‘The history of musicology and music theory in our generation’, write Cook and Everist, ‘is one of loss of confidence: we no longer know what we know’ (1999: v). The reasons for this widely acknowledged crisis of confidence need not be rehearsed, but clearly arise from a series of challenges to the established discipline – from, for example, the critical and feminist theories of the ‘new’ musicologists, from various claims about the proper relation of musicology to ethnomusicology, from the emergence of popular music studies, and so on. In this chapter I will be concerned with one aspect of these challenges...

In the previous chapter it was suggested that many of the challenges to the ‘old’ ways of musicology derive from the assertion that the study of music must recognise the inescapably social nature of the creation, performance and reception of music. While there may indeed be much to be gained in a technical sense by removing the creature – in this case the musical work – from its natural habitat and dissecting it in the laboratory, the essence of the critics’ case is that this process inevitably obscures and ignores more than it reveals. Not only must the musical text be reconnected...

The idea that people may be subject to manipulation by music is a familiar one, yet efforts to develop it sociologically soon run into difficulties. For one thing, the ‘manipulation’ in question always seems to involveotherpeople; it seems that no one, however much of a ‘music lover’, likes admitting to being taken over by the sounds and controlled by them. Indeed, there is a hint here of the elitism which some have detected in the pronouncements of the Critical Theorists on the degradation of consciousness brought about by mass culture; a fate which only they (and connoisseurs of...

For Pierre Bourdieu, musical taste was a highly significant indicator of a person’s position in the socio-economic order. Near the beginning ofDistinction, he reports the outcome of a large-scale French survey which led to the identification of three ‘zones’ of musical taste, which ‘roughly correspond to educational levels and social classes’. ‘Legitimate’ taste (for example the works of ‘serious’ composers) was found to increase markedly with level of education and thus ‘was highest in those fractions of the dominant class that are richest in educational capital’. ‘Middle-brow’ tastes (such as forRhapsody in Blueor the singers of chansons)...

It was argued in the previous chapter that the relationship between people’s social class position and their musical preferences is both more complex and more sociologically interesting than several influential theorists have allowed. In what follows I wish to pursue some of the implications of William Weber’s contention that although they are related in some ways, social class and musical taste must be considered as ‘quite distinct factors’. This theme will be developed through a consideration of some of the historical research into the growth of musical institutions in urban areas since the eighteenth century, with particular reference to the...

‘Improvisation’, wrote Gunther Schuller in his ground-breaking study ofEarly Jazz, ‘is the heart and soul of jazz’ (1968: 58). Yet improvisation is only one of the distinctive elements of the music, and indeed Schuller immediately qualifies his assertion by pointing out that improvisation is also an essential ingredient of other folk and popular music traditions. Even more to the point, improvisation is not a major ingredient in many celebrated jazz recordings. Louis Armstrong’s classic ‘Cornet Chop Suey’ of 1926 was copyrighted almost as recorded (and in the trumpeter’s own hand) more than two years earlier (Gushee, 1998: 298–299)....

The argument of this chapter is that the practice of musical improvisation, which has often been considered as a result of the unusual talent of a few individuals, or as a problem for the psychology of creativity, may be productively analysed from a sociological point of view. Indeed, it may be suggested that this form of musical expression offers a specific challenge to sociological explanation of the same kind that Durkheim (1952), more than a century ago, found in suicide – which was then, as now, generally understood as the outcome of the subjective states of individuals. As such, it was...

A notable aspect of the development of the social sciences in recent years – some would say the most notable aspect – has been the enormous increase in concern with the analysis of culture. The reasons for this ‘cultural turn’ are complex, and a full consideration of them is far beyond the scope of this chapter, but I don’t think that anyone would seriously dispute that it has occurred. Within sociology, it has been suggested that this reorientation of the research agenda reflects a fundamental change in capitalist societies themselves during the twentieth century: from an earlier period in which people’s sense...

One of the arguments for which Wittgenstein is most celebrated is his contention that linguistic meaning is not inherent in words, phrases, sentences and so on, but depends on the ways in which they areused(1972: 20). At first sight, this seems contrary to commonsense notions of how we communicate, and also to alternative theories of language which are based on the assumption that words represent states of affairs. After all, what could be more straightforward than a sentence like ‘The grey geese are flying east’, which seems to describe – indeed, may evoke a picture – of a group of...