Ronald Eyerman is Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. His recent books include Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Myth, Meaning, and Performance: Toward a New Cultural Sociology of the Arts (Paradigm, 2006).

An accomplished cellist, Lisa McCormick is a graduate student at the Department of Sociology, Yale University. Her doctoral thesis applies the performance perspective in an analysis of music competitions.

The cultural and performative turns in social theory have enlivened sociology. For the first time these new developments are fully integrated into new approaches to the sociology of the arts in this important new book. Building on the established research into art worlds, what is interesting for the new sociology of the arts, understood in the broad sense to include popular culture as well the classical focus on music, painting, and literature, is the relationship between art works and meaning, myth, and performance. Also reflected in these rich essays, which range from Beethoven to John Lennon to Chinese avant garde artists, is the lived experience of the artist and its impact on the process of creation and innovation.