Sociology of Music Research Papers (original) (raw)

SUMMARY: SOCIOLOGY OF THE BODY OF ROCK 1 Introduction This work on the body of rock and sound interactions is the result of the academic and musical research. On one hand is an acoustic archeology of the rise of British rock (60'). On... more

SUMMARY: SOCIOLOGY OF THE BODY OF ROCK

1 Introduction

This work on the body of rock and sound interactions is the result of the academic and musical research. On one hand is an acoustic archeology of the rise of British rock (60'). On the other it‘s an investigation of the academic possibilities of sociology. In both cases the fundamental the role is played by the ear, that thing that lies behind the ears, a sense as obvious as sight that has been so mistreated by the sound excess of our time and our History. The ear/hearing is the axis of this thesis. It is its perspective.
Based on the sociological theory of habitus as body, history and technique (basically, Pierre Bourdieu, Norbert Elias and Marcel Mauss ), and trying to develop a phenomenology of sound perception (sociological ear/hearing) from the work of some ethnomusicologists (Steven Feld, Charles Keil and Thomas Turino) and using the very sociology of rock (Simon Frith, Motti Regev) or the acoustic ecology (Murray Schafer), I have started analyzing the emergence of rock as the establishment of a new social ear/hearing or sound field that is manifested in its works, in the way of making them or carrying them out and the relationship they have with the situation in which they arise. Through historical cases and analysis, I test, first, some assumptions concerning precisely this capacity of objectification of rock as a cultural event, while on the other hand I try to develop an analysis of the possible relationship between body and the new technologies of music production.

2 Objectives

The main goal of all this work has been to apply a new perspective in sociology (at least in the Spanish sociology). A perspective that we can say it enables to operationalize the weberian maxim of understanding social facts from our own feeling nature, emphasizing, because of the sonic nature of rock, the world of sound and experience. To access this social ear/hearing, I tried to develop an approach that focuses its attention on the sociology ear/hearing, and I have called it sonic sociology or sounding interactions sociology. To achieve this, I started from the bourdian sociology and interest in the study of habitus as analysis of the institution of the social in the bodies and in the fields. First, searching for the impact it has had on the sociological theory of rock and developing a field theory of cultural production linked to the rock industry. And then, introducing the ethnomusicological perspective that has allowed me to think and locate sound phenomena in their cultural and technological context.
As for the complementary goals of this work, they point to the social life of sounds and the way they are lived and their capacity to objectify themselves and their social surroundings, even if that means \to allow the incorporation of elements that, for lack of a better term, we might call non-humans. (Latour, 2008: 107). These goals or intentions are operationalized in a number of assumptions: a technological hypothesis about the relationship between music, body and technology, which postulates that the body, returning to Simon Frith (1996) and his so called stages of musical storage (Folk, and Pop Art), disappears from music as its support with the spread of the pentagram representation, but returns with the emergence of new audiovisual technologies that, while not bringing back the body as a physical body, it returns the body as a place in which the music occurs.
Furthermore, I have presented a number of hypotheses about the objectification of the field of rock. First, as Pierre Bourdieu notes regarding Flaubert 's writing (2002a), the works -and this includes the whole output of rock- can objectify the social space at which are born: not that they reflect the social space, but that they generate and give meaning to it. Secondly, that the hexis of rock .as a bodily matrix of the way of doing things in rock- can play a similar objectification in relation to the social space at which is brewing. Combining these hypotheses about the objectification of rock with the technological hypothesis, we come to the third assumption: the generating formula behind the production of rock in general and the record production in particular is based both on a socio-cognitive generative matrix and the technological evolution that precedes and constitutes it.

3 Results

The first result of the use and combination of these theoretical and analytical perspectives applied to our case is a sociological and conceptual scheme of the rock body during the years of the beat boom (in section 5). Taking the sound interactions as our independent or fixed variable, we were able to draw some general lines of progression of the beat boom situation, with the Beatles on top of it. As seen in sections 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4, the body that bajtinianly emerges from the toilet and rises to a royal position and then retires, matches different fields of musical activity. In turn, these musical fields (using Thomas Turinoes ethnomusiclogical frame) are objectified after the status obtained by these beat boom musicians. Being no more than mere backing musicians in a field of participative and presentational activity in the first half of decade (60e), then they gain recognition as artists through the development of the studio audio art that allows the recording studio in the second half of the decade. This sound production, with its reception and consumption, helps to transform the nature of the rock body and its miraculous qualities acquired during the beat boom (in section 5.3). The table in section 5.1 summarizes these results.
A second result of the combination of these perspectives applied to our case is the matrix of the generative formula of rock (in 6.5). Analyzing the recording adventure of our cases (the Beatles, the Who and the Kinks, but applicable to the vast majority of acts that, in the wake of the Beatles, pounced on to the compositional work, sooner or later, like the Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, Small Faces, Cream, etc.), we discovered and were able to establish the main lines that constitute the habitus of the rock album of the sixties, focusing on two ideal states, the very stage of the beat boom and the step that benefits from its consequences. The table at the point 6.5 summarizes the results.
A third result was the confirmation that, in effect, both the body and technology are fundamental to rock, to rock music as cultural production and as a form of leisure and consumption (in Part III). Thus, through the analysis of sound interactions occurring within rock .albums and singles, concerts, films and tv footage, different fields of musical activity-, we could delve into the return of the body .moved away by the civilizing process. Finally, when we look at the history of rock, how it developed from the mechanization of electronic music on the one hand, and the so called body release on the other, we note that the body of rock it is there .but confronting the technological hypothesis, it is not: it seems to be there, but is not. When the music is live (folk) we have the body present; in the score (within Simon Frithes stages in the relationship of music with technology, the one he calls art) we have a non-body or a split or idealized body, a supposed one; with the recorded sound we have a \body., a body recovered from certain traces that are technologically captured.

4 Conclusions

In the end, the search for sound traces allowed us to analyze specific cases in the shaping of the social ear/hearing that is generated in rock. For example, it allowed us to see how, in the staging of those bands associated with the music industry, after presenting and studying the creation of a formula for the record production under the paradigm of rock, sound homologies do exist between the records as sound conceptualizations of ideals and their live performances as an attempt to achieve this ideal in a ritual or community time; and also homologies that could be called consonants, homologies between the records and the field of cultural production that is organized and propitiated around them. That is, it allowed us to get closer to the ear, as a stylized or socialized way of hearing, as a fundamental element of social and bodily coordination, as part of the constitution of a field of cultural production. Secondly, this sound archeology allowed us to study and analyze some specific cases: for example, the construction of the voice of rock, at which interact the body and its parts (lungs, larynx, intensities, etc.), physical techniques applied to sound and musical body (shouting, crooning, transposition of the vocal habitus of rhythm and blues, girl groups, call and response, etc.) and technologies (tapes, double tracking, ADT, etc.) in cultural and musical production of rock.
Finally, we can say that popular music in postindustrial age has brought the body back into the spotlight. However, it is not a full come back or at least is not a return to a preindustrial or an ethnological body: it is an altered body, made from the great innovations in communication and audiovisual media, and ites combined with psychotropic experimentation and the new mass phenomena. Although all this technological progress will bring back a body that, under rationalism, had vanished, it will be, as demonstrated, not a complete return but a representation of the body, a remembrance, or perhaps a celebration of its own demise.