Abstract
Despite the large amount of sociological work on human embodiment very little has been done on the embodiment of music or musicking. In this paper I seek to open this area up by way of two key concepts: ‘body techniques’ and ‘music worlds’. Specifically I seek to explore the role of body techniques within music worlds. The first part of the paper engages with the work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Culture Studies on subcultures, considering how this might shed light upon the body techniques used by audiences in music worlds. The second part turns to artists, support personnel and their body techniques. In this second part specific attention is given to the interplay between body techniques and other key elements of music worlds, namely networks, conventions, resources and places.
Keywords
As Driver and Bennett (2015) observe in a recent article, there is surprisingly little sociological work on the link between music and human embodiment (important exceptions include DeNora [2000, 2003] and Shilling [2005]). Their own paper offers a partial corrective to this, focused largely upon the affective attachment of participants to a local hard-core punk scene and the visceral nature of that participation. This paper is intended as a further corrective.
Music and embodiment are each big topics, however, and it is necessary to focus more narrowly. I do so here by anchoring my reflections to two concepts which I have discussed separately at length in previous work: music worlds and body techniques (Crossley, 1995, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2015a, 2015b; see also Bottero and Crossley, 2011; Crossley and Bottero, 2015; Crossley et al., 2014; Hield and Crossley, 2014).
I begin by briefly outlining these concepts. Having done this I turn to the implicit focus on embodiment in the subcultural work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Culture Studies (CCCS). This work has been strongly criticised in recent years and I agree with much of the criticism. The music world concept is intended, in some part, as an alternative to the concept of ‘subculture’, which addresses the latter’s shortcomings. In particular, where ‘subculture’, at least as the CCCS theorised it, is focused almost exclusively upon audiences (indeed it is only focused upon music to the extent that music is appropriated by working-class youths in their efforts to resist domination and alienation), ‘music world’ focuses upon artists and what Becker (1982) calls ‘support personnel’, as well as audiences. But what the CCCS scholars said about audiences touches upon embodiment in ways which remain very significant and which resonate with the idea of ‘body techniques’, and we need to incorporate and build upon these insights with the concept of ‘music worlds’. That is the aim of the first half of this paper.
In the second half of the paper, I turn to look at support personnel and artists, considering how their roles also involve body techniques. I begin with a general reflection on the embodiment of their roles, before considering how body techniques are dynamically interwoven with four other key components of music worlds: conventions, resources, social networks and places.
As noted above, DeNora (2000, 2003) offers an interesting analysis of embodiment and music, which has been taken up and discussed further by Shilling (2005). This work is important. Like the CCCS, however, DeNora focuses exclusively upon audiences and consumers in this work (although see DeNora, 1995, where she engages directly with music worlds, but not embodiment). Furthermore, her focus is different to my own in the respect that she is focused upon the way in which music is woven into everyday life, often in situations where it is not a primary focus: e.g. muzak in shops, and music in aerobics classes. In contrast to this, the ‘music world’ concept denotes a social space centred upon a self-identified musical style; a space set aside from other concerns, at least to some extent, where music is a primary focus and where participants share a set of musical preferences and knowledge. DeNora’s work may have some relevance in such contexts, and I identify where that is in what follows. In particular, her interest in the uses of music is important. However, my focus requires an alternative approach centred, as previously noted, on body techniques and music worlds.
Body Techniques
As defined by Marcel Mauss (1979), body techniques are ‘uses of the body’ which vary across societies, sub-populations within societies, such as status groups, and historical periods. In some cases this is a matter of actors doing ‘the same’ thing in a different way. For example, Mauss observes differences in walking styles between Americans and the French, and differences in swimming styles between his childhood and late adulthood. In other cases, it is a matter of one set of actors having no meaningful equivalent to techniques used by another group. Mauss claims, whilst on ethnographic fieldwork, to have encountered a society whose members did not spit to clear their throats, for example, and we might add that many of the hunting techniques which were widespread and essential to survival in the societies he studied have no equivalent in contemporary Western societies.
This variability indicates the social nature of body techniques for Mauss. ‘Use of the body’ is shaped by both biology (e.g. anatomical constraints) and psychology (e.g. mood) but patterns of similarity within, and differences across, populations of actors suggest a social aspect. We learn how to use our bodies within networks of family, friends, colleagues, and also via the networks of the mass media. 1 Body techniques are ‘social facts’ in Durkheim’s (1982) sense.
Body techniques are not merely patterns of movement, however. Anticipating the work of Merleau-Ponty (1962) and Dewey (1988), Mauss claims that they are forms of practical reason which embody meaning, know-how and understanding. To learn a body technique is to acquire a new way of knowing, understanding and relating to the world and perhaps also to oneself. Such understanding and knowledge are pre-reflective. The actor often cannot explain how they do what they do. They ‘just do it’. But what they do embodies knowledge, understanding and meaning. Body techniques facilitate mastery over particular types of environment.
The relevance of body techniques to music can be drawn out by way of a brief reflection upon musicologist, Christopher Small’s (1998) concept of ‘musicking’, which in turn echoes and deepens Howard S. Becker’s (1974, 1982) understanding of art as collective action. ‘Music’ is not an object, a thing or noun, according to Small, but rather an activity. It is a verb: to music. Music or musicking is something that we do, whether as performers who make patterned sounds; audiences who engage perceptually with those sounds, seeking out patterns, framing experiences in particular ways, attributing meaning and bestowing the status of music and an aesthetic value upon what is heard; or one of the many ‘support personnel’, to borrow a term from Becker (1982), who variously facilitate (e.g. coordinate, engineer, produce, promote, advertise, etc.) such communicative exchanges in both their live and recorded/mediated formats. Becker says much the same thing when he claims that ‘art work’ should be treated as a verb rather than a noun, referring to the work involved in producing and maintaining particular perceptual experiences which are regarded by those involved as ‘art’.
Furthermore, both Small and Becker stress the collective nature of musicking, arguing that all parties to such exchanges, from composer, through performer, via support personnel, to audience, play an essential role, acknowledging that the same person or persons may play several roles in some cases (see also Dewey, 2005, who argues that art does not exist in the absence of an audience who perceive it as such). Becker’s (1974, 1982) concept of ‘art worlds’ seeks to capture such collectives. At its most basic, a ‘world’ is the population of participants involved in doing a particular type of art. My concept of music worlds, discussed below, further develops this idea in relation to music and the different collectives involved in its various forms.
‘Body techniques’ is an important concept in this context because it encourages us to dig deeper into musicking. It requires us to focus concretely and precisely upon what the various parties to musicking do. We have to capture, on the one side, the know-how and understanding (cultural competences) involved, and on the other, the acquired and socially-distributed character of that competence, and doing so in a manner which captures the irreducibly embodied nature of musicking. The embodiment of musicking is assumed by both Small and Becker but remains tacit and unexplored in their writings. The concept of ‘body techniques’ draws it into the analytic foreground (see also Crossley, 2007).
Music Worlds
As just noted, ‘music world’ is a concept I have adapted from Becker’s (1974, 1982) work on ‘art worlds’ (Crossley 2015a, 2015b; see also Bottero and Crossley, 2011; Crossley and Bottero, 2015; Crossley et al., 2014; Hield and Crossley, 2014). It seeks to capture the collective nature of musicking; the multiple relays of interaction, on different timescales and mediated in many cases by technologies, including recording technologies, within and between sets of artists, audience members and support personnel.
Becker’s work suggests four key analytic foci for the sociological investigation of music worlds:
Networks. Participants in a music world necessarily interact with and depend upon one another, forming ties of varying types, durations and intensities. Moreover, this network is dynamically interlocked with the constitutive activities of the world in a feedback loop. Participants draw upon the network in order to organise and promote events, for example, and these events facilitate the revivification, growth and transformation of the network. Becker tends to think of networks both as a division of labour, with different individuals pooling their efforts and resources and playing different roles, and also as a population of enthusiasts drawn together by common tastes and forming multiplex 2 ties with both cooperative and competitive/antagonistic aspects.
Conventions. The cooperation that is necessary to the collective ‘doing’ of music is eased to the extent that particular interaction patterns stabilise as conventions. This can be seen in grosser forms of event organisation but equally within the finer detail of musical work. Western music scales, for example, are conventional, as are the standard tunings of instruments, the dominant system of musical transcription and the defining characteristics of particular musical styles (see also McClary, 2001; Meyer, 1989, 2000). All help musicians to work together, coordinating their activities. Similarly, they inform the ear of the listener, facilitating coordination between artist and audience (Meyer, 1956). Some conventions are common across a number of worlds. Others are specific to particular worlds and contribute to their distinct identity, defining the style (e.g. reggae, jazz or punk) which distinguishes the world (Meyer, 1989). They provide the raw materials upon which (contestable) boundary claims are made (on boundary claims in art worlds, see Fine, 2004).
Resources and Resource Mobilisation. ‘Musicking’ involves the mobilisation, use and exchange of a variety of resources: e.g. time, energy, money, equipment and skill. Furthermore, the distribution of resources across participants in a music world creates relations of inequality, interdependence and (thereby) power between them.
Places. Art always ‘happens somewhere’, Becker (2004) observes, and where it happens often impacts upon the way in which it happens. Music is shaped by the places in which it is made (see also Byrne, 2012; Small, 1998). Furthermore, as anybody with a passion for popular music knows, these places often acquire a quasi-sacred status within a world: from Minton’s in Harlem, where the pioneers of bebop forged their style in the 1940s (Davis, 1990), to Eric’s in Liverpool, where almost every punk and post-punk band of the late 1970s graced the stage (Crossley, 2015a).
The distinction between these four elements is in some cases only analytic. Places are also resources, for example, designated as ‘the place’ by convention within networks of enthusiasts. Moreover, even when they are concretely separable, they interact. Focal places encourage network formation (see Feld, 1981; 1982), for example, and networks facilitate the movement of resources.
Subculture and the Embodied Audience
‘Music world’ is one of several alternative concepts that have been suggested in recent years, as a means of capturing the networks involved in musicking qua collective action, in the wake of extensive critique of the once dominant concept of subculture posited by the CCCS (Clarke et al., 1993; Hebdige, 1988; Willis, 1978; for critiques see e.g. Bennett, 1999; Bennett and Kahn-Harris, 2004; Huq, 2006). I agree with much of this critique. However, the analyses of the CCCS were often focused upon embodiment, even if that word was not explicitly used, and they remain a useful resource. Before turning to music worlds, it will be useful briefly to review this contribution. Three observations are particularly significant.
First, ‘style’ is integral to the CCCS concept of subculture and it implies embodiment. Different subcultures mark themselves out by the ways that their members dress, do their hair, speak, dance and walk. Body techniques, are involved here. Speaking, walking and dancing are all body techniques, and the wider cultivation of visual style through clothing, hair, make up, etc. involves what I have called ‘reflexive body techniques’- that is, embodied ways of acting upon the body to modify it (Crossley, 2005). Looking like a punk requires embodied know-how.
According to the CCCS, these stylistic uses of the body serve to build collective identities amongst members of particular subcultures, marking one subculture out from another, and symbolically resisting a social order in which the working-class youths who (the CCCS scholars maintain) become involved in subcultures are both alienated and dominated. Identification with and loyalty to a social group, as Durkheim (1915) recognised, are communicated by way of the body, and subcultural style simultaneously communicates non-identification with the dominant culture and identification with an alternative culture. Furthermore, for Hebdige (1988), subcultural styles challenge the dominant culture’s taken-for-grantedness and claims to naturalness, by signalling alternative choices, whilst their obvious artificiality exposes that of the dominant culture.
Many of the abovementioned criticisms of ‘subculture’ might apply here. Bennett (1999), for example, argues that youth identification with style, both musical and visual, is more fluid (i.e. contextual, volatile and only loosely bounded) than ‘subculture’ suggests. Similarly, he questions the idea that youths’ musical and stylistic attachments necessarily entail political resistance. These are important criticisms. However, we should not overstate them. Participants in at least some music worlds (e.g. punk, heavy metal, folk, indie and hip hop) do still express their identification by way of their appearance. Furthermore, some music worlds, including punk, folk and hip hop, still function, in some respects, as political public spheres, where oppositional ideas are aired and discussed, and the visual style of their members can be read as expressions of this opposition. The mistake of the CCCS, I suggest, was to posit their concept of style as a categorical constant rather than a variable; that is to say, the importance of embodied visual style varies across both different worlds and different participants in the same world, and should be empirically analysed as such. Likewise, this point also applies to oppositional attitudes and politicisation (on political variation in the folk world see Hield and Crossley, 2014). This is how I propose to incorporate the idea of embodied style within music worlds.
Second, though some subcultures, including straightedge and, in the view of Fonarow (2006), indie, manifest a puritan ethos, many celebrate and facilitate the body’s potential for aesthetic, erotic and other pleasures, and in doing so transgress wider norms of corporeal regulation, threatening to disturb the social worlds (e.g. of work and the household) that such norms protect. Again, however, this is a variable. Some music worlds and some participants within them are more hedonistic than others. Furthermore, the suspension of certain norms and conventions within a music world is facilitated by the upholding of others, and the pleasures achieved often depend upon specific (reflexive) body techniques. As Becker’s (1961) seminal paper, ‘Becoming a Marihuana User’ demonstrates, even the chemical action of drugs must be channelled through embodied know-how if the desired effect is to be achieved.
Recent work on ageing and music consumption adds an interesting twist to this. It highlights the balance which many older participants try to strike between such hedonistic pursuits and the relative frailty of the older body and the responsibilities they have accumulated as adults (Bennett, 2013; Bennett and Hodkinson, 2012). Participants find that recovery from a wild night is harder and takes longer. Combined with the fact that ageing tends to bring social responsibility, such that nights out are increasingly and ever more tightly sandwiched between duties felt to require care and attention, this encourages moderation. Interestingly, for largely the same reasons, older participants also often feel the need to tone down stylistic markers of subcultural identification. A mohican is impossible for a balding man and may be felt to be inappropriate for an office manager.
This reference to age signals the latest in a sequence of challenges which have been made to the demographic profile which the CCCS attach to subculture. They were criticised for ignoring race and gender in early conceptions – an omission which was quickly corrected (Gilroy, 1992; Hebdige, 1988; Jones, 1988; McRobbie, 1991) – and for assuming that subcultures were a preserve of working-class youth, when many working-class youths did not participate to any significant degree and a sizeable minority of middle-class youths did (Bennett, 1999; Clarke, 1990). Now it appears that the assumption that ‘subcultures’ are a preserve of the young is questionable too. Again this should sensitise us to variation. We cannot assume that music world participants are young. Indeed we should not make any demographic assumptions. Rather, we should investigate empirically the demographic profile of both worlds and sub-sets of participants within them (e.g. on sub-sets see Hield and Crossley, 2014). Some are demographically diverse, some selective, and those which are selective select on different criteria. Note also that age, gender and race potentially bring embodiment into our investigation of music worlds in another way. Participation in a music world is affected both by an actor’s physical capacities and constitution (which vary by age, for example), and also by the meanings attributed to particular bodily properties. Furthermore, music worlds are sometimes sites where such meanings are either reproduced or contested.
Finally, Willis’ (1978) comparison of bike boys and hippies identifies the ways in which different subcultures ‘use’ the body and the relation of such uses to wider bodily ways of being. The bike boys, for example, were ‘physical’ and restless in orientation. They were always on the move, getting bored quickly if stationary. They craved speed (on their motorbikes) and put great value upon the physical prowess involved in being a good fighter, dancer, motorcyclist and mechanic. This gelled with their musical preferences: they liked music they could dance to, preferred singles over LPs, which they felt went on too long, and so on. The hippies, by contrast, celebrated their own physical ineptitude, did not often dance to music (they listened), had no preference for music that could be danced to, and preferred LPs to singles because they could sit, listen to and talk about them over an extended period.
Listening Techniques
Willis’ observations identify different embodied ways of approaching and listening to music, linking this to taste. Bike boys like to dance and prefer music which affords this. Hippies do not like dancing. They want to sit, listen and interpret, preferring music which best facilitates and rewards this. These approaches to music consumption can be conceived as ‘body techniques’. They are ‘uses of the body’. And they are also simultaneously different uses of music (on uses of music, see DeNora, 2000). The bike boys use music as a stimulus for dancing and a means of achieving all that dancing can achieve: e.g. wooing girls. The hippies use music as a stimulus for philosophical discussion. We can extend this analysis by exploring the process of listening in more detail.
The auditory engagement and ‘mutual tuning in’, as Schutz (1976a, 1976b) calls it, involved in musical appreciation entail body techniques. What Merleau-Ponty says of sight may equally well be said of listening:
The gaze gets more or less from things according to the way in which it questions them, ranges over or dwells on them. To learn to see colours is to acquire a certain style of seeing, a new use of one’s own body: it is to enrich and recast the body image. Whether a system of motor or perceptual powers, our body is not an object for an ‘I think’, it is a grouping of lived through meanings which moves towards its equilibrium. (1962: 153, emphasis added)
Ways of seeing and hearing are acquired uses of the body: that is, body techniques. We are all familiar with the experience of hearing something new in a familiar song; something we have never heard before but always hear thereafter. Our ear has ‘questioned’ the auditory stimulus in a different way and found something new which it is now sensitised to. Similarly, we are familiar with the process whereby exposure to a particular genre whose songs ‘all sound the same’ at first makes us more discriminating. Habitual familiarity with constitutive stylistic conventions pushes them below the level of our explicit attention, bringing finer variations and innovation to the perceptual foreground (on habituation as desensitisation see Ravaisson, 2008). Furthermore, though this may have individual aspects, it also has the strong collective element which Mauss identifies with body techniques. We learn about new (to us) styles and follow up listening recommendations from friends, magazines, television and websites, learning to listen for what others hear and to interpret and respond to it as they do.
Merleau-Ponty’s reference to ‘equilibrium’ in the above passage means ‘pattern’. As a practical animal, the human organism strives to render its environment intelligible and predictable (i.e. patterned) because this renders it manipulable. John Dewey (2005), who has a similar view, adds that identifying a pattern triggers (aesthetic) pleasure – an association which he explains in evolutionary terms. 3 Ideally, he suggests, pattern recognition should require some effort. Patterns which are easy to find are boring and bring no pleasure. Where patterns cannot be found, however, the result is frustration.
Developing this further and drawing both upon Dewey (1894, 1895, 2005) and GH Mead (1967), the pragmatist musicologist Leonard Meyer (1956), argues that pattern recognition is often aided by the mutual orientation (mutual tuning in) of composer, performer and audience to shared conventions. It is for this reason, he claims, that listening to the music of other cultures can be both hard work and unrewarding. We cannot find the pattern because we do not know, in the embodied way that we know the music of our own culture, what to listen for. However, he adds that music is most pleasurable when it plays with and teases our expectations. Drawing upon Dewey’s (1894, 1895) theory of affect, he argues that teasing generates visceral tension which is then released to pleasurable effect if/when expectations are eventually fulfilled and/or a pattern identified (see also Ball, 2011; Huron, 2007). Knowing this, he continues, composers and performers deliberatively play with conventional expectations – a process which, in turn, causes conventions to evolve over time. Becker (1982) draws upon this idea in his discussion of convention in Art Worlds and it is thus integral to the ‘worlds’ concept.
Pulling these ideas together, I suggest that body techniques of musical appreciation are linked to the visceral, aesthetic pleasure of pattern recognition. To acquire or refine one’s listening technique(s) is to learn a new way of deriving pleasure from a particular type of music. I would also note the similarity between Meyer’s ideas of ‘play’, and the tension–release it involves, and both Elias and Dunning’s (1993) account of the role of cathartic pleasure in The Quest for Excitement, and Simmel’s (1949) similar reflection upon the role of ‘play’ in sociability. Although the economic elements of much musicking conflict with Simmel’s conception, all three explore the intrinsic, embodied pleasures associated with structured social interaction and tension–release mechanisms in play. Meyer is the most important for present purposes, because the form of interaction he explores is musicking. However, the overlap with Simmel allows us to deepen our understanding of musicking as social activity. The relation of artist to audience is a social relation: a form of (sonic) sociability. Similarly, the overlap with Elias and Dunning allows us to situate musicking amongst other quests for excitement and visceral pleasure in contemporary societies. Note that this connects back to my earlier discussion of the ways in which music worlds provide temporary relief from wider norms of bodily regulation (albeit in their own, normatively regulated way). Music is a source of physical excitation and pleasure, and that is one of the reasons that we value it.
Returning to Merleau-Ponty, this is not only a matter of the ear alone or of purely sonic patterns. Each of the senses informs the other, such that the sight of a musician struggling to reach a high note may add to the intensity we hear in the note. Furthermore, this is overlaid, as Lucy Green (1997, 2008) has noted, with what she calls ‘discourse’. Knowing that a piece of music is being performed by a woman, to use her example, may change how we hear the music at the most basic, visceral level.
Beyond Subculture
The discussion of listening (body) techniques has taken us beyond the CCCS concept of subculture. Now I want to take a further step and to engage more fully with ‘music worlds’. A key problem with the subculture concept is that it focuses more or less exclusively upon the consumption of music, affording no proper consideration of production (Crossley, 2015a; Laing, 1985). Properly conceived consumption is part of the production process. Music is an act of communication involving both artist(s) and listener(s), even if, in the limit case, the same person plays both roles. As both Dewey (2005) and Becker (1982) stress, there is no music without an audience who define it as such, listening, hearing, seeking out patterns and thereby finding meaning in it. Willis’ (1990) reflections on the active nature of music consumption overlap with these conceptions. However, consumption is only one element in production, and the subculture concept does not engage with the others. ‘Music world’, by contrast, does. It encourages us to look at both artists and support personnel as well as audiences. We find further body techniques in both cases.
The ability to play a musical instrument or sing, for example, can be conceptualised as a body technique, or perhaps rather as a set of interlocking body techniques (see below) which are more or less important in different music worlds. Learning to play a musical instrument is an embodied process. It may involve reading books and theoretical knowledge, but this is optional. Physical engagement with the instrument and ‘body modification’ are not. Muscles must be strengthened (e.g. the embouchure of the saxophonist or the finger strength of the guitarist), dexterity and coordination sharpened, and detailed nuances of movement mastered. The process is not ‘merely physical’, however. What is acquired is a form of embodied practical reason. Learning to play an instrument is not learning to play particular songs by rote but rather mastering a set of transferable skills and principles. The classically trained can play a previously unknown piece by sight, for example; rock musicians can often do the same by ear. Both may be able to transpose the piece into a different key without preparation. Jazz musicians will improvise on a basic theme. Being able to play entails a variable (see below) degree of mastery over an instrument which, like mastery of a language, allows the player to form expressions which are both individual and creative, and yet structured in an intersubjectively familiar and intelligible way.
Moreover, these techniques, and variations across them, are distributed in a way which betrays their social basis. Different societies, across both space and time, have invented different musical instruments and techniques for playing them. They recognise and use different tonal intervals. And where contemporary Western music focuses upon harmony and melody, other traditions focus upon rhythm, deploying rhythmic patterns which are alien to the Western ear. Indeed, historians and ethnomusicologists struggle to find any meaningful constants in music.
Furthermore, within the West there is marked variation across music worlds (see Finnegan, 2007). And as with other body techniques, ability to play particular instruments is unevenly socially distributed. Work on a range of music worlds suggests a strong gendered aspect, for example, with a number of instruments being deemed either masculine or feminine and being disproportionately selected accordingly (Bayton, 1997; Clawson, 1999; Green, 1997, 2008). Similarly, the cost of instruments and lessons, combined with the effect of social networks, puts them beyond the reach of the less affluent (Bates, 2012). Finally, expertise in certain music styles is often concentrated within particular ethnic communities. Indeed, insofar as music styles emerge out of and are shaped by wider everyday practices, the ease with which individuals can engage with them may be affected by ethnic group belonging. Kofsky (1998), for example, suggests that jazz rhythms are reproduced in the childhood games of African-Americans, and that this makes these rhythms much more accessible to this group:
There is a relationship – difficult to specify with complete precision but real nonetheless – between socialisation games like the Hambone on the one hand and motor skills necessary for participating in black dance or the playing of black music on the other … Socialisation activities … make it clear why virtually all of the major innovations in jazz have been the product of black creativity. Instead of having to learn the basic rhythmic and melodic vocabulary as does a white performer, a black artist is free to concentrate talent and energy on refining, enriching, and perfecting that vocabulary … (1998: 140)
Beyond musicians, many of the support personnel who work with them in music worlds, making a crucial contribution, draw upon a range of important body techniques. Assembling the vast configurations of equipment typically involved in both live performance and recording, for example, requires considerable practical knowledge. This is increasingly recognised in contemporary music, where engineering and production credits enjoy a much greater prominence in both recording and live performance than they did previously.
Body Technical Complexities
If we are to understand musicking in terms of body techniques it is important that we recognise certain complexities. Mauss frames body techniques in a binary fashion: one either has them or not. In practice, however, as Blue (2013) observes with respect to social practice more generally, playing ability falls along a continuum and learning is a lifelong experience. The absolute beginner can often play something from within a few minutes of their first attempt, whilst even the most skilled virtuosos continue to learn and improve. Both ‘have’ the technique but to varying degrees and both continue to learn.
In addition, there are many facets to playing an instrument. A guitarist must usually be able to form a number of different chord shapes, for example, and move swiftly and smoothly between them. They need to be able to keep time – a skill often honed by playing with a metronome. They might need to be able to use a variety of picking and strumming styles. They might, in some cases, need to be able to read music or alternatively to pick out and emulate songs which they hear. They might need to be able to improvise around a basic song structure or transpose a melody from one key to another. ‘Playing guitar’ actually combines multiple acquired techniques, and which of these techniques are important varies across both music worlds and playing contexts. Whilst a folk guitarist will typically need a range of fingerpicking techniques, for example, a punk guitarist may not. ‘Playing guitar’ entails different elements in different worlds.
These qualifications potentially problematise the notion of body techniques. Where a technique begins and ends, and who qualifies as having it, are slippery issues (although see below). However, it is a fascinating sensitising concept which can open up new facets of musicking to sociological investigation. It is in this pragmatic spirit that I push ahead with it here.
Body Techniques and Music Worlds
The arguments of the paper so far suggest that audiences, artists and support personnel in music worlds use their bodies in distinctive ways, drawing upon particular body techniques. The link between body techniques and music worlds runs deeper than this, however. In order fully to understand the role of body techniques within music worlds we must consider the interplay between these techniques and the other elements of music worlds listed above: networks, conventions, resources and places. I begin with conventions.
Body Techniques, Conventions and Understanding
By some definitions, body techniques are conventions. Becker’s use of ‘convention’ entails something more specific, however: the resolution of what Lewis (1969) calls ‘coordination problems’. This deepens and extends our sense of what it is for a technique to be social. Body techniques are social for Mauss because they have a social distribution; one group has a particular technique, another does not. He portrays the exercise of such techniques as an individual matter, however. I have criticised him elsewhere for this, drawing a comparison with Goffman (Crossley, 1995), who is also interested in the embodied techniques of everyday life but who focuses upon their exercise within interaction and the adaptations and additional skills this requires (Goffman, 1971). Techniques are social for Goffman not only in the respect that they manifest group specific styles, but also because they are used in, and must be adapted to, interaction. Becker’s idea of ‘convention’ pushes this point further. There are often different ways of coordinating our activities, he observes, none of which are intrinsically superior. For any to work, however, all participants must ‘agree’ upon it, if not explicitly then at least tacitly. We could drive on either the left or right side of the road, for example. However, whichever we choose will only work, facilitating traffic flow and minimising crashes, if everybody does the same. Convention entails such agreement. A convention is an agreement, often tacit, between embodied actors, which allows them to coordinate their activities (see also Crossley, 2014).
This discussion suggests a need for combining ‘convention’ and ‘body techniques’ in the study of music worlds. ‘Convention’ invites us to consider whether and to what extent particular body techniques facilitate coordination between participants. Learning to play guitar, for example, is not only an individual accomplishment, nor merely a practice typical of teenage boys. It enables an actor to fit their music-making activities with those of others and to engage the culturally-rooted expectations of an audience.
Conversely, the concept of ‘body techniques’ invites us to consider both the way in which conventions take root within the corporeal schemata of participants and to examine the (acquired) skill that orientation to convention often entails. Musicians could never adhere to the many conventions involved in musicking, achieving the desired coordination with others, if they had to think reflectively about doing so. Coordination always involves a degree of negotiation of the kind described by Goffman, but this is only possible against a backdrop of conventions which do not need to be negotiated or thought about. Body techniques, qua habituated understanding of certain conventions, generate this backdrop.
A Wittgensteinian Interlude
We can develop our understanding of the interplay between body techniques and conventions by way of a brief reflection on Wittgenstein’s (1953) discussion of ‘understanding’ and his critique of the Cartesian version of that concept. The Cartesian treats understanding as a conscious experience. It is a sense of ‘getting it’, whatever ‘it’ is. This accords with the Cartesian argument that the mind is transparent to itself and that individuals enjoy privileged access to their own mental states. I know what I understand because I have the experience of understanding, and as only I have that experience, then only I truly know what I understand. The problem with this argument, Wittgenstein observes, is that we sometimes say and feel that we have understood something shortly before acting in a way which demonstrates that we have not and which forces us to revise our judgement, concluding that we do not understand after all. ‘Understanding’ and having a feeling that we understand are not the same thing and do not necessarily coincide. In some cases, an individual may insist that they understand something, genuinely believing and feeling this to be so, when it is plainly obvious to all around them that they do not. From the other side, teachers and lecturers are familiar with situations where students understand something but are unsure whether they do and have to ask, ‘have I understood?’
Wittgenstein concludes from this that ‘understanding’ is a public, intersubjective phenomenon rather than a private, intra-subjective experience. To understand is to be able to ‘go on’; that is, to do something in a potentially public context where others could witness it. To understand ‘calculus’, for example, is to be able to solve a certain sort of mathematical problem in a particular way. One may do that in a room on one’s own but there is nothing necessarily private about it. It could be televised. And in the case of a student, the opinion of another might be required to confirm that the individual actually has understood.
Note that this argument overlaps with and supports Mauss’ discussion of body techniques as forms of understanding. Understanding is practical and public, which is to say embodied, for Wittgenstein. To understand is to be able to ‘go on’, acting appropriately in a given situation.
Gesturing towards conventions too, Wittgenstein further develops this argument by asking how we can ever know that we have understood something. How does the maths student know that they have grasped the principles of calculus if understanding is not a conscious feeling? And how can we, as academic onlookers, ascertain whether or not they have understood anything? How do we discriminate between understanding and not understanding, whether as participants or academic observers? Wittgenstein’s answer centres upon agreement and community. To understand calculus is to perform calculations in a way which members of the mathematical community accept as legitimate and to produce an answer which they find acceptable. This is often not agreement of opinion, as such, but rather what Wittgenstein calls ‘agreement in forms of life’. It entails shared ways of acting - that is, conventions.
Such agreements are often habitual in Wittgenstein’s view. We do not reflect upon them or actively negotiate them. Furthermore, they are often supported through sanctions, both positive and negative. However, they are not static. They evolve by way of unintended deviation and may be successfully challenged by innovators.
The significance of this argument for our purposes is that it suggests that the understanding embodied in particular body techniques depends for its status qua understanding upon tacit agreement - that is to say, convention. To put it bluntly, being able to play a musical instrument means being able to play it to the satisfaction of other participants in a particular musical world. The existence of the technique, at least qua form of understanding, is dependent upon the conventions which, in some part, constitute a music world. Note that this argument also helps us to address the slipperiness of the concept of body techniques, as discussed above, because it suggests that body techniques are defined and their acquisition judged by participants in particular worlds. It is not for us, as academics, to decide what playing guitar involves or who can and cannot play. Rather we should explore the ways in which such decisions are made within the music worlds that are of interest to us, looking at the conventions which are mobilised in particular contexts.
Body Techniques as Resources
Body techniques are not only embodied conventions in the context of music worlds, however. They are resources, and therefore forms of what Gary Becker (1993) calls ‘human capital’. As such, they are significant at both the collective and the individual levels.
At the collective level, the formation of a music world is dependent upon the existence, mobilisation and combination of certain resources, including body techniques. Most obviously, the formation of a music world requires a critical mass of both skilled musicians, covering a range of instruments, and support personnel. Such skill reserves are not static. Would-be participants, enthused by an emerging world, may become motivated to learn to play as a consequence. Punk is an obvious example of this. It stimulated many young people to take up instruments and form bands, the added incentive being that high levels of skill were not always necessary. Joy Division bassist Peter Hook was so inspired by the Sex Pistols’ first Manchester gig, for example, that he bought a bass and began practicing the next day. This spike in learning was however stimulated by a pool of musicians who had begun to learn their craft before punk existed, and who collectively invented it. Embodied resources pre-existed and contributed to the emergence of punk, even if punk subsequently stimulated the generation and flow of further such resources. In addition, we should acknowledge that at least some of these innovators were relatively accomplished rock musicians, whatever the claims of both critics and apologists. As their biographies and band histories testify, they had put the hours in, learning their craft. Moreover, at least some of the later arrivals to the punk world, who swelled its ranks, were converts from earlier music worlds, including glam and pub rock. In other words, even punk, as a new style and one which rejected the virtuoso claims of its contemporaries, drew upon and needed reserves of body techniques for its formation.
At the individual level, participation is dependent upon the possession of certain body techniques and one’s ‘career’ is shaped by the techniques one has mastered. In some part, this is a matter of proficiency. A very skilled guitarist may enjoy celebrity status within a world as a consequence of this, for example. They may find it easier to secure gigs and recording contracts. And they may enjoy greater opportunity for movement between bands. It may also be a matter of the ‘market’ in body techniques, however. If drumming skills and equipment are in short supply, for example, then those who have them may find themselves in high demand.
I noted earlier that the various components of a music world are, in some respects, only analytically distinguishable. The dual status of body techniques as embodiments of both convention and resources illustrates this. Furthermore, as such they also illustrate how, in this case, resources are constituted, in part, through convention. What counts as a resource depends upon the constitutive conventions of the particular world. In the folk world, for example, where synthesisers play, at most, a very minor role, skills on this instrument have little value. They are not resources. In the world of electronica, by contrast, such skills are important, valued resources.
Body Techniques and Social Networks
Body techniques relate to the social networks which structure music worlds. There are three aspects to this. Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, body techniques are often acquired and developed through contacts within networks. They diffuse through networks. This might be a matter of straightforward instruction. Some research on networks of classical musicians, for example, has focused upon mentoring relationships. Many of the best known classical composers were mentored by equally prestigious alters (McAndrew and Everett, 2015). Similarly, in my own recent work on the birth of the UK punk world, there are many examples of musicians passing on their skills to others (Crossley, 2015a). Slits guitarist Viv Albertine, for example, was helped to learn guitar by her old friend, Keith Levine (who played in both an early line up of the Clash and also later on in Public Image Limited) and also by her then boyfriend, Mick Jones of The Clash.
In addition, as Sara Cohen (1997) has noted, musicians’ networks constitute an important source of tips and other resources which allow them to develop technically. Cohen’s main observation is that women are often excluded from these networks because of the masculine conventions which structure their constitutive ties. This is an important point and helps to explain the abovementioned gender skew in the distribution of music-related body techniques. It also raises a more general point, however, about the role of networks in diffusing and refining body techniques.
Secondly, dense networks are conducive to the generation of conventions and thus, following the Wittgensteinian interlude above, to the framework necessary for body techniques to be said to embody understanding. In dense networks where, by definition, each node enjoys a tie to most of the others, ‘agreement’, whether in opinions or ‘forms of life’, is more easily arrived at (through mutual influence) (Coleman, 1988, 1990). Consequently, so too are agreed standards against which performance of musical techniques can be judged wrong or right, good or bad.
Finally, looking at things from the other side, however, body techniques, via conventions, shape networks. It is conventional, for example, for rock bands to have one drummer, one bassist, one singer and either one or two guitarists. As a consequence, two bassists within a rock world, even where they move between bands, are very unlikely to ever play together. Likewise drummers and singers. They may cooperate on other grounds but we would expect to find considerable levels of ‘instrument heterophily’ in such music worlds: that is, players work less often with others who play the same instrument as themselves.
For illustrative purposes I decided to test this idea on one of the networks I explored in an earlier work on early UK punk in London (Crossley, 2015a). The basic network, involving 75 actors, which is represented in Figure 1, involves a large number of support personnel and high profile ‘faces’ as well as musicians. To simplify matters, I decided to remove them, leaving musicians only. I also removed Dave Greenfield of the Stranglers, because he was the only keyboard player in the network and there were therefore too few keyboard players to base an analysis upon. The reduced network is visualised in Figure 2.
The London punk world.
The London punk world (musicians only).
Next, I put each of the remaining participants into one of four categories, reflecting their instrument (this is captured in Figure 2 by using differently shaped nodes to reflect different instruments). Few musicians had changed instrument across their career, but where they had, they are categorised according to their current instrument, and with the exception of singers who also played guitar (recorded as singers) there were no multi-instrumentalists.
Having prepared the data in this way, I conducted an E-I analysis. This test compares the number of ties in a network between nodes who share a categorical attribute (internal ties [I]) with that between nodes who differ for this attribute (external ties [E]). It summarises this ratio in a score (the E-I index), calculates the score that would be expected if the categories had no effect (either positive or negative) on tie formation (the expected E-I index), and calculates the statistical likelihood that any deviation between the actual and expected E-I scores could have occurred at random.
Table 1 summarises the most salient figures for this test. Note firstly the comparison, for each instrument, between internal and external ties (under the ‘Aggregate Figures’ heading). In each case, the number of internal ties is much lower than the number of external ties. The difference is slightly reduced for guitarists. This reflects the fact that bands sometimes have more than one guitarist. Even in the case of guitarists, however, there is a clear heterophilic tendency. The final column of aggregate figures, ‘E-I Index’, expresses this bias in a single figure. If members of any category only ever forged ties with members of another category their E-I score would be 1 (and if they only ever formed ties with members of their own category, it would be −1). The scores indicate that for drums, bass and vocals, they come very close to this.
Instrument heterophily in music world networks.
The density matrix on the right hand side of Table 1 captures the number of ties between members of each category, expressing it as a proportion of the total number that are possible, given the number of participants in each category. The 0.127 in the top left of that part of the table, for example, indicates that of all of the ties that there could possibly be between guitarists in the network, 12.7% of them actually exist. The 0.172 next to that figure indicates that for guitarist–drummer relations, the figure is 17.2%. The figures in this density matrix tell the same story as the aggregate figures. More importantly, the E-I figures and p value below them suggest that they depart significantly from what would be expected by chance.
These findings reflect two underlying processes. Firstly, musicians with existing skills (body techniques) are more likely to form cooperative ties with others who have different skills. This may seem obvious but it is important because it shows how body techniques, as resources and by way of conventions, shape the networks constitutive of a music world.
Secondly, however, a converse process may also be in play, with networks shaping the body techniques which particular participants acquire. Where individuals learn instruments in an effort to join a band and a music world with which they are familiar, the process of choosing their instrument may reflect the choices and skills of others with whom they expect to form a band. If one’s friends are forming a band and they need a bassist, for example, one is more likely to learn bass. Changes of instrument are also sometimes explained in this way. It is not uncommon, for example, for guitarists to shift to bass where they wish to join a band which already has a guitarist but no bassist. Sid Vicious, for example, played saxophone and sang in the Flowers of Romance, moving to drums (because that seat was vacant) when playing briefly in Siouxsie and the Banshees, and then to bass when joining his friend, Johnny Rotten, in the Sex Pistols (after the original Pistols’ bassist, Glen Matlock, left).
Body Techniques and Music World Places
The relationship of body techniques to a music world’s places is threefold. Firstly, a world’s places are often the main sites where its constitutive body techniques are performed and valued. Dance styles are often tied to particular places, for example, because they are the only spaces where appropriate music is played publicly and because the clientele in such places share a common stock of both dance techniques and perceptual techniques/conventions for their recognition and judgement. In addition, structural features such as a properly sprung floor may be an advantage. Northern Soul lovers flocked to the Wigan Casino and related venues in the early 1970s, for example, because that was a place where their dancing styles were supported both by means of the ‘best’ music and by a crowd who all aspired to make the same shapes. Furthermore, the clientele were quick to voice their opinions when overcrowding threatened the dance space or, indeed, when music was deemed unsuitable:
There were clubs more progressive … for purists, for innovators, for collectors, but if what you really wanted was a club for dancers, then Wigan Casino was the place to go. […] Wigan’s dancers were demanding and the music had to be just right or they would walk. There could be few experiences worse for a DJ than standing behind the turntables of the Casino’s main ballroom when the mighty, heaving, Wigan dancefloor cleared in a show of spontaneous musical disapproval, revealing the vast expanse of sprung wooden flooring … (Hunt, 2002)
Similarly, metal clubs support headbanging through the music they play and the shared positive valuation of this dance by their patrons. This may also apply to appearance and the reflexive body techniques which cultivate it. Unusual visual styles very often fall foul of door policies and attract hostility in the wrong places, but are cultivated and attract kudos in the right places: i.e. the places of a specific music world.
Second, and conversely, body techniques serve to define certain locales as key places for a music world. Places become recognisable as places belonging to a particular world in virtue of their patrons’ appearance and dancing styles, and of course also the body techniques of musicians, DJs and support personnel. The stress on territory and territorial claims in some of the work of the CCCS (e.g. Willis, 1978, on the bike boys café) is instructive here, because it underlines and explores the various ways in which places are marked out as ‘ours’ by both visual and auditory means, that is, by body techniques. In the case of music worlds which are more masculine in orientation, this may entail body techniques which lend places a threatening atmosphere (e.g. aggressive dancing and gesturing), discouraging both outsiders and some would-be women insiders from entering (Krenske and McKay, 2000).
Finally, music worlds’ places are sites where some of their constitutive body techniques can be learned. By visiting a world’s places, neophytes learn how they should look, dance and more generally comport themselves, and receive positive reinforcement for their appropriation of these body techniques. Rehearsal will typically take place elsewhere, in private spaces, but what is rehearsed is learned from the public space of the world, and ‘passing’ in that space, perhaps after receiving advice and criticism from other denizens at an earlier time, is a sign of authentic acquisition valued by participants.
Conclusion
I began this paper with the observation that the embodiment of music has received less attention than might be expected. My discussion of the CCCS suggests that embodiment may enjoy more of a tacit presence in their work than this initial observation suggested. However, even if this is so, more work is necessary if this tacit presence is to be made more explicit.
My suggestion for achieving this, building upon earlier work, has been by use of the concept of body techniques. ‘Body techniques’ is a sensitising concept which encourages us to focus upon different uses of the body as they manifest within and across a variety of different social worlds. It encourages a very concrete focus upon what various parties to a particular activity actually do, and the prior learning this presupposes.
Part of the attraction of the body techniques concept is that it points simultaneously in two directions: to the knowledge and understanding embedded in these techniques, as also identified by such writers as Merleau-Ponty (1962) and Dewey (1988), but also towards the social distribution of these collective forms of knowledge and understanding. In this paper I have added to this by drawing out the way in which body techniques both function as resources (human capital) and interlock in a mutually affecting way with the other key constitutive elements of music worlds, namely conventions, social networks and places. Body techniques are key constitutive elements of music worlds and also interact in important ways with the other key constitutive elements.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.