Sounds of culture : music imagination in cultural studies

Georg Simmel, one of the pioneers of sociology of music, discussed morality as the key form of socialisation. If one follows on this thought, it needs to be postulated that music, as an important type of cultural practice, is a unique form of socialisation due to its relationship-forming role as proven by contemporary psychology research. In this context, music becomes language of a kind, understood not as a set system of rules, but as communication space, a process of symbolisation. As such, it is always a social action in a Weberian sense. This, in turn, requires the research to adopt the ideal type approach, and, additionally, to emphasise "matter itself," meaning music material, as Theodor W Adorno posited, "society is reflected in music [...] it is possible to learn it from its material". In this paper, music is perceived in a category of a dialogue; therefore, an appro-priate research method proposed here is experiment. As researchers, we could not only analyse culture, but also we could articulate it, "play it" in a musical sense, and, for this, we need music imagination, the theory of which is presented in this article. To understand a society means also to grasp tones that dominate its audiosphere. If we follow Durkheim’s methodological guidelines, then one may assume that in each culture it is possible to distinguish musical facts-signposts, in other words, such empirical phenomena that signify the character of a specific type of ‘musi- cality’ that denote that particular society. The crux of our proposition is a directive stating that, in the field of cultural studies, it is not enough to establish facts, but it is important to make them audible in their whole, complicated, self. In order to make the investigation worthwhile and to yield rich results, these facts should be assembled in a creative way, treating them as ideal types, but also to musicalise the theory, thereby offering an innovative audial ideal type. The researcher then becomes here, not only a musical culture analyst, but also a creator of cultural music. If music is a union of a creator and a recipient, then the theory must be present simultaneously in both elements: reception and performance