Repertoire Communities in American Popular Music, 1900–1949

Abstract

What are the social factors shaping musical repertoires? This paper analyzes repertoires as social relations among performers, refracted through factors such as the organization of industry, genres, race, and gender. Using data from American popular music recordings, performers and songs are treated as a two-mode network and repertoire communities are operationalized as bicliques. The production of culture perspective, the sociology of genres, and theories of race and gender imply hypotheses that are tested diachronically. Analysis finds support for the first two, with genres becoming the strongest basis of repertoire community membership while race and gender are surprisingly weak. Importantly, these factors worked in tandem as reflexive mechanisms for each other. The repertoire community system documents the rise of genre as the primary means of categorizing American popular music in the early twentieth century and mediated the effect of other factors.