Author Archives: Cynthia Wang

This was part of a reaction paper I wrote for another class, but thought I’d share it here too:

I had an interesting discussion with a cellist friend of mine today (as I was sitting in traffic on the West Side. Rango, the movie with Johnny Depp’s voice just came out, and they blocked off a few streets in Westwood for the premiere… and I’m sure I can get into a discussion about how pop/mass culture such as a Johnny Depp Hollywood movie can cause physical discomfort and inconvenience for even those not involved, both spatially and temporally, given the power of said culture industry, but I’ll save that for another day), about why young people don’t like classical music. Or why classical music is not popular. My thinking on this is two-fold. On one hand, borrowing from Gross’s notion of symbolic competence, we are not trained competently in music as a language. We do not need music as a foundational competence in order to function in our society like we do linguistic competence (we need to know how to read, write, speak, and understand the English language), and hence, we do not know how to comprehend the musical code. I have encountered many people who say they like classical music because it is “beautiful.” They cannot give a deeper reason as to why they like it. But classical music, or all music, really, should transcend simply being “beautiful.” It’s like saying, I like listening to Italian poems because they sound beautiful, but I don’t understand Italian. We are not trained in the depth of understanding and significance of music as a language. Hence, pop songs use the English language – words – to supplement the music, while rendering the music in these pop songs to the pseudo-differentiated mindless drone Adorno says it is, with conventional and predictable chord progressions that flatter the listener when it is expected and realized. But people who are trained in English as a basic symbolic competency are able to draw a narrative, to draw meanings, from pop music because of its words, in ways that they are unable to draw deeper meanings from the word-less, strictly instrumental pieces of classical music. Hence, a musical competency requires time and education (to go above and beyond the basic competency of the English language), and a certain socioeconomic and class status, which follows Bourdieu’s statement about cultural capital, effectively making classical music cognitively and meaningfully inaccessible to the “masses.”

So the question becomes, how can we change that? What can be done with classical music in order to get more people interested in it? Can we popularize classical music without bastardizing it (like what Vanessa Mae does – example here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euOu89d3npA)? Can we get people interested in classical music without compromising the purity of music (by techno-fying, or adding rhythms and percussion and a bass beat) that has been in existence for 300, 400 years? Let us set aside, for the moment, that wanting to keep classical music “pure” may be, in fact, problematic in itself. My thoughts are that it is hard to change a culture, to change people’s habits of listening. We have an idea of what entertainment is, of what interesting art is, and classical music just isn’t it. It just ain’t hip enough for the young ‘uns.

All done in one take. Totally acappella, totally crazy, totally awesome, totally Dawen:

I can’t remember where I had heard this song before, but this is my latest download:

This is amazingly awesome.http://www.inbflat.net/

My friend’s playing this piece and told me to look it up. So I did.

Jonathan Sterne’s semi-behemoth of a book gives a coherent narrative the different ways of hearing and listening that stemmed from the advent of sound technologies. His idea of audile techniques are helpful in framing the way we think about how we listen in a world of intense sound mediation and sound reproduction. He strips the ideas of hearing and listening down to the basic biologies, then building up techniques and technologies of listening and sound reproduction and mediation on top of these philosophies that stemmed from biology and anatomy.

His discussion of how public acoustic space turned private in order to enable the commodification of sounds and music and class distinctions that it constructed and into which it interpolated individuals illuminated something that seems so normal to us that we never think to deconstruct it. This is a cohesive continuation from the articles we had been reading earlier, about how sound is immersive and inescapable, with bells, with Islam soundscape, environments in which sound is NOT private. Could we go as far as to think about this “equity” of accessibility to sound as democratic? What are the implications here? After all, Sterne discusses how audile techniques privilege certain sounds and render them into a privatized space, whether it be with stethoscopes or headphones, or sound telegraphy and Morse codes. How does this isolation effect habits of listening, how has it changed, and how has commercialized entities turned sound commodification to their advantage?

Mediated sound as “better” hearing seems to be a theme that is relevant today. Back in the day, sound mediation tools and technologies (like the stethoscope) was needed to hear properly. Even today, people use headphones, especially those with noise canceling capabilities, in order to become fully immersed in sound. They hear the music “better” (or perhaps just more like how the people who control these privatized sonic spaces want you to hear it). Sterne’s discussion of audile technique as “dissemination of a specific kind of bourgeoise sensibility” (Sterne, 160) ties into private space, and this commodification of sound. After all, one needs to be able to afford the equipment in order to experience privatized music.

With this idea of privatized music comes the idea of how, with sound recordings, people have more control over how they spend their time listening to music or experiencing sound recordings. Sound recordings essentially divorce sound from its necessity to be present, to be in the now. Attali, through Sterne, talks about “stockpiling” others’ use-time. While I won’t attempt to tackle the Marxist implications in what he says, I do want to mention that sound recordings have huge implications for the idea of temporal capital, in that being able to separate a sonic experience from its presence in time allows more control over temporal capital (or how one spends their time). There is more flexibility in this, and temporal capital is much more widely spread – people are able to spend their time increasing their cultural capital (ie: as Kenney, through Sterne, points out, “recorded music allowed people to experience concert music they might otherwise not have encountered.” (Sterne, 243) I would argue that sound recording actually increases one’s temporal capital, as temporal capital is not necessarily the time available for a sonic experience, but one’s control over such time. Hence, in a concert, forget about the fact that going to the concert, dressing up for it, buying the tickets, providing transportation, etc would cost not only economically, but the individual who is going to the concert would need to, ironically, have the temporal capital, or the flexibility, in order to enjoy this sonic experience in the NOW, in the inflexibility of the experience. Sound recordings free the individual from the constraints of the concert hall in time and space.

Sterne also discusses the question of authenticity. The idea that the “original” does not exist until “copies” are made is poignant on many levels. They are both “products of the process of reproducibility.” (Sterne, 241) We also should think about the fact that many of the “original,” live shows tend to try and mimic the “copy,” or the sound recording of a record. After all, in most cases, albums are not recorded live. They are heavily engineered and layered, with each part being recorded at a different time, then compressed together on the same timeline in order to create that “authentic” sound. The real test is whether or not the “authentic” live performance can live up to the sound recording. This become a real conundrum. What is the original? Is it the recorded and engineered music? Or is it the ability of the artist or musician to reproduce what was heard on the record? It becomes a Catch-22.

Finally, Sterne talks about preserving sound, and creating an audible history. All I can think about is, sadly, we will never ever hear Mozart play his own piano concertos, because sound recording and reproduction technologies have not been invented yet.

Heading north on Figueroa a little before 7pm tonight, I encountered a ton of traffic. Unexpected. Near LA Live, though, there seemed to be commotion. I saw lots of lights – seems to be very renau. So I turned off my radio and rolled down my windows. Not only were people cheering, but there were teenage girls SCREAMING in a very high pitch. I thought, it HAS to be Justin Bieber, which was confirmed when I got home and googled it, but I swear, I didn’t know beforehand, until I heard high-pitched screaming. Because who else would there be high-pitched screaming for? I figure, high pitched screaming would be limited to a small age range. Once you hit your mid-20’s or so, you wouldn’t be screaming at such a high pitch. There’s a modicum of propriety people seem to develop. Most people. I’m not going to overgeneralize. So this establishes the fact that there were a lot of excited teenage girls there. What then, I though, would teenage girls be screaming at (a la Beatles back in the day)? Must be male. The only thing I could think of was Justin Bieber. How right I was.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110209/ap_en_ce/us_film_justin_bieber_premiere

All this just from hearing high-pitched screaming.

In a completely unrelate tangent, Jen Kwok is awesome. And I still can’t get enough of this video (it’s a live performance at Kollaboration NYC 2010):

And the actual music video for the song is here:

I’m sitting outside ASC232 right now, and there seems to be someone blasting…something from one of the rooms. It sounded like there was an amateur singer who’s singing Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.” Oh, it sounds like she’s a 10 yr old girl singing crazy hard songs.
Oh, I think I know where the sound is coming from. Someone’s putting it on in a classroom, but the sound is seeping everywhere in the vicinity.

On another note, I realize that I know exactly when my tea kettle starts to whistle because the tone changes right before it does. Talk about sound giving off information.

I’m watching Flashdance for the first time. I’m only 30 minutes in, but can already conclude that it’s schizophrenic and plotless. This also means I will have 80’s music stuck in my head for the rest of the week.

In other news, Jennifer Beals is on The Chicago Code tomorrow night, but I will be stuck in meetings all evening. API Equality Public Education Committee, you’d better feel special! I’m choosing you over Jennifer Beals. Speaking of…the timbre of JBeals’ voice has changed rather drastically over the years. But the grain of her voice remains the same. I can’t remember right now who says that though…Adorno?

(and to class members, or my professor, who are reading this and may be somewhat confused by my over-personal blogs: because I don’t want to keep track of tons of blogs, and I don’t like having separate blogs with different stuff on them, I have this posterous blog forwarded directly to my main blogger blog (cyndaminthia.blogspot.com) — if this becomes too annoying or too irrelevant, let me know and I’ll blog separately for the remainder of the semester)

…what a feelin’…….