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PART 4

WHOSE?
Social Forces and
Musical Belongings
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

The Cultural Study of Music : A Critical Introduction, edited by Martin Clayton, et al., Taylor & Francis Group, 2011. ProQuest
Ebook Central, [Link]
Created from universidadcomplutense-ebooks on 2021-09-19 [Link].
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

The Cultural Study of Music : A Critical Introduction, edited by Martin Clayton, et al., Taylor & Francis Group, 2011. ProQuest
Ebook Central, [Link]
Created from universidadcomplutense-ebooks on 2021-09-19 [Link].
CHAPTER 21
MUSIC AND SOCIAL CATEGORIES
JOHN SHEPHERD

The starting point of this chapter is the question, to what extent do musical
structures and practices reflect, model, or resonate with the identities, expe-
riences, or structural positions of social classes, and gendered and ethnic
groups? This issue is a vast one, encompassing an impressive and imposing
literature going back almost forty years and raising some major questions in
social and cultural theory. It is an issue to which I contributed during the
1970s and 1980s. My intent in this chapter is to explain why I think this issue
and its exploration were important to the development of the cultural study
of music during this time; why the work that resulted was superseded by
other, more sophisticated work; and why the legacy of some of the thinking
that occurred during the 1970s and 1980s might remain pertinent to an
emergent paradigm for the cultural study of music. This chapter is thus
tinged with an element of intellectual autobiography.
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

It is also written largely, but not exclusively, from the point of view of
popular music studies. This is because the issues discussed here found a
striking focus during the 1970s and 1980s in work in this discipline, even
though it can be argued that they are important to the cultural study of all
music. Popular music studies were, however, influenced by wider develop-
ments, including some outside the study of music as a whole. Some of these
developments are discussed in this chapter. Also, developments important
to the issues discussed in this chapter occurred independently of popular
music studies in disciplines such as ethnomusicology (e.g., Blacking 1973;
C. Keil 1979). As the 1990s dawned, the importance of ethnomusicology to
these issues increased considerably (e.g., Slobin 1993).

MUSIC AND PARADIGMS

When I studied music during the late 1960s and early 1970s, I did so in what
was then a very conventional way. I studied the history of Western art music,
and with only marginal reference to social and cultural forces. The emphasis
was overwhelmingly on “the music itself,” a music that was judged to be
autonomous. The assumption was that, although Western art music was
created at particular points in history, it was essentially beyond the influence
of social and cultural forces. It was assumed to embody within itself uni-
versal, “otherworldly” values and truths immune to the impact of everyday
life.
This same period witnessed considerable cultural and social turmoil. In
the United States, this was evident in the Civil Rights movement and
opposition to the war in Vietnam. Developments in the United Kingdom
were less dramatic, but there was nonetheless considerable opposition
to established social, cultural, and moral values, with an emphasis on a cul-
tural rebirth emanating from younger generations. Common to all this
“anti-establishment” activity was the role of popular culture, and particu-
larly popular music. Much popular music of the time was for younger
generations imbued with and expressive of a broadly based and broadly felt
sense of cultural and political opposition and renewal. It had to do with the
realities of everyday life, and was self-evidently and palpably “social.”
For many studying music in institutions of higher education at the time,
it was not difficult to perceive a disjunction between music as understood
academically, and music as experienced as a part of everyday life. There
existed few if any alternatives to the way that music was studied. By contrast,
the role of popular music in the cultural politics of everyday life was unmis-
takable and compelling. To those of us naive enough to suggest that popular
music and its politics were a legitimate object for study, the reply was swift
and final. Popular music was inferior to “classical” music, and should not
therefore be included in the curriculum. Its inferiority was marked and
guaranteed by its clear social “content,” which served to compromise its
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

tonal values. “Classical” music was superior precisely because it was immune
to such undesirable social forces. The cultural, musical, and, indeed, acad-
emic battle lines of the late 1960s and early 1970s were drawn very clearly.
This book on the cultural study of music comes from a very different
moment. While it would be misleading to say that the old “high cultural”
attitudes are no longer evident in university music departments, there had
undoubtedly been significant changes even at the time the first edition
appeared, changes whose impact has continued to ramify. This has been due
to several factors: the contributions made to the study of music by a wide
range of disciplines outside music, such as sociology, anthropology, and
communication; the increasing and sustained influence of ethnomusicology,

a discipline for which existing and interacting with the people whose music
is being studied have been a central and defining methodology; and major
changes within the historically more conservative disciplines of academic
music.
The suggestion has been made that these disciplines have interacted with
an intimacy that makes possible a new paradigm for the cultural study of
music. This paradigm will certainly be in contrast to the one dominant
during the quarter century following the end of World War II. It is of sig-
nificance that this earlier paradigm became susceptible to challenge in part
because of the advent of the term and concept of paradigm. The concept’s
widespread currency derived from Thomas S. Kuhn’s influential book The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn argued that scientific knowl-
edge did not progress steadily toward “the truth,” with erroneous knowledge
being discarded and replaced by new, more accurate knowledge. He sug-
gested that, when one scientific paradigm, or body of premises, axioms, and
theories, could no longer answer the questions it had generated, a crisis
would occur in the scientific community supporting and advocating the
paradigm. The crisis would be followed by a revolution in which the old
paradigm would be replaced by a new one capable of answering the pre-
viously unanswerable questions. This new paradigm would be based on a
different set of premises, axioms, and theories, and would, quite literally, see
the world differently. A classic example of one such paradigm shift is that
instigated by Einstein’s theories of relativity early in the twentieth century.
Scientists who accepted his theories at an early stage did so not because of
any empirical “proof,” which had to wait some years, but because of the ele-
gance and effectiveness of their explanations. Kuhn concluded that scientists
shifted paradigm allegiance not for scientific reasons but for reasons that
were primarily aesthetic.
While Kuhn did not say that scientific knowledge was a social construct,
he opened the door for this controversial argument to be made in later
years. The argument that reality is a social construct was, however, made in
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

1966 in Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of

Reality. According to Berger and Luckmann, reality was not something given
that we receive and perceive neutrally, but something that is constructed by
people acting together. These two books provided the intellectual basis for
arguing that the way in which music was studied after the end of World War
II was not something natural, given, self-evident, or unquestionable, but
something that had been constructed socially for political and cultural
reasons. What followed from this realization was that something that was
made by people could be changed by people. The stage was set for a major
paradigm shift in the academic study of music. Fundamental to this para-
digm shift was the foundational premise that all music, including “classical”

music, was a social construct, and thus something that had to be understood
both socially and culturally.
Social categories played an important role in the early days of this para-
digm shift. If music was a social construct, it followed that connections
should exist between social groups and their music. This chapter traces the
lines of this development, the problems to which such work gave rise, and
the more sophisticated work that followed it. However, the chapter remains
cognizant of something recognized by Kuhn: namely, that with paradigm
shifts there are losses as well as gains. More specifically, Kuhn observed, with
a paradigm shift questions that were previously important become much
less important and sometimes get lost to view. A theme underlying this
chapter is that, if a new paradigm for the cultural study of music is now in
view, then, in the spirit of the continual problematization of objects and
methods of study, there should be a sensitivity to questions that appear to
have receded from view.

MUSIC AND SOCIAL CATEGORIES

The idea that connections exist between social groups and the characteristics
of their music began to emerge in the 1970s. In 1970, Andrew Chester
drew a distinction between extensional and intensional forms of musical
expression:

[Western classical music] is the apodigm of the extensional form of musi-

cal construction. Theme and variations, counterpoint, tonality . . . are all
devices that build diachronically and synchronically outward from basic
musical atoms. The complex is created by combination of the simple,
which remains discrete and unchanged in the complex unity. Thus a basic
premise of classical music is rigorous adherence to standard timbres.

By contrast:
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Rock . . . follows . . . the path of intensional development . . . the basic

musical units (played/sung notes) are not combined through space and
time as simple elements into complex structures. The simple entity is that
constituted by the parameters of melody, harmony and beat, while the
complex is built up by modulation of the basic notes, and by inflection of
the basic beat.
(Chester [1970] 1990, 315)

Chester saw important connections between musical characteristics and

social groups. While “the internal coordinates of a musical form are not
mechanically determined by its social base,” he said, “to each social group
correspond certain acceptable genres” (pp. 318–319).

This idea that the characteristics of a musical form could give life to the
social reality of a culture gained increasing currency during the 1970s and
1980s. In 1977, I argued that the characteristics of functional tonality as the
“language” of classical music embodied and gave expression to the temporal
and spatial senses underlying and making possible industrial capitalism as a
social form. In 1978, Paul Willis argued that early rock ’n’ roll and pro-
gressive rock articulated the social realities of biker boy subculture and hippy
counterculture, respectively. In 1982, I attempted to set out an encompassing
model for the social analysis of classical music and many forms of African-
American and African-American-influenced popular music important
during the twentieth century. The idea behind this model was that of a
“harmonic-rhythmic framework,” comprised of three chords (the tonic,
dominant, and subdominant) and simple duple and triple meters, which
was common to both classical and popular musics. This basic framework,
with its centralized and “controlling” keynote, was a code for, and articula-
tion of, the encompassing social structures of industrial capitalism. Those
with power and influence could manipulate this framework extensionally—
hence the complex architectonic harmonic structures of classical music.
Those with little power or influence tended to live within this social-musical
environment—taking it for granted—and to develop musical complexity
intensionally, through individualized sounds or timbres, and through the
bending of pitches and rhythms in ways that would be unacceptable within
classical music (hence Chester’s reference to “modulation”—actually an
incorrect use of the term—and “inflection” in his description of intensional
modes of musical development). The model thus incorporated the socio-
logical categories of class, ethnicity, and, to a degree, age. In 1987, I extended
this kind of analysis to gender, arguing that different voice types or timbres
in popular music gave expression to different kinds of gender identities. It is
symptomatic that all this work reflected the clearly drawn battle lines of the
1960s and 1970s.
Illuminating though this work seemed, it brought with it problems.
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Despite Chester’s observation that “musical practice has a relative auton-

omy” ([1970] 1990, 319), the impression lingered that music was a
secondary symptom of social and cultural forces. Music, in other words,
seemed to be produced by the “social base.” Second, this work operated only
at the level of social groups. Little attention was paid to the social and cultural
identities of individuals. Such identities could exist only because of group
membership. Third, the fit between music and social and cultural realities
was too tight and convenient. It was not difficult to demonstrate that the
practice of music was more complex than theoretical models would allow.
This problem was identified by Will Straw (1991) when he drew a distinction
between musical communities and musical scenes. A musical community,

observed Straw, “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
rooted organically in that community.” By contrast, a musical scene (“the
most appropriate term for designating centres of musical activity today”) is
“that cultural space within which a range of musical practices co-exist, inter-
acting 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 work of the 1970s and 1980s is clear in Straw’s assertion
that cultural theorists like himself encountering such 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 con-
cerning an expressive unity of musical practices” (1991, 369–373).
At one level, Straw’s observations signaled real changes in musical and
cultural life as captured in concepts such as “globalization” and “postmod-
ernism.” The battle lines of the 1960s and 1970s had been replaced by an
understanding that the musical world is more complicated than the work
emanating from those politics and battles could reveal. Since then, cultural
commodities including music had to a degree been drained of ideological or
organically rooted meaning as a consequence of their increasing number
and variety, and the speed and efficiency with which they were transmitted
across the surface of the globe. One consequence was that musical practices
no longer occurred just within the delimited geocultural spaces within
which particular communities lived. Communities in part and musical
communities in particular were created as a consequence of the transmission
of music. The notion of place and its role in identity construction thus had
to be reconceptualized, a process evidenced in the work of George Lipsitz
(1994), Martin Stokes (1994), and Andrew Leyshon, David Matliss, and
George Revill (1998). At another level, however, Straw’s observations are
more profound, signaling the distinct possibility that musical life has always
been characterized by complex patterns of cross-fertilization and cultural
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

hybridity, and that notions of organic rootedness and “authenticity” are

largely mythical. It has only been the more modest rate of such changes
during the course of history that has allowed for the appearance of tight fits
between music and society.
It is perhaps not without coincidence that, in the same year that Straw
was making his observations, Sara Cohen was also calling for a change in
approaches to the cultural study of music. In an observation symptomatic
of a move away from theory, she argued that “what is particularly lacking in
the literature . . . is ethnographic data and micro-sociological detail” (1991,
6). Such detail has been provided not only by Cohen but by Ruth Finnegan
(1989), Deena Weinstein (1991), and Susan Crafts, Daniel Cavicchi, and

Charles Keil (1993). It has also been provided by a generation of ethnomu-

sicologists interested in world popular music (e.g., Manuel 1988; Waterman
1990; Stokes 1992; Guilbault et al. 1993; Slobin 1993; Erlmann 1996;
Langlois 1996).
The 1990s seemed to evidence a watershed in the cultural study of music.
A concern with particular social categories (class, gender, ethnicity, age,
subculture, counterculture, and so on) was replaced with a more embracing
and pervasive concern with identity. This concern with identity subsumed
established social categories in markedly complex ways, and at the same time
has required and been evidenced by an attention to the specific details of
lived cultural–musical realities to a degree not on the whole characteristic
of earlier work. The move to ethnography, together with a partial shift
in focus from “traditional” to “popular” music in ethnomusicology, can be
seen as a defining moment in the emergence of the new paradigm for the
cultural study of music. As Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh
observed, “a common problematic across musicology, ethnomusicology and
popular music studies in recent years has been the theorization of music
and identity and, by implication, difference” (2000, 2).

MUSIC AND MEANING

In the early pages of Studying Popular Music (1990), Richard Middleton
refers to Gramsci’s distinction between “situations” and “conjunctures.” In
Middleton’s words, “situation” refers to “the deepest, the organic structures
of a social formation; movement there is fundamental and relatively per-
manent, the result of crisis”; “conjuncture” refers to “more immediate,
ephemeral characteristics, linked to the organic structures but changing at
once more rapidly and less significantly, as the forces in conflict within a
situation struggle to work out their contradictions” (1990, 12). A question
that might be asked of an emergent new paradigm for the cultural study of
music is the extent to which the growing, necessary, and legitimate concern
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

with the details of lived cultural–musical realities has nonetheless allowed

the situational to recede in relative importance in musical analysis. It is
symptomatic, perhaps, that, according to Born and Hesmondhalgh, “much
recent work has attempted to move beyond the neo-Gramscian concepts of
hegemony and resistance” (2000, 5). They also report that the postcolonial
theory so central to many recent developments in the cultural study of music
“has been criticized” for treating issues of power “almost entirely in terms
of textuality and epistemology” and sidelining “material conditions and
the possibility of political practices oriented towards changing material
conditions” in a manner that “has been the cause of some bitter Marxist
polemics against the field” (p. 6).

A second and related question has to do with musical meaning. The

paradigm shift that began in the 1970s had as much to do with the question
of musical meaning as it did with the foundational premise of music’s social
and cultural constitution. Susan McClary (1991), in a book that played a
seminal role in the development of critical thinking on questions of gender
in music, identified the importance of this issue. “I was drawn to music,” she
said, “because it is the most compelling cultural form I know. I wanted
evidence that the overwhelming responses I experience . . . are not just my
own, but rather are shared.” However, McClary soon discovered that “musi-
cology fastidiously declares issues of musical signification off-limits to those
engaged in legitimate scholarship” (1991, 4). In instigating the beginnings
of a paradigm shift, the work of the 1970s and 1980s began to throw light on
this question precisely by way of the premise that music was constituted
socially and culturally. If music were constituted in this way, then it followed
that its characteristics—its harmonies, melodies, rhythms, and sound
qualities or timbres—embodied and gave expression to meanings that were
pervasively social and cultural.
The work of the 1970s and 1980s spoke as much to the situational as it
did to the conjunctural. If one question that might be asked of the new
paradigm is the extent to which the situational has receded in relative
importance in musical analysis, an allied question might be that of the extent
to which questions of signification in music have likewise been allowed to
recede. A concentration on the details of lived cultural–musical realities
quite correctly involves a heavy reliance on the verbal accounts of those
involved in musical practices. This concentration has nonetheless been con-
sistent with the placing of considerable emphasis on the role of connotation
in musical significance: the feelings and images capable of descriptive
encapsulation that are customarily associated with such musical character-
istics as, for example, the feelings of apprehension created by the use of
high tremolo violins in film music, or in the images of the ocean—visual,
rhythmic, sonic, and even, perhaps, olfactory—evoked by Debussy’s La
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Mer. This is an emphasis that seems to have detracted from a concern with
the way in which the structural elements of music—harmonic, melodic,
rhythmic, and timbral—can speak directly to the structures of social,
cultural, and individual realities, and thus to the identities and structural
positions of social classes and gendered and ethnic groups. This shift in
emphasis is consistent with the Foucauldian “linguistic turn” that has been
so influential in a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social
sciences. Although Foucault himself stressed the way in which discourses are
embedded in the material practices and apparatuses of institutions (see for
example, Foucault 1970, 1972, 1978, 1979), this turn nonetheless draws on
a long line of French-language linguistic and cultural theory that has tended

to eschew the material, whether the material bases of lived realities or those
of various signifying practices such as music (in the case of music, its
sounds). It is perhaps not without relevance that Born and Hesmondhalgh
have recently quite baldly claimed that “connotation is undoubtedly the
dominant mode of musical signification” (2000, 56).
If there is a new paradigm for the cultural study of music, then, it may be
important to ensure that the situational and the structural, in both life and
music, do not get obscured from view. Any reassertion of the situational
and structural will have to take on board the important insights resulting
from more recent research on the ways in which music is involved and
implicated in the construction of cultural identities. A hint as to how such
analysis might work can be drawn from the opening pages of Middleton’s
book. One moment of situational change identified by Middleton “begins
sometime after the Second World War—most strikingly with the advent of
rock ’n’ roll” (1990, 14). The role of Elvis Presley in this upheaval has been
debated. As Greil Marcus observes, “it is often said that if Elvis had not come
along to set off the changes in American music and American life that
followed his triumph, someone very much like him would have done the job
as well.” However, concludes Marcus, “there is no reason to think this is true,
either in strictly musical terms, or in any broader cultural sense” ([1976]
1982, 166). Because of his particular biography and musical talents, it can
be argued that Presley was able to identify intuitively many of the cultural
contradictions evident in the United States at the time—between black
and white communities, rural and urban life, men and women, working and
middle classes, young and old, the South and the North—and give them
musical expression. This expression was not simply reflective but also
evidenced the relative autonomy of which Chester speaks. As Marcus notes,
“Elvis inherited these tensions, but more than that, gave them his own
shape” (p. 166). Middleton echoes these sentiments in saying that “Elvis’s
importance . . . lies not so much in the mix of elements (blues/country/Tin
Pan Alley) which he helped to bring into rock ’n’ roll, but in what he did with
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

it. He transformed them into particular patterns” (1990, 21). Presley gave a
specifically musical shape to a situational moment in a manner that was
structural as well as connotative, and powerfully corporeal. The question is
whether this would have been possible through any other medium than
music, and whether an understanding of this moment could be achieved
without a heightened awareness of the social categories through which
situational contradictions are generated and find expression.

FURTHER READING
Born, Georgina, and David Hesmondhalgh, eds. 2000. Western music and its others. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Bradby, Barbara. 1990. Do-talk and don’t talk: The division of the subject in girl-group music. Pp.
341–368 in On record: Rock, pop and the written word. Edited by Simon Frith and Andrew
Goodwin. New York: Pantheon.
Frith, Simon, and Angela McRobbie. [1978] 1990. Rock and sexuality. Pp. 371–389 in On record:
Rock, pop and the written word. Edited by Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin. New York:
Pantheon.
Koskoff, Ellen, ed. 1987. Women and music in cross-cultural perspective. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press.
Maróthy, János. 1974. Music and the bourgeois, music and the proletarian. Budapest: Akademiai
Kiado.
McClary, Susan. 1991. Feminine endings. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Middleton, Richard. 1990. “Roll over Beethoven”? Sites and soundings on the music-historical map.
Pp. 3–33 in Studying popular music. Milton Keynes, U.K.: Open University Press.
Peña, Manuel. 1985. The Texas-Mexican conjunto: History of a working-class music. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Radano, Ronald, and Philip Bohlman, eds. 2000. Music and the racial imagination. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Shepherd, John. 1991. Music as social text. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity.
Stokes, Martin, ed. 1994. Ethnicity, identity and music: The musical construction of place. Oxford:
Berg.
Taylor, Jenny, and Dave Laing. 1979. Disco-pleasure-discourse: On “Rock and sexuality.”’ Screen
Education 31: 43–48.
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

The Cultural Study of Music : A Critical Introduction, edited by Martin Clayton, et al., Taylor & Francis Group, 2011. ProQuest
Ebook Central, [Link]
Created from universidadcomplutense-ebooks on 2021-09-19 [Link].
CHAPTER 22
MUSIC AND MEDIATION
Toward a New Sociology of Music
ANTOINE HENNION

After a century of studies, there is no agreement on what it means to con-

struct a sociology of music. From the beginning this “of ” has been a place
of tension, not of smooth coordination. If music has easily attracted social
readings, there has been strong resistance to a systematic sociology of music
whose aim would be to explain musical values or content through reference
to sociological factors. The most vehement prosecutor of such alleged reduc-
tionism was undoubtedly Adorno (e.g., 1976)—even though he himself
became the worst reductionist when it came to popular culture (Adorno
[1941] 2002); for him, only musics that are not really art deserve sociological
treatment (it is difficult to know if this is more disrespectful of popular
music or sociology!). By contrast, the opposite program—a positive expla-
nation of the ways in which music is produced, diffused, and listened to—
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

has been attacked on the grounds that, given its refusal to address “music
itself,” it cannot acknowledge music’s specificity.
In this opposition between two programs, a part of the question is spe-
cific to the case of music, but another is common to the social interpretation
of any art. To a large extent, the sociology of art has defined itself through
opposition to aesthetics. The aim was both to criticize any claim of auton-
omy for works of art and aesthetic judgment, and to return the experience
of aesthetic pleasure—often regarded as immediate and subjective—to its
social and historical determinations. The two types of causality mobilized
above have often been described in social studies of art in terms of a dis-
tinction between studying either “the art object sociologically” or “the art

object as a social process” (Zolberg 1990, chapters 3 and 4). One approach
displays the mediators of art, the other how art mediates society. The latter
takes art as an empirical given reality, and provides explanations of its social
conditions; it can be respectful vis-à-vis the “artistic nature of art”: the task
of sociology is to give an account of the social conditions of its production,
diffusion, and reception. The former shows art as a social artifact, or con-
struction, of a group—an “art world”; as such, it is more invasive (it looks
for the social nature of art, as Blacking (1973) would put it, not for wider
social factors), and sees the claim of art to be autonomous as problematic.
These two directions, one clearly empiricist and more devoted to specific
case studies, the other more theoretical, are themselves divided into different
trends. Across the board, though, sociology has set itself against a purely
internal and hagiographic aesthetic commentary on artworks, “filling out”
an art world formerly including only a very few chefs-d’œuvre and geniuses.
Mainstream productions and copies, conventions and material constraints,
professions and academies, performance venues and markets, on the artistic
side of the scene; and, on the social side, codes and rites of consumption,
gender and ethnicity, and, in the specific case of music, modes of circulation
in a “glocal” world: these are what have been pushed to the front of the
scene. These mediations range from systems or devices of the most physical
and local nature, to institutional arrangements and collective frames of
appreciation such as the discourse of critics, right up to the very existence of
an independent domain called art. In pursuing this program, scholars have
given up global, abstract systems of interpretation, and produced instead a
practical theory of mediation, conceived as the reciprocal, local, hetero-
geneous relations between art and public through precise devices, places,
institutions, objects, and human abilities, constructing identities, bodies,
and subjectivities.

A SOCIOLOGY OF AESTHETIC PLEASURE?

Nevertheless, the relationship of sociology and art remained problematic.

For most of the classical forms of sociology, for critical theory (Bourdieu
1984), and for interactionist (Becker 1982) or constructivist (DeNora 1995)
currents, the sociological analysis of art has always been less interested in
creation, genius, or the works “in themselves” than in what makes these
categories appear as such. For Bourdieu, who took the critical intention
furthest, it means unmasking the magical role of “creation.” In this view,
culture is a façade disguising social mechanisms of differentiation, artistic
objects being “only” means to naturalize the social nature of tastes; aesthetic
judgments are but denegations of this work of naturalization that can be
made only if unknown as such. This critique of taste and of its social

reproduction has led to many empirical surveys of musical consumption

(e.g., DiMaggio 1987; Lamont and Fournier 1992; Peterson and Kern 1996).
A radical lack of concern for the works themselves characterizes most of
these studies. Sociology refuses subjectivism, the cult of genius, and the self-
glorifying discourse of artists, preferring to demonstrate the constraints
through which artists and amateurs are unknowingly determined, the con-
ventions through which they recognize and create their world, and the
formats used to mold the social construction of masterpieces.
In these conditions, any report on artistic experience in terms of beauty,
sensation, emotion, or aesthetic feeling is automatically regarded as a mani-
festation of actors’ illusions about their own beliefs (Bourdieu 1990), or the
conventional products of a collective activity. The works do nothing, and the
processes involved in their appreciation lose their specificity or specialness
(a view deplored by Frith (1996) in his plea for the importance of the
evaluation of popular cultures); works and tastes—meaningless in and of
themselves—are returned to the arbitrariness (a key word in any analysis in
terms of belief) of a collective election based on a social, nonartistic prin-
ciple. The argument is a powerful one, and should not be overlooked if we
want to avoid the celebration of autonomous art simply being taken literally
again. But one also has to measure the limits of such a view, particularly in
view of the dominant position it has had in the sociology of art. It is becom-
ing essential to reconsider sociology’s lack of interest in works of art and the
aesthetic experience as, echoing cultural studies (Hall and Jefferson 1976;
Grossberg et al. 1992; Frow 1995), music sociologists have done (DeNora
2000; Hennion [1993] 2007, 2004; A. Bennett 2000; Gell 1998): what do we
do with art or music, and what does it produce, emotionally and collectively?
Otherwise, there is a danger of reinforcing the great divide between expres-
sive comments and analytical writings: between literary, subjective, “hot”
accounts of musical experience on one side, as provided for example by
cultural, gender, or queer studies (but often with insufficient rigor—the
“what allows you to say so?” syndrome); and explicative, objective, “cold”
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sociological analyses on the other side, with a higher requirement for

evidence—but keeping too far from what art or music are about to be
acknowledged by the “groups concerned” (Dewey 1927).
Understanding the work of art as a mediation, in keeping with the lesson
of critical sociology, means reviewing the work in all the details of the
gestures, bodies, habits, materials, spaces, languages, and institutions that
it inhabits. Without accumulated mediations—styles, grammar, systems
of taste, programs, concert halls, schools, entrepreneurs, and so on—no
beautiful work of art appears. At the same time, however—and against the
usual agenda of critical sociology—we must recognize the moment of
the work in its specific and irreversible dimension; this means seeing it as

a transformation, a productive work, and allowing oneself to take into

account the (highly diversified) ways in which actors describe and experi-
ence aesthetic pleasure (Hennion 2007; DeNora 2011).
For various reasons, this was for many years not the case within social
studies of music. The sterile opposition between theoretical and empirical
programs was not clearly superseded. In the case of literature or the visual
arts, the sociological approach was prepared by lengthy debate over the
merits of internal and external explanations. Even if the terms of this debate
proved to be unsatisfactory in the end, the debate has at least occurred; in
the case of music, the fight has not taken place. Music has always puzzled
the critical discourse of the social sciences: here there is an art obviously
collective but technical and difficult to grasp, and with no visible object to
contest. As music had a priori no explicit “content,” the opposition between
internal and external approaches was difficult to mobilize. To what could
one refer an opposition between a formalist and a realist interpretation of
musical works? The positivistic character of much traditional musicology,
with little theoretical self-questioning, has often been criticized, while a
purely grammatical analysis of musical language produced its own closed
sphere. With little relationship to either, a history of music could then
describe all the concrete forms through which music had been created,
performed, and listened to. The social status of musicians, the technical and
economic development of musical instruments, changes in concerts and
musical life: studies of all these elements have accumulated, producing rich
insights and results, but without any possibility of relating them to musical
works, languages, or “contents” in other than very intuitive or metaphorical
terms. Instead of giving birth to fruitful controversies and passionate
polemics, music has allowed different disciplines to grow, and to ignore one
another.
In the case of the visual arts, the materiality of the works, even and
especially if challenged by the artists, has allowed a debate to take place about
the social production and reception of art. Music is in the reverse situation:
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its object is elusive; social interpretations just take it as the expression of a

social group (ethnic trance, rock concert), aesthetic studies as a nonverbal
language of immediacy. Music has nothing but mediations to show: instru-
ments, musicians, scores, stages, records. The works are not “already there,”
faced with differences in taste also “already there,” overdetermined by the
social. They always have to be played again or, to say it better, performed
anew (Schechner 2002; Butler 2005).

THE LESSON OF MUSIC

But what was a handicap for the older, formerly dominant critical approach
can become an asset if the aim is to envisage a positive conception of medi-
ation (Hennion [1993] 2007). Patrons, sponsors, markets, academies: from
the first undertakings of the social history of art, mediations have always had
a crucial role in social analyses (e.g., Baxandall 1972; Haskell 1976). Their
critical dimension has been used against aestheticism to recall that works
and tastes are constructed and socially determined. But music enables us
to go beyond the description of technical and economic intermediaries as
mere transformers of the musical relationship into commodities, and to do
a positive analysis of all the human and material intermediaries of the
“performance” and “consumption” of art, from gestures and bodies to stages
and media. Mediations are neither mere carriers of the work nor substitutes
that dissolve its reality; they are the art itself, as is particularly obvious in the
case of music: when the performer places a score on his music stand, he plays
that music, to be sure, but music is just as much the very fact of playing;
mediations in music have a pragmatic status—they are the art that they
reveal, and cannot be distinguished from the appreciation they generate.
Mediations can therefore serve as a base for a positive analysis of tastes, and
not for the deconstruction of these tastes.
Various authors have foregrounded the specificity of music’s construc-
tion, on the basis of either ethnomethodologist or reflexivist claims to take
into consideration the way people themselves construct a reality that they
call music (Frith 1981; Bergeron and Bohlman 1992), or to account for the
fact that we find in music a very particular way of putting a social reality into
a form and a practice, and need to cope with the enigma of this art, which
is both very immediate, subjective, and emotive, and also highly symbolic,
so powerfully able to mobilize groups and carry social identities. To make
a sociological analysis of taste does not mean to acknowledge the existence
of some general underlying social mechanisms responsible for the presum-
ably stable and necessary relationship between self-enclosed works and
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pre-existing tastes. Rather, taste, pleasure, and meaning are contingent,

conjunctural, and hence transient; and they result from specific yet varying
combinations of particular intermediaries, considered not as the neutral
channels through which predetermined social relations operate, but as
productive entities that have effectivities of their own.
One could expect that musical practices, publics, and amateurs would be
privileged objects of study for sociologists of music. This is the case with
changes in concert life and the development of new musical tastes (Weber
1975, 1992; Morrow 1989; Johnson 1995). The invention of a tradition and
the social production of the past have been traced for several repertories,
ranging from Beethoven (DeNora 1995) to country music (Peterson 1997).

From a more political point of view, Fulcher (1987) has discussed French
“Grand Opera” not as a mere petit-bourgeois form of divertissement,
as usual, but as a vehicle for the risky political production of the newly
restored monarchy’s national-popular legitimacy. And after Benjamin’s
much-debated essay (1973), modern media and the socio-economic trans-
formation of music and listening that they entail have been widely discussed,
for example, in relation to the production of a new “aurality” through early
music recordings (Maisonneuve 2009), to jazz (Berliner 1994), and to rock
and popular culture (Laing 1985; Hennion 1989; Frith and Goodwin 1990).
More generally, popular music and rock have been sites for rich critical
rethinking within cultural, gender, and ethnic studies (Willis 1978; Hebdige
1979; Whiteley et al. 2004; A. Bennett, 2005): what appears to be a blas-
phemy for occidental music is inescapable for popular music, which is
studied as a mixture of rites, of linguistic and social structures, of technical
media and marketing strategies, of instruments and musical objects, and
of politics and bodies. Often implicitly, social analysis refers to the power of
music to establish and actualize the identity of a group, an ethnicity, and a
generation, and points to the ambivalence of its political function: music
both helps a social entity to access reality, and prevents it from expressing
itself through more political means (Brake 1980; Frith 1981; Yonnet 1985;
Middleton 1990; Wicke 1990). And after all, Max Weber ([1921] 1958) had
done something similar in his much earlier essay—tentative and speculative
but full of deep insights—establishing new relations among musical lan-
guage, technique, and notation, and the social division of labor among
audiences, musicians, and composers.
The theme of mediation as an empirical means for identifying the pro-
gressive appearance of a work and its reception is very rich; it is the means
(for the sociologist) to reopen the work-taste duality, a duality that repre-
sents a closure of the analysis, with works on one side left to aestheticians
and musicologists, who attribute the power of music to the music itself, and,
facing them, a sociological denunciation, the reduction of music to a rite. In
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the next three sections I briefly exemplify such a “mediation perspective”

from some of my own studies.

“BACH TODAY”
Bach was not a “modern composer,” author of a “Complete Works,” cat-
alogued in the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, before musicology, the record
industry, and the modern amateur. One can trace through the nineteenth
century the long transformation of what was “music,” and how it produced
our taste for Bach as a musician, giving him the strange ability of being both
the object and the means of our love for music (Fauquet and Hennion

2000). Bach is neither the solitary individual born in 1685 to whom history
would ascribe an oeuvre, nor an artificial construct of our modern taste.
We listen to him today by way of three hundred years of collective labor, and
of the most modern mechanisms, mechanisms that we created to listen to
him but also because we were listening to him. Those mechanisms keep
on perfecting themselves in the desire for a “return to Bach” (thanks to
musicology, organology, computerized recording, the progress made by
performers, and the historicization of our appreciation). But in so doing,
they invest themselves more and more in this active production of “Bach
today,” and the more and more modern they become!
How can one analyze Bach’s grandeur? To answer such a question, one
cannot just study “Bach’s reception” musicologically. To speak of reception
is already to admit that the oeuvre is constituted. Beauty is also in the eye of
the beholder: the formation of a taste cultivated for classical music is not
simply an independent development that enables the “reception” of the
great composer always to be more worthy of him. But one cannot just
sociologically critique the cult of Bach: there was, and continues to be, a
simultaneous production of a taste for Bach, of an oeuvre corresponding to
this taste and, more generally, of a new mechanism for musical appreciation.
The hand is not dealt to two partners (Bach and us) but to three (Bach, us,
and “the music”), none of which can be separated from the others: Bach’s
music continually changes in the process, and reciprocally, all through the
nineteenth century, Bach helped a complete redefinition of the love for
music to take place.
Bach “becomes music”: not only a reference, an ancient Master, the statue
of the Commendatore in the shadow of whom the music of the present
time is written, but a contemporary composer. But the reverse is also true:
classical music “becomes Bach,” it is reorganized around his figure (and
Beethoven’s), resting on their production. Bach is not integrated into an
already made musical universe: he produces it, in part, through the inven-
tion of a new taste for music. Throughout the century, we witness the
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formation both of a new way to love music, as a serious, demanding activ-

ity—a development that was primarily due to the influence of Beethoven
and Bach—and of a new repertoire of masterpieces that respond to this
appreciation. Bach’s “early adopters” in France (Boëly, Fétis, Chopin, Alkan,
Gounod, Franck, Liszt, Saint-Saëns) copied, paraphrased, transcribed—not
because they were unfaithful, but because Bach was a means for making
music, not a composer of the past. Through the way that each incorporated
the insights that they discovered in Bach’s work into their own compo-
sitions, these composers gradually developed our modern form of musical
appreciation. Paradoxically, their interaction with Bach’s oeuvre also led to
the current stipulation that the past be respected, a stipulation that calls us

to reject this nineteenth century that brought Bach to us, so as to return to

a more original, more authentic Bach, a Bach who is “better” understood
(Hennion and Fauquet 2001).
This account reveals the “musicalization” of our taste for the music:
the formation of a specific competence, increasingly well defined and self-
sufficient, that makes us appreciate the works according to a regime of
connoisseurship—a format that we stop seeing as we come to belong to it
most naturally and intimately. This is at the heart of the paradoxes sur-
rounding the baroque revival (Hennion 1997): the appearance of a past to
listen to in a particular fashion, by respecting its modes of production, is the
incredibly elaborated—and very modern—fruit of a hypertrophy of musical
taste, based on musicology and the progress in recording. It is the culmi-
nation of a transformation of musical taste, not a passive and anachronistic
“return to sources.” Nothing is more modern than an historical approach to
an old repertoire.

JAZZ, ROCK, RAP, AND THEIR MEDIA

Comparing musics and genres on the basis of the media and modes of
performance they use does not mean taking their self-descriptions at face
value. It is too easy, for instance, to oppose the freedom of playing together
and the pleasure of dancing bodies, identified in jazz or rock, to the way
written music gives itself airs, while it is suspected by its opponents to be
already dead. Against the supposed rigidity of a corseted classical music—
prisoner of scores, orchestral hierarchies, harmonic “laws”—jazz, which is
so fond of old records, assumes its sweetest voice to sing praises of impro-
visation. But, busy adorning the object of her love with these praises, the jazz
lover forgets that this splendid transgression of centuries of written music
did not come about by going back to the oral sources of a traditional music
that cannot be written down on paper, but on the contrary by going forward
with the use of new means to overfix music, through a medium that no
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former genre could lean on: jazz has been written by recordings. Testimonies
from all the jazz greats converge: they have trained, they have practiced
scales, with one ear stuck at the gramophone and radio. Parker learns how
to “chorus” by listening hundreds of times to Hawkins’s or Young’s solos on
an old record player, just as previous generations wore out their eyes on old
scores, and he looks for the same thing they did: to read a music he could
not hear at its source, but that these recordings allow him to work and
rework, to analyze and copy, and to play, note by note, faster and faster
(DeVeaux 1997).
As a result, far from obeying the millennial rhythm of traditional musics
that (transmitted only through collective repetition) continuously change

without changing, never stop moving while thinking themselves eternally

the same, jazz covered in fifty years a history classical music took five
hundred years to write. Between an old blues and a chorus by Coltrane, both
officially improvised, lies a transition from orality to a music that on the
contrary is overwritten, even more written than classical pieces. Records
have written jazz’s library. Its living history is the fruit of mechanical
recording.
Another example: the sudden passage from rock to rap, quite similar to
the revolution of rock itself in the 1950s, also displays a conflict between
different media—stage versus record. Through a face-to-face confrontation
between the star and the public, rock constructed its power around a mythic
stage in the quest for a lost hand-to-hand clinch between idols and people.
This central place given to the stage was destroyed by rap from the very start,
giving way to another definition of musical truth: where you live, where you
hang out. The denunciation of rock’s too-sophisticated techniques, already
made by punks, and the bricolage with record decks and boom boxes,
exposed rock’s “archaic” conception of stage performance on the basis of an
unexpected promotion of recording: not as a faithful reproduction medium
but as a cheap means for local creation.
By explicitly refusing to refer to a place other than where one lives—the
street, the pavement, shared and invaded places, where one talks, fights,
discusses—rap at its origin interrupted the very gesture of the great stage
performance. It commuted rivalries and fights into an improvisatory spar-
ring match based on a given background music, played on equipment whose
quality did not matter as long as the music was loud enough, to be listened
to on the spot, by buddies, equals. The truth of music is not in music itself,
not in any reconstituted collective, it is in the present performance you
can give, here and now. The initial hostility of rappers toward the music
business, money, and the mass media is to be interpreted less as political
radicalism than as the technical means to stop the move of identities toward
the big stage, always in the hands of intermediaries—and of the white man.
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So defined, rap is not so new: bebop in its time, punk more recently, or
neobaroque musicians all began by escaping from the big stage and the
media, before being seized back or dying. Rap has already suffered this
common fate. But before it became just another musical genre and social
style—racking up huge sales for the record industry—rap had produced,
besides a blow to rock grandeur, a new and lasting instrumental use of
“reproduction” technology.

FIGURES OF AMATEURS
When a sociologist questions somebody nowadays on what he or she likes,
the subject apologizes. “My family is very bourgeois, my sister plays the
violin . . .” Far from revealing the hidden social reality of tastes thought of
by amateurs as personal and subjective, irreducible and absolute, sociology
has become one of the main registers in which to speak about them. Music
lovers, fully aware that tastes are relative, historical, and the supports of
various social rites, display them as arbitrary, socially determined signs.
Strange paradox of a highly reflexive field: it is the sociologist who must
henceforth “desociologize” the amateur if the former wants her to speak
back of her pleasure, of what holds her, of the astonishing techniques and
tricks she develops in order to reach, sometimes, her joy.
Far from being the cultural dope at whose expense the sociology of cul-
ture built its critical fortune, the amateur (in the broad sense of art lover) is
a virtuoso of experimentation, be it aesthetic, technical, social, mental, or
corporeal. She is the model of an inventive and reflexive actor, tightly bound
to a collective, continuously forced to put into question the determinants of
what she likes. She is as self-aware about pieces and products as about the
social determinants and mimetic biases of her preferences; about the
training of her body and soul as about her ability to like music, the technical
devices of appreciation and the necessary conditions of a good feeling, the
support of a collective and the vocabulary progressively designed to perform
and intensify her pleasure. Studying diverse amateurs, then, provides a
better understanding of our attachments (Gomart and Hennion 1999;
Hennion 2001).
Such a survey of classical music lovers, through all the means they can
use to reach music (instruments, choirs, singing, but also records, concerts,
media, and the Internet), displays the various and heteronomous moments,
formats, and configurations in the careers of amateurs, their pattern
depending less on past determinants than revealing the stages of a problem-
atic relation to an evasive object (Hennion 2007). A systematic comparison
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between wine amateurs and music lovers puts under scrutiny the variable
role of the heterogeneous mediations of taste: techniques of buying and
tasting; belonging to clubs or organized groups; use of an idiomatic vocab-
ulary somewhere between technical discourse and emotive self-expression;
the role of critiques and guides; modes of evaluation, status games, and so
forth. Bodies, spaces, durations, gestures, regular practice, technical devices,
objects, guides, apprenticeship: both music as a performing art and wine
because of its focus on a corporeal contact with the eye, the nose, and the
palate allow us to understand taste not as a recording of fixed properties of
an object, not as a stable attribute of a person, and not as a game played
between existing identities, but as an accomplishment. It is not about liking

music or being a wine taster, but about being touched by this piece or liking
this bottle, here, now, with these people: a strange activity, the conditions of
which are continuously discussed by amateurs themselves. It relies closely
upon moments, places, opportunities: taste is not only an activity, it is an
event, oversensitive to the problematic relationship between—as they nicely
say—a combination of circumstances.

A POSSIBLE RETURN TO THE WORK?

A last point, about the work “itself ”—this silent other side of the coin for
the sociology of art. A rewriting of music from the viewpoint of mediation
makes artistic creation somewhat less distant, less difficult to think of for
sociology. Creation does not need to be “taken away” from the great com-
posers and given back to society or consumers: it is just more distributed.
Creation is not only on the side of the creator; on the contrary, the more
there is a collective work in defining and thus creating a domain such
as music, the more we will end up attributing the origins of the works
exclusively to certain creators—the paradox of the “author,” which the
theoreticians of literature have clearly pointed out (Foucault 1969). This
mechanism is profoundly circular: it takes all the collectivity’s love to be able
to say that everything comes from Rembrandt or Mozart. This is why Elias
(1993) is caught in a double bind when he speaks of Mozart as a “socially
unrecognized” genius—a paradoxical pleonasm, considering how much this
“unrecognition” is a central figure of the social recognition of “genius.”
Highlighting the work of mediation consists of descending a little from this
slightly crazy position of attributing everything to a single creator, and
realizing that creation is far more widely distributed, that it takes place in all
the interstices between these successive mediations. It is not despite the fact
that there is a creator, but so that there can be a creator, that all our collective
creative work is required.
This collective redistribution of creation is a counterpoint to the single
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attribution—the “all to the author”—in the preceding period. There is an

optimistic note here: This redistributed creation, always out of line, has no
need to be compared to the original work as if to a sort of paralyzing chal-
lenge. Creation uses only the elements that it holds to make—with a slight
discrepancy—something else: a new creation. It is less a question of under-
standing everything (a formula whose epistemological terrorism is readily
apparent) than of grasping something at work, from which a constantly
changing interpretation can be presented.

FURTHER READING
Bennett, H. Stith. 1980. On becoming a rock musician. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Bennett, Tony, Simon Frith, Larry Grossberg, John Shepherd, and Graeme Turner, eds. 1993. Rock
and popular music: Politics, policies, institutions. London: Routledge.
Bennett, Tony, M. Emmison, and J. Frow. 1999. Accounting for tastes: Australian everyday cultures.
Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Chaney, David. 2002. Cultural change and everyday life. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave.
Cutler, Chris. 1985. File under popular: Theoretical and critical writings on music. London: November
Books.
Durant, Alan. 1984. Conditions of music. London: Macmillan.
Frith, Simon. 1978. The sociology of rock. London: Constable.
Gumplowicz, Philippe. [1987] 2001. Les travaux d’Orphée: Deux siècles de pratique musicale amateur
en France; harmonies, chorales, fanfares. Paris: Aubier.
Hennion, Antoine, Sophie Maisonneuve, and Émilie Gomart. 2000. Figures de l’amateur: Forme,
objets et pratiques de l’amour de la musique aujourd’hui. Paris: La Documentation française.
Jacobs, J. M. 1996. Edge of empire: Postcolonialism and the city. London, New York: Routledge.
Laborde, Denis. 1997. De Jean-Sébastien Bach à Glenn Gould: Magie des sons et spectacle de la passion.
Paris: L’Harmattan.
Leppert, Richard, and Susan McClary, eds. 1987. Music and society: The politics of composition,
performance and reception. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Savage, Mike, G. Bagnall, and B. J. Longhurst. 2005. Globalisation and belonging. London: Sage.
Scott, Derek. 2000. Music, culture, and society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Weinstein, D. 2000. Heavy metal: The music and its culture. New York: Da Capo Press.
White, Avron Levine, ed. 1987. Lost in music: Culture, style and the musical event. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul.
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

November 2010: a telematic music performance is taking place linking the

Sonic Lab of the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen’s University, Belfast, to
venues in Graz and Hamburg. Internet connections sustain for an hour or
so live transnational interactions between performers in three remote set-
tings—musical interactions that amount to a real-time distributed sociality.
The composer has orchestrated interactions such that each group drops
periodically in and out of the others’ hearing, eruptions of disconnection
and absence. The audience in Belfast, where I am sitting, strains to catch the
socio-musical and gestural theater between the performers, perceptible live
in the room and projected on giant screens. Another arena of sociality is
engendered between performers and audiences, one that follows the con-
ventions of silent and immobile audiencehood that for two centuries
have governed the concert hall. The technical dimensions of the event are
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experimental; they depend on a further vector of sociality: a division of labor

between technicians, composers, and musicians manifest in the room and
in the event’s networked infrastructure.
The musical sounds emitted and the constellation of corporeal, social,
technological, and discursive mediations in which they are embedded, as
well as the venue’s architecture, all locate this event generically: it belongs
to the genre of computer art music, although part of its experimentation
consists in the way that it mixes this heritage with adjacent genres—free
improvised music, sound installation and new media art. The genre is, then,
reanimated by the event and projected as an evolving entity. Musicians,
composers, and many audience members have a tacit understanding of this

generic location and share an identification with the genre: an affective

relation—whether fascination, burgeoning or passing interest, or sceptical
engagement—which has brought them to SARC this evening. This is an
affective identification that is at one and the same time musical, cultural, and
social; the genre, as an aggregation of the affected, forges a heterogeneous
musical public (Warner 2005) or imagined community (Anderson 1983;
Born 1993a). And while it is manifest in the event, this imagined community
predates and will outlive it. At the same time audience members, perform-
ers, and technicians bear the demographic inscriptions of their individual
histories such that the socialities of this event are crossed by the social
identity formations to which they belong by affiliation or involuntary asso-
ciation. Being an art-music-technology scene of the global North, a palpable
if “unmarked” race, class, and gender profile characterizes those who make
and listen to the music: white middle-class men predominate. SARC is
itself a complex social form. Part of the public University, connected to the
departments of Music, Engineering, and Anthropology, as well as interna-
tionally to other computer music and media arts centres, its ethos, staffing,
and funding are also hybridized through links to industry. Through its
population, organization, and technical resources, SARC proffers a set of
social-institutional conditions that afford certain kinds of musical practice,
while discouraging others.

July 1989: a recording is taking place in a studio in Johannesburg.

Alton Ngubane and his band are recording a cassette of Inkatha Freedom
Party songs . . . Tom, the [white sound] engineer, sets up the mikes, pre-
pares the console for the backing tracks, and programs a drum track. . . .
Bongani [the bass player] lugs the amp into the little booth. He starts to
plug in. “No”, says Tom, holding down the talkback button. Bongani looks
up. He plugs in anyway. He starts twisting the amp controls. “No”, says
Tom. Tom calls Bongani back into the control room. “The bass must go
directly into the console. Much cleaner sound”, he explains. “Sorry, no
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half-assed sound is going out of this studio”. The band wants the bass
amped and miked. Period. [But] “We’re dedicated to sound quality in this
studio”, Tom insists.
(Meintjes 2003, 144)

Cut to February 1992:

[G]uitarist Nogabisela is warming up in his booth. He has set a stinging

sound on the amp alongside him, just the way he likes it. . . . Lee [a
white engineer] is trekking in and out of the recording booths, moving
microphones. In passing, he cuts Nogabisela’s amp settings to zero,
dry. Then he returns to the control room to set initial sound levels and

EQs. . . . While Lee is preoccupied, Nogabisela turns his mix back up on

his amp.
(p. 106)

Through such ethnographic moments, in which white sound engineers who

know little about black styles are setting up to record black musicians, Louise
Meintjes captures how recording in South Africa becomes a site of struggles
over musical gestures. These are struggles in which black musicians employ
tactics to wrest back musical control from the white engineers. Probing the
social relations of the studio, Meintjes stresses that “The layering of techno-
logical mystification onto the South African social matrix . . . empowers
white men in the mbaqanga studio” (p. 104).
In terms of genre, Meintjes shows how such struggles extend to aesthetic
judgments in the mediation by white engineers of Zulu styles and sounds for
the much-sought world music markets. Infinitesimal shifts in intonation
or timbre determine whether a track is deemed to merit international dis-
tribution. She shows also how aesthetic imperatives issued by producers
serving international markets can tempt musicians to proffer Zulu stereo-
types, pandering to essentialist and primitivist imaginaries. The racialized
dynamics of the studio thus mediate the sounds that will circulate globally
as “authentic Zulu” music. The institutional conditions for these events are
provided by the existence in South Africa at the end of Apartheid of a white-
controlled recording industry, itself enmeshed in an avalanche of social and
political transitions: “studio processes, industrial politics, civic organisation,
and state negotiations produce a context within which [these sounds] take
on particular characteristics” (ibid., 5). By shifting analysis across scales,
Meintjes makes plain how the recording studio is a locus that produces its
own irreducible social relations, manifest in the division of labor and the
hierarchization of technical skills, while these relations are themelves
refracted by the wider social inequalities of race and class of the South
African polity, inequalities that intimately mediate musical sound.
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In both the ethnographic scenarios described I have drawn attention to the

social, and the socio-technical, in music. In both cases the social is not
singular but multiple. Music is socially mediated, but this social mediation
occurs on a number of distinct and mutually modulating or intersecting
planes. Such an analytics can be taken to historical as well as present-day
musical assemblages and events. It departs from previous frameworks,
which tend to foreshorten music’s social mediation, reducing it to one or
other plane or to simple determinations between them. The complexity
evident in the two scenarios raises the critical question: how should we
understand the social in music? In what follows I suggest that music poses

generative challenges to social theory, challenges that are symptomatic of an

urgent felt need to reconceptualize the very notion of the social. Music,
it seems, indicates fertile new lines of enquiry, catalyzing the wider debates.
The interdisciplinary perspective opened up by rethinking the social
through music is one that abandons older notions of coherent social total-
ities, as well as the reductive theories of determination or articulation with
which these concepts are often associated.
Two writers, Marilyn Strathern and Bruno Latour, have been at the fore-
front in articulating the “crisis” of the social, and in proffering theoretical
alternatives. Strathern develops a comparative stance that enables her to
supersede the twin reifications—society or social structure on the one hand,
asocial individual on the other—that underpin Durkheimian social theory.
As she puts it, in this line of thought

“society” was reified as an individual thing, set up as an entity in antithesis

to entities of a similar conceptual order: society versus economy, the mate-
rial world, even biology or nature. . . . The theoretical task then becomes
one of elucidating “the relationship” between it and other entities.
(Strathern 1990, 5)

Instead she proposes to “retain the concept of sociality to refer to the creat-
ing and maintaining of relationships.” For Strathern,”‘Social life consists in
a constant movement . . . from one type of sociality to another” (Strathern
1988, 13–14), and she enjoins us to trace how such socialities are constituted
by the creation of relations and aggregations, whether by the elimination of
difference and resulting unities or by the elaboration of heterogeneity.
Latour also rejects the reductive Durkheimian or Marxian “sociology of the
social” and advocates instead a “sociology of associations,” a nonteleological
focus on the action of assembling the social, where this is conceived as
multiple. Highlighting the “many . . . contradictory cartographies of the
social” (Latour 2005, 34), Latour insists on the contribution of nonhuman
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as well as human actors in making social connections, mediations that com-

pose an assemblage. Together these writers suggest a new analytical topos
of the social that can be taken to music; they pose, without solving, the
question of the interrelations between plural socialities.
It is a similar dissatisfaction with reification and reductionism that stoked
the questioning in music sociology, ethnomusicology, and popular music
studies of Durkheimian and Marxian models that portrayed the link
between musical style and social formation in terms of homology or reflec-
tion. In sociology the departure from such models is evident in the work of
Tia DeNora and Antoine Hennion. Their concern is with the bidirectional
nature both of music’s mediation and of human and nonhuman agency:

music constituting human subjectivities and socialities, while music is itself

constituted in discourse and practice and through its copious socialities and
socio-technical relations. As DeNora puts it, “Music is active within social
life: just as music’s meanings may be constructed in relation to things
outside it, so, too, things outside music may be constructed in relation to
music”(DeNora 2000, 3). Hennion, for his part, dwells on the intimate
mediation between music lover and musical sound in the co-production
of taste, where taste is understood as a transformative relation cultivated
through heterogeneous practices and techniques (Hennion 2001). There is
great merit in these perspectives, which are influenced not only by Latour
but by ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism. At the same time,
there is a risk of privileging a singular and micro-social conception of medi-
ation, neglecting other dimensions of the social in music.
Alternative directions are evident in ethnomusicology and popular music
studies. Steven Feld proposed to overcome the music–social dualism by
analyzing musical cultures as immanently social, “sound structure as socially
structured” (Feld 1984). To achieve this he called for ethnographic enquiry
into such matters as whether cooperative or competitive social relations
emerge in performance, how expressive ideology and performance mark
social differences and social inequalities, and whether there is a stratification
of musical knowledge. In his research on ethnicity, identity, and music,
Martin Stokes suggested in turn that “music does not . . . simply provide a
marker in a prestructured social space, but the means by which this space
can be transformed” (Stokes 1994, 4). Stokes argued that music can act
variably as a medium for both negotiating social identities and enforcing
dominant social categories; hence, the musical performance of ethnicity
“can never be understood outside the wider power relations in which [it is]
embedded” (ibid., 7). These writers attend not only to the socialities of
musical practice and how they are freighted ontologically but also, crucially,
to how such socialities are entangled in and mediate wider social relations
and modalities of power.
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Popular music studies have seen further generative developments.

Through detailed critique, Richard Middleton undermined simplistic
accounts of a homology between social group or subculture and musical
style. Drawing on Gramscian theories, he proposed a model of their articu-
lation. While he extended the analysis of social formations beyond a focus
solely on class to gender, age, ethnicity, and nationality, and employed exten-
uating terms (such as relative autonomy), Middleton retained a Marxian
insistence on the primacy of class or of overdetermination by “ruling
interests” (Middleton 1990, 10) in framing processes of articulation. It
was a break with this framing that underlay the next decisive move. In
Will Straw’s theory of musical scenes, exemplified by alternative rock and

electronic dance musics, music is detached from any grounding in a given

social ontology. Instead, “scene” captures music’s capacity to create “affec-
tive alliances” (Straw 1991, 374), engendering musical collectivities that are
irreducible to prior forms of social identity. Scene points to the significance
and the autonomy of two planes of sociality produced by music: the
immediate socialities of musical performance and practice—which Straw
portrays through the engrossing corporeal activity of the dance floor—and
the diverse musical publics conjured into being by musical tastes and
experiences, which he invokes through the “coalitions” created by certain
dance musics in the late 1980s between “black teenagers, young girls
listening to Top 40 radio, and urban club-goers” (ibid., 384–385). But scene
recognizes also the importance of their mutual mediation: how the intimate
socialities of performance catalyze music’s imagined communities, just as
those imagined communities imbue the socialities of performance with
collective emotion. Straw makes two further moves. Having established their
autonomy, he reconnects these two planes of sociality to wider identity
formations—whether class, race, or gender—which may be marked or
unmarked by the actors, arguing that the politics of popular music stem
from music’s capacity to create affective alliances that traverse such pervasive
social differences. He then introduces a further plane: the institutions—
dance clubs, radio, record stores—“within which musics are disseminated,”
providing “the conditions of possibility of [those affective] alliances” (ibid.,
384). Although incipient, then, Straw’s theory of musical scenes recognizes
and traces connections between four planes of music’s social mediation. The
point is that each—performance socialities, imagined communities, social
identity formations, institutions—has an autonomy. By opening up each
plane to enquiry, as well as their interrelations, they can be analyzed as
contingent, as taking a variety of forms—and as the potential conduit for a
politics.
It is now possible to advance the core argument of this chapter. It is that
music necessitates an expansion of previous conceptions of the social; that
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if music engenders myriad socialities, it is productive to analyze them in

terms of four planes of social mediation. In the first plane, music produces
its own diverse socialities in the guise of the intimate microsocialities of
musical performance and practice, the social relations enacted in musical
ensembles, and the musical division of labor. In the second, music has
powers to animate imagined communities, aggregating its listeners into
virtual collectivities or publics based on musical and other identifications,
collectivities that may be more or less unified or heterogeneous. In the
third, music refracts wider social identity formations—formations of
class, race or ethnicity, gender or sexuality, nationality or locality. In
the fourth, music is entangled in the institutional forms that enable its

production, reproduction, and transformation, including nonmarket or

market exchange, elite or religious patronage, public or subsidized cultural
organizations, or late capitalism’s multipolar cultural economy. In short, as
demonstrated by scene theory as well as the opening ethnographic vignettes,
all four planes of social mediation—which are often disassociated in dis-
cussions of music and the social—enter in dynamic ways into the musical
assemblage. The first two planes amount to socialities and social imaginaries
that are assembled specifically by musical practice and experience. In con-
trast, the last two planes amount to wider social formations and institutions
that condition music, affording certain kinds of musical practice. Such
conditions do not amount to an inert “context”: they are folded into musical
experience; they both permeate and are permeated by music’s intimate
socialities and imagined communities.
A number of propositions follow. To begin with, the four planes of music’s
social mediation are irreducible to one another and are articulated in
contingent and nonlinear ways through relations of affordance, condition-
ing, or causality. Strikingly, the first two planes—music’s microsocialities and
imagined communities—are irreducible to and have a certain autonomy
from the last two—music’s social conditions. Moreover, all four planes can
be the locus of significant and unpredictable transformations. It is the
complex potentialities engendered by both the autonomy of and the mutual
interference between the four planes that are particularly generative of
experimentation, transformation, and emergence in musical assemblages,
whether this entails experimentation with the socialities of performance or
practice, with the aggregation of the musically affected, with the crystal-
lization via musical affect of novel coalitions of social identities, or with
music’s institutional forms. That is to say, the irreducibility and the complex
interactions between the four planes of music’s social mediation—their
capacity to synergize and compound—afford spaces of agency and exper-
imentation in the musical assemblage. This is why all four planes have
the potential to animate music’s aesthetic, ethical, and political operations.
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At stake is an analytics of the social in music that acknowledges openness

and experimentation in the musical assemblage, and thereby the potential
for a micropolitics (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, ch. 9). This is a politics
“played out at the molecular level in terms of social affinities . . . and varieties
of communal belonging” (Patton 2000, 43); music’s affordances stem from
its capacity to destabilize and re-orchestrate not only affect and desire
but criteria of belonging and affiliation, and therefore new collective
solidarities.
The concept of assemblage invokes another influential lineage of social
thought. For Deleuze an assemblage is a “multiplicity which is made up of
heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them

. . . [where] the assemblage’s only unity is that of a co-functioning” (Deleuze

and Parnet 1987, 69). Moreover, an assemblage is characterized by “relations
of exteriority” such that its component parts may be detached from it and
plugged into different assemblages in which their interactions will be dif-
ferent. Each component therefore has a “certain autonomy,” while the
interactions between them are nonlinear and mutually catalyzing, “only
contingently obligatory” (DeLanda 2006, 11, 12). Taken to music, the notion
of an assemblage allows not only for music’s social mediation but for its
multiple simultaneous forms of existence. It suggests that music has no
essence but a plural and distributed socio-material being, enabling music to
be cognized as a constellation of mediations of heterogeneous kinds: sonic
and social, corporeal and technological, visual and discursive, temporal and
ontological (Born 1993b, 2005, Forthcoming). Scale and temporality also
characterize musical assemblages. In the analytics of music’s social media-
tion developed in this chapter, although scale differentiates the four planes
of the social, they defy any linear or nested organization (cf. Delanda 2006,
18–38); instead, the focus is on their cross-scalar interrelations (Strathern
1995), including the potential for disjunctures. And in as much as media-
tion refers to transformational processes, it ineluctably signals questions of
temporality: the relative endurance or stability of certain socialities or aggre-
gations, as against the unstable or fleeting quality of others. In the telematic
concert at SARC, these issues were signaled on several planes—concert
socialities, musically imagined community, demographics, institution—all
of which, while reanimated by the event, predate and outlive it. An analytics
of music’s social mediation must therefore be attuned to the temporalities
immanent in the assemblage, which are differentiated; some mediations will
exhibit historical depth and stability—albeit that their “contents” are con-
stantly in formation—achieving a type of “mobile stasis” (Born 1995, 326),
while others will be transient.

In this final section, I take the preceding analytics of music and social
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mediation to three areas of existing work. In each case, the aim is show the
anti-reductionist gains of analyzing both the autonomy of distinctive planes
of music’s social mediation and, thereby, cross-scalar relations between
them—including the potential for disjuncture or contradiction. The first
area concerns the socialities of musical performance. A number of writers
take these intimate socialities as the sole locus for theorizing the social in
music. Commonly, they are idealized through a metaphysics of musical co-
presence (e.g., Schutz [1951] 1971; Attali 1985, ch. 5; Small 1998, 13). Such
accounts contrast with studies that provide a more empirically informed
rendering of performance socialities by examining the interaction between
the first and third planes of the social: how the socialities of performance are

traversed by wider social relations. Examples are Charles Keil’s Urban Blues
(Keil 1970), Ingrid Monson’s Saying Something (Monson 1996), and Louise
Meintjes’s Sound of Africa! (Meintjes 2003), all of which address how per-
formance socialities refract formations of race and class. Keil’s description
of the relations enacted between blues singer Bobby Bland, his band, and
their audience captures the ways in which social solidarities and collective
catharsis are performed moment by moment through voice, gesture, humor,
and innuendo, all of them riffing on the “stylistic common denominators”
(Keil 1970, 143) linking blues performance and preaching in the lives of
black Chicagoans in the 1960s.
A crucial further stage is evident in studies focused on how performance
socialities are not only entangled in wider identity formations but have the
capacity to catalyze or act on them. Thus, Jocelyne Guilbault stresses the
transformative capacities of live soca performance in Trinidad as it produces
“public intimacies”: social interactions between artists and audience that
“reiterate identities,” while enabling “new points of connection [to be]
developed (for example among artists and audience members of different
ethnicities, nationalities and generations, and across musical genres)”
(Guilbault 2010, 17). The socialities enacted in performance, she says, can
either reinforce or work against social intimacies and social antagonisms.
Equally striking is Marina Roseman’s account (Roseman 1984) of how the
gender relations and cosmologies immanent in the musical performances of
the Temiar people of peninsular Malaysia invert the hierarchical gender
relations that characterize their everyday social lives. Indeed, historical and
anthropological research suggests repeatedly that it is the autonomy of the
socialities of musical performance and practice that enables them to pro-
mote experimentation, in the sense that they may enact alternatives to or
inversions of, and can be in contradiction with, wider hierarchical and
stratified social relations. These are performed contradictions that con-
tribute powerfully to the nature of socio-musical experience by offering
a compensatory or utopian social space—one that fashions experience
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differently even as it may fail to overturn wider social relations (although

such an outcome is not foreclosed).
A second area enhanced by the analytics proposed in this chapter is that
of music and genre; here, insights derive from attending to the interrelations
between the second and third planes—musically imagined communities
and wider identity formations. Indeed genre is commonly taken to be
the primary mechanism for the mutual articulation of social identities
and musically imagined communities, communities that are often taken to
derive from those same social identities. Already obvious here is how genre
theory risks teleology. In his work on corporate genre cultures, Keith Negus
emphasizes their contingency, given that “the genre boundaries associated

with commercial markets, radio or media formats and wider cultural

formations do not coincide in any straightforward way” (Negus 1999, 29).
Yet at other times, despite his exemplary concern with “how corporate
organization actively intervenes in the production . . . of genres” (ibid., 28),
Negus closes down contingency, noting “how genres operate as social
categories; how rap cannot be separated from the politics of blackness, nor
salsa from Latinness, nor country from whiteness and the enigma of the
‘South’” (ibid., 29). In this way he threatens to elide conceptually what must
strenuously be held apart: the mutual mediation between musically imag-
ined community, on the one hand, and identity formations, on the other.
Here David Brackett’s stress in his work on black popular musics on the
“paradoxes (and tautologies) of genre” (Brackett 2005, 82) is salutary:
“the notion of genre speaks to transitory divisions in the musical field that
correspond in discontinuous and complex ways to a temporally defined
social space.” Brackett indicates how historically labile have been the appar-
ently established links between black musical genres and African-American
social formations; yet he cautions against over-arbitrary accounts of genre
categories as mere “social constructions” (ibid., 75).
Brackett’s studies underline the insights afforded by focusing on both the
temporalities and the attempted teleologies of genre. That is to say, genre
works by projecting temporally, into the cauldron of evolving social identity
formations, potential reconfigurations of those formations coded as musical
transformations that are proffered as analogous to the social. When the
teleology works, music may effect either the reproduction of identity
formations, or a redirection or novel coalition of such formations. Brackett
illustrates these processes through Isaac Hayes’s 1969 hit crossover soul ver-
sion of Jimmy Webb’s 1967 ballad “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” arguing
that Hayes’s musical gestures reveal “how intersubjective awareness of the
audience . . . is in play” (ibid., 86) and results in the attachment of new audi-
ences. Genre can therefore be understood as a process enabling potential
convergence or translation between musical figure (and thence musically
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imagined community) and social identity formations. Genre should be

analyzed not as embodying any assured linkage, but as an evolving con-
stellation constituted by the mutual mediation between two self-organizing
entities (music, identity formations), both reliant on the collective pro-
duction of memory as well as the anticipation of futures (Born 2005, 20–23);
conceiving of genre in this fashion—as a radically contingent process that is,
however, oriented to the production of teleology and thus the erasure of its own
contingency—enables us to understand the way that wider social formations
are refracted in music, and that musical genres entangle themselves in
evolving social formations. In this light, genre theory can illuminate how
music’s creation of affective coalitions mediates wider identity formations,

but in the anti-teleological terms of affordance, catalysis, and contingency

as opposed to determination or singular articulation.
The final area that I want to address through the social analytics of music
outlined in this chapter is the fourth plane: music’s institutional forms. This
can only be indicative, but the goal is again anti-reductionist: to indicate the
autonomy and heterogeneity of these forms, as well as the benefits of
analyzing interrelations between this and other planes of social mediation.
Certainly, there is a continuing salience in distinguishing between two broad
spheres of music’s institutional forms that evolved over the twentieth cen-
tury: between those musical activities afforded by capitalist industrialization
and internationalization, and those oriented primarily to state subsidized or
patronage-endowed institutions—the sphere of art, academic, and nation-
alist musics (Born 1987). However a primary focus on the inequities and
disorders of capitalist music markets can entail a neglect of surprising
features of both spheres: the progressive potential of the corporate music
industry, as well as the repressive or inequitable tendencies of statist and
subsidized music institutions (e.g., Wicke and Shepherd 1993; Baker 2011).
On the former: Chris Lawe Davies gives an exemplary analysis of the entry
of Australian Aboriginal rock groups into the industry mainstream in the
late 1980s and early 1990s, stressing how effective this was in exposing a
“massively heterogeneous audience” to a “social narrative of Aboriginality”
(Lawe Davies 1993, 262) that is systematically denied in Australia’s public
culture. At issue is the uncertain capacity for novel engagement across the
third and fourth planes: between subaltern group and corporate industry.
On the latter: in my study of a globally influential, state-funded Parisian
institution, IRCAM, oriented to the future of Western art music (Born
1995), I chart how IRCAM hosted a gendered and racialized (if “unmarked”)
division of labor while proving unable to revivify its modernist musical
idiom—efforts predicated on a kind of aesthetic involution, alongside a
repression of “other,” nonmodernist musics and musical ontologies.
Analysis of the fourth plane must also entail a focus on experimentation
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and transformation in music’s institutional forms, and thus on their auton-

omy and heterogeneity. Here I want to effect an important conceptual
reorientation. I take my cue from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s critique of the
totalizing flavor of Marxist theories of global capitalism in which, from
a postcolonial standpoint, he develops a distinction between “histories
‘posited by capital’ and histories that do not belong to capital’s ‘life process’”
(Chakrabarty 2000, 50). His intention is to resist “the idea that the logic of
capital sublates differences into itself ” (ibid.) by disturbing universalizing
and teleological readings of noncapitalist lifeworlds as remnants destined for
capitalist incorporation, or, if unincorporated, as residual or insignificant.
Martin Stokes takes these ideas to music: drawing on ethnographies of the

circum-Mediterranean region, he shows how music and musical labor are

variably commodified, arguing against any “teleological, historicist assump-
tion about the [inevitable . . .] ‘incursion’ of money into musical worlds”
(Stokes 2002, 139). Stokes contrasts two successful Turkish popular musi-
cians from the northeastern area of Trabzon: the first with a strong sense of
music and musical labor as commodities, keen to see them “circulate freely
[and] fluidly, . . . in a system of generalised commodity exchange” (ibid.,
143); the second exhibiting “extreme indifference to the cash economy”
in favour of an economy of hospitality and honor, communal pleasures,
and poetic sentiments. Stokes points out that musical worlds like that of
the second musician animate this entire region; they are not destined to
disappear, nor are they less modern, less rational, or less well adapted to the
exigencies of cosmopolitan existence than the first. Indeed they are common
in diasporic and migrant communities. In this way he insists that noncom-
moditized musics are not pre-capitalist leftovers, nor a secondary sphere of
practice, but alternative modernities engaged in a “turbulent dialectic”
(ibid., 150) with capital.
The same shift in perspective is compounded by Ana Maria Ochoa and
Carolina Botero’s account of novel forms of exchange in Colombian popular
musics. They uncover a spectrum of practices that unsettle dualistic and
economistic models predicated on an opposition between the formal music
industry and informal practices of exchange. Instead, Ochoa and Botero
trace numerous hybrid forms including economic cross-subsidies between
different spheres of musicians’ activities and lives; movements between
“multiple forms of economic network”; “‘alternative economies [that]
become economies of subsistence”; an “economy of sacrifice”; and an econ-
omy of rebusque—of “inventing whatever it is in order to be able to make a
living” (Ochoa and Botero 2009, 163–165). The analysis points to initiatives
and adaptations that generate multiple forms of exchange enabling music’s
creation and circulation, forms ranged between the free and the monetized,
each entangled in intimate musical socialities and imagined communities as
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

well as wider social relations. It is a portrait not of marginality, necessity or

overdetermination, but of embedded and conditioned yet dynamic experi-
mentation and invention: of a certain musical and social autonomy.
If earlier popular music studies took as exceptional or unsustainable such
models as punk DIY (Laing 1985) or the independent labels and networks
associated with post-punk and electronic dance musics (Hesmondhalgh
1998, 1997), this scholarship goes further. It forges a radical shift in theo-
retical perspective by prioritizing those ubiquitous but under-recognized
worlds of musical practice (Finnegan 1989) that moderate or sublate both
music’s commodification and statist frameworks. Stokes, Ochoa and Botero
impel us to understand the practices they describe not as marginal to or

failures of capitalist modernization in music, but as viable, experimental,

and pervasive activities and micro-institutional forms. Such an account
shifts institutional analysis away from reductive suppositions about the
inescapable progress of capitalist relations in music to a nuanced awareness
of the spectrum of music’s non- or petty-market forms as modes of musical
and social organization. (I avoid the term “proto-markets” because of the
teleological implication of an eventual goal of “full” commodification: cf.
Toynbee 2000, 25–32; Hesmondhalgh 2002, 171.) This approach responds
to the condition of many contemporary non-Western and Western musics,
dignifying them with substance and significance rather than reducing them
to a transitional state destined to be brought under capitalist relations.
Augmenting this approach by tracing dynamic interrelations between
institutional form and other planes of social mediation is Aditi Deo’s
analysis of a congeries of changes to Khyal, an improvisatory genre of North
Indian classical music, over the twentieth century (Deo 2011). Deo draws
out synergistic shifts between the third and second planes—social identity
formation and musically imagined community: a transition from hereditary
Muslim practitioners to middle- and upper-class Hindus, alongside the
classicization of Khyal, previously a syncretic practice, as emblematic of a
modernizing Hindu cultural nationalism. At the same time she points to
tensions between transformations on the fourth and first planes: insti-
tutional form and performance sociality. Where formerly Khyal relied on
feudal patronage and master–disciple transmission of musical knowledge,
in the first decades of the twentieth century Khyal pedagogy was partly
relocated to novel secular institutions, its knowledge abstracted from
embodied methods, notated, and standardized. Yet Khyal defies a simplistic
account of these shifts. On the one hand, training in its aesthetic principles
remains bound to master–disciple lineages; subtleties of musical gesture
and their social embeddedness work against Khyal’s rationalization. On
the other hand, institutional processes mediate even those musical and
social practices rooted in master–disciple relations. Deo argues that while
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

public discourse reduces Kyhal’s socialities to an opposition, practitioners

experience them as multiple and juxtaposed. Khyal as an assemblage is
self-contradictory.

I have proposed that an analytics of four planes of social mediation throws

new light on music’s socialities, extending the plural and anti-reductionist
currents in recent social theory while retaining a concern with scale, time,
and power. Scale is addressed through the distinctive nature of and cross-
scalar relations between the four planes. Temporality is understood in the
sense of transformation given by mediation, and as a variable property of
each plane of the social, as well as of their dynamic interactions. Power is

conceptualized in the terms of critical social theory, given that “relations

of power are constitutive of the social” (Mouffe 2000, 125). Rather than
conceive of social relations as organic or oriented to community, the
intention must be to address them in all their complexity as constituted also
by difference, contradiction, and antagonism. While some writers have
addressed the articulation between different planes of music’s social medi-
ation, the framework advanced here foregrounds this perspective. In place
of reduction it probes the multiplicity and autonomy, as well as the mutual
mediation and entanglement, of music’s socialities. It suggests finally, as
evidenced by the readings of Meintjes and Brackett given in this chapter, that
through such an analytics the study of music as sound and as social form are
fully reconcilable (cf. Martin 2006; Born 2010a).

FURTHER READING
Born, Georgina. 2005. On musical mediation: Ontology, technology and creativity. Twentieth-
Century Music 2(1): 7–36.
Born, Georgina. 2010. For a relational musicology. Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 135(2):
205–243.
Brackett, David. 2005. Questions of genre in black popular music. Black Music Research Journal
25(1/2): 73–92.
Guilbault, Jocelyne. 2010. Music, politics, and pleasure: Live soca in Trinidad. Small Axe 14(1):
16–29.
Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Meintjes, Louise. 2003. Sound of Africa!: Making music Zulu in a South African studio. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Ochoa, Anna Maria, and Carolina Botero. 2009. Notes on practices of musical exchange in
Colombia. Popular Communication 7(3): 158–168.
Roseman, Marina. 1984. The social structuring of sound: the Temiar of peninsular Malaysia.
Ethnomusicology 28(3): 411–445.
Stokes, Martin 2002. Marx, money, and musicians. Pp. 139–166 in Music and Marx: Ideas, practice,
politics. Edited by Regula Burkhardt Qureshi. London: Routledge.
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music. Cultural Studies 5(3): 368–388.
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The Cultural Study of Music : A Critical Introduction, edited by Martin Clayton, et al., Taylor & Francis Group, 2011. ProQuest
Ebook Central, [Link]
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CHAPTER 24
LOCATING THE PEOPLE
Music and the Popular
RICHARD MIDDLETON

Who are “the people”? The Founding Fathers of the United States of
America had no doubt about the answer to this question: “We the people
. . .,” they declared in the new Constitution (1787), with the confidence
proper to a new epoch. A few years later, Thomas Paine, defending the
French Revolution with equal assurance, insisted that “the Authority of the
People [is] the only authority on which Government has a right to exist in
any country” (Paine [1791–92] 1969, 131). Such confidence was inspiring
but oversimple. The Revolutionary Terror set a cautionary precedent for a
host of subsequent attempts to establish popular authority by violence. The
founding “we” of the United States was not universal but limited to men
of property, excluding not only less-affluent white males but also Native
Americans, all women, and (naturally) all slaves. The political moment was
in any case part of a broader shift, in which, as Raymond Williams (1983)
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

has shown, the rise of commodity culture led to an emergent and soon
predominant usage of the term popular to mean “well-liked by many
people.” By the time that Alexis de Tocqueville was dissecting American
society—the 1830s, a period when “Jacksonian democracy” was refocusing
U.S. politics on the interests of the “common man”—he was as amazed that
“The people reign in the American political world as the Deity does in the
universe; everything comes from them, and everything is absorbed in them”
(Tocqueville [1835] 1956, 58) as he was depressed by the prospect of leveling
down that he saw resulting from the “tyranny of the majority.”
From an early-twenty-first-century vantage point, the tiredness of
the people idea seems self-evident. The grotesqueness of the concept of the

Nazi Volk (from which Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals were excluded: no
Volkswagen for them) was matched, for cynicism, by that of the “People’s
Democracies” of the post-World War II Soviet bloc; Brecht’s ironic advice to
his masters, on the occasion of the failed East Berlin uprising of 1953, that
they should perhaps dissolve the people and elect another, was the definitive
riposte to “totalitarian populism” (Esslin 1959, 165). Popular Fronts for the
Liberation of X (and, usually, the oppression of Y) have lost their allure (as
marked by the comic demolition job on the phenomenon in the Monty
Python movie The Life of Brian). Those of us who lived through the period
of Blairite, and perhaps also Thatcherite Britain became wearily accustomed
to the routine invocation of “the people” in the service of a multitude of
reactionary causes. Anything can be justified by “popularity”, and every-
where, it seems, distinctions between “the popular” and its others struggle
to survive amid the assumptions of a vulgar relativism.
But the complexities were endemic from the start. The German Romantic
W. G. Herder (1968, 323) carefully distinguished the folksinging people
(das Volk) from the “shrieking mob” (der Poebel), and in many ways the
“mob”, a key (if under-defined) actor in the theater of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century political and cultural discourses, came to govern those
of the twentieth: the idea, explored by such diverse writers as George Orwell
and T. W. Adorno, that capitalism’s best hope for defending class injustice
would lie in a program of cultural debasement of the masses is worth taking
seriously at the same time that we note the element of condescension
implicit in a perspective that fed a history of “moral panics” over “mobs” of
ragtimers, jazzers, rock ’n’ rollers, punks, and hip-hoppers. The nineteenth
century saw a host of new communities imagined into being (Anderson
1991), in Europe and elsewhere, almost always with an appeal to a “national
soul” embodied in their folk culture heritage. Small wonder that such a
company of Celts, Magyars, Poles, Bohemians, generic Slavs (etc.—not to
mention, further toward the margins, gypsies, Jews, “niggers,” and orientals)
danced and sang its way through the popular musical repertories of the
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period. Yet it jostled for space both with political and revolutionary songs
fixed to class projects (from “La Marseillaise” through songs of the British
Chartists, for whom, to quote one of their banners from 1848, “The voice of
the People is the voice of God,” to socialist anthems like “The Red Flag” and
the “Internationale”), and with a huge expansion in market-oriented pro-
duction, which by 1900 demanded that, in the words of Tin Pan Alley’s
Charles Harris, “A new song must be sung, played, hummed and drummed
into the ears of the public, not in one city alone, but in every city, town and
village, before it ever becomes popular” (Hamm 1979, 288). The character
of the “people,” despite its radical origins and potential, journeys through a
landscape which, to use Althusser’s phrase, is “structured in dominance,”

both in general and in the specific forms generated by the historical unfold-
ing of capitalism; and in the maintenance of these hierarchized formations,
cultural distinctions play an important role, as Pierre Bourdieu (1984) has
taught us. Today, the historical trajectories, in exhausted anticlimax, precip-
itate inversion, detritus, and perversion, as in (to choose examples almost at
random) the “turbo-folk” used as an instrument of ethnic cleansing in the
Yugoslav wars of the 1990s; in the embarrassed “Red Flag” performances at
Blair-era Labour Party Conferences; and in the unashamed market cynicism
of the wave of TV pop talent discovery shows, globally successful in the
early twenty-first century, under the celebrity guidance of their ideologist,
impresario Simon Cowell.
The people/popular concept, then, is irrevocably “dirty,” and in two ways
at least. First, it covers a discursive space whose content is mutable and open
to struggle; just as, according to Bourdieu (1993a), there is no such thing as
an objective “public” but only a shifting social character defined by varying
survey methodologies, so, in the words of Stuart Hall (1981, 239), “there
is no fixed content to the category of ‘popular culture’ . . . [and] there is
no fixed subject to attach to it—‘the people.’” Second (and connected), the
politics of the concept are “always already” corrupted (always already,
because they are produced in a discourse with no clear origin), and, today,
their rescue for progressive uses would require considerable cultural work—
not least by intellectuals, so often popular culture voyeurs, but also fellow
travelers and even would-be guides, for whom Fanon’s injunction (1967,
187) to “work and fight with the same rhythm as the people” represents both
an imperative and an impossibility.
The discourse we are uncovering is one specific to modernity. “The
people” names a character seen as inhabiting an imagined social space
(which is not to say that there is not a real social space in a relation with this).
The configuration of this space varies historically and in accordance with
ideological assumptions, and hence the character of “the people” is variably
delineated too—as a social body, a political actor, a cultural voice—with
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implications for interpretation of its musical manifestations. The stage on

which “the people” moves is commonly structured in alteritous fashion, and
a variety of psychic mechanisms come into play: projection, overcom-
pensation, objectification, abjection. Something in the term “people” wants
to figure its object as a wayward and subordinate other—a prodigal under-
side challenging, but also validating by difference, the elite ego of a centered
collective self. This figure is both gendered (popular culture is “effeminate”:
sentimental, passive, intuitive, affective, hysterical [Modleski 1986; Huyssen
1986]) and racialized (the popular is imagined as “barbaric” and/or
“exotic”—mapped, most commonly, onto “black”). But peripheral elements
can be appropriated by “the center,” as they have been, arguably, in much

of today’s hegemonic popular music culture in the advanced societies.

Alternatively they can answer back, as spectacularly evidenced in the long-
lived, intricate workings of the “Black Atlantic” (Gilroy 1993); when, for
instance, according to Lhamon (1998), an early-nineteenth-century New
York cross-racial (miscegenating?) working-class fraction used the blackface
mask to construct a subversive alternative to elite culture—a “Plebeian
Atlantic”—at the very moment when the Founding Fathers were construing
“we the people” as men of property and education. And of course, “the
people” can go further, as we have seen, and make their bid for sovereignty:
as “the voice of God” (Vox Populi, Vox Dei), their authority—cultural, com-
mercial, political—brooks no dissent. The working out of these tensions
takes hugely varied forms; but running through and overdetermining
this variability is a bifurcating dynamic, what we might call a structure
of exception: on the one hand, the People constituting itself as an excluding
(i.e. would-be sovereign) power, on the other, a “people” as, precisely, the
excluded; a “we” and a “they” in whose reciprocal embrace exception func-
tions as the condition of totality. As Gorgio Agamben (1998, 176–177) puts
it, “It is as if what we call ‘people’ were in reality not a unitary subject but a
dialectical oscillation between two opposite poles: on the one hand the set
of the People as a whole political body, and on the other, the subset of the
people as a fragmentary multiplicity of needy and excluded bodies.”
The subject/object people, then, is not only fragmented, variable, and
unstable—in the language of Freud and Lacan, split—but also contested
across the boundary-forming structures of social subjectivity. As such, its
very appearance is dependent on an apparatus—the regime of represen-
tation—specific to post-Renaissance (Cartesian) modernity (Foucault
1970), and given a new twist by Hegel’s dialectics of subject and object, self
and other. Earlier, the commoners were simply what was left over, but with
the Cartesian revolution they became bound into a system whereby the out-
there is a constituent of the problematic of the self: the representation of
“reality” reflects, refracts, distorts, and guarantees the subject’s presence, and
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the dynamics of popular and nonpopular interaction become an aspect of

the processes of subjectivity. For Enlightenment thinkers, the evident con-
tradiction between alterity (the inescapability of difference) and a politics of
inclusivity could in theory be squared through the principle of universalism:
all of humankind could potentially perfect itself in Reason. Mozart’s The
Magic Flute (1791) represents a neo-Kantian essay along these lines: Reason
triumphs, with the “lower” characters located, musically and socially, firmly
in the place appropriate to their cultural stage of development, yet at the
same time narratively shadowing the revelatory trajectory followed by their
“betters.” By 1824, Beethoven’s cry in the Ninth Symphony, “O ye millions,
I embrace you,” has moved on to a neo-Hegelian reach for the Absolute. The

shift from Kant’s programmatic universalism of taste to Bourdieu’s critique

of distinction and its socio-economic basis exemplifies a later skepticism. It
remains true, however, that it was only with the advent of “modern” thought
that this type of discourse became available at all. In the early eighteenth
century, Giambattista Vico offered the innovatory means to think all of
a society, and even all of humanity, together, through a world-historical
image of human development. Tracing the journey from the Enlightenment
to twentieth-century modernism reveals metaphors of cultural ladders
(progress; upward mobility) joined by, perhaps giving way to, more
synchronically structured models (highbrow–middlebrow–lowbrow; the
interrelations of modernism, mass, folk, and primitive). At this point the
figure of the “cultural field” (variably mapped to corresponding social and
politico-economic fields) achieved a dominance eventually theorized by
Bourdieu (1993b) among others, and in the Gramscian concept of “hege-
mony” (Gramsci 1971).
Although the European Union’s adoption of Beethoven’s Ninth Sym-
phony “freedom tune” as its anthem might suggest that the Enlightenment
project is still under way, it also marks its trivialization: the European masses
“embraced” as little more than subjects of a free market. Living (arguably)
in the climactic crisis of the modernity system, we often, it seems, find it
problematic, embarrassing, or even ludicrous merely to name “the people.”
This grand subject appears to have turned into a simulacrum of subjectivity
constituted in the reification of desire in advertising—“one market under
God,” as Thomas Frank’s ironic rewriting of an earlier national-democratic
ambition puts it (2002). At best, the people are elsewhere—in unnoticed
Third World catastrophes, asylum camps, sweatshops; at worst, the popular
is figured in terms of the mystifying populism of meritocratic “opportunity.”
And yet . . . Is it possible that such pessimism is premature, even self-
indulgent? At the time of writing, the “Arab Spring” of 2011 is exploding
across the Middle East, and the reports, the chants, the demands of the
demonstrators insistently name a self-mobilizing, seemingly authentic
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

revolutionary subject—“the People.” For one Egyptian writer, Ahdaf Soueif,

reporting from the streets of Cairo, “what was there was The People,” and
one of their chants, according to another, Alaa Al Aswany, was “The people
say, out with the regime” (The Guardian, January 27, 2011, 1, 38). Perhaps
there is life, still, in the popular.
The foundations of the structure outlined here, in its recognizable
modern form, were laid in the twentieth century. In a first phase, dominated
musically by the “jazz family,” the framework was constituted by the
conflicts between liberal/imperial capitalism, fascism, bolshevism and
Stalinism. A second phase, dominated by the “rock/pop family,” was molded
by the Cold War and its aftermath. Throughout, the forces of de- (and re-)

colonization were important too, as were the successive waves of feminist

struggle. However mixed and, often, fraught the outcomes, each of these
intersecting moments represents an opening, in which, mediated by tech-
nological and social changes (most importantly, for music, the evolving
mechanisms of mass media and mass culture), new democratic possibilities,
new senses of who “we” could be, were at issue. I will focus on the second of
the historical phases, as the backdrop against which I can then, in the final
section of this chapter, consider the conditions of our situation today.
Searching for symptoms of the popular within the musical currents of this
period, can we find ways of locating its subject?

Think of John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero” (John Lennon/Plastic Ono

Band, Apple PCS 7124, 1970). This is, evidently, a song about the people
conceived in terms of class—or more exactly, about the disjunction of this
relationship, that is to say, the culture forced on working-class people as a
result of their lack of political consciousness; implicitly, it is also a song
about leadership, or perhaps its lack or failure: “a working-class hero is
something to be,” as Lennon bitterly if ambivalently puts it. The style is terse,
stern, and didactic, with lyrics foregrounded, melody plain, and accom-
paniment limited to simple acoustic guitar, summoning up memories of the
equally spartan approach of the early Bob Dylan, down to the relentless
(“deathly”) guitar riff keeping the singer right on the straight and narrow
message, forbidding all semiotic play. But an element of doubt about the
references of pronoun shifters (“I,” “we,” “you,” “they”) clouds the issue:
the flow of identifications is disrupted. Similarly, behind the stern paternal
voice we hear a shadow—a would-be lyrical, “feminine” reach beyond the
meaningful surface, audible in occasional tremulous cracks in timbre,
anxious stretching for high pitches, and little inflections and melismas
around the main melody notes; and perhaps also in the disruption of the
otherwise insistent minor tonic chord, once toward the end of every verse,
by a single appearance of the “yielding” major chord on the subdominant
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(conventionally coded “feminine” in the Western tonal system, in relation

to the “masculine” dominant). Will Lennon cry, we ask?
Historically, the song is richly contextualized. On a biographical level,
it comes between, on the one hand, the traumatic Beatles breakup and
Lennon’s primal scream therapy earlier in 1970 with Californian psycho-
therapist Arthur Janov, when he spent much of his time crying and
screaming, and on the other hand, the “silence” of the period 1975–79, when
Lennon gave up musical production to be a (“feminized”) house-husband.
In terms of cultural history, it punctuates the transition from “John Beatle”
to “John Lennon,” taking this to stand for the shift from the fetishizing,
macho heroics of the 1960s star system (false hero worship, in Lennon’s eyes)

to the more skeptical, ironic, often gender-bending discourses around star

presence characteristic of the 1970s. On the level of political economy,
it engages the contemporaneous restructuring of class associated with
the move away from social democracy toward the Thatcherism to come.
“Working Class Hero” is both suspiciously insistent and revealingly frac-
tured, signaling what Lawrence Kramer (1990) calls a hermeneutic window
organized around scream/cry on the one hand and silence/death on the
other. Lennon’s figure of the people here is inscribed in the complex rela-
tionships and shifting meanings set up at the intersection of “leadership”
and “class,” generating a tantalizing image of the popular other, desired but
errant, and always receding from grasp.
The Spice Girls’ “Wannabe” (Spice, Virgin CDV2812, 1996), noisily
surrounded by proclamations of “girl power,” focused on gender rather than
class. The singers issue instructions, give us their demands, tell us “what they
really really want”; and the verses, where they do this, are delivered in a sort
of rap style, borrowing and inverting the machismo of male hip-hop. Female
vocal groups, however, can hardly avoid summoning references to 1960s girl
groups, especially those of Motown, with their approach oriented around
more traditional themes of “romance”; and, sure enough, the choruses turn
to a poppier style, complete with vocal harmonies, a melodic hook, and a
stress on togetherness. The bridging of individual empowerment (verses)
and collective feeling (choruses) is meant to target and construct girl power’s
own community (eliding the issue of class, of course). But verse and chorus
are also contrasted: rapped call-and-response backed by rock-style minor-
pentatonic bass riff in the first, major-key vocal harmonies in the second; it
is as if the inclusivity strategy couples popular music’s two main ideological
categories and their gender associations, “feminine” pop fantasy being
grounded by “masculine” rock realism. The claim of contrast is deceptive,
however. Verse and chorus flow seamlessly into each other, the rhythm track
is continuous, and bits of vocal style from the verse increasingly find their
way into the choruses; moreover, the bass/harmonic patterns of the two sec-
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tions perform closely related gestures. Similarly, the dialogues within the
verses are superficial: calls and responses from the different girls are much
the same, and come from much the same place on the stereo spectrum.
The song is a closed binary—nothing is left over—and the hint of teleology
(tonally, the relationship of the two bass patterns—minor pentatonic and
major, respectively—recalls that between passamezzo antico and passamezzo
moderno which marked the dawn of “modernity” in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries) leads nowhere.
Just as girl power offered a fake individual and collective empowerment
at the extreme end of Thatcherism (there is no such thing as society, she
told us), so “Wannabe” rehearses a simulacrum of difference, a wannabe

teleology, a fantasy in which nobody fails and nothing is left out: rock and
pop, romance and raunch, black (rap) and white (singalong), past and
future are seamlessly stitched together. But the stitching (the suturing, as
Lacan would call it) is overdone: it could not last—as became evident,
on the level of biography, with the Spice Girls’ disintegration, and, on the
level of society, with the passage from Thatcherite power-feminism to the
pseudo-meritocratic populism that followed, accompanied as this was by a
wave of emollient girl and boy bands on the one hand, and an underground
subchorus of unorthodox gender poses on the other.
White rappers became commonplace in the 1990s. Most notoriously, the
success of working-class white trash Eminem demonstrated the continuing
potency of the blackface stance, his records exploiting (by implication) the
blackface mask to proclaim white disempowerment. Though often collab-
orating with black rapper and producer, Dr Dre, Eminem has been most
conspicuously successful (as with most rap by this date) with a middle-class
white market. His extravagantly brutal, misogynistic, and homophobic
narratives work against the background of a cross-race, class-based eco-
nomic split in the United States (bourgeois affluence; workers impoverished,
neglected, or imprisoned), but also draw a traditional frisson from the image
of violence long associated with black ghetto society: rap’s “posses” and
“gangstas” reinscribe the discourse of mob and moral panic. Eminem’s
“My Name Is” (The Slim Shady LP, Interscope 490 287-2, 1999) adds further
dimensions to the masking operation. The insistent repetitions in the
choruses of the statement “My name is . . .” summon memories of the long
African-American tradition of naming games and rituals (the street game,
the dozens, for instance); they also echo boxer Muhammed Ali’s equally
insistent question, “What’s my name?” to his opponent Sonny Liston, soon
after the name change accompanying his conversion to Islam, and Black
Muslim refusals of slavery surnames (by Malcolm X, for example). Small
wonder that the persona Eminem adopts here, named for us by a distant,
other, and highly technologized voice, way back in the mix, is a marker of
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miscegenation: “Shady.”
In a sense, the narrative of the song, telling of Shady/Eminem’s brutal,
oppressive early life and schooling, and bringing together issues of identity,
charisma, and class, works similar territory to that of “Working Class Hero.”
But the fragmentation of voice is much more overt here. Shady’s apparent
identity and location shift constantly, and are embedded in complex dia-
logues with other voices. The play of name, identity, and voice is a work of
what black theorists such as Gates (1988) have termed Signifyin(g), a key
practice in African-American culture that operates through manipulation
of a “changing same” by constant variation of given material, disrupting the
signifying chain in the interests of semiotic play. Another element in this

intra- and intertextual work is the instrumental backing, shaped—typically

for rap—from a sample, here a four-chord riff taken from Labi Siffre’s “I Got
The,” which repeats in varied forms throughout. Again, technology (digital
sampling in this case) mediates a shift in the parameters of the popular
music community. The process of Signifyin(g) makes fun (play; play as fun;
funny, incongruous, or uncanny connections) of sense, of the signification
process itself, its orientation around doing rather than meaning pointing
toward the sphere of the body. Although “My Name Is” adheres to the
typical rap duality of “rhymes” and “beats” (word and act, logos and body),
the lyrics are noticeably “musicalized” through the operations of the vocal
polyphonies, and the underlying riff, reduced to the basic drum/bass
groove, is what fades out the song, inviting but always retreating from bodily
response, and, in the context of the racial location of Eminem’s perfor-
mance, implicitly posing the question, what the body of the people, its social
body, would be like.

These three songs are offered as symptomatic rather than representative

examples. Their intricate maneuvers around the registers of race, gender,
and class remind us of Hall’s point that there is no essence of the popular—
“the people” can only be defined dialogically. Their points of address
from “below,” no less (and no more) than their positionings in the power
textures of capitalist society, confirm that the discourse of “the popular” is
closely tied to the project of modernity. This, as we have seen, guaranteed
the subjectivity of the emergent Western self through an apparatus of
representations of his others, “masters” and “slaves” warring on, but also
maintaining, each other (to draw on Hegel’s celebrated dialectical image,
produced [1807] in the same moment that the “people,” conceived as
potential subject, made such a dramatic historical step forward).
It might be argued, though, that the very multivalency of subject-
position made available in such songs, their particularity of attachment to
racial, gender, or class locations, represents a weakness, an accommodation
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to the force of market hegemony: an argument all the more plausible from
an early-twenty-first-century standpoint when the fit between the liberal
pluralist positions characteristic of reductive “identity-politics” and the
voracious niche-marketing appetite of Big Capital in its current neo-liberal
mode becomes readily apparent (Badiou 2002); difference—of class, race,
gender, sexuality—is all too easily appropriated and sold back to its cele-
brants. And in that case, the mode of analysis practiced above risks falling
victim to the same critique. With the end of the Cold War, the emergent
neo-liberal hegemony—the “Restoration”, as Badiou calls it—found its
appropriate musical vehicle in the pseudo-democratic populism of the
“reality-based” (i.e. phantasmatic) TV talent show. The unlikely commercial

success in 2009 of Britain’s Got Talent runner-up, Susan Boyle, with its fairy-
tale air (she performed “I Dreamed a Dream”, from—ironically—a musical
based on Victor Hugo’s novel of revolutionary sympathies, Les Misérables),
perfectly mirrored the spectral pantomime of Capital after the twin “deaths”
of its epicenter, first time as tragedy, second as (black) farce (Z^iz^ek 2009a):
at the World Trade Center, 2001, in Wall Street, 2008–9; the “undead” of
Capital, staggering grotesquely, robotically, if so far successfully forward in
the face of on-rushing catastrophes of ecology, resource depletion, huckster
finance and social injustice. The (successful) online campaign to prevent
Simon Cowell’s 2009 X-Factor winner achieving its expected Christmas
Number One single spot, through multiple downloads of Rage Against the
Machine’s 1992 hit “Killing in the Name,” marks the limit of resistance at
this level of the system: the radical politics of the rap-metal band’s record left
not a dent in the hegemonic armour, and in any case it was marketed by the
same multinational corporation as Cowell’s products (Sony). This is not to
say that elsewhere, “below” this level, there are not instances of practice
figuring the popular in ways possessing genuinely independent, subversive
or resistant qualities and impact (for a study of one such strand, see Dale
2011); just that positing a simple alternative—“we” or “they”, univocal
People or multitudinous popular identities—is plainly inadequate to the
demands of this situation.
Number is key, however. One or Many—or (after all) Two? It is no coin-
cidence that in much recent writing on “democracy”—that is, on the politics
of the popular—what I have called the “structure of exception” is a key
trope. Here an almost absent referent of my discussion so far needs to come
to the front: the world beyond that of Western popular music and its cultural
hinterland—not “world music”, a commercial category, but the world as
such, or what commonly these days goes under the name of “globalization.”
The structure of exception has its (Western) roots in, on the one hand,
traditions of political philosophy going back, most prominently at least, to
the French Revolution (Agamben 2005), on the other hand, in philosophical
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traditions stemming from Hegelian logic (Z^ izêk 2002). (And the “world”
referent of this lineage reveals its historical dimension if we follow Zîzêk’s
injunction (2009a, 111–114) to think Hegel and the Haitian revolution
together. Haiti was, arguably, the absent referent for Hegel’s master-and-
slave dialectic.) In both cases, a One (a totality, a sovereignty, a set) is
constituted only through the work of boundary-forming exceptions. A
One—the People’s voice as voice of God, say—is always incipiently a Two
(through its formative exclusions); but this “originary two” can itself only
be forced from the play of infinite multiplicity, that is, it must be produced in
a specific act or event (Badiou 2007); and this becomes all the clearer in a
world that is rapidly “filling up,” that is running short of external exceptions:

as exception “rebounds” back inside, so “inside” and “outside” interpen-

etrate each other as never before, “we” and “they” turning each other inside
out in what is truly described as a play of miscegenation. If difference is
mundane (“infinite alterity is quite simply what there is”: Badiou 2002, 25),
then forcing in any given moment a Deleuzian “event of becoming-people”
(Z^ iz^ek 2009b, 110) is to work towards a conception of fraternity (of a
“we”) whose “being-together” is not that of a “quasi-military ‘I’” but oper-
ates through “immanent disparity” or “inseparate articulation,” always
devolving towards a decisive choice (Badiou 2007, 96–97, 123). The location
of the people is to be thought within a structure that is aporetic (Spivak
2009); People and people, “we” and “they,” are—to adapt Adorno (2002,
244)—“torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not
add up”: a negative dialectic that represents not blockage but the potential
always inherent in internal contradiction.
The cultural study of the musical popular, then, is always already
immersed in its politics. The best approach to the global dimension will
therefore lie not in any (impossible) attempt at a purely cultural survey but
in a focus on exemplary fault lines, points of fracture, in the global body
politic. Here we might return to the case of the Middle East, mentioned in
passing earlier. No fault line vibrates with more pregnant energy than the
location that, at the level of geopolitical fracture, constitutes the epicentre
of the tensions of this region: Palestine/Israel (even if the great powers
persistently struggle to keep it offstage). Two “peoples” contest the same
ground. Each stands at a point where the intersecting vectors of nation and
diaspora cross. Each, an epitome of exception, in relation both to the other
and to wider geocultural formations, twines around and interpenetrates the
other, encapsulating the multivalent tensions of home and exile, in a figure
that at the same time registers the residues of twentieth-century racisms,
totalitarianisms, and imperialisms as well as the absolutely current force-
field structured by the struggle between resource-hungry international
capital and dispossessed (that is, in effect, equally stateless) masses. Two
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

recordings cast a brilliant light on this aporia. (I have written on them in

more detail elsewhere: see Middleton 2009, 324–325; Middleton 2006,
131–134.)
“Al-Quds,” by the Jewish Israeli Gilad Atzmon, featuring Palestinian
singer Reem Kelani (Exile, Enja TIP-888 844 2, 2003), brings together Jewish
tune, Arab melody and lyrics, and hectic post-bop improvising in a lament
for (the divided city of) Jerusalem (Al-Quds). The musical transitions and
overlays—the fit is uncanny, that is, never quite at home—drawing on the
diasporic spirit of both jazz and klezmer, produce an exemplary image of
exile as also potential exodus: a departure whose singularity is, because
“voided,” precisely universalized. “Diva,” the 1998 Eurovision Song Contest

winner by Jewish transsexual vocalist Dana International (Diva, IMP 2048,

1998), presents a multivalent subaltern position (she is of immigrant
working-class Yemeni background, the lowest of the Israeli low—except for
Arabs—as well as a sexual outlaw) but does so through a certain kind of
hyper-technologized, almost cyborgian international pop style and in
the context of an instance of precisely that pseudo-democratic cultural
process—a sort of “Europe’s Got Talent”—which any genuine popular
must subvert. Rather than local being universalized, here global is, via
the mechanisms of outrageous camp, given a quite singular punch, Dana
International’s exceptionality undermining Israeli social norms but then, at
a higher level, bringing the Jewish exception itself, previously excreted from
the body of imperial Europe, right back to Europe’s cultural heart.
Zîzêk (2009b, 4–6) has argued that the Jewish tradition, via the appar-
ently contradictory myths of “cosmopolitanism” and “ghetto,” stands for
both universality and exception at the same time. To a greater or lesser extent,
perhaps, this is true of all diasporas, not least the Afro-diasporic traditions
that constituted the greatest single influence in the emergence of a world
popular music in the twentieth century. Zîzêk (2009a, 91–94) goes further
and suggests that, under the conditions of contemporary capitalism—
commodification of the remaining commons, indeed of the very gifts of
Being (water and air; memory, thought and subjectivity; human bodies—in
fact, the codes of life itself), along with the concentration of power and
wealth into fewer and fewer hands, and its corollary, the progressive out-
sourcing and pauperization of labor at the global level—the tendency is
towards a universalization of exception; “proletarianization” and “exile” both,
from different perspectives, name this state. And, just as Jewish critics of
Israel (such as Atzmon and Dana International) become “Jews of the Jews
themselves” (Z^ izêk 2009b, 6), so more broadly “we” and “they” produce
each other simultaneously, as exclusion is introjected into the social body.
This is a condition for any authentic popular today.
In July 2010 a Palestinian inhabitant of Jerusalem was convicted by an
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Israeli court of “rape by deception,” after having consensual sex with

an Israeli woman who believed him to be a fellow Jew. The specter of
miscegenation is still, it seems, at large. Indeed, as an acute pressure-point
in the structure of exception, where the inside-out relations of self and other
are inscribed on the body itself—social as well as personal—it can be taken
as the very mark of the popular. Whenever the People presents itself as the
“voice of God,” the miscegenating demiurge will not be far away. The “we”
of the people could never attain the purity it wanted. Where, then, is it to be
found, how can we locate its voice? Not there, is the answer; not where it
was, not where it is supposed to be. For Ernst Bloch (2009), the God of
Christianity, of a properly atheistic Christianity, could only be one who is

absent, who has absconded. The voice we must listen for, then, is that of a
populus absconditus.

FURTHER READING
Adorno, Theodor W. 1991. The culture industry. London: Routledge.
Badiou, Alain. 2007. The century. Translated by Alberto Toscano. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bennett, Tony. 1986. The politics of the “popular” and popular culture. Pp. 6–21 in Popular culture
and social relations. Edited by Tony Bennett, Colin Mercer, and Janet Woollacott. Milton
Keynes, U.K.: Open University Press.
Born, Georgina, and David Hesmondhalgh, eds. 2000. Western music and its others: Difference,
representation and appropriation in music. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Translated by Richard
Nice. London: Routledge.
Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. London: Verso.
Levine, Lawrence. 1988. Highbrow/lowbrow: The emergence of cultural hierarchy in America. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Middleton, Richard. 2006. Voicing the popular: On the subjects of popular music. New York:
Routledge.
Middleton, Richard. 2009. Musical belongings: Selected Essays. Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate.
Mowitt, John. 2002. Percussion: Drumming, beating, striking. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. 1986. The politics and poetics of transgression. London: Methuen.
Williams, Raymond. 1983. Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. Rev. ed. London: Fontana.
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

The Cultural Study of Music : A Critical Introduction, edited by Martin Clayton, et al., Taylor & Francis Group, 2011. ProQuest
Ebook Central, [Link]
Created from universidadcomplutense-ebooks on 2021-09-19 [Link].
CHAPTER 25
MUSIC AND THE MARKET
The Economics of Music in the Modern World
DAVE LAING

[W]ho would think seriously of minimising the role of the market? Even
in an elementary form, it is the favoured terrain of supply and demand, of
that appeal to other people without which there would be no economy in
the ordinary sense of the word. . . . The market spells liberation, openness,
access to another world. It means coming up for air.
(Fernand Braudel)

This chapter is concerned with the various ways in which the idea of the
market can be used to help us understand how music works as a business. It
begins with a consideration of markets as actual geographical spaces where
goods and services are exchanged, and then discusses some different con-
cepts of what, borrowing from Anderson (1991), I call “imagined markets.”
Such music markets can involve consumers of musical goods and services,
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employers of musicians’ labor power, and/or businesses that use music.

Here, ideas such as market failure, public goods, and intellectual property
are introduced. Finally, the chapter briefly deals with new ways in which
music is being consumed online and with the limits of the market idea.

THE MARKET AS BASIC PLACE OF EXCHANGE

In his book The Wheels of Commerce, the eminent social historian Fernand
Braudel reminds us that “exchange is as old as human history” (Braudel
1982, 225). The simplest modes of exchange are those involving no or few
intermediaries between producer and consumer, and these are modes where

supply and demand for goods or services fluctuate little. Exchange may take
a variety of forms including the bartering of goods or services without the
intermediation of money, but for some centuries the predominant sites of
exchange have been various forms of market. Some musical examples are
performances at fairs or street markets (“the elementary form” mentioned
by Braudel in the epigraph to this chapter), over many centuries to the pre-
sent day, in all parts of the world, and the sale there of musical commodities
in the form of instruments, cassettes, or CDs.
Popular music has had a presence at markets for centuries. In England in
1595, a writer complained that, at every market, ballad singers were “singing
their wares” (Clark 1983, 185), while cassette sellers are found in the markets
of most, if not all, African, Asian, and Latin American cities today. In con-
temporary Africa, Sandaga market in Dakar is a center of legitimate cassette
production, and in Kankan (Guinea) cassette stalls are set up near the Grand
Marché. Chris Waterman’s classic study of jùjú music in Nigeria in the 1980s
also discussed the role of markets in the dissemination of recordings
(Waterman 1990, 152–153).
As far as music is concerned, the most important role of contemporary
street markets is as venues for the sale of pirate discs and tapes. In his study
of street markets in Mexico City, John C. Cross points out that such
“informal economic activity” is more complex than the standard definition
of it as “the pursuit of legal ends with illegal means.” Cross says that, while
the sale of unauthorized music cassettes “violates a number of laws” (i.e.,
laws regulating intellectual property) apart from laws concerning selling in
the street, “enforcement rarely reaches the retail level . . . [and] . . . vendors
selling these articles behave in the same way as those selling legal goods”
(Cross 1998, 85). Elsewhere in Latin America, the main street market of
Lima has become a target for music industry antipiracy teams. More than
two million recordable (CD-R) discs were seized in a raid by over five
hundred police officers on three hundred stalls at the El Hueco market in
June 2001 (IFPI 2001). Even in Europe, music is sold in street markets from
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Sarajevo (where the biggest market is a major outlet for pirate CDs) to
London, whose large weekend market in Camden Town is famous (or noto-
rious) for the sale of bootleg tapes and CDs of concerts by David Bowie, Bob
Dylan, and dozens of other performers.
Diawara (1998) and Bohlman (1988) have stressed the continuing strate-
gic significance of street markets in separate ways. Diawara powerfully
evokes and analyzes the antiglobalization role of such markets in West
African life: “By producing disorder through pricing, pirating, smuggling
and counterfeiting African markets participate in the resistance to multina-
tional control of the national economy and culture” (Diawara 1998, 151).
In his description of the “bazaar” in North Africa, Bohlman emphasizes its

condition as a space of “cultural simultaneity” where musics of different

styles, commodity forms, and technologies interact and overlap. He also
points up the historical continuity of such musical melanges: “the cultural
simultaneity that obtains . . . is not a recent phenomenon. . . . Marketplaces
whether in pre-Islam middle east, mediaeval Europe, or 19th century
American Midwest have been a locus for diversity” (Bohlman 1988, 123).

MARKET AS CONCEPT IN CLASSICAL ECONOMICS

In the eighteenth century, Western economic theory elaborated the term
market into a concept denoting an abstract space where supply and demand
meet and find equilibrium through the pricing of commodities or services.
When demand exceeds supply, prices rise, and where supply is in excess of
demand, prices tend to fall. This theory, in its extreme form, claims that
distortion by alien forces such as governments or monopolistic practices
compromises the operation of a “free” market in providing equilibrium
between supply (the producers) and demand (the consumers). At this point,
the “market” becomes an autonomous, almost mystical force—Robert
Nelson has written of the “religion of economics” (Nelson 2001)—epito-
mized in Adam Smith’s famous phrase from his The Wealth of Nations, “the
invisible hand” that leads the merchant “to promote an end that was no part
of his intention” (A. Smith [1776] 1910, IV, ii, 9).
In practice, the free market concept developed by Smith and later “neo-
classical” economists remained an ideal type rather than a precise descrip-
tion of observable markets. Instead of an equilibrium deriving from the
possession by producer and consumer of the same information, disequilib-
rium and asymmetry beset each specific market. In the case of music mar-
kets, disequilibrium is most frequently produced when the greater power of
the suppliers (the record companies and retailers) determines the recordings
to be made available and the prices to be charged. The monopoly status
conferred by copyright ownership plays a role here too. On the demand side,
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

disequilibrium is created when the participants (notably the potential

audience) do not act as rational economic beings whose behavior can be
reliably influenced by such factors as pricing and publicity.
By the mid twentieth century, the concept of a free market had spilled
over from purely economic discourse to become central to much conser-
vative and even social democratic political ideology. It was counterposed to
the planned economies of state socialism where the supply of recorded
music was controlled by a state monopoly such as Amiga in the German
Democratic Republic. Amiga’s decision to issue an album was not primarily
determined by perceived demand but as “evidence of the official recognition
of the artist.” Consequently, “[a]s the print run of the record was fixed in

advance and second editions rarely appeared, musicians had no (economic)

interest in record production, only a chance to gain a reputation” (Maas and
Reszel 1998, 269).
If the abstraction of the market in neoclassical orthodoxy remains an
ideal type, it nevertheless underlines the fact that in many contemporary
economies the face-to-face character of exchange in street markets has
generally been supplanted by “imagined markets” where the relationship
between producer and consumer is highly mediated. The term imagined
markets is adapted from Benedict Anderson’s description of nation-states as
“imagined communities” produced by the action of print media and other
forms that connect individuals who can never meet face-to-face (Anderson
1991).
Authors who stress the exceptional character of the culture industries
have challenged the idealization and homogenization of the market idea by
neoclassical economics. Miège (1989) and Garnham (2000) have com-
mented on the special characteristics of markets for cultural commodities,
in particular the unpredictability of consumer demand for such items as
songs, books, and films. This unpredictability is a sign that consumer (and
often producer) behavior in markets for cultural goods and services fre-
quently deviates from the neoclassical theorists’ presentation of these
subjects as “homo economicus,” concerned only with their own economic
welfare. In his important study of large record companies, Negus brings
together the motifs of the imagined market and the uncertainty of demand
by emphasizing the construction of markets and consumers by such com-
panies. He writes that “[m]arkets are not simply out there in the world,
forming as members of the public gravitate towards certain recordings and
not others. Markets have to be carefully constructed and maintained”
(Negus 1999, 32).
Three strategies for the construction of markets where demand can be
managed can be identified. First, Miège and Negus (and other authors)
emphasize what the latter calls the “portfolio” approach, whereby a large
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

record company will promote a wide range of recordings in the expectation

that at least some of them will prove to be successful. According to Miège,
in order to reduce the risks of failure, cultural producers such as record com-
panies and film studios bring to the market a “catalog” of a large number of
different items in the expectation that profits from the small number of hits
will compensate for the losses incurred by unsuccessful titles.
The second strategy is systematically to gather information about con-
sumer preferences and behavior. Here record companies, especially in the
United States, are increasingly using the tools and methods of contemporary
market research. Negus (1999, 53) describes the Soundata system based
on an interview panel of twelve hundred U.S. consumers, and Anand and

Peterson argue that information about the market “is the prime source by
which producers in competitive fields make sense of their actions and those
of consumers, rivals and suppliers that make up the field” (2000, 271). They
point out that while some producers can undertake private research such as
public opinion surveys, the provision of a generalized “market information
regime” by an independent research firm is generally the most important
source of such data. In the music industry, the crucial feature of the regime
is of course the chart of weekly or monthly soundcarrier sales or radio
airplay.
A third strategy is to influence the various gatekeepers or intermediaries
perceived to be influential in consumer decisions. These include
broadcasting executives, disc jockeys, and journalists. The methods used
have often been controversial and unlawful, as the term payola testifies
(Segrave 1994; Dannen 1990). Since the early 1990s, a more radical version
of such marketing has been targeted at supposed opinion formers or taste
makers within the audience itself. This is the use of “street teams” that,
according to a record company executive interviewed by Negus, are “going
to places where consumers are and hitting them where they live” (Negus
1999, 97).
The only actors with the resources to deploy such strategies consistently
in order to limit their exposure to uncertain demand are, of course, large
corporations. At the start of the second decade of the twenty-first century,
four major companies—EMI, Warner, Sony, and Universal—controlled the
global distribution of over 80 percent of (nonpirate) CDs and cassettes. This
situation has given rise to numerous claims and complaints that these
companies operate a de facto cartel that keeps prices high and denies smaller
companies the opportunity to compete in the market on equal terms. In the
sphere of market regulation, notably in North America and Europe, the
oligopolistic tendencies of the record industry have led government agencies
to prohibit mergers in the sector, and to outlaw certain marketing practices.
Additionally, researchers analyzing the provenance of hit records have
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argued that the dominance of the major companies inhibits innovation in

music markets (Peterson and Berger 1990; Rothenbuhler and Dimmick
1982; Lopes 1992; Christianen 1995).

MUSICAL LABOR MARKETS

In the past, hiring fairs for musicians could be found in specific parts of
cities, such as Archer Street in central London. Today the distribution of
musical labor is carried out by imagined markets where the “uncertainty”
or “unpredictability” that characterizes consumer markets is echoed in the
oversupply of musicians and singers for the available work and income

opportunities. A study of the British market for classical singers by Towse

(1993) found that the market was “distorted” because the supply of labor
was far greater than the demand from opera companies, choirs, and so on.
According to mainstream economic theory, such a disequilibrium should be
corrected by the surplus workers moving to other industries where labor is
in short supply. Towse concluded that the singers were motivated more by
the aesthetic attraction of music than their economic self-interest.
Discussion of the general market for opera and classical music per-
formances has been dominated by the so-called cost disease first diagnosed
in the 1960s by the American economist William Baumol. This “disease” is
intended to explain the need for subsidy or sponsorship of arts perform-
ances. Baumol asked his readers to

[c]ompare what has happened to the cost of producing a watch with the
cost of a musical performance over the centuries. There has been vast,
labour-saving technical progress in watchmaking, which is still continu-
ing. But live violin playing benefits from no labour (or capital)-saving
innovations—it is still done the old-fashioned way, as we want it to be.
...
This is another way of saying that cost per attendee or per performance
must rise faster than the average price of other things: arts budgets there-
fore must rise faster than the economy’s rate of inflation, which is simply
the average increase in the prices of all the economy’s outputs.
(Baumol and Bowen [1966] 1997, 214; my emphasis)

Baumol’s theory has become widely accepted among economists of the

arts but it is open to some major criticisms. First, it ignores the fact that
many sectors of the music business have been restructured by “laborsaving
technical progress.” For example, the introduction of amplification per-
mitted bands to play to larger audiences (and thereby cut the cost per
attendee), while innovation in instrument design enabled the size of bands
to be reduced as synthesizers and drum machines have replaced performers.
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Perhaps more crucially, Baumol ignores the role of “technical progress”

in recording and broadcasting, two media that have provided many
participants in the labor-intensive performance-based sector with additional
income.
A second criticism of the Baumol thesis is that it ignores an important
source of cost inflation in classical performance: the escalating payments to
star conductors and soloists in the contemporary classical music industry.
In his analysis of the industry, Norman Lebrecht (1996) shows that a cartel
of agents and administrators has increased the fees of star musicians at a rate
far greater than any increase in the salaries of orchestral musicians and opera
choruses. Lebrecht’s data emphasize the degree to which the contemporary

classical music market is characterized by a complex mixed economy of

public subsidy and oligopolistic commercialism.

MUSIC AND MARKET FAILURE

Economists use the concept of “market failure” to describe situations where
suppliers are unable or unwilling to provide certain commodities or services
for which there is a demand. Examples of remedies for market failure in the
music industry include subsidies for performances through state funding
or private sponsorship to remedy the cost disease in order to make tickets
affordable, and the production and distribution of low-priced soundcarriers
when the previously available copies are priced too highly for some con-
sumers. A graphic example is the success of the Naxos record company,
which since its formation in 1987 has become a leading firm in classical
music by selling newly made recordings at about one-third of the price
charged for new releases by other labels.
Another remedy for market failure is the sale of pirate or unauthorized
copies of recordings, notably in developing countries where “legitimate”
copies of certain music on CDs or cassettes are unaffordable for most of the
population or are simply unavailable because no company holds the rights
in a particular country. This situation is graphically portrayed in Waterman’s
study of jùjú music in Ibadan, Nigeria. Waterman reproduces newspaper
reports of the clash between bandleaders and cassette sellers over the pro-
priety of this mode of exchange. While a musician complains that piracy
robs musicians of income, a market trader is quoted as saying that the com-
mon people cannot afford to buy the vinyl discs made by the bandleaders
and their record companies:

Fuji musician Ayinde Barrister has these [sic] to say: “The record pirates
make all the money leaving little for us and nothing for the government.
It is ridiculous that in a country of over 80 million people, a successful
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musician cannot boast that his record would sell over one million.”
Mr. Lanre Lawal . . . cassette seller at Ogunpa says: “music should not
be for only the rich men alone, poor people should also enjoy good music.
. . . We offer recording services for people who cannot afford to buy
records and this, to my mind, is a kind of promotion for the musicians
themselves.”
(Waterman 1990, 152–153)

Despite the authoritarian rigidity ascribed to state socialist “unfree”

markets, they were as much subject to the condition of market failure as
were free markets. In the words of Verdery, “the socialist economy needed
the black market to fulfil its shortcomings” (1991, 423) and “audiences and

performers experimented in the interstices of official culture” (Silverman

1996, 239). Unofficial performances and cassette recordings constituted a
“second market” for popular music throughout the socialist bloc, providing
audiences with music excluded from the official repertoire, both locally
created and foreign. The extent to which the second market was tolerated by
the official institutions varied considerably according to the overall political
and economic stresses and policies of each country at any particular time.
In the Bulgarian case, the growth of the second market for music was
associated with the relaxation of state controls on the “petty form of private
enterprise” in rural areas, and farmers benefiting from such enterprise could
afford to pay for the “wedding music” of such performers as the clarinettist
Ivo Papazov (Rice 1996, 182–184).

PUBLIC GOODS AND COPYRIGHT

A public good is defined by economists as one whose consumption by an
individual does not preclude its consumption by others. While a loaf of
bread is a private good (if I consume it, you are prevented from doing so), a
free-to-air radio or television broadcast has the status of a public good. The
public good idea has been applied to cultural production in contrasting ways
by Baumol and Garnham.
In a somewhat tortuous justification of state funding for the high arts, the
former seeks to define performances of drama, opera, and classical music
as public goods insofar as their existence has intrinsic value for society in
general in addition to their direct benefit for the small minority that actually
attends such performances. He writes that “Government must provide
funds only where the market has no way to charge for all the benefits offered
by an activity” (Baumol and Bowen 1997, 260). The difficulty with this for-
mulation is that it provides no systematic way to determine these “benefits,”
which are mostly potential in the sense that they remain available to a larger
audience should that audience one day materialize. Garnham emphasizes
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

a different aspect by linking the concept of a “public good” to a discussion

of the “free rider.” He begins by asserting that, in dealing with “media or
information,” “the market model of provision has serious problems”
(Garnham 2000, 57). The most fundamental of these is the lack of scarcity
of cultural products and services (market economics holds that the price of
a commodity is determined by its availability: a scarce “out of season” fruit
will cost more than a fruit plentifully available). But when a free-to-air
broadcast is available to all or a digitized recording can be easily copied or
cloned, there is no automatic or internalized pricing mechanism. The “free
rider” is the consumer (or competing producer), who thereby can acquire
the commodity free of cost. Garnham goes on to list three ways in which the

market is adapted to “solve” this problem and to ensure that the producer
recovers the cost of production. One (adopted by commercial broadcasters)
is through selling audiences to advertisers; another is to erect box-office
barriers such as pay-per-view television broadcasts; the third, and the most
significant for music economics, is through the granting by governments of
a legal right to intellectual property, notably the copyright. This last is in
many cases the overdetermining factor in music market structures, intro-
ducing “a monopoly and the producers’ right to a monopoly rent” (p. 57).
Rental is an idea familiar from markets for housing and other expensive
goods such as video recorders or automobiles. Its application to music is less
obvious but is based on the legal status of a song or recording as the inalien-
able property of an individual or company. A useful economist’s explanation
of the application of “rent” to the music business can be found in Andersen
and James (2000). As intellectual property, the song or recording cannot
pass wholly into the ownership of another (although the physical object
embodying it can), and any subsequent user of the music is liable in law to
pay a “rent” in the form of a royalty until the duration of its property status
has expired. Currently the expiration date for compositions is seventy years
following the death of the author, and for recordings is at least fifty years
after a track’s first release. A royalty is the customary form of payment in
business-to-business markets, such as those linking recording artist and
record company or broadcaster and composer. The latter market involves
an important intermediary, the authors’ collection society. Examples are the
Performing Right Society in Britain or the competing groups ASCAP and
BMI in the United States.
The “free rider” problem reached crisis point with the advent of the
Internet and the most prevalent form of online music exchange, the numer-
ous P2P (peer-to-peer) file-sharing networks whose best-known example is
Napster. Within such networks, any music tracks stored on the computer of
any participant can be copied by any other participant and held on the
latter’s computer (see Alderman 2001). The music industry considered such
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

behavior to be both unethical and illegal since no money is paid to copyright

owners when such copies are made. In legal terms, the practice of P2P is a
version of “private copying,” a term invented to describe the use of audiotape
cassettes by consumers to make copies of recordings, a practice that became
widespread in the 1980s. At that time, a legal remedy was found by legis-
lators in the “blank tape levy,” a fee paid by manufacturers of tapes that was
used to pay “compensation” to composers and record companies. This solu-
tion is not possible in the case of P2P since it involves no tangible copying
product apart from the computer itself.
There is, however, another perspective from which to view the practice of
P2P—the notion of the “gift economy.” This concept was introduced into

Western thought by the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, whose book The Gift
(1954) was a study of the economics of gift-giving in precapitalist societies.
This alternative economy has drawn much interest from philosophers and
political scientists in recent years. For some of these, the gift economy is
important for its diametrical opposition to the logic of the conventional
economy of exchange. In the words of Derrida, “for there to be a gift there
must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift or debt” (Derrida
1992, 12). The significance for the music market of this resistance to
the logic of exchange among music consumers is not yet clear, especially
after the failure of the record companies’ attempt to prevent file-sharing
by the deployment of digital rights management (DRM) technology. For
the present, P2P activity coexists on the Internet with the efforts of the music
industry to establish an exchange economy there, notably through the
sales of MP3 files from Apple’s iTunes online stores. Some experts believe
that coexistence is a form of symbiosis: “the gift economy and the com-
mercial sector can only expand through mutual collaboration within
cyberspace” (Barbrook 1998). One practical application of this approach is
the Creative Commons license, whereby a copyright owner can relinquish
some of her rights to enable works to be used creatively by others (see Lessig
2008).

LIMITS OF THE MARKET

This chapter has sought to show the usefulness of the idea of the market in
understanding music as a business. But this process has its limits, which are
twofold.
First, even in an era whose dominant economic mode is capitalist glob-
alization, many musical activities have no connection, or only a tenuous
connection, to markets. These include religious practices, military bands,
ceremonial music, work songs, and music for political causes. Bohlman
notes of such music making that music “articulates the organisation of
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

society” through its “role in ritual” and through “transforming labour into
a communal activity” (1988, 1). Second, there is much evidence to show that
there is an important aspect of the music economy that is surplus to, or
exterior to, the market relation. For example, considering the supply of
music, Toynbee discusses “proto-markets” that “bring together performer
and audience in arenas which are not fully commodified. Examples include
local rock scenes, dance music networks or jazz performance by players
taking time out from regular session work” (Toynbee 2000, 27). And echo-
ing Towse’s comments on classical singers, he concludes that, in such
contexts, “the level of activity cannot be explained by economic factors
alone” since the financial rewards are minimal or nonexistent.

From the aspect of consumption, the previously noted features of unpre-

dictability and irrationality are symptoms of what Jacques Attali has called
“the extra-market production of demand” (Attali 1985, 42). They also
underlie Toynbee’s proposition that “in order for culture to be sold it must
be shown to be (partially) external to the economic system” (Toynbee 2000,
3). In other words, market forces can never be autonomous, only “them-
selves.” They are always in flux, vulnerable to the impact of an aesthetico-
musical unconscious that overflows the economic and problematizes
exchange relations.

FURTHER READING
Baumol, William J., and William G. Bowen. [1966] 1997. On the rationale of public support. Pp.
243–260 in Baumol’s cost disease: The arts and other victims. Edited by Ruth Towse.
Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar.
Garnham, Nicholas. 2000. Emancipation, the media and modernity: Arguments about the media and
social theory. New York: Oxford University Press.
Laing, Dave. 1993. The international copyright system. Pp. 25–36 in Music and copyright. Edited by
Simon Frith. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Laing, Dave. 2002. Copyright as a component of the music industry. Pp. 171–194 in The business of
music. Edited by Michael Talbot. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Lebrecht, Norman. 1996. When the music stops . . . Managers, maestros and corporate murder of
classical music. London: Simon and Schuster.
Manuel, Peter. 1993. Cassette culture: Popular music and technology in North India. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Miège, Bernard. 1989. The capitalization of cultural production. New York: International General.
Negus, Keith. 1999. Music genres and corporate cultures. London: Routledge.
Peterson, Richard, and David Berger. [1975] 1990. Cycles in symbol production: The case of popular
music. Pp. 140–159 in On record: Rock, pop and the written word. Edited by Simon Frith and
Andrew Goodwin. London: Routledge.
Stamm, Brad K. 2000. Music industry economics: A global demand model for prerecorded music. New
York: Edwin Mellen Press.
Wallis, Roger, and Krister Malm. 1984. Big sounds from small peoples: The music industry in small
countries. London: Constable.
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

The Cultural Study of Music : A Critical Introduction, edited by Martin Clayton, et al., Taylor & Francis Group, 2011. ProQuest
Ebook Central, [Link]
Created from universidadcomplutense-ebooks on 2021-09-19 [Link].
CHAPTER 26
MUSIC, SOUND, AND RELIGION
JEFFERS ENGELHARDT

I take as my point of departure here a set of commonplace observations: The

pervasive, profound relation between the sonic and the sacred is an essential
aspect of musical practice, thought, and discourse and an enduring theme
in music scholarship. Some of the first musicologies are sonic theologies—
the Rig Veda, the Gı̄tassara Sutta, the Psalms of David, the Epistles of Paul,
the Surah 96 “al-‘Alaq.” Long before the disciplining of music scholarship,
texts such as these inspired the musicological thinking of figures like
Purandara Dasa, Zhuhong, Maimonides, Augustine, and al-Ghazālı̄ as
Dharmic and Abrahamic traditions transformed into world religions.
Within world religions, the applied musicologies of reform and renewal
movements like Sufism, bhakti, the Second Vatican Council, or Hasidism
have engaged debates about the propriety of sonic expression and aural
experience to clarify doctrine, meet the spiritual and social needs of specific
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communities, and situate the sacred in relation to a particular soundscape.

And through their early modern encounters with non-Europeans, mission-
aries, mercantilists, colonists, and thinkers like Jean de Léry (Harrison
1973) and Bernard Picart (Hunt et al. 2010) documented a developing sense
of a universal relation between music, sound, and religion—a relation
intensified through recognition, fascination, violence, ethnocentrism, and
civilizational stereotype. In these ways, religion has become such an essential
part of music scholarship that to critically rethink its naturalness might seem
unnatural.

MUSIC AND RELIGION AS CATEGORIES

This universality and naturalness is emblematic of the emergence of religion
as a sui generis, secular, Enlightenment category (Asad 1993; Masuzawa
2005; Taylor 2007)—what Derrida famously terms the “globalatinization”
(mondialatinisation) of religion (2001, 50). Religion becomes the same thing
everywhere, something people have that is distinct from other spheres of
experience, action, and belief and, like culture, comparable across time and
distances. Similarly, the kinds and qualities of sound that are recognized,
objectified, and disciplined as music (Bohlman 1999, 25–26) establish music
as a delimited, universal category of human expressive, affective, and sensory
experience. Given the pervasiveness of these epistemological categories, the
coupling of music and religion in music scholarship seems intuitive and
natural when we speak of and represent Jewish music, music and Islam,
Christian musical repertoires, Buddhist musical traditions, or Vedic music
theory, for instance.
In these cases, music is something known that gives voice to, mediates,
and is fundamentally shaped by what is known as religion. Here, religion
is circumscribed as doctrine, text, ritual, sincere belief, power, and tran-
scendence, and music is the sound, style, and performance that religion
legitimates. The secular concept of religion makes Buddhism and Islam,
Hinduism and Judaism, Christianity and Sikhism discrete, comparable
domains of spiritual experience, ethical and moral action, and human being
that subjects inhabit. And when musics are linked to religions, they too
become comparable and metaconceptually the same; the -isms of world
religions that suggest some kind of coherence, orthodoxy, and equivalence
also suggest that the musics of those religions are alike in terms of style and
efficacy.
For anyone attuned to the varieties of religious modernity and secularity
that take shape through different understandings of personhood, polity,
and society, this conventional way of thinking music and religion is unsatis-
fying, however. What sense to make of the substantial sonic and theological
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

disjunctures between the Christian musics of Pentecostal Romani in

Hungary (Lange 2003), House of God sacred steel musicians in the United
States (Stone 2010), women in the Church of the Nazarites (ibandla
lamaNazaretha) in South Africa (Muller 2000), popular Catholic ensembles
in Brazil (Reily 2002), Tanzanian kwayas (Barz 2003), and Trinidadian Full
Gospel musicians (Rommen 2007)? What sense to make of the popular,
marketable, public religiosity of musicians like Matisyahu, Arvo Pärt, Aretha
Franklin, Mos Def, or Lupe Fiasco? What sense to make of spiritualized, de-
ideologized religious musics at kı̄rtan sessions in Moscow, Mexico City, and
Melbourne or at the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music (Kapchan 2008)?
What sense to make of the folklorization of religious musics through tourist-

oriented performance (Hagedorn 2001)? What sense to make of religious

performance that precedes and enables belief (Engelhardt 2009) or models
“real” trance and spiritual ecstasy (Becker 2004; Jankowsky 2007; Kapchan
2007)? And what sense to make of the renunciation or coercive, violent
proscription of music in the name of religion?
Perfect sense, I would say, but only when concepts of music and religion
are continually and critically examined and their taken-for-grantedness
suspended. As spiritual life, ethical and moral action, theology, and the sonic
converge in the secular modern, music makes religion, and vice versa.
Engaging this, however, means thinking, listening, and writing in terms of
the sui generis, secular, Enlightenment categories of religion and music—
acts that limit perforce the kinds of knowledge scholars can produce.

SECULAR EPISTEMOLOGIES AND MUSIC SCHOLARSHIP

Ethnomusicologists and historians of music are good at representing and
interpreting the musical texts that establish religious repertoires, the ways
in which religious musics enable ritual and devotion, the ways in which
the religious and the secular interact sonically, the details of doctrine and
tradition that shape religious musics, the ideologies and aesthetic values of
religious sounds, and the far-reaching effects of religious performance. We
are good at this because these kinds of representation and interpretation
emerge quite easily from the secular concepts of music and religion that help
establish our disciplinary commitments; we are able to stop short of invok-
ing faith and the supernatural. Both ethnography and historiography appeal
to Enlightenment reason, the hermeneutics of suspicion, verifiability, critical
reflexivity, and the nonabsolute, nontranscendental worldliness of secular
knowledge (Said 1983), which is what locates ethnomusicology and histor-
ical musicology in the discourses of the social sciences and humanities as
opposed to religious discourses. As secular epistemological categories, music
and religion are about humanness and humanism (even, and especially, as
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

that assertion might be critiqued in the language of the social sciences and
humanities). Perhaps nothing gets at the secular epistemology of music and
religion better than John Blacking’s rightly famous definition of music—
religious musics included—as “humanly organized sound” ([1973] 1995).
Yet the effects and affects of what can be called religious musics may arise
precisely because music is not humanly organized sound. Rather, the
musicking body and subject may be a sonic medium for divine revelation,
spiritual presence, and cosmic union, reframing (or effacing) the role of
human agency in the efficacies of religious musics (Friedson 2009, 9). Here
we reach an epistemological limit established by secular concepts of music
and religion because we verge on matters of faith, the veracity of experience,

the possibility of ritual failure as nonparadoxical, and the reality of reve-

lation and presence. When “faith may be the ultimate touchstone” (Becker
2004, 34) for the kinds of questions scholars endeavor to address about
music and religion, the answers that come may well be beyond the privileged
knowledge of secular reason, and may therefore not count as knowledge at
all. Or by speaking in the language of secular reason and stopping short of
invoking faith and the supernatural, scholars may considerably limit the
kinds of representations and interpretations they are able to produce.
This is the epistemological divide across which the study of religious
musics must continually operate and translate. On one side of this divide is
the commitment of secular critique to continually reveal the worldliness
of religious musics—their contingency on forms of power, their stylistic
affinities to nonreligious sounds, their particular historicity, and their
mythic origins, for instance. In its strongest terms, secular critique concerns
the human creation of God and the place of religious musics therein. From
this position, scholarly discourse places implicit scare quotes around
its representations and interpretations of religious musics’ efficacies and
truths: It is the “voice of a deity,” not the voice of a deity, “sacred tradition,”
not sacred tradition, “divine silence,” not divine silence, “authentic,” not
authentic. The knowledge produced in critical secular ethnography and
historiography is of the worldliness of religious musics’ transcendence.
On the other side of this epistemological divide is the position of the
believer, the convert, or the practitioner. This is a kind of knowing that
comes about by being present to the truth, mystery, or utility of transcen-
dence in religious musics, and thereby relativizing the commitments of
secular critique as anthropocentric. Like the native ethnographer or the
performer who deeply identifies with a style or genre, the religious subject
for whom music is efficacious and true can produce knowledge of con-
sciousness and experience precisely because of the selfness that makes
articulating that efficacy and truth a challenge. In its strongest terms, the
knowledge of faith and experience is the provocation of no scare quotes:
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

It is the voice of a deity, sacred tradition, divine silence, authentic. Period.

This is the transcendence of religious musics’ worldliness.
In reality, scholars continually mediate this epistemological divide in
their production of knowledge. Many, myself included, work with the lan-
guage and paradigms of secular critique while remaining deeply empathetic
to the truth claims and lived faith of those who practice and believe in ways
different than our own, and mindful of the epistemological limits of our
work for those same reasons (Engelhardt 2009, 51–52). This is not unlike the
relationship of the ethnographer or historian to the category of culture writ
large. Many others are active participants in or become initiated into the
religious traditions in which they work (see, for instance, Bergeron 1998, xi;

Butler 2000, 38–40; Hagedorn 2001, 5; Summit 2000). The dynamics here
are of a different sort, marked by scholars’ self-distancing from communi-
ties, practices, and doctrines and empathetic engagement with the language
and paradigms of secular critique in order to address broad, plural audiences
by drawing on the knowledge of faith and experience. And beyond the
North American and European scholarly traditions I have in mind here, this
kind of mediation takes shape in numerous other ways.

MEDIATING ORTHODOXIES AND SECULAR NORMS

In this part of the chapter, I note some ways this mediation takes shape in
the study of music, sound, and religion as orthodoxies encounter secular
norms, and vice versa. At the heart of this mediation is ontological differ-
ence—the fact that a sound that might be perceived and thought of as music
is decidedly not music in a secular, Enlightenment sense, or that the power
of religious performance derives from the metaphysics of sound rather than
from its sonic qualities. This is the difference between qirā’ah and mūsı̄qā,
fanbai and yinyue, chanting and singing, and this difference is one of the
enduring epistemological concerns and ethnographic fascinations of music
scholarship. The question of whether ontology is “just another word for
culture” (Rollason 2008) is transposed into religious practice, experience,
and doctrine, bringing matters of subjectivity, materiality, ideology, and
alterity to bear on the provocative question of sounds being sacred per se.
In Orthodox Christianity, for instance, the human voice is the privileged
sound of worship because of its capacity to pray and its perfection as a
creation of God. But many Orthodox Christians would hold that the voice
of worship is ontically grounded where the aural and the spiritual converge
in a gendered subject disciplined by fasting and prayer. The religious meta-
physics of the voice, in this case, are directly linked to the spiritual condition
of the body and soul, and may not register in the realm of the aural. More
generally, when anxieties and debates arise over the performances of pro-
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

fessional musicians in any number of religious traditions, ontological

difference is articulated in terms of how sincerity and purity matter in
religious practice. Despite the exemplary qualities of their performances,
professionals may not be religious subjects who can perform authentically.
The concern is that their intentions, bodies, and spirits are not disciplined
by and reproductive of the religious ideology of a community and that their
presence is predicated on monetary payment.
Ontological difference articulates just as forcefully when the opposite is
true—when the power of religious performance is not contingent upon the
sincerity and purity of performers as religious subjects. In cases where
the performance of religious repertoires and sacred sounds precedes belief

or is potentially efficacious in any context, it is the ontological strength of

those sounds that unsettles and relativizes the secular norms of modern
scholarship, since religion is not something private, but something people
might become vulnerable to. Similarly, in contexts of public performance
where those who listen have different religious and nonreligious dispo-
sitions, listeners’ pleasure, affection, or pious engagement might be taken as
responses that reproduce religious meanings and subjectivities, when, in
fact, they mark an ontological distinction between the religious and the
spiritual.
The mediation of ontological difference happens in numerous other ways
as well. Within a normative secular modernity, the immediacy of revealed
sounds—the Qur’an, the śruti texts of the Vedas, the songs of shamanic
healers—establishes forms of religious subjectivity and concepts of indi-
vidual agency that chafe against the figure of the autonomous moral subject
of a liberal democratic order, thereby invoking competing discourses of
blasphemy and freedom as these sounds circulate within secular publics
(Mahmood 2009). Immediacy also matters when hearing and listening to
the voice and its sacred utterances, which are forms of touching, require
a degree of proximity and presence. In these cases, amplification, broad-
casting, and recording are mediations that ontologically transform the voice
in ways that undermine religious doctrine and ritual efficacy.
Mediation and immediacy bear on the materiality of sound and religious
discourses about its sources. Musical instruments are proscribed in many
Christian denominations, for instance, because only the voice is mentioned
in the New Testament as being apt for worship—organs, drums, and guitars
cannot be baptized. In Jewish practice, the Talmud lays out discrete guide-
lines regarding the kind of animal horn that can be used to make a shofar
and the kinds of repairs that can be made without altering its sacred
ontology, ensuring that the mitzvah of hearing the shofar is fulfilled. And in
Dharmic traditions, there is a wealth of interpretive tropes attending to the
conch shell, its physical qualities, and the auspiciousness and spiritual power
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of its sound. In each of these cases, material ontologies are the bases of sonic
ontologies, which are recognized and reproduced in religious practice.
These understandings of mediation and materiality take shape in relation
to religious technologies and media and the forms of mediation and mate-
riality attending to them. This includes traditional forms of notation and
circulation and conventional globalized electronic media (Frishkopf 2009;
Hirschkind and Larkin 2008; Oosterbaan 2008) as well as salat apps for
mobile media devices, digitized manuscripts and recordings, remote ritual
participation using Skype, other VoIP services and virtual studio tech-
nologies, electronic śruti boxes, online instruction in religious performance,
or emergent broadcasting networks (Lee 1999). Whether old or new,

technologies elicit responses from religious subjects and institutions and

shape experiences and practices. They may enable fuller realizations of reli-
gious doctrine, transform modes of pious listening and techniques of
sensory self-fashioning (Greene 1999; Hirschkind 2006; Schulz 2010),
intensify discourses of religious power through repetition, standardization,
and schizophonia, and require clarification or alteration of understandings
of how embodied performance, authorized voices, and specialist practi-
tioners function in the poetics of religion. In each case, mediations and
materialities index the historical specificity and worldliness of religious
musics and sounds.
Markets are another productive field through which to critically examine
the mediation of religion as tradition and ideology. Following the dissolu-
tion of the Soviet Union, for instance, the marketplace metaphor was a
means of conceptualizing the ways religious discourses and sounds took
root and took on new meanings. Throughout Eurasia, sounds from “the
West” and sounds from the past presented new possibilities for religious
practice and identification in a time of profound social dislocation and
religious renewal. Following the marketplace metaphor, these possibilities
were to be realized through choice and consumption—hallmarks of the per-
sonal freedom enshrined in the secular liberal order that was the goal of
many post-Soviet transitions. When ideas about individual autonomy
resonate with religious ethics and theology, markets can become fields
in which religious forms and spiritual power are authorized or produced
through acts of consumption. Record sales can embody consensus about
religious truth, and exchange can become part of religious practice, in other
words.
Markets are also indices of charisma, divine favor, and spiritual flourish-
ing. Pentecostal preachers I have done fieldwork with in Estonia and Kenya
invest significant resources into acquiring high-quality equipment, nur-
turing contacts with studio owners and music distributors, and producing
and promoting cassettes and VCDs of their music. Recordings are media of
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their religious charisma, and responses to their voices, styles, and messages
recognize the spiritual power they mediate. For these preachers and their
congregants, the market is a field for evangelism and gauging the spiritual
needs of listeners as prospective congregants. Market success becomes a sign
of God’s presence and blessing in the lives they live.
As indices of charisma, divine favor, and spiritual flourishing, markets
may dramatically impact established religious orders and institutions.
The voices and practices that circulate in markets create religious networks
and communities that obscure conventional boundaries between religious
traditions, laypeople and authorities, or between private religion and the
supposed secularity of markets. Furthermore, markets may amplify the

charisma of star performers and the significance of sacred places, reinvesting

singers and shrines, saints and pilgrimages, styles and repertoires with the
accord of market recognition (Chen 2005; Kapchan 2007; Qureshi [1986]
1995). This accord emerges from the forms of competition that markets
organize (freedom in choice and novelty, freedom in orthodoxy and tra-
dition), which are symbolized in competitive religious performances like
Qur’anic recitation competitions.
For scholars of music and religion, markets are essential fields for
understanding the dynamics of religion and its social surround. Markets
can afford performers, practitioners, and listeners a means of establishing
religious meanings in the world as they circulate sacred sounds in public
spaces, but their worldliness might also impinge upon the efficacy and
purity of those sacred sounds as they are decoupled from sites of religious
power. My point is that markets mediate these extremes through their
different forms of secularity. Believers make music for and consume music
with their co-religionists, but not only, since engagement with religious
sound is predicated on forms of exchange and labor rather than on the
sincerity or expediency of belief, once again invoking ontological difference.
In this way, markets make music and religion valuable and exchangeable
across multiple differences, thereby making the conditions for a secular
epistemology of music and religion.
My final point about mediating orthodoxies and secular norms in music
scholarship concerns the complicated concepts of hybridity and syncretism.
Hybridity and syncretism are everywhere in the scholarly discourse of music
and religion, perhaps most notably in thinking about Santería, Candomblé,
Vodun, and other Afro-Atlantic Orisha worship practices and the globaliza-
tion of Pentecostal and Catholic Christianities. However, these interpretive
tropes rely upon essentialized, secular concepts of religion and music
antecedent to the novel forms of practice they inspire. This privileging of
religious origins risks reproducing the dynamics of colonial domination,
missionization, and global power that scholars have long been committed to
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

critically rethinking (Engelhardt 2006). Hybridity and syncretism are always

relative, always for someone, in other words, and the orthodoxies, centers
of religious power, and marginal, derivative practices that these concepts
naturalize may create more problems than they solve. The banality of
hybridity and syncretism in musics and religions shifts scholarly attention
to religious performance as a form of consciousness and efficacy that is
always integral and historically specific.

CONCLUSION
I have meditated here on the critical urgency of thinking about the secularity
of music and religion when we think about music and religion. Far from
questioning the essential place of religion in musical thought and discourse
or writing off the universal associations of music, sound, and religion, this
is meant to clarify what we talk about and know through these concepts.
Scholars often turn to debates about reform, fundamentalism, and inno-
vation in religious performance and aural piety, for instance, because these
debates clearly bear on how people inhabit the world musically as religious
subjects, act ethically and morally through sound, or invoke religion and
style out of expediency. On the other side of these debates, however, are
embodied experiences of sacred sound and the consciousness of listening,
practicing subjects that are incompletely addressed through the bounded,
secular categories of music and religion. This is the alterity that, like the
concept of culture, establishes the disciplinary and epistemological bound-
aries within which music scholarship takes place. Short of imagining
nonsecular ways of knowing that are not reducible to belief and faith, the
critical imperative is to listen for voices across the differences that music,
sound, and religion bring into being within secular modernities.

FURTHER READING
Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of religion: Discipline and reasons of power in Christianity and Islam.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the secular: Christianity, Islam, modernity. Palo Alto: Stanford
University Press.
Bakhle, Janaki. 2008. Music as the sound of the secular. Comparative Studies in Society and History
50(1): 256–284.
Becker, Judith. 2004. Deep listeners: Music, emotion, and trancing. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Bohlman, Philip V., Edith Blumhofer, and Maria Chow, eds. 2006. Music in American religious
experience. New York: Oxford University Press.
Csordas, Thomas J., ed. 2009. Transnational transcendence: Essays on religion and globalization.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Hirschkind, Charles. 2006. The ethical soundscape: Cassette sermons and Islamic counterpublics. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of piety: The Islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Sullivan, Lawrence, ed. 1997. Enchanting powers: Music in the world’s religions. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Taylor, Charles. 2007. A secular age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

The Cultural Study of Music : A Critical Introduction, edited by Martin Clayton, et al., Taylor & Francis Group, 2011. ProQuest
Ebook Central, [Link]
Created from universidadcomplutense-ebooks on 2021-09-19 [Link].
CHAPTER 27
MUSIC, RACE, AND THE FIELDS
OF PUBLIC CULTURE
RONALD RADANO

The question of race abounds in contemporary cultural studies of music.

What was merely a faint blip on the screen only a decade or so ago has now
become an abiding concern for scholars across the musicologies, offering
collectively a sound rejection of facile claims that we have entered a post-
racial era. The interest in race has increased, in large part, owing to the
successes of African-American studies, whose commitment to the matter
of institutional racism and music’s role in its resistance has historically
informed the intellectual conversation. Analyses of race have also grown
influential as a result of the popularity of British cultural studies, which,
particularly through the work of Paul Gilroy, has helped to illuminate
music’s historical affiliations with the modern formation of blackness.
Gilroy’s foundational work, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Consciousness (1993), for example, has done more than perhaps any other
single monograph to elevate the significance of race in postcolonial analysis,
a position that he puts forward through the primary vehicle of U.S. black
music. In the wake of these central influences, matters of the racial have
assumed an increasingly conspicuous place in studies of music culture,
warranting publication of major edited volumes dedicated or attentive to
racial subjects (Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000; Brown 2007; Radano and
Bohlman 2000). While much of the most recent scholarship still gives
primary emphasis to U.S. and transatlantic black musics, scholars from a
variety of disciplines have begun to look beyond the United States in order
to explore how race identifies a concern of broad consequence in the

The Cultural Study of Music : A Critical Introduction, edited by Martin Clayton, et al., Taylor & Francis Group, 2011. ProQuest
Ebook Central, [Link]
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Music, Race, and the Fields of Public Culture • 309

formation of global history and culture. Studies range from the effects of
race in the shaping of national identities (Garrett 2008; Olaniyan 2004;
Seigel 2009) to the making of musical localities (Jones 2001; Meinjtes 2003;
Sharma 2010); from the coalescence of the racial and the musical within the
institutional apparatuses of the state (Baker 2011; Guilbault 2007; Wade
2000) to the musical constitution of racial subjects (Bohlman 2008; Kun
2005; Miller 2010); and from the politics of musical representation (Agawu
2003; Bloechl 2008; Moreno 2004; Tomlinson 2007) to the position of race
in the critical appraisal of European musicology (Cook 2007; Potter 1998;
Rehding 2000). One senses overall in the musicologies an increasing open-
ness about matters racial, coaxed, in large part, by the scholastic leadership
of critics working outside the discipline.
If race has earned a more visible place in the mainstream of musical
thought, however, it has yet to be acknowledged as a principal, structuring
force in the history of musical production and reception. Despite the shifts
outlined above, the subject of race represents in music studies but one of a
multitude of possible topics of research, a subject more or less equivalent to
any number of genre studies or analytical approaches. If, moreover, race is
now recognized as a legitimate concern in musicological inquiry, it is still
commonly regarded as a matter exterior to music as such, an issue primarily
for the politically motivated and politically minded—those “radical” critics
of noncanonical musics. And yet there is nothing inherently radical about
the study of music and race. On the contrary, it seems rightly considered as
a point of departure for any musicological enterprise attentive to the broad,
difficult matters of music as a constitutive force in the production of modern
cultures. Race is critical to the cultural study of music for the simple reason
that, since at least the mid-nineteenth century, the musical and the racial
have been inextricably linked in the popular imagination, and that linkage,
deeply connected as it is to economic interpretations of the racialized body,
has carried forward into the present day. For reasons that have everything to
do with race, “the racial” remains largely relegated to the study of black and
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

ethnic musics, even as we can so readily see and hear how race is always
among us. Despite the ever-widening recognition of race as an ideological
formation not limited to the domain of African America, the lion’s share of
musicological scholarship continues to perpetuate the faulty notion that
some musics are more racial than others. How might music scholars and
cultural critics seek to broaden comprehension of the complex relations of
the racial and musical? How do we demonstrate the critical place of race in
music studies? Simply put, why does race matter?
One could imagine countless responses to these rhetorical challenges,
from a call for continuing studies of various historical and ethnographic
sites to a vast rethinking of the “history of Western music,” and, indeed, of

the place of European art music across the legacies of empire. (How, for
example, might a sensitivity to race drive an interpretation of Beethoven’s
status in the history of popular meaning and taste?) My concern in this brief
chapter, however, focuses on a single issue, namely, race as an idea informing
the broad contexts of public culture, representing what is perhaps the
primary, ideological structuration determining musical significance in the
global metropolitan. At the center of this analysis is the legacy of African-
American music, which, through a rather bizarre set of historical circum-
stances, becomes, by the late nineteenth century, the fundamental “race
music” of the U.S., Europe, and beyond. U.S. black music’s centrality in the
formation of popular style is widely acknowledged, and the copious range
of studies attesting to its power across various genres, from jazz to blues to
funk to hip-hop, has certified its dominant position in the canons of modern
music. But explanations of the nature of that power, together with its role in
the formation of public imaginations of racial and national subjectivity,
remain few and far between. When critics do seek to examine black music’s
value, they typically depend upon predictable claims of its inherent artistic
superiority and moral authority, or assert that these qualities are attributable
to a precolonial or pre-capitalist past. While such notions are most certainly
important to the ideological formation of black music, they do not in them-
selves explain the source of its power. They are symptoms rather than causes.
In order to comprehend the value ascribed to black music, then, we need
to step away from literal concerns with music as such and acquire some
distance from the prevailing voluntarism that orients black music studies.
This, ironically, will allow us to focus more deliberately on U.S. black music’s
place within the circuits of public culture and its status as a key formation
in the modern production of race. I want to suggest that the cultural value
of U.S. black music rests fundamentally on its materialization of race in the
modern, giving audible form to new categories of racial subjectivity and
group identification. More specifically, black music has acquired global
status and appeal as a result of its unique articulation of a critical antinomy
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

in U.S. history, one resonant with the double-sided sense of liberation and
social rationalization characterizing the modern condition (e.g., Durkheim’s
functionalism, Weber’s “Protestant Ethic”). At the heart of this antinomy is
the contradiction between persons and things, between free-willed human
sentience and the historical background of slavery that established U.S.
black music as a key measure in the constitution of racial categories. A
public conception of “black music” appears at the very moment when ante-
bellum, southern whites first began to recognize a certain musicality in what
was previously deemed bestial noise, to hear qualities signifying human
experience in the lone, true possession of possessed slaves (Radano 2010).
Significantly, the musical possessions of slaves remained only partially

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Music, Race, and the Fields of Public Culture • 311

obtainable by whites even though they could otherwise claim ownership of

the bodies of the slaves themselves. For in music, slaves had discovered a
generative basis of culture whose life-affirming power stood repeatedly in
contradiction to the life-denying assertion that blacks were nothing more
than property. Black music, that lone possession of an economic property
named “slave,” becomes the basis of an other humanity, representing a
cultural form constituted within the very socio-economic frames that had
denied slaves the status of human.
U.S. black music emerged as a public form out of this contradiction. The
perpetuation of the blackness of black music would ironically grant to
African Americans a form of cultural ownership whose value linked directly
to the collective memory of the music’s status as the original possession of
U.S. slaves. Black music identified the exception to white, southern claims
upon property-as-slaves, a critical challenge that would prove to be a key,
orienting force in the performative constitution of African-American cul-
ture. Black music arose as an economically based racial form that ultimately
revealed a tear in the logic of capital, representing a supra-economic inter-
ruption of the processes of commodification. In black music, a worldly,
listening public could literally hear a miraculous feat of culture-making,
whereby a human property produces out of its own living body the original
basis for a distinctive and essential cultural form that exceeded the property
rights of a white majority. It is this fundamental excess in blackness, as a
sound referencing an essential inaccessibility structurally determined by
white supremacy’s commitments to race, that would inform the musical
values of U.S. and world-metropolitan youth cultures. The profundity and
depth of black music’s influence is what has encouraged scholars to presume
race to be the subject exclusively of African Americanists and to comprehend
European art forms as not-racial. Demystifying U.S. black music accordingly
enables us not only to contemplate its enduring cultural value, but also to
position race studies in the greater field of musicological analysis.
The history of U.S. black music is pivotal to the study of race because it
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

is through black music that the linkage of the racial and the auditory enters
into popular perceptions of the modern. U.S. black music’s public appear-
ance in the early part of the twentieth century and its domination of the
sound and style of metropolitan entertainment thereafter were not due to
an inherent value in the music itself, but rather were the result of a new set
of social relations and political-economic shifts that inspired popular
interest in African-American musical forms and encouraged stylistic devel-
opment. Making this claim is meant neither to devalue the importance of
African-American agency nor to suggest that African-American musical
innovation was merely an accommodation to market demands. The black
performers who migrated northward from around 1900 brought with them

traditions of musical learning based in a long history of southern vernacular

performance, and these traditions were absolutely central to African-
American culture-making. At the same time, however, it is equally critical to
recognize how the innovation of distinctive practices of modern “Negro
music,” as it was then called, grew as part of the emergence of a new pro-
fessional class of African-American musician-laborers working within the
white-controlled social fields of entertainment. The circulation of this new
“Negro music” via the affiliated technologies of transmission and reproduc-
tion was what introduced the very idea of modern musical blackness into
metropolitan cultures worldwide (Miller 2010; Sotiropoulos 2006). Black
popular music’s qualities of distinctiveness (what we now call authenticity)
were attributed to a unique, racial character—to natural rhythm, to hot
blood, to a proclivity to dance and sing, to emotional qualities of sympathy
and soul—all, tellingly, attributions of the black body. Such somatic-sensual
orientations, grounded in the common sense of nineteenth-century Western
racism that imagined black soundworlds as an unobtainable, supra-
economic excess, would drive public fascination with the new generative
machine of black difference-making. The depth of black music’s connect-
edness to race would perpetuate versions of color-line thinking well beyond
the era of conspicuous white supremacy, reinforcing racial commitments
even as the reality of race would increasingly be put to question.
Here, then, we may identify the fundamental logic of black music’s value
arising from the ontological uncertainties of race at the onset of the modern.
Value arose as an alchemy of sorts that brought into U.S. society by the late
nineteenth century an unprecedented cultural phenomenon, what James
Weldon Johnson called “a miracle of production” (Johnson 1925), the cre-
ation of a publicly recognized, creative form that had emerged within a
broad, social and technological matrix of change, from the beginnings of the
vast southern migrations to the technological revolution of mass production
that revolutionized and transformed the entertainment fields. What was
truly miraculous was how this form arose in the first place. Black music
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

stood as a powerful symbol of African-American humanity, representing the

creative genius and spiritual freedom of a class of people once enslaved,
whose facility to invent culture remained paradoxically suspect among the
general white populace (Herskovits 1941). Such suspicions were, of course,
a symptom of the racism that commonly shaped prevailing white opinion.
And the enduring commitment to that suspicion meant that whites would
rarely give up on their belief in the fundamental difference between black
and white. No matter how deeply they might have felt otherwise, most white
Americans could not allow themselves to embrace black music as American
because such an embrace would bring with it the contamination of white-
ness itself. As a result, black music would always remain partially contained

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Music, Race, and the Fields of Public Culture • 313

within the black body to which it referred, and, as such, always be in pos-
session of a racial essence that helped to formalize twentieth-century
conceptions of blackness and whiteness.
The structural impossibility for whites to fully appropriate black music,
to claim the newly commodified forms as yet another possession in a “world
of goods” (Douglas and Isherwood 1979), locates the seat of its power as
a popular, cultural phenomenon, one whose putative essence—a quality
constituted within the economy of U.S. race relations—repeated the con-
tradiction of the African American as simultaneously citizen and subject, an
American and progeny of a U.S. nation built upon the trafficking of slaves.
As this contradiction played out, black music’s instability and power would
grow; the more that U.S. black music circulated within the cultural networks
of twentieth-century entertainment, the greater its attachment to an insider
culture of mystified “blackness” would seem. Indeed, the belief in a distinctly
racialized African-American temporality, of a counter-modern difference,
would develop as something part and parcel of African Americans’ status as
other. And yet black music’s appeal was not simply a manifestation of desire
for that which was deemed different. It was rather the consequence of a
grand contest on the subject of race in which the modalities of blackness and
whiteness were materialized as purchasable sound, to be bought and sold,
performed, embodied, and acted out within the constitution of the U.S.
nation-state and as part of its position within the global modern.
Such anxious, musically bounded negotiations of modern, racial subjects
took place in the particular structural locality of a consumer society that
encouraged purchase as a means of social play. Constituting and constituted
within what Raymond Williams has called the “magic system” of advertising
and consumer society, U.S. black music emerged as part of the revolution in
industrialization and mass production that overtook the United States and
Europe in the late nineteenth century and positioned the U.S. as a global
leader in the making of a consumer empire (Hoganson 2007; Williams
1980). Black music’s ambiguous, symbolic status as purchasable property
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

and particularized, racial form captured interracial and international youth

attention within the new frames of the popular, paralleling the situation of
modern consumers as at once subjugated by market forces and enabled by
the liberating activity of purchase that linked spending and citizenship
(McGovern 2006; Suisman 2009). It is no coincidence that the appeal of
black music ignited at the same moment that “youth” emerged as an identi-
fiable consumer class in the 1910s (Savage 2008). The music’s popularity
arose as part of a popular system of signs, representing a particular material-
ization of racial ideology resonant with new comprehensions of subjectivity
in the global modern. That black music would be constituted as a form
whose special qualities and uniqueness grew from its original attachments

to the reified, black body—to a performance under slavery claimed by

whites yet always ultimately in the possession and control of African
Americans—would establish the frames of reference and meaning for the
rise of black music in the twentieth century.
Black music’s unique status as a material, commodified form accessible
to all listeners and capable of signifying a broad array of personal attach-
ments, magnified its potential for modern citizens to act out and negotiate
their positions as racial subjects. In black music, U.S. and European youth,
both black and white, could hear a soundworld that spoke powerfully
to commonality and manufactured difference; racially hybrid in form, it
“sounded like” black and white, at once. For U.S. black music, as an
acknowledged public form, betrayed the lie of Negro imitativeness as it
revealed the truth of African-American civility and humanity, just as it also,
in its very “blackness,” gave symbolic form to racial separation. Listening to
early recorded popular music from a historical distance, one can now hear
the obvious similarities between black and white styles from a time when
African Americans were ironically closer to the segregated tradition of
African-based slave culture. It was within this new, modern soundworld that
a consumer class of interracial, internationalized youth audiences learned
variously to perform imaginations of self, as style brought into symbolic
form the contradictions of similarity and difference.
A principal figuration in modern conceptions of racial subjectivity was
that of freedom—that marker of identification constituted within the
circumstance of pan-American slave regimes (Buck-Morss 2000). But what
did this popular sense of freedom, so common to the rhetoric of early-
twentieth-century U.S. black music, really mean? In general terms, black
music signified across racial category a new sense of cultural belonging
consistent with consumption’s value as a mechanism of communication
and social coherence. Yet the qualities and dimensions of black music’s
“freedom” registered differently on opposite sides of the color line. Among
African Americans, black music’s prominence within the new field of the
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popular represented, at least to a certain extent, the possibility of “Jazzing

Away Prejudice,” as in the 1919 Chicago Defender headline (Kenney 1993,
123). Even in those instances, however, black music’s value never moved
very far from the experience of life under Jim Crow, particularly so in
African-American religious settings that carried forth the prominence of the
spirituals. For many white Americans, on the other hand, value seemed to
depend more on the act of forgetting, or, at best, on a simulated recollection
of suffering, cast in the mediating languages of modern consumption—for
example, the mawkishly sentimental interpretations of the blues and spiri-
tuals in the 1920s. It was, indeed, far easier and more convenient for U.S.
white listeners to hear black music as a form without history, without

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Music, Race, and the Fields of Public Culture • 315

conflict, as a widely circulating commodity form obtainable to anyone who

had the money to buy it. And so we observe in black music’s liberationist
valuation an additional dimension of struggle, a racial contest that traces
back to the time of slavery and to black music’s public origins as a
commodity-within-a-commodity. It was the consequence of supremacist
efforts to claim black music that would orient African-American innovation
across the twentieth century, inspiring black musicians to develop new
forms that simultaneously accommodated and resisted the insatiable wants
of modern consumers.
Observing the legacy of race and music from the present, it would seem
that the peculiar logic of music under white supremacy has eroded consid-
erably. The most egregious claims of black inferiority and natural musicality
have largely disappeared, and the derogatory images of the minstrel past
have for the most part receded from the public arena. We can still observe,
however, how a subtler form of racialist thinking continues to inform
musical perceptions across political and ideological position. In some ways,
in fact, things have gotten worse. By the 1950s, as U.S. black music assumed
a dominant place on the world stage, claims about the racial specificity
of “blackness” intensified even as U.S. black music’s global circulation
grew. Narratives of the music’s essential, racial qualities would, in turn,
proliferate in direct proportion to the music’s availability as a commodity-
form. The depth of this racialization appeared in the very indication of
African-American performance as “black music.” And while the heightened
racialization of African-American forms was instrumental to the advance
of black civil-rights solidarity, it had the unintended effect of reinforcing
racial thinking about black music, bringing into the present what is, in
the end, a version of nineteenth-century racialism. The imaginations of
racial essence have, in turn, become increasingly decoupled from African-
American musical practices at the same time that they continue to orient
determinations of popular style and taste. Today, one can hear the influence
of U.S. black music in a diversity of expressions, from the vocal styles of
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

pop (consider, for example, the performances on American Idol or the

Eurovision Song Contests) to the rhythmic practices of rock. Frequently,
these performance practices carry with them a figurative language of
liberation yet without clear attachments to the historical legacies of black
music and black people. We might wonder, then, about the state of race
today in the broad frames of popular musical culture—about how the
invisible forces of race inhabit a grand array of humanly organized sound
that appears in the name of truth, liberation, and democracy. As Richard
Middleton writes with reference to The Black Atlantic, “If, as [Paul] Gilroy
argues, the presence of a slave and post-slave Afro-diasporic culture within
late-modern bourgeois society is not marginal but significantly constitutive

for that society, then the emergent role of black American music becomes
important not just for popular music but for our understanding of the
musical field in this society considered as a whole” (Middleton 2001, 146).
Understanding the qualities and character of these complex racial-musical
linkages stands as a primary challenge to the future course of music studies
in its multiple forms.

FURTHER READING
Agawu, Kofi. 2003. Representing African music: Postcolonial notes, queries, positions. New York:
Routledge.
Bloechl, Olivia A. 2008. Native American song at the frontiers of early modern music. Cambridge,
U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Bohlman, Philip V. 2008. Jewish music and modernity. New York: Oxford University Press.
Cook, Nicholas. 2007. The Schenker project: Culture, race, and music theory in fin-de-siècle Vienna.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The black Atlantic: Modernity and double [Link], MA: Harvard
University Press.
Jones, Andrew F. 2001. Yellow music: Media culture and colonial modernity in the Chinese jazz age.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Kun, Josh. 2005. Audiotopia: Music, race, and America. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Miller, Karl Hagstrom. 2010. Segregating sound: Inventing folk and pop music in the age of Jim Crow.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Radano, Ronald. 2003. Lying up a nation: Race and black music. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Radano, Ronald, and Philip V. Bohlman, eds. 2000. Music and the racial imagination. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Rehding, Alexander. 2000. The quest for the origins of music in Germany circa 1900. Journal of the
American Musicological Society 53(2): 345–385.
Wade, Peter. 2000. Music, race, and nation: Música Tropical in Colombia. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

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Ebook Central, [Link]
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CHAPTER 28
MUSIC, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY
FRED EVERETT MAUS

BASIC CONCEPTS
The terms gender and sexuality contribute to analysis of social and psycho-
logical phenomena. In recent cultural theory, these terms reflect a concern
with distinctions between natural or biological attributes of people, on one
hand, and constructed, contingent, cultural, or historical attributes, on the
other hand.
Gender refers to the classification of people and human traits as mascu-
line, or feminine, or by related terms. Often, theorists of gender distinguish
between gender, as culturally variable, and biological sex, understood as
something physical, determined by chromosomes, hormones, morphology,
and so on. By convention, the terms male and female, rather than masculine
and feminine, mark differences of sex. (Biological sex, in this contrast
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between gender and sex, differs from sex in the sense of sexuality, as dis-
cussed below: the same word has different meanings.)
The difference between gender and sex is politically important, because
gender, created and maintained socially rather than naturally, is subject to
analysis in terms of cultural issues such as the distribution of power, and is
subject to cultural change. If differences of biological sex are physical, they
do not appear open to cultural change. However, boundaries between gen-
der and sex, between the natural and the constructed, are controversial. At
one extreme, Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble (1990), argues that scientific
claims about sex difference should be understood politically, not as matters
of objective scientific knowledge.

Sexuality refers to feelings, actions, and attributes involving erotic desires,

feelings, and behavior. This vague definition reflects the vagueness of the
concept, which, like the concept of gender, is contested. As with gender,
recent cultural theory typically regards many aspects of sexuality as variable
and constructed. In The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1978), Foucault
argued persuasively that sexuality comprises a range of practices that
change historically; most famously, he argued that the conceptualization of
homosexuality in the late nineteenth century marked an ontological shift
from sexual acts to sexual identities, from kinds of behavior to kinds of
person.
Gender expresses itself in many different aspects of individual and social
life. While sexuality may seem more narrowly defined, it has also been
understood to express itself both directly, in consciously erotic thoughts,
feelings, and actions, and indirectly, through various routes of displacement;
the work of Sigmund Freud was crucial in expanding the range of phenom-
ena that could be regarded as expressions of sexuality. The diffuse realization
of gender and sexuality gives them extensive reach for understandings of
many aspects of life and culture, though analytical applications of gender
and sexuality are often controversial.
Beyond gender and sexuality, a complex interrelated vocabulary has
developed. Feminism denotes a cluster of political movements. Most simply,
one can say that feminism advocates for women. But this definition may
require complication, to the extent that it endorses a biologically determi-
nate concept of woman or treats woman as a cross-culturally unified group.
Feminism includes interpretive discourses as well as political activism. The
academic field of women’s studies takes women as its subject matter; feminist
studies implies, more strongly, an activist political stance. Gender studies
implies a constructivist emphasis, and invites study of categories beyond
femininity, especially masculinity.
In the late twentieth century, activists worked to replace the term homo-
sexual, used since the late nineteenth century to denote same-sex eroticism,
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with other terms, especially gay and lesbian, terms of self-identification

rather than diagnostic terms imposed by an external authority. Gay and
lesbian often denote fixed identities, alongside heterosexual or straight. None
of these identity terms include people sexually attracted to both men and
women, bisexual people. A coalition of non-heterosexual people, that is, gay,
lesbian, and bisexual people may be marked with the term GLB or LGB.
With LGBT, the grouping expands to include transgender, a term for people
who in various ways cross between sexes and/or genders. Thus, a gender-
related term is added to a list of terms designating sexualities.
During the 1990s, queer gained currency. Originally an insult, the word
has been reclaimed for self-identification. One goal in using the term queer

is to refuse specific identity categories marked by terms such as straight, gay,

or lesbian, indicating the diversity of desire and potentially including anyone
of minority sexuality. While some people now describe themselves as queer,
others continue to prefer self-description as gay or lesbian. The expanded
term LGBTQ reflects this. In U.S. academic settings, the term queer studies,
despite its origins in an intentionally provocative usage, is standard for an
interdisciplinary range of studies focused on minority sexualities.
Scholarly studies of gender and sexuality have been more visible in the
United States than elsewhere, reflecting a broader tendency to U.S. domina-
tion of feminist and queer politics. Further, within the U.S., gender studies
and queer studies have often reflected middle-class white norms. Recent
scholarly work has attempted to reduce such parochialism.
Relations between gender and sexuality are debatable. Some theories
place sexuality at the center of the account of gender, as in the work of
radical feminist Andrea Dworkin ([1987] 2006), who argues that the power
relations of heterosexual intercourse are fundamental to gender difference.
Others emphasize the importance of distinguishing gender and sexuality,
while acknowledging the interactions between the two; Gayle Rubin presents
this alternative in her essay “Thinking sex” ([1984] 1993). Recently, many
scholars have questioned the usefulness of discussions of gender and sexu-
ality that do not also treat their intersections with race, class, nationality, and
other social categories.

CONTRIBUTIONS IN THE 1970S

Gender and sexuality did not become major topics in professional music
scholarship until the late 1980s. But during the 1970s, feminist, lesbian-
feminist, and gay liberation political movements, vigorous from the late
1960s on, already led to impressive interpretive and practical work on music.
This work did not originate in academic music programs, but came from
journalism, scholarly fields such as cultural studies, and practical music
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making.
Through the 1970s, music critic Ellen Willis (2011) wrote brilliantly
about topics such as male domination of rock, an alternative tradition of
female and sometimes feminist musicians, the ambiguous accomplishments
of early ”women’s music,” and the gender politics of punk. In 1978, Simon
Frith and Angela McRobbie published a fine theoretical essay, “Rock and
Sexuality” (Frith and McRobbie [1978] 2007). They reject the commonplace
idea that “there is some sort of ‘natural’ sexuality which rock expresses,”
arguing instead that “the most important ideological work done by rock is
the construction of sexuality” (43). They also argue that analysis of lyrics is
inadequate to show how rock constructs sexuality, and that a full account

must also discuss musical sound (42). Already in 1978, a Foucauldian

emphasis on the construction of sexuality contributes to interpretation of
music, along with rejection of the alternative conception of a natural
sexuality that is repressed or released through music.
Frith and McRobbie distinguish two kinds of popular music. Both are
created and performed by men. Cock rock is “loud, rhythmically insistent,
built round techniques of arousal and climax,” with “shouting and
screaming” (44). Cock rock presents images of masculine sexuality, for
consumption by men who identify with these images. In contrast, teenybop
presents romantic images of masculine sexuality, for consumption by girls.
In teenybop, boys are “sad, thoughtful, pretty and puppy-like” (45). Rock
constructs males as collective and active, females as individual and passive,
with regard to both musical production and sexual behavior. Male audi-
ences, on this account, relate to performance by identifying with it, rather
than understanding themselves as passive in relation to male musicians.
Frith and McRobbie also complicate these oppositions, noting that both
male and female listeners may find value in cock rock’s emphasis on the
physicality of sex and teenybop’s complementary emphasis on feelings.
The essay touches on many other topics—complex images of gender and
sexuality in recent popular music, the importance of dance, the need to
understand constructions of sexuality in the context of leisure and con-
sumption, and more. (See Frith [1990] 2007 for his later comments on this
essay.)
Richard Dyer’s essay “In Defense of Disco” ([1979] 1992) notes that
socialists generally disparage disco music because of its commodity char-
acter. However, disco contributes to the formation of gay identity, and Dyer
suggests that it has subversive political potential. Dyer describes “the three
important characteristics of disco.” He contrasts its eroticism with the phallic
qualities of rock: “rock’s eroticism is thrusting, grinding,” whereas disco
“restores eroticism to the whole of the body, and for both sexes, not just con-
fining it to the penis” (153, 154). The romanticism of some disco emphasizes
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emotion, “the intensity of fleeting emotional contacts,” melancholy. Thus it

proposes alternatives to the world of work and obligation. The materialism
of disco, its lavish use of musical and technological resources, maintains
contact with the actual world, refusing the transcendence offered by much
art. Dyer suggests that, taken together, these attributes create experiences
that could be the basis for a questioning of hegemonic sexual and economic
practices.
In 1970, Pauline Oliveros, a composer of experimental music, published
a brief article in The New York Times (Oliveros 1984, 47–49). Addressing the
question why there have been no great women composers, she replies that
women historically “have been taught to despise activity outside of the

domestic realm as unfeminine,” and have been valued for the obedience and
support they offer to men. Oliveros observes that women presently have
more opportunities to participate in professional musical life than before,
although contemporary composers confront a musical culture that gives
disproportionate attention to the past. She notes that preoccupation with
“greatness” is harmful to appreciation of new compositional work.
Later texts by Oliveros deepen her explorations of gender and sexuality.
In a grant proposal (1984, 132–137), she contrasts “active, purposeful
creativity” and “receptive creativity, during which the artist is like a channel
through which material flows and seems to shape itself ” (132). Composers
should balance “the analytical way and the intuitive way” (132). But Oliveros
identifies a cultural bias toward the analytical, which draws support from
gender associations: “traditionally, men are encouraged in self-determining,
purposive activity, while women are encouraged to be receptive and depen-
dent” (135). Gender stereotypes support a one-sided account of creativity
that emphasizes masculine qualities. When creativity is misconstrued that
way, it seems less available to women.
Oliveros also questions a one-sided account of listening. “Browsing in a
psychology text, I came across the idea that music is a phallic phenomenon
because it penetrates the body! . . . Come now, Freudians, one can receive
music but also actively penetrate it, not to mention all the other finer
variations” (ibid., 113). Listening can have active and receptive aspects.
“Maybe the psychologist assumed that only men (probably dead men) write
music. According to a certain social paradigm, it follows then, that maybe
only women should listen to it! Or eat it.” But the “social paradigm,” like
the parallel account of creation as active, listening as passive, does not
reflect experience. “That paradigm leaves out a large assortment of very fine
variations in relationships. How many of you out there think you are in
the minority? If everyone came out of the closet the world would change
overnight” (113). For Oliveros, oppositions between active and passive are
simplistic, whether applied to creativity, listening, gender, or sexuality.
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Oliveros recommends greater attention to experience, to counter stereotypes.

Some of Oliveros’s creative work also addresses interactions between
activity and receptivity. Her verbal scores, collected as Deep Listening Pieces
(1990), often ask participants to shift repeatedly between active and recep-
tive roles. Most simply, Circle Sound Meditation (1978) asks participants to
lie in a circle and, after relaxing, “listen then sound. Alternate between
listening and sounding” (9). In The Tuning Meditation (1980), participants
alternate between singing a pitch that originates in their imagination and,
next, matching the note that someone else is singing. Such practices disrupt,
and critique, the fixed roles of performer and audience. The active/passive
contrast is fundamental to conventional ideas of gender roles and sexual

roles; thus, participants in Oliveros’s Deep Listening Pieces enact subtle forms
of gender and sexuality dissidence. (For much more on Oliveros, see Mockus
2007.)
During the 1970s in the United States, women’s music developed, shaped
by feminist and lesbian politics, composed and performed by women, and
primarily directed at female audiences. This remarkable application of
feminist thought led soon to new record companies and music festivals
(Mosbacher 2004). The political character of women’s music accounted for
its successes and its image as self-limiting. The music was primarily created
by lesbians, for lesbian audiences, and, despite the inclusion of African-
American musicians, most performers and audiences were white (Hayes
2010). Practices such as the exclusion of men from concert audiences
showed strong separatism.
However, stereotypes of women with acoustic guitars, singing simple
protest songs and lesbian love songs, are inaccurate. Women’s music was
stylistically eclectic and often skillful. An early, famous example, Cris
Williamson’s “Waterfall” (The Changer and the Changed, Wolf Moon
Records, [1975] 2005), reflects on personal experience and offers advice,
using images of water as models for life. A rainy day, she sings, can show you
that life will be all right. “When you open up your life to the living / All
things come spilling in on you.” Then, you will flow “like a river,” and you
will need to “spill some over,” in “an endless waterfall.” The lyrics are per-
sistently metaphorical, yet audiences understood and loved the song. The
water that spills over could refer to weeping, perhaps a figure for access to
one’s emotions. The water’s flow in and out, filling and spilling, is a non-
phallic sexual image. Other feminist texts of the time also represent women’s
experiences through images of water. In a 1976 novel, Rita Mae Brown
writes, “When Carole groaned, ‘Now, Ilse, now,’ she felt that she had ridden
out a tidal wave” ([1976] 1988, 77). More theoretically, Luce Irigaray
(1985b) argues that standard scientific and logical symbols represent solids
well, but not fluids; she connects this directly to the psychic centrality of the
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

phallus. Femininity, as fluidity, is unrepresentable or nonexistent.

At first, the keyboard-based music of “Waterfall” is slow, and the key is
uncertain. The tonic clarifies; the music accelerates, then accelerates again
to a repeating four-chord progression, a chorus-like section with momen-
tum and a catchy melody. The music drops off, in a delicate ritardando; the
first section repeats, just up to the point where the tonic was established, and
then the chorus repeats. Along with the non-phallic lyrics, the music offers
an image of gently increasing excitement, reaching a plateau, dropping back
and then recovering the plateau; the goal is not an orgasmic crisis but
a heightened vivacity. A final fadeout suggests that this pleasure has no
inherent conclusion.

In France during the 1970s, outstanding feminist theorists such as Julia

Kristeva and Luce Irigaray drew on psychoanalysis and philosophy. One
such writer, Catherine Clément, published a book on opera in 1978 (trans-
lated into English only in 1988, when musicological feminism began to
appear in Anglophone settings). Clément explores the deaths of female
operatic characters, arguing that opera presents misogynist content in a
seductive form. Clément’s book neglects music—it is basically about libretti.
But it is an auspicious contribution to the feminist analysis of represen-
tations of women.

LATER SCHOLARLY CONTRIBUTIONS

As already mentioned, discussions of music, gender, and sexuality did not
play a significant role in professional music scholarship until the late
1980s. As this delay reveals, the music scholarship of the time was insular
and socially disengaged; the same qualities account for the controversy
around the eventual attempts to bring gender and sexuality into music
scholarship. However, from the late 1980s on, research on gender and
sexuality in relation to music has been a productive and exciting field, with
excellent work from professional music scholars and fruitful interaction
between musicology and other fields such as cultural studies. By now there
is far too much valuable research to summarize, or to represent in a brief
reading list. The rest of this chapter indicates the range of more recent
scholarly work by commenting on selected texts. In general I emphasize
theoretical contributions, though much fine work has appeared that is
primarily empirical. And I emphasize work in which gender and/or sexuality
are the central themes, though one welcome shift is that it is common, now,
for such issues to be included along with many others in a musicological
study.
Two excellent anthologies, edited by Jane Bowers and Judith Tick (1987)
and by Ellen Koskoff (1987) respectively, exemplify a women’s studies
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

approach to music, using careful research—historical in the first case,

ethnographic in the second—to explore musical roles of women in many
times and places. Since then, many superb studies of women in music have
appeared. A fine essay by Marcia J. Citron, “Gender, Professionalism, and
the Musical Canon” (1990), returns to Oliveros’s question about the scarcity
of historical female composers. The creation of knowledge about women in
music has flourished as an important part of music scholarship (see, for
example, Tick 1997; Locke and Barr 1997; Kisliuk 1998; Koskoff 2000;
Whiteley 2000; Feldman and Gordon 2006; Cusick 2009, and much more.
The journal Women & Music, from 1997 on, has provided excellent resources
on women in music as well as feminist and queer studies).

During the 1970s and 1980s, musicologists such as Joseph Kerman (1985)
and Leo Treitler (1989) had urged music scholars to take up criticism, under-
stood as an interpretive and evaluative discourse in contrast to the more
empirical traditions of musicology. One branch of criticism, exemplified by
Anthony Newcomb and others, interprets classical instrumental music
through the concept of narrative. Susan McClary’s book Feminine Endings
(1991) offers a sustained example of feminist music criticism, discussing
Monteverdi, Bizet, Tchaikovsky, and Beethoven, along with recent female
musicians. By including chapters on Laurie Anderson and Madonna,
McClary juxtaposes canonic male composers with a performance artist and
a popular performer, proposing a critical approach that can cross generic
boundaries.
Feminine Endings contrasts two ways of shaping time in music. Some
music drives toward goals, creating desire for points of climax and reso-
lution. Other music creates a sense of sustained pleasure. McClary finds, in
both, powerful images of sensuality and sexuality, which listeners experience
as their own, and she associates the two with gendered conceptions of
sexuality—masculine and feminine respectively. Like Frith and McRobbie,
McClary argues that music participates in the social construction of gender,
in part by creating vivid, gendered musical images of sexual experience. A
later essay on Schubert ([1994] 2006) finds, in the nonteleological character
of some of his music, a related resistance to goal-driven masculinity.
McClary’s advocacy of music that embodies feminine sensuality, or music
that resists celebrations of masculinity, is provocative; but for some readers,
it is problematic. McClary seems to commend female musicians for pro-
ducing feminine music, and thereby to deny certain resources to women.
Long before, Ellen Willis had questioned the absence of rock in “women’s
music,” noting that “it is no accident that women musicians have been
denied access to this powerful musical language” (2011, 143). Frith and
McRobbie also noted that girls can find value in the physicality of rock music
(2007, 50).
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

In both opera and instrumental music, McClary identifies local stylistic

markers of masculinity or femininity, such as evasive chromatic melodies
that represent sly, seductive femininity. This approach resembles the topical
analysis of Leonard Ratner (1980), or the musematic analysis of Philip Tagg
([1979] 2000), but focuses on gender and sexuality. In sonata form, McClary
identifies a temporal and harmonic patterning of masculine and feminine
music that communicates a narrative about the subordination of femininity,
thus offering an instrumental analog of Clément’s work on misogynist
narratives in opera.
Philip Brett (1997) made an impressive and challenging contribution to
criticism when he entered the scholarly conversation about Franz Schubert’s

sexuality and its relation to his music. Maynard Solomon (1989) had argued
that Schubert may have been homosexual. Debate followed about the
biographical claim and its relation to Schubert’s music. Brett’s essay notes
that, up to his own intervention, self-identified gay scholars have been
absent from the debate, an astonishing fact. Brett describes his experiences
playing Schubert’s music for piano, four hands, with a younger gay male
friend; he savors the sexual implications of this duet collaboration, in which
the two men are physically and musically close. Brett then offers a detailed
description of the slow movement of Schubert’s four-hand Sonata in C (D.
812). The analysis identifies a contrast between superficial, conformist
musical gestures and moments that suggest suppressed rage; near the end,
violent emotions hold sway, briefly but impressively, before conventional
closure hides them again. Brett notes that this emotional pattern is familiar
to present-day gay men. With caution, Brett suggests that similar feelings
may have figured in Schubert’s life. Still, Brett leaves no doubt that
Schubert’s social life, sexuality, and feelings are difficult for us to reconstruct,
and should be assumed to be different, in various ways, from those of his
present-day admirers.
Brett’s essay, a model of circumspect historical thought, also restricts
the claim it makes for its authority as music criticism: Brett states firmly
that “criticism is radical in musicology because it is personal and has no
authority whatsoever” (p. 171). Some readers may be disturbed by this
relativism; more importantly, Brett is unnerving, in a productive way, in his
insistence that writing about music must be thoroughly open and honest.
Brett, McClary, and others have not only discussed classical music in
relation to gender and sexuality, but have also turned their attention
to professional discourse about music. They join critics like Kerman in
arguing that conventional verbal resources of music scholars fail to address
important experiential qualities, and they add that professional norms of
objectivity make it difficult to articulate issues of gender and sexuality that
are pervasive in musical experience. I make such arguments about music
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

theory in “Masculine Discourse in Music Theory” (1993); in a related essay,

Marion Guck (1994) writes of her experiences as a female music theorist
drawn to experiential description. Such arguments suggest a far-reaching
critique of musicological discourse as a defense mechanism, a way of
evading aspects of musical experience.
What would bland discourse about music hide? McClary suggests that it
hides the messages of gender ideology that music communicates. Another
answer is that it hides the eroticism of musical experience. Suzanne Cusick,
in a well-known essay ([1994] 2006), explores relationships between her
own lesbian sexuality and her musicality. She identifies both music and
sexuality as areas where people give and receive pleasure, with intimacy

and in relationships configured by power. In view of this broad parallel (or

perhaps identity—Cusick wonders, eventually, whether music simply is sex),
she compares her preferred sexual and musical experiences.
Power relationships emerge as the crucial variable: Cusick identifies the
constructed notion of “woman” as “nonpower,” and therefore, a relationship
between two women as, perhaps, “a relationship based on non-power,” or
with “a flow of power in both directions. No one in the relationship has been
formed to be the power figure, although all can play at it” (p. 72). Similarly,
Cusick states her preference for “musics which invite and allow me to
participate or not as I choose, musics with which I experience a continuous
circulation of power even when I let the music be ‘on top’” (p. 76). And, as
a performer, Cusick values moments when “power circulates freely across
porous boundaries; the categories player and played, lover and beloved, dis-
solve” (p. 78). Like Frith and McRobbie, Cusick sees that musical production
and reception could be understood as a relationship in which music, or
musicians, exert power over listeners; like Oliveros, she prefers to resist this
“social paradigm” by seeking out more complex variations in which power
relations may shift or become unclear.
There are alternatives, in theories and practices of sexuality, to Cusick’s
emphasis on mutuality, nonpower, and flexibility of roles. In general,
Alan Sinfield (2004) has questioned the cultural habit of praising equality
in sexual relationships. Leo Bersani ([1987] 2010) would identify Cusick’s
description of sexual experience as a “pastoralizing” account; Bersani coun-
ters such thinking with an account of sex as “self-shattering”. For Bersani,
the experience of self-loss in sexuality accounts for its value. Drawing on
Bersani, one can suggest alternative descriptions of musical experience that
center on the value of being controlled or overwhelmed by music. I have
worked on this approach, in different ways, in essays about Edward T. Cone
and Hector Berlioz (2006, 2009).
Clément’s neglect of voice and singing has been offset by many subse-
quent studies. John Shepherd (1987) and Suzanne Cusick (1999), using
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

examples from popular music, explore the construction of gender difference

through vocal style. Elizabeth Wood’s essay on “Sapphonics” ([1994] 2006)
identifies a type of female operatic voice, rich and powerful in its lower
register yet clear and strong in the upper register, with an awkward break
between. Wood documents the historic affinity of lesbian musicians and
opera fans with such voices, beloved for their “acceptance and integration of
male and female” (32). Wayne Koestenbaum (1993) writes of the culture
of “opera queens,” gay men whose love of opera centers on the diva; he offers
personal descriptions of specific opera scenes, somewhat as Brett offered a
personal account of Schubert’s music. In a related emphasis on physicality,
there has been a good deal of work recently on questions of music and

embodiment. Some of these studies explicitly thematize gender and/or

sexuality, while others do not. (For an overview, see Maus 2010.)
In popular music studies, there has been rewarding research on musi-
cians in light of the relations between their gender and/or sexuality, their
music, and their careers. In a few cases, scholars can write about popular
musicians or musical movements explicitly identified with feminism, such
as the riot grrrl movement of the 1990s (Leonard 2007). In other cases, when
musicians have not called themselves feminists, scholars have nonetheless
found proto-feminist positions in their work. Attention to female musicians
has potential for significant revision of histories of popular music. Angela
Davis’s study of women in blues (1998) counters the traditional emphasis
on male blues performers, while finding many links between female blues
singers and feminism. Jacqueline Warwick’s study of girl groups (2007)
counters a conventional historical narrative that moves from early rock ’n’
roll to the British invasion, with a gap between. In fact, much of the most
popular music during that alleged gap was by girl groups; their neglect by
historians reflects difficulty with taking young female performers, often
black, and their young female audiences seriously.
There is a surprisingly large literature of feminist commentary on
Madonna (for example, hooks 1992, 157–164; Bordo [1994] 2004; Fouz-
Hernández and Jarman-Ivens 2004). Musical theater has also drawn brilliant
commentary, in part because of gay and lesbian fandom (Miller 1998; Wolf
2002; Rogers 2008). Greater openness about sexuality has also permitted
illuminating studies of LGBTQ popular musicians (Echols 1999; Hubbs
2004; Gamson 2005; Randall 2008, and many more).
Important contributions have considered audiences of popular music in
light of gender and sexuality. Lisa Rhodes (2005) discusses the culture
of groupies, with attention to their love of music and their agency in seek-
ing pleasure. Maria Pini’s study of women and rave culture (2001), in an
unusual and skillful combination of resources, draws on ethnographic
interviews along with feminist theory; she shows that rave offers women
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

new kinds of subjectivity, parallel in some ways to subjectivities articulated

in speculative feminist philosophy. Walter Hughes (1994), influenced by
Bersani, suggests that gay men, dominated by the beat in the discos of the
1970s, experienced an unmaking of their subjectivities that permitted
the creation of new identities. The resulting analysis is quite unlike Dyer’s.
Tim Lawrence (2004), in a completely different style, has written an extra-
ordinary interview-based history of discos in New York City during the
1970s, a crucial contribution to the history of sexuality in the U.S. Judith
Peraino (2005) has offered an ambitiously broad synthesis of historical and
contemporary relations between music and queer identity, covering classical
music, popular music, and more.

Two excellent online resources direct readers to many additional mate-

rials on music, gender, and sexuality. The Committee on the Status of
Women of the Society for Music Theory maintains a bibliography of
research in these areas. And the website of the LGBTQ Study Group of the
American Musicological Society includes a full run of the group’s fine
newsletter, with reviews, articles, and more.
Significant gaps remain in the professional literature on music, gender,
and sexuality. Several recent studies address constructions of masculinity,
a welcome development that could be taken much further (Pederson 2000;
Meintjes 2004; Jarman-Ivens 2007; Biddle and Gibson 2009). Issues of
cross-dressing or complexities of gender presentation arise throughout
discussions of music, gender, and sexuality. (Examples include Garber 1991;
Muñoz 1999; Braga-Pinto 2002; Rodger 2004; Auslander 2006; Head 2006;
Dreyfus 2010; Rodger 2010; but related issues are pervasive in the literature.)
However, people who identify as transgender or transsexual have received
little interpretation or representation in music scholarship (for exceptions, see
Swedenburg 1997; Namaste 2000; Middleton 2006, 91–136; Constansis 2008).
Perhaps the most striking absence has been the relative lack of work on
sexuality and music in settings beyond classical music and mainstream
Anglophone popular music. E. Patrick Smith (2008) has gathered valuable
material about gay black men and the choirs of Southern churches. The
brief, descriptive studies in Whiteley and Rycenga (2006) are unusual in
their geographical range, with chapters on popular music in Germany, Latin
America, Israel, and Russia. Gayatri Gopinath (2005) has written usefully
about the heterosexual masculinity of recent Anglo-Asian rock and dance
music, in contrast to underground South Asian queer scenes. José Quiroga
(2000) and Frances Negrón-Muntaner (2004) offer Latin American perspec-
tives on a number of popular music topics, including bolero, Ricky Martin,
Madonna, and West Side Story. Susan Thomas (2006) writes about repre-
sentations of lesbians in recent Cuban popular song. There is need for much
more work along these lines.
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

FURTHER READING
Bernstein, Jane A., ed. 2003. Women’s voices across musical worlds. Boston, MA: Northeastern
University Press.
Blackmer, Corinne E., and Patricia Juliana Smith, eds. 1995. En travesti: Women, gender subversion,
opera. New York: Columbia University Press.
Brett, Philip, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, eds. [1994] 2006. Queering the pitch: The new
gay and lesbian musicology, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.
Citron, Marcia J. [1993] 2000. Gender and the musical canon. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Cusick, Suzanne G. 1999. Gender, musicology, and feminism. Pp. 471–498 in Rethinking music.
Edited by Mark Everist and Nicholas Cook. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fuller, Sophie, and Lloyd Whitesell, eds. 2002. Queer episodes in music and modern identity. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press.

Holsinger, Bruce. 2002. Music, body, and desire in medieval culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
McClary, Susan. 1991. Feminine endings: Music, gender, and sexuality. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Moisala, Pirkko, and Beverley Diamond, eds. 2000. Music and gender. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press.
Solie, Ruth A., ed. 1993. Musicology and difference: Gender and sexuality in music scholarship.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Stras, Laurie, ed. 2010. She’s so fine: Reflections on whiteness, femininity, adolescence, and class in 1960s
music. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate Publishing.
Whiteley, Sheila. 2000. Women and popular music: Sexuality, identity, and subjectivity. New York:
Routledge.
Whiteley, Sheila, and Jennifer Rycenga, eds. 2006. Queering the popular pitch. New York: Routledge.
Copyright © 2011. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

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