Music and Persona: An Introduction
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21153/psj2019vol5no1art856Keywords:
music, persona, musical persona, character, identity, popular music, celebrityAbstract
Persona is a very mutable concept. Perhaps its mutability is no more prominently displayed that in its intersection and integration into music and musical culture. In this opening essay for our special issue on music and persona, we chart the meaning and the value of persona analyses to the study of music. Essentially, our objective here is two-fold. First, we want to provide a map of how persona has been employed in research in music. What this will generate is a critical investigation of these traditions, but also what we hope will be a valuable reference for future music and persona scholarship. Second, and of equal importance, is how these uses of musical persona can be further informed and assisted by the more recent scholarship in persona studies most openly articulated by this journal over the last five years, but also the widening array of related books, articles and book chapters that are percolating in connected fields. We attempt to pull together our review of the current field of music and persona with the urgent need to identify with greater thought and clarity the industrial structures that shape our relationship to music performance and its relation to audiences and its constitution of celebrated individuals and recognizable and market-sensitive personas. Our essay concludes with the introduction of our series of articles in this issue and how they intersect with these various traditions that have explored persona’s imbrication into music.
Downloads
References
Aufderheide, P 1986, ‘Music videos: The look of the sound’, Journal of Communication, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 57–78.
Auslander, P 2008, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized World. 2nd edition. Routledge, New York.
— 2006, ‘Musical personae,’ TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies, vol. 50, no. 1, pp. 100–19.
— 1986, ‘Logocentrism and difference in performance theory’, Performance Theory Art and Criticism vol. 1, p. 60.
Barthes, R 1973, Mythologies, Paladin, St. Albans.
— 1977, ‘The grain of the voice’ in R Barthes (translated by Stephen Heath) Image, music, text, Hill and Wang, New York. pp. 179–189.
Baym, NK 2018, Playing to the crowd: Musicians, audiences, and the intimate work of connection, NYU Press.
Bennett, L 2014, ‘“If we stick together we can do anything’: Lady Gaga fandom, philanthropy and activism through social media’, Celebrity Studies vol. 5, no. 1–2, pp. 138–152.
Bolter, JD & Grusin, R 1999, Remediation: Understanding new media, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Chapman, Dale 2018, The Jazz Bubble: Neoclassical Jazz in Neoliberal Culture. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.
Cinque, T & Redmond, S 2017, ‘Intersecting David Bowie’, Continuum vol. 31, no. 4, pp. 495–498. doi: 10.1080/10304312.2017.1334382
— 2016, ‘Digital shimmer: Popular music and the intimate nexus between fan and star’, in P. David Marshall and Sean Redmond (eds) A Companion to Celebrity, Wiley, Malden, Ma, pp. 440–55.
Cochrane, TOM 2010, ‘Using the persona to express complex emotions in music’, Music Analysis vol. 29, no. 1–3, pp. 264–275. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2249.2011.00321.x.
Cone, ET 1974, ’Persona, protagonist and characters’, in ET Cone (ed), The composer’s voice (No. 3), University of California Press, Berkeley, pp. 20–40,
Davies, S 1997, ‘Contra the hypothetical persona in music’, In M Hjort and S Laver (eds), Emotion and the Arts, Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 95–109.
Dean, J 2009, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics, Duke University Press, Durham.
Duffett, M 2014, ‘Celebrity: The return of the repressed in fan studies?’ In L Duits, et al. (eds) The Ashgate Research Companion to Fan Cultures, Ashgate, Farnham, pp. 163–80.
Dyer, R 1998, Stars, BFI Publishing, London.
Fairchild, C 2008, Pop idols and pirates: mechanisms of consumption and the global circulation of popular music, Ashgate, Aldershot.
— 2014, ‘Popular music.’ In J Maguire and J Matthews, The Cultural Intermediaries Reader, Sage, London, 125–33.
Flisfeder, M 2015, ‘The entrepreneurial subject and the objectivization of the self in social media’ South Atlantic Quarterly vol. 114, no. 3, pp. 553–70.
Frith, S 1996, Performing rites: On the value of popular music. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Ma.
Frith, S, Goodwin, A & Grossberg, L (eds) 1993, Sound and vision: the music video reader, Routledge, New York.
Graver, D 2003 [1997], ‘The Actor’s Bodies.’ In P Auslander (ed), Critical Concepts: Performance, pp. 157–74. Routledge, London.
Godlovitch, S 1998, Musical performance: a philosophical study. Routledge, London and New York.
Goffman, E 1959, The presentation of self in everyday life, Doubleday Anchor Books, Garden City.
— E 1974, Frame analysis : an essay on the organization of experience, Harper Colophon Books, New York.
Gray II, RJ (ed.) 2014, The performance identities of Lady Gaga: critical essays, McFarland, Jefferson.
Guilbert, G-C 2002, Madonna as postmodern myth: How one star’s self-construction rewrites sex, gender, Hollywood and the American dream, McFarland, Jefferson.
Lacasse, S 2005, ‘Persona, emotions and technology: the phonographic staging of the popular music voice’, CHARM Symposium, Vol. 2, pp. 1–12.
Laing, D 1991, ‘A voice without a face: Popular music and the phonograph in the 1890s’, Popular Music, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 1–9.
Gelbart, M 2003, ‘Persona and voice in the Kinks’ songs of the late 1960s’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, vol. 128, no. 2, pp. 200–241.
Marshall, PD, Moore, C & Barbour, K 2019, Persona Studies: An Introduction, Wiley Blackwell, Hoboken, NJ.
— 2016, ‘When the private becomes public: commodity activism, endorsement and making meaning in a privatized world’, in PD Marshall, G D’Cruz, S McDonald & K Lee (eds), Contemporary Publics: Shifting Boundaries in New Media, Technology and Culture, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, pp. 229–45.
— 2014, Celebrity and power: Fame in contemporary culture, 2nd Edition, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
— 2017, ‘Productive consumption: agency, appropriation and value in the creative consuming of David Bowie’, Continuum vol. 31, no. 4, pp. 564–573. doi: 10.1080/10304312.2017.1334379
Marwick, A 2016, ‘Instafame: Luxury selfies in the attention economy’, Public Culture, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 137–60.
Maus, FE 2004, ‘The disciplined subject of musical analysis’, In A Dell’Antonio (ed.), Beyond structural listening? Postmodern modes of hearing, University of California Press, Berkley, pp. 13–43.
Meier, LM 2017, Popular music as promotion: Music and branding in the digital age, John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken.
Meisel, P 2010, The Myth of Popular Culture: From Dante to Dylan. Wiley-Blackwell, Malden.
Moore, AF 2017, ‘The Persona-Environment relation in recorded song’, In M Spicer (ed.), Rock Music, Routledge, London, pp. 275–294.
Morin, E 1972, ‘Les stars’, Paris, Éditions du Seuil.
Norman, DA 1988, The psychology of everyday things. Vol. 5: Basic Books, New York.
Small, C 1998, Musicking: The meanings of performing and listening. Wesleyan University Press, Middletown.
Robinson, J 1994, ‘The expression and arousal of emotion in music’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism vol. 52, no. 1, pp. 13–22.
Straw, W 2010, ‘Cultural production and the generative matrix: A response to Georgina Born.’ Cultural Sociology, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 209–16.
Taylor, T 2016, Music and Capitalism: A History to the Present. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Tomlinson, G 2015, A million years of music: the emergence of human modernity, MIT Press, Cambridge.
White, J 2015, ‘“Just type my name in Google and see what comes up”: Creating an online persona in the urban music industry’ https://ssrn.com/abstract=2569347 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2569347
Wiles, D 1991, The Masks of Menander: Sign and Meaning in Greek and Roman Performance. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
How to Cite
