Everyday reveries: recorded music, memory & emotion

This thesis investigates recorded music in everyday life and its relationship to memory. It does this by establishing the social and historical context in which sound recording was invented and developed, and by formulating a theory of how recorded music signifies. It argues that musical recordings do not simply facilitate remembering but are equally bound up with processes of forgetting. Each chapter of the thesis examines a different aspect of the relationship between recorded music and memory. Chapter one analyses the origins of sound recording and charts its subsequent development in terms of a continuum between social and solitary listening. Chapter two interrogates common assumptions about what is meant by the ‘everyday’, and argues that music in everyday life tends to be consumed and remembered in fragmentary form. Chapter three investigates the significance of, and reasons for, involuntary musical memories. Chapter four analyses the relationship between recorded music and nostalgia. Chapter five examines recorded music’s role in pleasurable forms of forgetting or self-oblivion. Chapter six is a summation of the whole thesis, arguing that recorded music in everyday life contains utopian traces which, when reflected upon, yield insights into the nature of social reality. The thesis also contains two ‘interludes’ that deal with pertinent theoretical issues in the field of cultural studies. The first of these interludes argues that Peircean semiotics is better suited to the task of analysing music than Saussurean semiology and that, furthermore, it is able to contribute to the emerging field of affect theory. The second interlude continues this analysis by arguing that mimesis or creative imitation should become a key concept in cultural studies

Aging, Death, and Revival: Representations of the Music Industry in Two Contemporary Novels

This article examines the passing of the rock ideology: the system of distinctions and stratifications whereby popular music was classified and argued over in terms of its cultural value and authenticity. It does this by analyzing parallel representations of the music industry in two contemporary novels: Jonathan Franzen's Freedom (2010) and Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010). Both novels suggest that rock culture and the ideology underpinning it are finally nearing their end or, what amounts to much the same thing, have undergone such a radical transformation in recent years as to be unrecognizable. In the popular press of the last couple of decades, any number of emergent cultural and artistic forms have been casually granted the epithet “the new rock and roll.”1 But what happens to rock and roll itself once it has become “old”? This is the question asked in two acclaimed novels, Jonathan Franzen'sFreedom (2010) and A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) by Jennifer Egan, both of which mark the passage into the second decade of the new millennium. By alighting on characters who are intimately connected with the music industry, either as musicians or as talent scouts and promoters, both novelists examine the passing of what, in broad terms, might be called “the rock era.” This is to say, they chart the decline and fall of “rock” not so much as a discrete style of music, or even as a meta-genre (Fabbri), but rather as an ideology: a system of distinctions and stratifications whereby popular music is classified and argued over in terms of its cultural value and authenticity. As Keir Keightley comments, “Taking popular music seriously, as something ‘more’ than mere entertainment or distraction, has been a crucial feature of rock culture since its emergence” (110). It is precisely this endowment of seriousness to popular music that Egan's and Franzen's novels question, not in order to disparage or discredit popular music—at least, not chiefly in order to do this—but instead to re-think its taken-for-granted centrality in the cultural life of Western societies since at least the end of World War II. In their different ways, what both novelists do is to present us with a world—our own—in which music is no longer as important as it once was

Everyday reveries : recorded music, memory & emotion

This thesis investigates recorded music in everyday life and its relationship to memory. It does this by establishing the social and historical context in which sound recording was invented and developed, and by formulating a theory of how recorded music signifies. It argues that musical recordings do not simply facilitate remembering but are equally bound up with processes of forgetting. Each chapter of the thesis examines a different aspect of the relationship between recorded music and memory. Chapter one analyses the origins of sound recording and charts its subsequent development in terms of a continuum between social and solitary listening. Chapter two interrogates common assumptions about what is meant by the ‘everyday’, and argues that music in everyday life tends to be consumed and remembered in fragmentary form. Chapter three investigates the significance of, and reasons for, involuntary musical memories. Chapter four analyses the relationship between recorded music and nostalgia. Chapter five examines recorded music’s role in pleasurable forms of forgetting or self-oblivion. Chapter six is a summation of the whole thesis, arguing that recorded music in everyday life contains utopian traces which, when reflected upon, yield insights into the nature of social reality. The thesis also contains two ‘interludes’ that deal with pertinent theoretical issues in the field of cultural studies. The first of these interludes argues that Peircean semiotics is better suited to the task of analysing music than Saussurean semiology and that, furthermore, it is able to contribute to the emerging field of affect theory. The second interlude continues this analysis by arguing that mimesis or creative imitation should become a key concept in cultural studies.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

‘Fate songs’: musical agency and the literary soundtrack in D.B.C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little

In its satirical depiction of the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who lives by his wits in a corrupt society, Vernon God Little (2003) conforms very closely to the conventions of the picaresque novel. Instead of chance encounters with other protagonists, however, the novel’s eponymous narrator more often has chance encounters with pop songs. Pop music thus forms part of the novel’s naturalistic and picaresque texture. Vernon refers to such songs as ‘fate tunes’ because of the way they determine the meaning of major events in his life. The ‘right’ song heard at the ‘right’ time – or even the ‘wrong’ song heard at the ‘wrong’ time – characterises Vernon’s consumption of pop music. This idea of the contingent meanings that pop songs acquire as they circulate between different social contexts is strongly tied in the novel to the themes of causality and determinism as Vernon unwittingly becomes embroiled in a trial-by-media for his alleged role in a high-school massacre. The novel’s ‘literary soundtrack’ helps ground it in its Texan setting, serves as a commentary on key episodes, and evokes the weariness of the teenage Vernon with the era in which he lives

Raiders of the Lost Archives

Fantastic Man (2014) and Searching for Sugar Man (2012) mobilize tropes of discovery occurring in the filmed process of collecting and curating the work and identities of two reluctant, elusive and resistive figures. They are part of a discourse of collectability which is marked by the urge to discover and to narrate a “quest” that has its precedents in record collecting as obsessive cultural practice (Straw, 1997; Shuker, 2012), and in the fetishizing of obscurity (Thornton, 1995; Hesmondhalgh, 1997). Furthermore, they can be seen as “performances” of the A&R process but for a “post-rock” era in which the customary roles of A&R (“artiste and repertoire”) have largely been eclipsed by social, economic and technological changes to the music industry: the “(re-)discovery” of Onyeabor and Rodriguez exemplifies an increasingly common fusion of, rather than oscillation between, novelty and nostalgia in the music industry, as “old” artists are “newly” discovered through practices of media archaeology aimed at unearthing artifacts of cultural and economic value from an ever bigger and denser digital archive