Symposium Keynote: Simon Waters

Further Entanglements: Observing the early stages of the analogue – digital shift in music’s infrastructure and organisation.

In a 2021 publication which grew from a conference presentation in Finland I suggested that we might learn something about current musical practices and how to organise them by looking at musical instruments from the past: at what these embody in terms of histories of action, in terms of entanglements with material culture, and in terms of the patterns of social organisation of humans which they suggest or assume.

For Sonorities I re-test that theory – that past conduct and materials might disclose something persuasive and pragmatic for us now – by looking at more recent histories, most particularly those involving the more explicitly (even self-consciously) technologised practices of the late twentieth century. Might an excursion through the changing studio practices of the 1960s to 2000s provide clues to how we might better approach the wonderfully rich and diverse practices of musicking a quarter of the way into a bumpy 21st century? And might the ways in which we organise musicking have implications for other forms of social organisation which might be useful – even crucial – right now?