Mapping Similarity and Familiarity in the Production, Curation and Consumption of Australian Art Music
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Distances in the Field: Mapping Similarity and Familiarity in the Production, Curation and Consumption of Australian Art Music Simon Chambers Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Western Sydney University 2020 Acknowledgements In acknowledging the support and assistance which has helped make this thesis possible, I would firstly like to thank the staff of the Australian Music Centre (AMC) for their dedicated work in meticulously documenting Australian art music practices. At a personal level, my gratitude goes to Judith Foster and John Davis for the professional guidance and encouragement they have given me over the past 20 years. I would also like to acknowledge my colleagues at the Australasian Performing Right Association (APRA), particularly Scot Morris and Dean Ormston, for their support and unending flexibility in allowing me to balance the demands of work and study. APRA’s commitment to the broader music sector is second to none, and I have been fortunate to benefit from the many and diverse ways in which they make this passion for music manifest. I am grateful to each of my supervisors – Roger Dean, Greg Noble and Liam Magee – for the individual support they have provided, and for collectively taking on the unique challenges of supervising research which crosses disciplines and institutes. Throughout my candidature I have appreciated the opportunities and support given to me by the MARCS Institute and its director, Kate Stevens. To the members of the Institute for Culture and Society’s (ICS) Bourdieu Reading Group, I thank them for the reliably entertaining search for post-Bourdieusian literature which achieved a modicum of consensus appreciation. To Yinghua Yu and Vanicka Arora, I could not have asked for better neighbours to sit alongside for the past two years. I am also especially grateful to the ICS Running Group for adding the oddly welcomed distraction of physical torment to offset the mental exhaustion of PhD research. My research could not have progressed without the many participants who generously gave their time to complete interviews and surveys. My gratitude goes to each of them, and also to Janine Marshman and Kim Lerchbacher at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), who provided invaluable assistance in the recruitment of participants and ensuring access to obscure archives of data. Finally, I have been fortunate to be able to rely on the support of my family while working on this thesis. In addition to my mother’s tireless proofing, I am indebted to my immediate family – Susan, Owen and Eloise – for their patience and support as I juggled the overlapping commitments of study, work and family over the past four years. Statement of Authentication The work presented in this thesis is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, original except as acknowledged in the text. I hereby declare that I have not submitted this material, either in full or in part, for a degree at this or any other institution. Table of Contents List of Tables ............................................................................................................. iv List of Figures ............................................................................................................ vi List of Models ............................................................................................................ix List of Equations .........................................................................................................x Abbreviations ............................................................................................................xi Abstract ...................................................................................................................xiii 1 Introduction ........................................................................................................ 1 1.1 Reflecting on the field of contemporary Australian art music ........................ 3 1.2 Research questions ....................................................................................... 8 1.3 Situating the research ................................................................................. 11 1.4 Epistemological conditions of investigating taste and cultural fields in an era of ‘big data’ ......................................................................................................... 24 1.5 Thesis structure .......................................................................................... 39 2 The space of producers in Australian art music: Composer, acoustic, curator and audience perspectives .............................................................................................. 47 2.1 Introduction ............................................................................................... 47 2.2 Composer perspective analysis.................................................................... 57 2.3 Acoustic feature analysis............................................................................. 61 2.4 Artistic network analysis ............................................................................. 91 2.5 Social network analysis ............................................................................ 125 2.6 Conclusion ............................................................................................... 143 3 Curating (un)familiarity: The assemblage of Australian art music in radio, concerts and digital playlists .................................................................................. 146 3.1 Introduction ............................................................................................. 147 3.2 Platforms for discovering music ................................................................ 151 i 3.3 Methodology ............................................................................................ 153 3.4 Results and analysis.................................................................................. 178 3.5 Conclusion ............................................................................................... 220 4 ‘You don’t go to these kinds of concerts for fun’: The fluid and emergent performance of taste in contemporary art music .................................................... 224 4.1 Introduction ............................................................................................. 224 4.2 Method..................................................................................................... 230 4.3 Practising taste: Acts of listening .............................................................. 232 4.4 Articulating taste: Discourses of evaluation............................................... 238 4.5 Discussion ................................................................................................ 248 5 Beyond familiarity: Modes of appreciation in the discovery, recommendation and engagement with unfamiliar art music .................................................................. 253 5.1 Introduction ............................................................................................. 253 5.2 Theory ...................................................................................................... 255 5.3 Data and methodology ............................................................................. 260 5.4 Results ..................................................................................................... 264 5.5 Discussion ................................................................................................ 283 6 Conclusion: Towards multidimensional spaces of cultural practice .................. 287 6.1 Findings ................................................................................................... 287 6.2 Contribution ............................................................................................. 293 6.3 Implications.............................................................................................. 296 6.4 Limitations and future work ..................................................................... 298 6.5 Coda ........................................................................................................ 300 References ............................................................................................................. 302 Appendix A Acoustic descriptors ........................................................................ 329 Appendix B Composer similarity survey instrument ........................................... 354 ii Appendix C List of Spotify playlists .................................................................... 355 Appendix D Art music curation in Australia dataset ........................................... 357 iii List of Tables Table 2.1 Distribution of recordings by instrumental classification........................... 63 Table 2.2 Number of retained acoustic descriptors at various correlation thresholds 66 Table 2.3 Optimal 13-descriptor acoustic feature set ............................................... 74 Table 2.4 Summary of dimensions in 3-dimensional MDS ....................................... 81 Table 2.5 Artistic network vertex attributes ............................................................. 93 Table 2.6 Vertices and edges in artistic networks ..................................................... 94 Table 2.7 Characteristics of artistic networks and sub-graphs .................................