Music can stir the emotions and fire the imagination, but can it make you a better academic? For sociology, at least, the answer is yes, according to a professor who has chronicled how an unusually high number of the subject’s leading lights were accomplished musicians who performed live throughout their careers.
In a new paper, Les Back, head of sociology at the University of Glasgow, explains how “sociologists very often have extracurricular lives as musicians” – a trend he traces from sociology’s founding fathers Max Weber, Theodor Adorno and W. E. B. Du Bois through to the likes of Howard Becker and Roland Barthes (both jazz pianists) and into the present day, with several former professional musicians making the leap into academia.
“We tend to think of Weber as this very austere German intellectual, but he was also a keen singer and played the piano, and went on to write the first sociology of music,” Professor Back told Times Higher Education, saying he was inspired to examine the topic by his “parallel life as journeyman guitarist performing in clubs and bars”.
Professor Back spoke to 28 sociologists about their musical hinterlands for the paper published in Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. Among them were the renowned cultural critic Paul Gilroy, now professor of humanities at UCL (a talented guitarist), Canadian data sociologist Evelyn Ruppert, based at Goldsmiths, University of London (a jazz trumpeter), and David Beer, professor of sociology at the University of York (formerly an indie rock band guitarist).
