Call for contributions Volume! La revue des musiques populaires
Listening to popular music: practices, experiences, representations
Submission deadline: June 1st, 2011
The auditor is a fertile basis for the social, cultural, aesthetic or even political analysis of popular music, which enables us to multiply its scales, and to enter into the most intimate details of the aesthetic relationship and signifying practices. One can focus on the individual or collective activity that shape the musical experience: technological, social and aural uses and rites. Indeed, auditors have recourse to various prostheses, just as they appeal to faculties, rituals or singular amateur skills, or multiple types and degrees of attention, depending on the micro-musical objects (group, album, track, chorus, riff, note, noise, silence etc.) they concentrate on, which enable them to individualize their experience. The emotion, the pleasure as well as the learning of music make themselves through listening, be it through self-teaching (the apprentice rocker with his solitary guitar) or an aesthesic community (the group of fans, the audience of a concert).
Then, listening constantly overflows the strict universe of music. Isn’t the nature of listening also defined by what does not belong to the order of sounds? Indeed, the quality, the pleasure of listening certainly depend on music factors (quality of the performance, of the sound reproduction etc.) but also vary according to extramusical or “para-sound” circumstances: environment, collective or individual moods, listener’s biography and historical conditions which increase our perceptional possibilities, revealing that every listener is unfaithful, to music of course, but also to his own ears. On the other hand, auditory attention is grafted onto a network of correspondences between the senses, that have retroactive effects on listening, and that can thus carry the analysis towards gestures, styles, subcultures that inform it – the relationship between sound, image and mythologies. What effects do star culture, the observation of the musician’s or the listener’s habitus or self-representations produce on the perception of a music, or of those (the individual auditor, the group of fans) who listen to it? Can we write a “history of our ears”? To every music library, we adjust a moving internal audiotheque that increases its heterogeneity.
Listening is thus an experience, but from the outside, it is an object of inquisition, the base for a discourse focused on the meaning of music, on the effects that certain forms are expected to produce (Satanist proselytism in metal, hatred and crime in rap), on the amateur’s emotion and taste, and thus a means by which he is identified, and eventually the proposal of a social therapeutic treatment, emanating from moral, scholarly or political authorities. A moralized aesthetics that is also the normative prescription of the right ways of feeling and interpreting (a government of senses): social, psychological or moral identification of the subject, either valued for his activity, originality, or stigmatized for his passivity, his immaturity, his vulnerability, or even his voluntary servitude or perversity. The cursory review and superficial representations of the act of listening are the pretext for a judgment on the character, the intelligence, the sensibility, the desires of an individual, or a subculture – a “distribution of the sensitive” that freezes the listener, whereas the analysis of forms of appropriation perhaps reveal his/their aesthetic “emancipation”. The intentions that lurk in listening and the uses that are made of it also lead us to describe the multiplicity of its types: the musicological, sociological, musical or amateur ears each “scrutinize” their object with different assumptions, goals and methods, thereby producing radically opposed (or not!) sensitive effects, at the same time as the identification to coherent communities (fans, musicians, researchers…) who validate, legitimize and entrench these aural identities.
Finally, these uses compose aesthesic ethics and techniques of the self, which may for example bring the amateur to try to build a constantly renewed hearing, or on the contrary to free himself from himself by the research of a permanence of the sensation, or to assign certain listening practices not to all, but to certain genres, groups, tracks he likes. And vice versa: there are also negative, impatient or lazy listening practices, which also find in discourses or representations the base of their lack of constant attention. It’s to all these detours taken by the course of listening that we would like, for this issue of Volume!, lend an ear.
Contributions should be sent before June 1, 2011, by email (in .doc or .rtf format) with a summary, key words and a short biography of the author, to the following addresses: editions at seteun.net & jedediah-sklower at hotmail.com _______________________________________________