Music in a capitalist culture

Midterm paper for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg

Max Weber locates the roots of capitalism in vestigial puritanical Protestantism. Émile Durkheim, in turn, gives a theory of how that Protestantism arose in the first place. In this paper, I ask two questions. First: can Weber’s and Durkheim’s theories of religion be extended to explain culture generally? Second, and more specifically: can their theories explain music?

Music is a valuable lens for examining cultures, because while every world culture includes it, the particular form and function varies considerably from one culture to another. Contemporary America contains a variety of musical subcultures and countercultures that overlap and conflict with one another. We might follow Weber’s example and say that America’s culture has capitalism as its single defining feature. And we might say that America’s commercial pop mainstream defines our musical culture. But those two generalizations conceal roiling masses of unresolved conflict.

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Music Matters chapter nine

Public-facing note taking on Music Matters by David Elliott and Marissa Silverman for my Philosophy of Music Education class. 

Research into music psychology (and simply attending to your own experience, and to common sense) shows that music arouses emotions. However, there is no conclusive way to explain why or how. To make things more complicated, it’s perfectly possible to perceive an emotion in a piece of music without feeling that emotion yourself–you can identify a happy song as being happy without it making you feel happy. Music and emotion are inextricably tied up with each other, but how does music arouse emotions, and how do emotions infuse music?

Elliott and Silverman summarize some major philosophical theories of musical emotion (or lack thereof).  Continue reading

Émile Durkheim – Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg

This week, we read another cornerstone of the sociology canon: Émile Durkheim on where religion comes from.

Émile Durkheim

The book is very much a product of its time, with continual and annoying references to “primitive” religions and peoples. No question that Durkheim’s methodology doesn’t pass contemporary muster. But his theoretical insights are on point.

[R]eligion is something eminently social. Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities; the rites are a manner of acting which take rise in the midst of the assembled groups and which are destined to excite, maintain or recreate certain mental states in these groups (10).

You could substitute the word “music” for “religion” and this paragraph would still be true. This is food for future thought.

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