Schutz and Becker on making music together: A note on their respective contributions to the sociology of music

Abstract

This article compares the sociological writings of Schutz and Becker on making music together. Schutz laid stress on the We-relationship resulting from face-to-face performance of music, in which every listener participates with the other listeners, the performers, and the composers. Becker emphasized the existence of taken-for-granted conventions on which cooperative relations between performers are based, in conjunction with other members of the music subcommunity with whom they are engaged in a communication flow. The involved actors may participate in several reciprocally connected worlds of shared experiences, which if jointly considered constitute the art world. The theoretical and conceptual differences between Schutz and Becker, which concern their sociological writings on music, are related to analogous diversities between Phenomenological Sociology and Symbolic Interactionism. Finally, Weber, Honigsheim, and Adorno’s contributions to the sociology of music have been here considered for comparative purposes.