Bytes and Backbeats: Repurposing Music in the Digital Age by Steve Savage (review)

There is something refreshing about the optimism and directness of this book. In contrast to all those who frame the ‘manipulations’ of contemporary digital recording technology as part of a broader narrative of decline in the ‘state of the art’—Benjamin, Barthes, Attali, and Adorno are all identified, in one respect or another, as sowing the seeds for this diagnosis—Steve Savage argues that the most recent forms of technological fixing, borrowing, and alteration or ‘repurposing’ simply represent the latest steps in a long history of technological mediation, from the wooden flute to the modern piano, the phonograph to professional-quality home recording. For Savage, it is a change in degree, not kind (p. 22).

The notion of repurposing is a nebulous though important idea designed to capture the primacy of recontextualization in contemporary recording activity. Made possible by digital audio workstations (DAWs), the environments in which the vast majority of music production takes place, repurposing is used here to move away from the pejorative associations of ‘appropriation’ towards an understanding of technological manipulations—from sampling to Auto-Tune—as creative, aesthetic acts. This conceptualization results from an ontological account (not specified as such by Savage) that views repurposing as integral to the primacy of mediation. As noted by Georgina Born, the recording figures as ‘an utterly distinctive musical object—a second primary object, if you will, and one that, in its difference, augments . . .music’s live performance’ (‘Afterword’, in Nicholas Cook et al. (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music (Cambridge, 2009), 286–304 at 294). The ‘hyper-mobile’ digital recording, meanwhile, moves us into another stratosphere entirely (p. 302). As an idea, then, repurposing is important because it provides scholars with a conceptual tool that points to activity in a way that the more abstract ‘mediation’ often fails to do; indeed, repurposing is a welcome addition to debates about hybridity, intertextuality, mediation, and materiality in digital contexts.

Alongside the term repurposing, Savage refers to the role performed by ‘recordists’ and highlights the nature of the ‘construction’ work they undertake. Both are crucial for an understanding of his project. The term recordist highlights the increasingly blurred distinctions between the acts of composing, performing, recording, and mixing, and the roles of composer, performer, engineer, and producer. Meanwhile, construction is employed as a means of moving scholarly emphasis away from traditional, linear-based notions of composition: it is the perfect metaphor for the non-linear process of creation that takes place within the DAW environment, a more sophisticated development from pre-digital studio practices of multi-track, non-linear music production. Through the course of the book, however, construction quickly comes to represent something more akin to an aesthetic position, with Savage’s methodology following Nicholas Cook’s preference for a constructionist (rather than determinist) approach to the relationship between music and technology.

The target of the book’s argument is encapsulated by the first part of its title. While the notion of repurposing certainly helps to underscore the complexity involved in the interaction of practices that Savage is concerned to highlight, it is ‘byte’ and ‘backbeat’ that point, crucially, to those aspects of musical production that operate in the background, intentionally—indeed deceptively—hidden from view. As a result of a successful career as an engineer and producer of popular music, and with a previously professed love for using the studio to construct that which ‘could have happened’ (see his chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music, 32–5), Savage is able to draw upon numerous case studies and personal experiences to help detail such ‘behind the scenes’ activities. It is precisely such hidden, unseen work that, for him, is lamentably absent from ‘traditional musical paradigms’ and the evaluative processes we musicologists employ when studying music. (He states in one particularly disparaging remark that ‘if musicology has done anything it has at least shown [that] a state of “pure” music...