Liveness in Modern Music: Musicians, Technology, and the Perception of Performance by Paul Sanden (review)

Sanden theorizes ‘liveness’ for the present, showing how it has both changed and thrived in our heavily mediated, MP3-laden age. He gives various examples: recorded evidence of the musician’s physicality (Glenn Gould singing and stomping, and the noisy performance mechanisms of his piano and chair), some rockers’ relations with audio production and stylistic authenticity (the White Stripes), electronic composers’ renegotiations with sound technologies (musique concrète composer Jacques Poullin), constructions of virtual liveness (John Oswald’s plunderphonics), and latter-day performance art’s involvement in MIDI and sampling (Canadian composer Omar Daniel’s The Flaying of Marsyas).

As a loose-fitting and expansive account of these far-flung projects, Sanden’s book is eye-and ear-opening. The author takes a persistent and probing approach, and shows himself to be widely read. But he has written neither a survey of this huge topic nor an introduction to it. Sanden has avoided hackneyed or even ‘representative’ examples, which may be the reason he pretty much ignores IRCAM, the MIT composers, speech analysis, and specific software developments. Apart from Gould and Oswald, I hadn’t heard of most of the musicians he discusses. A final, six-page section on hiphopça topic he admits could be the most apropos of all—seems tacked on as an afterthought.

It should be said straight away that the ‘live’ has become so big, recursive, and culturally entangled a subject that it is thankless for just about any author after Jean Baudrillard to pursue it. As a concept and simply as a word, ‘liveness’ introduces all manner of convolutions and blind spots. The term itself is a misnomer dressed as a neologism, or maybe the other way around. If ‘live’ is to be a viable term in media and the arts, or so the adage goes, then ‘dead’—or at least ‘non-live’—also has to have currency. At the broader level of epistemology, a living sensibility cannot know anything beyond the horizon of ‘liveness’—it is in short incapable of knowing anything beyond itself.

In making these points, I don’t believe I’m being over-literal with these words, or confusing ‘live’ with ‘alive’. As in-your-face cultural terms that are both blunt and broad, ‘live’ and ‘liveness’ don’t allow for finer shades of meaning. They are polemics, provocative failures as words; but at the same time such failures point to urgent, vital issues as regards music, media, and everyday experience. For someone fully versed in their connotations as regards semantics, performativity, musicality, and media, their very clumsiness can make them useful.

In essaying this challenge, Sanden follows Philip Auslander. Auslander took a post-McLuhanian approach in his game-changing book Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (Routledge, 1999; 2nd edn. 2008), showing just how hard it is to extricate ourselves enough from media to assess them. While ‘it is particularly urgent to address the situation of live performance in our mediatized culture’, Auslander writes, we live in ‘a culture in which [live performance] seems to have less and less presence and importance’ (p. 4). More to the point, he avers that ‘The progressive diminution of previous distinctions between the live and the mediatized, in which live events are becoming more and more like mediatized ones, raises for me the question of whether there really are clear-cut ontological distinctions between live forms and mediatized ones’ (p. 7). He concludes that live performance has become involved enough with mediatized performance, has been co-opted economically and ontologically, that live-ness can hardly do what some have allowed it, which is function ‘as a site of cultural and ideological resistance’ (p. 7).

Sanden has the good or bad fortune of following in Auslander’s footsteps, and frequently references that author. As his title indicates, he is much more willing to allow liveness a role and...