Sociology and Music Education

Ruth Wright

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351548342
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Sociology and Music Education addresses a pressing need to provide a sociological foundation for understanding music education. The music education community, academic and professional, has become increasingly aware of the need to locate the issues facing music educators within a broader sociological context. This is required both as a means to deeper understanding of the issues themselves and as a means to raising professional consciousness of the macro issues of power and politics by which education is often constrained. The book outlines some introductory concepts in sociology and music education and then draws together seminal theoretical insights with examples from practice with innovative applications of sociological theory to the field of music education. The editor has taken great care to select an international community of experienced researchers and practitioners as contributors who reflect current trends in the sociology of music education in Europe and the UK. The book concludes with an Afterword by Christopher Small.

Chapter 1

Sociology and Music Education

Ruth Wright

One could say that the main service the art of thinking sociologically may render to each and every one of us is to make us more sensitive … Once we understand better how the apparently natural, inevitable, immutable, eternal aspects of our lives have been brought into being through the exercise of human power and human resources, we will find it hard to accept once more that they are immune and impenetrable to human action-our own action included.

(Zygmunt Bauman, 1990, p. 16)

Introduction

This book is intended to deal with issues of sociology as they apply to the field of music education. It is not intended, nor could such a volume ever manage, to be comprehensive in its coverage of sociological theories, movements and topics; the field is simply too broad. What I and the other authors who have contributed to this text have tried to do, however, is to present some relevant sociological ideas as they relate interestingly to matters of music education. You may ask: why do we need such a book? I would argue that the answer is because, as Bauman says above, once we begin thinking sociologically we find that we have a new lens to bring to bear upon some of the issues that have vexed music educators persistently since the field was first given a name. Questions as to whether and which music should be included as a compulsory element of school curricula and, if so, in what form originated with some of the first considerations of how we should formally educate human young (see Plato, 2008) and some of these may even have been implicit in our earlier ventures into education (see Mithen, 2005, The Singing Neanderthals). More recent questions concerning the ownership of music in education, the amount of control pupils should have over their experiences in music classrooms and the extent to which various groups and individual learners are relatively advantaged or disadvantaged by and in music education are also of the greatest interest. Not only does sociological thinking present us with a new lens or set of lenses through which to examine such issues but it may also help us to begin to see our way towards answers to questions, answers which have proved particularly elusive in the past. Sociological theory is good to think with, it gives us a framework around which to order our investigations and analytical tools with which to dissect what we find. Perhaps most importantly it makes the familiar strange, so that we have the opportunity to see it as if for the first time. One could argue that this is something that much music education research has tended to lack in the past.

To begin with, it might be helpful to readers who have not previously ventured into the field of sociology to look briefly at what sociology entails and the ideas of some of its major figures. I hope this will help to set the scene for the concepts discussed in the chapters that follow. Of necessity, given the space available to discuss these issues in this volume, they are rather broadly stated and oversimplified but suggested readings are given at the end of the chapter for those who wish to explore the ideas in more detail at a later date. This first section is explicitly sociological. It prepares the way for the second half of the chapter, however, in which connections are drawn between sociology and the field of music education.

What is Sociology?

In its broadest definition, sociology is the study of human societies with particular reference to those developed since industrialization. The American sociologist C. Wright Mills (1916–62) famously coined the term the ‘sociological imagination’ to challenge observers to move beyond abstract, scientific enquiry and to think imaginatively about social life. This required them to detach themselves from social preconceptions and to bring history and biography in their relationships to society under consideration. This ability to detach oneself and to imagine the lives and circumstances of ourselves and others, and envision how they might be potentially different, has led to some of the most potent analysis and theory concerning the human condition.

Origins of Sociology

The word sociology was first used by the nineteenth-century French theorist Auguste Comte. He believed that although each scientific discipline had its own subject matter, all disciplines shared a common logic and a common scientific method of enquiry that should be used to discover universal laws. Comte’s original term was in fact ‘social physics’, which he later changed to ‘sociology’ to avoid confusion of his ideas with those of his contemporaries. Comte believed that as discovery of the laws of nature was allowing humanity greater control over the natural world, so discovery of the laws of human society should allow for greater control over the course of human destiny and more effective action to improve human welfare. Comte was much influenced by the social turbulence of the age in which he lived. The period following the French Revolution had heralded great unrest and an unprecedented rate of social change. As industrialization spread rapidly throughout France, the lives of workers were again being transformed at an alarming speed. Little wonder, then, that Comte, like many other philosophers, was consumed with trying to understand the changes he observed occurring around him. This concern with understanding change became particularly apposite for future sociologists as the rate of change in societies accelerated throughout the industrial and modern eras. Such changes were further enhanced by the effects of developing technology and increasing social and geographical mobility, which brought about attendant changes in the nature of the labour market. Sociological theory has multiplied at an exponential rate since the work of Comte and has been brought to bear upon an ever increasing range of subjects, such that understanding sociology is becoming an increasingly time-consuming and complicated task. Craib (1997), however, helpfully suggests that underlying the complexities of the multitude of theories and perspectives now presented as sociology there is an organizing framework resting on four tensions or dualisms that theorists seek to address to varying degrees. An understanding of these dualisms helps us in positioning various theories and reducing the apparent complexity of the field. They are shown in Table 1.1. Its language and choice of emphases are inevitably somewhat idiosyncratic. Differing approach paradigms or schools of thought in sociology can all be taken to be concerned with the dualisms which he lays out without sharing either the same vocabularies or hierarchies of explanatory adequacy. Conventionally these are thought and taught about as originating in the work of a succession of nineteenth-century thinkers, upon the basis of whose empirical and theoretical work a variety of twentieth-century approaches were built. The character of the structure of this knowledge, as is general in the social sciences, is horizontal, rather than vertical; descriptive, with relatively weak internal grammars, rather than empirically robust and theoretically cumulative, as with the case of natural sciences, such as physics (Bernstein, 1999).

Table 1.1 Underlying Dualisms of Sociological Theory Adapted from Craib 1997, pp. 7–8

Individual		Society
How does the individual/individuals relate to society? How does society relate to the individual/individuals? Which is dominant/ takes priority?
Action		Structure
How do human beings’ abilities to act (agency) either individually or collectively relate to the organisation of society (structure)? Which is dominant/takes priority, action or structure?
Social integration		System integration
A development of the action/structure dualism How do individuals relate within society? (social integration) How do different parts of society relate to each other? (system integration) Do they relate through harmony or conflict? Either can be a type of integration Is either dominant?
Modernity		Capitalism-socialism
Has modernity inevitably produced modern societies and their features? Has a particular form of modern society – capitalism – produced modern societies and their current features? Could modern societies be transformed by another form of social organisation – socialism? Would they then possess different features or are the effects of modernity upon societies inevitable?

Some Key Figures in Classical Sociology

It is usual to identify four key figures whose contributions to sociological thought were particularly important in creating what has become known as classical sociology: Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. They were all male, reflecting the patriarchal character of relationships between power, gender and academic recognition in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One English, female sociologist, Harriet Martineau, is now recognized as contributing to early developments in the field before Marx, Durkheim and Weber. Her contribution includes translating Comte’s work into English and authoring the first systematic sociological treatise How to Observe Morals and Manners (2005). Her work would almost certainly have had greater influence on classical sociology and been more prominently recognized had her gender been different, and she exemplifies how female sociologists have been excluded from the discipline until comparatively recently.

Auguste Comte (1798–1857)

An interest in studying human behaviour and social organization had been evident throughout the Enlightenment – the period around the eighteenth century when modern science developed and there was a new belief in the power of reason and the potential improvement of the human condition – and there were many who contributed to early sociological thinking. Comte envisioned sociology as a positive science. Marshall (1998) has suggested that Comte’s use of the term positivism has frequently been misinterpreted to suggest that he embraced empiricism – the reliance solely upon physical, observable evidence as the basis from which to infer laws. He suggests that while Comte took the natural sciences as his model for inquiry, he used his term positivism to suggest that his science was positive rather than negative in approach. Comte considered that the Enlightenment thinkers had been too critical of social conditions and had failed to recognize the essentially beneficent nature of some social institutions and, moreover, the fundamentally interrelated nature of them all. Within his consideration of the social whole, Comte identified topics which he suggested should be the specific object of sociological investigation: ‘economic life, ruling ideas, forms of individuality, family structure, the division of labour, language and religion’ (Marshall, 1998, pp.105–106). Today these areas, or subsets of them, still occupy the minds of the vast majority of sociologists.

Karl Marx (1818–83)

Like Comte, the German theorist Marx sought to understand the reasons for the failure of the French Revolution to make actual the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity. He also wished to explain the changes occurring in society during the Industrial Revolution. Marx positioned himself in opposition to the philosophical movement of German idealism and in particular the thought of Hegel. Hegel’s concept of ‘idealism’ at its simplest posited that the social world is produced from ideas; that human beings formulate ideas and then make them real. On this reading, then, history is the gradual realization of thought or Reason. Marx’s reaction was, famously, to turn Hegel on his head. Marx argued that ideas developed from action, from life, what Marx thought of as the material basis of society, and not vice versa. As Marx continued to try to understand this material basis of life it led him to the consideration of economics. To simplify, Marx became interested in the effects of the day-to-day experiences of people producing goods for consumption by the rest of society. Marx argued that these daily experiences of production shaped the ways in which people thought about politics and about the world.

Marx (1982, p. 37) famously posited that human consciousness must be understood in terms of the material conditions within which it was formed: ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence but their social existence that determines their consciousness’. Also important in Marx’s analysis were the relationships between people based on the ownership of property, factories, land and so on. Marx termed these the ‘relations of production’. It was important whether one employed people or lived on the ability to sell one’s labour as these relationships allocated people to different social classes, who then shared a common world view through shared experiences of work. Marx and Engels elaborated upon this to show how the relations of production of material wealth generated ideology whereby the ideas of the ruling class encouraged acceptance and perpetuation of the social status quo by those whom they dominated:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Sociology and Music Education
• 2 Research in the Sociology of Music Education: Some Introductory Concepts
• 3 Class, Power, Culture and the Music Curriculum
• 4 Music Education from the Perspective of System Theory
• 5 Unpopular Music: Beliefs and Behaviours towards Music in Education
• 6 The Sociological Critique of Curriculum Music in England: Is Radical Change Really Possible?
• 7 Ethnicity and Music Education: Sociological Dimensions
• 8 Towards a Sociological Perspective on Researching Children’s Creative Music-Making Practices: An Exercise in Self-Consciousness
• 9 Gender Identity, Musical Experience and Schooling
• 10 Modernity, Identity and Musical Learning
• 11 Towards a Broader Conception of Creativity in the Music Classroom: A Case for using Engeström’s Activity Theory as a Basis for Researching and Characterizing Group Music-Making Practices
• 12 Revealing Musical Learning in the Informal Field
• 13 Musikdidaktik and Sociology
• 14 Culture, Society and Music Education
• 15 Listening To Children: Voice, Agency and Ownership in School Musicking
• 16 Democracy, Social Exclusion and Music Education: Possibilities for Change
• Afterword
• Index