Connecting sounds

The social life of music

Nick Crossley

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526126047
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Crossley argues that music is a form of social interaction, interwoven in the fabric of society and in constant interplay with its other threads. Musical interactions are often also economic interactions, for example, and sometimes political interactions. They can be forms of identity work, for both individuals and collectives, contributing to the reproduction or bridging of social divisions. Successive chapters of the book track and explore these interplays, in each case combining a critical consideration of existing literature with the development of an original, 'relational' approach to music sociology. The result is a grand sociological vision of music which captures not only music's context but 'the music itself'. The book will appeal to social scientists, musicologists and cultural scholars more widely.

1
Introduction

Music is an important thread in the fabric of the social world. It is a form of social interaction; one amongst many forms which concatenate, interpenetrating and overlapping in the ongoing process which generates, reproduces and transforms our societies in their various local, national and global manifestations. That, at least, is the central claim of this book. It sounds simple. However, unpacking it and filling in its details gives rise to questions and complexities which it will take the whole book to tackle.

The book covers a wide range of themes, from meaning, taste and identity, through social division, cohesion and the dynamics of economic and political life, to the various social worlds (‘music worlds’ as I call them) which form around different clusters of musical interactivity. Underlying all of this, however, is a relational conception of both social life and music. There are several competing versions of ‘relational sociology’ in the literature (Depelteau and Powell 2013), with the perspectives of Born (e.g. 2010a) and Bourdieu (1984, 1993) proving particularly influential within music sociology (Bennett et al. 2009; Born 2005, 2010b; Prior 2008, 2011, 2013; Rimmer 2010, 2012; Savage 2006). The discussion in this book converges with these different relational perspectives at points and departs from and disagrees with them at others (see also Bottero and Crossley 2011; Crossley 2011, 2013a). However, my conception of relationality is different and has been developed – partly in relation to music, but also in more general theoretical discussions – across a series of books and papers (Crossley 2011, 2013a, 2015a, 2015c, 2016). This intellectual trajectory, which the present book continues, elaborating further the distinctive relational approach to music sociology sketched therein, requires brief elaboration.

Several years ago I wrote a book about the origins of punk and post-punk in the UK (Crossley 2015a). In this book, taking Becker (1974, 1982) as my point of departure, I developed a concept of ‘music worlds’ to capture, amongst other things, the network of participants involved (i.e. musicians, audience members and the assortment of managers, promoters, engineers etc. whom Becker collectively terms ‘support personnel’) and their various interactions and relations. The idea that early punks formed a network was central to this study and I used the techniques of formal social network analysis (SNA) to analyse this network (on SNA see Borgatti et al. 2013; Scott 2000; Wasserman and Faust 1994).¹

The ideas originating in this work were subsequently developed across a number of papers. Working both alone and with others, I further elaborated the ‘music worlds’ concept and used SNA to analyse: Sheffield's folk-singing world; the UK's trans-local underground heavy metal world; UK music festivals and the artists who perform at them; and Turkish, university-based music festivals and their artists (Bottero and Crossley 2011; Crossley and Bottero 2014, 2015; Crossley and Emms 2016; Crossley et al. 2015; Crossley and Ozturk 2019; Emms and Crossley 2018; Hield and Crossley 2015).

Networks are central to relational sociology; but not only networks. It is my intention in this book, in addition to further elaborating upon the importance of networks, to bring a wider range of relational concepts to bear upon music and also bring a wider range of music's facets into relational perspective. I will make a start here by briefly sketching the foundational arguments of my relational perspective (see also Crossley 2011, 2013a, 2015c, 2016).

My point of departure is a critique of those approaches to sociology which either reduce society to an aggregate of individuals or reify and hypostatise it as an individual in its own right with goals and the means to achieve them (Crossley 2011, 2013a, 2015c). Rational choice theory is an example of the former approach. Functionalism and teleological forms of Marxism exemplify the latter. In contrast to these approaches I propose that the building blocks of society are: (1) social interaction; (2) the more enduring social relations which form within interaction and subsequently shape it; and (3) networks of interaction and relations, which both shape and are shaped by them. And I propose that these building blocks are irreducible – sui generis as Durkheim (1979) would say. ‘Society’, on whatever scale we may wish to focus (e.g. local, national or global), is a network on this account; a huge and immensely complex network of interactions and relations operating on different scales and in different ways.

Actors and their agency are important in relational sociology, not only in their human but also their corporate forms; that is, in the form of organisations – such as economic firms, governments, trade unions and pressure groups – which own and control resources and make and implement decisions in ways which are irreducible to the individual human actors who staff them (see Hindess 1988). Actors are not discrete atoms, however, and they do not pre-exist social life. They are formed in and by social interaction.

This is obvious in relation to corporate actors, whose decisions and actions, whilst irreducible to those of the human actors who compose them, are nevertheless dependent upon them. Human actors too are the product of interaction, however. Infants interact with their adult carers from the moment of conception and must do so given their biological dependency. However, their capacity for interaction and agency is initially very limited and only develops by way of nurturing and learning within interaction. The infant becomes a social actor by engaging with others and thereby acquiring: a sense of self and identity; practical skills and embodied know-how; moral sensibilities; the capacity for rational deliberation; and both language and the capacity for reflective thought that it engenders. Biological organisms become social actors through social interaction, and interaction is therefore irreducible to ‘the actor’.

Indeed, the human organism itself, as a product of evolution, was shaped by the demands of social interaction and relations. Collective living considerably enhanced the survival and reproduction chances of our primate ancestors, generating a selection pressure for traits conducive to it. Certain of our hardwired biological attributes were selected for in the evolutionary process because they better equipped us for social interaction and the formation of enduring social relations (Wilson 2012).

In addition, actors never exist apart from networks of interaction and relations (‘the individual’ is an abstraction) and their thoughts, perceptions, interpretations, decisions and actions are shaped by these interactions and relations. Social interaction forms an irreducible system: A responds to B, who responds to A in a circular dynamic which can only be understood as a whole. As Merleau-Ponty argues in relation to conversation, interaction gives rise to sui generis dynamics. It is not decomposable into the individual contributions of its participants:

my thought and his are woven into a single fabric … called forth by the state of the discussion … inserted into a shared operation of which neither of us is the creator … the objection which my interlocutor raises … draws from me thoughts which I had no idea I possessed …. making me think … It is only retrospectively … that I am able to reintegrate it and make of it an episode in my private history. (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 354)

These arguments call for a situated conception of the actor; situated, that is, within networks, social relations and interactions which both shape the actor and draw her into action. However, they do not dispense with actors as functionalist and structuralist arguments do. Actors are never entirely independent and autonomous from a relational perspective but, qua interdependent agents, they remain a driving force of society. Agency and its creative, inventive potential are central (on this point I agree strongly with Born (2005, 2010b)).

A situated conception of agency has the advantage, moreover, of facilitating, indeed demanding, a focus upon social structure. This is not the place to discuss structure in detail. Briefly, however, it has three interpenetrating aspects as I conceptualise it (see also Crossley 2011).

First, social structure is network structure. Social actors, human and corporate, are connected. That is what makes them ‘social’. And their connections concatenate to form structures whose properties generate opportunities and constraints for them, at different levels, simultaneously steering the social processes which arise within them.

Second, participants in social interaction orient to conventions, forged within earlier interactions, which structure both them and the wider relations and networks to which they belong. ‘Conventions’, as I conceive of them, do much of the structuring work that Bourdieu (1992) assigns to ‘habitus’ and our orientation to them is often habitual. Used in conjunction with ‘habit’, however, ‘convention’ better captures this structuring work. For example, it allows for those cases, such as that of the neophyte who has yet to form a habit, where interaction is structured through self-conscious observance (of convention). More importantly, it better captures the relational nature of social structure. Habits (or habitus), even when collective, are localised in individuals. Conventions, by contrast, following Lewis's (1969) definition of them as solutions to ‘coordination problems’, involve intersubjective agreement.² They form between actors. Where habits steer individual behaviours, conventions structure interaction and relations. They allow actors to coordinate their ac...