Everyday Reveries: Recorded Music, Memory & Emotion
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
University of the West of England EVERYDAY REVERIES: RECORDED MUSIC, MEMORY & EMOTION GERARD MOOREY A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of the West of England, Bristol for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Arts, Creative Industries and Education, University of the West of England, Bristol, February 2012 This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. EVERYDAY REVERIES Contents * Everyday Reveries: Recorded Music, Memory, & Emotion Abstract 1 Introduction 2 Chapter 1: Music & Memory in the Age of Recording 10 Echo – The phonograph & the mimetic faculty – The ‘wonder-box’ – Reveries of the solitary listener – The ‘choral production in the drawing room’: text & context in recorded music – Ravel’s Boléro & the shortened durée – Recognising & forgetting recorded music Chapter 2: Recorded Music in Everyday Life 52 Everyday reveries – Music & everyday life – Musical repetition – Stray refrains, mobile motifs, & quotation listening – The ‘refrain’ in the work of Deleuze & Guattari – Of theme tunes, chants, & jingles – Advertising jingles Interlude I: Music, Semiotics, Affect 90 The ‘affective turn’ in cultural theory – Sémiologie or semiotics? – Musical semiotics, musical affect – An ‘archaeology’ of musical signification Chapter 3: Involuntary Musical Memories 112 Involuntary memory – Proustian memory – Proust & Bergson – Involuntary musical memories: two examples – Unconscious musical icons – Unconscious cribbing – A culture of overstimulation Chapter 4: Recorded Music & Nostalgia 130 Pan & Syrinx – A history of the concept of nostalgia – Tonality, colonialism, & nostalgia – Recorded music, nostalgia, & autobiographical memories – Pop music, nostalgia, & the absent rememberer – Of retro & revivals – Cultural dementia, commodified nostalgia, & pop music Interlude II: Music & Mimesis 153 A mimetic art – The origins of ‘mimesis’ – Music, the body, & gesture – Mimetic culture – Mimesis & cultural theory Chapter 5: Recorded Music, Mimicry, & Self-Oblivion 169 Diegetic performance in the pop soundtrack movie – Pop-rock mimicry – Mimicry in classical music – The blurring of musical production & consumption – Identification, expressivity, & song lyrics – Pop-rock mimicry & possession rituals – Mimicry, subjectivity, & the habitus Chapter 6: Everyday Reveries 189 The history of a dream – Everyday reveries: two examples from cinema – Attention, distraction, & the everyday reverie – Cagean listening – Bachelardian reveries – Profane illumination, dialectical images, & historical consciousness – The everyday reverie & utopia Notes 207 References 218 EVERYDAY REVERIES Abstract * This thesis investigates recorded music in everyday life and its relationship to memory. It does this by establishing the social and historical context in which sound recording was invented and developed, and by formulating a theory of how recorded music signifies. It argues that musical recordings do not simply facilitate remembering but are equally bound up with processes of forgetting. Each chapter of the thesis examines a different aspect of the relationship between recorded music and memory. Chapter one analyses the origins of sound recording and charts its subsequent development in terms of a continuum between social and solitary listening. Chapter two interrogates common assumptions about what is meant by the ‘everyday’, and argues that music in everyday life tends to be consumed and remembered in fragmentary form. Chapter three investigates the significance of, and reasons for, involuntary musical memories. Chapter four analyses the relationship between recorded music and nostalgia. Chapter five examines recorded music’s role in pleasurable forms of forgetting or self-oblivion. Chapter six is a summation of the whole thesis, arguing that recorded music in everyday life contains utopian traces which, when reflected upon, yield insights into the nature of social reality. The thesis also contains two ‘interludes’ that deal with pertinent theoretical issues in the field of cultural studies. The first of these interludes argues that Peircean semiotics is better suited to the task of analysing music than Saussurean semiology and that, furthermore, it is able to contribute to the emerging field of affect theory. The second interlude continues this analysis by arguing that mimesis or creative imitation should become a key concept in cultural studies. 1 Everyday Reveries Introduction * This project is about recorded music in everyday life and its relationship to memory, the general thesis being that recording gives rise to new kinds of musical memories but also new forms of forgetting. At the heart of the project is a concern with changing the way we listen to music – and the way we think about listening to music – in order to re- invigorate social space. To this end, I introduce the notion of the ‘everyday reverie’: a moment of vivid reminiscence, heightened affect, or expanded potential triggered by the chance audition of recorded music in everyday life. Recorded music has a claim to being the medium that has had the biggest impact on everyday life. More than cinema, newspapers, television or the Internet, recorded sounds have penetrated almost all everyday spaces and accompany all manner of everyday activity, whether we are at home or at work, in the bathroom or on the beach, in the supermarket or in our cars. In its early years as a fairground gimmick, the phonograph helped prepare people for the ‘magic’ of media to come – ‘talkies’ at the cinema, television at home, and the transistor radio anywhere it could be taken. In spite of this, there was, until recently, a sense that the record industry had been ‘routinely ignored’ in media studies in favour of visual culture (Frith 1996b: 457). The Internet’s role in facilitating digital downloads and file sharing has altered this situation somewhat, moving sound recording closer to the centre of discussions concerning the cultural and political significance of the ‘new media’ for example, yet it can still be argued that analysis of the record industry often stands in for analysis of recorded music. This, I would suggest, is connected to the fact that recorded music shares with everyday life a certain ‘invisibility’: 2 both fall below the horizon of conscious awareness, rarely warranting further attention. In this respect, recorded music remains an element in what C.N. Seremetakis (1994) describes as ‘the material culture of the unconscious’ (12). This material unconscious belongs to the everyday, described by Seremetakis as ‘a zone of devaluation, forgetfulness, and inattention’ but also as a ‘site where new political identities can be fabricated by techniques of distraction’ (13). Recorded music and the everyday are united through ‘habitual’ or ‘procedural’ memory: a type of memory that is deeply sedimented in the body as a set of predispositions, and which we are often barely aware of as ‘memory’. In spite of, or rather, because of this, recorded music and the everyday belong to sites where the senses and the memory of the senses get re-made, away from the glare of critical scrutiny and official agendas. In this regard, the role played by recorded music in everyday life is part of a project stemming from time immemorial through which the human senses are constituted. To quote Marx (1844/1974): ‘The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present’ (96). As has often been noted, music and memory are intimate partners. Michael Chanan (2005), for instance, observes, ‘Music and memory interact at every possible level and in every possible way. […T]he experience of music […] is an unceasing shuttle back and forth between private moments and public settings, private and public associations and connotations’ (50, 54). The specific concern of my work is with recorded music and its effects on cultural memory – the way it makes possible new kinds of musical memories while, at the same time, giving rise to new forms of forgetting. Sound recording is one of a number of technologies – writing, printing, photography, computers, etc. – which have had more or less direct effects on the way we remember while, unsurprisingly, providing metaphors for how we remember, as when we talk about ‘photographic memory’ or something being ‘etched’ on our minds. John Young (2008) makes explicit the analogies between the ‘internal’ memory of our minds and the ‘external’ memory of phonography: ‘The fact that the same snatches of recordings are reiterated in new contexts epitomises the creative, fluid and contextual nature of memory; the specific experiences are the same, but the context in which they are recalled, and therefore the perspectives offered on them, have altered’ (324). Memory traces, then, like familiar musical recordings, are ‘re- made’ in the process of their being recalled (or ‘re-played’); they are rendered fluid and 3 mobile, forming new connections with other memories. To understand more fully the connection between sound recording and memory, we must go beyond metaphorical parallels. It should be stated instead that phonographic devices are not mere adjuncts to memory, neither are they mere ‘artificial’ or ‘external’ forms of memory; rather they are examples of the kinds of tools, aids, or artefactual signs through which human conscious activity has always been formed, and are thus innate to a specifically human