The Archival Turn in Music Sociology

In the course of the 60th anniversary of the Department of Music Sociology in 2025, we propose the conference “The Archival Turn in Music Sociology” in order to acknowledge the contributions of female, feminist, queer and post-/decolonial scholars, musicians, activists, and archivists to the history of music sociology and to critically engage with the historiographies of music’s past.

Physical and digital archives play an important role in these processes. They are sites and practices of knowledge formation, cultural production, and activism and provide means to engage with the past to understand the construction of temporalities, histories, and heritage and to question the canon. The archival turn in music sociology thus proceeds from Michel de Certeau’s idea that ‘the transformation of archival activity is the point of departure and the condition for a new history’ that has gained currency in a range of disciplines and reflects the desire to take control of the present in neoliberal capitalism through a reorientation to the past.

The archival turn in music sociology reflects the move towards an understanding of the ‘archive-as-subject’ (Stoler 2009) and shares elements with what Steve Waksman (2018) has coined the ‘historical turn’ in popular music studies and Kate Eichhorn (2013) as the ‘archival turn in feminism’ in the twenty-first century.

The Department of Music Sociology at the mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna houses two comprehensive archival collections of the first generation of music sociologists in Austria: the Kurt Blaukopf Archive and the Elena Ostleitner Archive. Kurt Blaukopf (1914–1999) initiated the founding of the department in 1965; Elena Ostleitner (1947–2021) became an internationally recognised scholar in the late 1970s for her research on women in music and worked at the department from 1975 until her retirement in 2010.

These archives are accompanied by the private library of Irmgard Bontinck (1941–2021) that also found its home at the department after her death. Irmgard Bontinck had served as the Head of the Department of Music Sociology, following Kurt Blaukopf, and introduced the term ‘Viennese School of Music Sociology’ in 1996 to describe its interdisciplinary and empirically oriented research programme that was gradually developed in the late 1960s and the following decades in Vienna. Scientific narratives about the founders of music sociology, however, associate the Viennese School of Music Sociology exclusively with Kurt Blaukopf’s work and, as a result, reproduce the androcentric reconstructions of the history of sociology in general that are characterised by a neglect of women’s contributions to the discipline (e.g. Gerhard 2013; Lengermann & Niebrugge-Brantley 1998).