Weber on Music: Approaching Music as a Dynamic Domain of Action and Experience

Abstract

Max Weber's music writings (including his unfinished Music Study) have always mesmerised readers but their importance for analysing music as a cultural domain has only started to be acknowledged. This paper focuses on Weber's approach to the inner 'developmental momentum' of the music domain through his study of the particular tension that pervaded Western harmonic music. By showing how composers, performers, instrument manufacturers, art recipients and the instruments themselves had to grapple with such tension, Weber was able to give an account of the inward connection to an art sphere and its structuring effects, whilst also bringing social, economic and technological factors to bear. In the current debate on the desirable ways for a renewed sociology of culture, Weber's music writings present us with a path at once precarious and bold, an account of inner connections and outer relations, which, against Weber himself, also provides bases for aesthetic judgment.

Of Sound and Flavour – Revisiting the Notion of Material for the Cultural Sociological Analysis of Art Domains

“…Max Weber used the notion of domain of culture (Gebiet der Kultur), sparsely, but in a crucial reflection of the 'development momentum' of domains of art, and anticipating his study of music. He thus linked the notion of domain (which is admittedly vague) to a dynamic historical approach which he aimed to articulate to a more sociological approach (as he indeed started to do in his unfinished study of music) (Darmon, 2015). Etymologically, domain, in French and English, and Gebiet in German both suggest a bounded territory, a jurisdiction, and, by extension, a bounded area of knowledge and/or action.…”

The Virus as a Catalyst for Culture? Sociological Reflections Using as Example the Musical Practices during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…During the pandemic, a great number of remote music recording initiatives have sprung up, providing artists with space for entirely new forms of musical communication by artists and for crossing geographical and temporal boundaries. Moreover, globalized musical culture has never been so close to what Max Weber wrote long ago when he discussed the phenomenon of music rationalization (Weber 2009;Darmon 2015). By revisiting Weber's assumptions, one can certainly argue that the global quarantine has accelerated in an unprecedented way a type of musical practices that would certainly not have emerged so rapidly in normal (non--pandemic) times.…”

Deciphering Markets and Money: A Sociological Analysis of Economic Institutions

“…In particular, he identified processes of increasing rationalization, typical of modern capitalistic economy, but also evident in almost all other areas of modern life. For example, in his sociology of music he analyzed the Western tonal system as a good example of the process of cultural rationalization and calculation (Darmon 2015). Weber was, however, by no means a historical materialist who would have searched for the determination of culture and art in economy.…”