Technical intermediaries in music production

In 1979, the Sociology of work and occupations journal issued an article of Edward Kealy accounting for the existence of a very strong link between the musician-technician working relationship during music recording, and the kind of aesthetic outcome (Kealy, 1979). For him, the decentralization of the profession lead to the emergence of new forms of collaboration, that beyond supporting the emergence of rock music, paved the way to a revolution in music production : it is in that period that concerts started to be produced in function of recorded music, while the opposite process had been applied since the beginnings of recorded music (Maisonneuve, 2009 ; Tournès, 2008). Despite the important implications of such a result, and the existence of theoretical frames accounting for the collective aspects of musical production (Becker, 1984 ; Peterson et Anand, 2004), the role of technicians in the creative process in music stays marginally studied (see Horning, 2004 ; Leyshon, 2009 ; Le Guern, 2004). One reason might be that their role is quite difficult to conceptualize : they are neither artists, neither audiences, neither gatekeepers and not really cultural intermediaries. To characterize their role in the creative process, we propose to conceptualize them as technical intermediaries. They are close to cultural intermediaries in the sense that they are implied in the framing of goods, carry a specific expertise, and have an impact in the production process (Smith Maguire, 2008). But on the contrary of many studied cases of cultural intermediaries (Franssen & Kuipers, 2013 ; Moor, 2008) they may appear less involved in marketing concerns, and their mediation is more situated between the actors of the production process, rather than between the artists and the audience. With this conceptual toolkit, we are currently conducting an empirical study designed to expand the findings of Kealy to the contemporary context of France and the Netherlands. Using ethnographic methods (interviews and participant observation), we will study two groups of sound engineers in Paris and Amsterdam, tracing their careers, social properties, and working relationships. We will try to understand how the role of technical intermediaries in music production can vary with symbolic boundaries such as music genre and musical aesthetics (Lamont & Thévenot, 2000), as well as with social boundaries such as the presence of absence of a protective social security system (such as the “intermittence” system in France (Menger, 2011)) or the level of common social properties in actors of the production nexus. This study intends to 1. understand the current musician-technicians modes of collaboration and their links to contemporary musical aesthetics, 2. understand how social protection systems and social composition of art worlds influence working practices, and 3. build a conceptual category that would properly describe the role of technicians in cultural production. The first results issued from the fieldwork will be presented.