August 31 Response
Thomas Turino is an American Ethnomusicologist and currently teaching at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Turino specializes in Andean music, Latin American music, the music of southern Africa, the semiotics of music, and in theoretical issues of music and politics. He has published several books including Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe, Music in the Andes: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture, Music As Social Life: The Politics of Participation, and co-author of Excursions in World Music and co-editor of Arts in Diaspora Communities.
The chapter we read from Turino comes from his book Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation in which he presents different tools to analyze the various ways music and dance can function in a society. Here, Turino presents the four conceptualizations or social fields in which to think about and frame studies of music in society. Turino uses Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of social fields, defined by the purpose, goals, values, power relations, and types of capital of the activity, thus determining role relationships, social positioning, and the status of actors and activities within the field. The four conceptualization fields are Participatory, Presentational, High Fidelity, and Studio Audio Art. Chapter three focuses specifically on the last two which require special technologies to produce.
Participatory performance is an artistic practice in which there are no artist-audience distinctions. In this field, everyone’s attention is on the activity of the music and on the creation of the music for the moment. Some types of participatory music, for example, singing in church, is usually considered to be amateur music-making, but Turino believes it is a different form of art and should be conceptualized as such.
The fact that many consider participatory music to be amateur reveals an assumption of most Western musical performance: music professionals are, by definition, paid for playing music. There seems to be some tension in the exchange of money for performance. Presentational performers "owe" their paying audiences an exciting show. In contrast, participatory performances are open, cyclical, and predictable. Rather than surprise, the goal of participatory performance is to get others involved in music making. The cyclical form of presentational music, which often uses loops or repeated progressions, provides "security in constancy" for participants (Turino, 40).
This doesn't mean that participatory performance can't be exciting. Because of its focus on repetition and inclusion, participatory music is often dense in texture. This can create rare harmonies, contrapuntal melodies, or even a thick sound when a large number of instruments plays in unison. Yet even those who are afraid to join in can feel comforted that their mistakes will most likely not be heard. Due to wide tunings of instruments and a large number of participatory performers, an individual has to work hard to stand out among the group.
Presentational performance is where one person or a group of people provide music for another group, the audience, which does not participate in making the music or dancing. In this field, the music is prepared and performed by a group of people to be listened to by another group of people, who are supposed to pay close attention to what is being performed, for example, a Western symphonic concert. Also, according to Turino, members of a presentational performance group are usually of a similar skill level.
In Small’s chapter he is talking about how, throughout history, we have tended to think about music as a noun, a thing, when instead it is a verb, something we do. To Small, musicking means more than to perform or make music, but to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, listening, rehearsing, practicing, providing material for performance, or by dancing. His purpose in this book is to propose a framework for understanding all musicking as a human activity. He writes that a composed theory of musicking is not simply an idea that should be studied and tested by intellectuals and academia, but should be examined by every human being if it is to have any importance or basis in real life. Small uses the "concert in Symphony Hall" as a vehicle to discuss this all encompassing notion of musicking. His reasons for choosing the symphonic concert as the basis for observing what is "really going on" are that most of his presumed readers will have attended such an event, and that the symphonic concert is in Western music, a "sacred event" whose meaning has been largely unquestioned.
The chapter from Lysloff and Gay on ethnomusicology in the twenty-first century tackles ideas of music and technology. They provide methodological distinctions for understanding the place of technology in society and how technology is used by society. They say that it is not the technology itself or the original purpose of the technology, but how the technology is used, that the relationship of user, technology, and music can be found. The aim of this collection of essays is to advance discourse about technological meaning and therefore make us able to reach informed decisions about the aesthetic, social, and political consequences of technological change.
Turino, Small, and Lysloff and Gay all present different ideas about how to think about and study music. All bring out different ideas in which to study music, but all focus on music, not as an object, but as an activity.
Discussion Questions
How does Small’s concept of musicking fit into Turino’s conceptualization fields? Does it only fit into participatory music-making?
Will Turino’s and Small’s approaches to understanding music help us to study music and technoculture? How?
Can technological development (research, experimentation, etc.) be considered part of musicking, if the end results are adapted to musical use? If not, once the technology is in musical use, can its further development be so considered?
I find that while Small's writing excludes any mention of music and technoculture (due to the date of this article I would assume) that his ideals can be easily applied to music one may find on the internet. Whether it be in a discussion board about music, a youtube video, or a streaming broadcast of a live recital, Small's concept of musicking seems open-ended enough to include events like discussions within music forums. Keeping with the open-ended nature of musicking, one question that continues to come up in my mind is whether or not after the fact written observations of a musical event would be part of Small's definition of musicking. While such an event (an after the fact written observation) takes place at a separate moment in time than when the actual music is heard, I feel that particularly with regard to technoculture, that such written observations play an enormous role in much of the music that is heard on the internet. The growing Youtube phenomenon has been the impetus for an unbelievable amount of free music being posted online for global enjoyment. Have we not all scrolled through the comment boards beneath the thousands of Youtube videos we have watched? Have we not all encountered asinine criticisms of artists like Vladimir Horowitz or Glenn Gould that have irritated us to the point of even responding to these faceless critics who seem to know nothing of the music they are hearing? I would argue that such written events can be attributed to musicking (not to say Small has definitively ruled out written discussions, he simply has not made explicit mention of them within his initial definition of musicking). If we assume that even the written comments on a Youtube video can be filed into the broad category of musicking, then technoculture becomes an incredibly potent resource for participating in musical events.
To further clarify my point, I would simply like to add that the example of youtube comments came to mind in light of the fact that at times my own views of certain artists/compositions/ensembles have been at times strengthened, lessened, and reiterated by the comments I have read. I have also learned things from the same comments. Whether it be because something someone wrote sparked my interest in something, or because I never really questioned how I felt about a certain musical event until it was either praised or criticized by others, I have found that even the comments on a youtube video can have a profound effect on how I listen to music.
The abridged version of my response to Small and L/G's ideas about musicking and how they fit into Turino's conceptualization fields is a very simple "yes" to the question if they only fit into the "Participatory" category or music making. Christopher Small's colorful writing about musicking being so much more than simply the source of the "music" (the noun) and the sounds they create lead me to believe that his response to Turino's "Presentational" category would be a definitive NO.
I would say that Small’s conception of musical participation is so open-ended that it does in fact encompass Turino’s four fields, if only by virtue of its being much more vague. If anything the idea of musicking would expand Participatory music to include things that don’t contribute to the physical sound or motion of the performance (the example of janitors springs to mind). I do agree, though, that any one of the four categories does not completely express the idea of musicking.
I wonder how Small might argue that an online observer of a live streaming event might contribute to the musicking happening on stage. I find it hard to separate an online observer from the Presentational category due to the fact that the people in the live audience and the performers are entirely unaware of the presence of online audiences or lack thereof. The only connection I can surmise is the added anxiety for performers when told that there could be an unknown amount of audience members watching online, and how that might affect the musicking. I am not sure of any other ways an online observer can be factored into the activity of making music as Turino, Small and L/G see it.
That’s an interesting question, considering the emphasis Small places on relationships amongst the participants in a performance. His second corollary to the statement ‘Music is an object,’ in fact, is that there is a one-way flow of relation from composer through to audience members [his corollaries, to me, read almost exclusively as objections to the original premise]. It seems that viewing a streamed performance forces one into the receiving position of a presentational performance (that is, a one-way relation), even if the streamed event is a participatory one. The event becomes an object due to the means of delivery, transduced into audio/visual signal and shipped across some geographic distance.
But the notion of musicking seems to be one of inclusion, more than anything, so I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the online audience isn’t participating in the activity of music, as a whole. The technology through which they are experiencing it, though, is limiting in that they can’t physically engage the audience members or performers (or cleaners, or ticket takers…). As you state earlier, though, they can interact through written commentary, which may point out what could be called a theme of this class. Where technology creates a limitation, the users/developers of it (the ‘ethnos’?) can create a new way to work around it, a way to experience a similar/equivalent level of relation as before the inception of the technology.
I guess when you say that the online audiences are participating in the activity of music that I am trying to figure out how they are participating. If they are not a known entity to the live audience/performers, how are they interacting with the music being made other than simply as listeners. I'm not disagreeing, only trying to figure out the tangible ways in which an online audience might be involved in a live performance thousands of miles away. Maybe we should have a projection of online audiences' webcam feeds above the performers head so that the audience members can see the reactions of the online participants!
To connect what zoraidita says below in More on Turino with this above conversation it seems like Turino needs a third category (at least) in his model. I certainly think the distinction between Presentational and Participatory is more rigid than I would prefer and doesn't account for the fluidity inherent when invoking Bordieu's cultural fields. It also feels like privileging, or seeking out models that will privilege, this quest for higher art-authentic-folk music that 'real' ethnomusicologists study.
Obviously there is some trouble in translating his notion of participatory into online spaces. So a primary distinguishing feature of being participatory is that there is no audience-artist distinction. I find this, again, too rigid. When you have an artist like Soldier Boy and the Youtube soldier boy mimicry (perhaps better understood as a form of co-creation and re-articulation of the original music content and dance) isn't this participatory? Maybe a third category could exist where the artist exists but does not exercise direct creative control of the content. But then I have to say that an artist only ever has the illusion of control over their music, brand, image because of the discursive nature and unfinalizability (to echo Bakhtin) of music and artistic expression. I guess the point is that everything can fall into the sequential participatory music subtype so the distinction is pretty porous.
If we believe Jenkins, who says that this new convergence culture is a participatory culture, then there is always the potential to participate as active audiences. With the chat on a Youtube page isn't the fact that you are coming together as a community of fans an act of participation and performance, especially if you are vocalizing your defense of your favorite band. I guess you could argue that this isn't a performance but then I would think that this privileges a specific form or interpretation of performance.
Turino explains that participatory performance features no artist-audience distinction. In some cultures a successful performance is considered the one that arises enthusiasm and intense participation of the audience. When reading this it came to my mind the concept of experimental music ( a famous example John Cage's 4'33) where the audience contributes directly to the content of the music performance with the difference that composer and artist are removed from the process of creation. Although in experimental music we do not see the interaction performers-audience, certainly the overall result of the performance depends on the audience participation. Can we also include also experimental/chance music into the category of participatory performance?
Small gives music a broad definition. In this sense, music is not a thing but an activity, the fundamental nature of music lies not in objects or musical works but in action, in what people do. And I wonder (as Nathan does) how Small might argue that online observer of a live streaming event might contribute to the musicking happening on stage. As Small states, the fundamental nature and meaning of music lie not in objects, musical works, but in action, in what people do. This makes sense if consider by “action” for example the reaction of an audience to a performance: applauses, noise, sighs, laughs, etc. I can understand these actions as part of musicking, but watching a recording (even a live streaming event) does not affect or contribute to the process and result of musicking.
In Lysslof and Gay's article, Simon Frith makes a good point by saying that technology is somehow false and it is an artificial presence in performance. On the other hand thanks to technology we can see and hear recordings of great musicians that not longer exit which have contributed with an unequaled legacy. Without technology we would not be able to experience those performances.
There certainly has been an institutional reticence amongst ethnomusicologists to grapple with technology and especially the internet because of that perception of unauthentic, artificiality that creeps in when the music hasn't been 'discovered' through fieldwork. What seems to be lacking is an understanding of communities online and meaningful social interactions that can be inhabited and researched as a site of 'living fieldwork'. I do like the insight that technologies related to music are contested sites of social and political struggle. Wasn't Napster a site of participatory struggle?
A minor note/qualm, in the Lysslof and Gay article they say that "technology, rather than being part of lived experience, only mediates it." That may be true for some mediated forms but with technoculture I would argue that the online/offline disjunctures blur. No one interacts with your facebook page as a a form of mediation but as a lived experience—as you!
I think when watching a live streat recording like on Youtube, the audience has the option to give his/her evaluation on the performance. This feedback system is pretty similar to the fact that during/after a live performance, the audience can applause or say "bu…" to that performance. Watching a video affect contribution to the process of musicking this way, at least.
But what if we add that the evaluation is part of the spreading of the content and the continuation of the life of the video and presentation. In this way the audience is continuing the song and dance—they are active participants in the propagating of the content as well as the surrounding construction of meaning. I guess that mediated technologies don't allow videos and performances to remain static. They are constantly in dialogue with flows of culture.
DJ's seem to be largely presentational for Turino but spinning records is totally participatory. A good DJ feels his crowd and is full of experimentation and 'authentic' moments of scratching etc. where the song never begins or ends. Isn't a DJ taking presentational records and reforming and re-appropriating their context and meaning?
I think it is about how you characterize experimental/chance music. You can claim that they can be included into participatory performance only if they ALL involve performers-audience interaction, not just some of them. Or, it is viable to say, SOME experimental/chance music would be included into participatory performance.
The word "technoculture" is used in many posts. I don't know if it is being used as a synonym for "cyberculture," but it begs the question: what is the difference between technoculture and cyberculture, and is this difference important?
We haven't yet defined these terms, but many of us understand culture as a set of attitudes, values, and/or beliefs shared by a group. If technoculture is a culture whose identity is formed largely in and around technology, then cybercultures, communicating largely through digital networks, would seem to be an aspect of technoculture. Small would definitely include members of techno- and cybercultures in his definition of musicking. After all, don't both techno- and cybercultures play a part in this act?
For example, new technologies have entered into the music making process at various stages of invention: phonographs, radio, electric microphones, tape editing, sampling, digital audio workstations, etc. People who record music or even the musicians themselves are often members of various technocultures (and if we understand technology broadly, all musical instruments, even the voice, are technologies in themselves). Members of cybercultural communities are probably best known as fans of musical performers, but an argument can be made that cyberculture communities are involved in the production process as well.
SoundCloud began in 2007 as a Berlin, Germany website where musicians could share music with one another. Here musicians could collaborate with other musicians, often sending rough recordings, then edited versions, to one another when they couldn't be in the same studio. In time the website caught on with artists as a distribution platform which allowed them to link directly to their music, unlike proprietary sites such as MySpace.
Some music acts have even produced music over the Internet, showing how cybercultures can actually be directly involved in the creation of music. American band The Postal Service became somewhat of a popular novelty not only for its music, but the way in which it was produced. The two members of the band lived far away from one another on the west coast, so they would collaborate over digital audio tapes through the mail (i.e. The Postal Service). As broadband internet connections became widely available in the early 2000s, the two members of the band would send their edits over e-mail.
The affinities and distinctions between technoculture and cyberculture are important because they force us to ask which cultures are not involved in musicking? Small's definition wants to include everyone:
I wonder if this grab-bag approach teaches us only that everyone has an effect on the process of musicking. In contrast, Turino breaks down the performance of music into intuitive categories that we can use when trying to discuss the differences between the values of Participatory, Presentational, High Fidelity, and Studio Audio Art. This makes describing music and the relations between those who make it (something Small also values) a worthwhile endeavor.
In the end, I appreciate the fact that Small wants to see a musical performance as more than a mere commodity, as something that can be studied, scrutinized, and deconstructed. He's really arguing that we see the process of making music as a rhetorical event, chocked full of values, assumptions, and meaning-making negotiated by a number of cooperative and competing groups. If Small's goal is
then I'm all game. But Small leaves the purpose of his musicking project on a vague note at the end of his introduction. He simply tells us to ask questions about musicking. Which ones? Which will lead to "useful" or "right" answers, and which to the "useless" or incorrect (17)? And as a last non-sequitous question, why are concert halls the most effective venue to study the current state of musicking?
My question though is when Turino tries to break this down into categories isn't he losing the inherent intertextuality of performance and music(king). Barthes has this classic line about a text being "a tissue, a woven fabric" of "the already written and the already read". I guess music only exists as a discourse. I fear that this categories naturalize and hide the refracted histories of these performances and their interconnectedness. Strangely the Small definition of musicking takes into account the technology surrounding the music, the materiality of music. Small is actually talking about the technoculture that is intertwined in the production and performance of music. If not then music is the product of the individual genius, the author of western capitalist society. Music, which doesn't even exist except as a label, is socially constructed. But ultimately, yeah—why concert halls?
Feedback on Turino’s article:
I think Turino’s efforts to explain participatory and presentational music can be summarized that they are fundamentally different in the following ways: the musical forms(short, open, repetitive vs. longer, closed, scripted forms), the beginning and ending (feathered vs. organized) the skill levels anticipated, the responsibility among participants(virtuosity downplayed vs. virtuosity emphasized), texture (dense, wall of sounds vs. transparent)
Forms:
Dance is many times involved in participatory music, while not in presentational music.
Role:
In fully participatory occasions there is no artist-audience distinctions, only participants and potential participants. Participation is much more emphasized in participatory music than in presentational music, no matter what the participants’ skill levels are.
Skill Level Anticipated:
A participatory performance is expected to have a variety of roles that differs in difficulty and degrees of specialization required. Virtuosity among participants are downplayed, while on the contrary in presentational music, the virtuosity is emphasized.
Responsibility:
The success of participatory performance relies on the degree and intensity of participation, while in presentational music, the success is emphasized on some abstract assessment of the musical sound quality.
As I am a trained instrumentalist who usually perform in traditional recital/ensemble/orchestra settings, the value of Turino’s article is that he offers the viewpoint to let me evaluate participatory music and presentational music on the same table, compare their similarity/difference, and see them as equally important, while in the past I tend to use a limited view to credit presentational performance more than participatory performance, and see them as fundamentally different activities that are hard to be compared side by side due to their difference in nature. In other words, Turino broadens my viewpoint, and actually inspires me to use a respecting attitude toward viewing different types of music activities happening in the world. My past criteria of valuing music is also challenged because participatory performances evaluate the success in a very different way than my previous presentational-oriented view.
Feedback on Small’s article:
Indeed, as Small indicates, classical music consists only 3% of record sales in 1998, music is not limited to the western traditional music that I am so used to and limited to. It does include many other types that I neglected before, for example, the cheers and songs in the stadium. Small points out that as Dalhaus mentioned, it is the concept “work” other than “event” that is emphasized in the western music history. In other words, Small points out that traditionally, “music performances plays no part in the creative process, being only the medium through which the isolated, slef-contained work has to pass in order to reach its goal, the listener.” Some would even argue that performance, usually not totally perfect, is always an approximate presentation of the work, and thus can never yield the inner meaning of a musical piece. To read and study the score yield the inner meaning better than listening to the performance!!
Even when I use to hold a presentational musical view, I am still shocked by Small’s article that the “inner meaning” of music can go to such extreme, claming that it brings more value to read and study the score than listening to its imperfect performance.
Small also points out that usually a musical performance is thought to be one-way communication.
It is also interesting that Small points out that traditionally by corollary, a performance cannot be better than the piece itself. An inferior work cannot give rise to a good performance!! This of course is denied by Small (and me) right away, but we can see that some scholars can view things in such an extreme.
Small then points out that some people would even argue that music is autonomous as an art work itself, the spirit behind the work is not important.
All these that points out by Small tells us how scholars can view music in a narrow-minded way, and thus we should always remember to view music in a landscape way so as to avoid such bias.
Small then points out the fundamental nature and meaning of music is not in the object (musical work), but in the action, what people do. Thus his musiking concept values “taking part in the performance”, that is, performing, listening, rehearsing, practicing, providing materials (composing), or dancing, or even those indirect help to enable the performance(ticket selling, shifting piano etc)
This again broadens my near-sighted view to overly focus on the presentational performance. I feel that I can start to credit every activity and every person involved in a musical performance, and see the performer-staff-audience relationship in a new way.
Feedback on Lysloff & Gay’s article and the two questions for discussion:
Lysloff and Gay introduce the importance to look at the techoculture in the music world.
They claim that technologies related to music are not neutral, and not fully controlled by a single constituency. They are actually sites of continuous social and political struggle. In view of this, I will then talk more about the two questions in the discussion:
1. How does Small’s concept of musicking fit into Turino’s conceptualization fields? Does it only fit into participatory music-making?
When Turino focuses his view on segmenting different types of performance/interaction between performers and audiences, and categorize them as participatory performance and presentational performance, he compares the various types of the roles, right and obligation, and expected behavioral models between performers and audiences. Audience is not passive anymore, they have their roles in participating (sing, dance, enjoy and create the great atmosphere), and the success of a musical performance relies majorly on the collaborative atmosphere/enjoyment, but not solely on the quality of the musical performance.
Small approaches this subject in a way less on comparing performers/audiences, but more on the overall outcome collaboratively created by every person involved in a musical performance. That is, performers, audiences, staff. In other words, Small offers a landscape view to give credit to all the activities created by all participants in a music performance, and treat them equally as part of the created value through this musical event.
With this view, every kind of Turino’s defined performance creates value to a musical event, not only the participatory performance, because in presentational performance, the audience creates value to this musical event by their participation rate, their reaction to the performance (quite or noisy when listening, enthusiastic clapping or reluctant clapping?), their feedback to the performer on the backstage, and even their feedback to friends aurally/literary about this performance in the future.
Question 2. Will Turino’s and Small’s approaches to understanding music help us to study music and technoculture? How?
Turino’s viewpoint is very valuable on studying music and technoculture in the sense that it offers us a framework to evaluate the roles, right and obligation, and expected behavioral models between those performers and audiences. We can apply this framework to evaluate these aspects in the newly developed technocultural environment.
Small’s landscape approach offers value on studying music and technoculture in the sense that it offers us a sharper sense to observe every activity involved in producing music in the technocultural environment, and think about its created value. For example, the staff of Youtube or other online music venue can be viewed as creating value to an online musical event because they provide the venue. The maker of a video or audio equipment can be seen as creating value because it is required for the performer to utilize them to enable his/her online music performance. The online discussion forum, a new feedback venue, offers similar value as the traditional way to give feedback to friends aurally/literary about the performance, although it is seen as more powerful/responsive than traditional feedbacks because of the internet nature. In view of this, the responsibility/obligation of audiences should be re-examined because of their influence. Say, if a group of people lacking appropriate knowledge background give bad comments on an actually very good performance, this would negatively affect the viewing rate of this performance, and we have to think about Turino’s framework to analyze this phenomenon.
The provided Turino's concepts of conceptualization fields, such as Participatory performance and Presentational performance, high fidelity and Studio Audio art describe different types of music activities, practiced in the world throughout the history. Turino is putting a contrast between the Participatory and the presentational types of performance. Thus his understanding of the presentational performance can be described as following: one group of people or a single person, entitled " professional" musicians are preparing and performing a music performance for the another group of people, entitled audience. And it is preassumed. that the audience in no way is influencing the musical process, going on the stage. So, in describing the Presentational performance Turino stands on the position, that the music work in western tradition is an isolated, self-contained object, which has only to be properly presented to the inactive audience. Small's conception of musicking goes beond that. He assumes, that any musical activity includes all the people (performers, composer, cleaners, audience etc.) in the unieted and unique event of musicking. Thus, the Small's term musicking expands its range of implementation over both of described Turino's conceptualization fields.
The important Lysloff & Gay’s focus of research is the technology in the context of culture, and it's impact on creation of the culture itself, rather then just simply mediating the already existing cultural phenomena.