Music Sociology After Mass Modernity
Alfred Smudits starts with a discussion of the terms ‘modernity’ and ‘modernization’, identifying several dimensions of modernization, such as rationalisation, individualisation, differentiation, domestication as well as several temporal stages of moderni
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The title of this contribution contains some notions that may need to be clarified. What exactly is modernity? And mass modernity? What role does music sociology play in this constellation? And what role sociology in general? What precisely are the tasks that an up-to-date sociology—a modern music sociology— must address? I will first discuss the terms ‘modernity’ and ‘modernisation’ in particular, before I go on to make my arguments about mass modernity in general. Then I’ll consider the role of music sociology in relation to modernisation. Finally, I reflect on the role of music sociology after mass modernity. I confess that I find the term modernity problematic. It is both a central concept in sociology and an ideological concept at the same time. When I was growing up in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, modernity and modernisation were unquestioningly seen as goals to be attained. Modernity was a hegemonic concept present in everyday life, and somehow this remains true to this day. We still talk about the necessity to modernise the school system, the bureaucracy, the labour market system, etc. That means modernity is not only a theoretical concept but also an ideological, political concept—and a very diverse one. But I don’t intend to discuss the various meanings of modernity and modernisation in this contribution; that would be a different article. Let me simply start with the established concepts of modernity, as found in the relevant literature.
A. Smudits (*) Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien, Wien, Österreich E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 A. Smudits (ed.), Roads to Music Sociology, Musik und Gesellschaft, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22279-6_2
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1 Modernity and Modernisation In the political sense, modernity starts with the Enlightenment and the bourgeois revolutions; in the economic sense, it begins with industrialisation. In the cultural sense, it addresses the plurality of values, secularisation and the emancipation of the individual from traditional concepts of life. In the field of arts, we have talked of modernity since the Renaissance—or, in the case of Arnold Hauser, since Mannerism (Hauser 1979). But in the fine arts, the beginning of modernity is very often located in the second half of the 19th century, when the work of art became autonomous. Here the meaning of ‘modern’ can be quite simply something ‘new’, something that did not exist before. In other words, modernity is a very complex concept, and one that was long seen as positive. The first crisis or critique of the concept of modernity or modernisation—beyond earlier philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Arthur Schopenhauer—occurred in the early 1970s in reaction to the oil crisis and went hand-in-hand with the emergence of environmentalism. And yet modernisation is still alive and kicking. In sociology, four dimensions can be identified that characterise modernity.1 These are clearly linked. From the perspective of ‘structure’ or ‘produ
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