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Musicology Without Music

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On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements

Part of the book series: Pop Music, Culture and Identity ((PMCI))

Abstract

The phrase “musicology without music” is not a call to abandon music or musicology. Rather, it is a call to expand and multiply those domains by highlighting the ways that they are not only inseparable from but also constituted by a variety of distributed and ostensibly non-musical conditions. The word “without,” then, connotes less its everyday prepositional meaning as lack than its archaic adverbial meaning as outside—although, as I show in this chapter, the latter (musicology that begins from a position that is exterior to “music”) authorizes the former (musicology that proceeds in the absence of “music”). The point is to develop a mediatic version of music research that does not begin as a musicology of music—that does not begin in a tautology whereby the force of pre-constructed definitions of either music or musicology delimit what music or musicology can be or should do. I illustrate the epistemological and political benefits of this perspective by attending to the key materials that constitute the distinctive thin sizzle of the 78-rpm disc as a format.

Whosoever is able to hear or see the circuits in the synthesized sound of CDs … finds happiness.

—Friedrich Kittler

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Surface noises and textures, in the senses I am discussing them here, are not equivalent to the “sonic signatures” discussed by Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen and Anne Danielsen (2016). These authors develop their notion by outlining, for example, how “the sonic signature of the phonograph” arises from a “combination of characteristic background noise” (i.e. “the physical contact between stylus and cylinder”) and “limited sonic range” (Ibid., 63, 64). Brøvig-Hanssen’s and Danielsen’s main interest is in how such sonic signatures work as experiential properties in musical consumption as well as aesthetic imperatives in musical production. I am speaking of the distinctive textures of formats in terms of their nonhermeneutic and nonphenomenological mediatic conditions (a perspective from which observers and horizons of shared meaning are irrelevant but where such conditions do index broad social frictions; cf. Tsing 2005). It is also worth noting that the perspective developed here participates in a broader attention to surfaces that is emerging in cultural theory (e.g. Coleman and Oakley-Brown 2017).

  2. 2.

    I am here offering a simplified summary of Latour (2005). For a helpful application of Latour’s actor-network-theory in music research, see Piekut (2014).

  3. 3.

    For some of the broader politics of “turns” and “interventions” in scholarship, see Straw (2016) and Sterne (2017).

  4. 4.

    See Felski (2015) for an overview of the interpretive imperative in twentieth-century thought and scholarship, which associates “deep” readings with structuralism and “surface” readings with poststructuralism.

  5. 5.

    Perhaps the most significant problem in music research, which underlies the suspicion of textualism, surrounds epistemological and methodological questions of how “the social” gets into “the musical” (also sometimes known as the homology thesis); see Hennion (1995), Frith (1996), Shepherd and Wicke (1997), DeNora (2003), Martin (2006). For a critical defense of close reading, see Richardson (2016) in relation to music. For a “post-antihermeneutic” defense of culture more generally, see Fornäs (2017).

  6. 6.

    For a summary of this shift, from which I borrow the paintings-to-painting expression, see Calhoun and Sennett (2007, 5).

  7. 7.

    Note, though, that poststructuralists such as Jacques Derrida took a foundational interest in the materialities of communication.

  8. 8.

    The conventional understandings of media studies and mediation in this sentence are drawn from Peters (2008b) and Sterne (2012, 9), who are both summarizing and criticizing these objects, approaches, and ideas.

  9. 9.

    Although I am using “conventional” definitions of mediation as the foils for my description of mediality, I should note that there is a sophisticated body of work on mediation in music research—work that is not at all limited to conventional understandings of mediation. In fact, definitions of mediation in music research offer something similar to the conception of mediality outlined in this chapter (cf. Born 2012; Hennion 2016; Valiquet 2017; Prior 2018; for a perspective from media studies, see Grusin 2015). It is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide a detailed analysis and/or synthesis of these two concepts—although this is something I hope to work out more fully in a future publication. Thanks to Georgina Born and Tom Western for encouraging me to try and clarify the similarities and differences between mediality and mediation.

  10. 10.

    The “sonic signatures” of various recording formats can of course also operate as meaningful aesthetic content in musical consumption and collecting—especially in terms of nostalgia (e.g. Bijsterveld and van Dijck 2009; Shuker 2010). See for example Askerøi (2016) and Wragg (2016) on sonic markers and retronormativity in popular music production.

  11. 11.

    For other key research on this history from the perspective of disability media studies, which points to numerous other valuable sources, see Mills and Sterne (2017). For another take on listening to technological mediation rather than through it, see Brøvig-Hanssen (2018).

  12. 12.

    Excepting, of course, a minority of antiquarian shellac lovers, for whom the 78’s sizzle can invoke fuzzy feelings of nostalgia for bygone days.

  13. 13.

    The arguments presented here are summaries of those that appear in Devine (2019), which also includes additional information on this estimate. For further discussion of shellac in the recording industry, see Melillo (2014), Roy (forthcoming), and Smith (2015).

  14. 14.

    This was the motto that appeared in the letterhead of the Lowell Needle Company in 1943. Unless otherwise noted, the references in this subsection are found in letters, memos, and other documents of Columbia Records held at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, A.F.R. Lawrence Papers—∗L (Special) 89.21—Boxes 2 and 4. These sources are not reproduced in the bibliography.

  15. 15.

    Take for example Lionel Sturdy’s regular column in Talking Machine World as well as others reports in this trade paper (e.g. Anon. 1920a, b). The Victor Talking Machine Company’s management meeting minutes, held at the Hagley Museum and Library, contain weekly reports on shellac shipments and stockpiles during this period.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Musicology, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Kyle Devine

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  1. Kyle Devine
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Correspondence to Kyle Devine .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Media Arts, Waikato Institute of Technology, Hamilton, New Zealand

    Nick Braae

  2. Department of Art and Cultural Studies, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Hamar, Norway

    Kai Arne Hansen

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Devine, K. (2019). Musicology Without Music. In: Braae, N., Hansen, K. (eds) On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements. Pop Music, Culture and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18099-7_2

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