Roads to Music Sociology

Musik und Gesellschaft

Alfred Smudits Editor

Roads to Music Sociology

Musik und Gesellschaft 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) Musik und Gesellschaft ISBN 978-3-658-22278-9 ISBN 978-3-658-22279-6  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22279-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018948616 Springer VS © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer VS imprint is published by the registered company Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH part of Springer Nature The registered company address is: Abraham-Lincoln-Str. 46, 65189 Wiesbaden, Germany

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

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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

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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, shedding 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 University 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 analysis 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: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 A. Smudits (ed.), Roads to Music Sociology, Musik und Gesellschaft, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22279-6_1

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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 general 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 sociology 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 ‘modernization’, identifying several dimensions of modernization, such as rationalisation,

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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 formerly ‘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 models, 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 former dealing with everything around music but not ‘music itself’, the latter taking 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 musicologists 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

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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, international scholars have explored the ways contemporary female musicians find it more difficult to get access, to remain and to be recognized as legitimate professionals 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 barriers have disappeared and formal equality between the sexes is considered a priority 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 poprock music has been a key force in propelling cultural cosmopolitanism, especially 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 penetrated 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 cosmopolitan 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 cultural 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 cosmopolitanism 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

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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. Sociological 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 practice, 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 potentially 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 scientific 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 sociology 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 predominant Marxism-Leninism. In particular, East Berlin musicology developed an

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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, published 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 clarified. 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 ideological 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 somehow 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 concept—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: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 A. Smudits (ed.), Roads to Music Sociology, Musik und Gesellschaft, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22279-6_2

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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 Mannerism (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 complex 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 environmentalism. 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 ‘differentiation’. 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 modernisation, 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).

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the West. Max Weber has underlined this specifically Western way of empowerment; he sees rationalisation as its main characteristic. Georg Simmel posited 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 prominent concept today. Then there are ‘genderisation’ and ‘de-genderisation’, which mean, respectively, that gender has become a central issue in the process of modernisation 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 characterised by no longer being dependent on the boundaries of space and time. Concrete 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 domestication 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 mystification 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.

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

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As for acceleration, a growing possibility of deceleration, or of a force pushing 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 discussion 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 industrialisation. 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 periodisations. 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 modernity 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 designation 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

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‘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 interesting 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 concerts 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 movement—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 characteristic until the end of the Middle Ages. Thereafter, we talk about performance music (Darbietungsmusik), meaning the division between performers and audiences 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

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Kurt Blaukopf (1982) and I (Smudits 2002) have formulated, namely graphic mediamorphosis, reprographic mediamorphosis, chemical-mechanical, electronic and digital mediamorphosis. In early modernity, it was graphic mediamorphosis which enabled the transformation 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 reprographic 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?

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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 phenomena 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 bourgeois 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 modernity. 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.

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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 sociology 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 developments that have taken place since the 1980s, namely the digitalisation of communications 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 digitalisation 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.

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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 corresponding 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 digital 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 communication, and for younger people the central tool for listening to music? The social

7For

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

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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 perspective, 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-bureaucratically (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 production, 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. Especially 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 contexts in production, dissemination or appropriation are vanishing. They simply

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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 production and consumption gets increasingly blurred in this hybridisation process, making it a dramatic challenge to our understanding of authorship and, as a consequence, 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 conservative 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

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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 relatively 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 appropriation. Only some technical tools will have changed, as described above. There are also local music scenes, which increasingly develop over the Internet 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-oriented 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.

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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 phenomena 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 practices. 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 sociology will not be able to produce satisfying results. These dimensions need the analytical tools of culture sociology and sociology in general, including their theoretical 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.

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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 possible to be able to describe and analyse specific problems of musical life adequately. Music sociology has to face this challenge if it wants to keep abreast of the times—if it wants to be ‘modern’.

References Adorno, Theodor W. (1976 [1962]) Introduction to the Sociology of Music. New York: Seabury. Baumann, Zygmunt (2000) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, Ulrich / Giddens, Anthony / Lash, Scott (1994) Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Cambridge: Polity Press. Benjamin, Walter (2008 [1935]) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin. Blaukopf, Kurt (1992 [1982]) Musical Life in a Changing Society. Portland: Amadeus. Blaukopf, Kurt (1989) Beethovens Erben in der Mediamorphose. Kultur- und Medienpolitik für die elektronische Ära. Heiden: Niggli. Bourdieu, Pierre (1979) La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Les éditions de minuit. Canetti, Elias (2000 [1960]) Crowd and Power. London: Phoenix. Castells, Manuel (1996) The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Cyborg Art Limited: https://www.cyborgarts.com/ [28 November 2017]. Degele, Nina / Dries, Christian (2005) Modernisierungstheorie. München: Fink. Freud, Sigmund (1960 [1921]) Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. New York: Bantam. Giddens, Anthony (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Habermas, Jürgen (1984 [1981]) The Theory of Communicative Action. Cambridge: Polity. Hauser, Arnold (1979) Der Ursprung der modernen Kunst und Literatur: die Entwicklung des Manierismus seit der Krise der Renaissance. München: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag. Huber, Michael (2018) Musikhören im Zeitalter Web 2.0: Theoretische Grundlagen und empirische Befunde. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Kauer, Katja (2009) Popfeminismus! Fragezeichen! Eine Einführung. Berlin: Frank & Timme. Klein, Gabriele (2004) Electronic Vibration: Pop – Kultur – Theorie. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Kracauer, Siegfried (1963 [1927]) Das Ornament der Masse: Essays. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Kusek, David / Leonhard, Gerd (2005) The future of music. Berklee: Berklee Press. Le Bon, Gustave (1966 [1895]) The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. New York: Viking.

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Mitchell, Tony (1996) Popular Music and Local Identity: Rock, Pop and Rap in Europe and Oceania. London: Leicester University Press. Ortega y Gasset, José (1932 [1930]) The Revolt of the Masses. London: Allen & Unwin. Peterson, Richard / Kern, Roger M. (1996) “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore”, American Sociological Review, 61 (5), 900–907. Reitsamer, Rosa / Liebsch, Katharina (eds.) (2015) Musik, Gender. Differenz. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot. Rosa, Hartmut / Strecker, David / Kottmann, Andrea (2007) Soziologische Theorien. Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft. Simmel, Georg (1950 [1917]) Fundamental Problems of Sociology (Individual and ­Society), in: The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Translated, edited and with an introduction by Kurt H. Wolff. New York: The Free Press, 3–84. Smudits, Alfred (2002) Mediamorphosen des Kulturschaffens: Kunst und Kommunikationstechnologien im Wandel. Wien: Braumüller. Smudits, Alfred (2007) “Wandlungsprozesse der Musikkultur”, in: de la Motte-Haber, Helga / Neuhoff, Hans (eds.): Musiksoziologie (Handbuch der sytematischen Musikwissenschaft, Band 4, hrsg. von Helga de la Motte-Haber) Laaber: Laaber 2007, 111–145. Taylor, Timothy D. (1997) Global Pop: World Music, World Markets. New York: Routledge. Tschmuck, Peter (2017) The Economics of Music. Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Agenda Publishing. Villa, Paula-Irene / Jäckel, Julia / Pfeiffer, Zara S. / Sanitter, Nadine / Steckert, Ralf (2012) Banale Kämpfe? Perspektiven auf Populärkultur und Geschlecht. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Weber, Max (1978 [1921]) Economy and Society. An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Ed. by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. New York: University of California Press. Weber, Max (1958 [1921]) The Rational and Sociological Foundations of Music. Tübingen: Southern Illinois University Press.

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 concerns 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 © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 A. Smudits (ed.), Roads to Music Sociology, Musik und Gesellschaft, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22279-6_3

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expressed the ideal of the free individual in early-bourgeois society gradually giving way to the oppression and enslavement of the individual under advanced capitalism. So the task of the musicological analyst becomes that of decoding or deciphering 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 provided 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’ musicology. 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, harmony 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, encoding 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 alternative 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 somehow inherent in the music itself (e.g. Shepherd 1991, pp. 217, 150). This was certainly 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

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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 structure of their own thought processes’ (1987, p. 57). Such thought processes—and here most sociologists would agree—are not individualistic but ‘socially mediated’ (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, undocumented, and rather mysterious’ (1976, p. 271). Indeed, it is doubtful whether any cultural object can have the sort of ‘inherent’ 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 quality of objects, but derives from their involvement in the social process of circulation 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 provocative 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

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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 ‘artworks’. 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’ musicology. Philip Glass, John Zorn, k. d. lang and Prince are all serious and innovative ‘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 situation of jazz: ‘Louis Armstrong’s music reflected New Orleans, Duke Ellington’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

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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 sustain 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 relationship 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 composers (and performers) are still selected on the basis of their supposed significance

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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 society, 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 considered 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 greatest 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 musicologist 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 musicological 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 important 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

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is a part’ (2012, p. 81). My argument is that this applies not only to the ‘participatory 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 interest 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 dispute 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 hearing 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 particular, and for many people novel, ‘way of hearing’ some music and given us

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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 situations 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 sociology 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 individuals. 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 individual 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 sociological 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

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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 process 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 interesting 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 categories. 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 ‘interdisciplinarity’ 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 interdisciplinarity is unquestionably a good thing, my contention is that for it to be productive 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 exposition 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

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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 popular 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 popular 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 analytical 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

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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 Sociology 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 development, 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, historians, 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 ‘popular’ 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

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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 suggested, 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 importance 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 widespread 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 notation 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.

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Before that, however, it will be useful to consider the effects of some important 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 stereos and many others. All of these, in various ways, have contributed to the situation 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 somewhat 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 digitisation can bring about a new era in which so-called ‘minority’ tastes, often overlooked 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, ending 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 industry 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 Hesmondhalgh 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 possibilities for exploiting these rights have grown steadily over time, and continue to grow’ (2009, p. 65–66).

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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 digitisation? 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 business 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 productive 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 superstructure and … definite forms of social consciousness’; quoted from ibid., p. 46) have clearly been undermined by developments in the technological ‘forces of production’. 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 technology 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 business is developing. Making predictions is always risky, but I do think we are seeing the emergence of a ‘high’ end, with specialist labels and retail outlets, and a

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‘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 studies 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 mentioned 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 validity 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 Mulligan sees it, there was a significant change during the 1990s: ‘Music still mattered 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 suggesting 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 relatively 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 rapidly, and continuing growth seems likely. It may be that there is a significant cultural 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

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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 ‘decoding’ 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 welcomed 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 interdisciplinary 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 perspectival rather than absolute. But to pursue this would take us once again far from our present interests, and far from my competence.

References Adorno, Theodor W. (1958 [1949]) Philosophie der Neuen Musik. Tübingen: Mohr. Anderson, Chris (2006) The Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand. London: Random House. Becker, Howard S. (1989) “Ethnomusicology and sociology: a letter to Charles Seeger”, Ethnomusicology, 33(2), 275–282.

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Becker, Howard S. (1982) Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Berger, Peter / Luckmann, Thomas (1991 [1966]) The Social Construction of Reality. London: Penguin. Blaukopf, Kurt (2012) Kurt Blaukopf on Music Sociology – an Anthology. Tasos Zembylas (ed.) Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Blaukopf, Kurt (1992 [1982]) Musical Life in a Changing Society. Portland: Amadeus. Blumer, Herbert (1969) Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bourdieu, Pierre / Passeron, Jean-Claude (1990 [1970]) Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London: Sage. Frith, Simon (2007) Taking Popular Music Seriously. Aldershot: Ashgate. Frith, Simon (1987) “Copyright and the music business”, in: Popular Music, 7(1), 57–75. Gronow, Pekka / Saunio, Ilpo (1999 [1998]) An International History of the Recording Industry. London: Cassell. Hesmondhalgh, David (2009) “The digitalisation of music”, in: Pratt, Andy / Jeffcut, Paul (eds.) Creativity, Innovation and the Cultural Economy. London: Routledge, 57–73. Hesmondhalgh, David / Meier, Leslie (2015) “Popular music, independence, and the concept of the alternative in contemporary capitalism”, in: Bennett, James / Strange, Niki (eds.) Media Independence. Abingdon / New York: Routledge, 94–116. Hughes, John / Sharrock, Wes / Martin, Peter J. (2003) Understanding Classical Sociology (2nd ed.). London: Sage. Jenkins, Richard (2002) Foundations of Sociology. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kolakowski, Leszek (1978) Main Currents of Marxism: Vol. I. The Founders. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martin, Peter J (2006) Music and the Sociological Gaze. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Martin, Peter J. (1995) Sounds and Society. Manchester: Manchester University Press. McClary, Susan (2000) Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mulligan, Mark (2015) Awakening: The Music Industry in the Digital Age. London: MIDiA Research. Nicholson, Stuart (2005) Is Jazz Dead? Or Has It Just Moved to a New Address? Abingdon: Routledge. Paddison, Max (1993) Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peterson, Richard / Berger, David (1990 [1975]) “Cycles in symbol production: the case of popular music”, in: Frith, Simon / Goodwin, Andrew (eds.) On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word. London: Routledge, 117–133. Rock, Paul (1979) The Making of Symbolic Interactionism. London: Macmillan. Shepherd, John (1991) Music as Social Text. Cambridge: Polity. Shepherd, John (1987) “Towards a sociology of musical styles”, in: White, Avron Levine (ed.) Lost in Music. Culture, Style, and the Musical Event. London: Routledge, 56–76. Subotnik, Rose R. (1976) Developing Variations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Weber, Max (1978 [1921]) Economy and Society, Vol. I. Berkeley: University of California Press. Willis, Paul (1990) Common Culture. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Zimmerman, Don / Pollner, Melvin (1970) “The everyday world as a phenomenon”, in: Douglas, Jack D. (ed.) Understanding Everyday Life. Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 80–103.

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 trajectories. 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 occasion 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 distancing 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: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 A. Smudits (ed.), Roads to Music Sociology, Musik und Gesellschaft, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22279-6_4

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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 contributes to making the experiences exist in other ways, to prolonging and augmenting them, just as such experiences have sustained the writings of the music sociologist 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 possibility 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 Passion 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, musicians 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. Mediation 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 relationship of cause-and-effect. But at the same time, I was not being all that esoteric 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

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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 player’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 caregiver’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 personal 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 sociologist. Is this tension the hidden engine behind his research, a subjective bias to be avoided, or the ferment indispensable for his understanding? Yet he trembles 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 neutrality 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 discussion 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).

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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 flattering 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 reformulate for our purposes the issues that he presented so well in his own relationship 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, managed 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.

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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 keeping 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 performs 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 knowledge to what has taken hold of him as a human being, which would make invisible the link between this initial personal motivation and the public work that he subsequently realized—a link usually made anonymous by the curious mechanism 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 Christianity 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 showing 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 tricking, 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 everywhere 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!

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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 nourished by writing that ‘starts with’ it, or ‘from’ it. For instance, I could easily identify 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 sociologist. 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 passage, 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 valuable 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 analyses 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.

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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 content): starting with the medium employed, they become doubles of their own theological message. They are angels showing angels so as to rehearse the presence 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 transparent, ‘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 materializes and a church is founded. From the theology in several acts that the paintings 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 without 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. Mediation 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 opposition 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 resistance 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 neutral objectivising posture, in which the scholar writes without leaving any traces

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of her presence as the one doing the writing? To call it subjective would be feeble 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 experience. 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 something 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 outside the actors’ game of constructing their values, without them knowing of it? Who still presents his taste as disinterested, absolute, independent from its origins, 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 sociology 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).

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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 observation 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 worldsin-the-making, in the smallest gesture and the collective choices with the heaviest consequences. The social sciences have employed all their ingenuity to make belief into a sort of useful blindness, the mortar necessary to keep our communities 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 reason but without which these worlds could never occur.

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In my case, it was above all the pragmatics of taste that effected this displacement (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 existing, 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 impossible 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 highlighted 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).

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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 carried away, flowing passively into an ongoing action, allowing our own gesture to happen (Hennion 2007). The techniques used by athletes, singers, yogis and tasters 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, loosening, 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 themselves, 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 happily 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 scientific) conception of sociological research, can we speak of the more internal experiences 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 experience based not on the impressions he has ‘lived’ through but on an almost material 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 description 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-tobe-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 100metre 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.

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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 pragmatist project: it is to accompany the flow of infinite extensions. If there is nothing 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 lifeas-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 inadequate: 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).

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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 precise 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 physiological 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 feeble reduction such an opposition is of what actually happens! Of course, the teacher uses such imagery to help the pupil in his unceasing back-andforth between the impression of doing something and the opposite impression 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 without trying to master it—which, far from reinforcing it, would immediately block its momentum.

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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.

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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, installations, 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 attributionist) 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 improvisation. 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).

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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 workto-be-done. But far from providing the miraculous solution to our questions, 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 banalities 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 irritation 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.

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because of this, the fact that you have a frame that’s much more … The palette 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 efficacy amongst the training of bodies, the recourse to tricks and memory aids, depending on resources and the affordances that present themselves—associations, 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 carried 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 attentive 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

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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 secondary 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 question of improvisation never seems to be more than half-asked by its producers (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).

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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 ambition that is commensurate with the challenges our discipline faces: like any other work, the sociology of art remains ‘to-be-done’.

References Becker, Howard S. (1982) Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (1984) Distinction. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Bourriaud, Nicolas (1998) Esthétique relationnelle. Dijon: Les Presses du réel. Michaud, Yves (2004) L’art à l’état gazeux. Paris: Stock. Chateau, Dominique (2009) L’art comptant pour un. Dijon: Les Presses du réel. Callon, Michel (2013) “Qu’est-ce qu’un agencement marchand?”, in: Callon, Michel et al. (eds.) Sociologie des agencements marchands. Paris: Presses de l’École des Mines, 425–426. De Certeau, Michel (1992) The Writing of History. New York: Columbia University Press. De Certeau, Michel (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Eco, Umberto (1989) The Open Work. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Eco, Umberto (1981) The Role of the Reader. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press and Hutchinson. Fauquet, Jean-Marie / Hennion, Antoine (2000) La Grandeur de Bach. Paris: Fayard. Fourmentraux, Jean-Pierre (ed.) (2012) L’Ère post-média. Paris: Hermann. Genette, Gérard (1997) The Work of Art: Immanence and Transcendence. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Gomart, Émilie, / Hennion, Antoine (1999) “A Sociology of attachment: Music amateurs, drug users”, in: Law, John, / Hassard, John (eds.) Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell, 220–247. Hennion, Antoine (2004) “Pragmatics of taste”, in: Jacobs, Marc / Hanrahan, Nancy (eds.) The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 131–144. Hennion, Antoine (2007) “Those things that hold us together: taste and sociology”, in: Cultural Sociology 1/1, 97–114. Hennion, Antoine (2010) “La mémoire et l’instant. Improvisation sur un thème de Denis Laborde”, in: Tracés, 18, 141–152. Hennion, Antoine (2012) “‘As fast as one possibly can…’: Virtuosity, a truth of musical performance?”, in: Hawkins, Stan (ed.) Critical Musicological Reflections. Essays in honour of Derek B. Scott. Farnham: Ashgate, 125–138. Hennion, Antoine (2014) “Playing, Performing, Listening. Making music—or making music act?”, in: Marshall, Lee, / Laing, Dave (eds.) Popular Music Matters: Essays in Honour of Simon Frith. Farnham: Ashgate, 165–180. Hennion, Antoine (2015a) The Passion for Music. Abingdon: Routledge. Hennion, Antoine (2015b) Enquêter sur nos attachements. Comment hériter de William James? See http://sociologies.revues.org/4953 [22.11.2017].

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Hennion, Antoine (2016) “From ANT to pragmatism: A Journey with Bruno Latour at the CSI”, in: New Literary History 47 (2/3), 289–308. Hennion, Antoine (2017) “Attachments, you say…? How a concept collectively emerges in one research group”, in: Journal of Cultural Economy 10 (1), 112–121. Hennion, Antoine / Monnin, Alexandre (2015) “Sous la dictée de l’ange. Enquêter sous le signe d’Étienne Souriau”, in: Courtois-l’Heureux, Fleur / Wiame, Aline (eds.), Étienne Souriau. Une ontologie de l’instauration. Paris: Vrin, 131–156. Iser, Wolfgang (1980) The Act of Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. James, William (1979 [1897]) The Will to Believe, ed. Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. James, William (1977 [1909a]) A Pluralistic Universe, ed. by Fredson Bowers, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. James, William (1909b) The Meaning of Truth. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. James, William (1976 [1912]) The Works of William James: Essays in Radical Empiricism, ed. by Burkhardt, Frederick / Bowers, Fredson. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Jauss, Hans R. (1982) Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kalinowski, Irène (2005) “Leçons wéberiennes sur la science et la propagande”. Introduction in: Weber, Max [1919] La Science, profession et vocation. Marseille: Agone. Lapoujade, David (2011) “Étienne Souriau. Une philosophie des existences moindres”, in Debaise, Didier (ed.) Philosophie des possessions. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 167–196. Latour, Bruno (1999) “Factures/Fractures: From the Concept of Network to the Concept of Attachment”, in: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 36 (Autumn), 20–31. Latour, Bruno (2013) An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Marin, Louis (1989) Opacité de la peinture, Paris: Usher. Souriau, Étienne (1955) L’ombre de Dieu. Paris: PUF. Souriau, Étienne (1956) “Du mode d’existence de l’œuvre à faire”, in Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie, 50 (1), 25 February 1956: 4–24 (reprinted in Souriau, Étienne (2009), Les différents modes d’existence. Paris: PUF, 195–217). Stengers, Isabelle (2007) ‘William James: une éthique de la pensée?’, in: Debaise, Didier (ed.) Vie et expérimentation. Peirce, James, Dewey. Paris: Vrin, 147–174. Sudnow, David (1978) Ways of the Hand: the organization of improvised conduct. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Teil, Geneviève / Hennion, Antoine (2004) “Discovering quality or performing taste? A sociology of the amateur”, in: Harvey, Mark / McMeekin, Andrew / Warde, Alan (eds.) Theoretical Approaches to Food Quality. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 19–37. Teil, Geneviève / Hennion, Antoine (2011) Le vin et l’environnement. Paris: Presses de 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 various 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 processes—which produce and legitimate gendered differences as well as question 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: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 A. Smudits (ed.), Roads to Music Sociology, Musik und Gesellschaft, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22279-6_5

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(Buscatto 2007a, b, 2010a, b, 2014a; Buscatto and Leontsini 2011a, b; Buscatto 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 transformed 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, leadership, 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 considered 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 historians 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).

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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 secondary 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 intrinsic 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

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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 devalued 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 history, 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, simplicity 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 create 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 valuation 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

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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 stereotypes 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 unconsciously, 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 sexuality, seductiveness, motherhood, creative independence or virtuosity, they often go along with a disparaging attitude when it comes to assessing women’s professional 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 Rolling 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 demonstration 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. Comparing reviews of these female musicians’ musical performances before and after they obtained commercial success, Faupel and Schmutz show not just the negative 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 femininity and sexuality become more subtle (rather than disappear) once artists have

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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 produced 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 commit themselves lastingly, seriously, reliably to highly demanding artistic activities. 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 different 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, ethnic, 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 perceive 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 people 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

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not, depending on those meanings attached to many phenomena external to musical 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 compose, is located at the intersection of technical skill criteria and judgments bearing 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 relatively 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 perform 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 networks 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 interpreted 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

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project, having to deal with relational ambiguities in what is supposed to be cooperative work, women musicians learn early on to ‘turn off’ their seductive power. They also try to behave irreproachably in professional terms to avoid being denigrated for their musical technique—a constant threat. But ‘turning off the seduction’ 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 relatively ‘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 colleague, 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 perspective, one reveals all those things which intervene in being considered a good colleague who is worth being recruited, financed, helped out, discussed with, critiqued 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. Musicians, 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

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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 commitment 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 relatives 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 themselves 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 providing 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.

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Most women artists do not have male partners willing to play this same extensive 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 simply 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 conditions. But this makes women highly dependent on such partners and a separation, 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 create 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 relatives (when for instance they are part of the musical world). They help in many different ways: they connect the musician with efficient musical partners (musicians, 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 suggesting 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 including taking care of one’s kids or elder parents.

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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 influence who gets to create or perform music and how. This may be even more necessary 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 possible to remove certain social barriers. Access to education programs ensures the acquisition of the knowledge and skills necessary to take the entrance examinations 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 necessary 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).

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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 developing 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 classical orchestral musicians has a favourable effect on women’s entry into classical music worlds simply because the jury listens ‘blindly’, ignorant of the instrumentalist’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 musical 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 musical 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 performed. Such an approach shows the researcher the ways that marginalized people 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

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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 performances 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 musicians may ‘seduce’ audiences quite easily and be successful as such. Some female musicians may also decide to promote a ‘feminine’ music based on intrinsic ‘feminine’ or feminist qualities—including songs dedicated to rape or violence, music performed in ‘feminine’ ways. This may attract some militant audiences or producers 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 considered 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 electronic 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.

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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 technical 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 preventing women from being trained and getting access to musical work have disappeared, 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 people who may operate to make it despite all obstacles and helps us better understand 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 produced, 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 outside 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.

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• Think of musical work as hierarchized work, far from the myths of talent or genius revealed through interaction as currently propagated by famous sociologists 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 intersectional 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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Ortiz, Laureen (2004) Parcours par corps: une enquête de terrain sur les musiciennes de rock, mémoire de maîtrise de sociologie, Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne. Perrenoud, Marc / Chapuis, Jérôme (2016) “Des arrangements féminins ambivalents. Musiques actuelles en Suisse romande” in: Buscatto Marie / Monjaret Anne (eds.) “Arts et jeux de genre”, Ethnologie française, 71–82. Ravet, Hyacinthe (2011) Musiciennes: enquête sur les femmes et la musique, Paris, Editions Autrement. Reitsamer, Rosa (2011) The Do-It-Yourself Careers of Techno and Drum & Bass DJs in Vienna. Dancecult. Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 2011, 3 (1), 28–43. Rudent, Catherine (2016) “Les personnages de la musicienne et du musicien dans la presse musicale: quelques stéréotypes de genre”, in: Timothée Picard (ed.) Quelle critique pour les musiques actuelles? (to be published). Schilt, Kristin (2004) “Riot Grrrl Is… Contestation over Meaning in a Music Scene” in: Benett A., Peterson R.A. Music Scenes. Local, Translocal, and Virtual. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 115–130. Tripier, Odile (1998) “Mixité et discrimination dans le champ musical: l’exemple des femmes dans les groupes rock”, Documents de recherche OMF, Série: Sociologie des faits musicaux et modèles culturels, Observatoire Musical Français, 3, March 1998. Wagner, Izabela (2004) “La formation des violonistes virtuoses: les réseaux de soutien”, Sociétés contemporaines, 56, 133–163. Whiteley, Sheila (ed.) (1997) Sexing the Groove. Popular Music and Gender. London: Routledge.

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 detective 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 create with these sounds: a staccato electric guitar for casualness, a chirpy synthesizer 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 consolidation 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: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 A. Smudits (ed.), Roads to Music Sociology, Musik und Gesellschaft, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22279-6_6

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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 proceed to talk about pop-rock and musical cosmopolitanism. Preliminaries Firstly, I want to address the relationship between music sociology and sociological 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 conceptualization 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 findings 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 ‘cosmopolitan 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 society 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

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place. I should stress that in this recent sociological discourse, at least as I understand 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. Cosmopolitanism, 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 sociological 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 performance. 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 mediated by—or in fact culturally performed and enacted through—music. So finally, to conclude this first part, I want to devote some words to sociological approaches to musical substance, sonorities, the musical text itself. Music sociology, and especially the sociology of popular music, has consistently 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, distribution, 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

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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 repeatedly 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 cultural 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 frameworks 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 reality. 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 prominent 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 cosmopolitan 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.

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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 cosmopolitan condition as the most recent phase in the long historical process of civilization. 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 modernity, detached from any particular ethnicity or culture, yet ‘foreign’ to most traditional cultures on earth. Cosmopolitan bodies are bodies whose very corporeality is inscribed with cultural dispositions and sensibilities, skills and forms of knowhow, schemes of perception and evaluative criteria shared by many other bodies across the world, in national and ethnic settings other than their own. Once bodies 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 overlap between different cultural settings around the world and enactments of world culture as one entity. One realm of cultural practice and performance that exemplifies the propagation of cosmopolitan bodies is the enactment of musical knowledge, and especially pop-rock knowledge.

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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 poprock 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 knowledge 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 probably 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 experiential, 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 humming 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 rhythmic 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 recording of the song that appeared on the White Album of the band in 1968.

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A third layer of musical knowledge is also experiential and affective, but consists of a rather basic form of acquaintance and a familiarity with forms of musical 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 specific 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 background 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. However, 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 cosmopolitan 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 ‘poprock 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 musical 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 narrative, a lineage of inter-connected styles and genres whose discourse points to a

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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 culture 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 conventionally 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-songwriters, 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 institutionalized 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 participating in what such musicians and fans believed, and still believe, are the constantly 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 studies 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), electronic 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

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(Mōri 2009) and South Korea (Shin 2009) and metal all over the planet (Wallach et al. 2011). The above are but a sample of the work on pop-rock phenomena 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 emergence 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 example 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 Spanish 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 musical 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

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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 naturalize into the cultural environment of countries all over the world the electric, electronic, 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 sonorities 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 listeners 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 sonorities, 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. Individuals 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 performance 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 domesticity 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

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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 aesthetic 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 poprock. Consider the following four types of sonic expression, all emitted by electric 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 elevation and transcendence; syncopated riffs, that is, short chords separated by a second 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 musical phrases that originated in the aesthetic culture of pop-rock and gained worldwide 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 numerous national and ethnic settings and enacted routinely for performing mundane, 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 reality 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 familiar 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 poprock being absorbed into the canonical auditory knowledge of listeners across the

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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 listeners 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 providing 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, cognition, emotions and the senses; routine, habitual practices, or everyday life as cultural performance; and cosmopolitanism as the current state of world society. 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 saturated 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 cultural reality in almost all spheres of social life. Music sociology therefore is in a perfect position to contribute empirical evidence and theoretical insights pertaining 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 contributions 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 sociality and about mechanisms of sociality in general.

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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, general 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 potentially 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 listening 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 contribute 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 proliferation of specific musical cultures may prove highly efficient as a research strategy for exploring the cultural performance of boundary work by members of collective 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 evolving social units or collective identities, and especially into groupings differentiated by nuances of life style. Bringing about a constantly increasing demand for cultural materials around which such groupings can organize their sense of distinction and perform boundary work, this development closely corresponds with the accelerated pace of stylistic innovation in all forms of art and expressive culture, 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 sensual experience, in emotional states and in bodily movement. Given that members of social units adopt such sonorities or genres as markers of identity, such inquiries can reveal much knowledge about the relationship between aesthetic cultures and the performance of collective identities.

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Of particular interest in this regard are genres, styles and sonorities, or aesthetic 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 performance through various bodily practices, can amount to a substantial contribution to the sociological understanding of contemporary cosmopolitanism.

References Baulch, Emma (2007) Making Scenes: Reggae, Punk and Death Metal in 1990s Bali. Durham / London: Duke University Press. Beck, Ulrich / Sznaider, Natan (2006) “Unpacking Cosmopolitanism for the Social Sciences: A Research Agenda”, The British Journal of Sociology, 57, 1–23. Bodden, Michael (2005) “Rap in Indonesian Youth Music in the 1990s”, Asian Music 36, 1–27. Born, Georgina (2010) “For a Relational Musicology: Music and Interdisciplinarity, Beyond the Practice Turn”, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 135, 205–243. Brackett, David (2000) Interpreting Popular Music. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chew, Matthew M. (2010) “Hybridity, Empowerment and Subversiveness in Cantopop Electronic Dance Music”, Visual Anthropology, 24, 139–151. Condry, I. (2006) Hip Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization. Durham, NC Duke University Press. de Kloet, Jroen (2010) Red Sonic Trajectories: Popular Music and Youth in Urban China. Amsterdam: School for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam. Del Val, Fernán / Noya, Javier / Pérez-Colman, Martin C. (2014) “Autonomy, Submission or Sound Hybridization? The Construction of the Aesthetic Canon of the Spanish PopRock”, Revista Española de Investigaciones Sociologicas, 145, 147–178. Delanty, Gerard (ed.) (2012) Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies. London: Routledge. DeNora, Tia (2003) After Adorno. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doehring, André (2015) “Andrés’s ‘New For U’ – New For Us: On Analyzing Electronic Dance Music”, in: von Appen, Ralf / Doehring, André / Helms, Dietrich / Moore, Allan F. (eds.) Song Interpretation in 21st-Century Pop Music. Farnham: Ashgate, 133–155. Elias, Norbert (2000 [1939]) The Civilizing Process. Oxford: Blackwell. Fabbri, Franco / Plastino, Goffredo (eds.) (2014) Made in Italy: Studies in Popular Music. London: Routledge. Goffman, Erving (1961) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. Hennion, Antoine (2011) “Music and Mediation: Toward a New Sociology of Music”, in: Clayton, Martin / Herbert, Trevor / Middleton, Richard (eds.) The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction. New York / London: Routledge, 249–260.

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Karahasanolu, Songül / Skoog, Gabriel (2009) “Synthesizing Identity: Gestures of Filiation and Affiliation in Turkish Popular Music”, Asian Music, 40(2), 52–71. Knorr Cetina, Karin (2007) “Culture in Global Knowledge Societies: Knowledge Cultures and Epistemic Cultures”, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 32, 361–375. Latour, Bruno (2005) Re-Assembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Law, John (2008) “Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics”, in: Turner, Bryan S. (ed.) The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 141–158. Looseley, David (2003) Popular Music in Contemporary France: Authenticity, Politics, Debate. Oxford: Berg. Magaldi, Cristina (1999) “Adopting Imports: New Images and Alliances in Brazilian Popular Music of the 1990s.” Popular Music, 18, 309–329. Martínez, Sílvia / Fouce, Héctor (eds.) Made in Spain: Studies in Popular Music. London: Routledge. Mauss, Marcel (1973 [1934]) “Techniques of the Body.” Economy and Society, 2, 70–88. Middleton, Richard (1990) Studying Popular Music. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Moore, Allan (2001) Rock: The Primary Text: Developing a Musicology of Rock. Aldershot: Ashgate. Mōri, Yoshitaka (2009) “J-Pop: From the Ideology of Creativity to DiY Music Culture”, Inter Asia Cultural Studies, 10, 474–488. Nettl, Bruno (2008) The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-Three Discussions. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. O’Connor, Alan (2004) “Punk and Globalization: Spain and Mexico”, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 7, 175–195. Pacini Hernandez, Deborah / L’Hoeste, Héctor / Zolov, Eric (eds.) (2004) Rockin’ Las Américas: The Global Politics of Rock in Latin/o America. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Peterson, Richard A. / Kern, Roger (1996) “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore”, American Sociological Review, 61, 900–907. Regev, Motti (2013) Pop-Rock Music: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in Late Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Saldanha, Arun (2002) “Music, Space, Identity: Geographies of Youth Culture in Bangalore”, Cultural Studies, 16, 337–350. Shin, Hyunjoon (2009) “Have you ever seen the Rain? And who’ll stop the Rain?: The Globalizing Project of Korean Pop (K-Pop)”, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 10, 507–523. Skinner, Ryan Thomas (2015) Bamako Sounds: The Afropolitan Ethics of Malian Music. Minneapoils: University of Minnesota Press. Stokes, Martin (2010) The Republic of Love: Cultural Intimacy in Turkish Popular Music Chicago: University of Chicago. Tagg, Philip (2012) Music’s Meanings: A Modern Musicology for Non-Musos. New York: Mass Media Music Scholars’ Press.

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Turino, Thomas (2000) Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ulhôa, Martha.T. de / Azevedo, Cláudia / Trotta, Felipe (eds.) (2015) Made in Brazil: Studies in Popular Music. London: Routledge. Varriale, Simone (2015) “Cultural Production and the Morality of Markets: Popular Music Critics and the Conversion of Economic Power into Symbolic Capital”. Poetics, 51, 1–15. Wallach, Jeremey / Berger, Harris M. / Greene, Paul. (eds.) (2011) Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music around the World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Yurchak, Alexei (2003) “Soviet hegemony of form: Everything was forever, until it was no more”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 45, 480–510.

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 players 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 societies, where all sorts of sub-groups speak specialized languages most of us don’t

H. S. Becker (*)  San Francisco, California, USA © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 A. Smudits (ed.), Roads to Music Sociology, Musik und Gesellschaft, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22279-6_7

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know. Some ethnic groups speak the language of their country of origin, or perhaps 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 substantially different dialects, too. So our research requires us to do some linguistic study first. We encounter similar problems studying occupational groups, which ordinarily have, at the least, a substantial technical lexicon, referring to things, operations 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 language. 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 implication, 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 meaning. Players make those mistakes so valuable to us as sociologists in musical language, 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 amateurs. They read music, can discuss music in the technical language of the trade,

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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 practice, 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 without 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

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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 something 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,

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rather than the first beat, where we all felt it ‘should’ end. That is, where the normal 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 ‘Forgetful’, 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 create 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 usually 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 conventional 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 simpler 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.

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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 inattentively, 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 people 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

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have to find out all the things we did, prominently among them the basic musical 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 analytic 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 Republic (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 Bangui. 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 problem 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

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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 possibilities without any observable system organizing them. But the musicians themselves 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

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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 singing 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 knowledgeable 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 produced 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 transcribing 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.

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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, collect 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 evidence 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 knowledge 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 descriptions. 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 dancing, 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 reliable 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)

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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 single 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 dissonance, and pick up the melody again. The eight-bar bridge would consist of a seesawing 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 activity 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 solution they arrive at. And so they don’t—can’t—understand the point of the example 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 negotiate 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 example of how unfamiliar harmonic patterns destabilize jazz players and create difficulties 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”:

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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 circleof-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 sociology 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.

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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 excellent to see a growing body of Blaukopf’s work translated into English and shared with a wider reading public (e.g., Zembylas 2012).

1It

is 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 movement activity) and they have helped to introduce our subfield to wider audiences.

T. DeNora (*)  University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 A. Smudits (ed.), Roads to Music Sociology, Musik und Gesellschaft, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22279-6_8

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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, ethnomusicology, 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 ‘systematic 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 interrelationship between music and perceptual systems, and with music as ideological in its configuration, marks his work as anticipating some of the current debates within 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 particular, 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.

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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 offered 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 constrained 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—ironically, 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 musicologically—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 discoveries’ (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 therapists, musicians and music lovers already know) a way of doing, a modality, a register for and a way of being.

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Methodologically, it becomes possible to trace the movements and transformations of musical materials (tones, passages, rhythms, songs, connotations) as music travels and is drawn into contact with many things. And within this paradigm, ‘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 scholarship at a distance, somewhat passive, a kind of ‘pointing out’ form of observation 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). Epistemologically, 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, hypostatize 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.

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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 platitudinous 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 parallels 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 increasingly 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 testing 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

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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 certainly 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 sociologist 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 sociologist/analyst. Ironically, and despite the anti-positivist claims of the once ‘new’ musicology, critical musicological ‘readings’ of musical texts or performances as

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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, misguided, 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 offering potentially varied, perhaps contrary, and by no means fixed or pre-determined 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 musicology, making a space in the canon for something new, juggling values, engaging in activism through musical critical means).

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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 linked 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 pastime (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’.

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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, symbolic, 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 bootstrapping operation, a process that taps cultural resources and draws them into the field of action where they become props, levers and vehicles that become implicated 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

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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 project 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 better!’ 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 musicled, 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 sympathetic 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).

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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 xylophone,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 therapeutic 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 xylophone and toward increased possibilities of musical companionship (both facing the keyboard and performing a duet together, both piano and vocal). This transformed 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 happened 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 xylophone). 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, SaintSaëns’ Danse Macabre, but also Walt Disney’s 1929 cartoon Skeleton Dance, where the xylophone being played is the backbone of a ‘live’ skeleton.

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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 psychiatric 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’, officially 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 narrative 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 potential 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)

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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 relationships 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 community 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, psychiatric 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).

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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 happening 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 materials. 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]), certainly 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!

The Unsung Work of Music Sociology? Musical

125 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... 0:14 - piano plays intro to song strongly, pauses.... 0:20 - Gary sings first line of verse ... When all the world is a hopeless jumble...

Gary scans front-row people... ‘front-row’ participants look towards Gary for an entry 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... 2:18 - Bit of a strain for all voices at the climax, ...that's where you'll find me... clarinet covers with a little twiddle at end 2:20 - final Somewhere... strong singing, with clarinet now confidently doing decorative motifs between songs, helps bind it together as singers flag a bit... 2:48 - coda section – If happy little bluebirds fly... people don’t know this so exactly, so it goes a bit messy with pitch and rhythm again. Gary, violin, clarinet to the rescue with emphatic playing... 2:50 - ...why oh why can't I... slows down and leans into the final phrase – full singing + violin and clarinet doing flourishes up and down to embellish the final note...

‘Ooh, Hello there!’ (A shouts to B – singer to friend just coming in, timing speech in the pause between two sung phrases) Gary looks up to singers, says ‘sing up!’... (they do!)

Bobby makes a face at Gary & others as if to say ‘What's this bit?’ People looking towards each other to time final note... Clapping, cheers... ‘Not bad...’ ‘Very good Simon, nice...’ ‘Very good Rob!’

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

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Over a ten-year period, Pam increasingly uses her songs for a variety of purposes: 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 message 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 wellbeing, 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

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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’.

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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 musical 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 diminished 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 embodied notions of feminine decorum (women in music were not meant to huff and

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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 construction (2000, 2001), following the ways in which different actors appropriate ‘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 singers, 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 logical 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

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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 members, and singing group volunteers. Musical activity redistributes salient characteristics 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 musician, 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 transformation; see e.g., Bergh 2011; Bergh and Sloboda 2010 and Robertson 2011). The organization itself became musicalized and increasingly prioritized musical 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 certain 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

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and stances through ‘sonic idioms’. The various members of SMART could frequently be seen to organize themselves in relation to sonic idioms—in Pam’s case, her idiomatic ‘fragile’ voice (high pitched, occasionally breaking or halting, 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 experiences, 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 understood to function as a salutogenic medium and as a medium that can be used explicitly 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-Rawden’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 continually 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 screamed 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).

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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 watershed 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 becomes 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 anticipation 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 identity 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 specifically for Ivan—as it did with the fact that it was music per se. Here then we

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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 simultaneously 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 process, 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 embodiment. 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 ordering, a dynamic and powerful ingredient of social life. and music sociology has ­documented this point, and therefore offered powerful contributions to sociology writ large.

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Music sociology also shows sociology how and where to look if it is interested 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 practice are world-making, music sociology arguably leads the way to a richer understanding 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 temporal 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.

References Acord, Sophia / DeNora, Tia (2008) “Culture and the Arts: From Art Worlds to Arts-inAction”, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 619(1), 223–237. Ansdell, Gary / Davidson, Jane / Magee, Wendy / Meehan, John / Procter, Simon (2010) “From ‘this f*****g life’ to ‘that‘s better’…in four minutes: an interdisciplinary study of music therapy’s ‘present moments‘ and their potential for affect modulation”, Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 19(1), 3–28. Ansdell, Gary / DeNora, Tia (2016) Musical Pathways in Recovery. Community music therapy and mental wellbeing. Farnham: Ashgate. Becker, Howard S. (1982) Art Worlds. Berkeley / Los Angeles: University of California Press. Becker, Howard S. (1986) Doing Things Together: Selected Papers. Evanston: N ­ orthwestern University Press. Becker, Howard S. (2014) What About Mozart, What About Murder: Reasoning from Cases. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bennett, Andy (2004) “Consolidating the music scenes perspective”, Poetics, 32, 223–234. Berger, Bennett (1995) An Essay on Culture: Symbolic Structure and Social Structure. ­Berkeley: University of California Press. Bergh, Arild (2011) “Emotions in motion: Transforming conflict and music”, in: Deliège, Irène / Davidson, Jane (eds.) Music and the Mind: Essays in Honour of John Sloboda. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 363–378.

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Bergh, Arild / Sloboda, John (2010) “Music and art in conflict transformation. Music and the arts in action. A review”, Music and Arts in Action, vol. 2(2), http://www.musicandartsinaction.net/index.php/maia/article/view/conflicttransformation (20.6.2017) Blaukopf, Kurt (1992) Musical Life in a Changing Society (Trans David Marinelli). ­Portland: Amadeus Press. Buscatto, Marie (2011) “Using ethnography to study gender”, in: Silverman, David (ed.) Qualitative Research. London: Sage, 35–52. Cook, Nicholas (2003) “Music as performance”, in: Clayton, Martin / Herbert, Trevor / Middleton, Richard (eds.) The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge, 204–214. Cook, Nicholas (2012) “Anatomy of the encounter: Intercultural analysis as relational musicology”, in: Hawkins, Stan (ed.) Critical Musicological Reflections: Essays in Honour of Derek B. Scott. Farnham: Ashgate Publishers, 193–208. Cook, Nicholas (2013) Beyond the Score. Music as Performance. Oxford: Oxford ­University Press. DeNora, Tia (1994) “Review, ‘Musical Life in a Changing Societyʼ by Kurt Blaukopf”, Contemporary Sociology 23(2), 317–318. DeNora, Tia (1995) Beethoven and the Construction of Genius. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. DeNora, Tia (2000) Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DeNora, Tia (2003) After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DeNora, Tia (2005) “The concerto and society”, in: Keefe, Simon (ed.) The Cambridge Guide to the Concerto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19–32. DeNora, Tia (2006) “The Concerto and Society”, in: Keefe, Simon (ed.) The Cambridge Handbook to the Concerto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19–32. DeNora, Tia (2012) “Music and talk in tandem”, in: Bonde, Lars Ole / Ruud, Even / ­Skanland, Marie Strand / Trondalen, Gro (eds.) Musical Life Stories: narratives on health musicing. Oslo: Norges musikkhøgskole, 329–338. DeNora, Tia (2013a) Music Asylums: Wellbeing Through Music in Everyday Life. Farnham: Ashgate. DeNora, Tia (2013b) “‘Time After Time’: A Quali-T Method for Assessing Music’s Impact on Wellbeing”, International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Wellbeing. Vol. 8(1), http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/qhw.v8i0.20611 (20 June 2017). DeNora, Tia (2014) Making Sense of Reality: culture and perception in everyday life. ­London: Sage. DeNora, Tia / Ansdell, Gary (2014) “What Can’t Music Do?”, Psychology of Wellbeing, 4(23), http://www.psywb.com/content/pdf/s13612-014-0023-6.pdf (20 June 2017). Edwards, Jane (1995) “You Are Singing Beautifully: Music Therapy and the Debridement Bath”, The Arts in Psychotherapy 22/11, 53–55. Einarsdottir, Sigrun Lilja (2012) J. S. Bach in Everyday Life: The ‘Choral Identity’ of an Amateur ‘Art Music’ Bach Choir and the Concept of ‘Choral Capital’. PhD Thesis, Exeter University, https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10036/4022 (20 June 2017). Elliot, T. S. (1943) Four Quartets. London: Harcourt, Brace and Company.

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Fancourt, Daisy / Ockelford, Adam / Belai, Abi (2014) “The psychoneuroimmunological effects of music: A systematic review and a new model”, Brain, Behavior, and Immunity 36: 15–26. Fauquet, Joël-Marie / Hennion, Antoine (2000) La Grandeur de Bach. L’amour de la musique en France au XIXe siècle. Paris: Fayard. Fine, Gary Alan (2012) Tiny Publics: A Theory of Group Action and Culture. New York: Russel Sage Foundation. Finnegan, Ruth (2007 [1989]) The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Gaines, James (2010) Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment. New York: Harper. Goffman, Erving (1961) Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. New York: Anchor Books. Hagen, Trever (2012) From Inhibition to Commitment: Configuring the Czech Underground. Eastbound: Special Issue ‘Popular Music in Eastern Europe’, https://ore.exeter. ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/17271 (20 June 2017). Hanser, Susanne (2010) “Music, Health, and Well-Being”, Juslin, Patrick / Sloboda, John (eds.) Handbook of Music and Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 849–877. Hennion, Antoine / Fauquet, Joël-Marie (2001) “Authority as performance: The love for Bach in nineteenth-century France”, Poetics, 29, 75–88. Hennion, Antoine (2007) “Those Things That Hold Us Together: Taste and Sociology”, Cultural Sociology, 1/1, 97–114. Hennion, Antoine (2015) The Passion for Music. Farnham: Ashgate. Huber, Michael (2013) “Music reception in the digital age – empirical research on new patterns of musical behavior”, International Journal of Music Business Research, 2(1), 6–34. Kaden, Christian (2013) “Communication in music”, (Trans. Katharina Maes-Roopchansingh), in: Simonson, Peter et al. (ed.) Handbook of Communication History. London: Routledge, 153–180. Keane, John (1998) Civil Society: Old Images, New Visions. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Latour, Bruno (2005) Assembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maines, David (1979) “Mesostructure and Social Process (Review of Anselm Strauss, Negotiations: Varieties, Contexts, Processes, and Social Order)”, Contemporary Sociology, 8(4), 524–527. Martin, Peter J. (1995) Sounds and Society: Themes in the Sociology of Music. Manchester: Manchester University Press. MacDonald, Raymond / Hargreaves, David J. / Miell, Dorothy (eds.) (2017) Oxford Handbook of Musical Identities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McCormick, Lisa (2015) Performing Civility: International Competitions in Classical Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCallum, Richard (2011) “Micro Public Spheres and the Sociology of Religion”, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 26(2), 173–187. Nercessian, Nancy J. (1990) “Methods of Conceptual Change in Science: Imagistic and Analogical Reasoning”, Philosophica, Special Issue: Scientific Discovery, 45, 33–52.

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Procter, Simon (2011) “Reparative Musicing: Thinking on the usefulness of social capital theory within music therapy”, Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 20(3), 242–262. Robertson, Craig (2011) “Music and Conflict Transformation in Bosnia: Constructing and Reconstructing the Normal”, Music and the Arts in Action, 2(2), http://www.musicandartsinaction.net/index.php/maia/article/view/conflicttransformationbosnia (20.6.2017). Roy, William (2012) Reds, Whites, and Blues: Social Movements, Folk Music and Race in the United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Schütz, Alfred (1962) “Making Music Together”, in: Schütz, Alfred: Collected Papers, vol 2. The Hague: Martinus Njhoff, 159–179. Skanland, Marie (2011) “Use of MP3 players as a coping resource”, Music and Arts in Action, 3: 2, 12–33. Small, Christopher (1998) Musicking. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Stern, Daniel N. (2004) The present moment in psychotherapy and everyday life. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Trevarthen, Colwyn (2002) “Origins of Musical Identity: evidence from infancy for musical social awareness”, in: MacDonald, Raymond / Hagreaves, David / Miell, Dorothy (eds.) Musical Identities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 21–38. Wuthnow, Robert (2003) All in Synch: How Music and Art are Revitalizing American Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press. Zembylas, Tasos (ed.) (2012) Kurt Blaukopf: An Anthology. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Zembylas, Tasos (ed.) (2014) Artistic Practices: Social Interactions and Cultural ­Dynamics. London: Routledge.

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 © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 A. Smudits (ed.), Roads to Music Sociology, Musik und Gesellschaft, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22279-6_9

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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 hesitate 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 general, 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 developed general sociology was already available, in Historical Materialism (ibid., p. 475). The practical consequences would have been absurd: ‘sociological’ theories became a triviality. And they were reserved for the celebration of 100-yearold dogmas, far from empiric reality. Even more, empirical research, in a broader sense, was incompatible with the ruling Leninist ideology. Consequently, scholars 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,

1A

significant exception is Meyer’s contribution to a Music History conceived by himself: Musik in der Urgesellschaft (1977).

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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 leading scholar was the East Berlin philosopher Georg Klaus. Klaus wrote several books on self-organizing systems, on semiotics, on data processing and on information 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 Germany’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 reception of modern system theory in East Germany, and even in Eastern Europe generally. This theory was adopted not only by technical and biological disciplines, but also by social sciences and the humanities, particularly psychology, linguistics 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 seriousness 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 TheorieRevolution’, 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.

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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 sociologies 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.

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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 Musikverständnis (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 dialogue 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 project 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’ (KneplerGruppe). 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/organisierten Gruppe von Musikwissenschaftlern in der DDR, insbesondere in Berlin [Information 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).

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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 discussions 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 acoustic 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 adopting Ludwig Wittgenstein’s dichotomy of ‘Sagen und Zeigen’, telling and showing, to artistic communication, with music as a system of ‘Zeigen’ (showing), of gestural meaning. 3. Friedhart Klix, director of the Psychological Institute at Humboldt University. 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 discussions 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.

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I am not going to underestimate my own contribution to these discussions, directing 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 during 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 attractive: 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 working in the management of the computer centre at Humboldt University for several 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 innovation 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 neuroscience to musicology (Thierbach 1988); and last but not least, with me, engaged in music sociology of a new type.

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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 anthropological 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 Australian 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 emigrate 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 administrations. That is why our ways separated.

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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 service. That’s why I worked from 1972 to 1973 as a dramaturge for opera, musicals 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 sociology 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 processes 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 similar argumentation in Ulrich Beck’s book on Risikogesellschaft (Risk Society) (1992 [1986]). Beck advised a reconstruction of sciences, and of scientific methodology. He accentuated the fact that there was always an essential need for specialists 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’.

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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 referential 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 semantic 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 classification 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 ‘classificatory ­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

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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 evident (Meyer 1956). In my book on Musiksoziologie, the type of ‘classificatory meaning’ was unfolded as an explanatory model of Eduard Hanslick’s aesthetics 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 transport 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 experience 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 complexity, in sum, seems to be true, but most people do not behave like this. Therefore, 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’ transported 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 people of the 18th and 19th centuries were organizing their behaviour exactly corresponding 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 seriously the phantasies, the norms, the beliefs, the social rules of the culture investigated. This does not necessarily prevent the sociologist from commenting on

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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 necessary 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 partners in communication have vital contact with each other, and that this personal contact is regulating the behaviour of the partners involved. Of course, the elementary 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 decoding 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 relation 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. Communication 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.

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The aesthetics of works, and not of musical actions; the scientific interest in written objects or in taped acoustic events; the praise of an opus perfectum et absolutum (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 communication, or vice versa. The focus is not music itself, in a centripetal movement 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 communication. A model that better fits the circumstances described is the model of participation: of participation in a common worship. Again, we can define communication 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 considered as an exemplification, and as an explanation, of heaven—in Latin, as ordinis distinctionisque caelestis exemplar (Boethius 1867). This exemplification, however, 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 necessary, 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 organum 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 understood 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:

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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 stainedglass 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 abstractions 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 Handbook 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 public 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 communication’ 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 relevant 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, materializes 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 structure of doubling. You might remember the postulates of David Garrick, JeanJacques 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).

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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 feeling of fictive persons, caused by these events. The difference becomes evident when you compare the structure of the genuine 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 double-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 Jerusalem; ­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 cantus firmus choir. In its historical perspectives, the Passion is exogamic; it transcends 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 persons: Simon, Lukas, Hanne, who report on their feelings. The story itself is boring: 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 importantly, there is only one horizon of history: the horizon of Haydn’s contemporaries. 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

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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 maximum of profit. The ‘origin’ of linear communication in music, besides and in parallel 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 musicology 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 Cienskowski. 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, interdisciplinary 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 borderlines 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 Sociology 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

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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 experiences under the repressive conditions of dictatorship in this talk could paradoxically serve as the memorializing of a possible scientific future.

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