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Highlights the importance of music in ritual and culture generally, extending the focus to collective action. Argues that music and its emotional and cognitive impacts can be fundamental to the construction of social movement culture. Analyses song lyrics from the southern textile strikes of 1929‐1934 in an attempt to show how music and song helped construct a collective identity across relatively dispersed mill villages, shifted accountability for mill workers problems towards the labour process and its beneficiaries and suggested to the listener a collective solution. Discusses the implications of the findings for understanding music, culture and their relation to subordinate group challenge.

In this brief essay, I will describe the compatibility of a postmodern turn in sociology and the symbolic interactionist approach to the study of music in everyday life. This compatibility is reflected in the work and career of musical artist Matisyahu, as illustrated by the concept of pastiche. The interaction among the three dimensions of image, music, and religious ideology in Matisyahu’s work operationalizes this concept. The primary resources for this analysis include Matisyahu’s recorded music; an interview conducted with him by The Times of Israel in which he explains his personal transition from the Labuvitch movement to the Modern Orthodox Movement and how this transition affected his music; and my attendance at four of his concerts in Central Texas. Pastiche refers to “a free-floating, crazy quilt, collage, hodgepodge patchwork of ideas or views. It includes elements of opposites such as the old and new. It denies regularity, logic or symmetry; it glories in contradiction and confusion” (Rosenau, 1991, xiii). I conclude with a brief pedagogical argument on how to expand the use of music to explain complex sociological theory and social phenomena. By highlighting theoretical concepts through music, we can ground new and complex ideas in lived experiences and engage students with a topic that is grounded in their daily life experience.

Howard Becker’s theory for the sociology of art (including music) revolves around the simple, and often overlooked fact, “All artistic work, like all human activity, involves the joint activity of a number, often a large number, of people.” Among Becker’s writing about music, he presents an idea that I find is still relevant today, namely, that sociological and ethnomusicological work seem to be two hands of a single body that have little idea of what each other are doing. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Becker and Kay Kaufman Shelemay, I propose a model for the construction of the music event that highlights the relationship among the many systems behind the musical experience. I provide a case study of Inuit throat singing to demonstrate the effectiveness of this model in trying to explore the relationships among music, culture, and society.

In this paper, I use 33 interviews with songwriters to explore the relationship between songwriting and emotion, particularly as it relates to the lived and embodied aspects of emotional experience. I contend that songwriting can be understood as a form of sensual reflection and inquiry, one that synthesizes the emotional and evocative properties of both music and language. For songwriters, the creative process of songwriting serves as an embodied vehicle through which to assign meaning to lived emotional experience and the self. Resultant performances represent an expressive forum in which to communicate the outcomes of this process. For sociologists of emotion, examining the neglected process of songwriting represents an opportunity to extend the study of emotion beyond discursive and dramaturgical approaches, lending fresh insight into the lived, embodied character of emotion.

This paper investigates the meaning of sound in social life through participant observation of Experimental Improv and Noise (EIN) collectives in Virginia, United States. Employing a blend of interactionism and musical sociology, this paper is attentive to the sonic practices of EIN, examining how participants construct shared meanings about abstract, or even antimusical, sounds. The ability to construct shared meanings with nonpractitioners shapes the art world of EIN and has relevance for the resources available to EIN. In this way, I show how sonic practices are involved in the formation of the collaborative networks that undergird art worlds. I argue that the creation of shared meanings in interaction can generate new organizational forms as musicians build their own scenes and audiences in the digital age.

Consecration represents the most definitive form of legitimation in every cultural field. Complementing previous research focused on individual, contextual, and structural conditions underpinning consecration, this paper takes a sequence analytical perspective and explores whether diverse creative trajectories are more frequently associated with consecration. We introduce the notion of signature style and the pace of category spanning as key features for consecration. We argue that a consecrated signature style is just as likely to result from a producer’s adherence to a specific style over time or from a consistent (and fast-paced) category-spanning creative trajectory. The resulting identity will be specialist in the first case, eclectic in the second. We analyze the stylistic trajectories of 863 electronic music artists and find robust support to our hypothesis. The analysis is corroborated by further exploratory findings that identify intriguing questions for future research. By examining the organization of creative journeys in the career of cultural producers, this paper emphasizes the importance of considering the unfolding and rhythm of creativity over time. This temporal perspective sheds new light on the dynamics of distinctiveness and consecration in cultural fields.

It's a simple idea, really: music has force. In The Mourning Bride, William Congreve famously wrote that music has “charms to soothe a savage beast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.” Just about anyone who's ever listened to music will agree with that. Upbeat songs energize us, and ballads bring us to tears. Music moves us in so many ways – to say nothing of the ways we use music to move people (see the U.S. Marine Corps use of heavy metal music to extract Manuel Noriega from Panama). It's simple, really.