures,
and poetic sentiments. Stokes points out that musical worlds like that of
the second musician animate this entire region; they are not destined to
disappear, nor are they less modern, less rational, or less well adapted to the
exigencies of cosmopolitan existence than the first. Indeed they are common
in diasporic and migrant communities. In this way he insists that noncom-
moditized musics are not pre-capitalist leftovers, nor a secondary sphere of
practice, but alternative modernities engaged in a “turbulent dialectic”
(ibid., 150) with capital.
The same shift in perspective is compounded by Ana Maria Ochoa and
Carolina Botero’s account of novel forms of exchange in Colombian popular
musics. They uncover a spectrum of practices that unsettle dualistic and
economistic models predicated on an opposition between the formal music
industry and informal practices of exchange. Instead, Ochoa and Botero
trace numerous hybrid forms including economic cross-subsidies between
different spheres of musicians’ activities and lives; movements between
“multiple forms of economic network”; “‘alternative economies [that]
become economies of subsistence”; an “economy of sacrifice”; and an econ-
omy of rebusque—of “inventing whatever it is in order to be able to make a
living” (Ochoa and Botero 2009, 163–165). The analysis points to initiatives
and adaptations that generate multiple forms of exchange enabling music’s
creation and circulation, forms ranged between the free and the monetized,
each entangled in intimate musical socialities and imagined communities as
well as wider social relations. It is a portrait not of marginality, necessity or

overdetermination, but of embedded and conditioned yet dynamic experi-
mentation and invention: of a certain musical and social autonomy.
If earlier popular music studies took as exceptional or unsustainable such
models as punk DIY (Laing 1985) or the independent labels and networks
associated with post-punk and electronic dance musics (Hesmondhalgh
1998, 1997), this scholarship goes further. It forges a radical shift in theo-
retical perspective by prioritizing those ubiquitous but under-recognized
worlds of musical practice (Finnegan 1989) that moderate or sublate both
music’s commodification and statist frameworks. Stokes, Ochoa and Botero
impel us to understand the practices they describe not as marginal to or
failures of capitalist modernization in music, but as viable, experimental,

and pervasive activities and micro-institutional forms. Such an account
shifts institutional analysis away from reductive suppositions about the
inescapable progress of capitalist relations in music to a nuanced awareness
of the spectrum of music’s non- or petty-market forms as modes of musical
and social organization. (I avoid the term “proto-markets” because of the
teleological implication of an eventual goal of “full” commodification: cf.
Toynbee 2000, 25–32; Hesmondhalgh 2002, 171.) This approach responds
to the condition of many contemporary non-Western and Western musics,
dignifying them with substance and significance rather than reducing them
to a transitional state destined to be brought under capitalist relations.
Augmenting this approach by tracing dynamic interrelations between
institutional form and other planes of social mediation is Aditi Deo’s
analysis of a congeries of changes to Khyal, an improvisatory genre of North
Indian classical music, over the twentieth century (Deo 2011). Deo draws
out synergistic shifts between the third and second planes—social identity
formation and musically imagined community: a transition from hereditary
Muslim practitioners to middle- and upper-class Hindus, alongside the
classicization of Khyal, previously a syncretic practice, as emblematic of a
modernizing Hindu cultural nationalism. At the same time she points to
tensions between transformations on the fourth and first planes: insti-
tutional form and performance sociality. Where formerly Khyal relied on
feudal patronage and master–disciple transmission of musical knowledge,
in the first decades of the twentieth century Khyal pedagogy was partly
relocated to novel secular institutions, its knowledge abstracted from
embodied methods, notated, and standardized. Yet Khyal defies a simplistic
account of these shifts. On the one hand, training in its aesthetic principles
remains bound to master–disciple lineages; subtleties of musical gesture
and their social embeddedness work against Khyal’s rationalization. On
the other hand, institutional processes mediate even those musical and
social practices rooted in master–disciple relations. Deo argues that while
public discourse reduces Kyhal’s socialities to an opposition, practitioners

experience them as multiple and juxtaposed. Khyal as an assemblage is
self-contradictory.
I have proposed that an analytics of four planes of social mediation throws

new light on music’s socialities, extending the plural and anti-reductionist
currents in recent social theory while retaining a concern with scale, time,
and power. Scale is addressed through the distinctive nature of and cross-
scalar relations between the four planes. Temporality is understood in the
sense of transformation given by mediation, and as a variable property of
each plane of the social, as well as of their dynamic interactions. Power is
conceptualized in the terms of critical social theory, given that “relations

of power are constitutive of the social” (Mouffe 2000, 125). Rather than
conceive of social relations as organic or oriented to community, the
intention must be to address them in all their complexity as constituted also
by difference, contradiction, and antagonism. While some writers have
addressed the articulation between different planes of music’s social medi-
ation, the framework advanced here foregrounds this perspective. In place
of reduction it probes the multiplicity and autonomy, as well as the mutual
mediation and entanglement, of music’s socialities. It suggests finally, as
evidenced by the readings of Meintjes and Brackett given in this chapter, that
through such an analytics the study of music as sound and as social form are
fully reconcilable (cf. Martin 2006; Born 2010a).
FURTHER READING
Born, Georgina. 2005. On musical mediation: Ontology, technology and creativity. Twentieth-
Century Music 2(1): 7–36.
Born, Georgina. 2010. For a relational musicology. Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 135(2):
205–243.
Brackett, David. 2005. Questions of genre in black popular music. Black Music Research Journal
25(1/2): 73–92.
Guilbault, Jocelyne. 2010. Music, politics, and pleasure: Live soca in Trinidad. Small Axe 14(1):
16–29.
Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Meintjes, Louise. 2003. Sound of Africa!: Making music Zulu in a South African studio. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Ochoa, Anna Maria, and Carolina Botero. 2009. Notes on practices of musical exchange in
Colombia. Popular Communication 7(3): 158–168.
Roseman, Marina. 1984. The social structuring of sound: the Temiar of peninsular Malaysia.
Ethnomusicology 28(3): 411–445.
Stokes, Martin 2002. Marx, money, and musicians. Pp. 139–166 in Music and Marx: Ideas, practice,
politics. Edited by Regula Burkhardt Qureshi. London: Routledge.
Strathern, Marilyn. 1990. The concept of society is theoretically obsolete. Pp. 60–66 in Key Debates
in Anthropology. Edited by Tim Ingold. London: Routledge.
Straw, Will 1991. Systems of articulation, logics of change: Communities and scenes in popular
music. Cultural Studies 5(3): 368–388.

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CHAPTER 23

MUSIC AND THE SOCIAL

November 2010: a telematic music performance is taking place linking the

experimental; they depend on a further vector of sociality: a division of labor

generic location and share an identification with the genre: an affective

July 1989: a recording is taking place in a studio in Johannesburg.

Cut to February 1992:

[G]uitarist Nogabisela is warming up in his booth. He has set a stinging

EQs. . . . While Lee is preoccupied, Nogabisela turns his mix back up on

Through such ethnographic moments, in which white sound engineers who

In both the ethnographic scenarios described I have drawn attention to the

generative challenges to social theory, challenges that are symptomatic of an

“society” was reified as an individual thing, set up as an entity in antithesis

as well as human actors in making social connections, mediations that com-

music constituting human subjectivities and socialities, while music is itself

Popular music studies have seen further generative developments.

electronic dance musics, music is detached from any grounding in a given

if music engenders myriad socialities, it is productive to analyze them in

production, reproduction, and transformation, including nonmarket or

At stake is an analytics of the social in music that acknowledges openness

. . . [where] the assemblage’s only unity is that of a co-functioning” (Deleuze

differently even as it may fail to overturn wider social relations (although

with commercial markets, radio or media formats and wider cultural

imagined community) and social identity formations. Genre should be

but in the anti-teleological terms of affordance, catalysis, and contingency

and transformation in music’s institutional forms, and thus on their auton-

circum-Mediterranean region, he shows how music and musical labor are

well as wider social relations. It is a portrait not of marginality, necessity or

failures of capitalist modernization in music, but as viable, experimental,

public discourse reduces Kyhal’s socialities to an opposition, practitioners

I have proposed that an analytics of four planes of social mediation throws

conceptualized in the terms of critical social theory, given that “relations

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