Music is an accumulation of mediators: instruments, languages, sheets, performers, scenes, media and so on. The Passion for Music proposes no typification of listeners, no social decoding of musical genres. To do so would be to admit a pre-existing musical object. But there is no musical object 'in itself' - and so no object for critical sociologies of music to deconstruct. In this innovative book, Hennion turns the elusiveness of music into a resource for a pragmatic analysis which, in turn, transforms the paradigm to be offered by sociology.Learning from music - this art of infinite mediations - allows us to confront sociology (from Durkheim and Weber to Bourdieu) with a different way of considering objects. For this task, Hennion draws on aesthetics (Adorno) and art history (Haskell, Baxandall), as well as science and technology studies and popular music studies (Latour, Frith, DeNora). Hennion shows us that music is a collective process, which must always be performed again and again.

As part of that project, The Passion for Music presents a wide-ranging series of case studies, restoring attention to the rich and varied intermediaries through which music is brought to life: from the debate around the reinterpretation of baroque music, to the classroom, the rock scene, the classical music concert, Bach's 'social career' in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the practices of music 'amateurs' today. This is the first English translation of one of the most important works of French scholarship on music and society.