The study of the role of music within society, its dynamic as a mode of human communication and its position within established social structures. Initially the discipline concerned itself largely with Western art music, but more recently greater attention has been paid to popular music of all forms and the role of music within mass culture.
2. General considerations, early history.
4. The diffuse and political character of the sociology of music.
6. Music as social interaction.
8. Music as commercial and industrial process.
JOHN SHEPHERD
Sociology has roots going back in Europe to at least the 18th century. The word, a combination of the Latin societas and the Greek logos, was first used by Auguste Comte (1789–1857). Sociology was thus conceived as the science of the history and constitution of human societies. In its early stages, it drew in its thinking from the natural sciences: societies, like biological organisms, were seen as systems of related elements in which the whole was greater than the sum of the parts, and the functioning of the parts could be understood only in terms of their contribution to the whole. Thus arose a fundamental and defining characteristic of sociology: the priority of society over the individual. This was in contrast to much previous thinking, in which the social order had been conceived as the consequence of the qualities of individuals and their acts. The sociology of Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) entrenched and developed the basic concepts, stressing the role of processes of socialization, through which growing individuals learnt the norms, values and beliefs of their culture, and that of internalization, through which these norms, values and beliefs became part of the individual: an understanding of these roles should provide the means to ensure the smooth running of society.
However, from its beginnings, sociology has been a creature of social and historical circumstances: there never has been, nor could there be, only one sociology. Some forms, most notably those influenced by Karl Marx (1818–83), have been critical, seeking to uncover the causes of social inequality and stressing conflict rather than consensus as a fundamental dynamic of social process. Marx's work was driven in many respects by ‘alienation’, the phenomenon through which the products of human social activity appear to take on a life of their own as independent forces which then subordinate individuals. In the light of the grave social inequalities, ills and injustices of 19th-century European society, Marx came to believe that there was a hierarchy of alienation, with economic alienation being fundamental. The outcome was a model of social process in which the development of material productive forces, together with the relations into which people entered to utilize them, came to shape if not determine the character of various cultural institutions: legal, religious and educational systems, together with the state, were seen as forms of ideological alienation through which people were led to believe that the social relations of production into which they were forced in order to earn a living were justified and legitimate. Through such processes, a dominant class was understood to maintain its position of superiority and to subordinate others.
The sociologies of Durkheim and Marx were thus quite different: Durkheim's was consensual and largely ahistorical, concerned with understanding how, at any one time, different institutions contributed mutually to the larger social picture, and with an ultimate agenda of liberal, reformist, social engineering; Marx's was critical, understanding tension and conflict as the basic engines of social process, deeply historical and with a driving vision of the redress of social injustice. These sociologies had two important common characteristics: they assumed the priority of society over the individual, and they were concerned with uncovering and understanding dynamics considered basic to social process. Max Weber's sociology, by contrast, was motivated less by a desire to provide a basic explanation for the dynamics of social process than to understand social behaviour through categories of social action. For Weber (1864–1920), sociology was a comprehensive science of social action. In its terms, he rejected both Durkheim's idea that collective social forces determined human behaviour and Marx's concept of the character of economic processes. Drawing on an examination of the importance of Protestant religions to the development of industrial capitalism, for example, he argued that cultures manifest beliefs and values that cannot be reduced to economic factors. For Weber, ‘social structure’, ‘class’ and even ‘society’ were concepts rather than concrete entities manifesting real causality or agency. To subjugate the complexities of social action to the condition of these concepts was to reify them, or to turn them conceptually into ‘things’, which they were not; the social order could thus arise and persist only through the actions of real people. However, in asserting this, Weber did not abandon the defining characteristic of sociology: the priority of the social over the individual. He understood people acting socially in four ways: rationally in relation to a goal; rationally in relation to a value; affectively; and in terms of established tradition. Modern societies, according to Weber, were characterized by an increasing dominance of rational action, particularly in relation to a goal.
Marx, Weber and Durkheim have commonly been regarded as the founding fathers of sociology, and their influence has been both broad and pervasive. However, other developments have been as formative. Sociology in the USA, for example, has been less concerned with comprehensive theories and categorizations and has focussed more on the pragmatic in the form of demographic studies, studies of social organizations and studies of social inequality and stratification. An important motivation for sociological research in the USA flowed from the practicalities of engendering a sense of nationhood and common culture in populations from widely different ethnic backgrounds. If European sociology has tended to be more theoretical, philosophical and distanced, even antagonistic, in its relations with the long-established societies from which it emerged, American sociology has on the whole had a more intimate and friendly relationship with its own society. In common with that of Durkheim, American sociology has tended to evidence both a liberal, reformist orientation, as well as a concern with social engineering. A powerful and influential advocate of this form of normative American sociology during the 1950s and 60s was Talcott Parsons.
The forms of sociology so far described have been concerned with major forces and movements: they have represented forms of ‘macro-sociology’. A distinctive contribution of American sociology has been the development of symbolic interactionism, a ‘micro-sociology’ that, in concentrating on face-to-face behaviour and small group dynamics, has shared Weber's concern with individual social action as the wellspring of social order. Symbolic interactionism developed from the work of the American philosopher George Herbert Mead, who distinguished between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’, the intensely subjective awareness constituted through the temporal flow of consciousness and the objective awareness of self constituted through the imaginative projection by the individual into how others might see them. A fundamental tenet of symbolic interactionism was that individuals behave in terms of the meanings that society holds for them, in terms of the meanings proffered to the self by the organized community or social group that Mead designated ‘the generalized other’ (Mead, A1934). This developed largely at the University of Chicago: its practitioners have come to be known as the ‘Chicago School’. It has contributed to areas such as deviance (particularly in youth cultures), work and the professions, and the desire to understand and contribute to the American cultural ‘melting-pot’. Unlike most forms of macro-sociology, which have preferred statistical and quantitative methods, symbolic interactionism has been the realm of qualitative methods: observation, participant observation, interviews and questionnaires. Its best-known practitioners have included Erving Goffman and Howard S. Becker.
Sociology has been, and is increasingly, characterized by a series of related debates and differences: consensus v. conflict, determinism v. agency, macro-sociology v. micro-sociology, theoreticism v. empiricism, reformism v. critique, and so on. Further, sociology, like social anthropology, has not been concerned with a specific subset of social activities, such as the political, the economic or the legal. It has in principle been concerned with all social activities and social relations, even if this concern has on the whole been restricted to modern societies. Social anthropology and sociology have had distinct histories, have customarily studied different kinds of societies (one traditional, the other modern) and have used different methodologies, social anthropology investing heavily in fieldwork, sociology more tied to statistics and quantitative methods as well as interviews and observation. However, the increasingly transnational character of capital, the increasing interconnectedness of the world's regions, nations and ethnic communities, and increasing globalization have drawn the interests of the two disciplines closer. While sociology, like social anthropology, has a clear object of study, that of the character, order and consequence of human relatedness, it is as a result a discipline that readily spills over and contributes to others, while at the same time being easily subject to developments within them. It has at the same time contributed to, and been influenced by, developments in interdisciplinary intellectual trajectories such as structuralism and semiology, cultural studies, feminism, post-structuralism, post-modernism, post-colonialism and Foucauldian discourse analysis. Indeed, there was evident towards the end of the 20th century a split between more established forms of sociology, up to and including the work of the Chicago School, and ‘post-Chicago’ sociology, strongly critical in orientation, and investing heavily in conversations with such intellectual traditions. Towards the end of the 20th century, the discipline was widely seen as entering a state of crisis.
Two characteristics marked work in the sociology of music from the outset. First, there was no community of scholars dedicated to examining the subject, and thus no continuity of intellectual tradition. The principal considerations of sociology lay elsewhere in understanding phenomena such as social inequality, social cohesion, the logic of mass movements and of small group interaction. Music has always been regarded within sociology as of only marginal interest. Those sociologists who did write about music tended to do so as an extension of their other activities and their work, as a consequence, was understandably characterized by their own theoretical and methodological predilections.
Thus, Weber, the only one of sociology's ‘founding fathers’ to write on music, developed a sophisticated – and arguably too little known and appreciated – analysis of the finite and closed system of functional tonality as an expression and incorporation of the rational instincts of modern Western societies. This work was published posthumously in 1921 (Weber, B1921). Earlier, in the 19th century, Herbert Spencer and Georg Simmel, in replicating the earlier, scientific model of sociology, had contributed to what has been called ‘a somewhat futile debate about the origins of music (initiated by Darwin's view that musical communication preceded speech in humans)’ (Martin, B1995; see also Newman, B1905; Etzkorn, B1964).
Much later, Alfred Schütz published an article, ‘Making music together: a study in social relationship’ (B1951). Nearly 20 years before, he had made an important contribution to sociology by publishing a volume that, in drawing on the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, shared some of the interests of Mead and the Chicago School in the manner in which social awareness was constituted, but in this case from a more theoretical and less empirical basis (A1932). Schütz's article argued that an examination of the micro-social relations of musical performance and listening could reveal much about processes fundamental to human communication. Although Schütz draws here on Weber's notion of goal-orientated action and his definition of a social relation, there is little to connect their writings. Weber is concerned with a particular musical system as an expression and embodiment of rationality, while Schütz is attempting to understand the social constitution of subjective and objective awareness as manifest in the relations of performance and listening.
A second characteristic to mark work in the sociology of music has been an unusual preoccupation with Western art music. This concern might seem warranted, in that it is this form of music, rather than traditional or popular forms of music, which has been argued to be autonomous, and essentially divorced in its aesthetic core from the influence of social processes. Here, in other words, would seem to lie a central problem for sociologists, rather than in the fields of traditional and popular music, forms whose social character, on the face of it, seems all too evident. However, such has not been the case. The preoccupation among many sociologists with art music, rather than with traditional or popular music, has lain in art music's privileged position, not only in society in general, but also in the academy, where there has been an overwhelming tendency – abating during the second half of the 20th century – to view it as the only form of music worthy of scholarly treatment.
Thus, scholars such as Supičić (B1964) have understood a lack of interest in art music on the part of large sections of the population as a problem requiring resolution through the work of sociologists, and the development of appropriate policies in the spheres of education and culture. Norbert Elias's study of Mozart (B1991) clearly ‘places him in the context of the general “civilizing process”’ (Martin, B1995), while the work of Weber and Schütz are in their different ways based on the art music tradition. More recently, Christopher Ballantine's contributions to the sociology of music in his book Music and its Social Meanings (C1984) rest heavily on critical examinations of art music, while even more recently, in the related field of cultural theory, Christopher Norris's collection, Music and the Politics of Culture (B1989), is overwhelmingly concerned with the art music tradition as, remarkably, is Edward Said's Musical Elaborations (B1991). It is in particular difficult to reconcile Said's pioneering work in post-colonial thought with a book seemingly so indifferent to the music of other groups and cultures.
Nowhere, perhaps, does the privileged position of the art music tradition emerge more strongly than in the work of Theodor W. Adorno. Adorno differs from many other scholars who have written in this area in that music was his primary though not exclusive interest. He is rightly regarded as the father of the sociology of music, and his work has succeeded in giving shape – if perhaps in a somewhat idiosyncratic way – to a rather fragmented field of study. A trained musician with a minor but not insignificant career as a composer, his principal contribution was as a philosopher and scholar of music. On the completion of his academic studies in 1931, he joined the Department of Philosophy at Frankfurt University and became associated with the Institute for Social Research, directed by Max Horkheimer. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Adorno left Germany, moving first to England, and in 1938 to New York, where he rejoined the Institute of Social Research in exile. He moved to Los Angeles in 1941 and then, in 1949, returned to Frankfurt and became, with Horkheimer, co-director of the re-established Institute. The influence of the ‘Frankfurt School’, the group of scholars associated with the Institute, began to grow within Germany and, subsequently, throughout circles of critical scholarship within English-speaking intellectual life.
The work and influence of the Frankfurt School can be understood in part as a reaction to the rise and fall of fascism in Germany, and also in part as a reaction to the alienation experienced by its members in the face of American popular culture. Dialectic of Enlightenment, by Adorno and Horkheimer (A1947), develops a theory of ideology in terms of which the culture industries are seen to instil in the majority of the population, through the mass production of cultural commodities, patterns of feeling and behaviour commensurate with the needs of the dominant social form of industrial capitalism. Adorno was thus instrumental in developing an influential theory of mass culture that was pervasively Marxist and critical in its orientation, and that coloured his understanding of popular music in particular. Adorno heard popular music – in his experience, apparently the dance-band music of the late 1930s and 40s – as standardized and repetitive, hypnotically so in its alienating effects on the mass of people. However, to Adorno's credit, and unlike many who preceded and followed him, he paid attention to popular as well as to art music (Adorno, B1941, B1967, B1991).
Indeed, it was a fundamental assumption of Adorno's work that no form of music in modern Western cultures could be understood in isolation. His work on popular music thus formed part of a much larger undertaking in which he attempted to grasp the significance of the entire contemporary musical field in its full historical and social dimensions. He was concerned to tease out from the actual materials of musical works their social and historical implications. This approach is most clearly evidenced in Philosophy of Modern Music, first published in 1949 (B1949), in which, to put it candidly, he saw in the work of the Second Viennese School a vision of a future, egalitarian and socialist world, and in that of Stravinsky a regression to the bourgeois, subjective individualism implicit in much 19th-century music. There is thus apparent in Adorno's work, as in certain pronouncements of Marx on culture, an idealist strain of thinking according to which works produced in specific social and historical circumstances only realize their full significance in the future with the advent of socialism – a socialism in which the population would have unfettered access to, and enjoyment of, the ‘highest’ cultural attainments of humankind.
Adorno's work is clearly the product of a troubled and contentious period of history and of a severely dislocated biography. With the benefit of hindsight, many of his principal ideas on music are easy to criticize. However, his legacy can be argued to lie more importantly in the character and scope of the questions he asked than in the specifics of the answers he provided. Adorno understood the holistic character of the entire ‘musical-historical field’; that various musical traditions in modern Western societies could be understood only through the character of their mutual relations, which were embedded in extended forms of social organization; and that music needed to be understood not only in terms of its formal characteristics but also in terms of the relation of these to the circumstances of its production and reception. Adorno's work has been much discussed and much debated, and has been highly influential (see Martin, B1995; Middleton, G1990; Paddison, B1982, B1993, B1996; and Witkin, B1998).
A reason for the influence of Adorno's work lies in the way in which, as a sociology of music, it can be positioned away from the more democratizing instincts of the discipline, and closer to the idealist and exclusionary tendencies of historical musicology and music theory. Adorno believed that it was the business of the sociology of music to make aesthetic judgments (for which he has been criticized: Martin, B1995). This belief was part of a critical orientation that had little time for the kind of consensual and positivistic objectivity claimed by many sociologists. Adorno would thus have had little time for publications such as Alphons Silbermann's The Sociology of Music, first published in 1957 (B1957). Indeed, Adorno saw such claims – which in the case of music pit the aesthetic and the emotional against social ‘facts’ – as so much ideology, and reasoned that the aesthetic was necessarily social. But while this critical orientation, grounded in the wider Marxist project, generated the basis for later approaches to music that questioned the social and cultural status quo and the role in it of art music, it also allowed for the persistence of established beliefs concerning the relative value of art music and popular music. It was this retention of an aesthetics recognizable as traditional that allowed many musicologists, faced with the cultural and aesthetic challenges of the 1960s and afterwards, to reconcile in an acceptable form two realms regarded previously as incommensurable, the sociological and the musicological.
It can be argued that the cultural and intellectual shifts, first of the 1950s, and then, more importantly, of the 1960s, marked the beginnings of a watershed in the academic study of music to which sociological and social anthropological concerns contributed importantly. In the USA, this watershed first became apparent in the founding, in 1955, of the Society for Ethnomusicology. Ethnomusicology was a discipline developed in its initial formulation in the USA (it has a history that can be traced back to the years before World War II in Europe as well as the USA: see Ethnomusicology) from the disciplines of social anthropology and musicology. The advocacy of this society for the inclusion of traditional music in the curricula of university faculties, schools and departments of music was to have far-reaching implications in challenging the exclusivity of art music. Following on from this, the cultural and political challenges of the 1960s, intimately related as they were to various developments in rock, folk and popular music, gave rise to a generation of young people, some of whom, in obtaining academic positions in a range of disciplines in the 1970s, brought with them their cultural, political and musical affiliations. A similar phenomenon had occurred in the USA in the late 1930s and 40s as a younger generation of scholars raised on jazz entered the academy: jazz, slowly but surely, became accepted as a legitimate object of academic study.
The preferred music of the 1970s was rock, and its infusion into the academy had four consequences: the challenge to the exclusivity of art music posed by ethnomusicology was supplemented by an advocacy for the inclusion of popular music in education at both the secondary and post-secondary levels, an advocacy resting heavily on sociological arguments (see for example Vulliamy, I1976, I1977, I1978; Shepherd and Vulliamy, I1983, Vulliamy and Shepherd, I1984); the sociology of music itself became quickly and increasingly concerned with forms of popular music; as a field of study, it in addition began to manifest a recognizable community of scholars and, for a short while, a coherent intellectual trajectory (the foundation, in 1979, of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music was in part an expression of these trends). However, it also began to undergo two transformations: it began to be practised as much by non-sociologists as sociologists and, in the formulation to emerge in the late 1970s, its democratizing and critical instincts spread readily and quickly outside the borders of its established concerns in conversations with ethnomusicology, as well as with interdisciplinary intellectual trajectories such as cultural studies and feminism. Sociology, through its relations with the study of music as in other areas of endeavour, was by the late 1980s evidencing both the porous character of its disciplinary borders and its move towards a perceived state of crisis.
This changed character of the sociology of music became apparent first in Great Britain (for discussion of the forces behind this development, see Chambers, G1985, and Shepherd, G1994). 1977 saw the publication of Whose Music? a Sociology of Musical Languages, by Shepherd and others (B1977), and Christopher Small's Music–Society–Education (B1977). Both books cast a critical eye on the social constitution and character of art music and argue for the serious study of other music, including popular music, in terms and criteria drawn not from the study of art music but from within the cultural and social realities of the people creating and appreciating music of these other kinds. The work of Shepherd and his colleagues was influenced in particular by Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality (A1967) which, in drawing in part on the work of Goffman, Mead and Schütz, argued for the manner in which both subjective and objective reality were socially constituted. Together with Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (A1962), Berger and Luckmann's work laid the foundations for a more relativistic sociology of knowledge and of culture than had hitherto been practised, as applied to the study of music.
In The Sociology of Rock (B1978), Frith argued that the social relevance of popular music in Britain had to be understood as much in terms of generational as class differences. While ‘pop’ music, chart orientated and acquiescing in the conditions of its own commercial production, was relevant to youth culture and subcultures in the formation of their identities, it was rock music, judged as authentic and as carrying a critique of its own conditions of production, that more directly served the oppositional stances of many youth subcultures. The Sociology of Rock (subsequently reworked as Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock ’n’ Roll, 1983) combined the methods and instincts of symbolic interactionism with the insights of cultural Marxism. This combination, characteristic of the conversation between British sociology and cultural studies at the time, received clearer theoretical formulation in Willis's Profane Culture (C1978), which made a case for the structural similarities between early rock and roll and the lived realities of bikeboy cultures on the one hand, and progressive rock and the lived realities of hippie counter-cultures on the other, both in opposition to the conditions of industrial capitalism. Hebdige's highly influential Subculture: the Meaning of Style (A1979), although hardly mentioning music, provided insightful analyses of many youth subcultures in which music had played a constitutive role, including, most importantly, that of British punk in the late 1970s.
This British sociology of music, oppositional in its stance to the social and musical status quo, was prefigured in the work of the ethnomusicologist John Blacking, whose How Musical is Man? (C1973) undertook a comparative and critical, Marxist-orientated analysis of established attitudes concerning Western art music, based on his experiences of fieldwork with the Venda of South Africa. This approach was echoed in Tiv Song (C1979) by the American scholar Charles Keil, whose fieldwork with the Tiv of Nigeria during the Nigerian civil war in 1966 served as a stark counterpoint to the character of Western musical practices. The point of contact between this sociological and anthropological work was that, despite its different disciplinary background, it shared a concern with a Marxist-influenced, critical orientation and, in many cases, the importance of fieldwork and observation in understanding the construction of specific and different musical realities.
From this point the boundaries between sociology, social anthropology, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, feminism and, indeed, some forms of musicology became less and less clear as the major task seemed that of constituting a critical, cultural musicology rather than of working within established disciplinary boundaries. 1987 saw the publication of Leppert and McClary's Music and Society: the Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception (B1987), contributed to equally by sociologists, musicologists, cultural theorists and feminists, and the late 1980s and early 90s witnessed the publication of four important volumes concentrating on ethnography, interviews and face-to-face interaction as the route to understanding the social constitution of musical realities. Two were by social anthropologists (Ruth Finnegan's The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town, D1989, and Sara Cohen's Rock Culture in Liverpool: Popular Music in the Making, D1991), one by a sociologist (Deena Weinstein's Heavy Metal: a Cultural Sociology, D1991) and the other the result of a study, the ‘Music in Daily Life Project’, led by an ethnomusicologist (Crafts, Cavicchi and Keil's My Music, E1993). Of equal importance was Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality (C1991), by feminist musicologist Susan McClary, which occasioned heated debate within musicology as to the gendered provenance of music.
The connections between ethnomusicology and the sociology of music discernible in the 1970s and 80s became even closer in the 90s as a growing community of interest on the part of sociologists and social anthropologists in questions of ethnicity, difference, identity and globalization found expression in the study of world popular music – popular music having been an area in which the study of Western music had predominated and in which sociology had been more influential than ethnomusicology. This drew several important contributions to the study of popular music on a world basis and thus to the sociology of music as broadly defined (Frith, H1989; Waterman, G1990; Stokes, G1992; Guilbault and others, G1993; Slobin, G1993; Erlmann, G1996; and Langlois, G1996). This concern with the way in which ethnicity, difference and identity have figured in the social constitution of musical realities has also given rise, in an era of globalization and postmodernity, to an interest in the concept of ‘place’, being understood more in terms of a community of intersecting musical interests and cross-fertilizations and less in terms of a notion of physically delimited space; there have been important contributions from an ethnic studies scholar (Lipsitz, G1994), an ethnomusicologist (Stokes, G1994) and a geographer (Leyshon, Matless and Revill, G1998).
The history of the sociology of music has thus been diffuse as well as fragmented. A reason for this is the character of sociology as a discipline. One of its central tenets is that all human action and thought is at the least profoundly influenced by the character of the social circumstances in which they occur; some sociologists go further and argue that people, their thoughts and actions, are all socially constituted. This implies that nothing that happens in human life is beyond the realm of the social. In one sense this is true: since ‘the social’, by definition, refers to human relatedness and its character in any specific situation, and since individuals cannot develop into recognizable and functioning people independently of relations with others, either direct or indirect, there is little in human life that can escape it. Yet this does not mean that people are unilaterally determined by the social. The social is constituted by human relations, and individuals can contribute to these as well as be profoundly affected by them. As the work of Weber and the symbolic interactionists attests, the social may encompass the creative as well as the scripted.
However, this principal tenet of sociology raises a question: why the need for sociology if all thought and action are socially constituted? Cannot various subsets of human activity be covered adequately in the other disciplines of the arts, humanities and social sciences? More specifically, if all human thought and action are socially constituted, then why the need for a sociology or sociologies of music as distinct from other forms of the study of music? The idea that all thought and action are socially constituted has not met with easy acceptance, either during sociology's formative times or more recently. This idea has continued to be resisted within the academic study of music, a tendency which itself requires historical and sociological analysis.
Although they may not use these terms or the modes of thinking that accompany them, in most if not all traditional cultures the endemically social character of music appears self-evident. The activities that have come to be understood in modern Western cultures under the separate linguistic and epistemological category of ‘music’ form an integral aspect of nearly all other activities in traditional cultures, and are understood linguistically and epistemologically as such (see for example Keil, C1979). A related though far from identical claim might be made with respect to European art music up to the end of the 18th century, at least in the sense that such music was intended for specific social occasions: it had a social function. However, an impulse in European culture to treat music as something apart from other activities, and to understand it as of more relevance to the individual than to the collectivity, can be traced to the late Middle Ages. This impulse received an additional and vital emphasis at the beginning of the 19th century, when European art music came to be thought of as ‘autonomous’ in relation to other activities, a pursuit that had value in its own right, and was in this sense ‘pure art’. This move has been accompanied by the ‘professionalization’ of the artist, whether composer or performer, who have seen themselves increasingly as governed by the conventions and norms of their profession, a view symptomatic of a desire to render themselves as free as possible from the constraints of church, state, patrons and the public (Supičić, B1964).
From a sociological point of view, such developments have to be understood as themselves products of social processes, with their underlying logic grounded in the exigencies of wider social forces (Shepherd, C1991). The separation of music (or, more precisely, art music) from society as part of the received wisdoms of modern bourgeois culture created as a consequence a situation ripe for the sociologist's intervention. ‘Music’ and ‘society’ were seen as separate entities and the problem became that of understanding how the two might relate. This problem was more attractive to sociologists than to historical musicologists or music theorists, since historical musicology and music theory had developed in part as an aspect of the entrenchment of art music as autonomous. Despite the initial and continuing tendency within the sociology of music to study art music, not because of the particularly intriguing sociological problem it posed but because of its privileged position in society and the academy, the sociology of music from the time of Adorno onwards nonetheless evidenced increasingly critical and democratizing tendencies, which in the final two decades of the 20th century resulted in the mounting of explicit opposition to the desired exclusivity of art music as an object of study and to its presumed autonomous character.
The basis of this opposition resided in a critical, sociological instinct. However, because work resting on this instinct assumed that music, like all human activity, was socially constituted, it was an instinct whose fruits could no longer be contained exclusively within the discipline of sociology as traditionally conceived. There were several other disciplines and intellectual trajectories to which the politics of music and its study were relevant. Therein lies the diffuse character of the sociology of music, in particular during the 1980s and 90s.
This diffusion and its political character have been integrally linked to a critical impulse that results habitually in the ‘problematization’ of objects of study. This concern to problematize the world has distinguished critical forms of sociology from everyday, commonsense reality, and leads to the sociological enterprise being viewed with suspicion. This arises because, for the majority of people, the world is something to be ‘lived within’. While individuals certainly analyse the world and are critical of it, there remains a great deal that most individuals can take for granted as they lead their everyday lives. In contrast, the sociologist examines the relational processes through which people collectively produce and reproduce their worlds; the sociologist's understandings and explanations are themselves part and parcel of these processes. There is in consequence little that the critical sociologist can take at face value. Actions, events, trends, views, opinions and beliefs: these are the stuff of sociological investigation and, in order to investigate them, the critical sociologist must enter a state of constructive scepticism. In many cases, that which seems unremarkable, mundane and unexceptional has lurking within it a question that needs to be framed and formulated if light is to be thrown on the character of its social constitution. Such framing and formulation for sociological investigation renders problematic the unremarkable, the mundane and the unexceptional; in other words, objects of study become ‘problematized’ through their very constitution by critical sociologists.
If sociology's object of study seems widely general, if its borders seem more porous than most, and if its modus operandi involves a suspension of reality – or at least a suspension of everyday reality – then it may seem more like a frame of mind, a way of relating to the world, than an academic discipline as such. This attitudinal as opposed to formal understanding of sociology as a discipline goes some way to explaining the increasingly diffuse character of the sociology of music. That sociology is a discipline is not, however, in question. Yet the frame of mind, the constructive scepticism and the suspension of reality do give a feel for the character of critical sociology as a practice. All these things involve what has perceptively been referred to as ‘the sociological imagination’ (Mills, A1959).
It is the exercise of this imagination which made such a difference in the academic study of music during the 1980s and 90s. However, more conventional forms of the sociology of music have nonetheless continued to be practised. One form approximates to social history in examining the history of the institutional, political and economic circumstances within which music has been practised. Here the pioneering work of Henry Raynor (H1972, H1976) has been important in the context of European art music, as has the work of Tia DeNora (H1991, H1995). Another approximates to a more synchronic concern with such circumstances, as well as with the effects that music itself can have upon them; important in the realm of concert music have been the contributions of DiMaggio (H1986; with Useem, H1982), and in popular music studies the contributions of Garofalo (H1992), Bennett and others (H1993) and Eyerman and Jamison (H1998).
The assumption that all human thought and action is socially constituted has given rise to the possibility that the structures and sounds of music are of social significance: that is, the meanings articulated through the structures and sounds of music may themselves be socially constituted. This line of thinking, implicit in the work of Weber and Adorno, became explicit around the 1970s (see Lomax, C1968; Blacking, C1973; Shepherd, C1977, C1982; Small, B1977; Willis, C1978; Keil, C1979; and Ballantine, C1984).
All this work, with some variations, rested on the central idea that the character of social or cultural formations could find expression through musical structures and sounds, if not be in part constituted through them. Ballantine's work drew explicitly on that of Adorno yet brought into question the supposed social importance of avant-garde music and perceived in some forms of popular music resistance rather than subjugation to dominant ideological forces. However, Ballantine retained a strong sense of the importance of aesthetic judgment in distinguishing between ‘good’ forms of popular music, such as that of Bob Dylan and punk culture, clearly seen as oppositional, and those such as disco, clearly seen as passively reproductive of dominant ideology.
Lomax's work, by contrast, is more evidently Durkheimian and consensual in spirit, seeing in the song styles of traditional cultures a reflection of essential cultural forms as well as a reinforcement of normative behaviour. This strain is apparent also in the work of Blacking, Keil, Willis and Shepherd, as is a more critical, Marxist-orientated element. In the work of Willis and Shepherd, this critical element (as in the work of Ballantine) is located in the presumed oppositional stances of various genres of popular music, a stance resting on a perceived homology between the technical characteristics of the musical genre in question and the character of the subcultural reality involved with the music. Shepherd (C1982), drawing in part on the work of Willis and Hebdige, nuanced this element by identifying in the technical musical characteristics of a wide range of popular music genres the potential for both social reproduction and resistance.
A rather different and distinctive approach to the question of music's social meaning has been developed by Philip Tagg (C1979, C1982, C1987, C1991). Drawing in part on the semiotics of Charles Peirce (Fisch and Kloesel, A1982–99), and in part on the work of Charles Seeger (G1977), Tagg developed the concept of the museme as the equivalent in music to the morpheme in language. As the morpheme in language depends on phonemes, so the museme depends on ‘musical phonemes’ or ‘basic elements (not units) of musical expression’ (C1979, p.71). Unlike the phoneme as a basic and consistently stable unit of meaning in language, the parameters of musical phonemes as elements of meaning in music may shift according to the conventions of the musical genre in question and the perception of listeners. Having determined the existence of a museme as an agglomeration of musical phonemes through the ‘interobjective comparison’ of musemes between similar pieces of music, Tagg creates a hypothesis of meaning for the museme: ‘affectual meaning in associative verbal form’, which is then tested through a process of hypothetical substitution or commutation. Unlike language, in which morphemes occur in a discrete and sequential manner, musemes in music can be heard simultaneously, thus giving rise to subtle and complex relations of both denotative and connotative meaning. For Tagg, the notion of ‘museme stacks’ which thus derives is understood to correspond to the notion of a ‘sound’ in popular music (C1982, pp.50–53).
Tagg's method of analysing social meanings in popular music has been used to provide extended and sophisticated analyses of the theme from the television show Kojak and of the ABBA hit song Fernando the Flute (C1979, C1991). Insightful though these analyses are, the criticism can easily be lodged that the kinds of music Tagg has chosen – music with strong associative visual images or lyrics – favour his mode of analysis (Middleton, G1990, pp.233–6; Shepherd and Wicke, C1997, pp.105–8). The difficulty of applying the technique ‘to a pop recording with relatively bland, unimportant, or “musicalized” lyrics’ (Middleton) highlights a second weakness, shared by nearly all work on the social meaning of music: a silence or lack of precision on the question of how ‘the social’ gets into ‘the musical’. A related question that is as difficult is that of how musical materials can have such meanings in the first place. There are two possibilities. One is that the meanings are endemic, ‘immanent’ in some way to the specific character of the musical materials in question. Yet the presumed fixity of relation between meaning and music precludes the possibility for negotiation fundamental to the constitution of any social meaning. The alternative is that the characteristics of the sounds in question are assumed to play little role in the construction of the meanings articulated through them. This has been the position of Lawrence Grossberg, who has seen the sounds of music as little more than a ground of physiological and affective stimulation which can take on meaning only after being interpellated into the world of language (E1984, E1987, E1993).
A basic tension in the sociological analysis of musical meaning has thus lain in the need on the one hand to understand the characteristics of musical sounds as in some way being implicated in meaning construction, and on the other to allow that processes of meaning construction through music are social in character. Martin (B1995) has identified this tension as a basic difficulty in the work of Shepherd, which in turn has highlighted another problem: the tendency to reify both social structures and musical structures in the service of ensuring a smooth analytical fit between the two. It remains to be seen whether the more recent work of Shepherd and Wicke (C1997) is to be judged successful in resolving these tensions and difficulties through its development of an alternative social semiology for music. Drawing on and critiquing extant work in structuralism, semiology and poststructuralism of relevance to the understanding of music, this work, in following that of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (A1972), problematizes the concept of the social structure, as well as the related concepts of ‘society’ and ‘the social’. It also engages in a problematization of the concept of ‘music’, hitherto taken for granted, suggested by the ways in which many societies and cultures function without this linguistic and epistemological category.
An interest in music as social interaction at the level of micro-sociology was first revealed in the work of Schütz. It is also evident in Henry Kingsbury's important ethnographic study of the social dynamics of life in a music conservatory (D1988). However, it has been argued for extensively and consistently by Howard Becker, who has drawn a clear distinction between a more theoretical sociology of music, concerned with teasing out music's meanings, and an empirical sociology of music based on an examination of what ‘people do together’. Sociologists working in this latter mode, he has observed, ‘aren't much interested in “decoding” art works, in finding the work's secret meanings as reflections of society. They prefer to see those works as a result of what a lot of people do together’ (D1989, p.282).
Becker's initial contribution to the sociology of music is to be found in his book Outsiders (D1963), a seminal contribution to the field of deviance, where two chapters deal with the distinctive way of life and careers of dance musicians. Though the activities of dance musicians are formally within the law, ‘their culture and way of life are sufficiently bizarre and unconventional for them to be labeled as outsiders by more conventional members of the community’ (p.79). He gained access to the culture of dance band musicians in 1948–9 through an almost perfect form of participant observation. He had played the piano professionally for many years and been active in musical circles in Chicago; like many other musicians, he took advantage of the G.I. Bill to attend college, so his status as a student did not differentiate him from other musicians. Working in a wide variety of orchestras, he was able to make extensive notes on events in which he was involved and conversations that he heard. Most of the people he observed did not know that he was undertaking a study of musicians.
What Becker's research revealed was that dance musician subculture formed around a tension between the need of these musicians to work as dance musicians and the desire to perform jazz, the only music that in their view was worth playing. There was thus a need to choose between the necessity of engaging in a conventional form of earning a living and the desire to maintain self-respect and integrity by conforming to artistic standards as defined by the subculture. In this situation, the outsiders who listened to these musicians' performances in dance bands were referred to as ‘squares’, and disliked intensely for their role in representing unwanted interference in the artistic lives the musicians wished to lead. The musicians thus saw themselves as essentially different from other people and felt little compunction about disregarding the norms of ‘square’ society. They thus behaved in ways regarded as deviant as a means of constructing a strong subcultural identity.
Becker's Art Worlds (D1982) – a major contribution to the sociology of art, and thus to the sociology of music – rendered problematic received notions of art, understanding artistic works and other forms of cultural products as a consequence of the whole range of activities, hitherto taken for granted, involved in their production and consumption. For Becker, art worlds are constituted through the social interactions of a wide variety of players, who act according to the opportunities, norms and constraints that typify the art world in question. The products of such worlds are thus shaped through the character of these actions which, in line with the general tenets of symbolic interactionism, may involve innovation as well as conformity. The possibility of understanding the social institutions of art and culture that thus arise as the ordered playing out of such interactions effectively dissolves the distinction between ‘the work’ and its ‘context’ that has characterized much work in the sociology of music, a dissolution also seen in the work of Weinstein (D1991). In such work, the production and consumption of cultural commodities is understood as a complex but basically ordered set of mediations, in which the materials of music themselves also play a role.
This emphasis on mediation has been central to the work of the French sociologist Antoine Hennion. The sociology of culture as practised in France during the 1980s was heavily influenced by the tradition of symbolic interactionism and Becker's work in particular. In a series of publications (D1981, D1983, D1986, D1996–7; see also Hennion and Meadel, D1986), Hennion has argued against both an understanding of the art work as an independent object of beauty and a sociological approach that conceptually eradicates the specific and distinctive qualities of individual art works by reducing them to the conditions of reflective social symbols. In stressing the concept of mediation, Hennion understands the specific and distinctive character of cultural commodities as complex emanations of the social interactions that produce them, and the character of the material objects in and through which they are invested. He has thus striven to transcend a distinction customarily drawn in the sociology of culture between the circumstances of production and consumption.
Work on music as social interaction has not only distinguished between its interests and the more theoretical concerns of work on music as social meaning; it has also been critical of the latter in failing to demonstrate through concrete analyses of musical activity how social meanings in music actually arise. Thus, at the beginning of the 1990s, it was observed that ‘what is particularly missing in the literature [on popular music] is ethnographic data and micro-sociological detail’ (Cohen, D1991, p.6). In the same vein, Becker criticized Shepherd's work for an absence of ‘any sense of the process by which [the] connections [between changes in large-scale historical forces and in musical forms] actually come about and any attention to the details of the worlds whose features are given such explanatory weight’ (Becker, D1992, p.529).
An important contrast between concepts fundamental to the two traditions has been made in the distinction between ‘musical communities’ and ‘musical scenes’. For Will Straw, a musical community ‘may be imagined as a particular population group whose composition is relatively stable … and whose involvement in music takes the form of an ongoing exploration of a particular musical idiom said to be organically rooted in that community’. A musical scene, by contrast, is ‘that cultural space within which a range of musical practices co-exist, interacting with each other within a variety of processes of differentiation and according to widely varying trajectories of change and cross-fertilization’. The break with the tradition of work established in the 1970s on the social meaning of music – both sociological and ethnomusicological – becomes clear in Straw's observation that cultural theorists like himself ‘encountering ethnomusicological studies for the first time after an apprenticeship in the hermeneutics of suspicion may be struck by the prominence within them of notions of cultural totality or claims concerning an expressive unity of musical practices’. The conclusion that the concept of the musical scene is ‘the most appropriate term for designating centres of musical activity today’ stands as a theoretical prolegomena for much work that followed on the relations between music, ethnicity, difference, identity, place and the forces of globalization and postmodernity (Straw, E1991, pp.369–73). The notion of the scene as it developed through the 1990s owed much to Becker's work on art worlds as well as to Shank's work on music in the city of Austin (E1994).
Towards the end of the 1980s, Frith observed that ‘the experience of pop music is an experience of placing: in responding to a song, we are drawn, haphazardly, into affective and emotional alliances with the performers and with the performers' other fans'; he concluded that the ‘interplay between personal absorption into music and the sense that it is, nevertheless, something out there, something public, is what makes music so important in the cultural placing of the individual in the social’. What he identified in this article was the way in which popular music in particular serves as a powerful force of identity for the individual within society, as well as a powerful force in forming the collective cultural and group identities from which individuals draw sustenance in constructing a sense of self. As he concludes, ‘the intensity of this relationship between taste and self-definition seems peculiar to popular music – it is “possessable” in ways that other cultural forms are not … other cultural forms – painting, literature, design – can articulate and show off shared values and pride, but only music can make you feel them’ (Frith, E1987, pp.139–44).
This interest in music as a basis for the formation of social identities, whether individual or collective, can be traced back to the late 1960s and early 70s in work concerned to understand the relations between popular music and young people's perceived proclivity to challenge the social status quo (Denzin, B1970; Hirsch, B1971; Robinson and Hirsch, B1972). Towards the end of the 1970s and going into the 80s, this nascent interest took on a more explicit character in attempts to understand popular music as a force for the construction of gender and sexed identities (Frith and McRobbie, E1978; Shepherd, C1987; see also Taylor and Laing, E1979). However, the major contribution to the understanding of popular music as a force for the construction of identities – beyond the largely ethnomusicological contributions to the study of world popular music and the related questions of ethnicity and place of the mid- to late-1990s – has lain in the work of Frith.
Like Grossberg, Frith has maintained a strong interest in what people say about music as a route to understanding the meanings that music holds for them. In this, he has demonstrated a strong affinity for the work of scholars such as Finnegan and Cohen in distancing himself from the more totalizing claims of studies in popular music emanating from British cultural studies of the 1970s (E1992) and for the work of Becker (D1982) and Bourdieu (A1979) in understanding how meaning and value are attributed to music (E1990). Frith does not understand various genres and styles of popular music as reflecting cultural and group realities so much as serving to constitute them in complex ways. A key to understanding his work is the way in which, as a sociologist, he has refused to take the discourses in terms of which people talk about music at face value but to problematize them in the process of getting beneath their surface to grasp how they serve to constitute meaning and value for people in music. It was Frith who first importantly pointed out that notions of authenticity as attached to certain kinds of rock music in contrast to the perceived commercialism of pop music were in fact ideological in character: ‘the myth of authenticity is, indeed, one of rock's own ideological effects’ (E1987, p.137). He followed this by arguing that the discourses of autonomy, authenticity and commercialism customarily applied to art music, folk music and popular music respectively were much more slippery than appeared at first sight. In referring to the way in which ‘in the 1930s jazz was understood, in bewilderingly quick succession, first in commercial, then in folk, and finally in art terms’, he concluded that a ‘comparative sociology would reveal far less clear distinctions between these worlds than their discursive values imply’ (E1990, p.101). Elements of all these discourses can in fact be discerned in what people have said about all three of these musical traditions.
The character of Frith's insights can be traced in part to the dual careers he has followed, as a professional sociologist on the one hand, and a rock critic on the other, working at various times for the London Sunday Times and the Observer. The former career tended to be concerned with the development of dispassionate but committed social analyses, the latter with the world of value judgments: they came together in his book Performing Rites: on the Value of Popular Music (E1996), a series of essays in which, as an academic critic, he seeks to understand the constitution of personal taste and emotional response in relation to music. Like Adorno, therefore, Frith has put aesthetic judgment at the centre of his sociological agenda. But, unlike Adorno, he does not see the purpose of the sociology of music as the making of such judgments, but rather their understanding. Other important contributions to understanding the role of music in constituting social identities have been made by Walser in respect of heavy metal rock music (E1993), Thornton in respect of the music of dance clubs and raves (E1995) and Grossberg, particularly in respect of the situation of rock music in an era of popular conservatism and postmodern culture (E1992).
The practice of music, and not just popular music, has, since at least the middle of the 19th century, become increasingly commercial and industrialized. Forces of mass production and mass consumption have, through different forms of mass dissemination (for example radio, film, television and Mp3 software) and of commodification (for example sheet music, cylinders, records and compact discs), changed the practice of music from something necessarily embodied, local, face-to-face and located in the here-and-now to something as often as not disembodied, global, impersonal and out of time and space. The influential theory of mass culture developed by Adorno and Horkheimer viewed these innovations as having nothing but a deleterious effect on social and cultural life, although their contemporary Walter Benjamin argued a more positive case, seeing in the new technologies of mass production and mass dissemination creative possibilities for artists and cultural workers (A1961; see also Middleton, G1990). The stage was set by Adorno's work in particular for the conventional view that the music industries do little in their constant search for profits but create fantasy worlds of escapism for the vast majority of the population, thus serving the ideological needs of industrial capitalism as a social form and effectively marginalizing any possibility for opposition. This view, in essence, was replicated in the work of Chapple and Garofalo (F1977) and, in a more measured way, Wallis and Malm (F1984).
Much work in the sociology of music since the 1970s has argued for the oppositional potential of many genres of popular music, while still acknowledging the undoubted influence and importance of the music industries in shaping public taste. Further, towards the close of the 20th century, much work in popular music studies – including, notably, work on world popular musics – in choosing to concentrate more on the social interactions giving rise to particular musical scenes and genres than on the development of all-inclusive theories, began to reveal a more complex and nuanced understanding of the character of the tensions and plays that occur between musicians and the music industries than could possibly be illuminated through an assumed stand-off between the forces of reproduction and resistance.
Nonetheless, it is important in these contexts to explore the dynamics of the music industries as a topic sui generis, and in this the work of Richard Peterson has been influential. He has sought to account for the pervasive influence of the music industries on the one hand and the fact that, on the other, the industries cannot actually determine tastes and buying habits: music sales are manifestly unpredictable, which is why, in comparison to other commodities, cultural or otherwise, the music industries put out such a massive variety of product. In 1975 Peterson and Berger developed a cyclical theory, according to which, during periods of oligarchy in the music industries – when a small number of major or transnational record companies command a high share of the market-place – opportunities for artistic innovation and creativity are low, and a high degree of control over public taste is maintained (F1975). By contrast, at the other end of the cycle, when the major companies command a relatively low share of the market-place, independent record companies are seen to play a more significant role, and the argument is that artists have more creative freedom and consumers a wider choice of product.
This work concentrates on the middle part of the 20th century and, during this period in the history of the music industries, when American companies dominated, it is arguable that their analysis possessed considerable explanatory power. Peterson's use of this theory (F1990) to explain the rise of Elvis Presley and rock and role in the mid-1950s in terms of major structural tensions and changes in the music industries from approximately 1948 to 1958 is valuable in countering the customary ‘great man’ accounts of these events, even if his explanation can, on the other hand, be judged somewhat one-dimensional in discounting wider cultural forces and the undoubted performing ability of Presley himself.
However, as the 20th century progressed, it became more difficult to draw clear distinctions between major record companies and independents. Further, the American command of major, transnational record companies began to decline. As the role of the traditional ‘artist and repertoire’ men diminished (they acted as talent scouts, who identified, signed and then supervised the recording of potentially successful musicians), and the independent producer became increasingly influential, the major record companies began, on an increasingly international scale, to use independent producers and companies as creative partners who assumed the initial risks in identifying and recording artists. In consequence, the major companies concentrated more and more on marketing and distribution and the management of an increasingly complex web of rights. Thus, although six major record companies accounted for 90% of American sales and between 70 and 80% of world sales by the 1990s (Burnett, F1996), it is questionable whether the 1998 takeover of Polygram by the Canadian alcoholic beverage company Seagrams to form the largest conglomeration of record companies in the world, with an estimated 22% share of the world market (Seagrams already owned Universal), can be understood solely or even largely in terms of Peterson's model. Indeed, this kind of model has been explicitly challenged by Christianen (F1995).
While rationalization is an undoubted feature of such takeovers, it seems likely that creative decisions are located at a relatively low level in the organization and that the conglomeration is more of a complex of associated record and production companies, many of whom ‘contract out’ work to associated but essentially independent firms. As early as 1992, it was pointed out that major record companies were becoming noticeably more decentralized and using more open management techniques (Lopes, F1992). Added to this, there has been the development of new information technologies, which, in affecting processes of both production and marketing, have allowed record companies to become both more flexible and more focussed in their operations, moving them away from the old ‘mass production’ models (Hesmondhalgh, F1996). It was not until the end of the 20th century that an attempt was made to provide the first systematic analysis of the corporate culture and strategies of the major record companies (Negus, F1999) or a truly international history of the music industries (Gronow and Ilpo, F1998).
In these discussions, it is important to recognize the contributions of Becker and Hennion, who have been concerned to render more sophisticated the analysis of music's relations to its conditions of production and consumption. These contributions have worked against the view that music is some kind of ‘object’, which then endures, for example, the ministrations of the music industries in the manner in which it is produced and consumed. This standard view has been problematized by both Hennion and Frith, who have variously argued that music's specific characteristics are actually constituted through the conditions of their production and consumption, while at the same time not being reducible to them. The central flaw of the traditional view, it has been argued, ‘is the suggestion that music is the starting point of the industrial process – the raw material over which everyone fights – when it is, in fact, the final product’… ‘the “industrialization of music” can't be understood as something that happens to music but describes a process in which music itself is made – a process, that is, which fuses (and confuses) capital, technical, and musical arguments’ (Frith, F1987, p.54).
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S. Frith: ‘The Cultural Study of Popular Music’, Cultural Studies, ed. L. Grossberg and others (London, 1992), 174–82
L. Grossberg: We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (London, 1992)
S.D. Crafts, D. Cavicchi and C.M. Keil, eds.: My Music (Hanover, NH, 1993)
L. Grossberg: ‘Is Anybody Listening? Does Anybody Care? On Talking about “The State of Rock”’, Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture, ed. A. Ross and T. Rose (London, 1993), 41–58
R. Walser: Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Hanover, NH, 1993)
B. Shank: Dissonant Identities: the Rock ‘n’ Roll Scene in Austin, Texas (Hanover, NH, 1994)
S. Thornton: Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital (Cambridge, 1995)
S. Frith: Performing Rites: on the Value of Popular Music (Oxford, 1996)
R.A. Peterson and D.G. Berger: ‘Cycles in Symbol Production: the Case of Popular Music’, American Sociological Review, xl (1975), 158–73; repr, in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, ed. S. Frith and A. Goodwin (London and New York, 1990), 140–59
S. Chapple and R. Garofalo: Rock ‘n’ Roll is Here to Pay: the History and Politics of the Music Industry (Chicago, 1977)
R. Wallis and K. Malm: Big Sounds from Small Peoples: the Music Industry in Small Countries (New York and London, 1984)
S. Frith: ‘The Industrialization of Popular Music’, Popular Music and Communication, ed. J. Lull (Newbury Park, CA, 1987, 2/1992), 53–77
R.A. Peterson: ‘Why 1955? Explaining the Advent of Rock Music’, Popular Music, ix (1990), 97–116
P.D. Lopes: ‘Innovation and Diversity in the Popular Music Industry, 1969–1990’, American Sociological Review, lvii (1992), 56–91
M. Christianen: ‘Cycles in Symbol Production? A New Model to Explain Concentration, Diversity and Innovation in the Music Industry’, Popular Music, xiv (1995), 55–93
R. Burnett: The Global Jukebox: the International Music Industry (London, 1996)
D. Hesmondhalgh: ‘Post-Fordism, Flexibility and the Music Industries’, Media, Culture and Society, xviii (1996), 469–88
P. Gronow and S. Ilpo: An International History of the Recording Industry (London, 1998)
K. Negus: Music Genres and Corporate Cultures (London, 1999)
C. Seeger: Studies in Musicology, 1935–1975 (Berkeley, 1977)
I. Chambers: Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture (New York and London, 1985)
R. Middleton: Studying Popular Music (Milton Keynes, 1990)
C. Waterman: Juju: a Social History and Ethnography of an African Popular Music (Chicago, 1990) [sound cassette also available]
M. Stokes: The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey (Oxford, 1992)
J. Guilbault and others: Zouk: World Music in the West Indies (Chicago, 1993) [accompanying sound disc]
M. Slobin: Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West (Hanover, NH, 1993)
G. Lipsitz: Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place (London, 1994)
J. Shepherd: ‘Music, Culture and Interdisciplinarity: Reflections on Relationships’, Popular Music, xiii (1994), 127–42
M. Stokes, ed.: Ethnicity, Identity, and Music: the Musical Construction of Place (Oxford, 1994)
V. Erlmann: Nightsong: Performance, Power, and Practice in South Africa (Chicago, 1996) [accompanying videocassette]
T. Langlois: ‘The Local and Global in North African Popular Music’, Popular Music, xv (1996), 259–73
A. Leyshon, D. Matless and G. Revill, eds.: The Place of Music (New York, 1998)
H. Raynor: Social History of Music: from the Middle Ages to Beethoven (London and New York, 1972)
H. Raynor: Music and Society since 1815 (New York, 1976/R)
P. DiMaggio and M. Useem: ‘The Arts in Class Reproduction’, Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education: Essays on Class, Ideology, and the State, ed. M. Apple (London, 1982), 181–201
P. DiMaggio: ‘Cultural Entrepreneurship in 19th Century Boston: the Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America’, Media, Culture, and Society: a Critical Reader, ed. R. Collins and others (London, 1986), 194–211
S. Frith, ed.: World Music, Politics, and Social Change (Manchester, 1989)
T. DeNora: ‘Musical Patronage and Social Change in Beethoven's Vienna’, American Journal of Sociology, xcvii (1991), 310–46
R. Garofalo, ed.: Rockin' the Boat: Mass Music and Mass Movements (Boston, MA, 1992)
T. Bennett and others, eds.: Rock and Popular Music: Politics, Policies, Institutions (London, 1993)
T. DeNora: Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792–1803 (Berkeley, 1995)
R. Eyerman and A. Jamison: Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1998)
G. Vulliamy: ‘What Counts as School Music?’, Explorations in the Politics of School Knowledge, ed. G. Whitty and M. Young (Driffield, 1976), 19–34
G. Vulliamy: ‘Music and the Mass Culture Debate’; ‘Music as a Case Study in the New Sociology of Education’, Whose Music? A Sociology of Musical Languages, ed. J. Shepherd and others (London, 1977/R), 179–200; 201–32
G. Vulliamy: ‘Culture Clash and School Music: a Sociological Analysis’, Sociological Interpretations of Schooling and Classrooms: a Reappraisal, ed. L. Barton and R. Meighan (Driffield, 1978), 115–27
J. Shepherd and G. Vulliamy: ‘A Comparative Sociology of School Knowledge’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, iv/1 (1983), 3–18
K. Swanwick: ‘Problems of Sociological Approach to Pop Music in Schools’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, v/1 (1984), 49–56
G. Vulliamy and J. Shepherd: ‘Sociology and Music Education: a Response to Swanwick’, ibid., 57–76