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Epilogue jJ In 1964, virtuoso pianist Glenn Gould, at the height of his career, ceased performing. Gould disliked the narrow expectations of audiences and promoters during concert tours, something that would likewise motivate the Beatles to eschew performance two years later. But Gould had another, deeper motivation: he was convinced that the future of musical creativity lay not in the role of the performer but in the role of the listener. As he provocatively explained in a 1966 essay in High Fidelity Magazine, “This listener is no longer passively analytical; he is an associate whose tastes, preferences, and inclinations even now alter peripherally the experiences to which he gives his attention, and upon whose fuller participation the future of the art of music waits.” Citing the interpretive power of “dial twiddling,” Gould argued that technology would shift “decision-making capacities” from musical establishment specialists to ordinary people, whose “properly self-indulgent participation” would transform the work from an “artistic to environmental experience.” Musicality itself would be revolutionized: “In the best of all possible worlds, art would be unnecessary. Its offer of restorative , placative therapy would go begging a patient. The professional specialization involved in its making would be presumption. The generalities of its applicability would be an affront. The audience would be the artist and their life would be art.”1 Such pronouncements were not uncommon in avant-garde circles in the mid-1960s (one might compare it to Roland Barthes’s 1967 essay “Death of the Author”), but unlike most declarations about the future of art, Gould’s predictions have largely come true. We live in a time when audiencing has become the dominant form of musicking for a majority of people in the Western world. Reggae and rap, with their recombination and layering of beats, refrains, and sounds from obscure tracks in the recorded history of music are essentially listeners’ musics, dependent on a fan/listener’s sensibil- Epilogue / 187 ity. The rise of easily exchangeable digital music files, made portable by ubiquitous iPods, mp3 players, and cell phones, has woven music even more deeply into previously “non-musical” experiences, including everything from jogging to doing the laundry. While listeners rarely twiddle dials anymore, Garage Band grooves, mash-ups, and other homemade remixes are evidence that ordinary people are, in fact, engaging in a great deal of decision making inside the music they hear. Fandom, as both a personal and social expression of audience enthusiasm , was considered a suspicious activity as late as the 1980s, but today identifying passionately with a band is now an acceptable activity of selfde finition, cultivated by Internet sites like MySpace and YouTube and even by a struggling record industry desperate to sell deluxe box sets and special concert promotions. Indeed, everyday life, which was formerly considered so separate from the institutionalized world of music as to necessitate a scholarly subfield, now seems to be the very ground on which music has significance. Recent work in sociology and ethnomusicology has shown clearly that listening, consuming, and audiencing have come to serve a number of meaningful functions for people in modern society, including developing self-identity, managing emotion, and establishing social relationships . As Tia DeNora says, we “aesthetize” ourselves through listening—we bring ourselves to life.2 Contemporary American culture does not get much respect in institutions of music education, where the idea of engaging in music only through the act of listening is at best a sign of dilettantism and at worst a symbol of our society’s decreasing level of musical literacy. Despite their dedication to fostering an understanding about music through listening and analysis, departments of music at American colleges and universities are primarily vocational, focusing on the production of professional musicians and diminishing —through requirements and teaching techniques—knowledge of music created by listening. Most departments require at least two semesters of ensemble experience and/or keyboard proficiency for undergraduate majors, many have auditions for admission, and programs uniformly describe their mission in terms of musicianship, including photographs of their concert facilities and people playing instruments, either with masterteachers in a studio or on stage before an audience.3 Even the field of ethnomusicology, which was founded as an alternative to traditional musicology, and which one would think would be open to different sorts of musical experience, idealizes performance. In 1998, on the Internet discussion group run by the Society for Ethnomusicology, several scholars argued that the prevalence of music listening had made Americans less “musical” than...

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