Cultural data analysis of production cultures in classical music

• Applicants: Dr. Karin Martensen; Professor Dr. Stefan Weinzierl
• Subject Area: Musicology
• Term: since 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 419911712

As the project "The Sound Studio as Discursive Space", which is to be continued by the present application, was able to show, the classical sound recording is not a sealed-off terrain that revolves only around itself and is committed only to the work or the artist. Rather, it participates in aesthetic and social changes. It also does so through the people involved in sound recording, who bring and/or acquire music cultural capital, participate in social discourse, and incorporate all of this into their philosophy of sound recording. Essential for a better theoretical understanding of the discursive structure and aesthetic concepts in classical music production, however, is not only the analysis of the communication between the people involved in a sound recording, but also a better understanding of the concrete modes of action in the course of the production process itself.The project "Cultural Data Analysis of Production Cultures in Classical Music" therefore aims to lay the foundations for media production research in the field of classical music. On the one hand, this is to be achieved through job shadowing in recording studios in North America and in Great Britain: A comparison of the data obtained there with the results of the aforementioned preliminary study aims at a deeper understanding of production cultures, their processes and the habitus of musicians and engineers in international comparison. It will be shown that the meaning attributed to the profession of 'engineer' is also socially constructed. This view, together with historical anthropology as well as praxeographic anthropology of technology, assumes "that people, discourses or things do not have a static essence of their own, but only become what they are in social practice" (Heßler/Liggieri). This must also be made visible in musicology. On the other hand, the concrete actions of the participating sound engineers in the course of the production process have remained invisible so far, since a description of the production steps can hardly be represented linguistically. The project outlined here therefore also aims to develop visualizations in the sense of an abstraction of the entire montage process. It is to be expected that the work, i.e. the sound recording, will prove to be significantly more multilayered than previously assumed: the recording is woven into production cultures that must be made visible using innovative methods in order to be taken note of at all. The overarching goal of the project is thus to link the history of technology, knowledge, and media, with the intention of revealing strategies of acoustic knowledge production and thus contributing to a contemporary form of musical interpretation research.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Steffen Lepa