ABSTRACT
The basic notion that music is social is of course not new to ethnomusicologists nor even to musicologists, even if are the theoretical frameworks which now embed claims about music’s sociality. But there is something about the notion-most usually its radical politicization-which still meets strong resistance from theorists rooted in the Western, classical, so-called ‘autonomous’, ‘purist’, or ‘absolutist’ tradition. For these theorists still believe that speaking about music as just another contingent manifestation or deployment of semiotic and politicized strategies is not really to be speaking about music at all. It is not that these theorists claim that music is asocial-for
what would this claim really mean-social ‘as opposed to what’? Rather, their complaint derives from their conviction that treating the social and political dimensions of music as if such dimensions were essential to, or responsible for, generating musical meanings is to ignore what is specifically musical about music. Thus, it is important to reiterate the point because it is often disregarded, that their complaint is not that music is void of social dimensions-they too have produced genuinely social histories of music, for example. Rather, traditional music theorists seem to want to remind the more radical ones that the musical dimensions of music can and should be attended to independently of its extramusical dimensions because, to reduce the former to the latter, or to deny music its autonomous or internal musical core, is to deprive music of what makes it different from everything else.
