According to Philip Auslander, due to the proliferation and development of sophisticated media techniques, the entire notion of the “live” is now contingent on comparisons to mediated experiences.
In this thesis I examine how developments in music and media technology affect how people listen to and perform folk music.
My goal was to expand on the concepts of "liveness" and "mediatization" through an analysis of the relationship between the use of media technology and the performance and education of folk music at the Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music.
I performed 15 in-depth, open-ended interviews with music teachers who have worked at the Old Town School of Folk Music (OTSFM) for upwards of fifteen years. The interviews centered around two inquiries:
What role does new media technology plays in the classroom, both regarding how teachers implement technology as well as how technology helps inform students’ musical backgrounds?
How has the educational experience at OTSFM changed over the last three decades?
I transcribed the interviews and performed a constant comparative method to locate four prominent themes:
- Ideas surrounding how new media technology has enhanced the community, including communication, archiving, and recording as educational tools
- Ideas surrounding new forms of access and discovery
- Ideas surrounding people's tastes, listening behavior, and identity, as fans and players
- Ideas surrounding technical skills and practice
I was then able to delineate three ways that the school offers contexts to the “live” experience: a social context, a traditional context; and a physical, embodied context. I conclude that the concept of “liveness,” is in agreement with Sanden’s (2013) redefinition of it;
Liveness is not simply the marked absence of technological mediation, but rather is manifest in a rich number of ways that people perform acts of live human expression within a larger technological context.
Additionally, I conclude that folk music culture can function to destabilize the “authority” of the popular studio recording, challenge its technological aura, and cultivate a plurality of temporalities.
Introduction
The relationship between folk culture and new media technology has been commonly thought of in two ways. People can use new technology in ways that promote folk culture, emphasizing sharing, community building, participation, and ritual. Yet technology can often change or disrupt the occasion for social interactions, leading to a decline in activities and pastimes.
Inquiries into new technology and its effect on social interaction date back well beyond the digital revolution. The idea that the internet fosters a plurality of voices and democratic communication echoes John Dewey, that “communication must take possession of the physical machinery of transmission and circulation and breathe life into it. . . . [Democracy] will have its consummation when free social inquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art of full and moving communication” (Dewey, 1927, p. 350). Simultaneously, the perspective that technological mediatization severs people from an authentic experience with their environment and distorts the way people approach reality echoes Martin Heidegger (1954).
As a musician and media studies scholar, these lines of thinking often inform my understanding of the relationship between music culture and technology. While new media technology can enhance the sharing of music, bringing people together in new ways, it can also erode and supplant live communication and performance. The relationship between technology and music itself is even more complex, because technology is integral to musical content. Music, as a form of communication, has been mediated through available technology since the invention of musical instruments. Developments in technology continually lead to new forms of music and art. In this way, music is mutable; people’s understanding of music is not fixed through time, but continues to shift through technological and cultural changes.
That being said, one of the most revolutionary developments in music history was the invention of recording technology over a century ago. Recording technology dramatically changed people’s understanding of music. It severed music from what was essentially a privileged live experience for over a millennium. The distinction between recorded music and “live” music emerged; “live performance” was born simultaneously when recording technology was invented, as previously, all music was experienced live (Auslander, 1998).
Today, the majority of music people listen to comes from the replaying of studio recordings. Recording technology has allowed music to be broadcast and listened to on a mass scale. Popular music as we know it is indebted to recording technology. Yet while recording technology has allowed more people to share and listen to music, it is not without its critics. After the invention of the phonograph in the early twentieth century, cultural theorist Theodore Adorno argued that the new recording technology reduced the musical experience to a two-dimensional commodity that could be reproduced at will (1934/1990, p. 57). Walter Benjamin articulated that mechanically reproduced representations lacked an “aura”, a unique position in time and space. Yet he also argued that reproducible mediums have an important revolutionary potential, and can express new meanings about modern perceptions of time and space as affected by new media technology (Benjamin, 1936/1968).
Recording technology has led to the production of new forms of music. “Artificial” techniques developed in the 1950s, such as multi-track dubbing, cutting and splicing allowed for the creation of sounds that could not be achieved in a live performance. Due to techniques like these, recordings evolved from reproductions of live events to include completely new representations of music. The production, distribution, and consumption of recorded music has been constantly changing, from the rise of the record industry, to the CD era, to the internet age. One important question that has emerged concerns how recorded music effects how people experience live music as a result. This subject of live music has often been explored by music fans and writers, most notably in the form of self-reflexive music journalism, but it is relatively recent that live music has been approached by academics as a dedicated object of study. As music recording and listening technology have developed, critical theorists, cultural studies and media studies scholars have begun to examine how people’s live experiences are influenced, informed, disrupted, and extended by recorded media content.
Ethnomusicologists have shifted an orientation to the study of music within its live, performative contexts. Cultural studies scholars have begun to study the culture and economy of the live music scene over the last decade (Frith, 1998, 2007; Holt, 2010). A pointed inquiry into media technology and its relation to the experience of “liveness” comes from Philip Auslander. Auslander employs the term “mediatization", originally coined by Baudrillard, to describe that the proliferation of recorded media content has radically altered people’s conception of live performances. People cannot help but refer to recorded media in their approach to live performances, and the whole notion of a "live" experience now exists in relation to mediated experiences. In the case of the record industry, live music performances are often measured against the ubiquitous studio recordings and not vice versa (Auslander, 1998; Katz, 2010).
One significant musical scene in which to apply the concepts of mediatization and liveness is the North American folk music revival. The concept of “folk” music emerged, not prior to the era of popular recording, but as a direct result of it. The live folk music space developed in opposition to ahistorical, commercialized, popular music as well as elite hierarchies of classical music; it emphasizes the oral, ritualistic tradition of sharing music in a live setting.
This thesis attempts to elaborate on the concepts of liveness and mediatization through an examination of the relationship of live music performance/education and new media technology at Chicago's the Old Town School of Folk Music (OTSFM). An organization where I taught piano for four years, OTSFM is the largest community arts school in the nation. Longstanding teachers at OTSFM are able to reflect on how folk music performance and education is situated within a changing technological context. They offer a unique and privileged perspective on how beginning students’ assumptions, expectations and understanding of music can be informed by media technology, as well as how this relationship may have changed over time.
With the goal of developing a richer understanding of how media technology plays a role in the culture of live music performance and education, I engaged in open-ended interviews with 15 longstanding teachers at the school. In my process of conducting the interviews as well as in my analysis of them, I employed a constant comparative method to organizing prominent themes (Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Glaser & Strauss, 1967). While the interviews were semi open-ended, I was interested in how the teachers used and were affected by media technology in their role as musicians and educators. I was interested in how things have changed over time in regards to musical content, access to music, and musical listening practices.
In my analysis, I found that mediatization has always been integral to the process of folk music education. All the teachers shared vastly different different backgrounds, music education, access to music, and styles of music. Yet they all shared a love of music and a history of listening to and learning music from media like records and television in order to be able to incorporate these traditions into live practice. Through the constant comparative method (Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Glaser & Strauss, 1967) I organized themes out of how the teachers situated their work in relation to technology and popular music and how these positions may have shifted as music and media technology has evolved. I organized my analysis into four themes: Social Media and the Live Community; YouTube: Access, Affect, Archive; The Technology of Listening, Tastemaking, and Popular Culture; and Practicing / Playing / Listening. In all of these themes, the educator/performers at OTSFM offered compelling examples of how scholar and electronic musician Paul Sanden defines the performance of “liveness”, as a “dynamically-performed assertion of human presence within a technological network of communication” (Sanden, 2013, p. i).
I continued to expand on “liveness” by offering three “live contexts” that OTSFM offers, each of which situates live performance in relation to technological mediation. Namely, the school offers a unique social space for people to get together and share music and ideas about music. It also offers a traditional context in which students learn about the historical situation of musical styles and actively take part in those traditions. Lastly, it offers a physical context in which students can develop a practice ritual over time, with an emphasis on variation and spontaneity in playing songs (such as through rhythm, voicing or style).
The teachers’ perspectives illustrate that the experience of live music performance is intricately related to exposure to recorded music. Their stories also suggest that music recordings have come to develop a unique and influential “aura.” Not only are studio recordings often approached as the legitimate authority in which people measure live performances against, recordings perpetuate a spatio-temporality that lacks a signification to a live physical context. Regardless of the style of music in focus, folk music culture can help destabilize the “authority” of popular studio recordings in order to encourage a democratic participation in music performances and to cultivate a plurality of rhythms and temporalities.