Includes bibliographical references (pages 231-277) and index.
Contents:
Genre, frame, persona – Part I: Preliminaries – Performance analysis and popular music: a manifesto – Music as performance: the disciplinary dilemma revisited – Sound and vision: the audio/visual economy of musical performance – Lucille meets GuitarBot: agency, instrumentality, and technology in musical performance – Part II: The interactionist turn – Musical personae – Everybody’s in showbiz: performing star identity in popular music – Jazz improvisation as a social arrangement – Beatlemania: the audience at Shea Stadium, 1965 – Good old rock and roll: performing the 1950s in the 1970s – Barbie in a meat dress: performance and mediatization in the twenty-first century.
Summary:
"The conventional way of understanding what musicians do as performers is to treat them as producers of sound; some even argue that it is unnecessary to see musicians in performance as long as one can hear them. But musical performance, counters Philip Auslander, is also a social interaction between musicians and their audiences, appealing as much to the eye as to the ear. In Concert: Performing Musical Persona he addresses not only the visual means by which musicians engage their audiences through costume and physical gesture, but also spectacular aspects of performance such as light shows. Although musicians do not usually enact fictional characters on stage, they nevertheless present themselves to audiences in ways specific to the performance situation. Auslander's term to denote the musician's presence before the audience is musical persona. While presence of a musical persona may be most obvious within rock and pop music, the book's analysis extends to classical music, jazz, blues, country, electronic music, laptop performance, and music made with experimental digital interfaces. The eclectic group of performers discussed include the Beatles, Miles Davis, Keith Urban, Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Frank Zappa, B. B. King, Jefferson Airplane, Virgil Fox, Keith Jarrett, Glenn Gould, and Laurie Anderson"--Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.