Why Study Record Production?
Section Headings:
1. How Recording Changed Music
2. Fitting in with existing musicology
3. Production or Reception?
4. To Do It Better Or To Understand It Better?
5. Do we just study the musical affect or should we also be studying the way that music is produced and disseminated?
6. Critical theory and the role of music in our society.
How Recording Changed Music
Analogy with speech and writing – it allowed the storage of some aspects of a transient process. Different to notation which was a set of instructions for creating the transient process. Listen again – can be seen as a ‘text’.
Eisenberg’s paradox – what does it mean?
What difference has it made to the performer? Allows for critical reflection and postproduction editorial decisions. It also changes the social dynamic – different type of performance anxiety and different type of positive reinforcement.
What difference has it made to the listener? A further step in the commodification of music. Walter Benjamin and art’s removal from the ritual? Removes the dimension of sight from music.
As a creative tool. Recording allowed the manipulation of many parameters that were previously fixed – some like the relative amplitude of components were part of the broader technological change of microphones and amplifiers. Others, like double tracking the voice and editing allowed occurrences that were impossible in performance.
Fitting in with existing musicology.
Allan Moore, Nicholas Cook and what’s the point of musicology?
Defining the terminology.
Rationale – Small and Musicking: the conceptual separation of production and consumption involved in the incorporation of music in the capitalist system. The creation of a product through recording – from score to recording: the musical text in relation to the process of musicking.
Why study record production separately to music?
Allan Moore’s paper and chapter
Eric Clarke and the ecological approach
Studying a single element in isolation – orchestration versus harmony? Their inter-relationship should always be accounted for but we can still say something useful about orchestration and identify it as a component – the necessity of compartmentalising something in a representational system?
Production or Reception?
Originally the study of music was about learning the musical arts i.e. performance and composition. Musical appreciation – being a better listener by understanding more about the techniques and intentions of production.
Kerman’s rejection of musicology from the 1950s to the 80s as aiming to create definitive editions of the canon for no musical purpose – neither to enhance production or reception?
Analysis tells us how to listen or to perform / compose – imposes an ideological slant.
To Do It Better Or To Understand It Better?
Do we just study the musical affect or should we also be studying the way that music is produced and disseminated?
A musicology of production as separate to a musicology of reception / interpretation?
How are they related? – producers need to understand the effect of their actions – universal and cultural specificity. Listeners can understand more if they understand the mode and reasons for – the causality – of production. How similar is the process of listening for someone involved in producing the sound of music to that of an audience member? Lakoff and Johnson – metaphor, Clarke – meaning based on interpretation. Interpretation based on attributing intention. Is intention more visible from inside the process? Distance – seeing the wood for the trees.
How are they different? -
Critical theory and the role of music in our society.
Small and musicking – music as social practice.
Our motivation for studying music will also determine what we consider a worthwhile aspect for study:
Theories of musical creativity should be situated in the social and cultural structures of production.
Theories of musical meaning should be situated in the social and cultural structures of reception.
