Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The study of music making and musical experience – too often conceived as a “specialist corner” of sociology – has the potential to illuminate more the general topic of how social orders are created and sustained and, at a more basic level, the nature of the relation between individual “agency” (e.g., musical creator or respondent) and social “structure” (e.g., aesthetic media and aesthetic convention). Music is, I suggest, “good to think with.” Thinking with music can advance the sociological understanding of culture's mechanisms, the ways it can be seen “in action.” To think in this way requires a shift in focus from the still-vital “production of culture” perspectives (as developed during the 1980s and 1990s and still thriving) to action and situated networks of activity. More specifically it requires – in keeping with the themes of this volume – an engagement with theoretical debates concerning structure, culture, and agency, with the nature and cultural dimension of cognition, and with contingency as a long-neglected topic within sociology. To some extent, classic work in music sociology has begun to address these themes but there is still a great deal of work to be done.The work of T. W. Adorno can be used as a springboard to the issue of aesthetic “structures” and social agency. For Adorno, music was key to understanding the psychosocial conditions of modernity. Aesthetic ... log in or subscribe to read full text