Repertoire Communities in American Popular Music 1895-1950

• In Event: 023 - Regular Session. Popular Culture: Spaces, Places, and Scenes

Abstract

What are the social factors that shape musical repertoires? This paper makes theoretical, methodological and substantive contributions. Repertoires are treated as social relations among performers, refracted through social relations such as the organization of industry, genre formation, race and gender. Using data from American popular music 1895-1950, artists and songs are treated as a bipartite network and repertoire communities are operationalized as overlapping network communities. The production of culture perspective, the sociology of genres, and theories of race and gender imply hypothesized that are tested temporally. The first two were supported with genres becoming the strongest basis of repertoire community membership while race and gender were surprisingly weak bases.

Author

• William G. Roy, University of California-Los Angeles