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.

About the Author
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
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



Book Information
ISBN 9780367598938
Author Antoine Hennion
Format Paperback
Page Count 352
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 780g