Performativity Through(out) Media. Methodological Reflections On Song Analysis

Since recording technologies broke into the musical domain at the end of the 19th century, the concept of performance has undergone a substantial redefinition. Despite the early myth of sound recording being a mere dilation or documentation of a supposed original sound event, technologies soon foreshadowed the possibility to set up artefacts provided with specific meaning apparatus. In mediatized societies, the values of ‘ephemeral’, ‘unrepeatable’, ‘volatile’—which are constitutive to the idea of liveness—remain substantially confined to a nowadays marginal sphere of musical experience, such as concerts. Yet, in the last decades, technological mediation has rapidly expanded beyond the borders of stage performance and has undermined the very definition of ‘live’ (Auslander 2008). At the same time, values of liveness have gradually shifted into recordings as categories of the imagery, to be shaped and conveyed through the means of technological facilities; throughout the 20th century and with a dramatic climax after the advent of the digital era, media started to function as performative agents negotiating each phase of existence of a musical artefact, from its construction to its reception. Popular music is certainly more permeable than other musical styles in acknowledging and thoroughly adopting intermedial strategies of signification, communication and distribution. Yet, this is only partially due to advantages that could derive from the economic exploitation of records, videoclips and so forth; my argument is that the imagery implied by the technological processing of musical performance is particularly functional to song, that is, the prominent form of expression of popular music. As Tomlinson (2003) neatly demonstrates, song urges to be studied in the framework of a neocomparativist perspective, wherein textual and performative implications might be read as deep structures, rhetoric and cognitive paradigms that migrate throughout the fluid continuum of media. A short, condensed and syncretic form of expression (Fabbri 2001), capable of efficiently and consistently articulating emotional contents and performative utterances, song qualifies as a particularly adaptable trans-historical and cross-cultural object to be subsumed in wider ‘frames’, each of which implies various degrees of (pre)scripted performativity: songs can play crucial roles within larger artefacts (e.g. operas, operettas, vaudevilles, and later, films and albums), social venues (e.g. salons, cafes, clubs etc.) and events (e.g. rites, cults, feasts, fairs, sport and political celebrations, etc.), and even in structuring the spatial-temporal dimension of private experiences (e.g. a stroll with headphones, a road-trip with a car radio). On the other hand, (oral) even long before the advent of recording techniques, song could circulate through time and space in different sorts of written re-mediations, such as song collections, Medieval treatises, broadsides, brochures, drawings, librettos and scores, which configured a parallel existence as ‘transcriptions’ and ‘translations’ outside the realm of performance. Nonetheless, from the 20th century on, the proliferation of technological media (each disseminating different levels of textuality) has reached its peak, and today it is difficult if not impossible to isolate the multitude of grammars that are equally involved in and around the circulation of a song, eventually demanding interdisciplinary competences. Hence: which grammar(s) for song analysis? This question is far from being solved. While some recent paths of analysis, such as A. F. Moore’s works on the “sound-box” (Dockwray and Moore 2010) and on the “deictic projection” (Moore 2010) have already accomplished significant results in articulating the spatial dimension of recorded songs and exploring the interactions between various instances within the song’s communicative world, the application of the notion of intermediality (Montani 2010) might succeed in grasping the processes of song’s signification along the chain of media; quite similarly, the category of performativity (Auslander 2008, Fischer-Lichte 2008) may well serve to detect the trajectories of song’s complex utterances in the ideal (mediatized) path that bridges the performer to the audience; finally, useful paradigms of interpretation were proposed in the field of Italian socio-semiotics, wherein ‘texts’ are addressed as singular emersions in the continuum of cultural discourses (Spaziante 2007). This paper does not aim to propose a brand new theory for this intricate set of issues, premature as it would be to attempt any conclusive assertion at such an early stage. I would rather contribute to the general purpose of this panel by bringing to the foreground some case studies, which in my intention should help to empirically delineate the nature of these theoretical problems from a musicological and audiovisual perspective: the analysis of how ideas of performativity are translated throughout the web of media in the process of production and circulation of a song, can contribute to point out common traits of different grammars and eventually locate semantic constants. In doing so, I will privilege the case of ‘psychedelic music’, whose attempts to short-circuit audiovisual languages is programmatic to the point that makes it a borderline case. Through analysing a selection of songs loosely related to this idea, I will try to trace the trajectory leading them from (virtually unknown) live performances to the construction of multimedia ‘conglomerates’ (or perhaps better, ‘clouds’) capable of evoke ideas of performativity in the listeners/spectators.