Anna Reguero

Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction

By Arved Ashby

Arved Ashby Associate Professor at Ohio State University. Ph.D., Yale University. Fulbright Scholar.
Recipient of an AMS 50 fellowship and Albert Einstein Award. Research areas: Modernism throughout the
20th Century, musical theater, popular culture, intellectual history, cultural studies, and film music.
(Condensed bio from OSU website)

Title: Kick back to Walter Benjamins essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
Asks how people should relate to art in a time when its so easy to reproduce identical copies of that art.
What happens when art survives into a secular age?

That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a
symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying:
the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making
many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the
reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object
reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the
contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind.

Summary:

Ashby finds that recorded music has supplanted notation as the musical text. He
explores questions about how this digital, mechanical music age, where we can
listen to an endless supply and repetition of music of our choosing (or of our iPods
choosing on shuffle mode), affects how we listen to, consume, perform, and think
about absolute music. He ultimately grapples at how absolute music is understood
today, and argues that it cant be done without consideration for recording and its
listening practices.

From the introduction: What does music performance mean in the age of mechanical reproduction? He is
pursuing the topic as a cultural anthropologist, not as philosopher. Addresses the problem of unlimited
reproducibility and the impact this has had on subjectivity, memory, and convention and its effect on
notions of art, authenticity, and reality. Emphasizes the roles of invention and technology in producing new
intuitions and new manners of thought. If we wish to understand a Brahms symphony or a Haydn quartet
as a public resource across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we must discuss recordings, and talk
about them as objects to be bought and sold (music as commodity, an element that has remained constant
through recording history; i.e. recording as a commercial venture).
Introduction:

When you buy a record there are always cuts that leave you cold. You skip them. You dont approach a
record as a closed book that you have to take or leave. Other cuts you may listen to over and over again.
They follow you. You find yourself humming them under your breath as you go about your daily business.
Brian Massumi, on ways to approach reading the book volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Ashby: it seems odd that a philosopher and political theorist should find music recordings more useful,
conceptually and practically, than many musicians do. Though the recording has been serious musics
main vehicle of currency for at least twenty years now, American musicologists fail to give it or other mass
media much ontological recognition beyond documentary functions.

Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler: These composers are now less likely to be heard in a concert hall than as a
ringtone or in a video game, or paused, fast-forwarded, and shuffle-played on an MP3 player. Taking a
Massumian approach to recordings recorded music as open texts.

Evidence of musicians/scholars negative feelings towards recordings:

Simon Rattle Music was not meant to sound like gramophone records.

Roman Ingarden (music ontologist) Distancing of the recording from the composition by invoking a
record of a work in performance and not of the work itself.

Lewis Lockwood (Harvard musicologist) Angry that the Beethoven movie Immortal Beloved was made
as a Hollywood film and not as a history textbook.

This intellectual neglect of recordings and other media is emblematic of a wider oversight in American
musicology: to judge from the scholarly literature in this country, there would seem to be no vernacular
practice for so-called classical music. Recordings, films, and other media have enabled or, more simply,
are vernacular practices with art music, and those music scholars who slight or ignore them are relics
tending a relic discipline. Ashby

Work and text are stringent ideas in musicology, compared to literature, and do not allow as much for
imagination and initiative. Takes some blame off musicologists because the musical work is so
ambiguous (i.e. notation and musical score are poor representations of sounds heard As heard, a musical
work does not map onto its printed score with nearly the same directness and precision, as written prose.)

Phonograph means: That which writes in sound. The recording is both written, fixed into permanency,
and oral, where a listener can learn directly from listening to it.

Recordings have changed music. Examples: streamlining of vibrato in the second half of the 20th
Century; role of music in commercial cultures and social interaction.

Scholars have dealt with this, but less often discussed, with any musical specificity and in a way that
takes into account the deep and wide cultural import of recordings, is the impact that the recording has had
on aesthetics and on basic questions of ontology on what sort of thing music is. I aver in this book that
recordings have irrevocably changed notions of performance and the musical work, and that certain bodies
of classical music have had as profound a symbiotic relationship with media as has some pop.

None of them [musicologists], however, asks basic epistemological questions about how our musical
expectations and music-historical understandings are shaped and colored by the recording formats
themselves, or about how recording represents a textural endeavor and has in fact affected classical-music
practice in a way that is less (or less directly) aesthetic than ontological.

Even more reprehensible than disallowing classical music any real vernacular practice or of ignoring
such practice, which amounts to the same thing is the implication that vernacular customs are somehow
synonymous with popular music, while classical music represents a kind of strict orthodoxy.

Why Absolute Music?

-Exploring the transformation of absolute music due to recording culture.

-What is absolute music? 19th Century description: purely instrumental, structure oriented, no extra-musical
elements, purely aesthetic without social function. Takes on a sacred meaning; religious experience.
Ashbys definition: music heard without regard for the context surrounding its composition (recordings
have forced more music to become absolute). Generally, he speaks of absolute music as recorded
instrumental music.

-Assumptions he explores: Recording falsifies the art music experience, and popular music and absolute
music do not share a connection or culture (developed social and communal elements in antitheses to
absolute music).

The Fate of the Work

-Absolute musical culture is transformed by recording, which has become the dominant form of musical
transmission while reducing music to exchange value in a context of commodity capitalism.

-Book addresses the strange fate of music at a point in history where recorded simulacra of performances
of music works are more relevant, accessible, and real than any lingering notion of the pieces
themselves. Musical work played an originative role in past, the source/origin of musical experience. Now
it plays esthetic function a point of orientation and demarcation.

-Film more widely regarded as both the performance and text.

-Absolute music as commodity? Does it still have artistic, social value?

Why Technology?

-Recordings have played a role in both dismantling and perpetuating absolute music

-Recordings as physical objects have taken on the qualities of perfection, ineffability, and permanence,
once attributed to the musical work itself.

-Pitfalls of talking about technology: Dehumanization of technology, isolating human expertise, giving a
social role to technology is outdated/has been done.

Recording as Challenging and Standing-Reserve

-Recording can be counted mad in that it ultimately resulted in devaluation of the very notions of work
and performance that it was originally designed to preserve.
-Arthur Schnabel: For twenty years I have refused to be part of this destruction by preservation. Now I
know I cant play well enough to want to remain forever on the same level. The coupling of the unceasingly
changeable man with the permanently insensitive machine is wrong. It is mankind using its intelligence for
self-destruction.

-Irrationalism that users of recorded music are torn between art and truth.

-Artistic elements are recognized and honored in popular music

-In classical music, lingering notions of text and work have compelled musicians to classify recording as a
technological rather than artistic-aesthetic process.

Music or mediation?

-Music as soundtrack, regardless of whether it appeared in a movie: Films and their soundtracks have
taken over stewardship of the long, parsed-out, attention-monopolizing time spans that were once the
domain of art music.

-Reason for decline of concert music: not because recordings have displaced concerts, but because
recordings give listeners an unlimited cinematic experience. The malleable recording allows the listener to
see more, fantasize more, and do more mental spatiotemporal roaming.

-Absolute music is alive as aesthetic model and cultural force, but as an exclusive aural paradigm it is
dead and gone.

Chapters:

I. The Recorded Musical Text

The verbatim repetition of the recording as something distinguishable from hearing the
same musicians twice in a row.

II. Recording, Repetition, and Memory in Absolute Music

III. Schnabels Rationalism, Goulds Pragmatism

IV. Digital Mythologies

V. Beethoven and the iPod Nation

Contrasts LPs and CDs with MP3 and iPods (digital music players)

LP and CD are containers for sound. Physical commodity.

MP3 neither a medium nor a recording method. New information format for classical
music asks if art music represents a type of information.

MP3 rendered music largely immaterial and invisible.

MP3 - serves the ear rather than the eye (notation serves the eye). Speeds up dissemination of
music.
 MP3 is now a stable technology, studies show it's preferred over higher fidelity options. Sales
continue to rise in corporate download market (which only represents a part of total
downloads.)

Has a youth-market aesthetic. Musical tastes diverge, while MP3s become the techno-
cultural chic. Leading to a disinterest in media types in younger generation.

Music, Information, Originality

Music as information, ever since rise of publishing and ticket-selling in 19th century.

Information definitions 1. Information: selected and concentrated form of data. 2. Information

Goods: information that is bought and sold. 3. Experience Goods : commodities that must be
experienced in order to be valued. 4. Information Technology : systems and infrastructure that
organize and provide access to information.

Musical style is an information technology system, example with Babbitt and serialism: This
increase in efficiency necessarily reduces the 'redundancy' of the language, and as a result the
intelligible communication of the work demands increased accuracy from the transmitter
(performer) and activity from the receiver (the listener). Ashby says, With this description,
Babbitt proudly emphasizes the status of his works as experience goods, describes their
elegance as information systems, and tells us that they have a highly developed information
technology and demand the same of their listeners.

Absolute music, an aesthetic of information deprivation. Absolute music has aesthetic of

exclusion and abstraction. Paradox: Symphony written not for aristocracy but for enlightened
public. Self-important, but delimited and informationally self-conscious culture of music
doesn't work today with the mass media.

Present day, genius is not found in the recordings of great composers, but in the devices
themselves: The iPod, in short, is more original than any of the music now stored on it.
Oversaturation of information, music melds together.

Literacies

Musical literacy. Ability to sight-read, fluent in solfege, aurally able to deconstruct works of
length and complexity, etc.

We are now in the midst of a wholesale revision of musical literacy. Assimilation of

musical culture has shifted into understanding its deployment and configuration of
information. Acquaintance with so many kinds of music due to iPod and MP3 players
changing conceptions of musical literacy.

Media as modern form of language.

Media shapes us. MP3 as servomechanism, blurs division between the user and the thing
being used. The increasingly small digital sound file formats are bringing music so close and
conveniently to listeners for so many hours a day, making for an increasing intimate system of
 self-regulating feedback, that an onlooker might well ask just who is playing whom. Think
iPod shuffle.

Music players moving towards devices that are less and less like playing an instrument.

Media technologies as extensions of our bodies iPod earphone reduce distance between
reproduction and ear. Technology is worn.

MP3 represents a musical revolution more than a media development. MP3 is the first
information technology to have the direct kind of impact, ontological as well as aesthetic,
delivered inside to the listening mind itself, that was previously the province of music and
musicians.

Individual and Group

Absolute music isolationist aesthetic. Music expresses universal messages to a larger public,
but is still contemplated in isolation.

Listening to music: an individual or a communal encounter?

iPod invites the isolationist listening experience. Seems suited for absolute music, such as
Beethoven, Brahms and Babbitt not public music (via Babbitt).

iPod induces active listening: the world becomes the accompaniment to the music, or the
meaning of the music is elevated because of its surroundings. (paradoxically changing the
absolute nature of the music.)

Canons from Shuffles

Media and technology causing canons (musical canons i.e. generally accepted favorite and
important musical works) to change in content and structure. Expands or diminishes choices
available to consumers.

MP3 mission to increase literacy, makes an abundance of texts available at affordable

prices.

Some lament that the personal stereo turns music into aural wallpaper. Example with the
increase and affordability of publishing - the same claims were made that it was the end of
literature. Instead, a new canon emerged: the popular novel.

Market so cluttered and fragmented now due to digitalization of music that the market cant
now support an art music canon.

MP3 may be exit from segregations of taste and audience (due to the variety that can fit on it).
But it can also be a canon demonstrator (listening through all the works of a composer to
hear progresses). Compacting and Great Quartets or Great Symphonies listening experience
so tightly, in a way that wasnt possible before the iPod, clarifies and perhaps justifies the
cannon can also bring out the negative aspects of canons and canonic thinking.
 Issue of works one should know and works one would like to hear an issue for concert
music in iPod generation.

If a listener hears all Beethoven symphonies in a row, the composers various ways of
playing with the sonata form idea-type could blur together into mere idiosyncrasy. Crowds
out the distinctions in works that give them meaning. Produces exhaustion/distraction.
Musical canons incompatible with MP3 culture.

Playlists, or Ruffled Cannons

How is absolute music to be organized and heard on an iPod? The answer is playlists: anti-
intellectual, miniaturized, tailored to the individual listener and momentary whim, canon
replacements for the 21st century.

Lateral aspect to playlists can connect any point to any other and every other. No longer
organized in the sense of a library.

Shuffle liberating and challenging. Laziness? Or, emphasis on the moment? Formal
structure theories, such as Schenker, not compatible with shuffle and other types of
interrupted, or all-too-continuous playback.

A number of important examples expose as something of a myth the assumption that

shuffling movements by Beethoven, Mahler, or Brahms would ipso facto contravene and
violate those composer structural thinking. In reality, there are some instances of symphonic-
compositional shuffling from the composers themselves. Composers often shuffled
movements, order was indeterminate, etc. Encored repetitions in concert performances.

starting with the symphonys premiere in 1813, the Allegretto second movement of
Beethovens Second proved so popular that conductors were often forced to repeat it at least
once before they could go on to the Scherzo. Isnt this the equivalent to pushing the repeat
button on an iPod or Discman?

MP3 culture habits similar to London in the 1790s and Vienna in first decades of 19 th C
variety, mixing of genres, disinterest in concert protocol.

MP3 goes some way in eliminating some of musics rituals (concert hall rituals, etc.).
technology has made it possible for mechanical rituals of recorded music playback to
become rituals of corporate chic.

VI. Photo/Phono/Porno

VII. Mahler as Imagist

A Mahler symphony problematizes the historical work-concept even as it offers a particular

solution to those problems. Mahler created a strange, anti-Romantic disjunction between
words and music, and the glut of video and web imagery in our own era has brought us closer
to understanding his meanings without closing the hermeneutic circle. There has always
been an imagistic or photographic aspect to Mahlers music, in my view, but it was electronic
media of the later twentieth century that helped listeners become literate, and then conversant,
 with this aspect. In short, Mahlers works are better assimilated precisely because the world
has become increasingly crowded, and not because of any developments in listening
cognition or concentration. His symphonies press us urgently into a variety of roles, except
that of listener.

I paint perhaps the first sanguine picture of art music as it connects and will potentially connect in the
future with early twenty-first century market technologies. I see this music as an ever-lively
phenomenon that will always involve, if not a majority, then a vital and passionate set of listeners.
Technology will neither save nor destroy classical music, or any art form for that matter. Innovations in
audio electronics speed up the increase-decrease of musics popularity, certainly, but in introducing sambas
and sonatas to new cultures and manners of construal they also serve to broaden their significance. The
currency of classical music bears little if any connection to issues of education and commercialism; the
only real concern is access to and distribution of the music, and that is now largely a technological
concern.