The Relationship Between Musical and Social Patterns in American Popular Music

T BE SURE, the history of scholarly interest in the question concerning the relationships between musical and social patterns is fairly extensive and can be dated far beyond Karl Marx's Critique of Pure Economy. The publication of the latter work, however, introduced new vigor into the discussion of this and related problems and, it may be submitted, provided a convenient point of orientation for followers and critics. Particularly in the German-speaking scholarly world this discussion was taken up by scholars who are frequently counted among sociologists or anthropologists. Thus, in the early part of the 20th century we have several studies by the sociologists Georg Simmel, Max Weber and Paul Honigsheim, by Karl Biicher, a political economist, and by Carl Stumpf, von Hornbostel, and their students, who are anthropologists and psychologists.1 All these studies had in common-contrary to traditional humanistic musicology-a conviction that music, wherever found, is a product of