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.
"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!
"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!