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Taking its theoretical orientation from Sherry Ortner's distinction between ‘power’ and ‘projects’, this article considers the relationship between local artistic projects and the cultures in which they participate. I focus on Pleasure Garden, a collaborative project that spans site-specific installations, concerts and an album. Exploring a wide range of issues at stake in the creative process, including collaboration, gender, aesthetics, colonialism, the work concept, and commodification, I trace how Pleasure Garden’s creators variously reproduced and reworked dominant conventions, while at the same time pursuing their own distinctive commitments. Through this, I argue that Pleasure Garden’s creators negotiated a space that was inside, yet sometimes out of alignment with what I call the ‘cultures of creativity’ associated with Western art music, the music industries, late capitalism, and neoliberalism. This highlights both the powerful forces affecting musicians today and the possibilities for making things otherwise.
This article takes a site-specific, interactive sound installation called Pleasure Garden as a space for thinking about contemporary forms of musical experience. I develop a relational account of the ‘co-reception’ of Pleasure Garden, not centred on listening subjects, but distributed across audience members, artists, researchers and the more-than-human assemblage of the installation itself. I also discuss the effects of several overlapping cultures of ‘audiencing’ associated with Western art music, sound art and other forms of cultural experience – variously individualistic, distracted and participatory – characteristic of late capitalism. Tracing how Pleasure Garden both responded to and was interrupted by these wider forces, I take this case as suggestive of a deep ambivalence: that musical experience is at once powerfully conditioned and generatively uncertain. Throughout the article, problems of method, interpretation and representation intertwine, raising questions about how to study forms of musical experience that evade conventional ethnographic enquiry.
Nature is a widespread theme in much new music for the shakuhachi. This article explores the significance of such music within the contemporary shakuhachi scene, as the instrument travels internationally and so becomes rooted in landscapes outside Japan, taking on the voices of new creatures and natural phenomena. It tells the stories of five compositions and one arrangement by non-Japanese composers, first to credit composers' varied and personal responses to this common concern and, second, to discern broad, culturally syncretic traditions of nature mimesis and other, more abstract, ideas about the naturalness of sounds and creative processes (which I call musical naturalism). Setting these personal stories and longer histories side by side reveals that composition creates composers (as much as the other way around) and so hints at much broader terrain: the refashioning of human nature at the confluence between cosmopolitan cultural circulations and contemporary encounters with the more-than-human world.
This article examines the folding together of music and landscape in some recent albums featuring the shakuhachi, a Japanese bamboo flute that today animates an active and international music scene. Through analysis of the texts, images, and sounds on these albums, I explore the re-imagining of the shakuhachi’s musical geography as the instrument reaches new players and places in Europe, Australia, and North America. Using recordings that incorporate environmental sounds alongside the shakuhachi, I examine ideas about the perceived authenticity of particular sounds, performance spaces, and recording aesthetics. These recordings unsettle our thinking about the relationship between music and landscape in several ways. First they document performers’ connections with particular sites, yet complicate any notion that the shakuhachi is related to a single place or nation, signalling a distinctly contemporary sense of place. Second, the centrality of mediation in these artistic projects makes technology crucial to the production of the natural and renders the naturalness of the shakuhachi audible in new ways. Third, the use of environmental sounds provokes questions about agency and the boundaries between human and non-human sound-making. By treating these albums as assemblages of material, social, technological, and natural elements, I reveal the lively and complex character of otherwise everyday musical objects.
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