Music and Mediation

After a century of studies, there is no agreement on what it means to construct 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 contents through reference to sociological factors. The most vehement prosecutor of such alleged reductionism was undoubtedly Adorno (e.g., 1976)—even though he himself became the worst reductionist when it came to popular culture (Adorno 1990); 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 explanation of the ways in which music is produced, diffused, and listened to—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 specific 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 autonomy 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 distinction 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 construction, 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 …