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NOTES about this article: + Gives HISTORY/overview of the most significant music-sociological studies...
The sociology of music has
a strong empirical tradition, yet retains inspiration from its more philosophically
oriented past. For sociologists, especially in recent years as the field
has experienced a cultural and interpretative turn, the study of music
has been linked to wider questions concerning social structure, stability
and change, the interaction between social networks and musical production,
the emotions, the body, the study of social movements, identity politics,
and organizational ecology. In all these areas, sociologists of music
have sought to ground their enquiries through the use of empirical methods
designed for the scrutiny of behavioural trends, organizations, and forms
of action. In this chapter I take stock of sociology of music’s
“toolkit” and present some of the best-known empirical work
within the field. My discussion is organized around two broad areas of
study: musical production and musical consumption. To contextualize these
topics, and to differentiate the empirical sociology of music from musicology’s
growing interest in social constructionism, I begin with a brief sketch
of classic , and more overtly theoretical, work in music sociology. A. Sociology of Music:
the Classic Legacy In contrast to Max Weber’s
more formal concern with the origins of musical-technical practices distinct
to the West (Weber 1958), Adorno focused on the question of music’s
ideological dimension. In line with classical philosophers such as Plato
and Aristotle, he pursued the question of music’s ability not only
to reflect but also to instigate or reinforce forms of consciousness and
social structures. For Adorno, different forms of music were homologous
with (structurally parallel to, and thus able to inculcate) cognitive
habits, modes of consciousness, and historical developments. As he saw
it, music’s compositional processes — its degree of conventionality,
the interrelation of musical parts or voices, the arrangement of consonance
and dissonance — could serve as means of socialization. This ultimately
structuralist notion is perhaps best exemplified by considering Adorno’s
views on the contradictory possibilities for consciousness posed by twentieth-century
musical forms. On the one hand, he believed that Schoenberg’s music
could enable critical consciousness because, through its processes of
composition — for example, its use of dissonance and formal fragmentation,
it modeled a mode of critical attention to the world refusing to offer
“false” musical comfort. On the other hand, jazz, Tin Pan
Alley, and other popular genres inculcated psychological regression and
infantile dependency (Adorno 1990; Witkin 1998), providing, in the age
of “Total Administration,” a medium that “trains the
unconscious for conditioned reflexes”(Adorno 1976:53). “Wrong”
music thus had to be denounced, and for this reason, Adorno considered
socio-musical study to possess a special urgency: given music’s
capacity to “aid enlightenment” (Adorno 1973:15), socio-musical
analysis was nothing less than a tool for liberation. Ten years on from Goehr (1992)
and Randel (1992), a form of social constructionism thrives in musicology,
one that opposes itself to traditional understandings of what is “natural”
in music. Even basic, previously taken-for-granted concepts such as the
musical “work” have been deconstructed, shown to be purely
social constructions of restricted historical and geographical application.
Today, most musicologists would probably agree with Randel’s apt
observation that musicology’s traditional “toolbox”
was designed for the construction and maintenance of a canon of acceptable
topics, namely, works and composers. But, as I shall suggest in this chapter,
the forms of constructionism now prevalent within musicology are, from
a current sociological perspective, not so different from the structuralism
characteristic of Adorno’s work. Although there are some notable
exceptions, particularly studies of musical listening, reception and use,
constructionist approaches in musicology still center on works, and on
critical readings of them that aim to reveal the music’s social
content. In the writings of Lawrence
Kramer and Susan McClary, for example, we are directed to see music as
structurally similar (homologically linked) to social phenomena, or as
a “representation” of some extramusical phenomenon. The methodological
toolkit here — uncovering intertextual allusion, identifying conventional
tropes and the ideological connotations and functions of these tropes,
comparing (some aspect) of music’s structure with (some aspect)
of the structure of something else — maintains a separation between
works and the actual contexts of their production and reception. While
social contexts and contents are the ultimate quarry of this type of “New”
musicology (as the work of such writers as Kramer and McClary was termed
in the 1990s), they are typically pursued through the analysis of texts,
rather than through more ecological, empirically oriented investigations
of the production, distribution, and consumption of music. Such a move
also sidesteps the contested meanings that arise within particular contexts,
for example, through resistance to particular musicological interpretations.
In short, it is impossible to specify music’s mechanism of operation:
there is no methodology for describing music as it acts within actual
social settings, specific spaces, and in real time. I do not here wish to imply
that sociology cannot benefit from or be compatible with this type of
text-based musicological constructionism; on the contrary, a weakness
of sociology has been its failure to deal with music’s specifically
musical materials, and here textual interpretation and analysis can help
to draw sociological studies on to more firmly musical terrain. Nor do
I wish to imply any clear division of labor between musicology and sociology;
some of the best “sociological” work on musical topics is
currently being done by musicologically trained scholars (e.g., Pasler
forthcoming). Rather, I wish to contrast the textual focus of New musicology
with the emphasis of the sociology of music, particularly since the late
1970s, on an action-based paradigm — one that is concerned with
the matrices and milieux in which action is framed and effected. Howard
Becker (1989: 282) put his finger on the difference when he wrote, with
disarming clarity, that sociologists of his persuasion (generally termed
social interactionists’) “aren’t much interested in
‘decoding’ art-works [but rather] prefer to see these works
as the result of what a lot of people have done jointly.” This version
of constructionism treats music as a social process, focusing on how musical
structures, interpretations, and evaluations are created, revised, and
undercut with reference to the social relations and contexts of this activity.
It is also concerned with how music provides constraining and enabling
resources for social agents — for the people who perform, listen,
compose, or otherwise engage with it. As the sociologist Pete Martin (1995:
42) has observed, “in general this ‘turn to the social’
in musicological studies has not led to a sustained engagement with the
themes and traditions represented within the established discourse of
sociology” — themes and traditions that are at some remove
from Adorno and his structuralist perspective. Martin calls instead for
a focus on music as it is lived and experienced, quoting the Swedish musicologist/ethnomusicologist,
Olle Edström, on how the members of his group at Gothenburg responded
to Adorno: “we gradually gained a deeper insight into the pointlessness
of instituting theoretical discourses on music without a solid ethnomusicological
knowledge of the everyday usage, function and meaning of music”
(Edström 1997: 19, quoted in Martin 2000: 42). Edström and Martin both
allude here to a shift in focus from abstract theory and “macro”
issues (such as systems, societal structures, and norms) to grounded theory
and “micro” concerns (such as a focus on individual and collective
practice). Part of this shift centers upon the concept of social agency,
on how both social and musical forms (including meanings) are put together
or accomplished jointly, in Becker’s sense. This focus on activity
is, as I shall argue intermittently throughout this chapter, a very useful
perspective. It is dedicated to elucidating the links between social and
musical structures in ways that are more than hypothetical. It conceives
of the music-society nexus in terms of the pragmatic contexts within which
musical works take shape and come to have “effects” in real
situations. This focus on action provides an alternative to homological
models and their text-centered methodological toolkit — to the emphasis,
pace Adorno, Attali (1985), and Shepherd (1991), on how music “reflects,”
“anticipates,” or is structurally analogous to social developments
or social structures. From a social-interactionist perspective, then,
neither Adorno-inspired sociology of music nor musicology’s version
of constructionism is sufficient for illuminating (“grounding”)
music’s sociality. The problem with both these inherently structuralist,
text-centered modes of study is simply this: they are oriented to the
recognition of patterns and structural affinities between two or more
realms (music and some aspect of society — ideology, gender or class
relations, identities, cognitive styles), but they are not able to document
the mechanisms that create these patterns, that is, to describe how music
informs or enters social life, and vice versa. They assert links between
music and society, but their methodological toolkits do not equip them
to show these links in terms of how they are established and how they
function within actual musical and social contexts. By contrast, newer sociological
perspectives concerned with social agency investigate the social processes
through which these links are forged. As the French sociologist Antoine
Hennion says, “it must be strictly forbidden to create links when
this is not done by an identifiable intermediary” (1995:248). By
this, Hennion means that while music may be, or may seem to be, interlinked
to “social” matters, for example. patterns of cognition, styles
of action, ideologies, institutional arrangements, such links should not
be assumed. Rather, they need to be specified (observed and described)
at their levels of operation, for instance in terms of how they are established
and come to act. We need, in short, to follow actors in and across situations
as they draw music into (and draw on music as) social practice. And this
is where empirical methods come into their own within the sociology of
music. There are good parallels and precedents to be found in the social
study of another “technical” realm: science and technology,
in particular in the study of science-in-the-making (Knorr-Cetina 1981;
Latour and Woolgar 1986; Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch 1987; Latour 1987).
It should be underlined here that these studies of scientific practice
and knowledge formation, most of which have been conducted by sociologists
with advanced training in the sciences, have concentrated on action —
on the situated production of scientific matters of fact, step by (at
times, contested) step. In this respect, such action-based studies move
well beyond more general concerns with the parallels between science and
society. And some recent studies of this sort have begun to focus explicitly
on music technology and musical culture (e.g., Pinch, 2002). It is, then, in the focus on
culture-producing worlds that the sociology of music has found its empirical
feet, and thus a way to ground its claims about the links between music
and society. More specifically, as I will describe below, such work centers
on action: on musical practices in and across musical and extramusical
realms. For example, it is concerned with musically engaged actors as
they constitute (and negotiate the constitution of) music through performance,
through coordination, and through reception. It is also concerned with
how these constitutive processes in turn draw upon music to constitute
other social realities, realities that may exceed the musical but that
may, simultaneously, be articulated with reference to music. And with
this focus it is possible to dispense with the music–society dichotomy,
and to think instead of musical practice as, inevitably, social practice.
During the 1970s and 80s, and
particularly in the U.S. and UK, new paradigms were developed that sought
to explore music’s links to social processes and contexts rather
than structures. Here, music was conceptualized, simply, as social activity.
Known as the “production of culture” approach, and developed
by scholars such as Peterson (1976), Wolff (1981), Becker (1982) and Zolberg
(1990), this perspective provided an effective antidote to the overly
theoretical character of Adorno-influenced models. It reinvigorated the
sociology of music in its emphasis on action and action’s matrices.
It reconceptualized the composer, or music producer, as a member of a
musical world or community, and as working with and abiding by (or reacting
against) conventions and work practices in order to make music. This view
was deliberately prosaic; the production of culture approach sought to
demystify the romantic notion of “the composer” and its attendant
ideology of the genius in the garret. Karen Cerulo’s (1984)
study of change in musical composition across six countries during the
Second World War serves to illustrate these points. Cerulo focused on
the social disturbance brought about by war and its relation to music-compositional
practice. She examined the prewar and wartime activities of composers
whom she divided into two groups, those located in combat zones and those
who operated in more stable environments. She began with the hypothesis
that the work of composers located in areas most characterized by social
upheaval due to war would exhibit most evidence of stylistic change, with
composers based in non-combat zones showing less evidence of change in
their compositional styles and practice. She established a sample of wartime
works, focusing on pieces that were intended by their composers explicitly
as reactions to the war, and compared these with prewar works by the same
composers so as to identify any changes in style during the war years.
Government-sponsored works were excluded, on the grounds that they may
have needed to portray official sentiments (through uplifting march rhythms
and so on). Thus delimited, Cerulo’s
sample consisted of 16 works by 14 composers over six countries —
combat zone (wartime England, France, Hungary, Germany, and Russia) and
noncombat zone (prewar England and the U.S.). These works were examined
in terms of the following features, conceived of as dependent variables
(see chapter 9, this volume, for a definition of dependent variables):
melodic structure, tonality, dynamics, rhythm, medium of expression and
form. (“For purposes of pedagogical vividness and ease of exposition,”
however, Cerulo’s discussion of her findings focused primarily on
melody.) In particular, Cerulo sought to measure the degree to which melodies
were conjunct (“smooth gradations”) or disjunct (“leaping
motion”) before and after the onset of war in each zone. She plotted
melodic pitches using crotchets — one for each new pitch —
so as to achieve a graph of melodic spacing for each work. She concluded
that while before the onset of war the works of all composers in the sample
— combat zone and non–combat zone composers, exhibited jagged
melodies, after the beginning of the war those in combat zones became
conjunct and lengthy, while those in noncombat zones remained unchanged
(1984: 892). From this, Cerulo concluded that she had found evidence for
the impact of disruption on compositional practice. She then turned to
the critical question: how was one to explain this apparent shift in compositional
practice? While older sociological paradigms
might have pointed to a homology (or reverse homology) between disruption
in society and conjunction in music, with perhaps an associated psychological
explanation of trauma and its impact on composers’ needs for consonance
and congruence of musical material, Cerulo took a different and more pragmatic
tack. She emphasized instead how war-zone composers were cut off from
normal music-world interactions, from information and communication with
fellow composers, and from access to music publications: “The loss
of contact with peers experienced by Combat Zone composers destroyed their
professional community.” This, in turn, Cerulo suggested, “led
to the unravelling of the normative prescriptions that govern techniques
of composition. Consequently, in the absence of both a supportive system
and its enforcement by contemporaries of normative adherence, composers
deviate from their current paradigm of musical construction” (1984:
900). To be sure, these conclusions
may provide a source for fruitful debate by music historians: why, for
example, if changes in stylistic practice were a function of loss of normal
networks and communication patterns, should the deviation of isolated
war-zone composers all exhibit the same basic tendency — the shift
from disjunct to conjunct melodic lines? How might the study benefit from
more detailed consideration of the individual work-lives of composers?
Does the graphical method of plotting melodic movement provide a valid
means for comparing different melodic structures? Could identification
and measurement of the parameters of compositional material be combined
with an ethnographic understanding of the meanings (local, regional, biographical)
associated with musical materials and practices? I suggest that the value
of Cerulo’s work (and the justification for reading it today) lies
in her general interrogative strategy, her bold attempt to specify measurement
techniques for the study of compositional practice and, in particular,
her focus on production networks and communication as a determinant of
this practice. Cerulo’s study is important
in the present context not only because it was one of the first sociological
works to deal with musical forms and stylistic change, but also because
it can be regarded as a pivot between the older homological model and
the newer approach, with its emphasis on music-producing worlds and on
the social contexts of artistic production. As Cerulo (1984: 885) put
it: “the limited body of literature dealing with the transection
of artistic creation and social structure consists almost entirely of
large-scale, speculative theories which are heavily influenced by sociohistorical
arguments, and whose illustrative support often rests on the stylistic
and structural changes in the music of a single composer, or a particular
musical tradition.” While seeking to distance herself
from “speculative theory,” Cerulo also set her sights on matters
that connected back to the grand tradition within music sociology –—concerns
that were addressed by the earlier homological perspectives she sought
to transcend. On the one hand, her work can be read as in contrast to
structuralist approaches, such as Lomax’s (1968) “cantometric”
investigation of correspondences between song styles and societal structures.
(For Lomax, song styles reflect societal forms and, thus, thus habits
of mind congruent with these forms — see chapter 8, this volume,
for further details.)1 On the other hand, Cerulo wished to retain Lomax’s
concern with musical style and its variation across social space —
too often, she argued, ignored by the new perspectives and their focus
on production, markets and patronage, while linking that concern with
a focus on the production circumstances of composers. In this sense Cerulo’s
study represented a pioneering attempt to illuminate the “transection,”
as she put it, of structure and creation: that is, to devise means of
measuring the impact of a changed social context on creative activity
in music. By 1989, the “production”
perspective was firmly established in not only the anglophone but also
the francophone world, after Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) work on taste
publics and social classification systems, and Bruno Latour’s studies
of science worlds and science in the making (1987). These perspectives
and the various publications that issued from them drew upon detailed
empirical study —ethnographies, cultural and social histories, quantitative
surveys, and studies of music-producing organizations. It was precisely
what Becker referred to as “what a lot of people have done jointly”
that formed the focus of sociological investigation between, roughly,
1978 and the middle 1990s. In retrospect, the contributions of these years
may be set in one of three broad categories: (1) conditions of production,
(2) the construction of musical value and reputation, and (3) musical
tastes, consumption, and social identity. Conditions of Musical
Production Not only are individual compositional
practices affected by production organization, but so too is the selection
of compositions that are ultimately produced and marketed. Peterson and
Berger [1990 (1975)] illustrated this point in a highly influential study
that revealed how musical innovation was enabled and constrained by infrastructural
features of the pop music industry; their work suggested that innovation
in pop arises from competition between large record companies and their
smaller rivals, showing that diversity in musical forms (as they are produced
and reach their publics) is inversely related to market concentration.
At the time their article was published, Peterson and Berger were trailblazers
for the “production of culture” perspective, and their study
still serves as a model of how to conduct work in this tradition. Peterson and Berger examined
number one hit songs over 26 years of record production, from 1948 to
1973, dividing this period into five eras of greater and lesser degrees
of market concentration. Eras of high market concentration were those
in which a high proportion of the annual production of hits was produced
by one of the four leading companies. During such eras, these companies
controlled over 75 percent of the total record market; in fact just eight
companies produced nearly all the hit singles. They considered whether
such concentration bred homogeneity of product, pursuing this question
by examining the sheer number of records and performers who recorded the
hits during their five eras; the thinking was that there might be little
incentive to introduce “new” products under conditions of
market concentration. They also examined the lyrical content of hits,
tracing these variables through the five eras as competition between record
companies grew and then diminished over the 26-year period. Simultaneously,
they considered indicators of what they termed “unsated demand,”
such as changes in record sales and the proliferation of music disseminated
through live performance and backed up by independent record producers
— genres such as jazz, rhythm and blues, country and western, gospel,
trade union songs,.and the urban folk revival. They then considered the
conditions under which the independent producers were able to establish
more secure market positions as the top four producers lost control of
merchandising their products over the radio. Finally they traced how the
record industry and its degree of market concentration expanded and contracted
cyclically over time. By studying conditions of record
production and marketing, relating these conditions to new developments
in the communications industry, and examining trends in record output
and product diversity, Peterson and Berger concluded that changes in concentration
lead rather than follow changes in diversity, and that this finding “contradicts
the conventional idea that in a market consumers necessarily get what
they want” (p. 156). Their study not only highlighted the impact
of production-organization on musical trends and styles; it also outlined
how popular music production is characterized by cycles, and detailed
some of the mechanisms that affect cyclic development. Peterson and Berger’s
study set the scene from the 1970s onward for the concern, in popular
music studies, with the production system. Negus (1992), for example,
has suggested that working practices within the popular music industry
are linked to an artistic ideology associated with college-educated white
males who came of age in the ‘rock generation’ of the 1960s
and 70s. This occupational stratification has consequences for the types
of pop that are produced: women and unfamiliar styles and artists, for
example, are marginalized (Steward and Garratt 1984). Such forms of gender
segregation may also be seen in pedagogical settings (Green 1997), particularly
with regard to instrument choice — a topic that overlaps with work
by social psychologists (O’Neill 1997). More recent work in this area
has gone beyond the distinction between “high” and “low”
musical forms. It now includes the issue of how “authenticity”
is constructed and contested (Peterson 1997), dismissing the idea of the
“work itself” in favor of particular configurations of the
work in and through particular performances (Hennion 1997; see also chapter
5, this volume). And it examines the practices and strategies through
which particular versions of aesthetic hierarchies are stabilized. For
example, Hennion (1989) has drawn comparisons between the recording studio
and the scientific laboratory, showing how musical value and scientific
fact are both produced through producers’ liaisons with various
groups such as the public and the media. Similarly, Maisonneuve (2001)
has focused on the way in which the twentieth-century technology of the
gramophone afforded music’s users new and more intensely personal
modes of experiencing the love for music. Drawing upon record reviews,
catalogues, liner notes, and other documents, Maisonneuve suggests that
this technology facilitated a music user actively engaged in constructing
her or his tastes and monitoring self-responses. By comparing the two
major technological revolutions in music distribution during the century,
she shows how both musical listening and the listening subject were technologically
transfigured. Her study thus builds upon and gives a new type of spin
to the pioneering tradition forged by Bill Weber on the legacy of modern
musical consumption and the emergence of modern notions of “music
appreciation.” Similarly, it highlights the extent to which the
consumption of music involves more than listeners and works, consisting
also of networks or M as Maisonneuve puts it, “set-ups” of
objects, postures, habits, and evaluative discourses. Sociological studies of musical
value can be regarded as critical or even deconstructive in that they
suggest that apparently self-evident judgments of inherent quality are
socially constructed. In my own work on Beethoven’s reputation,
for example (DeNora 1995), I was interested in the interaction between
Beethoven’s reputation and the organizational culture and practice
that allowed Beethoven to be increasingly perceived (and behave) as Vienna’s
“greatest” composer. This project was by no means posed in
contradiction to the idea of musical value (as some musicological critics
believed, e.g., Rosen 1996, DeNora and Rosen 1997), but was rather concerned
with two main sociological issues. The first was how, to be a social fact,
value of any kind needs to be recognized socially. Unlike gravity or the
sound barrier, artistic value is an institutional fact, not a natural
one. And music, if it is to be valued, must be socially recognized and
institutionalized as valuable, particularly when it is perceived as violating
the norms and conventions that characterize a musical field — when
in other words, as with Beethoven, its acceptance constitutes a significant
reorientation of taste. (The point is not to presume there is anything
automatic about these recognition processes, but to explore them to see
how they took shape.) The second issue concerned how the musical field
was in flux during Beethoven’s first decade of operation in Vienna,
being increasingly transformed in ways that were conducive to the perception
of Beethoven’s “greatness.” Somewhat like a financier,
then, Beethoven gathered increasing means with which to launch increasingly
ambitious aesthetic ventures, while simultaneously augmenting his power
within the evaluative terrain of that field. In short, I tried to document
the fundamentally practical aspects of how one can emerge as a socially
recognised “genius,” so highlighting the way in which genius,
as a social fact, emerges from a particular configuration of evaluative
criteria, aesthetic orientation and convention, social acts, discourses,
and material culture. The study thus focused on the complex interaction
between what Beethoven did, what he could do, and how he was perceived. Methodologically, the work
began with an investigation of three interrelated factors: the organizational
context of music patronage as Beethoven entered it in 1792, Beethoven’s
social network as it expanded over time, and his social situation as compared
to that of some of his competitors. From there, I adapted methods of ethnographic
observation for use on historical data, focusing on agents and actions
within this musical field — and specifically on the entrepreneurial
activities of Beethoven and his patrons as they presented him in contexts
that would flatter his talent. Here the data were letters, other accounts,
and contemporary descriptions of the ways in which Beethoven was presented
to the public and quasi-public worlds of Viennese musical culture. These
were, as I have said, highly pragmatic activities accomplished by Beethoven
and his supporters, and they included such things as Beethoven’s
own negotiations with the editor of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung
(a leading music periodical of the day) and his interventions in the world
of piano technology. While the study’s aims were ultimately sociological
rather than musicological — to theorize, via a case study, key issues
concerned with the politics of identity, the book also sought to highlight
the contingent nature of the writing of history. In relation to music
scholarship, this can be understood as a move away from hagiography and
toward an ethnomusicological perspective as applied to the canon.This
line of enquiry has been pursued by sociologists in relation to other
art forms — for example, Heinich’s (1996) study of van Gogh’s
posthumous reputation. It has also been pursued as a collaborative project
between a musicologist (J.-M. Fauquet) and a sociologist (Antoine Hennion),
in a recent study of J. S. Bach (Fauquet and Hennion 2000) which argues
that the present-day understanding of Bach is a particular “use”
of the composer within a social context. By this they mean that the way
in which Bach is configured — his value and the ethos for which
he is said to stand, represents a form of cultural “work”:
it is a tool with which social realities are established and elaborated.
The nineteenth-century discovery of Bach and his installation as the “father
of music,” Fauquet and Hennion argue, were simultaneously a means
of configuring the present; Bach’s presence was a resource for articulating
the meaning of what it was to be “modern”(Hennion and Fauquet
2001). Their empirical strategy was anthropological: they followed various
musical (and musicological) actors as they appropriated Bach and so simultaneously
produced “Bach” and themselves, defining their own identities
in relation to music and, through music, to the social world. Musical Taste, Consumption
and Identity Quantitative modes of analysis
have an important place within the sociology of music. Representative
sampling techniques permit reliable and generalizable portraits of populations,
which in turn permit the testing of hypotheses — in this case, concerning
cultural consumption and social exclusion. But, as with all methods, quantitative
techniques pose limits, even when practiced at their best. Peterson’s
and Simkus’s work (1992), for example, points directly to questions
concerning music and the construction of self- and group-identity; most
of these concern the social-psychological and cultural aspects of musical
consumption and practice — music’s link, for example, with
the social identities of its consumers, its role within sub- and small-group
cultures, its social uses within music-consuming worlds. And nowhere is
this tradition better illustrated than in the pioneering work of Paul
Willis (1978; see also Frith 1981), with its ethnographically oriented
work on the sociology of popular music consumption. Willis was concerned with how,
in and through musical practice, through situated consumption of (and
talk about) music, musical structures could be seen to have social-organizational
properties and capacities. Methodologically, his study drew upon participant-observation
techniques (see chapter 8, this volume). The great advantage of this kind
of ethnographic observation is its ability to illuminate the nondiscursive
dimensions of action (such as emotions and embodiment) –—the
very dimensions overlooked by survey questionnaires and quasi-formal interview
techniques (and also the dimensions of human existence most closely associated
with music and musical response). Because of its aims, ethnography is
conducted in real time and on the social territories germane to the research
subjects themselves. If the aim of one’s research is to understand
how music functions, for example, how it inscribes social relations, or
how it may serve to inculcate modes of agency within social settings (questions
that hark back to Adorno’s concerns), then the advantages of this
approach more than outweigh its practical disadvantages (i.e., is labor
and time intensive, focused on a particular milieu, and not conducive
to generalization). In particular, ethnography’s advantage lies
in its holistic focus and the emphasis on the emergent and negotiated
character of meaning within social settings (Hammersley and Atkinson 1995).
Ethnography, in short, can illuminate music as it functions as a resource
for meaning construction and for the structuring and organization of social
settings. Describing ethnographic work
with two groups of music consumers, the “hippies” and the
“bike boys,” Willis made his theoretical and methodological
perspective clear in the book’s appendix, where he emphasized the
virtues of participant observation and its ability to follow actors in
natural environments and situations. When allied with other methods, he
argued, it provided a means of understanding members’ practices
and meanings while suspending theoretical notions that might otherwise
be externally imposed. His study involved “hanging around”
with members of a motorbike club in an English city, engaging the men
in group discussions (tape recorded) where records were played and discussed,
and where conversation took off without prompting by the researcher. In
the same way, Willis investigated the hippy scene by visiting three groups
at their “pads” and holding similar discussion sessions with
them. Through this unobtrusive mode of inquiry, held on the respondents’
normal territory and following their ordinary conversation and action,
Willis was able to observe how deeply music was implicated in the life
worlds of his informants. The preferred songs of the
bike boys, for example, were fast-paced and characterized by a strong
beat, a pulsating rhythm. It is here that we can see the great advance
of Willis’s study, particularly in its handling of the “homology”
concept. While Willis suggested that the preferred music of each group
resonated with or was homologous to his groups’ values and habits
of being, his concern was to show how the boys themselves established
these connections, how they themselves constructed the links between their
preferred forms of music and social life. This point bears underlining:
the structural similarities between music and social organization documented
in Willis’s book were forged through the cultural practices and
lay classifications of the group members. And it follows from this that,
as Willis (1978: 193) put it, “objects, artefacts and institutions
do not, as it were, have a single valency [one could read here also ‘single
social significance’]. It is the act of social engagement with a
cultural item which activates and brings out particular meanings.” In Willis’s work, then,
we can observe a theory of musical meaning as located in the interaction
between musical objects and music’s recipients; in this respect,
Willis’s work connects with other, more theoretically oriented,
perspectives within music sociology that conceptualize musical meaning
as the result of an interaction between music’s properties (its
mobilization of familiar or “stock” materials, conventions,
styles, gestures) and the ways these properties are received and responded
to (DeNora 1986; Martin 1995). While emphasizing the social construction
of meaning, then, Willis is by no means dismissive of the ways in which
music’s specific properties may lend themselves with greater or
lesser degrees of fit to particular interpretations and appropriations.
In the theoretical appendix to his work (1978: 200–201), he describes
how cultural items possess “objective possibilities,” but
suggests that: Willis’s work demonstrates
that if our aim is to understand music’s social significance and
dynamic relationship to social structure, we need to move beyond an exclusive
concern with “the work itself” and investigate the processes
of its reception and use. This line of thinking has been developed by
sociologists of other cultural media: literature (Griswold 1987), television
(Moores 1990), and theatre (Tota 1997). Across these studies, attention
has been devoted to the more general fabrication of meaning and aesthetic
response (including nonverbal response) through interaction with cultural
texts, in ways that are directly linked to identity and world construction.
The observation that agents attach connotations to things, and orient
to things on the basis of perceived meanings, is a basic tenet of interpretivist
sociology. But its implications for theorizing the nexus between aesthetic
materials and society are profound. It signals a shift in focus from aesthetic
objects and their content to the cultural practices in and through which
aesthetic materials are appropriated and used to produce social life.
And with this shift, we have moved from the cultural constructionism characteristic
of recent trends in musicology (as described at the outset of this chapter)
to the interactionist constructionism of sociology proper. n Willis’s study, “the
boys” are seen as interpretatively active; their group values are
“almost literally seen in the qualities of their preferred music”
(p. 63). The focus is directed at the question of how particular actors
make connections or, as Stuart Hall later put it, “articulations”
(1980, 1986) between music and social formations. This approach grounds
the concept of homology by focussing on the way in which homologies are
created (articulated) and experienced, rather than seeing them as inherent
in the relationship between pre-given musical texts and pre-given social
contextual factors. The further development of this perspective is, arguably,
one of sociology’s greatest contributions to the understanding of
culture, insofar as it has provided concepts and descriptions of how aesthetic
materials come to have, as Willis puts it, social “valency”
in and through their circumstances of use. And to see how this valency
is produced, ethnographic methods of observation are required —
methods that, through their very time-intensity, allow the researcher
to observe articulations in the making, in real time and within naturally
occurring situations. Willis’s work was pioneering
in its demonstration of how music does much more than “depict”
or embody values. It portrayed music as active and dynamic, as constitutive
not merely of “values” but of trajectories and styles of conduct
in real time. It reminded us of how we do things to music and we do things
with music, dance and ride in the case of the bike boys, but beyond this,
work, eat, fall asleep, dance, romance, daydream, exercise, celebrate,
protest, worship, meditate, and procreate with music playing. As one of
Willis’s informants put it, “you can hear the beat in your
head, don’t you . . . you go with the beat, don’t you?”
(p. 72).3 As it is used, both as it plays in real time and as it is replayed
in memory, music also serves to organize its users’ actions and
experiences. Studies such as those conducted
by Willis and Frith during the 1970s have proposed that, for sociology
of music, one of the most fruitful analytic strategies is the focus on
musical practice. In recent years, the ethnographic focus on musical consumption
and musical practice has embraced sociological questions concerned with
collective behavior and social institutions, as well as questions concerned
with the emotions and embodiment. A common thread running through
nearly all of the new sociology of music is the concern with music as
a resource for social action and for agency broadly conceived. Within
social movement theory, for example, music has been conceptualized as
providing “exemplars” or models within which social action
and movement activity is constructed and deployed (Eyerman and Jamieson
1998). In this respect, music provides, as earlier ethnographers of musical
subcultures suggested, a resource for articulating meanings that apply
beyond the sphere of music itself. Following actors ethnographically,
as they explain themselves in terms that make reference to music, and
as they compare themselves or their action styles to musical works, shows
how music may actually ‘get into’ action in specific ways,
how it functions as an analogue or paradigm for action and cognition.
This perspective develops the
assumption outlined by Willis’ work on the bike boys, that music
provides homologous resources for imagination and conduct. This is saying
much more than that there are parallels between music and social forms;
it is saying how such parallels are drawn and acted upon — how,
as Middleton puts it in his description of Levi-Strauss, music comes to
offer “ a means of thinking relationships . . . as this note is
to that . . . so X is to Y" (Middleton 1990:223). Examining music
as it provides media for building social and conceptual relations both
extends and operationalizes Attali’s (1985) vision of music’s
“annunciatory vocation,” its ability to presage social structural
developments. It does this by shifting socio-musical interrogation away
from a focus on “reciprocal interactions,” homologies or structural
similarities between “music” and “society” (as
if these were two distinct realms). By contrast, it directs focus to the
interactive relationship between music and social activity, music and
interpretation. This is a pragmatic approach to the topic of musical meaning,
one that sidesteps the text/context dichotomy (and the idea of the musical
object) in favor of a notion of music as it is drawn into and becomes
a resource for action, feeling, and thought. This focus on music as resource
has recently been applied to the question of subjectivity and its cultural
or social construction (Hennion 1993, Gomart and Hennion 1999, Bull 2000,
DeNora 2000, DeNora 2001). Here music is portrayed as a resource for the
production and self-production of emotional stances, styles, and states
in daily life, and for the remembering of emotional states. The predominant
methodological strategy within this work has been the ethnographic interview,
designed to uncover, in the first instance, musical practices of the kind
that often pass unnoted by respondents — for example, whether they
listen to certain types of music in particular circumstances but not in
others, or whether they ever choose to listen to works to realign their
emotional or energy state. Although this work clearly connects with research
in social psychology (Sloboda 1992, Sloboda 2000) and ethnomusicology
(Crafts, Cavicci, and Keil 1993), it also indicates an explicitly sociological
focus on self-regulatory strategies in particular social contexts. It
reveals some of the ways that individuals and groups engage in emotional
management and in self-production across a range of circumstances. Concurrent with sociological
studies of music and emotion management, there has been a renewed interest
in music’s effect on and relation to the body. This focus moves
beyond the interest, within musicology, in body imagery (Leppert 1993,
Walser 1993) to a concern with bodily praxis and bodily phenomena. In
this respect, it connects with recent work by music scholars on the topic
of performance “ergonomics” and the socially communicative
body in performance (viewing music performance as just one type of social
performance [Clarke and Davidson 1998]), and with work on the body as
implied and afforded by musical form (McNeill 1995) . In keeping with
sociology’s emphasis on the situated construction of musical response,
new research by sociologists on how music may be understood to mediate
corporeal states (such as energy, coordination, entrainment, and bodily
self-awareness) downplays a conception of music as stimulus and highlights
instead music’s capacity to “afford” — to provide
resources for and to enable forms of corporeal organization and states
of being. In its focus on music’s connection with modes of being
and modes of attending to the social environment, this work connects with
Schutz’s classic emphasis on the phenomenological dimension of music
making (Schutz 1964). These issues can be illustrated
through a study of my own on the role played by music within fitness classes
(DeNora 2000: 88–102). The research site — the aerobics class
— was chosen because, given the music-led, choreographed character
of aerobic exercise, it provided a venue in which music’s role in
relation to bodily phenomena (energy, stamina, pain perception, coordination,
and motivation) was critical, and where it could, potentially, be observed.
The central aim of the research was to illuminate the way in which music
structures physical activity and the subjective dimension of that activity.
To that end, the study was designed to observe what was conceptualzsed
as “human-music interaction” — the points where music
came to serve as an organizing device for bodily activity. It drew together
a range of methodological strategies, employed in the following order
with overlap between the different types of data collection: participant
observation of fitness sessions (primarily “hi/lo” aerobics;
the research was undertaken by S. Belcher, the extremely fit research
assistant); in-depth interviews with music producers; in-depth interviews
with class instructors and class members; and quick questionnaires, administered
to class members. Given the aims and subject
matter of the study, participant observation was a critical investigative
technique. As with most embodied practices, there are many things about
aerobics that one can only know about by doing. Being physically stretched,
for example, experiencing “the burn,” sweating and tuning
into the rhythm of a session, feeling at the point of fatigue and then
re\-energized when the music changes, wanting to move with gusto to the
musical pulse — these are all experiential matters. The first form
of data in this study thus consisted of the (junior) researcher’s
own experience of exercising to music, her “knowing-by-doing.”
The second form of data was the record provided by the videotapes of each
session. These enabled the researcher not only to recall the embodied
experience of class sessions, but also to see and freeze otherwise fleeting
and subconscious moments of class experience, to play them back and so
enable reflection upon what it was about the music that enabled or constrained
forms of physical activity. This reflection was facilitated through conversations
(in-depth interviews) with the senior researcher (myself), such that the
research assistant was, simultaneously, researcher and key informant in
the study. These conversations (analytically oriented debriefing sessions)
in turn generated hypotheses and ideas for further observation. Key among
these was the strategy of examining “breakdowns” in sessions
and of comparing “good” sessions with “bad” ones,
that is, sessions characterized by a high degree of aerobic order with
sessions where such things as fatigue, lack of coordination, and boredom
occurred. The research highlighted ways
in which specific musical devices were enabling or constraining at certain
points in the aerobic session. The key point was that some of these devices
were effective for some aspects of the exercise session but not for others,
and this finding helped to highlight music’s structuring properties
in relation to the body and embodied activity. From there, the key research
question became why certain features were effective at certain stages
of the aerobic process. Analysis of all the data, and particularly the
videotapes, suggested that music could be seen to work with and for the
body (and against the body) by profiling bodily movement, by entraining
movement, and by modeling and enabling the adoption of motivational stances
(and energies) appropriate to different segments of the session. So, for
example, slower-paced, more “lyrical” formats were useful
for the stretching movements of the warmup, while music with a highly
prominent beat and powerful orchestration (e.g., lower brass tutti) was
useful during the core of the session characterized by a vigorous movement
style. The study concluded that music could serve as a “prosthetic
technology” (Ehn 1988: 399) of the body, a device that has the capacity
to extend and restructure bodily phenomena, including embodied states
such as emotion and motivation. This capacity is by no means confined
to the totalizing environment of the exercise session, but can be perceived
across a range of settings in daily life - in the workplace, within organizations
(Lanza 1994), and in commercial environments such as restaurants and shops.
Indeed, the study was followed
by an ethnography of music in retail outlets, with an explicit focus on
these outlets’ attempts to configure modes of agency (here understood
as predispositions for and styles of action or subjectivity) by configuring
the sonic environment (DeNora 2000, chapter 5). Overall, we were interested
in how shops used music to structure temporal and scenic parameters of
the setting, to filter consumers and target preferred types of consumers,
and to help consumers tune in to the store’s “scenic specificity”
or locational style; we were also interested in how shoppers interacted
with music in-store — for instance whether they noticed it and,
if so, what they thought about it. As with the aerobics work, our own
autobiographical experiences in relation to in-store music were used as
a basis for generating interview questions and as a ground against which
to analyze the in-store conduct of other shoppers. To these ends, and with the
permission of the stores in question, the research assistant and I posed
as shoppers to observe the scene in-store, and in particular to take note
of (and compare) in-store ambience and the conduct of other shoppers.
With tape recorders unobtrusively held in our hands (they pass as personal
stereos) and clip-on microphones on our coat collars, we simultaneously
recorded the in-store soundtrack and our various observations about the
conduct of other shoppers (such as whether shoppers showed signs of engaging
with the music by singing along, snapping their fingers, or making dance
movements). We combined this with semistructured interviews with shop
managers and staff about their music policies and how the music seemed
to work in-store, as well as exit interviews with consumers as they left
the shops (we did not have permission to speak to shoppers in-store).
In addition, as a pilot study, we followed volunteer shoppers whom we
“wired for sound.” We asked these shoppers simply to “think
out loud” as they moved through the shop, commenting on anything
that came to mind and anything they might notice about the music in particular.
Simultaneously, we shadowed these shoppers, one-on-one, recording our
own observations about their behavior (e.g., “she is looking at
an orange jumper now”). The two tapes could be synchronised precisely
because they shared the same musical soundtrack, and this enabled us to
overlap the two transcripts.
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