Liveness in Modern Music

Musicians, Technology, and the Perception of Performance

Paul Sanden

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136155284
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoria: Music

This study investigates the idea and practice of liveness in modern music. Understanding what makes music live in an ever-changing musical and technological terrain is one of the more complex and timely challenges facing scholars of current music, where liveness is typically understood to represent performance and to stand in opposition to recording, amplification, and other methods of electronically mediating music. The book argues that liveness itself emerges from dynamic tensions inherent in mediated musical contexts—tensions between music as an acoustic human utterance, and musical sound as something produced or altered by machines. Sanden analyzes liveness in mediatized music (music for which electronic mediation plays an intrinsically defining role), exploring the role this concept plays in defining musical meaning. In discussions of music from both popular and classical traditions, Sanden demonstrates how liveness is performed by acts of human expression in productive tension with the electronic machines involved in making this music, whether on stage or on recording. Liveness is not a fixed ontological state that exists in the absence of electronic mediation, but rather a dynamically performed assertion of human presence within a technological network of communication. This book provides new insights into how the ideas of performance and liveness continue to permeate the perception and reception of even highly mediatized music within a society so deeply invested, on every level, with the use of electronic technologies.

1 Introduction

The performance had already started (performance is no better than show, but most of these words just don’t work properly anymore).

David Toop, Haunted Weather

WHY LIVENESS? (AND WHAT IS IT?)

Consider the following hypothetical (although highly plausible) scenario: A well-known hip-hop act appears on a live television show as that evening’s musical guest, performing its latest top-selling single. The identity of the show does not much matter for our purposes—late-night talk shows and other live entertainment programs have featured musical guests for decades as part of their standard formats. Nor does the identity of the hip-hop act much matter, as the scenario I describe could apply to recent televised performances by a number of artists. The performance itself involves several identifiable “categories” of musical utterance, and it is to the diversity of, and relationships between, these categories that I wish to draw my readers’ attention.

A DJ, hunched over a table at center stage, establishes a rhythmic background layer (a beat) using a variety of prerecorded and synthesized materials: A basic repetitive beat of recognizably (though synthetic) drumlike sounds is set in motion with the push of a button or click of a mouse and will continue to loop for the remainder of the performance. This beat is punctuated and embellished periodically by the DJ’s live manipulations of recorded sound, as he drags (scratches) a couple of vinyl records back and forth with incredibly dextrous skill beneath the tone arms of twin turntables. The precise motions of his hands are difficult to track, as fingers not in contact with the records at any one moment are moving quickly from one switch, dial, or fader to another, all these movements breathing new life and new identities into musical recordings once considered fixed in their aural properties (this type of performance is often referred to as turntablism).

Standing farther upstage and off to one side are four horn players—the musical and racial lineage from hip-hop back through funk, soul, early R&B, and jazz is foregrounded by repeated trumpet and saxophone riffs during the tune’s chorus, or hook. On the other side of the stage stands a group of back-up singers, who also contribute to the hook with harmonized vocals that contrast with the rapped verses. And over all this activity reigns the MC, the rapper, standing in front of the rest of the group and delivering her lyrics with appropriate attitude and posturing. The arm holding the microphone is bent sharply, the elbow raised parallel to the MC’s face, with the microphone itself in almost direct contact with her lips so it catches all the pops and sibilants of her vocal apparatus at extremely close range. Moreover, the microphone clearly feeds these vocals through a signal processor: The voice that emanates from the loudspeakers has been made to sound as though it is coming from a megaphone that cannot quite handle the full frequency and dynamic ranges of the vocalist. The MC paces deliberately back and forth across the front of the stage as she raps, gesticulating at appropriate moments not just with her free arm and hand but with her entire body. As the spoken verses give way to the sung hooks, her physical demeanor changes to emphasize the musical contrasts achieved within the song’s overall structure.

At the end of the performance, the studio audience applauds wildly, many of its members suitably satisfied to have witnessed in a live performance the track they had been listening to on a daily basis via the earbuds attached to their portable MP3 players. Some have no idea that the DJ’s turntable performance, presented in a seemingly improvisatory manner on stage, was captured on the “original” recording in multiple takes and pieced together for maximum effectiveness; or that the four horn players they just saw and heard were replicating the studio performance of one adept musician, who recorded each of the four parts in turn so the producer could layer them together in the final mix. Other, more informed fans are aware of these distinctions in general practice between studio recording and live performance and are impressed with how successfully the spirit and overall sound of the recording were replicated in this live setting.¹

The following day, a digital copy of the television broadcast of this performance is uploaded to the Internet, and over the following weeks and months multiple links to this data file and its copies are circulated in e-mails and, even more frequently, on social networking sites. Online viewers share their impressions of the performance, praising or condemning it for various reasons: the physical intensity and effectiveness of the MC’s overall delivery, the apparent skill of the DJ at the turntables, the obvious mistake made by one of the saxophonists as she fumbled one of the riffs, the similarly unexpected lyrical changes (when compared to the studio recording) made to a single phrase in the song’s second verse, and so forth. Some even compare this live performance to one that they saw on a different television program a few weeks earlier or to live performances in various arenas throughout North America they were lucky enough to attend. Several contributors also draw comparisons between these live performances and the song’s studio-produced music video, which depicts much of the same physical choreography enacted by the MC in her live performance. Throughout the majority of this discussion, and also in the individual experiences of most others who have seen this performance but have not participated in the discussion, one significant common element of perception remains consistent, despite the unique inflections of each interpretation: As I have attempted to convey in the language of my description, most witnesses to this musical event experience it as some type of live performance (whether they see it in person, on television at the initial time of broadcast, or on the Internet in the following months).

I emphasize the qualifying words some type: As has been repeatedly argued in recent years, most extensively by Philip Auslander (2002, 2005, 2008), liveness is a rather fluid concept, contingent upon historical context, cultural tradition, implicated technologies, and various other factors for its exact articulation. Whereas live music was once understood simply as musical performance that was experienced in person—what I call traditional liveness—rather than on a recording, the current state of performance can no longer be suitably served by such a simple binary reduction (live/recorded), because many other musical contexts exist, seemingly between these poles, in which liveness plays an important defining role.² Whereas many elements of this particular musical event can be singled out as evidence against defining it conventionally as a live performance—the most obvious of which might be its existence as a televised event, its reliance on prerecorded materials, and its continued circulation as a recording long after the moment of its initial utterance—nevertheless, the existence of a temporally continuous performance before a group of in-studio audience members would be sufficient reason for most viewers to maintain that “live” classification. If questioned further, many would undoubtedly allow that this performance was not fully live or was not live in the purest sense (because of the factors just listed). They would still wish to use the word live, however, to distinguish this unique recorded event from a typical studio recording, which most people, particularly among hip-hop’s fan base, understand to be the product of many hours of work in one or several recording studios.

My task in this book, simply stated, is to address why and how the word live is still used in such modern musical contexts, despite its apparent ontological inappropriateness in many of those situations; to offer an account of the current state not of live performance itself but of its attendant concept of liveness. More specifically, I propose here a theoretical framework for understanding how the concept of liveness is active in the creation of music’s meaning, especially (although not exclusively) at an aesthetic level. As is apparent already from the description with which I begin this chapter, the overall terrain of modern musical performances and their recorded representations is a highly complex one in which to map the meaning of such a concept as liveness. As suggested above, this concept’s early history demonstrates a more straightforward social and musical context, which is important to consider more fully if we are to make any sense of the current meanings of liveness.

With the widespread proliferation of recorded music in the first half of the twentieth century, for the first time in history, the adjective live was required to distinguish between different types of musical experiences. What was once referred to simply as music or performance now became identified as live music or live performance. Recorded music, on the other hand, often picked up identifying (and derogatory) adjectives, such as canned and mechanical.³ Although musical recordings had many advocates, the use of the word live usually carried with it a particular value judgment, even if only implicitly: Despite whatever benefits that recording technologies may have offered, live music was typically considered more real, more authentic, and in the final balance, more desirable. As Sarah Thornton argues:

Liveness became the truth of music, the seeds of genuine culture. Records, by contrast, were false prophets of pseudo-culture.

… The expression “live music” soaked up the aesthetic and ethical connotations of life-versus-death, human-versus-mechanical, creative-versus-imitative. (1995, 42)

Despite the considerable increase in the frequency and complexity of the use of electronic technologies in modern music since the early twentieth century, much of the ideology originally implicated in the concept of liveness has remained constant. The term live still carries with it a defining connection to unmediated musical performance along with the aesthetic and ideological values associated with that performance. What have changed are the diversity of contexts in which the concept of musical liveness is now invoked and the ontological makeup of those musical contexts (i.e., their essential categories of existence as strictly performed acoustic sound, as prerecorded and replayed sound, etc.). As the ontologically complex televised performance described above partially demonstrates, the range of musical experiences in the early twenty-first century includes (and often combines), among other categories, live performances, live broadcasts, live recordings, live performances of recordings, and live performances of electronically synthesized sound. In all these situations, a concept of liveness plays a central part in the creation of musical meaning. The fact that liveness still exists for many musickers even in situations that are not live (according to traditional definition) is a testament to its power as a concept through which meaning is interpreted.⁴ That is, if liveness were still strictly understood only as representing an ontological category in firm opposition to recorded music, even the idea of a live televised performance would be incomprehensible.

As a concept, however, liveness can inform one’s perception of a given musical experience, despite its ontological makeup; it can provide a perspective from which musical meaning is gleaned,⁵ even when audiences are faced simultaneously with the supposedly oppositional categories of live and recorded sound. Further consideration of our hypothetical hip-hop performance demonstrates some of the different ways in which the concept of liveness is invoked while also highlighting the extremely complex relationships established between the categories performance and recording/mediation in the construction of this concept. Perhaps the most obvious reason for our turn to the idea of liveness in this instance is, as noted above, the performance’s initial occurrence before a live audience in the television studio. That is, witnesses were present at the same time and in the same space as the initial performance, a condition that lies at the heart of the liveness concept for most musickers. Many of those watching the initial broadcast of this performance on their televisions would also understand the performance as live in a temporal sense, even though they are not present in the same physical space as the performers. They are, after all, witnessing this performance in the moment of its initial utterance.⁶

My description of this entire scenario also mentions some potential public (online) responses, including the singling out of individual elements of the live performance for praise or condemnation. I cite the demonstrations of physical skill and energy by the DJ and MC and the unexpected variances from the known musical text (i.e., the recording) in this particular performance, whether intentional (the MC’s lyrical changes) or unintentional (the saxophonist’s mistake). Recognition of these elements of the performance reflects common observations about the corporeal grounding of live performance in the actions of performers’ bodies, on one hand, and the spontaneous and unexpected nature of live performance—its “non-take-two-ness”⁷—on the other. Further appeal to common perceptions of liveness can be found in the group’s incorporation of traditional acoustic instrumentalists (the horn section) and vocalists within an environment that otherwise features a high level of mediation (the DJ’s wholesale reliance on recorded and synthesized sound and the signal processing applied to the MC’s vocal performance).

If these elements all add to the perception of liveness in the context of this performance, many seemingly contrasting elements may work against such a perception. Most obviously, this live performance is only live in the most traditional sense for the few hundred members of the studio audience. Everyone else sees and hears a recording (albeit a live recording). Whereas the initial television audience may experience this performance as a live broadcast, the subsequent Internet audience can claim no such temporal proximity to the initial event. The performances of the two central musicians also trouble traditional understandings of musical liveness. Unlike the members of the horn section and the vocalists, the DJ himself does not physically produce musical sound, despite the physicality of his performance; he recalls it from prerecorded and preprogrammed sources and arranges it anew. For her part, the MC produces new sound as a direct result of (some of) her body’s movements, but this acoustic sound is immediately lost to the amplification and modifications that begin with her microphone and end with the loudspeakers.

At a more complex level, the reception of this performance in constant reference to a recorded original and the seeming evaluative equality of live performance, televised performance, recording, and Internet video for most fans reflect Auslander’s observations about the wholesale confluence of live and mediated events within modern culture (2008, esp. 10–72). Ontological distinctions that were once fiercely defended between live and recorded modes of musical reception seem to mean little any more, particularly for many fans of popular music, with respect to their ability to glean aesthetic appreciation from the musical event. The recorded seems live, and the live is heard as (or at least in reference to) the recorded.

Two significant factors are already apparent in this preliminary discussion about the complexities of modern musical liveness. First, the concept of liveness persists for many musickers, even when the musical event in which they participate is not strictly live in a traditional sense. Second, this concept acts in constant reference to the opposing implications of electronic mediation (primarily recording). On an ontological level, liveness first emerged from the distinctions between recorded and unrecorded music, distinctions that, as we have already established, have lost much of their significance in recent years. On a conceptual level, these historic distinctions still exist, or the idea of liveness itself would have long since lost all cultural currency.⁸ If such a concept as the live still exists, such a concept as the not-live must also exist. Complications arise, however, when one attempts to draw a clear defining line between the two, because modern musickers regularly allow for significant amounts of mediation even within their conceptualizations of liveness. From this perspective, then, I argue that the perception of liveness depends not necessarily on the total eschewal of electronic mediation but on the persistent perception of characteristics of music’s live performance within the context of—and often with the help of—various levels of such mediation. Liveness represents a perceived trace of that which could be live in the face of the threat of further or complete electronic mediation and modification.

Defining more precisely what this concept represents, and its different manifestations, constitutes a significant part of my work in all the chapters that follow. Indeed, I argue throughout this book that the most useful way to understand liveness is as a flexible concept, with different shades of meaning for different musickers in different times and places and in different musical contexts. From the outset, however, I clarify some basic premises (to be further developed in Chapter 2) that summarize my discussion to this point and that underlie all my forthcoming discussions:

• The concept of liveness derives from the concept of music as performed.

• The perception of liveness in a particular musical experience, then, amounts to the perception of performance—not necessarily actual performance, but some characteristic that resonates with a particular musicker’s concept of performance.⁹ As Simon Emmerson (2007, 93) argues, the conceptualization of liveness rests on perception, not ...