The 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.