Music and Society in Discourse

A Lecture Series

Max Weber’s fragmentary essay, Die rationalen und soziologischen Grundlagen der Musik (“The Rational and Sociological Foundations of Music”), written in 1912-13, is, from today’s perspective, something like the “big bang” within the discipline of music sociology in the German-speaking world.

As representatives of Europe’s only Department of Music Sociology (IMS), we took the 100th anniversary of this field of research as an opportunity to inaugurate the lecture series Music and Society in Discourse.

Today, the sociology of music represents a rather small discipline with a relatively low degree of organisation (few dedicated textbooks, journals, or conferences) and neither a unified research tradition nor a binding canon of research questions and methods. As such, in the course of its history, music sociology has produced extremely heterogeneous scientific and theoretical positions and methodological approaches to the study of the relationship between music and society.

The aim of our lecture series is to invite scholars from different disciplines (sociology, musicology, cultural studies, media studies, cultural anthropology, ethnology, etc.) to the mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna to discuss their respective theoretical and methodological standpoints in order to arrive at a current inventory of the field. Our aim is to present interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary discourses in the heterogeneous field of music sociology in all their diversity.

In this way, we hope to stimulate the discourse on the sociology of music, since the Music and Society in Discourse lecture series is also intended to promote the networking of scholars working in this field.
 

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