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Editorial
Simon Frith
To cite this article: Simon Frith (2012) Editorial, Social Semiotics, 22:5, 517-522, DOI:
10.1080/10350330.2012.731894
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2012.731894
Social Semiotics
Vol. 22, No. 5, November 2012, 517522
Editorial
This issue of Social Semiotics is concerned with the staging of live music. The papers
here were first prepared for a conference on the Business of Live Music, held in
the University of Edinburgh from 30 April to 2 May 2011.1 The term business in
the conference title was chosen because of its double meaning: on the one hand, we
were interested in the economics of live music, in music promotion as a sector of the
music industry; on the other hand, we were interested in the construction of the
concert as a meaningful event, in the institutional and ideological activities that
cause live music to heard in particular ways. Our reference point here was magic:
magicians use stage business to mislead the audience, to make what they do seem
literally magical. Live music is akin to magic in that many mundane things must be
organised sound, lights, seating/standing space, etc. for an audience to appreciate
the musical performance itself as extraordinary, as something transcendent.
The scholars gathered here address the business of live music in this second
sense.2 They also all suggest that the live music experience is at once intensely
individual and essentially social. They thus follow Ruth Finnegans argument that
musical activities are social pathways through which people make sense of their
lives,3 while providing further phenomenological detail as to how these pathways
work. In this introduction, I want to draw attention to three such socio-musical
processes described in the essays that follow: listening, performing and recalling.
Successful live music promoters are in the business of organising musical events
that enable audiences to listen to music in an appropriate way. What is appropriate
depends of course on the type of event and the type of music, but in general terms
what is at issue here is that the event works in terms of particular ideologies of
music listening, and it is certainly the case that in the history of live music there have
been significant moments of ideological dispute. Such dispute can take different
forms and involve different parties (musicians, promoters, different sectors of the
audience), and their resolution has lasting effects on how live music is promoted,
performed and recorded. Our own research on the history of live music in Britain
suggests that there have been two (overlapping) axes around which most listening
arguments have taken place since the development of music promotion as a
commercial activity. The first, on which I will concentrate here, involves the
relationships of silence and noise; the second the relationship of watching music
and dancing to it.4
Various social historians have shown how the listening conventions for classical
music concerts with which we are all now familiar the still, seated audience, their
physical/emotional response held back until the end of the work had to be taught
to audiences as part of the development of concert hall culture, and more broadly, of
high culture among the late-nineteenth century urban bourgeoisie.5 Simon Gunn
ISSN 1035-0330 print/1470-1219 online
# 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2012.731894
http://www.tandfonline.com
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Editorial
Firstly, they effected the transposition of classical music from the semi-private realm of
club and society to a public sphere of art deemed representative of the urban community
as a whole . . . . The second significant feature of classical music as a component of high
culture was its status as a non-profit activity . . . the highest forms of music in the
provincial cities were seen as autonomous of the market.6
The immediate effect of the ideology of high culture was that audiences had to be
convinced of the superiority of music that had no function other than aesthetic,
which meant a new concert-hall regime. As Gunn notes, the discipline of
collective silence in public was a relatively new phenomenon but the combination of
the increasing professionalism of musical performance, the developing status of the
conductor, the emergence of music criticism and the use of programme notes, created
the idea of serious music needing an attentive and educated listener:
By the later nineteenth century the music hall was represented as the social and cultural
obverse of the concert hall, the former identified with brash vulgarity and commercialism;
the latter with refinement, decorum and disinterestedness.7
As a social institution, then, the classical concert depended on and made possible
in the way it organised space silent listening, listening in which the only relevant
sounds came from a specific site, the platform on which the orchestra sat, but which
were ideally heard within each individuals head. And to achieve this effect, concert
promoters had to minimise the possibilities of distraction, distraction that came to be
understood as noise.
This is a familiar story but it is worth drawing out its implications for what it
means to listen to music. First, as Gunn points out, while what is valorised here is
listening as a particular kind of mental process, the ideology of such serious listening
was developed in the public sphere. Proper (and improper) listening was both
observable and a matter of etiquette, listening in relation to other listeners. This was
an ideology of listening that drew attention to the listening subject. Listening was not
just something one did, but something which one showed oneself doing. As a
classical concertgoer I certainly subscribe to this belief system: the concert behaviour
I find most irritating is too rapid applause and huzzas when a performance finishes.
Such behaviour suggests to me that these people have not been listening properly;
they have not really been inside the work; or they have emerged too quickly. It is
worth noting too that such issues of listening etiquette are not just about noise:
recent concert hall disputes suggest people are equally irritated by fellow audience
members silently texting while they listen.8
But the issue here is not just listening without distraction. As Gunn also suggests
in his reference to the role of conductors and critics in teaching classical audiences
how to listen, what was also involved here was an argument about correct listening,
listening which involved self-discipline, an informed attention to musical structure
and so forth. Music listening was not just to be an indulgence in the sensuality of
sound. Listening, to put this anther way, was not meant to be easy. This became a
particular problem when the new twentieth-century mass media opened up new
listening possibilities. The question now became how to ensure that people listened
Social Semiotics
519
properly in private, when their listening behaviour could not be seen. Thus radio,
from early on, developed programmes of musical appreciation, which explicitly
told radio listeners how they should listen, while the classical record industry was
concerned from the start with the technological problems of providing the ideal
concert hall experience in the living room as hi-fi ads and Gramophone critics all
made clear, the domestic listener was expected to concentrate on classical works with
the same rapt individual attention as the listener in the live performance space.9
Television is a particular problematic medium in the context. Keith Negus has
documented the 1950s arguments of such composers as Benjamin Britten that
television was simply unfit for classical music; its viewers were bound to be
distracted.10
While the ideology of individual autonomous serious listening is central to
classical/high music culture, it provides an account of proper or serious music
listening that has a much broader resonance. It is involved, for example, in
technological developments focused on in-the-head listening, on the rise of
headphones as a listening norm. And it certainly informs our understanding of
what it means to be serious about music in other genres than classical both jazz and
rock, for example, in laying claim to artistic status made demands on their audiences
for respectful silent listening.
This is one of the issues touched on in Karen Burland and Stephanie Pitts paper
here on the rules and expectations of jazz gigs. Their concern is what it means to
listen to music as a jazz fan, that is with a particular kind of identity which is
brought by an audience to a jazz club, but also learned in and shaped by their
jazz club experience. Burland and Pitts suggest that appropriate listening at a jazz
club involves a combination of commitment (fans need to indicate their commitment
to jazz as a musical form by their continuous response to what they hear); the right
level of comfort (provided by the promoter) with good sound and sightlines, sociable
seating and easy access to and from the bar; and connection, a sense of a tangible
relationship with both performers and other audience members. What seems to
matter most to the jazz audience is that a gig has the right atmosphere, something
that is determined by how the venue is organised and managed, by the behaviour of
other audience members and by the quality of performance in terms of its direct
engagement with the audience as well as its skill.11
Burland and Pitts research also suggests that jazz audiences, at least, must expect
a degree of improvisation in how they listen, must decide when to be silent, when to
be noisy, when to be still, when to be exuberant serious listening occurs in a
context of a deliberate display of emotion. There is thus more audience dissatisfaction at jazz than classical gigs, more irritation with people in the next seats, more
grumbling about organisers carelessness, more criticism of musicians for misjudging
the occasion (whether being too introverted or too extroverted). Participation at a
jazz gig is, like improvised music itself, a more unreliable pursuit of musical
expectations than attendance at a classical show.
Lucy Bennetts paper on audiences and social media examines the construction of
listening behaviour from a quite different angle. Bennett is concerned with a new
kind of live audience that has emerged in the last decade for pop and rock events,
an audience which is present at the events not bodily but via mobile phone access to
the Internet and on social networking sites. For such listeners physical absence from
the show itself is compensated by a more intense engagement with what is going on,
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Social Semiotics
521
Liverpool. For Forbes, musical memories are imbricated with traces of architectural
material; for Cohen, with geographical information. Forbes shows how the startling
physical state of the Apollo (the squalor of the toilets, for example) becomes in
peoples memories the guarantor of the realness of their musical experiences there.
Cohen describes a research project in which mapping peoples memories of getting to
gigs the bus routes and short cuts becomes a way of understanding their social
identities. For Forbes, the key term in analysing live music experience is authenticity.
The Apollos revered status partly reflects its historical situation it thrived in the
golden age of rock, and partly its social setting a working-class city with a long
history of aggressive proletarian leisure and the best audience in the world. For
Cohen, the key term in analysing live music experience is circulation. The circulation
of sounds and the circulation of people make live music not just the setting for the
experience of social identity but also, in memory, the way that identity is most
intensely felt and expressed.14 In Cohens words:
Music venues often provided a physical idiom for defining a particular social group and
the relationships involved, and for expressing feelings of belonging or not belonging to
that group and a wider community or scene.
What is clear here is that such venues are settings for social interactions which then,
through memory, become the ideal musical experience against which all others are
judged. As Forbes notes, the reality of such a memory (was the person really there?)
is less significant than the way it works to define what a real musical experience
involves. Musical meaning is determined by a continuous process of blurring the
boundaries between the real and the ideal.
To study live music sociologically is to confirm the Durkheimian proposition that
what is experienced most intensely as a sense of self is a social fact, made possible by
a series of social conventions, agreements and sensitivities. But the authors here
suggest, further, that what is involved in live music events is not just the social in the
individual, but also what one might call the banal in the transcendent. Live music is
made possible by buildings, licenses, electricity supplies, tickets, toilets and all the
other material things promoters have to worry about, and it is made meaningful by
the anticipatory routines of a good night out, the nostalgic reminiscences of being
there and by the equally breathless cliches of club hosts and social networkers. It is
on such apparently shoddy gestural foundations that the opportunities emerge for
musicians and audiences alike to be taken out of themselves, to have an experience
that seems, at the moment, to be beyond sociological understanding.
Simon Frith
Notes
1. The conference was held to mark the completion of a research project on live music
promotion funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/
F009437/1).
2. The conference papers concerning the business of live music from an economic perspective
can be found in a special issue of Arts Marketing, an International Journal 1 (2) 2011.
3. See Ruth Finnegan (1989).
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Editorial
4. For examples of the problems British promoters have faced when trying to reconcile the
expectations of dancing and spectating audiences see Simon Frith et al. (forthcoming).
5. The most entertaining account of this process can be found in Lawrence Levine (1988).
6. See Simon Gunn (2000, 14042).
7. See Simon Gunn (2000, 14654).
8. Peoples listening signs are, of course, not always easy to read. There is a blurred line, for
example, between silent listening and sleeping. Is someone with closed eyes listening
particularly intently or not listening at all?
9. For radio and music appreciation see Joseph Horowitz (1987); for record companies
classical recording policy see Colin Symes (2004); for Gramophone critics, see Simon Frith
(2009).
10. See Keith Negus (2006).
11. For an interesting account of how these values are shared but expressed quite differently
by a chamber music audience see S.E. Pitts (2005).
12. See Philip Auslander (2008).
13. See, for example, John Rink (1995).
14. In Liverpool football matches offer particular important occasions for public musical
performances.
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