In
his Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation,
Thomas Turino offers a pragmatic conceptual framework within which we can
develop our thinking about music in such ways that we move away from the notion
of music as a single art form that is divided into categories of style and
status. His framework
re-conceptualizes music-making as relating to ‘different realms or fields of artistic practice’ (p. 25). Turino writes that this idea of social
field (borrowed from Pierre
Bourdieu) ‘refers to a specific
domain of activity defined by the purpose and goals of the activity as well as the values, power relations, and
types of capital (e.g.,
money, academic degrees,
a hit song, athletic prowess, the ability to play a guitar) determining the role of relationships, social positioning, and
status of actors and activities within the field’ (pp. 25-26).
Turino
distinguishes between four fields
of musical practice:
‘participatory performance’, ‘presentational performance’, ‘high
fidelity’, and ‘studio audio art’.
He explains:
- participatory performance is a special type of artistic practice in which there are no artist-audience distinctions, only participants and potential participants performing different roles, and the primary goal is to involve the maximum number of people in some performance role.
- presentational performance, in contrast, refers to situations where one group of people, the artists, prepare and provide music for another group, the audience, who do not participate in making the music or dancing.
- High fidelity refers to the making of recordings that are intended to index or be iconic of live performance. While high fidelity recordings are connected to live performance in a variety of ways, special recording techniques and practices are necessary to make this connection evident in the sound of the recording, and additional artistic roles—including the recordist, producers, and engineers—also help delineate high fidelity as a separate field of practice.
- Studio audio art involves the creation and manipulation of sounds in a studio or on a computer to create a recorded art object (a “sound sculpture”) that is not intended to represent real-time performance. Whereas in high fidelity recordings studio techniques are masked or downplayed, in studio audio art processes of electronic sound generation and manipulation are often celebrated and are overtly represented in the ultimate recording or sound files. (pp. 26-27)
In
what ways are these distinctions helpful in thinking about musical practice and
about the perceived challenges facing contemporary musical culture? Why should we move away from the notion
of music as a single art form categorized by style?
Crossing
stylistic boundaries and defying genre distinctions have been fetishized in
today’s musical culture (at least within what Turino calls the
‘capitalist-cosmopolitan formation’).
But aren’t there more fundamental issues at stake here? Aren’t genre distinctions and the
impulse to transgress such distinctions too narrow? What about the values and the kind of sociality that a
particular musical practice makes possible or closes off?
Why
is it that we tend to judge all musical practice through the lens of
‘presentational performance’? How can
thinking of music as relating to different fields of artistic practice (rather
than in terms of style or genre) sharpen and clarify mainstream discourse on music?