Introduction: Liveness, Mediatization, and Glenn Gould's Recordings Live music does exist without its recorded other. In other words, the concept of liveness in music was unknown until there was something live--recordings--with which to compare it. Sarah Thornton describes the conventional ideology of liveness, which derived from a live/recorded binarism, as historically giving positive valuation to ... performed music. [The word 'live'] soaked up the aesthetic and ethical connotations of life-versus-death, human-versus-mechanical, creative-versus-imitative ... Liveness became the truth of music, the seeds of genuine culture. Records, by contrast, were false prophets of pseudo-culture (1995:42). Liveness, at least as historically constructed, signified the authenticity of human musical production and performance, always considered in contrast with the artifice of electronic reproductions. While this rather straightforward live/recorded binarism still informs some Western concepts of liveness today, many recording and performance situations are far more complex than such a binarism will allow. So-called recordings provide a simple example: on the one hand, those who listen to such recordings are immersed in the same atmosphere of sights, smells, tactile sensations, or even sounds (because, despite the best intentions of its producers, no recording can ever exactly reproduce the sounds it supposedly captures) the attending audiences experienced at the time of performance/recording. On the other hand, the liveness of these recordings is thought to consist in their apparently faithful representations of performances took place in the presence of these audiences. Television broadcasts, rock music performances, and various forms of electroacoustic music (among many other musical contexts) all similarly present mixtures of electronic mediation and some semblance of liveness. (1) In many instances, then, liveness persists even within what I will call mediatized music, or more specifically mediatized performance. I borrow the term mediatized from Philip Auslander, who in turn borrows it from Jean Baudrillard (1981) to indicate that a particular cultural object is a product of the mass media or of media (1999:5). Auslander, like Baudrillard, recognizes the mass media as the dominant form of cultural production, and thus as a vehicle of the general in a way performance is (or is no longer) (1999:5). Use of the term mediatized thus indicates only the deployment of electronic technology in the production of culture, but also the ways in which this very deployment brings cultural production into a much wider network of dominant social and economic practices. Mediatization recognizes the deeper implications of technology's ubiquity in a way a more neutral term like mediation cannot. My own use of the term mediatization is slightly but significantly reconfigured from of Auslander, in while I still rely on the term's ability to denote the profound effects of electronic media on the musical process, I also believe there are many forms of mediatized music in fact challenge the dominance of a single code (Auslander 1999:5) informing Baudrillard's thinking and to a lesser extent of Auslander himself. This is mainly because much mediatized music exists largely outside the economies of mass circulation so prominently explored in their usage, even though much of it is produced using popular contemporary forms of media technology. So much of our performance tradition has become mediatized we must, as music scholars and practitioners, re-examine old distinctions between live and not live. In this sense, then, I propose we understand liveness so much as a designation of non-mediatization, but rather as a designation of a trace of which could be live, in the face of the threat of further or complete mediatization. …
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Aug 11, 2015
Anita Howarth 
Open Access
