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Music has undergone a tremendous mediatization the last hundred years. Electrification and (later) digitization of music media has exposed music to an increased dissemination, both spatially - it can be heard almost everywhere - and temporally - one can listen to music almost anytime. This increased spatial and temporal dissemination can be likened to a democratization of music. Anyone can listen to anything at anytime and anywhere. The claim is an exaggeration, of course (music is subject to both political and commercial constraints), but from a historical perspective the purely quantitative aspect of music's mediatization has been enormous. Even more important is the qualitative aspect of music's mediatization. The mediatization of music has affected our relation to music, not only how we sing, play and ”create” it, but also how we listen, appreciate and understand it. As will be shown, there is support to the claim that music – at least in the West – is not the same today as it was a hundred years ago. The general perception of what music is changed in fundamental ways during the 20th century, from being essentially something one did together with others, a communal activity, to becoming an object, a personalized commodity intended for individual consumption in private detachment through new media systems such as records, players, and home speakers or shielding earphones., The past as repeatable presence: How phonography changed music from ephemeral event to ever accessible object (a comparison between Sweden and Italy during the interwar years)

Taking inspiration from Foucault’s ”author function”, the concept is further specified by the subcategories the work function, the genetic function, and the labor funtion. Only towards the end of the 19th century do the functions come together as one, and it shown that it takes until the interwar years before this unified Urheber function is more widely embraced in the music world., The Past as Repeatable Present

Until the 1920s, music listening had hardly, if at all, been available as a means for individual mood regulation, and listening neither to recorded music nor to any music at all had been available as a solitary practice. Music was, until the third decade of the twentieth century— and being strange as it may seem today when almost everybody listens to music with headphones both privately and in public spaces—commonly regarded as a communal rather than as an individual and solitary activity. The chapter considers several interrelated main questions: How was the gramophone used and what social roles did it play? Who listened? What did they listen to? When and where did they listen and why?, The Past as Repeatable Present

The presence of music in ideological and political propaganda is an age-old phenomenon. However, in recent times the increasing mediatization and digitalization of cultural and political discourse have caused an unprecedented spread of carefully calculated uses of music in everything from electoral campaigns to the image-building of influencers. This musicalization of communication and discourse is evidenced by the great variety of audiovisual representations available online where music is called upon to reinforce claims to political power, facilitate the spread of conspiracy theories, or sanction different forms of gendered, racial and ethnic stereotyping. Such musicalized ontologies invite us to adopt a particular opinion, attitude or world-view, and they do so by using music as a central corroborating mechanism. In this respect they may be described as instances of what we propose to call discriminatory worldmaking. Employing many of the world-building processes identified by philosopher Nelson Goodman, discriminatory worldmaking is characterized by a strategic, interest-relative and ideologically driven attempt to establish cultural, political and epistemological authority without recourse to reasoned debate or nonpartisan justification. This paper discusses two instructive examples of how music is used as a corroborating mechanism in audiovisually based discriminatory worldmaking: the 2016 Victory Speech by Donald Trump and a 2015 “information” film posted on YouTube by the so-called Flat Earth Society.

This inquiry deals with the changing role of the technology and the use of phonographs and gramophones during the first half of the 20th century. Rather than looking at the UK or USA, which much previous research has done, the focus is on peripheral Sweden. More specifically the question is how phonography turned from being a scientific curiosity into becoming an everyday media technology, and how it thereby influenced culture and everyday musical communication. The findings show two distinct approaches to recorded music, which intermingle in today’s unprecedented musicalisation of culture and everyday life around the globe – approaches respectively described as utilitarian and solipsistic.

It has become a commonplace to describe the entrance of the phonograph into Western music history as taking place in the parlor, or (depending on the decade of focus) the more modern living room. ”Americans”, as we are told in an influential book, ”increasingly welcomed the phonograph into their parlors”. People were ”at home with the phonograph” already at the turn of the 20th century, since there was ”a phonograph in every home”. With classical musicians such as Caruso, Toscanini, and Heifetz on record, one can even speak of a “domestication of the concert hall”. This paper looks at role of the phonograph/gramophone from a different perspective. Rather than the economically prosperous east coast of the USA, the focus is on Sweden, a country with one of the lowest standards of living in Europe during the first half of the 20th century. Instead of commercial advertising (as in many of the above cases), the sources are daily papers and weekly journals (addressing the middle and lower classes), together with catalogues of early housing- and home exhibitions, and a national survey from 1962. By inquiring locations, spaces and rooms where gramophones were actually used, a different picture appears that emphasizes popular music and dancing. The results are discussed in the context of the ”mediatization of music”, as well as the corresponding ”musicalization of the media”.

Everyday Devices: Mediatisation, Disciplining and Localisation of Music, in Sweden 1900-1970

Listening to music alone, what may be termed solitary listening, is probably the most widespread form of listening in our digital age. However, for almost half a century of sound reproduction technology, various forms of social listening were the norm. In this article we discuss what we see as the most important preconditions for solitary listening as it developed during the course of the twentieth century. More specifically, we argue that solitary listening became the dominant form of listening toward the middle of the century as a result of three different, but interrelated, developments in modern society: (1) the emergence of the modern living room; (2) the arrival of new and ever more sophisticated technologies for sound reproduction; and (3) a continuously growing individualism in society at large, fostering an aesthetic individualism in which solitary listening found its natural place. With the Internet, digital technology and modern noise-cancelling headphones the journey from social to solitary listening has reached its ultimate destination, giving rise to what can perhaps best be described as a contemporary solipsistic sound culture. At the same time, through the sharing of music and musical playlists on social media the social aspects of musical listening seem to have returned in a new form., Everyday Devices. Mediatisation, Disciplining and Localisation of Music, in Sweden 1900-1970

This chapter identifies and examines a phenomenon we propose to call musicalization. It discusses how processes of musicalization relate to and interact with processes of mediatization. Musicalization is defined as an ever-increasing presence of music in culture and everyday life. As such it comprises both a discursive and a dramaturgical dimension. In the first part of the chapter these dimensions or aspects of musicalization are considered in detail. The second part discusses how musicalization relates to mediatization. We argue that three possible variants of this relation can be discerned: musicalization may be regarded as (a) quantitatively conditioned by mediatization; (b) a qualitative part of mediatization; and (c) a relatively autonomous phenomenon in relation to mediatization. As such musicalization involves both analogue and digital modes of communication., EVERYDAY DEVICES. MEDIATISATION, DISCIPLINING AND LOCALISATION OF MUSIC IN SWEDEN 1900-1970 (Swedish Research Council)

In this paper we discuss a concept that we propose to call musicalization. Musicalization can be defined as a long-term historical process characterized by an ever-increasing presence of music in everyday life, a process that is intimately connected with changing technological conditions and with transformations in how music is mediated and communicated as well as with broader socio-cultural processes at work in a given historical period. In this it is linked to what media scholars Krotz and Hepp calls “mediatization”, i.e. a “long-term metaprocess of changing forms of communicative action”. More specifically, musicalization is theorized as one in which the dispersal and experience, and indeed the very definition, of music to an increasing degree become dependent on the media and their logic. We also consider what we see as some of the more profound and wide-ranging effects of musicalization in the twentieth century. The most salient of those effects concern new ways in which people listened to and behaved towards music and, perhaps even more importantly, radical changes in how music was comprehended and conceptualized. However, those changes should not merely be understood as transformations in the reception of established and newly emerging musical genres. Rather, they should in a more radical way be seen as enabling new musical ontologies; that is, as effecting alterations in the very nature or “essence” of music and consequently as restructuring the ways human relations and communicative action is organized around music. Thus, a central upshot of our discussion is that since the musicalization of everyday life is closely aligned with and dependent on an increasing mediatization of culture and society, the study of mediatization processes provides a novel and promising way to theorize and explain profound alterations in musical ontology over time as well as the restructuring of cultural practices and social relations affected by such alterations.