Communications & Media Studies Podcast
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Subscribe to this feedCosmopolitan Melbourne Conference: Scott McQuire
28th March 2008
Public Screens and the Transnational Public Sphere
Scott McQuire (University of Melbourne)
Public space in 21st Century cities is increasingly shaped by interactions between media and architecture. The result is the formation of media-architecture complexes which are fast coalescing into ‘media cities’. The social implications of the new public spaces created at the intersection of media networks and material structures are highly ambivalent. New security and commercial agendas overlay older traditions of civic life. In a context where fear of strangers is frequently promoted as a strategy of political control, new media forms such as large public screens can play a critical role in promoting collective interactions in public space. However, facilitating cosmopolitan public culture demands strategic displacement of the flexible forms of power frequently deployed in the public spaces of contemporary cities. Drawing on research undertaken in Australia and the UK, this paper will argue that sites such as Melbourne’s Federation Square can take a strategic role in the contemporary formation of experimental ‘transnational’ public spheres.
Cosmopolitan Melbourne Conference: Katie Fraser
28th March 2008
Steering Past Settlement: Cases from the African Legal Service
Katie Fraser (Footscray Community Legal Centre)
How does Melbourne’s social and cultural geography shape legal problems and unlawful behaviours? The western suburbs have long been a settling point for new arrivals; however, as gentrification continues and the inner west becomes unaffordable, new refugee arrivals from Sudan and Burma are being settled further out in the western suburbs. Here public transport links are less developed, and a private vehicle is essential for access to language classes, schools and other essential services. Driving without a license, driving with a suspended license, and driving without insurance are all inevitable consequences of this geographical imperative to drive. Such problems are compounded by certain public policy initiatives. For example, the Centrelink implementation of “welfare to work” policies pressures unskilled workers—including many refugees and other new arrivals—to take factory work, which tends to be available during time periods and at industrial locations not serviced by public transport. In these ways, policy, landscape and cultural differences combine to cause shame and high financial costs, creating barriers to settlement and barring the participation of some in “cosmopolitan” and “multicultural” Melbourne. Other social consequences include high costs on the road and the broader losses associated with social isolation. This paper will draw on evidence from the African Legal Service project, which has been run from the Footscray Community Legal Centre to provide legal advice services to African clients. It will examine geography as one of the barriers to social inclusion for new arrivals, and suggest ways in which spatial and cultural isolation can be overcome.
Cosmopolitan Melbourne Conference: Kate Shaw
28th March 2008
Planning the ‘Creative’ City: Global Strategies and Local Creative Subcultures
Kate Shaw (University of Melbourne)
The ‘creative city’ concept has high political and symbolic importance for global cities seeking to attract jobs and investment. But the concept contains a well established dilemma: local creative subcultures, which feed city cultures, can be vulnerable to the gentrification that often results. Increasing land rents in Australian central cities are placing pressure on local creative initiatives, displacing small cultural producers and dispersing local networks.
Genuinely creative cities foster new ideas and practices and new uses of space, requiring that we plan for the unplanned. Some city governments are beginning to understand this, and are developing planning policies that can create the conditions for the continuity of their valued (and valuable) creative subcultural activities.
This paper examines the complex relationships between ‘creativity’ and place, and evaluates recent initiatives intended to nourish local cultural diversity. In identifying cases of best practice in Australia, and with reference to similar practices overseas, the research reveals an evolution in the range of regulatory and negotiating tools available to governments, and in public discourses around the maintenance of sustainable city competitiveness.
Music, Culture and Society: Postgraduate Session
8 March 2008
Jimi Hendrix: Towards A Socio-Biography
Marios Elles
Mythologized in his own time, Jimi Hendrix is still a name that arouses enigma today. Despite numerous biographical works by scholars and fans, over the last four decades an understanding of the inner man and the social, cultural and historical basis of his work remain largely untapped. As we move away from the twentieth century new works by his admirers will begin to emerge that represent a closer reading of his life and achievements. Drawing upon a range of research approaches and perspectives I identify my own work as belonging to this second wave of Hendrix scholarship. Although a worthy exercise, I have not sought to prise apart the extra musical and musical elements of Hendrix’s life, because I wish to illustrate how one necessarily informs the other. Hence the paper provides some interesting insights into the intentions behind Hendrix’s entry into the musical world, why he played guitar so well, his relationships with fellow friends and band members and the reasons behind the change in his career direction in 1969. Whilst the paper consciously avoids venturing into the thicket of theoretical discussion, one of the underlying features of this work-in-progress more generally is that it takes its inspiration from a wide range of disciplinary fields within the humanities.
Elements of Musical Listening: Conceptually Generating A Way into the Social Investigation of the Musical Experience
Michael Walsh
This paper presents the findings of a review of literature that explored the social action of musical listening in its historical and contemporary manifestations. From a brief consideration of the literature the paper moves on to present the need to explore musical listening through five related strands of enquiry. These five constitutive aspects of listening are presented as the site of musical experience, the musical elements, the social history of the listener, the technological means by which listening is enabled and the agency of the individual. The paper finds that it is only through combining and considering these particular elements of listening an adequate and more precise understanding of musical listening in the social is possible.
“That Feeling of Exaltation”: An Ethnography of Music and Religious Experience at a Music Festival
Mark Jennings
This paper is a work in progress, based on an ethnography of the performances at the West Coast Blues & Roots festival (henceforth “WCB&R”) which took place March 31-April 1 2007 in Fremantle, Western Australia. I begin with a narrative of a day at the festival, sketching the transition from the casual interest of attendees in the morning and early afternoon to the intense, densely packed devotion of participants in the evening. I describe music as a ritual negotiated between performers and participants. I outline the combination of factors by means of which music becomes a “portal”, inviting participants to an experience of euphoria and communitas. I make use of the broad understanding of religious experience outlined by Friedrich Schleiermacher, together with the historical and ethnographic work of Robin Sylvan, to suggest that this musical portal opens into a transcendent experience of the sacred.
Music, Culture and Society: Stuart Grant
8 March 2008
On the One: Fundamental Rhythm
According to John Dewey, “rhythm is a universal scheme of existence” which “holds science and art in kinship”. Rhythm is a most fundamental ontological underpinning of human experience. But the term rhythm is used to designate a diverse, different, seemingly unrelated phenomena. The rhythms of day and night, sleep and wakefulness, the four seasons, walking, running, breath and blood, birth, senescence and death, menstruation, the moon and the tides, are rudiments of our social structures. Psychologists and biologists have studied rhythm from a systematic psycho-physical perspective, revealing how behavioural and mental structures emerge from biological and natural rhythms. Anthropologists have studied how musical and ritual rhythms express and give form to cultural and social phenomena. Philosophers have written about poetry and time as an essence of the human. Still, there is debate about what constitutes rhythm; what is rhythmic in rhythm, what makes rhythm rhythm?
This paper outlines how a phenomenological/intersubjective study of rhythm - musical, temporal, social, cultural, biological and natural – first from a theoretical perspective (using a worldly Schützian social phenomenological frame), then from a first and second person reporting conducted as a group phenomenological enquiry, and finally reducing to a transcendental/phenomenological study - might provide some eidetic constants of what we mean when we talk about rhythm, and give insight into how these different levels of understanding of natural, subjective and intersubjective rhythmic processes understood as rhythmic are intertwined to produce time, self and world.
Music, Culture and Society: John Rundell
8 March 2008
Music as Critico-Reflective Space
Following Adorno’s remarks on Bach and contrapuntal music, this paper explores the possibility of theorising music as a spatial form, and one not only constituted through time and rhythm. It is not only the space of performance, of reception, of listening and interpretation that is of concern here, but also the internal space of the creation, arrangement and voicing of that space. This spatiality creates what might be termed a specific musico-reflective space where thinking, feeling and particular moods are created, performed and interacted with.
Music, Culture and Society: Robert Savage
8 March 2008
On Truth and Semblance in an Operatic and Extra-Operatic Sense: Michael Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage
Is there a reality specific to opera, and if so, what are its constitutive characteristics? How does it stand in relation to extra-operatic reality, and how can that relationship be figured within operatic reality itself? In this paper, I attempt to tackle these questions with reference to Michael Tippett’s opera “The Midsummer Marriage” (1955), which I take to be a neglected masterpiece of fully realized opera.
Music, Culture and Society: Agnes Heller
8 March 2008
Modern Hermeneutics and the Presentation of Opera
Opera, on stage, had been declared a “dead” bourgeois genre, in the fifties and sixties. Its resurrection and, recently, its growing attraction, grew out of the new idea of staging opera as a kind of “music drama”, as a kind of “Gesamtkunstwerk”. This idea, again, was inspired by a new kind of hermeneutics, one that provoked radical and entirely unusual interpretations. The paper analyses some of these new kinds of interpretations, putting emphasis on the various new interpretations of Wagner’s Ring and of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. It tells the story how the spirit of our times (the depreciation of violence, feminism, etc.) have contributed to a reversal in the evaluation of characters like Siegfried or Don Giovanni, and how this reversal illuminates their similarities.
Music, Culture and Society: Aline Scott-Maxwell
7 March 2008
Making a Home Away From Home: The Indonesian Student Music Scene in Melbourne
For Indonesian international students living far from home, their preferred contemporary popular music is embedded in and fills the social space of their daily lives and serves as an important expression of cultural and group identity. But it can also reflect the way they engage with Australia and their transitory status here. This is illustrated in my paper, which examines the Indonesian student music scene in Melbourne with particular reference to a 2004-5 compilation CD, titled Pengamen Melbourne (Melbourne Buskers), that showcases fourteen Melbourne-based, Indonesian student bands. Collectivity, fluidity and a focus on group music-making—on process rather than outcomes—are all characteristics of band activity and of the scene. The fluidity of this scene extends to its boundaries, which arguably take in Jakarta, where musicians re-group and bands sometimes re-form following their return to Indonesia at the conclusion of their studies. The pop and rock styles on the CD draw on Western musical models, materials and structures, which are mediated and re-created in Indonesia. Various aspects of the CD, however, including its title, artwork and some of the tracks, testify to a relationship with the students’ temporary home, Melbourne. The CD and associated music activity therefore provide a tangible manifestation of both their self-contained social and cultural world in Melbourne and their transnational lives spanning geographically and culturally distant locations.
Music, Culture and Society: Philip Flavin
7 March 2008
Miyagi, Modernity, Nationalism and Kitsch
This paper explores modernism, nationalism, and ‘modern Japanese’ music for the koto and focuses upon Miyagi Michio (1894-1956) and his creation of the first “national music”. Miyagi was the first traditional Japanese musician (koto) to draw upon Western compositional technique and his importance in the history of Japanese music is indeed indisputable. In spite of having revolutionized music for the koto, rather than a simple appropriation of Western musical ideas, Miyagi’s borrowings were interpreted through a highly nationalistic lens created by Miyagi and other seminal figures in the New Japanese Music Movement. The premise behind this movement was to “modernize” Japanese music by turning to the West, modify Western techniques to reflect Japanese taste, and thus create a music that would match Western music in its complexity. The contemporary reception of Miyagi’s works was extremely divided. Many supported his efforts while others accused Miyagi of questionable taste as “he made the _koto _sound like a piano” and also disparaged the mass appeal of his music. In this paper, I argue that in the creation of a “national music”, much of what Miyagi created was kitsch, which in turn leads to the overt militarism immediately before the war.
Music, Culture and Society: Alison Tokita
7 March 2008
The Piano and Cultural Modernity in East Asia
International Piano Competitions consistently show the dominance of young Asian pianists, reflecting the prominence of the piano in contemporary East Asian culture.
Max Weber wrote that: “It is the peculiar nature of the piano to be a middle-class instrument… It was a product of the industrial age.” The importance of the piano in 19th century Western culture was obvious to the Japanese, who early gave it an important place in the new education system and in public life. Companies such as the Yamaha Piano and Organ Company (founded 1897) obtained international recognition at world expositions, and commodification of instrument manufacture made the piano a feature of bourgeois family life (Herd 2006; see also Herd 1994). The domestic market grew further when the _bunka jūtaku _architecture with western style rooms became popular in the 1920s, and Hosokawa notes the centrality of the piano in his discussion of the enthusiasm for home music-making in 1910s to 1930s Japan (Hosokawa 2003). Further, efficient new methodologies for teaching piano and violin were developed in Japan to satisfy the demand for Western music by the new middle classes. Suzuki Shin’ichi’s music teaching method was later followed by the Yamaha group teaching piano and keyboard as a way of increasing sales.
Focusing on the piano, this paper will explore the reasons why Western music became such an important part of modern Asian culture; it will argue that the piano had already become a symbol of modernity in Japan in the pre-war period, and that the Japanese model was being taken up by East Asian countries in this colonial era.
Alison Tokita is Director of the Japanese Studies Centre, Monash University. Her research interests lie in the Japanese performing arts, especially music and sung story-telling (katarimono). Subsidiary interests are the influence of Japanese music on contemporary Australian composition; contemporary Japanese musical composition and composers; koto music; international marriage; Japanese popular culture.
Music, Culture and Society: Graeme Smith
7 March 2008
From Ethnics to Cosmopolitans: Multicultural and World Music in Australia
From the late 1970s, Australian government cultural policies of multiculturalism provided the initial framework whereby musical diversity was placed within national discourses. In the 1980s, these policies encouraged the development of a group of musical styles associated with immigrant communities and the idea of multicultural Australia. However, in the following decade, shifts in policy away of social and cultural equity, linked to broader shifts in global cultural flows of music, lead to the emergence of cosmopolitan discourses as the source of claims to musical authority and social value of these musical forms.
Music, Culture and Society: Craig De Wilde
7 March 2008
Jazz and the Australian Eureka Youth League: An Uneasy Alliance
From the time of its origins in America, jazz music has been surrounded by questions of moral, political and racial significance. Even when this musical tradition was disseminated to other geographical regions, it continued to be associated with controversial issues, exemplifying strong social and political viewpoints. In 1941, the Eureka Youth League, a politically left-wing society with communist affiliations, was begun in Australia. Among their attitudes, the members of the League regarded jazz as a strongly political statement, representing a message of protest by African-Americans against what was considered a racist and unjust society. The League saw a strong parallel between the African-American viewpoint and their own perceived notion of the societal oppression being perpetrated on the Australian working classes. In 1944, the Eureka Hot Jazz Society was formed in an attempt to make jazz a part of working class life, similar to the way folk music had been used to communicate a pro-labor union message in the American South. While many jazz musicians of the period claimed to be largely apolitical, the communist affiliation remained associated with traditional jazz music in Australia.
Music, Culture and Society: Julie Waters
7 March 2008
Proselytizing the Prague Manifesto in England: The Commissioning, Composition and Performance of Alan Bush’s ‘Nottingham’ Symphony
British composer Alan Bush (1900-1995) composed the ‘Nottingham’ Symphony in 1949. It was the first major orchestral work he wrote after attending the Second International Congress of Composers and Music Critics in Prague in 1948 – a Congress at which the principles of socialist realism were confirmed and national musical traditions upheld as artistic models. Not only did the symphony mark the end of Bush’s flirtation with modernism, but it affirmed his commitment to English national style. This style, drawing on elements including contrapuntal forms, modal inflections, and associations with English history and geography, was a musical path Bush had begun travelling earlier in the 1940s. Given his Marxist and Communist Party connections, and the symphony’s pivotal position in his oeuvre, the work clearly invites exploration in terms of ideological influences. This article explores the symphony – and the circumstances surrounding its conception and performance - in the context of Bush’s view of music as social practice, and particularly in terms of his response to the Prague Manifesto and Soviet musical aesthetics. What was the significance of the symphony’s commissioning by a co-operative society? In what ways may the symphony be seen as Bush’s attempt to implement the Manifesto, and to rework the English pastoral tradition to accommodate his ideological aims? Drawing on a range of sources, including Bush’s published articles and unpublished correspondence, the article aims to shed light on the complex interrelationship between his musical theory and practice, and the social and cultural context in which the symphony was created.
Music, Culture and Society: Joel Crotty
7 March 2008
Marketing Romanian Music Abroad (1948-1964): The Use of Totalitarian Language in Various Guises
This paper uses two sources that were marketed in the “West” – one was an official party propaganda newspaper, For a lasting peace, for a people’s democracy and the other an academic journal, Rumanian review, that on the surface appeared to be above the direct approach of a communist communiqué. A source from the West that represented a communist mouthpiece, the British-Rumanian Friendship Association’s British-Rumanian Bulletin,_ _has also been included to highlight the extent to which the Romanian authorities went to project its propaganda.
What was the language used? How was “socialist realism”, “cosmopolitanism”, “internationalism” expressed in musical terms? And how did the marketing of music change with the fluctuation of ideology? The period under review reflects an era in which communism had rapidly engulfed every aspect of Romanian life and the Party’s self-justification for societal domination needed both its own people and those abroad to be “educated” in the utopian vision. In terms of theoretical ballast the paper will use the work of Monika Kroupova and Victor Klemperer both of who have studied the totalitarian language from respectively the communist and Nazi “persuasions”.
Music, Culture and Society: Shane Homan
7 March 2008
Pop in the City: Industries, Governance and Night-Time Economies
Popular music plays an important role in the cultural life of many cities, as a key commercial entertainment option for residents and tourists, and as a particularly powerful means by which cities claim a competitive foothold in the ‘selling’ of a vibrant nightlife._ _The suburban or inner city rock pub, jazz restaurant or dance nightclub has always played an important role not just in the lives and careers of individual musicians, but in the life of cities. In the particularly Australian context that I will discuss here, live rock, blues and jazz venues have similarly assumed local and national importance as sites where communities are formed, performance skills tested, and reputations earned.
In this paper I consider the recent history of debates about the role of popular music in reconfigurations of the ‘civilised’ and ‘sophisticated’ city and the challenges in ensuring a diversity of nightlife and entertainment. Drawing on my recent involvement in music venue and liquor law reform in NSW, this paper also reflects on the ongoing politics of ‘cultural’ or ‘creative precinct’ conceptualisations of city music-making, and the desire for popular music to be contained within more orderly (gentrified) constructions of the night-time economy.
Music, Culture and Society: Chris Worth
7 March 2008
VU and Value: Canonising Popular Music
The study of popular culture originated partly in resistance to scholarly investment in ‘elitist’ canonical texts at the expense of texts generated and/or consumed by ‘the masses’ or by marginalized social groups. There are, however, many processes at work which encourage the formation of certain kinds of canonicity within popular cultures themselves and also within academic discussions of widely circulated or marginalised cultural texts. Many such processes deploy notions of value and of judgement or taste, explicitly or inexplicitly, to serve the interests of those for whom canon formation is an exercise of and source of power. What are the elements that might be at issue in the formation of putative canons of ‘rock music’? I apply a grid of supposed markers of canonicity and value to the Velvet Underground’s music and its reception. Looking at the results of this thought experiment, I argue that explorations of notions about cultural persistence can in fact generate productive dialogical resistance to, for example, those kinds of critique that, with the best intentions, treat popular creative texts as short-lived commodities circulating in an aesthetic-free market economy.
Music, Culture and Society: Beilharz, Hogan & Walker
7 March 2008
The Vinyl Age: Rock Music in Australia, 1945-1995
Peter Beilharz, Trevor Hogan, and Clinton Walker
This paper represents a work in progress. This project promises the first coherent narrative and thematic work on rock and the postwar period, especially the sixties , with reference both to content and context . Team members - Clinton Walker, Peter Beilharz, and Trevor Hogan - will offer vignettes of enthusiasms including the idea of cultural traffic between cities outside and inside Australia, picking up themes like patterns of performance, innovation, imperfect mimesis, music technologies, production, consumption and youth culture. What happened in these spheres in the antipodes? What made these experiences different, as well as common, and what are the remaining resonances of these stories?
Music, Culture and Society: Peter Murphy
6 March 2008
Bob Dylan Ain’t Talking: One Man’s Vast Comic Adventure in American Music, Dramaturgy, and Mysticism
Bob Dylan is the Augie March of American music, a Bellovian character who is engaged in an endless relentless picaresque journey through the vast landscape of American music, adopting and readopting one musical character type after another, a wanted man pursued by his original fans, the egregious sixties protest generation, whose idolatry he reviles—a musical chameleon, evasive, shape-shifting, identity changing, metamorphosing, impugner of romantic authenticity. The talk explores Dylan’s mystic propensity not to talk, his preference for dramaturgical masks and theatrical collaborators, the disappearance of his original self (Zimmerman) and its replacement with an enigmatic persona—an astonishingly original impersonator-mimic whose unending touring is an emblem of a life that is a comic masterpiece where the aw-shucks sly humor of Huck Finn meets the allusive mercurial word play of Shakespearean drama meets a kind of Quixote-like misidentification of self, misunderstanding by audiences and a mysterious transcendentalist metaphysics that is a peculiarly American mix of Calvinist necessity, bohemian experimentalism and mystical disdain for messages. Please allow me to introduce you to the Augustinian Jew, the philosophical entertainer, the jokerman born out of time. He is one hell of a bunch of interesting guys.
Peter Murphy is Associate Professor of Communications at Monash University. He is co-author of Dialectic of Romanticism: A Critique of Modernism (2004) and author of Civic Justice: From Greek Antiquity to the Modern World (2001). His edited volumes include Agon, Logos, Polis (2000), Friendship (1998), and The Left In Search Of A Center (1996). Murphy is a Coordinating Editor of Thesis Eleven: Critical Theory and Historical Sociology (Sage) and an Associate member of La Trobe University’s Thesis Eleven Centre for Cultural Sociology.
Recording includes a reply from John Dickson.Music, Culture and Society: Eduardo de la Fuente
6 March 2008
That Other Modern Musical Persona: John Cage and the Minimal Self
This paper is derived from a larger research project on twentieth century music/musicians that uses that musical tradition to think about dynamics in modern culture. In this paper, I draw on Christopher Lasch’s notion of the ‘minimal self’ to think about the compositional aesthetic of John Cage. Lasch argues that Cage, and his creative partner Merce Cunningham, were at the forefront of a post-1950 development in avant-garde art he terms the ‘minimal self’. The minimal self rejects the need for ‘self assertion’ associated both with Romantic expressivism and the rational control of aesthetic materials (for e.g., serialism in music). The aesthetic outlook in question cultivates a creative personality based around the themes of self-effacement and impersonality. Lasch sees the minimal self as stemming from a fundamental anxiety in modern culture regarding the self and its relationship to the non-self, with Cage’s ‘tossing of coins, consulting the I Ching and using a stopwatch to time performances’ reflecting a rejection of the aesthetics of ‘tension and release’ for that of ‘psychic oneness’. Lasch’s assessment is decidedly neo-Freudian. He describes the Cagean aesthetic project as a form of narcissism that seeks that ‘blissful feeling of oceanic peace’ that comes from re-fusion with the world at large. He suggests something similar occurs in New Age therapies and forms of spirituality that ‘seek the shortest road to Nirvana’.
My own analysis of Cage’s musical aesthetic begins with a consideration of his work, Indeterminacy, presented with David Tudor at the Brussels World Fair of 1958. I argue that Lasch is only partly correct in his depiction of Cage as the example par excellence of the composer as minimal self. I suggest the following additional considerations: firstly, that characterizing Cage as the purveyor of an aesthetic based ‘on the shortest road to Nirvana’ ignores the deep-seated asceticism and vocational impulse that underlies his approach to merging music with life; and, secondly, that the ‘cult of impersonality’, which Cage could be said to be emblematic of, is itself a product of modern culture’s obsession with an aestheticized self. Drawing on Max Weber’s typology of ‘religious rejections of the world’ as tending towards the ideal-typical extremes of ‘emmisary’ and ‘exemplary’ prophecy, I argue that Cage represents an avant-garde persona that employs a logic that might be termed ‘the charisma of impersonality’. As against the Faustian model of the creative person, as someone seeking transcendence through imposing their will on the world, the exemplary avant-gardist eschews seeking followers and appears to defy the modern ideology of ‘art for art’s sake’. I will argue, however, that in letting sounds be themselves and in withdrawing his personality from the creative process, Cage is employing an important alternative paradigm of modern creativity: the artist as mystical and detached; a prankster who is deadly serious; a teacher who teaches through exemplification; the leader who refuses to lead - in short, charisma through impersonality. I conclude by suggesting that this cultural type recurs in both modern ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture, and represents an important variant of the modern creative self.
Eduardo de la Fuente teaches in the Communications and Media Studies program in the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University. Since 2005, he has been a Faculty Fellow of the Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University, and Co-Convenor of the TASA Cultural Sociology Thematic Group. He has published articles on topics such as the aesthetics of social life, Romanticism in the social sciences, and the cultural dimensions of modernity in journals such as Distinktion, Thesis Eleven The Journal of Sociology, The European Journal of Social Theory and Sociological Theory. He has a forthcoming monograph (Routledge) on twentieth century music and the question of cultural modernity. He recently joined the Editorial Board of the journal Thesis Eleven.
Music, Culture and Society: David Roberts
6 March 2008
Reflections on Cultural Secularization
The paper reads the theme of the conference against the grain: instead of treating music as an integral part of modern culture, I want to examine the conception - prevalent since the Romantics - of music as standing apart from the other arts through its power as absolute music to express the infinite (E. T. A. Hoffmann) and mirror the universe (Schelling), that is, music’s power to be an aesthetic substitute for religion and philosophy.
The cultural secularization of the arts is examined with reference to Adolf Behne’s essay, Rebirth of Architecture and Hegel. The counter-movement against secularization is examined by reference to Proust and Wagner’s late essay, Religion and Art. In conclusion, I argue that cultural secularization is better understood as a dialectic of desacralization and resacralization, illustrated by a brief look at the ongoing significance of religious music in the twentieth century.
David Roberts is Emeritus Professor of German, Monash University, a former director of the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, and co-editor of the social theory journal Thesis Eleven.
Music, Culture and Society: Joseph Borlagdan
6 March 2008
The Paradox of “Do-It-Yourself” in Unpopular Music: Power, Capital, and Social Relations Within a Local Music Community
This paper examines the construction of ‘Do-It-Yourself’ (DIY) values in music-making. The importance of agency and participation as existing outside of the mainstream field of music is argued to be part of a process of music production, consumption and distribution that cannot be simplified according to a ‘mainstream versus alternative’ model. This dichotomy is a persistent one, but investigation into a small music making community revealed that social actors situating themselves in opposition to dominant norms will engage in complex and contradictory ways within the music field. It is more useful to talk of a continuum of music production rather than clearly bounded
categorisations. To better conceptualise how this is negotiated within the milieu of social relationships, Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital as operating within a field of restricted cultural production will be used to explain how forms of sociality are organised around symbolic forms of music made for ‘art’s sake’. By applying this conceptual framework, struggles emerge in which music makers attempt to create their own self-determined autonomous space. Paradoxically, however, these moves towards independence are largely enabled and facilitated by the actor’s dependence on the social networks that constitute the field. The DIY ethic is therefore a misnomer of sorts that belies the inherently social and co-operative manner in which music is pursued against the grain of ‘the mainstream’.
Joseph Borlagdan joined NCETA in July 2007 as a Lecturer. He is currently working on a project exploring the cultural influences on alcohol use amongst young Australians. Prior to working with NCETA, Joseph lectured in the Sociology Department of Flinders University and the Communication School of the University of South Australia. His teaching background includes topics such as youth culture, consumerism, contemporary social problems, social identity and media studies. He has also contributed to research in the teaching and learning field. Joseph completed his PhD at Flinders University in 2005. His research examined the cultural and social context in which young people actively produce their own underground music community. Located within the field of cultural sociology his research interests include the sociology of young people, post-subcultural theory, and ethnographic research. Joseph also holds a Bachelor of Behavioural Science (Hons).
Music, Culture and Society: Dan Black
6 March 2008
Algo-Rhythm and Mello-dy: A Consideration of the Relationship between Technology and the Embodied Performance of Music
For some time, a distinction between musical performance and practices such as sound engineering, arranging, playback, and even computer programming has been becoming progressively more difficult to draw. Harmonies can be constructed on the fly using computer algorithms and arrangements can be generated in a random and evolving fashion in realtime by computer programmes, while original music is produced in a way which precludes its live performance and DJs win fame as virtuoso performers despite being unable to play or compose music in any traditional sense. This paper considers the evolution of technology, changes to ideas of originality and reproduction, and the phenomenology of physical performance to reach some tentative conclusions about the nature of musical performance today.
Dan Black is Lecturer in Communication and Media Studies, School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University. He has a BA(Honours) from Melbourne University and a Ph.D. from RMIT University, and has written for journals such as The Journal of Popular Culture, Fibreculture, and Continuum. His ongoing research interests focus on the relationship between the human body and technology. The impact of embodiment and our interactions with other human bodies on the design and use of technologies; attempts to simulate the human body using technological means; and the interplay between understandings of human life and technological artefacts are of particular concern in his current work.
Note:There are some technical glitches in this recording, which causes parts of the speech at the very beginning to be inaudible. We apologise for the error.
Music, Culture and Society: Lawrence Harvey
6 March 2008
Auditory City: Realising an Auditory Spatial Awareness
The role of the electroacoustic music studio and associated domains of practice have significantly transformed in recent years. Institutional studios were originally necessary to aggregate expensive equipment for a small body of expert users to undertake research in musical, technical and perceptual topics. However the democratisation of technology and widely available technical information has forced a shift in the focus of such sites of auditory production.
The SIAL Sound Studios were established in 2004 in RMIT University’s School of Architecture and Design. As the Studios are located in a school of spatial studies and not a traditional music or media arts school the research, teaching and cultural agenda pursued in the Studios has been developed to address a unique set of cultural, spatial and musical concerns. Research in the Studios is primarily situated in three domains: urban soundscape research and design, spatial sound concerts and acoustic design. This paper will report on a series of public performances and new work in urban-based electroacoustic performances and installations that addresses two of these domains.
In 2007 the Studios produced Auditory City, a pilot series of three events for the Arts and Culture Branch of the City of Melbourne. The aim of the series was to present a free series of spatial music concerts in the city using diverse locations: the local town hall and grand-organ, a laneway and a multi-channel soundscape system. Each of the performances used components of the Studios’ 40 speaker sound diffusion system and software, and involved collaboration with a solo performer. Extending this project is current practice-based research into large-scale urban soundscape systems for electroacoustic sound design. The paper considers the place of sound design in the experience of urban spaces and proposes how this type of work exemplifies the new cultural role that a studio can play in the auditory life of a city and its inhabitants.
Music, Culture and Society: Joanne Cummings
6 March 2008
Trade Mark Registered: Sponsorship, Brand communities and Neo-tribalism within the Australian Indie Music Festival Scene
The paper investigates the relationship between corporate sponsors and Australian indie music festivalgoers at two festivals, Big Day Out and the Falls festival. It is argued that through their consumption of indie music festivals, the festivalgoers have become a ‘brand community’ or neo-tribe. I look at the impacts of branding and commercialisation on the festival scene through an examination of the use of corporate sponsors. It is argued that festivalgoers through their consumption of indie music festivals have become a ‘brand community’ or neo-tribe. Drawing a comparison to the American Vans Warped tour, it is further argued that the commercialisation of the festival scene ultimately impacts on the meanings created by the festivalgoers. I argue that this relationship can have advantages as well as disadvantages due to the blurring of the lines between the meanings created by festivalgoers and the ‘experience enhancement’ techniques used by sponsors and festival organisers.
Music, Culture and Society Conference: Michael Bull
6th March 2008
Sounding Out Cosmopolitanism: iPod Culture and Recognition
In this lecture I argue that iPod culture represents the antithesis of the ideal of the cosmopolitan citizen inscribed in Western culture, that cosmopolitanism increasingly resides in the content of users iPods. That users increasingly turn away from the complexities and contingencies of urban everyday life. iPod culture signifies the development of a new listening self that calibrates the personal use of sound to the desire of the user – iPod culture represents a culture in which individuals increasingly micro-manage their experience. The lecture will discuss the social ramifications of what I refer to as a hyper-post-fordist appropriation of social space.
Michael Bull is Reader in Media and Film at the University of Sussex and has written widely on sound, music and technology. He is the author of Sounding Out the City. Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life (Berg 2000), Sound Moves:iPod Culture and Urban Experience (Routledge 2007) and is co-editor of The Auditory Culture Reader (Berg 2003). He is also the founding editor of The Senses and Society Journal published by Berg. He was until recently a consultant to Portalplayer, California and is a core member of New Trends Forum, a European Thinktank funded by Bankinter, Spain.
ECPS Conference: Professor Jeffrey Alexander
19th December 2007
Performance and Cultural Pragmatics in Social Action
Jeffrey Alexander (Yale)
Jeffrey Alexander presents an overview of his current work on the role of performance and cultural pragmatics in social action. He leads a discussion about the fruitful interaction of contemporary cultural sociology and performance studies—and the place of dramaturgy, narrative, audience and performance in social inquiry.
Jeffrey Alexander is the author of The Civil Sphere (2006), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (2004 co-author), The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology (2003), Neofunctionalism and After (1998), Fin-de-Siècle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction and the Problem of Reason (1995), Structure and Meaning: Relinking Classical Sociology (1989), Action and Its Environments: Towards a New Synthesis (1988), Twenty Lectures: Sociological Theory Since World War Two, Columbia University Press (1987), Theoretical Logic in Sociology (1982-83).
Today, Alexander is leading a team of researchers at Yale University dedicated to developing a ‘strong program in cultural sociology’. A preliminary version of Alexander’s work on social performance can be found in the volume he recently edited with Bernhard Giesen and Jason Mast, Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual (Cambridge, 2006).
'The Greeks' Conference: Vrasidas Karalis
May 3rd 2007
Can ancient myths express modern politics: some comments on Theo Angelopoulos’ Ulysses Gaze
Associate Professor Vrasidas Karalis (Sydney)
Vrasidas Karalis is the author of Nikos Kazantzakis and the Palimpsest of History (Kanakis, 1995) and a number of translation-studies of books by Michael Psellos, Michael Doukas, and Leo the Deacon. He is also the translator of Patrick White’s Voss and A Cheery Soul into Greek.
'The Greeks' Conference: Vassilis Lambropoulos
May 3rd 2007
Governance, Violence, and Justice in Modern Tragedy: on the 1946 tragedy 'Capodistrian' by Nikos Kazantzakis
Professor Vassilis Lambropoulos (Michigan)
Vassilis Lambropoulos is author of The Tragic Idea (Duckworth, 2006), The Rise of Eurocentrism (Princeton University Press, 1993), and Literature as National Institution (Princeton University Press, 1988).
'The Greeks' Conference: Luis David
May 3rd 2007
The Reclamation of Classical Antiquity For Post-Modern Times
Associate Professor Luis David (Ateneo de Manila)
Luis David is editor of Budhi, the leading journal of ideas and culture in the Philippines.
'The Greeks' Conference: Louis Ruprecht
May 3rd 2007
Modern shrines to an ancient muse: a religious history of the modern public art museum
Associate Professor Louis Ruprecht Jr. (Georgia State)
Louis Ruprecht is author of Was Greek Thought Religious? On the Use and Abuse of Hellenism, From Rome to Romanticism (Palgrave, 2002), Symposia: Plato, the Erotic and Moral Value (SUNY, 1999), Afterwords: Hellenism, Modernism and the Myth of Decadence (SUNY, 1996), Tragic Posture and Tragic Vision: Against the Modern Failure of Nerve (Continuum, 1994).
'The Greeks' Conference: Peter Murphy
May 3rd 2007
Troy and Gallipoli: The Australian Myth of Foundation
Peter Murphy (Monash)
Peter Murphy is the author of Civic Justice (Prometheus/Humanity Books, 2001), coauthor of Dialectic of Romanticism (Continuum, 2004), and coeditor of Agon, Logos, Polis (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2001).