Music and Technoculture

Music and Technoculture RENÉ T. A. LYSLOFF & LESLIE C. GAY, Jr. (Eds) Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, 2003 395 pp. (pbk)

Among ethnomusicologists there is a growing interest in the intricate relationships between technology and musical cultures. This is fostered by significant developments in technological devices to register and distribute musical performances in tandem with information and communications technologies at the heart of today's enhanced globalization that have accelerated and intensified the worldwide distribution of music. But the focus does not remain confined to current developments or to popular music only. Scholars in this field are also increasingly studying earlier musical cultures (including elitist ones) from a similar perspective, adding refreshing new insights to the existing body of knowledge. This volume as a whole is a major contribution to the field. It contains 14 chapters by individual authors, an introduction by the editors (who each also wrote a chapter), all members of the Society of Ethnomusicology, and an afterword by Andrew Ross who first defined the concept of "technoculture" in a series of essays in the early 1990s.

This eclectic collection of case studies, mostly carried out in the United States and further in Colombia, Singapore, and Iceland (if one counts an analysis of Bjork's recordings in comparison with Madonna's as such), is held together by a common thread that runs through the volume: the dialectical interplay between technology and music, and the cultural practices that are ingrained in it. The overarching aim is to develop an ethnomusicology of technoculture, led by the crucial idea that technology should not be understood as a mechanical imposition on people's lives but as an entity that implies cultural practices permeated by social meanings in itself. This is contrary to the conventional distinction, if not conflictual opposition, between technology and culture as if these were completely separate domains-a tendency that can still be found especially in studies of "traditional" musics in the field of ethnomusicology. Importantly, music technology is seen here as a human practice itself and not as something that "automatically" develops in and out of itself. Technology is conceived as being predicated on deliberate human choices for specific organizational-technological structures, within the historical context of given opportunities and constraints as these have been developed earlier by...