Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements

Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience

THE CONCEPT OF THE AVANT-GARDE Prologue Terminological ups-and-downs The two avant-gardes A novel concept, a novel fact THE CONCEPT OF A MOVEMENT Schools and movements The dialectic of movements Activism Antagonism ROMANTICISM AND THE AVANT-GARDE Popularity and unpopularity Romanticism as a precedent Down-with-the-past Anticipations AGONISM AND FUTURISM Nihilism Agonism Futurism Decadence FASHION, TASTE, AND THE PUBLIC Fashion, avant-garde, and stereotype Intelligentsia and elite The intellectual elite The avant-garde and politics THE STATE OF ALIENATION Art and society Psychological and social alienation Econoimic and cultural alienation Stylistic and aesthetic alienation TECHNOLOGY AND THE AVANT-GARDE Experimentalism Scientificism Humorism Nominalistic proof AVANT-GARDE CRITICISM Prerequisites The problem of obscurity Judgment and prejudgment Criticism, right and left AESTHETICS AND POETICS Dehumanization Cerebralism and voluntarism Metaphysics of the metaphor The mystique of purity HISTORY AND THEORY Historical parallels Modernity and modernism The overcoming of the avant-garde Epilogue Bibliography Index

The Theory of the Avant-Garde

Jacques Attali. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.Jacques Attali's Noise: The Political Economy of Music opens with an ambitious program, the critique of two and a half millennia of Western knowledge. While this initial statement is perhaps more symbolic than substantive, Noise does undertake a significant historical revision of the last three hundred years of Western music. In doing so, it contributes some of the most innovative and important theoretical advances to date in twentieth-century musical scholarship.The central premise of the book is that music is prophetic. Attali finds the political economy of the western world in the twentieth century to be the natural outcome of its political rationale and political structures in the nineteenth century. In and of itself this is not a groundbreaking assertion, but the true innovation of Attali's work comes in finding nineteenthcentury European political theory contained, in nascent form, within the structural codes of eighteenth-century Western European music. In Attali's view, music's "styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code" (p. 11). Thus, music announces a society that is to come, heralding the political, economic, and cultural order of succeeding generations.Students of cultural Marxism will immediately notice the novelty, blasphemous or revolutionary depending on one's point-of-view, of Attali's claim. Noise is, at its heart, a reversal of the orthodox reading of Marx's base/superstructure model. By situating music as annunciatory of political economy, Attali is rejecting the economic determinism and reflection theory inherent in much critical cultural work. This theoretical claim is the essential innovation of the book, and, if taken seriously, it demands a substantial revisiting of long-held assumptions in musical and cultural studies.Attali identifies four epochs in the history of Western music: ritual, representation, repetition, and composition. He finds that the ritual function of music in channeling society's noise and violence eventually gave way to the age of representation as music's financial model transitioned from patronage to a free market system. Yet music retained its necessity for social cohesion and its prophetic qualities as it announced the com- modification of the immaterial, the logic of harmony and exchange, and the symbolic abstraction of The Scientific Revolution and The Enlightenment.The epoch of representation ultimately descended into that of repetition. In the case of music this was ushered in by the advent of sound recording, and this is a double irony for Attali. Not only was sound recording initially envisioned as a way to preserve the representative function of music, recording itself was only made possible by the technological advances of the political economy that music prophesied into being. In the current, repetitive epoch, Attali theorizes that as the economy of music expands it will ultimately collapse upon itself, for as supply approaches functional infinity the industry will necessarily become more concerned with the production of demand than with the value of its product. An ominous prophecy indeed if one is to take the collapse of the music industry in recent years as a harbinger of things to come in the wider economy.Yet there is hope. In the final epoch of composition, Attali theorizes that requisite preconditions such as technological diffusion, universal access, tolerance of differences, and individual autonomy may lead to an economic structure in which value is re-ascribed into the experience of music rather than in its ownership. …

Noise: The Political Economy of Music

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Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture

This dissertation studies Canadian campus radio broadcasting and its relationship to the circulation of local music. I examine three campus stations in two cities and one town of varying size, population, and location. These stations include CHMA in Sackville, New Brunswick, CKUW in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and CiTR in Vancouver, British Columbia. Following extensive analysis of policy documents and station-produced texts, as well as interviews with staff members, volunteers, and local musicians, I argue that a campus radio station does not simply respond to federal broadcasting regulation by ensuring programming differs from what is available on commercial and public radio. Rather, there is self-awareness throughout the sector that is decidedly attuned to local music. In each locality, numerous cultural institutions, including campus stations, work together to support local and independent music. The histories of these three stations illustrate the various paths taken in order to acquire FM radio licenses, extending from university campuses to also serve surrounding communities. The ways in which a station represents its community falls somewhere between how community representation is defined by a station mandate, and the process by which communities are imagined by campus radio practitioners. Individuals are connected to a segment of an overall music scene through a shared taste culture for which content is produced. A tension emerges between the taste and expertise of a practitioner or programmer and the ideal goal of fully representing his or her community. Despite instances of exclusion and hierarchies of taste, however, the promotion of music that is propelled by cultural status circumvents the purely economic model ingrained in commercial radio, producing alternative values and methods for circulating music.

Canadian Campus Radio and the Shaping of Sounds and Scenes

The aim of this article  is to assess whether and how the CBC’s music radio programming reflects the corporation’s mandate of showcasing a diversity of music and culture. I argue that a program log...

(Residual) Public Music Radio in the Streaming Era: Listening for Diversity and Frequency on CBC Music

‘Songs You Need to Hear’: Public radio partnerships and the mobility of national music

Reflecting on the historical relationships between manifesto-writing and politics, art, performance, and music, this article investigates the role of the liner note manifesto included with Refused's The Shape of Punk to Come (1998), considering it to be a rhetorical text supporting songs, lyrics, and images that openly identify as counter-cultural and contribute to an aesthetic transformation of the punk genre. Because the album is situated in dominant methods of production and distribution, this article addresses power relationships between the mainstream music industry and the cultural work that attempts to challenge it.

“New Noise” versus the Old Sound: Manifestos and The Shape of Punk to Come

Sirius XMU's Blog Radio show is a rich site for exploring the influence of podcasting on satellite radio programming. Bloggers from Web sites such as BrooklynVegan host daily 2-hour shows that also co-exist as playlists or mixtapes posted online and shared by social media profiles. Blog Radio highlights the presence of podcasting aesthetics, including time-shifting and themed playlists, within satellite radio programming, and also reflects SiriusXM's recent efforts to occupy online spaces. Further, Blog Radio demonstrates the ways in which radio in the digital age is shaped by podcasting, especially as radio becomes increasingly visual and mobile.

Brian Fauteux

Papers

Canadian Campus Radio and the Shaping of Sounds and Scenes

(Residual) Public Music Radio in the Streaming Era: Listening for Diversity and Frequency on CBC Music

‘Songs You Need to Hear’: Public radio partnerships and the mobility of national music

“New Noise” versus the Old Sound: Manifestos and The Shape of Punk to Come

Blogging Satellite Radio: Podcasting Aesthetics and Sirius XMU's Blog Radio