much to follow on Liveness

Taken from Auslander 'Liveness'

'An importance consequence of thinking about live and mediatized performance as belonging to the same mediatic system is the inscription of live performance within he historical logic of media identified by Marshall McLuhan (1964:158): "A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress he older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them." p6

'Linda Dusman, a composer, has suggested that the dominance of recording as the normative experience of music has made it almost impossible for audiences to hear a live musical performance as something actually occurring in the moment rather than a reproduction of a recording." p38

'Benjamen's notion of a mass desire for proximity, and its alliance with a desire for reproduced objects, provides a useful matrix for understanding the interrelation of live and mediatized forms [...] headphones clapped on their ears are trying to achieve a kind of aural intimacy that can be obtained only from the reproduction of sound" p39

'Evan Eisenberg distinguishes the experince of monphonic and stereophonic recordings by saying that: "Stereo [...] arrays the musicians before an empty space ... The introduction of stereo ... changed the phenomenology of the phonograph by adding a spatial, and hence visual aspect" (Eisenberg 1987: 64-5, my emphasis). Eisenberg's point is an imposrtant one: when sound is divorced from sight by virtue of technological mediation, the aural experience nevertheless evokes a visual one: "every mode of record listening leaves us with a need for something, if not someone, to see and touch" (ibid. :65). p85

PHENOMENOLOGY OF MUSIC

Study Day, 18 February 2011

Room ST274/5 Stewart House, 32 Russell Square, WC1B 5DN

Institute of musical research

Music, Phenomenology and Time Consciousness:

Reflections after Husserl

David Clarke

Professor of Music, Newcastle University

As the founding father of modern phenomenology Edmund Husserl remains an important reference point for the field; even the most trenchant critiques of his work do not cancel it out. Husserl has especial salience for music studies, since he treats music as paradigmatic for our understanding of temporality, in turn the essence of consciousness and hence of our lived experience of the world. Thus Husserl’s corpus of writings on time consciousness – published in translation as On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917) – represents as significant a starting point as any for an inquiry into music and phenomenology. Key to Husserl’s account of temporality is the concept of retention: a form of immediate memory, which simultaneously explains and problematises how the present is apprehended subjectively (as opposed to modeled mathematically as a durationless point on a line). The concept is defined differentially, being distinguished from (among other concepts) recollection, a more enactive kind of remembering or recalling. Much is at stake in the opposition between these terms, since Husserl attributes aprimordiality to retention that he associates with an irreducible transcendental subjectivity. It is this privileging and its attendant ‘metaphysics of presence’ that Derrida was famously keen to deconstruct and insert in its place the linguistically founded notion of différance. What might the study of music have to contribute to such debates (and vice-versa)? For one thing, it might investigate the role of recollection in a way that is missing in Husserl’s account, and show how this relates to a signifying dimension of music that he left insufficiently acknowledged. However, rather than necessarily corroborating Derrida’s notion of the differential movement of the signifier as the ultra-transcendental principle, this line of reasoning might instead underscore the distinction between retention and recollection, and with it the need to acknowledge the significance of a phenomenological dimension in musical experience that remains distinct from, even though intimately bound up with, the semiological. This, then, would point to phenomenology as a necessary element in the study of musical meaning.

Dyson - Sounding New media

Interesting quote from Immersion and Embodiment in the arts and culture

"The use of narrative is important for a number of reasons. First, it attaches to a sense of causality; second, it allows for sounds to be deployed in time; third, and most important, it creates "space" within the piece - allowing different sounds their difference, a degree of identity, a certain differentiation.