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Ananay Aguilar
Recording practices of classical music
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PhD Full-time |
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Nicholas Cook |
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Abstract
My doctoral research explores the values and discourses of classical music in relation to its recording practices. The current climate of the struggling music industry offers a rich arena for discussing musicians’ and recordists’ survival strategies in relation to performative, technical, and marketing perspectives. In my ethnographic fieldwork I have sought spaces where the values of classical music are negotiated on an everyday basis, including observations of and interviews with musicians, engineers and staff of the London Symphony Orchestra's own label, LSO Live. I have also analysed recordings by listening with an understanding of sound technologies, framing this and the field material within anthropological and sociological debates. In addition, I address musicology’s involved relationship with classical music and in particular its failure to attend to the technological developments affecting this music’s production. By doing this, I discuss the ways in which this type of study bears upon the broader field of musical studies. This discussion has direct implications for musicology’s current research discourses and practices, but more significantly, for the social and political reconfiguration of the global music market.