Anthropologist Georgina Born presents one of the first ethnographies of a powerful western cultural organization, the renowned Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris. As a year-long participant-observer, Born studied the social and cultural economy of an institution for research and production of avant-garde and computer music. She gives a unique portrait of IRCAM's composers, computer scientists, technicians, and secretaries, interrogating the effects of the cultural philosophy of the controversial avant-garde composer, Pierre Boulez, who directed the institute until 1992.

Born depicts a major artistic institution trying to maintain its status and legitimacy in an era increasingly dominated by market forces, and in a volatile political and cultural climate. She illuminates the erosion of the legitimacy of art and science in the face of growing commercial and political pressures. By tracing how IRCAM has tried to accomodate these pressures while preserving its autonomy, Born reveals the contradictory effects of institutionalizing an avant-garde.

Contrary to those who see postmodernism representing an accord between high and popular culture, Born stresses the continuities between modernism and postmodernism and how postmodernism itself embodies an implicit antagonism toward popular culture.

Georgina Born is University Lecturer in the Sociology of Culture and Media at the University of Cambridge, and Official Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

"Born questions the abstraction of recent cultural theory, yet remains sensitive to the field's complexity. Her book has considerable implications for critical theory and for the philosophy of the avant-garde."—Times Higher Education Supplement

"[Born] uses IRCAM to address a number of issues in cultural studies. While pursing this ambitious agenda, [she] provides the reader with passages of sparkling insight. For example, her discussion of musical modernism and postmodernism is outstanding. . . . Born’s volume fills a gap in sociological studies of music. She takes seriously the genre of avant-garde music and demonstrates that it is both substantively interesting and theoretically relevant."—Timothy J. Dowd, Contemporary Sociology

"A critical ethnography of a high-status culture-producing institution. . . . One can see from the start that Born’s project extends well beyond ethnography traditionally conceived. . . . She is concerned to develop a sociology of the musical object and thus a social semiotics but one that comprehends the myriad mediations that affect musical meaning and value. . . . Born’s book thus mixes traditional and reflexive ethnographies in ways that should appeal to and unite cultural studies and the sociology of cultural production. In showing us how ideas are mobilized and used in a high-status location at a specific point in time, Born offers a refreshing tonic for our field."—Tia DeNora, American Journal of Sociology

"A substantial and challenging book in every sense. . . . This is a book with many audiences and many readings."—Reviewing Sociology

"Born's study is striking for the way it captures the power trajectories of cultural discourse at a particularly absolutist moment."—Wire

"Shows what can be learned from an in-depth study of a very remarkable cultural institution."—Paul Rabinow, author of Interpretive Social Science

"The finest application yet made of critical theory to contemporary music. . . . It would be hard to imagine a more important book."—Richard Taruskin, author of Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions

"This work, intrinsically fascinating as is the subject matter, is eminently worth consulting as a model for researchers and students of all varieties about how to produce ethnography within institutions, but on the most lively issues of culture theory."—George Marcus, coeditor of Writing Culture