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Non-rational orderings

Just as it is customary within sociology to distinguish between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ societies (Beck et al. 1994), conventional distinctions are also made between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ musical practice (see, for example, Nettl 1990:1–3; Bebey 1975; Crozier 1997:124). In the latter form, characterized by a commercial and professional mode of music production, and also a pop–serious music aesthetic divide, the activity of music consumption or use is depicted as a relatively private a air, and the predominant category of analysis devoted to this topic is the idea of taste, value and the a liation of musical predilection with social standing. By contrast, musical use within ‘traditional’ societies is portrayed as deeply embedded in temporal and ritual custom and in communal practice. The implication is that musical experience is impoverished in modern cultures; this assumption often derives from a tendency to romanticize ‘exotic’ and ‘folk’ cultures, to imply, pace Weber, that aesthetic and a ective bases of action have declined in relation to bureaucratic and rational modes of ordering. Sociological discourse itself is biased against the perception of the aesthetic dimension in modern life. Instead, the sources of orderly conduct are depicted as residing in rules, knowledge, skills and sanctions. This aspect of sociological discourse separates individual from society, subject from object, and culture from agency. It achieves this separation through its use of concepts such as ‘interest’, ‘rationality’ and ‘free will’.

The notion of ‘disenchantment’ so pervasive in Weber and Adorno (Greisman 1976), and which usually trails this discourse, orbits around the idea that the aesthetic and sensuous bases of human subjectivity and human activity have been eroded by the tide of rational administration and rational, calculative modes of consciousness. This notion may, however, be an artefact of ‘modernistic’ sociological discourse, a part of the discourse’s tropes rather than an accurate description of social and aesthetic practice. Indeed, as was discussed in chapter 5, the notion of disenchantment has been subject to revision in recent years (Campbell 1987; Hetherington 1998). In its stead, culture’s role in modern societies has been made more central in relation to the structuring of social action. The study of musical practice in modern societies – what one might refer to as an ‘ethnomethodological ethnomusicology’, if it were not so clumsy to enunciate – has the potential to enhance significantly this neo-Durkheimian strand of thinking about culture and agency. Contrary to received notions about music’s waning role within modern cultures:

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in advanced industrial societies music is all around us, a major element in our culture, in contrast to the situation in pre-electronic times when it was a much less pervasive medium, and a much smaller part of most people’s experience. It is this contrast, though, that may serve to arouse our sociological curiosity: instead of just taking music for granted, we might begin to ask why it has come to occupy such a prominent place in our world. (Martin 1995:1)

A sociology of music concerned with the ground level of musical practice (Weber’s (1958 [1921]) was not), quickly leads to the idea that it is probably more reasonable to propose that music’s relation to forms of social order within Western cultures is not inactive, but, rather, usually unnoticed by social scientists. This is not to say that there are no crosscultural and historical di erences in music’s social position, its functions and uses; there are many. But the central di erence between so-called ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ music cultures, probably does not reside in music’s disembeddedness from social practice, its disjuncture from social ‘function’ and its reinstatement as an object of ‘listening only’, from the processes of putting together subjects and situations. By contrast, the major di erences between music in modern versus traditional cultures can be seen to lie in the relations of music’s production – how and where music is created, how musical forms undergo change, how music is performed and the quality of the performer–consumer relationship (for example, modes of attention, spatial relationship, who may count as a musician and how evaluation takes place and how music is distributed – such as many to many, one to one, one to many, many to one). Key, here, is the issue of how music distribution is controlled and, in modern societies, consolidated, as with the large record production firms and the burgeoning empires of music distribution. Key, too, are the social relations of how music is deployed within settings and the degree to which soundtracks for settings are negotiated.

There are many informal ways in which music is employed as an ordering device in social life within modern societies. This book has only scratched the surface of this topic. At the level of individual experience, these practices may not be overtly regulated at the communal, collective level (apart from criticism, professional or lay), though they are typically oriented to imagined communities and imagined (and often aspirational) scenarios – peer groups, idealized situations, conventional images and associations. A given individual may turn to a wide gamut of recorded music for any task and at any hour of the day and, if using a Walkman, may listen to music nearly anywhere. At the same time, musical practice is by no means individuated; regularities of musical use abound, as for example when retail outlets draw upon conventional notions of musical energy levels at di erent times of the day or week, or when transport sta-

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tions employ Vivaldi, Mozart and Delius to soothe irate travellers and to disperse potential hooligans. A thorough examination of these practices would have the potential to illuminate the (typically overlooked) aesthetic structures of social action, structures that undergo constant revision and renegotiation at the level of action. Seen in this light, the recent theorization of aesthetic reflexivity only serves to reveal matters that are – in more traditional cultures – more explicitly recognized as central to aesthetic ordering and its practice. How, then, might we account for the invisibility, within daily life, of music’s powers to produce order?

Ever since Beethoven uttered the notorious phrase, ‘I will not play for such swine’ (in response to some aristocratic listeners who talked through one of his performances), Western music has been encumbered with the paraphernalia of ‘high art’; ‘good’ music has become, and been designed as, an object upon which to reflect, an object for rapt contemplation. This ideology has also been projected backward on music that was originally designed to be heard within social contexts: Telemann’s Tafelmusik is perhaps the most famous example, but even Mozart was often heard amidst cries from the sausage sellers. The august music patron Baron van Swieten was described by one of Mozart’s nineteenth-century biographers as exerting:

all his influence in the cause of music, even for so subordinate an end as to enforce silence and attention during musical performances. Whenever a whispered conversation arose among the audience, his excellence would rise from his seat in the first row, draw himself up to his full majestic height, measure the o enders with a long, serious look and then very slowly resume his seat. ( Jahn 1882,II:385)

Within the modern institution of ‘serious’ listening, to listen ‘correctly’ is to be ‘transported’, to abandon, albeit temporarily, the realm of material and temporal being, to allow oneself to be taken over by music’s textual time. In this sense, ‘serious’ music may have been the earliest and most elaborated form of virtual reality. The abstraction of music from the flux of daily existence, and its excision of the body – both in terms of bodily rhythms in compositions and in terms of the motionlessness stipulated as appropriate listening conduct – have served to obliterate the none the less vital tradition of other music and its role in social life outside the concert hall, its role as it is woven into the tapestry of social life through the informal singing of songs, the pop concert, the car radio, the jukebox, ambient music, organizational music, amateur music production, singing, whistling and humming, and the playing of records, tapes and CDs. It is in all of these locations – from gilded concert hall to mega-mall, from bus terminal to bedroom – that music makes available ways of feeling, being, moving and thinking, that it animates us, that it keeps us ‘awake’.

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Reprise – what does music do?

Auden once said of poetry that it ‘makes nothing happen’, but rather that it survives as, ‘a way of happening, a mouth’ (1940). Music, too, is a way of happening, it issues as an audible channel, a series of audible articulated signals. In this sense, music is not ‘about’ anything but is rather a material that happens over time and in particular ways. Music is a medium, par excellence, of showing us how happening may occur; its forms and gestures stand, in Eyerman and Jamieson’s (1998) sense, as exemplars. One against many, all together, fugal, homophonic, softly, loudly, gentle or abrupt, legato, staccato, relaxed, tense, juxtapositions, variations, monotony – music is a medium that shows us ways of happening and, in common with dance, drama and cinema, music moves through time; indeed, it creates its own time and its own history, cyclical, linear, recursive. Music is also a physical medium, one that in and through its production shows us actors as they are engaged in forms of embodied production – the alarmingly extended cheeks of Dizzy Gillespie, the ‘throaty’ voice of Louis Armstrong, the apparent ease of Joan Baez’s upper range, the oarsmen-like approach of a tutti string section. Just how these things are perceived, what they are taken to mean and what they may a ord cannot be specified through musical analysis, traditionally conceived. These matters are, as was argued in chapter 2, best pursued through ethnographic investigation.

In the earlier chapters of this book, examples were provided where music was seen to work as a model – for conception, for a range of bodily and situational activities, and for feeling, whether as emotional work or as a way of heightening particular modes of feeling. We have also seen how the appropriation of music as a model often occurs at the semi-conscious, non-rational level of human existence even as and when its appropriation may be understood as aesthetically reflexive action. Music may serve, for example, as a model of self, a resource for articulating and stabilizing selfidentity (‘the me in music’, as Lucy put it). One can find one’s self in music’s ways of happening, draw parallels between it and one’s self such that one may say to self and others, ‘as this music happens, so do I’. One can also recall one’s self on rehearing music (for instance, ‘as this music happened, so did I’) and music is a key resource for the production of autobiography and the narrative thread of self. We have also seen how music may serve as a model of where one is, is going, or where one ‘ought’ to be emotionally (‘it gets you in the mood’), such that an individual may say to him or herself something on the order of, ‘as this music is, so I should or wish to be’. Music is one of the resources to which actors turn when they engage in the aesthetic reflexive practice of configuring self

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and/or others as emotional and aesthetic agents, across a variety of scenes, from quasi-public (a ‘buzzy’ barbecue or a ‘sophisticated’ cocktail party) to intensely private (an intimate encounter). In public, music may be most e ective at times when individuals experience social and aesthetic uncertainty, such as that described in chapter 5, where music may pro er cues and models for ‘appropriate’ agency within a setting. There, too, we saw music as providing a way of modelling future action and interaction, ‘setting the scene’, so to speak, by exemplifying action styles and ways of happening. Music’s capacity for exemplification arises from its primary and secondary significations; actors may refer to music’s sensuous properties as well as to the connotations they perceive within its structures. As a model, music serves as a resource for the generation and elaboration of ways of happening in many other realms. In this capacity it also serves as a means of melding present to future in so far as it may be applied in ways that permit cultural innovation in non-musical realms. As music is seen to be organized, so too can people and institutions be organized. In this sense, music may serve as a resource for utopian imaginations, for alternate worlds and institutions, and it may be used strategically to presage new worlds. As Pelle Ehn describes this role of ‘sensuous knowledge’ in the workplace (Ehn 1988:449), so, too, music provides a fund of materials that serve as paradigms, metaphors, analogues, hints and reminders of activity, practice and social procedure.

But music’s powers extend beyond its capacity to serve as a paradigm. Its temporal dimension, the fact that it is a non-verbal, non-depictive medium, and that it is a physical presence whose vibrations can be felt, all enhance its ability to work at non-cognitive or subconscious levels. Indeed, to speak of music merely as a kind of exemplar is to remain committed to a cognitivist conception of agency, one that is organized around the notions of mental skill and interpretive practice. Such a conception stops short of the more profound levels on which music also operates, the levels on which we do not turn to music as a resource but are rather caught up in it, find ourselves in the middle of it, are awakened by it. Victor Turner, whose work o ers one of the most extensive theorizations of culture-as-performance, has himself emphasized this point, suggesting that the notion of the cultural paradigm, ‘goes beyond the cognitive and even the moral to the existential domain’ (1981:149).

In the discussion of music and aerobic exercise this point is perhaps most strikingly illustrated. There, when music is used successfully to configure the aerobic embodied subject over forty-five minutes, we can actually see music as it configures, reconfigures and transfigures subjects, their modes of consciousness and their embodied capacities. There, music works as a prosthetic technology of the body, heightening and