Music as Technology, or the Way of the Viola

One of the big topics we’re interested in around here concerns the impact of technological change on how music is created, produced, distributed, discovered, and experienced.  In this post, I want to explore some ideas about that last issue — the way music is consumed and used. I also want to follow up on an earlier promise to develop some thoughts about what recent trends in #’s of various arts and culture organizations might mean. What I want to suggest is that we not only think about how technology is impacting music but also about the rising salience of music itself as a form of technology, a systematic and powerful technique of altering, heightening, and reconfiguring our bodies, moods, and social interactions.

Let me give some empirical motivation for the timeliness and significance of this idea. 

Take a look at these pictures.  The first, as in my previous posts, uses census data to show trends in some Canadian business categories, 1999-2008, highlighting their growth rates relative to total businesses.    Dark green bars indicate growth rates higher than the rate for total businesses in the period (20%); light green indicates positive growth but at a slower rate than that of total businesses; red indicates contraction.  If you’re interested in more detailed definitions of these categories, check out the Canadian Census manual.

The second set uses our scenes drawn from online yellow pages (in 2007) to show the top U.S. ZIP codes with the most total yoga instruction studios and the most yoga instruction studios per capita.  Note that there are about 2500 ZIP codes with at least one yoga studio listed in the yellow pages, out of about 42000 total US ZIP codes.  So having just one yoga studio already marks out a place as pretty distinctive relative to the 39000 ZIP codes with 0 yoga studios.

The Canadian trends are truly remarkable.  Musical groups and artists, dance companies, independent artists, writers and performers, and performing arts companies and presenters have all either nearly doubled or more than doubled their numbers in the past decade, far outpacing the rest of the economy.  Businesses devoted to sports and fitness have also significantly increased.    There seems to be a general rise in activities oriented around live performances, personal cultivation and expression, and active development of body and self.  As the marginal cost of acquiring products like recordings and books declines, the value of live, personal experience may rise.

The declines seem to come in two groups.  First, there are businesses suffering from competition with new technologies, such as bookstores, movie theaters, arcades and record stores.   Then there are businesses that might be linked with fading, more blue-collar sensibilities, like horse racing, bars, amusement parks, and bowling alleys, which provide both community and escape from draining and dulling work.  These are sharply contracting as well, fitting with Richard’s recent discussions about the decline of blue collar man.

The yoga studio rankings become a bit more intriguing when we note (not shown here) that places with more yoga studios tend to have higher concentrations of younger people (age 25-34) and college graduates – correlations that remain significant when controlling for income, population, and race.  Interestingly, while the places with more total yoga studios tend to have more college graduates, places with more yoga studios per capita (which are typically less populated) are more strongly correlated with rising numbers of college graduates.    Though we don’t have over-time #’s for yoga studios, these connections with younger and increasingly more educated populations suggests that they too are on the rise, together with demand and potential rewards for their services.

What might these suggestive results indicate?  Some speculations:

First, I’d highlight the concurrent rise in performance arts with fitness and yoga.  Brian’s work has focused on the ways in which musicians and fashion designers collaborate to add value to both music and clothing, something that becomes especially salient when any recording can be acquired for virtually no cost.  The common theme is a heightened emphasis on performance and self-expression, to which the rise in fitness and exercise adds another dimension: our bodies are also increasingly expressions of self, and more people are spending more time fashioning their bodies accordingly.  We are living in the wake of what the great sociological theorist Talcott Parsons called “the expressive revolution.”

We might further hypothesize that places with many health and fitness centers, musicians, and fashion designers might feature those kinds of scenes in which it makes sense to wear your music and hear your clothes – they may possess a “performative dividend: the added value that derives from an openness to turning one’s inner sensibilities into external forms of dress and appearance.  This, in turn, might make spill-across between fashion and music more likely than in places less tuned into body as a mode of performance.  Identifying places with high or untapped performative dividends might be a key to understanding what makes for success in the new musical economy.  Where do we find fitness and yoga with little music and fashion, fashion and music without fitness, etc.?

Second, I’d imagine that as the focus turns more to the experiences that live music and other performances generate the particular kind of experience might well become more important to consumers.   This is a key part of our scenes work, and we try to lay out a range of possible experiences and meanings that might be sought and symbolically affirmed: unique improvisation, connection with charismatic and glamorous stars, ecstatic release, transgression, a place in a tradition, rootedness in local or ethnic culture, and more.  Rather than the size of the cultural industry (# of bands, artists, etc.) as such, the presence, absence, intensity, and extensiveness of opportunities for these and other distinctive types of experiences and symbolic meanings may shape who lives where in the future – an idea relatively consonant with the notion that different cities’ personalities cater to different personality types.

Third – and now finally getting to the title of this post – we might expect a rising demand not only for distinctive experiences available in live performance but also for training and expertise in techniques devoted to cultivating those experiences in particular ways.   This demand for the sort of bodily engagement that the performance arts offer – and I include yoga and the martial arts under this broad heading – was powerfully on display in Matt Crawford’s widely discussed article in the New York Times magazine from a few weeks ago.  Crawford discussed the feeling of being cut off from one’s body and being physically out of tune with one’s environment that plagues many knowledge-workers stuck in front of computers all day.  He proposes hands-on work and training like shop class and motorcycle repair as correctives.   Setting aside that solution for the moment, the article clearly tapped into some kind of widespread uneasiness, as it was tops on the most-emailed list and the recipient of effusive praise in the comments sections.  There are clear resonances to the novels and short stories of David Foster Wallace (essayed brilliantly by Jon Baskin) and to the writings of philosophers like Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, among others, as well as Max Weber’s famous discussions of the psychological consequences brought on by the modern stress on self-discipline, control, and bureaucracy – an uneasiness captured beautifully in Dustin Hoffman’s look of horror in the Graduate at the prospect of a career in “Plastics!”.

Making work more creative and engaging is only a part of the answer.  It will take more than that, if it is possible at all, to move past the fissures and powerfully structuring dichotomies that have divided our culture for centuries, like bourgeois vs. bohemian, enlightenment vs. romanticism, discipline vs. spontaneity, head vs. heart, whole-hearted engagement vs. critical distance, and so on.  Musical technology, along with yoga and other bodily disciplines, seem to me to offer another part of the puzzle, just the sort of response that might be highly attractive to those rising numbers of highly educated individuals increasingly caught up in the practical, lived dilemmas of intellectual work.  For these are disciplines that deepen subjective, personal experience, synchronizing self and environment.

The transformative possibilities of music constitute the major theme of Tia Denora’s Music in Everyday Life.  There, she talks about how music helps newborns in intensive care units to organize their bodies, as well as about how expert aerobics instructors use music to sync participants together and create different moods for different types of exercise.  Music, she explains, is a powerful way that individuals can resonate with the moods that are vibrating around them.  Kwende has written elegantly about how DJ’S use music to activate a dance floor, tuning people into one another and their collective energies.  One also thinks about the role of music in psyching up atheletes, in facilitating and maintaining romance, and in providing identity to cities that allows the character of their streets and strips to shine out to residents and visitors.

Another significant exploration of musical technology as a response to life in post-industrial society has been undertaken by University of Chicago professor Donald Levine.  Levine, in addition to being a renowned social theorist, is also a 4^th degree black belt in Aikido, and has incorporated Aikido into his courses.  He has written eloquently about the need for bodily training in today’s sometimes overly-cognitive universities.  Most interestingly for the present discussion, he has recently partnered Masumi Per Rostad of the Pacifica String Quartet to develop the links between Aikido and what they call  “Viola-Do” – the way of the viola.

Citing not only the pressures of post-industrial society but also the opportunities of globalization, Levine suggests that both the Western performance arts (like viola) and the Eastern arts (like Aikido and Yoga) offer much needed “somatic wisdom” – wisdom of the body – from which both can learn.  Each trains practitioners to reconfigure their bodies in such a way that promotes harmony, balance, and sensitivity to one’s environment, both personal and physical.  Here is an excerpt from the program for their performance last year at the University of Illinois School of Music:

The implications of the heightened demand for these kinds of activities devoted to mood-attunement and bodily configuration may be vast.  The rise in the performance arts, together with the strong correlations between yoga studios, young people, and college graduates, suggest a premium – in terms of social prestige, emotional impact, cultural resonance, and economic value — on that kind of somatic education that Levine is developing.  As electronic and mechanical technology changes the way music is produced and consumed, those who can develop musical technologies of the self may be in the best position to succeed in the new cultural economies emerging around us.