Music in Culture and Society

How music functions within social life — as ritual, identity, politics, and shared experience.

Definition

The study of how music functions within human society — its uses, meanings, and social roles, and how cultural context shapes both its sound and its significance.

Scope

Covers the theoretical core of ethnomusicology: how music is embedded in and shaped by culture, its social functions and uses, its role in constructing identity and community, and its entanglement with power, ritual, and everyday life. Excludes the practical methods of fieldwork and transcription, treated separately.

Core questions

• What social functions does music serve in different cultures?
• How does music construct and express identity and community?
• How are music and power, ritual, and politics intertwined?
• How does culture shape what counts as music and how it sounds?
• How do participatory and presentational music differ socially?

Key theories

Music as humanly organized sound

Blacking argued that musical ability is a near-universal human capacity and that musical forms are humanly organized sound reflecting the structures of the society that produces them, challenging the idea that musical talent is rare or that complexity equals value.

Participatory versus presentational performance

Turino distinguished participatory music-making, which prioritizes inclusion and social bonding, from presentational performance for an audience, arguing that these fields carry different values, aesthetics, and social politics.

History

The shift from comparative analysis of musical sound to the study of music as social behavior was driven by Merriam's anthropology of music and Blacking's insistence on music's social embeddedness, and later elaborated through theories of identity, participation, and politics.

Key figures

• Alan P. Merriam
• John Blacking
• Thomas Turino

Seminal works

• merriam1964
• turino2008
• blacking1973

Frequently asked questions

Why study the social context of music rather than just the sound?

Ethnomusicologists hold that what music means and how it is made are inseparable from the society that produces it; studying sound in isolation misses much of what the music does for the people who use it.

Is musical ability universal?

Blacking argued that the capacity for music is a general human endowment shaped by culture, rather than a rare gift, even though particular skills and styles are learned within specific traditions.