Music is an accumulation of mediators: instruments, languages, sheets,
performers, scenes, media and so on. There is no musical object 'in
itself'; music must always be made again. In this innovative book,
Hennion turns the elusiveness of music into a resource for a pragmatic
analysis: by which collective process do we make music appear among us?
Rather than offering a sociology of music, The Passion for Music listens
to the lesson provided by the case of music - this art of infinite
mediations. Learning from music allows us to transform the paradigm to
be offered by sociology, by confronting it (from Durkheim and Weber to
Bourdieu) with a different way of considering objects. For this task,
Hennion draws on aesthetics (Adorno) and art history (Haskell,
Baxandall), as well as science and technology studies and popular music
studies (Latour, Frith, DeNora). As part of that project, The Passion
for Music presents a wide-ranging series of case studies, restoring
attention to the rich and varied intermediaries through which music is
brought to life: from the debate around the reinterpretation of baroque
music, to the classroom, the rock scene, the classical music concert,
Bach's 'social career' in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and
the practices of music 'amateurs' today. This is the first English
translation of one of the most important works of French scholarship on
music and society.
