Competitions have been a visible and controversial part of the classical music world for over a century, yet sociologists have strangely neglected to study their social significance.This article explores the competition's ongoing contest for legitimacy by considering the case of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.Through a discourse analysis of publicity materials and media coverage, I reconstruct the symbolic frameworks that guide the construction of the event and the interpretation of competitors' performances. I also trace the critical challenge to the idealized representations of the event, and decode the gender ideologies implied in commonly used metaphors. Demonstrating the centrality of meaning in musical production and reception, I aim to expose the limitations of the production perspective and Bourdieu's model of the artistic field, offering in their place a new approach based on social performance.
Realism has predominated in discussions about the coronavirus pandemic where politicians, authorities, and commentators debate over the substance and consequence of scientific facts. But while biology played a crucial role in triggering the pandemic, the resulting crisis developed through a social process. In this paper, I argue that the coronavirus pandemic in Britain was successfully framed as a crisis, but that the ritualization of solidarity normally generated by this meaning was compromised. Through an analysis of media coverage and official statements from the government, I trace the discursive construction of the crisis through the deployment of battle metaphors. Building on this discourse analysis, I show how the symbolic alignment of the pandemic and the Second World War revived symbols and tropes that informed the cultural construction of pandemic heroes. To explain why the intensity of the crisis framing was not matched in ritual performance, I consider how the government’s ambiguous policies and erratic social performance produced a state of indefinite liminality, subverting solidarity processes in lockdown. The paper offers insight into the experience of anomie during the pandemic and contributes to the strong program in cultural sociology by incorporating the crisis approach in disaster studies into the social drama framework.
Although competitions in classical music have a long history, the number of contests has risen dramatically since the Second World War, all of them aiming to launch young artists' careers. This is not the symptom of marketization that it might appear to be. Despite the establishment of an international governing body, competitions are plagued by rumors of corruption, and even the most mathematically sophisticated voting system cannot quell accusations that the best talent is overlooked. Why do musicians take part? Why do audiences care so much about who wins? Performing Civility is the first book to address these questions. In this groundbreaking study, Lisa McCormick draws from firsthand observations of contests in Europe and the US, in-depth interviews with competitors, jurors and directors, as well as blog data from competition observers to argue that competitions have endured because they are not only about music, they are also about civility.
This article examines how scholarship in the sociology of music has been dominated by an economic framework known as the production/consumption paradigm. It first traces the history of the production/consumption paradigm through its appearance in key texts, showing how it changes as it passes from Theodor W. Adorno and Pierre Bourdieu to the American production of culture perspective. It then presents a thematic overview of the literature and highlights the strengths of established research agendas as well as the blind spots that reveal the need for a more cultural approach. It also considers music as a text, as a resource, as a product, and as performance before proposing an alternative to the production/consumption dichotomy. The article argues that the growing interest in performance presents an opportunity not only to advance the study of music, but also to engage with the core theoretical issues in sociology.
The spectrum of spoken English was measured in 13-octave bands for men, women, and children. The speech produced by reading aloud newspaper text was recorded in an anechoic chamber for each member of groups of ten men, ten women, and six children. The combined output of each of the three groups was obtained by electronically mixing the member outputs with a 16-track tape recorder. After mixing, the resulting recordings were analyzed in 13-octave bands and converted to spectrum levels. The spectra exhibit peaks and valleys not revealed with wider-band analysis, but when the results of the 13-octave analysis are combined to simulate octave bands there is agreement with the previously published literature. Next these free-field spectra were converted to give the spectra at the eardrum of a typical listener, thus allowing for head diffraction and the resonance of the ear canal. The spectra so obtained have peaks appropriate to typical values of Fo, F1, and F3 for each of the groups. The region usually associated with F2 spans a dip between the F1 and F3 regions. At the eardrum, the frequency region from about 1.7–4 kHz, which is usually associated with F3 and many of the friction generated components in speech, lies only 5–10 dB below the maximum levels in the low-frequency region.
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