The Passion for Music

A Sociology of Mediation

Antoine Hennion, translated by Margaret Rigaud, Peter Collier , Mr. Gary Ansdell

$284

Hardback

Not in-store but you can order this
How long will it take?

Availability Information

We source books from suppliers in Australia and overseas. For books we don't currently have in stock, the time it takes to get them from our suppliers can vary widely - from a few days to a few months - so we check each book with each supplier to determine the expected time it will take to be supplied to us.

We then advise you accordingly. If the time taken to get any book is too long for you, you can let us know and we will cancel or adjust your order, and refund as required.

To find out the anticipated arrival time for specific items prior to ordering, please contact us by phone or email:

Phone +61 2 9264 3111, or 1800 4 BOOKS (1800 4 26657) if outside Sydney:
option 1 Abbey's Bookshop (Crime, History, Science, Kids & more) • info@abbeys.com.au
option 2 Language Book Centre (ESL & Foreign Languages) • language@abbeys.com.au
option 3 Galaxy Bookshop (Sci-fi, Fantasy, Romance, Graphic Novels) • sf@galaxybooks.com.au

QTY:

English

Routledge
28 June 2015

Theory of music & musicology; Sociology

Series: Music and Change: Ecological Perspectives

Music is an accumulation of mediators: instruments, languages, sheets, performers, scenes, media and so on. There is no musical object ’in itself’; music must always be made again. In this innovative book, Hennion turns the elusiveness of music into a resource for a pragmatic analysis: by which collective process do we make music appear among us? Rather than offering a sociology of music, The Passion for Music listens to the lesson provided by the case of music - this art of infinite mediations. Learning from music allows us to transform the paradigm to be offered by sociology, by confronting it (from Durkheim and Weber to Bourdieu) with a different way of considering objects.

For this task, Hennion draws on aesthetics (Adorno) and art history (Haskell, Baxandall), as well as science and technology studies and popular music studies (Latour, Frith, DeNora). As part of that project, The Passion for Music presents a wide-ranging series of case studies, restoring attention to the rich and varied intermediaries through which music is brought to life: from the debate around the reinterpretation of baroque music, to the classroom, the rock scene, the classical music concert, Bach’s ’social career’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the practices of music ’amateurs’ today. This is the first English translation of one of the most important works of French scholarship on music and society.

By: Antoine Hennion, translated by Margaret Rigaud
Translated by: Peter Collier
Series edited by: Mr. Gary Ansdell, Professor Tia DeNora
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Edition: New edition
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm, Spine: 21mm
Weight: 806g
ISBN: 9781472418104
ISBN 10: 1472418107
Series: Music and Change: Ecological Perspectives
Pages: 352
Publication Date: 28 June 2015
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Contents: Preface; Introduction; Lasting things: Durkheim as a founding father of the sociology of culture; Transition: restoring the mediators: one method for two programmes; Before mediation: social readings of arts; Sociology and the art object: belief, illusion, artefacts; The social history of art: reinserting the works into society; The new history of art: the social in the art work; Transition: linear causes or circular causalities?; The Baroque case: musical upheavals; Transition: ‘unhappy music’ which ‘fade[s] away as soon as it is born’…: painting-and-objects versus music-and-society?; ‘What can you hear?’: an ethnographic study of a solfège lesson; Transition: music as a theory of mediation; ‘Bach today’; Intermezzo: a sociologist at the Zénith concert hall…; Music lovers: taste as an activity; Conclusion: the representation of music: in praise of musical artifice; Epilogue: ‘Vor deinen Thron’…; Bibliography; Index.

Antoine Hennion is one of the masters of music sociology. He is well known in the Anglophone world for his many articles published in journals such as Theory, Culture and Society, Poetics and Cultural Sociology and in key edited collections, such as Cultural Musicology (2003) and Derek Scott’s Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology (2009). Hennion has held many important offices in international sociology associations (such as President of the ISA Network on Arts Sociology in the mid-1990s) and is a predominant figure in French Sociology today. He has been a visiting Professor at Princeton and Columbia.

Reviews for The Passion for Music: A Sociology of Mediation

Antoine Hennion, one of the foremost sociologists of music in the world, finally becomes available to English-reading audiences in this excellent and long overdue translation of his comprehensive analysis of the bewildering variety of sociological approaches to music that contemporary students of the subject have to choose from. His lucid explanations and examples are a wonderful introduction to an important and ever-growing field. - Howard S. Becker, author of Art Worlds The arguments in this text are worth grappling with, whether or not one works in the area of culture and music. (...) English readers of sociology inhabit a richer space now that they can encounter Hennion's book, based on his dissertation, well after its influence has reshaped the field of the sociology of music. - Shamus Khan, Columbia University Hennion's theory of mediation provides a comprehensive approach to the study of music, one which considers the training, production, and consumption of music, without dismissing its aesthetic dimension or the individual participant. - Thomas M. Kitts in VOLUME!