Nick Prior

Critique and Renewal in the Sociology of Music: Bourdieu and Beyond

This paper reviews the status, position and legacy of Bourdieu in the sociology of music, the waxing and waning of his influence and the recent move away from Bourdieu towards something like a post-critical engagement with musical forms and practices. The idea is to show the reaction to and treatment of Bourdieu’s ideas as a gauge of where we are in the sociology of culture, the various strands of influence that emanate from his work, and to assess what is at stake in a ‘post-Bourdieu’ moment when a position once considered progressive and critical now acts as the foil against which new work is being conducted. The article engages with some recent contributions to the music/society debate from figures in the UK and France, and points to the ways these contributions move debates on musico-social relations into territories more sensitive to the complex mediating qualities of music. Such work is better placed, it is argued, to represent music as an animating force in everyday life, including its specific mediating qualities ‘in action’. At the same time, however, the construction of a new sociology of music is not without its perils. The article will conclude with some potential problems with these approaches, and take stock of what might be lost as well as gained by adherence to them.

Putting a Glitch in the Field: Bourdieu, Actor Network Theory and Contemporary Music:

Bourdieus cultural sociology has become increasingly attractive to sociologists of music looking to account for the complex interrelations between industry, institution and practice. There remains, however, a tendency in such work to reduce the complexity and scope of Bourdieus ideas. This paper attempts to apply Bourdieus field theory to music, but does so with a critical orientation. The focus of the paper is the fin de millénaire music style called glitch, a style characterized by sonic fragments of technological error. While we learn a lot about the social trajectories of glitch from greater sensitization to its position in a structured setting of socio-economic relations, it becomes difficult to account for the centrality of technological mediators to this contemporary style of music using Bourdieus categories alone. The paper pursues the possibility of supplementing or combining a Bourdieusian approach with actor network theory.

Speed, Rhythm and Time-space: Museums and Cities

This article assesses some potential approaches to museums and cities propelled by a theoretical preoccupation with modernity as a condition of speed. Here, one can extrapolate two variants in the writings and interventions of Marinetti, Simmel, Virilio, and writers in the postmodern tradition: (a) the museum is slow, it is a brake on modernity, it is modernity’s sedentary other and (b) the museum is fast, it is as quick as the city, reflecting modernity’s impulse toward acceleration. To finesse these approaches, the article will move toward the method of rhythmanalysis and an emphasis on time—space considerations. It is Lefebvre’s teasing last snippets on the concept of rhythm, the article will argue, presaged by Benjamin’s approach to the variant tempos of modernity in The Arcades Project, that point to a fuller and more advanced approach to urban—museological relations and the multiple rhythms that feature in both.

OK COMPUTER: Mobility, software and the laptop musician

In this article I address some images, categories and open-ended trajectories of the laptop in music production. The aim is to explore the laptops increasing presence in the sites of music, from cyberspace to live venues, as well as the relationship between music and mobile computerized space. Implicit in the article is the claim that the laptop is a neglected device, but that close attention to its position in cultural networks and everyday settings is one way of examining some possible ways into the complex entanglements and layerings of mobile space. The first part of the article explores the laptop as the archetypal nomadic machine of the digital age, inserted into mobile networks, hubs and flows. The laptop mediates mobility and by doing so not only serves macro-processes of social and economic change, but also opens up creative possibilities for the musician beyond the studio and the home. The second part of the article examines the role of software in activating the laptops capabilities. The growth of music software and Virtual Studio Technology in the early 2000s, it will be argued, represents a major transformation in music production. A case study is made of a single application, Ableton Live, to show that new forms of music software encourage norms of creativity and play that take it beyond emulations of hardware studios. A residual distrust of the laptops automative capabilities, however, reprises an anxiety in the history of popular music around questions of creativity and musicianship. The final part explores this anxiety and argues that the laptop is a place-holder for conflicting meanings about what belongs in music: productivity and creation, reality and virtuality, play and work, the cybernetic and the organic. It thereby reveals socio-technical imbroglios in action, where digitized music and software code meet the material properties of technologies and the practices of users in complex, networked societies.

‘It’s A Social Thing, Not a Nature Thing’: Popular Music Practices in Reykjavík, Iceland

Over the last three decades, Iceland’s reputation has been increasingly tied to the prominence of its popular music. Associated with an effervescent independent scene and the global successes of the band Sigur Rós and the singer Björk, the country has been positioned as one of the world’s most vibrant cultural hotspots. With particular reference to Reykjavík, the paper aims to show how the city’s spatial configuration favours the development of dense creative networks and attendant forms of knowledge, conflict, diversity and collaboration. It assesses the integrative nature of music education on the island, the formation of a small but influential punk scene and the global marketing of the country’s music through an agile cluster of cultural agencies and intermediaries. Getting a sense of the city’s routine musical practices, it will be argued, opens an aperture on the location of place-based musics within prevailing social and economic conditions.

Editorial Statement: Tracing, Making and Locating Cultural Sociology:

An academic journal is a lot like an artwork. It is the product of collective activity, and the cooperation between participants is organised through joint knowledge of the conventional way of doing things. Editors, as core personnel, are expected to bring more than the technical skills required to assemble issue after issue; this status demands that they also have creative abilities and a vision that will lend the journal a distinctive character. The convention in the publishing world is for this vision to be articulated in the inaugural editorial statement, and depending on whether the editors see themselves as ‘integrated professionals’ or ‘mavericks’ (Becker, 1982), they also indicate the standards of taste to be upheld or introduced. While we will not deviate from this convention, we also see the editorial statement as a deeply symbolic act. It is the ritual equivalent in publishing to the handing over of keys, the changing of the guard, or the swearing in of new office holders. It is the editors’ first opportunity for social performance, where they can ‘display for others the meaning of their social situation’ (Alexander, 2004: 529), and their unwavering commitment to that which is held sacred in their scholarly community. Editorial statements by incoming editors capture a liminal moment in the life of the journal when it is betwixt and between the stewardship of old and new guardians. But in our case, the transition is laden with more significance, not just because it is the first handover in the journal’s history, but also because it aligned with its 10th anniversary volume. Milestones might be arbitrary temporal boundaries, but crossing into the journal’s second decade is experienced as a ‘mental quantum leap’ (Zerubavel, 1996) that prompts a form of biographical occasion to take stock of the journal’s history. To that end, we will begin our editorial statement by considering the position and legacy of the journal before placing ourselves in its unfolding narrative by offering our interpretation of the current state of the field. This sets the scene for the next section, where we reflect on what it means for the journal to serve as an ‘organ of self-consciousness’ (Inglis et al., 2007: 7) in cultural sociology today. In the final section, we identify some of the hot topics and critical conversations we would like to encourage in the journal, as well as our hopes for strengthening and widening the journal’s visibility.

On Vocal Assemblages: From Edison to Miku

For all its hermeneutic density the voice is a profoundly malleable object. By drawing our attention away from the ‘grain’ of the voice to networks of vocality, this article explores how modern mediations of the voice––from the microphone to auto-tune––illustrate its co-evolution with a history of non-human circuits and exchanges. The voice is categorized as an assemblage in the sense suggested by Deleuzian theoretical currents and actor network theory: a multi-scalar, human–non-human hybrid that emerges through nested constellations. Four vocal modalities––synthesis, deconstruction, auto-correlation, and simulation––are identified as integral to a modern history of vocal breaching experiments that transform what voices can be and how they are heard. The final part of the paper explores how these extensions play out in relation to the Japanese virtual singer, performer, and idol, Hatsune Miku. Miku’s voice, it will be argued, is constituted at the intersection of crowd-sourcing, corporate investment and the algorithm. But it also illustrates the distributed ontology of all voices.

Afterword: Mediating the Digital

This pair of essays combines effectively to constitute an invitation and a corrective, but they also pose a set of provoking questions. They invite the reader to ponder if and how technological innovations congeal around contemporary mediated practices in ways which recast our understandings of social and cultural relations. Here, both war reporting and social networks require a distinct sociological treatment, but one which treads delicately between the Scylla of modishness (the uncritical waving of the web 2.0 banner, for instance) and the Charybdis of absolute stasis, where little has changed. In this sense, they show why it is important to resist imprecise characterisations of digital mediations which replace fine-grained examinations of situated material practices with flabby sloganeering. That they do so whilst insisting on the importance of framing concepts reinforces the necessity of a theoretically attuned sociology of the digital that never loses sight of local relations. To bring together networks, mediations and communications is, after all, to associate three complex and multi-layered terms that have abstract qualities as well as evoking palpable, concrete, material worlds.