Music As Expressive Form Research Paper

1. Classic Approaches

The most ambitious paradigm to have been developed within sociomusical studies during the twentieth century—T. W. Adorno’s—is, arguably also the most controversial. Adorno’s periodic resurgence within and across the social sciences and musicology, however, is testament to the enduring heuristic value of his work. Adorno’s perspective is distinguished, above all, by its comprehensive vision, and for the central place it accords to music within modern (and often repressive) culture and social formation.

For Adorno, music was linked to and able to inculcate cognitive habits, modes of consciousness, and historical developments. Music’s compositional processes—its degree of conventionality, its interrelation of musical parts or voices, its use of concord and dissonance—could serve, within the Adornoian purview, as means of socialization. For Adorno, nothing was more serious or more urgent than sociomusical study: linked to a long-term and a developmental historical trajectory, music for Adorno could ‘aid enlightenment.’ Conversely, in the age of ‘Total Administration,’ music was also a medium that ‘trains the unconscious for conditioned reflexes’ (Adorno 1976, p. 53). Jazz, Tin Pan Alley, and nearly every other popular music genre were, in Adorno’s view, linked to forms of regression and infantile dependency.

In contrast to Max Weber, who primarily was concerned with the origins of musical–technical practices distinct to the West, Adorno’s focus was psychosociological, at times music-psychoanalytic. It was directed to the question of music’s ideological component, and to music’s ability not only to reflect but (in line with classic philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle) to instigate or reinforce forms of consciousness and social structures. At the same time, the absence in his work of an empirical methodology by which his claims could be demonstrated has frustrated critics from his own day to the present. By the late 1970s, Adorno, and the ‘grand’ paradigm represented by his work, was set aside (with the lone exception within musicology of Rose Subotnik). It is currently undergoing a resurgence within the social sciences.

2. Contexts Of Musical Production, Distribution, And Consumption

By 1989, new perspectives, established initially in reaction to grand programs such as Adorno’s, were firmly established. These perspectives and the various publications that issued from them drew upon close empirical work—ethnographies, cultural and social histories, quantitative surveys, and studies of musicproducing organizations. In an essay on ethnomusicology and sociology, Becker described scholars working in the new mode as not ‘much interested in ‘‘decoding’’ art works … (but rather) … prefer to see those works as the result of what a lot of people have done jointly.’

The years between roughly 1978 and the middle 1990s were enormously productive for grounded sociomusical enquiry. In retrospect, the contributions of these years may be seen to fall into three broad categories: (a) conditions of production, (b) the construction of musical value and reputation, and (c) musical tastes, consumption, and social identity.

2.1 Conditions Of Musical Production

Studies of music support have highlighted many of the ways in which the content of musical works is shaped in relation to musicians’ working conditions. Elias’s study of Mozart, for example, suggests Mozart’s compositional scope was hampered by his position between two patronage modes and his inability to escape the shackles of aristocratic control. Similarly, Becker’s study of dance musicians (published in Outsiders) documents how career patterns and occupational opportunities are shaped by patrons and by the need to find a fit between musicians’ aspirations and tastes and what the public will tolerate. Cerulo’s (1984) study of composition in six countries during World War II took the production approach into the realm of composition itself. It showed how the networks and music-occupational worlds within which composers operated affected their compositional choices. Combat Zone composers, Cerulo argues, were more likely to engage in idiosyncratic compositional practice, not as a matter of ideological or expressive intent, but because they were isolated from their professional communities, and it was this separation from the wider music world that ‘caused the unravelling of the normative prescriptions that govern techniques of composition’ (1984, p. 900).

Not only are individual composition practices affected by production organization, so too is the selection of compositions ultimately produced and marketed. Peterson and Berger (1990) illustrated this point in a highly influential study that reveals innovation as enabled and constrained by infrastructural features of the pop music industry. Their work suggested that innovation in pop is cyclical and arises from competition between large record companies and their smaller rivals, showing that diversity in musical forms is inversely related to the degree of market concentration.

Peterson and Berger’s study set the scene from the 1970s onward for the concern, within popular music studies, with the production system. More recent studies have highlighted the impact of music industry occupational stratification on the types of music that are produced: women and unfamiliar styles and artists, for example, are marginalized. These forms of musical-gender segregation may be seen within musical production in pedagogical settings also, particularly with regard to instrument choice.

2.2 The Construction Of Musical Value And Reputation

The stratification of composers, styles, and genres is a rich seam of sociomusical research. Historical studies have helped to unveil the strategies by which the musical canon and its hierarchy of ‘Master (sic) Works’ was constructed and institutionalized during the nineteenth century in Europe (Weber 1978) and America (DiMaggio 1982). An aesthetic and musicoccupational movement, the fascination with ‘high’ music culture during the nineteenth century was simultaneously a vehicle for the construction of class and status group distinction.

More recently, focus on distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ musical forms has widened to include questions of authenticity (Peterson 1997), focusing in particular on the practices and strategies through which particular versions of aesthetic hierarchies are stabilized. Other work focuses on musical reputation and emphasizes the simultaneous production of works and evaluative criteria, and the role played by patrons and the public in this process, particularly in relation to ‘revolutionary’ stylistic developments (DeNora 1995). Within the study of musical value and its construction, attention has been devoted as well to the role played by technology in stabilizing or undercutting value and to the configuration of the listener as a historical type.

2.3 Musical Taste, Consumption, And Identity

Studies of musical value and its articulation address, by definition, the matter of how music is appropriated and how music consumption is linked to status definition. This program is overt in the work discussed in the previous section. It is buttressed in turn by a wide band of quantitative studies of arts consumption that document links between musical taste and socioeconomic position. In recent years, perhaps particularly in the USA, the traditional highbrow lowbrow division of musical taste has been transformed in favor of an omnivore–univore model that suggests elite music consumers participate in and state preferences for a variety of musical genre while members of nonelite occupational groups exhibit more restricted taste preferences and defend those preferences more vehemently (Peterson and Simkus 1992).

Pioneering work by Willis (1978) and Frith (1981) inaugurated a strong tradition within popular music studies of music consumption ethnography. This work has been linked to broader concerns with subculture and style. Its strength has been to highlight music as a medium for the production of group identity. The particular contribution of these studies arises from their focus on the connections or ‘articulations’ made—by individuals and groups—between styles of action on the one hand and musical styles and forms on the other. Through articulation work, music is rendered emblematic of subcultural values and also constitutes and elaborates those values. The concern with ‘articulation’ has been subject to renewed attention in recent years in ways that have drawn it beyond its original subcultural confines (see Sect. 4.1).

3. The Meanings Of Musical Texts

The focus on music’s social contexts has contributed substantially to sociomusical understanding, in particular by theorizing and documenting in concrete terms some of the mechanisms by which music is linked to and affected by its social contexts. At the same time, critics of context studies, some of them internal, have suggested that these studies look every-where but at the musical forms (or, more broadly, the artworks) themselves.

The concern with musical texts has tended to follow one of two basic theoretical strategies. On the one hand, scholars have pursued the question of music’s capacities as a communicative and representational medium, in particular whether music can be said to possess grammatical and semantic properties and its capacity both to signify and refer to social and conceptual matters. This question continues to receive attention from psychologists and philosophers, as signaled, for example, by a special interdisciplinary symposium on Music and Meaning published in Musicae Scientiae (Symposium 1997). It connects most closely with some aspects of so-called ‘new musicology’ and the concern there with music’s social and cultural significance. On the other hand, sociologically minded scholars have suggested that while musical texts may appear to lend themselves to some interpretations more readily than others, their semiotic possibilities remain, at least in principle, open. For this reason, they argue, interpretive music analysis simultaneously constitutes the object of musical analysis. Sociological work has thus been concerned with musical meaning as an emergent phenomenon. It has focused on how texts connect, function, and are deployed within wider clusters of materials and conventions of reception such as the listening space, its social relations, interpretative choices involved in its performance (such as phrasing, dynamics, tempo, and tone color), and its accoutrements such as program notes, critical discourse, and technology. Others have pointed to music’s ability to delineate external meaning through performance.

These interactionist developments have run counter to earlier attempts to theorize music as homologous with deep mental structures or with social structural epochs. They also point away from laboratory-based studies of music perception (Deutsch 1982) which, as some have suggested, while valuable, are nonetheless far removed from forms of music listening that occur in daily life (Sloboda 1985, pp. 152–4 and passim). They do not dismiss the text or reduce it to readings but rather are concerned with delineating musical meaning as involving much more than individual readers and bounded texts (Martin 1995). As such, interactionist approaches to music’s meaning point the way toward a growing trend within sociomusical studies in favor of music as it occurs, is used and has effects in naturally occurring settings.

4. New Directions—Music In Naturally Occurring Settings

More recently, sociomusical analysis has been marked by two significant—and to a large extent, pandisciplinary—developments. The first is a shift away from the text context dichotomy. The second is an expanding interdisciplinary common ground upon which the question of musical ecology has been mooted and explored. Both trends have helped to highlight music’s active role in relation to human social agency and both document the ways in which music is used in social life. Both also point to a future for sociomusical studies wherein the (traditionally anthropological) matter (Merriam 1964) of how music functions in practice across a range of social settings will be more fully illuminated.

4.1 Overcoming The Text Context Dichotomy In Music Studies

The divide, within sociomusic studies, between work dealing with texts vs. those dealing with contexts left little space for questions concerning music’s social powers, and its role, pace Adorno, as an active ingredient in social life. In recent years, this gap has been bridged by work devoted to music and the emotions, the body and conduct style.

A common thread running through this work is its 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. 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. This perspective concentrates on the interpenetrative relation between music and human activity. This pragmatic and, conceptually, reflexive theory of the music–society nexus circumvents text context dichotomies, conceiving of music as a referent or model for (rather than a signifier of) action, feeling, and thought.

This focus on music as resource has been applied fruitfully to the question of subjectivity and its cultural social construction (Gomart and Hennion 1999, DeNora 2000). There, music is portrayed as a resource for the production and auto-production of emotional stances, styles and states in daily life and for the remembering of emotional states. Although this work clearly connects with pioneering efforts within social psychology (Sloboda 2000), it also indicates an explicitly sociological focus on self-regulatory strategies in—and oriented to—particular social contexts. It reveals some emotional management and self-production as social processes across a range of circumstances.

Concurrently, there has been a renewed interest in music’s effect on and relation to the body. This work has sought to document corporeal states (e.g., energy, coordination, entrainment, and bodily self-awareness) as they are mediated by musical materials (e.g., rhythm, cadence, tempo, motive, style, and genre). It downplays a conception of music as a ‘stimulus’ and highlights instead music’s capacity (according to how it is heard and appropriated) to ‘afford’—provide resources for and to enable—forms of corporeal organization and states of being. In its focus on music’s connection to modes of being and modes of attending to the social environment, it connects with Schutz’s classic emphasis on the phenomenological dimension of music making (Schutz 1964). These issues are currently being illuminated through studies of music and bodily activity, in particular in relation to fitness where music may be seen to function as a ‘prosthetic’ and/or body-modifying technology (DeNora 2000, Chap. 4). Music’s capacity as an affordance structure and its organizing powers with respect to the body is perhaps most concretely illustrated in medical-based studies of music therapy.

4.2 Interdisciplinary Convergences

In recent years, psychology, sociology and ethnomusicology have developed common ground with regard to the study of musical ecology. This focus reconnects with Blacking’s (1977) path-breaking attempt to draw sociomusic studies well beyond culturally specific notions of musical works and their reception and to move toward more universal questions concerning soundscape and the non-propositional bases of human social action. Such a program entails a shift away from ‘compositionality’ and toward the links between conduct and musical ecologies.

Work on musical ecology has stemmed from two distinct disciplinary sets of concerns, social psychological and sociological. The former has relied primarily upon environmental experimental procedures and quantitative modes of investigation. It has been concerned with music’s influence on behavior. Some of this work has emphasized music’s primary characteristics such as tempo and its relation to embodied activities such as walking, browsing, eating, or drinking. Other studies, particularly those concerned with musical ‘atmospherics’ in organizational settings have emphasized how, through its stylistic connotations, music may provide a set of cues about ‘appropriate’ forms of action and so serve as a resource for the creation of scenic specific forms of action and interaction (North and Hargreaves 1997).

Sociologically oriented work has been concerned more broadly with music’s heightened profile within managerial and consumer cultures. It has posed theoretical questions concerning the aesthetic and specifically musical means by which actors and their bodies are socialized (and seek to socialize each other) across a range of settings, public, private, collective, and intimate. To the extent that sociomusical analysis has addressed and continues to address questions of conduct and aesthetic consciousness (emotion and embodiment), it promises to enhance social science understandings of the aesthetic bases of social action and organization. In this regard, sociomusical studies have been restored to the heart of social science investigations, the position they occupied in social theoretical work from Plato through Adorno.

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