ITU—MIAM—Spr 2017

MYE/MYL 5029E: Selected Topics in Music and Sociology

Doctoral Credit under MDP 634E

Instructor: Dr. Jane Harrison, Office Rm. 223

Class Meetings: ???

Course Description
The field of sociology offers theories with impressive explanatory power and
methodologies of great utility to musicological inquiry; music is an activity performed
by humans working in groups (even seemingly solitary music makers are typically not
working in isolation), and sociology is a vast collection of data and ideas about groups of
humans. Looking back, I regret not having had a more thorough and systematic
introduction to the current state of sociology while I was still a student; this course will
I hope offer students at MIAM such a chance. We will seek to avoid the cherry-picking
approach that much touted interdisciplinary endeavors often become. Instead we will
aim at a broad base of knowledge from which individual students can pursue their own
interests in an informed and systematic way. Many of our texts have been written by
sociologists and do not have music as any sort of focus. Our task will be to dive into this
field that is quite different from the music scholarly fields, and after familiarizing
ourselves, engage in a critical discussion with the readings and seek points of
application to our own research within them.

Course Material
For the first six weeks of the course, students will need to purchase a reader and a full
copy of De Nora (2000) under the title of our course at Elif Kırtasiye; call to order your
copy before you pick it up at 0212 259 08 39. Students might also be asked to purchase
additional readers for the class. Other assignments will be found online or sent through
email.

Evaluation
1. Concept quizzes (25%): For each week’s assignments, students will be given a list of 10-15
concepts that they should pay attention to as they read. At the beginning of the class
students will be asked to write a paragraph on one of those concepts, in which they
define the concept and subject it to a few sentences of rigorous discussion. As a result,
students will gain a potentially new vocabulary of specific terminology and salient
examples that they have more or less committed to memory. Master’s students: 3/5
average for full credit; doctoral students: 4/5 average for full credit.
2. Reflection journal (15%): Should contain at least 8 entries corresponding to 8 different
class days. Can be handwritten or typed.
3. Final paper (30% final draft, 15% first draft, 5% proposal and bibliography): We are
concerned with quality and not necessarily number of pages here. Strive to do original
research and to make use of the new methodological strategies and perspectives on
cultural phenomena that this class will bring to you. Your paper must engage
significantly with the field of sociology; that is, please do not write an ethnographic,
historical, music analytical, or semantic study with a few sociology concepts mixed in.
 Students can choose to work on their final project in collaboration. About two weeks
before the due date students will turn in a first draft of at least 6 pages so that they can
receive feedback from me.
4. Attendance and in-class participation (10%)

Final Grading Scale

AA 92-100

BA 85-91

BB 78-84

CB 70-77

CC 60-69

FF (fail) 59 or lower

Course Policies
1. Students are expected to take good notes on the assigned readings.

2. Students who are auditing the class are asked to complete all reading assignments
and to try to contribute somewhat to the discussion. Passive participants can negatively
affect the learning environment. Please consider taking the class for credit in the future
if you are strongly interested in the topic.

3. “Plagiarism” means the close or exact copying of someone else’s work without giving
due credit. “Someone else” refers to published authors, classmates, handouts from other
professors’ courses, and all kinds of anonymous sources you might find anywhere,
including the internet. Reusing things you yourself have already written at any point in
the past will also be treated as plagiarism. I encourage you to take advantage of the
assignments this semester to further your musical, writing, reading, and English skills.
In today’s increasingly global world skills such as these can translate into power and
opportunity. I would always rather see your best attempt at original thought than a
summary of what someone else has said. Have confidence in yourself and take some
risks!

4. If students want to meet to help each other understand assigned readings it should
not be a problem. Problems will likely arise, however, when students work too closely
on their preparation for the concept quizzes. If I deem certain answers to one of the
quizzes to be too similar, their authors will not receive credit for them.

Partial Schedule
Feb6 Introduction and course planning: syllabus, interest survey

Feb13 Broad Survey of the Field of Sociology, 1

Mel Churton (2000), Skills-Based Sociology: Theory and Method, pp. 3-90,
156-191. Ignore all of the exercises and assignments.

Concepts: capitalism emotion work

class consciousness act
bourgeoisie Verstehen
hegemony positivism
culture industry quantitative data
social fact patriarchy
sampling representativeness

Feb20 Broad Survey of the Field of Sociology, 2

E.C. Cuff et al (1998), Perspectives in Sociology, pp. 149-179.
Sean Hier ed. (2005), Contemporary Sociological Thought, pp. 91-110.
Churton, Skills-Based Sociology, pp. 191-244. Ignore all of the exercises.

qualitative data ethnomethodology

cross-cultural research self indications
common-sense attitude acting units (in Mead)
intersubjectivity Shetland Isle examples
situatedness (of action) working consensus
visibility arrangements initial projection
reflexivity

Feb27 Broad Survey of the Field of Sociology, 3

Hier ed., Contemporary Sociological Thought, pp. 465-476.
Cuff, Perspectives in Sociology, pp. 257-280, 309-338.
Churton, Skills-Based Scoiology, pp. 245-276.

chilling
methodological pluralism
episteme
archaeology
discursive formation
biopower
structuration theory
lifeworld
Ms.
authenticity
languages of expression
politics of difference
Mar6 Tia De Nora (2003), After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology,
Chapters 1,2,3
negative dialectics The Musical Event
arrangement (Adorno) Adorno’s conductor study
Adorno’s Beethoven De Nora’s Lucy case study
Latour’s pumpkin logic of disintegration
affordance Adorno’s critique of Stravinsky

Mar13 Tia De Nora, After Adorno, Chapters 4,5, chapter 6 recommended

record collection cultural repertoires
body as an instrument anchoring practice
preparatory set French/German wine study
Enigma store study Pipedown

Mar20 Quantitative Studies

1. Colin Robson and Kieran McCartan (2016), Real World Research, 4th ed., pp. 404-441.
2. Richard Peterson and David Berger (1975), “Cycles in Symbol Production: The Case of
Popular Music,” in On the Record: Pop, Rock, and the Written Word, Simon Frith and
Andrew Goodwin eds., pp. 117-133.
3. Tom F.M. ter Bogt et al. (2011), “Intergenerational Continuity of Taste: Parental and
Adolescent Music Preferences,” Social Forces 90(1): 297-319.

Broad issues to think about

1. Method of data gathering
2. “Level of analysis” following DeNora and other theorists we have studied
3. Nature of analyzed variables (their strengths, their limits)
4. Interpretation of statistical results
5. Consideration of specific musical details

A: basic analytical terms

descriptive statistics
frequency distribution
correlation coefficient
exploratory factor analysis

B: concept quiz concepts

statistical significance o
“four firms” of radio x
homogeneity of product x
disc jockeys x
Beatlemania x
structural equation modeling x
taste socialization theory x
omnivorous taste x
Highbrow taste x
Mar27 Spring Break—no class

Apr3 Cultural Sociology

1. Jeffrey Alexander (2003), The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology, pp. 3-
26, 193-224.
Concepts: cultural autonomy, cultural text, modernity, telos, Huck Finn
Gorbymania
2. Andy Bennett and Jodie Taylor (2012), “Popular Music and the Aesthetics of
Ageing,” Popular Music 31(2): 231-243.
Concepts: Ageing punks, performative assemblages
3. Lisa McCormick (2009), “Higher, Faster, Louder: Representations of the
International Music Competition,” Cultural Sociology 3(5): 5-30.
Concepts: Van Cliburn (the person), Olga Kern, fused performance

Final Paper Proposal due ( abstract + bibliography of at least 10 sources)

Apr10 Theories of Pierre Bourdieu

homologies
position-taking
habitus
field (specific to Bourdieu’s thought)
reflexive sociology
cultural capital
codification of culture

Apr17 Bourdieu’s Theories in Music Research

alafranga
Imperial Band (Muzıkay-i Hümayun)
Doxa
Darül’elhan
Fine Arts Academy

glitch music
Mille Plateaux (company)
laptop performance
machine-body assemblage

habitus of listening,
rasa
structural coupling

Apr24 Feminisms
gender ideology, out-of-control domains, kulintang, Indian courtesan tradition
bourgeois femininity, postural mirroring
embodied cultural capital, doing gender, metalhead habitus, folkie habitus
May1 No class

May8 Work of Simon Frith/sociolinguistics

struggle for fun”, leisure commodities, rough leisure, punk, campus culture
Martha’s Vineyard Study, centralization index, speech community, stylistic variation, change from
below/change from above

May15 Instructor at Conference—no class

May 24 First draft of paper due (6-pp. DS minimum)

June 7 Final paper due