Music, New Media and the Archive

This introductory chapter presents the background to the collection of chapters that follow, outlining their origins at a symposium hosted by the Grainger Museum at the University of Melbourne in late 2023. In addition to offering an overview of the book’s individual contributions, highlighting their interlinking themes, this chapter also provides a broad framing of the term ‘new media’ as it is used throughout the book, and a brief introduction to the way music and sound—like other ephemeral art forms—can be represented through archives. It also provides context for a number of chapters that engage specifically with the archival legacy of Australian-American composer Percy Grainger.

Sound hunters were amateur sound hobbyists who, from the 1950s, started to form clubs, national and international organisations, to produce radio programmes, and to organise national and international contests. Such hobbyists have been active since the beginning of sound recording technologies, but it was with the advent of tape recorders that the movement grew to a large scale.

This chapter will present the work of French and British sound hunters who experimented with the tape recorder. As early as the 1950s, using this newly available technology, they started to make sonic experiments, sometimes with home-built machines: recording of very faint sounds, musique concrète, field recordings and soundscapes, and sound collages comparable to what Fluxus artists would do decades later. It is therefore an alternative history of musique concrète and field recording that this chapter will present, through people who are usually absent from history books.

By the late 1920s, technological advancements made it possible to broadcast from recordings over the radio with acceptable levels of acoustic quality. In Weimar Republic Germany (1919–1933), this development spawned anxieties over the nature of radio, which had previously been conceived as a fundamentally live medium. Previous scholarship has examined how German radio discourse and practice engaged with the rise of recordings on radio with a focus on the technology involved and on debates over liveness and mediation. In this chapter, I turn instead to the important role that was played by the archive: concerns that radio stations might begin to build archives of recorded sound and music at the expense of live performance, but also the new artistic possibilities opened by such archives on which composers, sound designers, and other creators could draw. I show that liveness and mediation were major concerns in speculative debates, but that in practice, discourses of newness and topicality shaped the development and use of archives of recorded sound and music.

Percy Grainger’s (1882–1961) experimentation with music technologies of the early twentieth century arguably demonstrates a form of ‘queer modernism’, one that often gets excluded from the twentieth-century modernist canon. In this chapter, I consider Grainger’s Free Music—the complex and irregular rendering of the universe through music—and his instrument inventions (Free Music Machines) through the lens of queer theory. Although music historians do not normally include Grainger within the canon of queer composers or musicians, this chapter nonetheless suggests we can orient Grainger’s archive as a resource containing personal documentation of his sexual deviancy in the same breath as documentation of his Free Music ideologies. I posit that the resulting invented instruments can be considered queer cyborgs. Vis-à-vis Free Music’s lofty and imprecise sonic aims and the crafted instruments’ abject and atypical material construction from household objects and dumpster dives, I argue that these instruments—and their failure—suggest Grainger’s queer relationship to modernist aesthetics. In applying frameworks of queerness to Grainger, this chapter challenges and reorients existing discourses around early twentieth-century music technology, inspiring queer visitation to unconventional archives.

Since the mid-1960s, several New York-based artists have used intermedia and intertextuality to explore the archive’s role and nature beside related concepts like the index and the trace. This chapter examines how intermedia and the archive pertain to two related case studies from late-twentieth-century New York. The first, is John Zorn’s 1985 arrangement of Kurt Weill’s song ‘Der kleine Leutnant des lieben Gottes’. In this arrangement, Zorn evokes mental images of the Weimar Republic, transforming Weill’s song into a montage of disjunct musical styles. Not only is the historical moment of Weill’s song represented by Zorn’s arrangement, but the audiovisual medium of cinema is compressed into sound alone—typical of the ‘contracted cinema’ made in New York during the 1970s. My second case study is a cinematic adaptation of Zorn’s arrangement, made by experimental filmmaker Henry Hills and dance choreographer Sally Silvers, titled Little Lieutenant. This adaptation uses archival footage from the Weimar era to realise the audiovisual potential latent in Zorn’s music. As I show, Little Lieutenant also entails several intermedial transferences, playing with the boundaries between cinema, music, and dance.

We live in an age of simulacra, where versions of ourselves are created, multiplied, transformed, and shared, often without our knowledge or consent. Ideas of simulacra appear in the Grainger Museum’s collection with striking frequency. These range from multiple compositional iterations, to duplicates of letters and scores, to replications of the physical form in photographs and mannequins. This chapter describes the processes and outcomes of a Creative and Research Residency at the Grainger Museum, where we speculated about the role and impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the Creative Arts and society. Archival material became living artefacts which were transformed and re-used in multiple ways with new media technologies to create a multi-faceted exhibition addressing contemporary concerns about technology in a form of ‘archival performativity’ (Sabiescu 2020). Using participatory arts practice, we created interactive experiences that allowed visitors to self-discover their own views on the ethics of data scraping, AI’s role in amplifying bias against underrepresented musical cultures, and the creation of socio-cultural echo chambers through an embodied experience of music-making, listening, and moving in physical space. The museum became a site for restaging the archive, allowing dynamic encounters between history and present, and of preservation and creation.