The Unsung Work of Music Sociology?
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
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Music sociology has anticipated so many major developments in sociology writ large but in ways that remain, mostly, ‘unsung’. Our shared field will, I believe—eventually—influence sociology profoundly and for the better. But it is up to us to sing the praises of what music sociology can do. Hence the immodest title of this paper.1 Where then to begin? Where else but with the Institut and its visionary founder, Kurt Blaukopf. By the time I present this paper, Peter Martin will already have spoken about Blaukopf’s contributions. I want, however, to add a few more notes (or, perhaps, to echo Pete’s comments) and to add that it is excellent to see a growing body of Blaukopf’s work translated into English and shared with a wider reading public (e.g., Zembylas 2012).
1It
is worth noting that over the past ten years, well-established sociologists are turning to music research after making their mark in other areas (e.g., Atkinson 2008 and beyond; Crossley; Roy; Eyerman). Their reasons for doing so usually accord with an interest in a ‘core’ sociological topic (collaboration and mutual orientation, embodiment, social movement activity) and they have helped to introduce our subfield to wider audiences.
T. DeNora (*) University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 A. Smudits (ed.), Roads to Music Sociology, Musik und Gesellschaft, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22279-6_8
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1 Vienna’s Institut—Caldron of Current Music Sociology In 1993, I was asked by the editors of Contemporary Sociology to review the English translation of Professor Blaukopf’s, Musical Life in a Changing Society (Blaukopf 1992). In my review, I noted the richness of the ‘Musiksoziologie’ paradigm (we need to recall that Blaukopf’s volume had originally been published in 1982), in particular its powerful combination of music analysis, ethnomusicology, empirical sociology and sociological theory. This was a perspective open to so much more than, as we called it in English, sociology ‘of’ music: it embraced the realm of the socio-musical holistically and not merely as a kind of ‘systematic musicology’ (still corralled in the more restricted realm of musicology) but in terms of built environment, sonic studies, media, reception, theory, aesthetics and change. It did not omit the so-called ‘music itself’ from consideration. In that review, I said: [Blaukopf’s] book permits us to recover certain aspects of the sociology of music side-stepped in more recent work. For one thing, it attempts to pull sociomusical studies back into an explicit concern with the musical object itself, and this is surely crucial to any ‘strong’ sociology of music … Blaukopf’s concern with the interrelationship between music and perceptual systems, and with music as ideological in its configuration, marks his work as anticipating some of the current debates within cultural studies as practiced both by musicologists and sociologists (DeNora 1994, p. 317).
It is wort
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