Sociology of Music: Tendencies, Issues, Perspectives

Sociology of Music: Tendencies, Issues, Perspectives

International Conference

Lisbon, Portugal, 23-26 July 2009

Scientific Co-ordination

Mário Vieira de Carvalho (CESEM – Universidade Nova de Lisboa)

Christian Kaden (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

Organisation Commitee

Mário Vieira de Carvalho; Paula Gomes Ribeiro; Ângelo Martingo

During recent decades the Sociology of Music has developed, expanded and diversified its thematic areas and methods extensively. New approaches, crossing the research fields of both sociology and the musicology, have emerged. The interdisciplinary spectrum has increasingly widened. Both critical-theoretical issues and empirical studies have broadened their horizons. The Sociology of Music has evolved in an integrative direction, by taking into account the contributions of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Aesthetics, Psychology and Psychoanalysis, Economics, Theories of Reception, Communication and Systems, Gender, Cultural, Comparative and Globalisation Studies. Its impact on the field of Musicology – for example, in Composition and Performance Studies or Musical Analysis – has increased. The dichotomy between music and society, which was still postulated at the beginning of Musicology as a scientific discipline and even of the Sociology of Music when the latter gained some methodological autonomy, has today been largely overcome. Most approaches now deal with musical praxis as social interaction, musical material and works of art as encoded society, musical meaning as a result of social processes in changing life-worlds, system-environment exchanges by making or listening to music, and so on. The Sociology of Music has also contributed to a self-critical musicology, which becomes aware of the social construction of knowledge and consequently aims at producing a socially more valid knowledge. Of special importance seem to be the growing connections to Historical Anthropology. Music Sociology is not bound to the empirical research of actual processes of ‘musicking' (C. Small) but decidedly to historical environments, historical ‘events', and to an interpretation also by taking into consideration the culturally native's vision.

The international conference is organised by CESEM – Centro de Estudos de Sociologia e Estética Musical (Research Centre for the Sociology and Aesthetics of Music) of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, in scientific cooperation with the chair for Music Sociology of Berlin Humboldt-University. It will be held in Lisbon, on 23-26 July 2009, and aims to bring together different tendencies in the Sociology of Music, their theoretical approaches, preferential topics, as well as to raise new issues and to discuss future research perspectives and forms of scientific cooperation and networking.