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Two privileged sites for witnessing the diminishing relevance of the ringtone in the 2000s are those of present-day classical music and the global art market—spheres that include many interrelated, semi-autonomous, and complex subdivisions, such as those between the modern orchestra and “new music” (itself fractured along aesthetic lines) or those among museums, “new media” art exhibitions, and for-profit galleries. An important distinction within these spaces is that between cultural producers whose artistic media are either extremely isolated from new technologies like cell phones (typically the case with the modern orchestra) or uncomfortably close to them (such as “new media” art scenes). On both sides of that divide, we might first attend to the reality of artistic domains’ need for producing continual relevance to prospective consumers in increasingly crowded culture (arts and leisure) markets; the ringtone fad, when still current, offered relatively immediate access to media attention—and, in some instances, corporate capital—and upon its decline suffered a loss in appeal.1 But this only tells one part of the story: as the ringtone transformed into a sound file, it converged with other audio playback technologies and therefore became far less distinctive as a sonic and aesthetic entity, and thus less desirable for artistic appropriation. While mobile phones, as portable computers and media devices, continue to serve as objects of fascination for artists and musicians of various stripes, the ringtone per se—with a few exceptions—no longer seems to be on the agenda of contemporary, “high art” cultural production. The primary goal of this chapter is to track the emergence of new genres of contemporary music and art enabled by the monophonic and polyphonic ringtone—the medley composition and Nokia Tune piece in contemporary art music, the ringtone sound installation, and ringtone sound/music performance in new media art—and to chart their decline as the sound file became the dominant ringtone format. But a secondary 4 The Ringtone and Its Aesthetic Subgenres in Contemporary Classical Music and Media Performance/ Installation Art 102 Chapter 4 theme, not always explicitly articulated below, concerns the contradiction between art’s parasitic absorption of a fad, demonstrating a bid for attention and relevance, and the ringtone’s role as an object of social critique, distancing art from that fad. As the fad became less novel, the ringtone itself became less interesting sonically. As aestheticized treatments of it became more widely known, the tension between interest and disinterest structuring the contradiction of ringtone art slackened. The techniques of aesthetic engagement were correspondingly (further) banalized, and ringtone artwork, already a peripheral phenomenon, was ultimately reduced to the gag that motivated it from the outset. The two most important and compelling representatives of ringtone art discussed below—Salvatore Sciarrino ’s Archaeologia del telefono (2005) and Golan Levin’s Dialtones: A Telesymphony (2001–02)—best embody the contradiction of fad and critique. Both surfaced before the ringtone had become passé and fundamentally indistinguishable from other ambient music. Ringtones in Contemporary Classical Music In the broad domain of Western classical music, the ringtone functioned largely as a novelty phenomenon. Ringtones, ringtone melodies, and even mobile phones were used to draw attention to themselves as marked, even invasive presences within broader musical and performative flows. Employed in works and arrangements by composers, performing musicians , and orchestral conductors to make Western concert music more current and socially relevant or to ironically distance it from contemporary social phenomena, the ringtone and related paraphernalia surfaced primarily in two forms. In the first, ringtones participated in a number of medley-style compositions or performance works, typically in which familiar melodies were performed on mobile phones (as ringtones) in tandem with larger musical ensembles. For example, in October 2001 the percussionist and conductor Bernd Kremling of the Drumming Hands Ensemble in Würzburg, Germany wrote and led the premiere performance of a composition for 30 mobile phones and 30 percussion instruments titled Von der Hand zum Handy (From the Hand to the Cell Phone). The piece juxtaposes African-influenced percussion music with the quotations of works by classical composers (including the C major prelude from Book I of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Bach’s cantata chorale movement known in English as “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” the Alla Turca from Mozart’s A major sonata K. 331, and Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2), each first played by a ringtone and then continued by a marimba, and tunes like [3.145.60.149] Project MUSE (2024-04-18...

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