Aura, iteration, and action
digital technology and the jouissance of live music
T. Harper
Abstract
This chapter explores whether live music produces a fundamentally different experience than listening to recorded music. To do this, I shall undertake Miles Davis’s prescribed structure for Jazz composition; this involves the collective establishment of a territory, followed by a period of exploration. To establish the territory, I shall examine the benefits attributed to the authenticity of an event by philosophers who prize live performance—namely Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno, and Hannah Arendt. In his essay “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” Benjamin highlights the importance of presence in time and space for the “aura” ...
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