About the Book
It is undeniable that technology has made a tangible impact on the nature of musical listening. The new media have changed our relationship with music in a myriad of ways, not least because the experience of listening can now be prolonged at will and repeated at any time and in any space. Moreover, among the more striking social phenomena ushered in by the technological revolution, one cannot fail to mention music’s current status as a commodity and popular music’s unprecedented global reach. In response to these new social and perceptual conditions, the act of listening has diversified into a wide range of patterns of behaviour which seem to resist any attempt at unification. Concentrated listening, the form of musical reception fostered by Western art music, now appears to be but one of the many ways in which audiences respond to organized sound. Cinema, for example, has developed specific ways of combining images and sounds; and, more recently, digital technology has redefined the standard forms of mass communication. Information is aestheticized, and music in turn is incorporated into pre-existing symbolic fields. This volume - the first in the series Musical Cultures of the Twentieth Century - offers a wide-ranging exploration of the relations between sound, technology and listening practices, considered from the complementary perspectives of art music and popular music, music theatre and multimedia, composition and performance, ethnographic and anthropological research.
Table of Contents:
Contents: Preface. Part I Facets of a Theoretical Question: Aesthetic experience under the aegis of technology, Gianmario Borio; Ideological, social and perceptual factors in live and recorded music, Eric Clarke; On the evolution of private record collections: a short story, Esteban Buch; Music and technical reproducibility: a paradigm shift, Alessandro Arbo; Algorithmic and nostalgic listening: post-subjective implications of computational and empirical research, Sebastian Klotz; Listening to histories of listening: collaborative experiments in acoustemology with Nii Otoo Annan, Steven Feld. Part II Remediations: Remediation or opera on screen? Some misunderstandings regarding recent research, Michele Girardi; Between mediatization and live performance: the music for Giorgio Strehler’s The Tempest (1978), Emilio Sala; The `remediated’ Rite of Spring, Gianfranco Vinay. Part III Listening with Images: Listening to images: a historical overview of theoretical reflection, Roberto Calabretto; Seeing sounds, hearing images: listening outside the modernist box, Nicholas Cook; The transformation of musical listening: the case of electroacoustic music, Martin Laliberté. Part IV Recordings and the New Aura: Neo-auratic encoding: phenomenological framework and operational patterns, Vincenzo Caporaletti; `If a song could get me you’: analysis and the (pop) listener’s perspective, Dietrich Helms; The persistence of analogue, Mark Katz. Part V Composing and Performing with Electronic Means: Semiconducting: making music after the transistor, Nicolas Collins; `Live is dead?’: some remarks about live electronics practice and listening, Angela Ida De Benedictis; Sonic imprints: instrumental resynthesis in contemporary composition, Nicolas Donin. Part VI Audiovisual Documentation in Ethnomusicological Research: New trends in the use of audiovisual (and audio) technology in contemporary ethnomusicology, Giovanni Giuriati; Recording out-takes: what can be discovered in the `historical’ recordings of traditional music, Maurizio Agamennone; Audiovisual ethnography: new paths for research and representation in ethnomusicology, Nicola Scaldaferri. Index.
About the Author :
Gianmario Borio is Professor of Musicology at the University of Pavia and Director of the Institute of Music at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice. In 1999 he was awarded the Dent Medal by the Royal Musical Association. In 2013, he was Distinguished Visiting Professor at The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America. His publications deal with several aspects of the music of the twentieth century, including theory, aesthetics, political background and the audiovisual experience; as well as the history of musical concepts and the theory of musical form. He is a Fellow of the Academia Europaea.
Review :
`Bringing together a distinguished international roster of scholars, Musical Listening in the Age of Technological Reproduction offers an unprecedented breadth of new perspectives on the question of how sound technologies have transformed many aspects of what it means to listen. Building on Walter Benjamin’s classic writings, these essays make important contributions in the areas of musicology, ethnomusicology, analysis, composition, film and media, philosophy, perception, and sound studies, while their fascinating intersections point to emerging paradigms for rethinking the relationships between analog and digital, audio and multimedia, and live and recorded sound.’
Joseph Auner, Tufts University, USA
`These essays written by high profile scholars tackle some of the essential areas of today’s artistic expression. By placing listening in the foreground, they reverse the object of musical studies, and provide compelling and provocative ideas for both thinkers and creators of different aesthetic perspectives in today’s hyper-connected and technological world.’
Marco Stroppa, Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst, Stuttgart, Germany
