Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 2023
This paper argues that recent transformations in the means of production and dissemination of rec... more This paper argues that recent transformations in the means of production and dissemination of recorded music have changed, not simply the ways in which music is consumed, but have also changed the way in which music can be understood, both epistemologically and ontologically. By epistemology in this case, I mean, not just what we know about music, but what we know through music. By ontology, I mean not just what music is, considered as content, but also what music is, considered as artefact. The essay will proceed in three sections. The first part, drawing on Adorno, will argue that music has, at least potentially, the ability to de-familiarise the world and our sense of our subjectivity and its limits. I argue further that this has-and must have-a critical function. The second part will argue that the advent of recorded music represented a significant ontological shift. The recording, as artefact and inscription, imported a fixity of exact timbral authority into musical types: put simply, in popular music, 'the track' replaces 'the song'. My final section attempts an analysis of how both of the above considerations have shifted with the general replacement of physical instantiations of recording by streaming of remotely stored content. I conclude that: (1) streaming has decentred the notion of the 'work' that survived into the era of recording: (2) streaming has diminished the critical potential of popular music and, (3) that streaming and associated technologies have contributed to a potentially grievous 'data-fication' of subjectivity. The paper draws largely on Adorno and the more recent work of Robin James, as well as some empirical research into contemporary musical consumption practices.
Review of: Red Days: Popular Music & the English Counterculture 1965‐1975, John Roberts (2020)Col... more Review of: Red Days: Popular Music & the English Counterculture 1965‐1975, John Roberts (2020)Colchester and New York: Minor Compositions, 197 pp.,ISBN 978-1-57027-364-3, p/bk, GBP £18.00
The notion of soundless music seems contradictory, even absurd: the concept of soundless musical ... more The notion of soundless music seems contradictory, even absurd: the concept of soundless musical experience less so. In this article, I explore two quite different descriptions of this kind of experience as set out in two mid-twentieth-century Irish novels. In one, Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, the narrator watches one of the titular sergeants enjoy music that he – the narrator – cannot hear. In the second, Ralph Cusack's Cadenza, the narrator watches as a village priest mimes playing the piano on a café table, a performance he ‘hears’ and appreciates. Speculatively combining and extending these episodes, and using the figures of the philistine and the aesthete in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory as a key, I suggest that an anxiety about music and musical expression characterized the newly independent Ireland, an anxiety linked to wider concerns often read as ‘postcolonial’.
Country music has been popular in Ireland since the 1960s, most notably in the work of homegrown ... more Country music has been popular in Ireland since the 1960s, most notably in the work of homegrown performers. Despite the durability of this appeal in the face of huge changes in Ireland and in the Irish music industry over a half-century, it remains curiously underexamined in the literature on Irish popular music. In this paper, I wish to argue the following: (1) Country music did not simply arise 'naturally' in Ireland as a reflection of musical or national characteristics: it was promoted as such. (2) Both popular and academic literature on the subject have tended to unreflectively echo the narrative that was introduced alongside the music in order to fix its audience. (3) In so doing, the literature reproduces a set of anxieties about modernity as it arrived in Ireland, about the postcolonial condition and about authenticity, even as it attempts to locate Irish popular music within these concerns.
Chapter
Popular Music Studies Today
Part of the series Systematische Musikwissenschaft pp 97-10... more Chapter
Popular Music Studies Today
Part of the series Systematische Musikwissenschaft pp 97-101 Date: 31 March 2017
Abstract
In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno repeatedly posits what might be called the place-holder thesis; the notion that autonomous art keeps open a space for ‘a praxis beyond the spell of labour’ (AT 12) or functions as a ‘plenipotentiary of a liveable world’ (AT 40). Popular music, of course, for Adorno, has no such function, merely affirming the ever same of domination. In this paper, I would like to suggest that
1)
Certain places, both as locations and as names, have functioned as metonyms for the utopian in popular music: the locations we go to, or go back to, New Orleans, Kansas City, Cali etc. and
2)
Despite Adorno’s strictures, we can use his notion of the ‘non-identical’ as exemplified in the place-name to interrogate this power.
On Laruelle and Music - (very) preliminary. Delivered at 'Fringes, Outsides and Undergrounds' - G... more On Laruelle and Music - (very) preliminary. Delivered at 'Fringes, Outsides and Undergrounds' - Goldsmiths May 2016
Draft of paper delivered a 9th Rome Critical Theory Conference, John Felice Center/ Loyola Univer... more Draft of paper delivered a 9th Rome Critical Theory Conference, John Felice Center/ Loyola University. 6th May 2016
Draft of a paper delivered at Rhythm Changes 2016 -Birmingham City University. An attempt to unea... more Draft of a paper delivered at Rhythm Changes 2016 -Birmingham City University. An attempt to unearth the utopian potential in Jazz and popular music more generally, using the apparatus of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory.
Draft of Introduction to Vox 80-83, the complete collection of a seminal Dublin fanzine. Publishe... more Draft of Introduction to Vox 80-83, the complete collection of a seminal Dublin fanzine. Published by Hi-Tone Books
Adorno’s writings are often the starting point for the teaching of popular music studies, usually... more Adorno’s writings are often the starting point for the teaching of popular music studies, usually passing swiftly on, after concluding that ‘he didn’t listen to the right jazz’ or ‘he was a snob’. In this book, using Adorno’s aesthetic theory more generally, a viable philosophical approach to the study of idiomatic, non- standard music is constructed. The links between Adorno’s work and its Kantian roots are explored, and a more general and inclusive aesthetic constructed, using the utopian and implicitly political elements in each.
For Kant, taste was, in the end ‘a kind of sensus communis’ – it was a way in which our individua... more For Kant, taste was, in the end ‘a kind of sensus communis’ – it was a way in which our individual and a-conceptual judgements were confirmed by the felt necessity of the assent of others and which, therefore underwrote a common humanity and a shared world.
‘Good’ taste, in such a model, was singular, and, while ‘without a concept’, was calculable according to the four moments of aesthetic judgement. In the modern era, and more particularly with regard to popular art forms, ‘personal’ taste became an index of distinction, an archive of memory, association and aspiration, part of, in Tia DeNora’s words. ‘a technology of the self’.
Now, however, the construction of our supposedly personal canon is being increasingly outsourced to algorithms. Streaming services can, with, it seems, uncanny accuracy, discern the lineaments of our taste and guide us towards exactly what we would like, had we the time to research the by now vast archive of recorded sound.
In this paper, I would like to interrogate how much this prothesis might modulate the model of aesthetic subjectivity we have inherited from Kant. Can the idea of aesthetic judgment survive the replacement of the complicated social network of gatekeepers and sites of negotiation and conflict by a flatter and less engaged technology of taste formation?
Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 2023
This paper argues that recent transformations in the means of production and dissemination of rec... more This paper argues that recent transformations in the means of production and dissemination of recorded music have changed, not simply the ways in which music is consumed, but have also changed the way in which music can be understood, both epistemologically and ontologically. By epistemology in this case, I mean, not just what we know about music, but what we know through music. By ontology, I mean not just what music is, considered as content, but also what music is, considered as artefact. The essay will proceed in three sections. The first part, drawing on Adorno, will argue that music has, at least potentially, the ability to de-familiarise the world and our sense of our subjectivity and its limits. I argue further that this has-and must have-a critical function. The second part will argue that the advent of recorded music represented a significant ontological shift. The recording, as artefact and inscription, imported a fixity of exact timbral authority into musical types: put simply, in popular music, 'the track' replaces 'the song'. My final section attempts an analysis of how both of the above considerations have shifted with the general replacement of physical instantiations of recording by streaming of remotely stored content. I conclude that: (1) streaming has decentred the notion of the 'work' that survived into the era of recording: (2) streaming has diminished the critical potential of popular music and, (3) that streaming and associated technologies have contributed to a potentially grievous 'data-fication' of subjectivity. The paper draws largely on Adorno and the more recent work of Robin James, as well as some empirical research into contemporary musical consumption practices.
Review of: Red Days: Popular Music & the English Counterculture 1965‐1975, John Roberts (2020)Col... more Review of: Red Days: Popular Music & the English Counterculture 1965‐1975, John Roberts (2020)Colchester and New York: Minor Compositions, 197 pp.,ISBN 978-1-57027-364-3, p/bk, GBP £18.00
The notion of soundless music seems contradictory, even absurd: the concept of soundless musical ... more The notion of soundless music seems contradictory, even absurd: the concept of soundless musical experience less so. In this article, I explore two quite different descriptions of this kind of experience as set out in two mid-twentieth-century Irish novels. In one, Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, the narrator watches one of the titular sergeants enjoy music that he – the narrator – cannot hear. In the second, Ralph Cusack's Cadenza, the narrator watches as a village priest mimes playing the piano on a café table, a performance he ‘hears’ and appreciates. Speculatively combining and extending these episodes, and using the figures of the philistine and the aesthete in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory as a key, I suggest that an anxiety about music and musical expression characterized the newly independent Ireland, an anxiety linked to wider concerns often read as ‘postcolonial’.
Country music has been popular in Ireland since the 1960s, most notably in the work of homegrown ... more Country music has been popular in Ireland since the 1960s, most notably in the work of homegrown performers. Despite the durability of this appeal in the face of huge changes in Ireland and in the Irish music industry over a half-century, it remains curiously underexamined in the literature on Irish popular music. In this paper, I wish to argue the following: (1) Country music did not simply arise 'naturally' in Ireland as a reflection of musical or national characteristics: it was promoted as such. (2) Both popular and academic literature on the subject have tended to unreflectively echo the narrative that was introduced alongside the music in order to fix its audience. (3) In so doing, the literature reproduces a set of anxieties about modernity as it arrived in Ireland, about the postcolonial condition and about authenticity, even as it attempts to locate Irish popular music within these concerns.
Chapter
Popular Music Studies Today
Part of the series Systematische Musikwissenschaft pp 97-10... more Chapter
Popular Music Studies Today
Part of the series Systematische Musikwissenschaft pp 97-101 Date: 31 March 2017
Abstract
In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno repeatedly posits what might be called the place-holder thesis; the notion that autonomous art keeps open a space for ‘a praxis beyond the spell of labour’ (AT 12) or functions as a ‘plenipotentiary of a liveable world’ (AT 40). Popular music, of course, for Adorno, has no such function, merely affirming the ever same of domination. In this paper, I would like to suggest that
1)
Certain places, both as locations and as names, have functioned as metonyms for the utopian in popular music: the locations we go to, or go back to, New Orleans, Kansas City, Cali etc. and
2)
Despite Adorno’s strictures, we can use his notion of the ‘non-identical’ as exemplified in the place-name to interrogate this power.
On Laruelle and Music - (very) preliminary. Delivered at 'Fringes, Outsides and Undergrounds' - G... more On Laruelle and Music - (very) preliminary. Delivered at 'Fringes, Outsides and Undergrounds' - Goldsmiths May 2016
Draft of paper delivered a 9th Rome Critical Theory Conference, John Felice Center/ Loyola Univer... more Draft of paper delivered a 9th Rome Critical Theory Conference, John Felice Center/ Loyola University. 6th May 2016
Draft of a paper delivered at Rhythm Changes 2016 -Birmingham City University. An attempt to unea... more Draft of a paper delivered at Rhythm Changes 2016 -Birmingham City University. An attempt to unearth the utopian potential in Jazz and popular music more generally, using the apparatus of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory.
Draft of Introduction to Vox 80-83, the complete collection of a seminal Dublin fanzine. Publishe... more Draft of Introduction to Vox 80-83, the complete collection of a seminal Dublin fanzine. Published by Hi-Tone Books
Adorno’s writings are often the starting point for the teaching of popular music studies, usually... more Adorno’s writings are often the starting point for the teaching of popular music studies, usually passing swiftly on, after concluding that ‘he didn’t listen to the right jazz’ or ‘he was a snob’. In this book, using Adorno’s aesthetic theory more generally, a viable philosophical approach to the study of idiomatic, non- standard music is constructed. The links between Adorno’s work and its Kantian roots are explored, and a more general and inclusive aesthetic constructed, using the utopian and implicitly political elements in each.
For Kant, taste was, in the end ‘a kind of sensus communis’ – it was a way in which our individua... more For Kant, taste was, in the end ‘a kind of sensus communis’ – it was a way in which our individual and a-conceptual judgements were confirmed by the felt necessity of the assent of others and which, therefore underwrote a common humanity and a shared world.
‘Good’ taste, in such a model, was singular, and, while ‘without a concept’, was calculable according to the four moments of aesthetic judgement. In the modern era, and more particularly with regard to popular art forms, ‘personal’ taste became an index of distinction, an archive of memory, association and aspiration, part of, in Tia DeNora’s words. ‘a technology of the self’.
Now, however, the construction of our supposedly personal canon is being increasingly outsourced to algorithms. Streaming services can, with, it seems, uncanny accuracy, discern the lineaments of our taste and guide us towards exactly what we would like, had we the time to research the by now vast archive of recorded sound.
In this paper, I would like to interrogate how much this prothesis might modulate the model of aesthetic subjectivity we have inherited from Kant. Can the idea of aesthetic judgment survive the replacement of the complicated social network of gatekeepers and sites of negotiation and conflict by a flatter and less engaged technology of taste formation?
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Popular Music Studies Today
Part of the series Systematische Musikwissenschaft pp 97-101
Date: 31 March 2017
Abstract
In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno repeatedly posits what might be called the place-holder thesis; the notion that autonomous art keeps open a space for ‘a praxis beyond the spell of labour’ (AT 12) or functions as a ‘plenipotentiary of a liveable world’ (AT 40). Popular music, of course, for Adorno, has no such function, merely affirming the ever same of domination.
In this paper, I would like to suggest that
1)
Certain places, both as locations and as names, have functioned as metonyms for the utopian in popular music: the locations we go to, or go back to, New Orleans, Kansas City, Cali etc. and
2)
Despite Adorno’s strictures, we can use his notion of the ‘non-identical’ as exemplified in the place-name to interrogate this power.
Drafts by Stan Erraught
Other by Stan Erraught
Books by Stan Erraught
Conference Presentations by Stan Erraught
‘Good’ taste, in such a model, was singular, and, while ‘without a concept’, was calculable according to the four moments of aesthetic judgement. In the modern era, and more particularly with regard to popular art forms, ‘personal’ taste became an index of distinction, an archive of memory, association and aspiration, part of, in Tia DeNora’s words. ‘a technology of the self’.
Now, however, the construction of our supposedly personal canon is being increasingly outsourced to algorithms. Streaming services can, with, it seems, uncanny accuracy, discern the lineaments of our taste and guide us towards exactly what we would like, had we the time to research the by now vast archive of recorded sound.
In this paper, I would like to interrogate how much this prothesis might modulate the model of aesthetic subjectivity we have inherited from Kant. Can the idea of aesthetic judgment survive the replacement of the complicated social network of gatekeepers and sites of negotiation and conflict by a flatter and less engaged technology of taste formation?
Popular Music Studies Today
Part of the series Systematische Musikwissenschaft pp 97-101
Date: 31 March 2017
Abstract
In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno repeatedly posits what might be called the place-holder thesis; the notion that autonomous art keeps open a space for ‘a praxis beyond the spell of labour’ (AT 12) or functions as a ‘plenipotentiary of a liveable world’ (AT 40). Popular music, of course, for Adorno, has no such function, merely affirming the ever same of domination.
In this paper, I would like to suggest that
1)
Certain places, both as locations and as names, have functioned as metonyms for the utopian in popular music: the locations we go to, or go back to, New Orleans, Kansas City, Cali etc. and
2)
Despite Adorno’s strictures, we can use his notion of the ‘non-identical’ as exemplified in the place-name to interrogate this power.
‘Good’ taste, in such a model, was singular, and, while ‘without a concept’, was calculable according to the four moments of aesthetic judgement. In the modern era, and more particularly with regard to popular art forms, ‘personal’ taste became an index of distinction, an archive of memory, association and aspiration, part of, in Tia DeNora’s words. ‘a technology of the self’.
Now, however, the construction of our supposedly personal canon is being increasingly outsourced to algorithms. Streaming services can, with, it seems, uncanny accuracy, discern the lineaments of our taste and guide us towards exactly what we would like, had we the time to research the by now vast archive of recorded sound.
In this paper, I would like to interrogate how much this prothesis might modulate the model of aesthetic subjectivity we have inherited from Kant. Can the idea of aesthetic judgment survive the replacement of the complicated social network of gatekeepers and sites of negotiation and conflict by a flatter and less engaged technology of taste formation?