Late breaking information

MUSICOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM

19/12/2019

Historicizing hype: 1995-present

Colloquium Musicology
Christopher Haworth, University of Birmingham

Thursday 23 January 15:30-17:00
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01

Popular music is often understood to have a special purchase on hype as a promotional and communicative strategy. As a Sunday Times article from 1968 put it, hype is ‘an American word for the gentle art of getting a tune into the pop charts without actually selling any records’ (quoted in Powers, 2011). The increasingly centrality of the internet over the last twenty years has if anything intensified the relationship between popular music and hype. Recommender services like ‘hype machine’ hard-code the ‘positive feedback loop’ (Ibid) of hype into their systems, as the music people discuss on music blogs and Twitter is crawled through and served back to consumers, fuelling further discourse on social media which in turn fuels algorithms. On the side of production, recent ‘net native’ microgenres like vaporwave, seapunk and witch house use the affordances of the internet to exaggerate hype-like qualities of simulacra and speculation. By invoking vapourware, the term used for software that is promoted without going into production, vaporwave drew implicit links between the anti-innovative excesses of predatory capitalism and the pre-emptive hype characteristic of the music press. Vaporwave was a term before it was a genre, and the genre was ‘dead’ as soon as it was formed.

The challenges of analysing hype are multiple. How does one historicise phenomena whose constituent parts are excess, whether all or in part? What approaches are appropriate to the analysis of phenomena whose dimensions—material, textual, discursive—may be in contradiction? How do internet technologies amplify and multiply the capacities for hype-generation in relation to music? This talk will analyse a group of musicians, critics, theorists, and philosophers whose collective influence on contemporary internet culture is great, even if the work they produced is little understood: the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), active from 1995-03. Cultivating, spreading, and theorising hype were central features of CCRU activity. The group spread misinformation about their formation and existence, as though deliberately obscuring their tracks for later historians. They participated in the propagation and ‘spreading of hype’ related to contemporary technoculture — most notably with Y2K, the computer bug that threatened to bring down the world economy. Hype was also central to the theoretical and practical work of the CCRU. They theorised hype, first, through the cybernetic concept of positive feedback (‘cyberpositivity’), which was the material driver of what would later (retroactively) be termed ‘accelerationism’; and second, through the concept of ‘hyperstition’—fictions which make themselves real—which informed the group’s writing in theory-fiction. Central to much of this play with authenticity, at least in the later years, was the internet. Using www.ccru.net as an informal base for they operations following their departure from Warwick University, they experimented with its capacities for inauthenticity, ahistoricism, and mythos in ways that directly anticipate the strategies of simulacral-genres like vaporwave.

Yet despite the clear centrality of hype to the CCRU’s work at the time, its pertinence is most striking in the present day, as a new generation of musicians and web-users rediscover the group and in the process amplify and expand the fictive universe they created. Was the hype self-fulfilling, or do media experiences of the present create new conditions for the CCRU's reception?

Christopher Haworth is Lecturer in Music at University of Birmingham. He is currently the PI on the AHRC funded Leadership Fellowship (2019-21) Music and the Internet: Towards a Digital Sociology of Music. In 2018 his article 'From Microsound to Vaporwave: Internet-mediated musics, online methods and genre' was awarded the Westrup Prize for the best article published annually in the journal, Music and Letters. 

05/12/2019

Making Sundanese music local again: Galengan Sora Awi

Colloquium Musicology
Henry Spiller, UC Davis

Thursday 12 December 2019 15:30-17:00
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01

Since the fall in 1998 of Indonesia’s authoritarian regime headed by President Soeharto, and the beginning of the era of reformasi, residents of Bandung—the capital city of the province of West Java and the cultural center of Sundanese traditions—have experimented with ways to affirm their regional Sundanese identity. Musicians in particular have looked to musical instruments made of bamboo to bring a sense of place and Sundanese-ness to their musical expressions.

This presentation introduces one such bamboo musical group—Galengan Sora Awi (hereafter GSA)—and examines how the group expresses a bottom-up approach to reconnecting to a Sundanese identity that is rooted firmly in a unique place—Bandung’s Dago neighborhood on the Cikapundung river. They achieve this connection by performing an eclectic repertory of Sundanese styles and genres, deploying idiosyncratic, homemade bamboo musical instruments, for audiences and events that are associated closely with Bandung’s physical environment and nascent grassroots environmental movement. I mobilize Bernard Stiegler’s notions of primary, secondary, and tertiary retention (Technics and Time, 1998) to examine how GSA’s bamboo musical instruments help them achieve their goals.

GSA’s musical activities fit well with the post-modern “do-it-yourself” (DIY) principles that drive alternative music scenes all over the world and are also associated with environmental and social reform movements. For GSA, however, it is the revival of a very old technology— bamboo—that enables them to perform a variety of musical genres once limited to specialists. For GSA, the path to renewing and reviving their connections to human groups and to the landscapes that nurtured them, even in contemporary Bandung, is paved with bamboo.

Henry Spiller (BA, UC Santa Cruz; MM, Holy Names University; MA and PhD, UC Berkeley) is an ethnomusicologist whose research focuses on Sundanese music and dance from West Java, Indonesia, on gender and sexuality. His award-winning books include Gamelan: The Traditional Sounds of Indonesia (ABC-CLIO, 2004), Erotic Triangles: Sundanese Dance and Masculinity in West Java (Chicago, 2010), and Javaphilia: American Love Affairs with Javanese Music and Dance (Hawaii, 2015). At UC Davis, he teaches world music classes and graduate seminars, and directs the Department of Music's gamelan ensemble. Currently he is a fellow at NIAS (Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences) in Amsterdam.