Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction

Recordings are now the primary way we hear classical music, especially the more abstract styles of “absolute” instrumental music. In this original, provocative book, Arved Ashby argues that recording technology has transformed our understanding of art music. Ashby sees recordings as socially progressive and as instruments of a musical vernacular but also finds that recording and absolute music actually involve similar notions of removing sound from context. He takes stock of technology's impact on classical music, addressing the questions at the heart of the issue: How have recording, digital copying, and remastering changed concepts of performance and ideas of music as text? Does literal repetition corrupt the meaning of a musical work or enable new meanings? Is music a product or a service, and how are notions of access and ownership being changed by converging media? This erudite yet concise study reveals how mechanical reproduction has transformed classical musical culture and the very act of listening, breaking down aesthetic and generational barriers and mixing classical music into the soundtrack of everyday life.

"Arved Ashby writes with a keen sense of the historical processes, ironies, and reversals that seem to characterize the ways that musicologists think about, and contemporary listeners experience, works and performance. This book is a major contribution to the burgeoning body of critical musicological literature on recordings; anybody interested in that field, or in the question of the 'artwork' in the contemporary world, needs to read this book—which fortunately, is a great pleasure to do."—Adam Krims, author of Music and Urban Geography

"The relationship between classical music and recording is strangely conflicted: on the one hand recorded music is the perfect realization of aesthetic autonomy, on the other hand it commodifies music and transforms its role within society. Ashby's book offers a penetrating analysis of these cultural conflicts, showing how technological developments from the phonogram to the mp3 have changed our basic sense of what music is as well as the ways in which we consume it. What emerges from this sustained study of the relationship between technology and values is a view of classical musical culture that is both richer and truer to life."—Nicholas Cook, author of A Guide to Musical Analysis

"Lively and persuasive. Ashby has the enviable, rare ability to lead the reader comfortably through highly complex material without oversimplifying. This is a must-read for composers, music theorists, performers, musicologists, critics, and anyone with an interest in classical music beyond the elementary level."—Jonathan Dunsby, author of Performing Music

Arved Ashby is Professor of Music at the Ohio State University. He is the editor of The Pleasure of Modernist Music, and has published articles on twelve-tone composition, film music, minimalism, and Frank Zappa. He was an American Musicological Society (AMS) 50 Dissertation Fellow, and won the AMS Alfred Einstein Award in 1996.