Live and Recorded: Music Experience in the Digital Millennium PDF
Preview Live and Recorded: Music Experience in the Digital Millennium
Live and Recorded Music Experience in the Digital Millennium Yngvar Kjus Pop Music, Culture and Identity Pop Music, Culture and Identity Series editors Steve Clark Graduate School Humanities and Sociology University of Tokyo Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan Tristanne Connolly Department of English St Jerome’s University Waterloo, ON, Canada Jason Whittaker School of English & Journalism University of Lincoln Lincoln, Lincolnshire, UK Pop music lasts. A form all too often assumed to be transient, commercial and mass-cultural has proved itself durable, tenacious and continually evolving. As such, it has become a crucial component in defining various forms of identity (individual and collective) as influenced by nation, class, gender and historical period. Pop Music, Culture and Identity investigates how this enhanced status shapes the iconography of celebrity, provides an ever-expanding archive for generational memory and acceler- ates the impact of new technologies on performing, packaging and global marketing. The series gives particular emphasis to interdisciplinary approaches that go beyond musicology and seeks to validate the informed testimony of the fan alongside academic methodologies. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14537 Yngvar Kjus Live and Recorded Music Experience in the Digital Millennium Yngvar Kjus Department of Media and Communication University of Oslo Oslo, Norway Pop Music, Culture and Identity ISBN 978-3-319-70367-1 ISBN 978-3-319-70368-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70368-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017961827 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and trans- mission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Ghenadie Pascari / Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Preface With this book I intend to offer a fresh contribution to our understand- ing of music and media. The intersection of music and media is a grow- ing research area that joins not only musicology and media studies but also disciplines dedicated to the study of social interaction (sociology), as well as the workings of the mind (psychology), to name just a couple. My entry into this field was through the interdisciplinary research project Clouds and Concerts: Mediation and Mobility in Contemporary Music Culture, which was funded by the Norwegian Research Council and car- ried out in the Department of Musicology and the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Oslo, Norway. I give a special thanks to our project leader, Anne Danielsen, as well as Arnt Maasø, Anja Nylund Hagen, Marika Lüders, and Ola Løvholm, for making the proj- ect an inspiring and challenging expedition. This book is an offspring of this project, for which I am also indebted to the faith of the editors at Palgrave Macmillan, my steadfast copyeditor Nils Nadeau, and the sup- port of the Norwegian Non-Fiction Writers and Translators Association. As the name suggests, the Clouds and Concerts project dealt with developments in the communication of music via the online cloud of recorded music (spearheaded by new streaming services) and via the con- certs of live performance (particularly the bourgeoning festival scene). Shortly before joining the project, I became interested in a specific per- spective on human communication—mentalization —which is e ssentially v vi Preface the ability to perceive and interpret what people think, feel, and experi- ence. It struck me that music is uniquely suited to mentalization, and this book is the first in either media studies or music research to present and employ this rich term. I hope it will inspire others. For me, mentalization represents a unique approach to the relationship between live and recorded music, understood as different ways to organize musical expression and experience. I have had the chance to discuss music experience with schol- ars with very different takes on the topic, including Georgina Born, John Durham Peters, Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen, Wendy Fonarow, and Simon Emmerson. I am also indebted to Paddy Scannell and Göran Bolin for very valuable feedback as the book project materialized. The work was also inspired by research stays at the School of Media and Communication in Leeds and Microsoft Research in Boston, generously hosted by David Hesmondhalgh and Nancy Baym, respectively. My thinking has also been nourished by Ingrid, and by witnessing our son Viktor’s spontaneous musical pleasures at close range—I am grateful to both of you. “Experience” is a concept that is almost too extensive to grasp clearly, partly because it encompasses our sensory apparatus, our mental capaci- ties, and our social interactions. Still, we use the term daily, in relatively meaningful ways. Context helps to delimit what we refer to, whether it is the experience of Christmas in Norway or that of a skiing accident (the two of which might coincide). This is also the case with this book, which by no means covers all aspects of music experience but rather zooms in on some key aspects that are associated with the use of new, mobile media in musical activities. The project also limits itself to the use of digital media in the 2000s (the digital millennium). The title, Live and Recorded, is also delimiting. It might come across as being inclusive, given that practically all music belongs to the domains of the live and the recorded. The “and” should be taken quite literally, however, because the book focuses on music that is somehow live and recorded at the same time—for example, when artists use recordings in their live performances, or when audience members try to record a live performance. These kinds of overlap between the live and the recorded are essential to the contemporary music experi- ence. I therefore have a specific approach to the terms “live” and “recorded,” one derived from the conditions for artists to express them- selves and for audiences to immerse themselves in the music. Prefac e vii The pairing live and recorded has a rich conceptual baggage and has featured in many analyses of technology/technical mediation, aesthetics/ rhetoric, and ideology/power in both music and media studies. The terms have been used to scrutinize cultural industries and institutions, decon- struct their use of stylistic devices (particularly those associated with live- ness), and relate them, in turn, to attempts at persuasion and dominance (see, e.g., Auslander 1999; Couldry 2000). The terms have also been used to explore how people communicate within, or experience, meaningful interactions, despite having to reach across time or space (see, e.g., Peters 1999; Sterne 2003). This book is a continuation of the latter inquiry in that it takes people’s engagement with music as a starting point, then studies how new mobile media allow for new avenues for music to travel from the minds and fingers of artists to the ears and eyes of audiences. It also contains criticism, for example, of the ways in which new media are allowed to intervene in live concerts. Still, it leaves room for further criti- cal analysis of the intersection of the live and the recorded, on the level of both cultural institutions and aesthetic ideals as well as cognition and music perception. Such analysis will surely come, and hopefully soon, as is indicated by the live and recorded pairing’s ongoing inspiration of reconsiderations of music and media. The power of these terms, I think, resides precisely in their ability to gain fresh relevance in the face of new circumstances, triggering as well as illuminating new questions. In its approach to live and recorded music experience, this book com- bines insights from the study of media, music, and psychology. These intersections have entailed a range of opportunities and challenges. Importantly, an interdisciplinary approach illuminates phenomena from a range of perspectives and inspires novel ways of conceptualizing them. For example, the notion of pre- and post-event listening modes derives from knowledge about media appropriation, musical genres, and percep- tual mechanisms (see Chap. 4). Integrating and balancing different per- spectives can also involve downscaling one or more of the disciplines involved. There is, for example, substantial research on liveness in televi- sion that is not mobilized in this book (for an overview, see Kjus 2009). It is also challenging to read studies that combine perspectives, which is partly explained by a key insight of psychology—we more readily per- ceive what we are already aware of and attuned to. Interdisciplinarity can viii Preface imply “a variety of boundary transgressions” while also triggering valu- able “problematisation” (Barry and Born 2013: 1), such as proposing alternative entries into what is otherwise unnoticed or taken for granted. I hope this book will contribute to the mutual sensitization of the disci- plines involved: of media studies to the complexities of music, of music research to the use of new media, and of psychological research to the significance of music and media to mentalization. Oslo, Norway Yngvar Kjus References Auslander, Philip. 2008 [1999]. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Barry, Andrew, and Georgina Born. 2013. Interdiciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences. London and New York: Routledge. Couldry, Nick. 2000. The Place of Media Power: Pilgrims and Witnesses in the Media Age. London: Routledge. Kjus, Yngvar. 2009. Event Media: Television Production Crossing Media Boundaries. PhD thesis, University of Oslo. Peters, John Durham. 1999. Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press. Contents 1 Setting the Scene 1 2 M usic, Media, and Mentalization 25 3 C reating Studios on Stage 51 4 I mmersing in Performances and Recordings 71 5 Bridging Concerts and Records 119 6 T he Live, the Dead, and the Digital 147 References 169 Index 179 ix
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