Performing Music Production:: Creating Music Product

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate a particular form of cultural production; the creation<br/>of musical product, the pop song. Previous accounts have been dominated by casting the<br/>process as one of transmission in which the music of the artists is captured in a recording and<br/>the resulting object is released into the market. I argue that this portrayal of cultural production<br/>as a pipeline directs attention towards activities at either end: the recruitment of talented artists<br/>and the distribution and promotional efforts of the record companies. What happens in the<br/>‘pipe’, how the product is created, is concealed, explained away by reference to stylised notions<br/>of technological and economic forces and the operation of unknowable creative talent. To open<br/>up this ‘black box’, an approach not previously applied to popular music production is used,<br/>actor-network theory. This thesis traces the formation and performance of moments in the<br/>production of musical product: songwriting, recording, mixing, mastering and live performance.<br/>Tracing the production of music is carried out through analysis of interviews conducted with the<br/>protagonists, the producers, engineers, studio managers and artists, and is supported by<br/>observation of studio sessions.<br/>The principal argument that I develop in the thesis is that musical product is not a discrete<br/>‘thing’ to be diffused, but a networked entity indissociable from the roles and identities,<br/>qualities and practices of others that constitute and perform the production, reproduction and<br/>consumption of popular music. Accordingly in this thesis musical product is revealed as an<br/>achievement, not an a priori fact, and I examine how its constructed qualities are stabilised and<br/>shape the network of production and consumption. Following the construction of these qualities<br/>reveals how the various interests of the protagonists are translated through their enrolment in<br/>practices and systems of calculation into relational arrangements that perform the power of the<br/>producer. The contribution of this research lies not just in making visible what has previously<br/>been obscured, but also in the way that it illustrates the value in analysing organised activity as a<br/>performative association of relationally constructed roles, objects, and qualities, of, in this case,<br/>the musical product, colloquially known as ‘a pop song’.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral Thesis

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

King's College London

Year dc:date.issued

2011

Author dc:creator

• Gander, Jonathan

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

oai:kclpure.kcl.ac.uk:studenttheses/9d443c79-db0d-4c34-9f7d-de4f4bc5fb14

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:kclpure.kcl.ac.uk:studenttheses/9d443c79-db0d-4c34-9f7d-de4f4bc5fb14