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date: 16 January 2021

Abstract and Keywords

No art form drew closer or more sustained attention from Max Weber than music. A lifelong personal passion, music became the subject of a singularly ambitious study in the final decade of his life, resulting in an unfinished monograph, Zur Musiksoziologie (The Rational and Social Foundations of Music [1958]), begun in 1912–1913 and published posthumously in 1921, raising key issues to which Weber returned in other writings. As with his earlier study of capitalism, Weber sought to trace the origins and development of a distinctive cultural product, occidental harmony, that revealed a complex interaction between rational processes both internal to the art and in counterpoint with varied social and historical contexts. Correspondingly, the music study avidly pursued cross-cultural perspectives, a prominent concern for Weber in the aftermath of critical reception to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and for which music had become a touchstone in contemporary scholarly and scientific domains. Engaged with diverse contexts and disciplinary perspectives that informed a frequently technical yet cosmopolitan account of Western music and its signal developments, Weber’s music study explored how a sociology of music could be productively founded and what it might aspire to become.

Keywords: sociology of music, sociology of culture, music history, music theory, ethnomusicology, comparative musicology, acoustics, psychoacoustics, genealogy

Brandon Konoval

Brandon Konoval is on faculty at the University of British Columbia, where he holds a cross-appointment at the UBC School of Music and in the UBC Arts One Program. His research addresses the relationship between music, mathematics, and early modern science, as well as the genealogies of inequality, morality, and sexuality developed by Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Recent publications include contributions to Nietzsche-Studien (2013), Perspectives on Science (2014, 2018), I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance (2019), and Modern Intellectual History (2017, 2019), as well as a chapter on music and disciplinary culture in Foucault on the Arts and Letters (2016).

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