Discussions on the Subject of the Sociology of Music

Introduction. The article discusses the genesis and content of the formation of sociological explanation of music as an element of culture and of the sociological perspective as a paradigm of social and cultural study of music. Research in this area of sociological knowledge has evolved from understanding music “in general” as the highest abstraction and attributing it to the aesthetic realm of perception to questions about how musical structures and practices reflect, model, or resonate with the identities, experiences, or structural positions of social classes, genders, and ethnic groups. Methodology and sources. Critical theory (P. Bourdieu), interactionism, constructivism (P. Berger, T. Luckmann, E. Chester, W. Straw) constitute the methodology and theory. Within the constructivist paradigm, such social categories as class, sex, ethnicity, age, subculture, counterculture, identity, gender and so on were introduced into the sociological field of music researchers. This made it possible to fill the subject area of sociology of music with a variety of substantive meanings and thus substantiate the expediency of this branch of sociological knowledge. Results and discussion. Understanding a work of art, particularly music, in all its manifestations, as mediations (“mediation”) means considering the work in all the details of the gestures, people, habits, materials, spaces, languages, and institutions it inhabits. No work of art is actualized for an individual as a social beings without accumulated forms of mediation – styles, grammars, systems of taste, programs, concert halls, schools, entrepreneurs, and so on. Conclusion. The theme of mediation as an empirical means of revealing the sequential development of a work and its perception (for the sociologist) reopens the “work-taste dualism”, which represents an attempt to overcome a conflict of views: on the one hand, works remain at the disposal of aestheticians and musicologists, and on the other hand, sociological judgment, that reduces music to ritual. At this point, the formation, functioning and transmission of links between the features of a musical work and social groups should be the main subject of the sociology of music, since in this case we observe dialogue and reconciliation between the two opposing views.

Authors: Maksim P. Zamotin

Direction: Sociology

Keywords: sociology of music, mediation, sociology of art, popular culture, social constructivism, culture, identity, social groups

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