No abstract

This article sets out new methodological principles for the sociology of art, a sub-discipline that it seeks to broaden conceptually by shifting the ground from art to cultural production. This shift suggests the utility of overcoming the boundaries that demarcate the sociology of art from adjacent fields, augmenting the sociological repertoire with reference to anthropology, cultural and media studies, art and cultural history, and the music disciplines. At the same time the article proposes that an explanatory theory of cultural production requires reinvention in relation to five key themes: aesthetics and the cultural object; agency and subjectivity; the place of institutions; history, temporality and change; and problems of value and judgement. The first half of the article approaches these issues through a sustained critique of Bourdieu. It proceeds through an exposition of generative research from contemporary anthropology, including the work of Alfred Gell, Christopher Pinney, Fred Myers and others, which highlights the analysis of mediation, ontology, materiality and genre. The second half develops fur ther an analytics of mediation and of temporalities, exemplifying this and expanding on the five themes through a discussion of two institutional ethnographies of cultural production (of the computer music institute IRCAM in Paris, and of the BBC). In pursuing this programme the paper advocates a novel conception of the relation between theoretical model and empirical research, one that might be termed post-positivist empiricism, while also suggesting that the framework outlined offers the basis for an enriched cultural criticism.

This article develops a theoretical analysis of music and mediation, building on the work of Theodor Adorno, Tia DeNora and Antoine Hennion. It begins by suggesting that Lydia Goehr’s account of the work concept requires such a perspective. Drawing on Alfred Gell’s anthropology of art, the article outlines an approach to mediation that incorporates understandings of music’s social, technological and temporal dimensions. It suggests that music’s mediations have taken a number of historical forms, which cohere into assemblages, and that we should be alert to shifts in the dominant forms of musical assemblage. In the latter part of the article, these tools are used to conceptualize changing forms of musical creativity that emerged over the twentieth century. A comparison is made between the work concept and jazz and improvised electronic musics. Three contemporary digital music experiments are discussed in detail, demonstrating the concepts of the provisional work and of social, distributed and relayed creativity. Throughout, key motifs are mediation, creativity, and the negotiation of difference.

How does music materialize identities? This article argues that music is instructive in conceptualizing the materialization of identity because it opens up new perspectives on issues of materiality, mediation and affect. These perspectives are intimately related in turn to music’s plural socialities, which necessitate a novel approach to theorizing the social. Music, it is proposed, demands an analytics that encompasses four planes of social mediation; while these socialities, with other forms of music’s mediation, together produce a constellation of mediations – an assemblage. All four planes of social mediation enter into the musical assemblage: the first two amount to socialities engendered by musical practice and experience; the last two amount to social and institutional conditions that afford certain kinds of musical practice. The four are irreducible to one another and are articulated in contingent ways through relations of synergy, affordance, conditioning or causality. By adopting the topological metaphor of the plane to stand for distinctive socialities mediated by music, the intention is to highlight both their autonomy and their mutual interference. The second half turns to genre theory to suggest that analysing genre in terms of the mutual mediation between two self-organizing historical entities illuminates both how social identity formations may be refracted in music, and how musical genres can entangle themselves in evolving social formations. Finally, with reference to music’s capacity to create aggregations of the affected, the article considers the efflorescence of theories of affect, association and entrainment. While such theories illuminate the generative nature of the mutual mediation between musical formations and social formations, they are limited by lack of awareness of the four distinctive planes of music’s social mediation, as well as the significance of their autonomy and their contingent interrelations for understanding how music materializes identities.

What would contemporary music scholarship look like if it was no longer imprinted with the disciplinary assumptions, boundaries and divisions inherited from the last century? This article proposes that a generative model for future music studies would take the form of a relational musicology. The model is drawn from the author's work; but signs of an incipient relational musicology are found scattered across recent research in musicology, ethnomusicology, and jazz and popular music studies. In support of such a development, the article calls for a reconfiguration of the boundaries between the subdisciplines of music study – notably musicology, ethnomusicology, music sociology and popular music studies – so as to render problematic the music/social opposition and achieve a new interdisciplinary settlement, one that launches the study of music onto new epistemological and ontological terrain. In proposing this direction, the article points to the limits of the vision of interdisciplinarity in music research that is more often articulated, one that – in the guise of a turn to practice or performance – sutures together the historically inclined, humanities model of musicology with the micro-social, musicologically inclined aspects of ethnomusicology. The article suggests, moreover, that this vision obscures other sources of renewal in music scholarship: those deriving from anthropology, social theory and history, and how they infuse the recent work gathered under the rubric of a relational musicology. As an alternative to the practice turn, a future direction is proposed that entails an expanded analytics of the social, cultural, material and temporal in music. The last part of the article takes the comparativist dimension of a relational musicology to four topics: questions of the social, technology, temporality and ontology.