Penser la musique à l’ère du web I / Thinking Music in the Web Age I

Ouvrage collectif
(dans le cadre du groupe de travail « Musique et intermédialité dans le cyberespace »)

Editeurs scientifiques : Alessandro Arbo et Alessandro Bertinetto

Editeur : Università degli Studi di Milano

Collection Annuario in divenire a cura del Seminario Permanente di Filosofia della Musica

Volume XXIV/2

ISSN (online) : 2465-0137

Parution : 25 juin 2021

Le site de l'ouvrage peut être consulté chez Università degli Studi di Milano.

 

     At the turn of the twenty-first century, recorded music, already largely converted to digital formats, began to migrate – like all entities in the social world – to the Web. What appeared to be a simple change in the broadcasting system of an artistic product was destined to overturn the structures and dynamics of the music industry – whose pivot was vinyl recording. Over the last two decades we have faced a revolution in the practice and in the experience of music. Its effects are strong and far-reaching: anthropological, economic, legal, ethical, and social issues intersect each other in what appears to be an almost complete reorganization of the musical world at a global level.

     This double number of the journal De Musica – of which this issue (24/2) constitutes the first part – is an outcome of the international conference Thinking music in the web age that addressed the rapid and profound transfor-mations of the contemporary musical experience1. These transformations are approached via three perspectives: ontology and categorization (the ways in which digital technology and the Internet have transformed traditional musi-cal entities; the new entities that have been made possible and the way new musical possibilities are to be categorized); production (how digital technology and the Internet have transformed production of works and performances); distribution and reception (how digital technology and the Internet have transformed our way of experiencing music or, more precisely, of perceiving, appreciating, and judging it). These research topics can be, and often are, de facto intertwined; this issue of De Musica focuses on each of them separately in order to explore them in a more appropriate way through the discussion of their specific aspects.

     The articles collected in the present issue concern the first of these three research topics. They examine the semantic shifts that the digital and the In-ternet have seemingly caused on important categories informing the aesthetic discourse about music. Some of these categories often have a relevant history in the debates related to the interpretation of works of the past or on the impact of new media, such as the concepts of “authenticity” (Giombini) or “de-con-textualization” (Arbo; Orcalli). Other categories have been highlighted more recently, in large part because of the increasingly invasive role of digital and technological innovations, such as “remediation” (Orcalli), “sampling” (Leh-mann), “dematerialization” (Arbo), and “altermodernity” (Fronzi). 

Musées de la Ville de Strasbourg
Opéra National du Rhin
Conservatoire de Strasbourg
CDMC