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The Unsung Work of Music Sociology?

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Book cover Roads to Music Sociology

Part of the book series: Musik und Gesellschaft ((MUGE))

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It 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.

  2. 2.

    An 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.

  3. 3.

    That 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).

  4. 4.

    Indeed, 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’.

  5. 5.

    The xylophone’s broader cultural and historical connotations include images and meanings associated with death and the supernatural. Musically, its ‘hollow’ timbre is often exploited to create macabre effects, the sound of bones in particular, in, for example, Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre, but also Walt Disney’s 1929 cartoon Skeleton Dance, where the xylophone being played is the backbone of a ‘live’ skeleton.

  6. 6.

    The 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).

  7. 7.

    McCallum 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).

  8. 8.

    As 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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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom

    Tia DeNora

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  1. Tia DeNora
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Correspondence to Tia DeNora .

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  1. Institut für Musiksoziologie, Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst, Wien, Austria

    Alfred Smudits

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DeNora, T. (2019). The Unsung Work of Music Sociology?. In: Smudits, A. (eds) Roads to Music Sociology. Musik und Gesellschaft. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22279-6_8

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