Passion for Music: A Sociology of Mediation

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.

• 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, 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!