6 research outputs found
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The Disc Jockey as Composer, or How I Became a Composing DJ
Only recently and somewhat reluctantly have DJs been accorded some degree of recognition in two musical worlds that rarely impinge upon each other: the music industry and the music academy. In both, DJs tend to be thought of as people who entertain audiences using mediated music, usually vinyl records or CDs, or who work as remixers or record producers by extending the commercial life of a pop song, thereby providing fellow DJs and dancers with music to liven up an evening of clubbing. Some DJs (DJ Spooky or Christian Marclay, for example) have been critically acclaimed as cultural heroes of the postmodern age, cutting up and mixing various sources into collages of sounds that reflect our time-in which virtually any sound can be heard anywhere, divorced forever from the limitations of time and space. Other DJs (such as Rob Swift and Kid Koala) have abandoned the term "DJ" in favor of "turntablist," presenting the command of a set of turntables and a mixer as comparable to the mastery exhibited by virtuosos of conventional musical instruments. As professionals, some DJs now travel the world and enjoy an audience-appeal comparable to that of earlier or contemporary colleagues who were (or are) pianists, violinists, or guitarists. In the context of hip-hop and house music, deejaying is thought of mainly in terms of performance, which is understandable in view of the many other strands of largely orally transmitted, performance-based, African-American musical forms (such as work songs, hollers, blues,jazz, or gospel)
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Paul Theberge. Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1997. xx, 293 pp.
In 1904 Erich M. von Hornbostel and Otto Abraham published an article entitled "On the Significance of the Phonograph for Comparative Musicology" in the Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie, thereby formally establishing the connection between technologies of sound recording and reproduction, and their field of academic inquiry, then known as comparative musicology. Since then, both domains have developed significantly. In the United States comparative musicology became ethnomusicology in the 1950s, while in the realm of musical technologies, the primary function of the phonograph shifted from recording to playback and, more recently, to performance. A second important technological shift for musicians and musicologists alike was the spread of audiomagnetic tape recorders in the 1950s and 1960s, a development that has more recently led to the mass marketing of technologies such as digital audio tape (DAT) and record- able compact disc (CD-R). This article explains why Any Sound You Can Imagine should be part of the library of anyone who is concerned with the state of music and music making at the end of this century