Music-in-Action Selected Essays in Sonic Ecology

This volume brings together DeNora’s work published between 1986 and 2007. It includes thirteen essays, some of which have had a major impact on the field. The chapters trace the development of her work from its early concern with musical meaning, historical ethnography and the ’everyday’ perspective, to its current focus on music in action. Topics covered include Adorno on Schoenberg and Stravinsky, a theory of music as a space and place for interpretive work, research methods for historical musicology, and the first key statement of her theory of music as an active ingredient in social life. These building blocks are then employed to investigate music and embodied experience, sexuality and gender differentiation, and music’s role as a technology of health. The essays are set in a multi-disciplinary context with an autobiographical introduction.

Contents: Introduction; Bibliography; Structure, chaos and emancipation: Adorno's philosophy of modern music and post-war avant garde; How is extra-musical meaning possible? Music as a place and space for 'work'; Deconstructing periodization: sociological methods and historical ethnography in late 18th-century Vienna; The musical composition of social reality? Music, action and reflexivity; The biology lessons of opera buffa: gender, nature, and bourgeois society on Mozart’s buffa stage; Music and erotic agency - sonic resources and social-sexual action; The concerto and society; Music as agency in Beethoven's Vienna; The pebble in the pond: musicing, therapy, community; Health and music in everyday life - a theory of practice; Evidence and effectiveness in music therapy: problems, power, possibilities and performances in health contexts; Postlude: two or more forms of music; Name index.

Tia DeNora, Professor of Music Sociology, Exeter University, UK