ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some issues in social analysis which have been suggested to me by ethnomusicological studies of musical traditions as cultural systems. It explains that ethnomusicological research confirms Alfred Schutz's view that some kind of tuning-in relationship is at the heart of all effective social organization, and that the ideal model for studying it is the situation of making music together. If one understood better how people make musical sense of the world, and how this relates to making sense of the world with music and sense in music with the world, he/she might make some interesting advances in sociology. Those who hope to change the world in significant ways might be able to understand better how the cheapest and most available form of energy, aesthetic energy, could be harnessed for greater social and political benefit, as it was in many pre-industrial societies.
