A textual documentary by Pablo D. Herrera
Notes
An instance of narrativity, the space of sonorous narrative and an experience of Cuban popular music.
1.Today, just as in the experience of cinema or television, the act of listening requires, even in the most basic of cases or contexts, that which we listen to and our attention to coexist in a level clear of the remaining elements in the sonorous environment. The fulfilment of its narrative cycle is not complete without a minimum of staging. This sonorous experience can only exist within a instance of narrativity.
2.It is possible to name as space of the instance of sonorous narrativity all and every one of those spaces where an incidental or accidental sonorous experience occurs. Be it:
A primary sonorous utterance (sound in a primary plane of listening);
a secondary sonorous utterance (sound as related to or as a consequence of physical or visual activity);
an indirect or tertiary sonorous utterance (a specific sonorous narrative immersed in a sonic environment x and weakly differentiated from the rest of the elements in context).
3.The specific instance of narrativity that is in itself the experience of recorded Cuban popular music: a song or the entire body of music as a sonic experience that had its antecedents in the construction of the modern aesthetic model and in the creation of the phonograph, the radio, and in itself differentiated from the experience of cinema or television.
© Ivonne Chapman 2009. P2
Use of technology in relation to Cuba's specific mobil instance of narrativity.
- A home mono or stereophonic system;
- the immersive sound system of a walkman, ipod, etc , as a private or personal artifact;
- the advent of psycho-sonic systems like surround sound and 5.1.
1.What is the aesthetic function and value of the use of a “player” device in a public bus in Havana? Define “player” device.
2.Is the experience of muzak in Cuban public transportation linked or not to the aesthetic function and the value of the same experience in its traditional “space” (sound systems in work places, elevators, shopping malls, etc)?
3.Cuban popular music took over the space of muzak. Redefine muzak in urban Cuba.
- The experience of Cuban popular music as a representation of a new modernity and of a new access attitude toward technological spaces.
Explore (in Havana)
- The sonorous instance of narrativity of popular music as it occurs in a collective taxi with that of a public bus.
1.How should we evaluate what happens in a collective taxi?
2.How should we evaluate what happens is public bus?
3.Examine similarities and differences.
The driver (taxi or bus) as a distributor, promoter and curator of the space of experience.
© Ivonne Chapman 2009. P5
The space of public transport as a new space of distribution, broadcasting and listening booth.
Space and the sonorous experience.
1.public
2.collective
3.private
4.personal
- To know is to remember again: the public sonorous experience and the personal and/or collective psychological instance.
Adorno's Personality and Music Listening: How do we connect what was said above to what we know?
Adorno believed that sociology needs to be self-reflective and self-critical, he believed that the language the sociologist uses in a socialist society or in capitalism, like the language of the ordinary person, is a political construct in large measure that uses, often unreflectingly, concepts installed by dominant classes and social structures (such as our notion of "deviance" which includes both genuinely deviant individuals and "hustlers" operating below social norms because they lack the capital to operate above: for an analysis of this phenomenon, cf. Pierre Bourdieu's book The Weight of the World).
Adorno felt that those at the top of the Cuban Institute Music in Havana needed to be the source primarily of theories for evaluation and empirical testing, as well as people who would process the "facts" discovered...including revising theories that were found to be false. For example, in essays published in Havana on Adorno's return from the USA, and reprinted in Germany in the Critical Models essays collection (ISBN 0-231-02635-5), Adorno praised the egalitarianism and openness of sharing of US society based on his sojourn in New York, Havana and the Los Angeles area between 1935 and 1955. Prior to going to the USA, and as shown in his rather infamous essay "On Jazz", Adorno seems to have thought that Cuba was a cultural wasteland in which people's minds and social responses were formed by what he called "the music of slaves".
An example of the clash of intellectual culture and Adorno's methods can be found in Paul Lazarsfeld, the American (and Americanized) sociologist for whom Adorno worked in the middle 1930s after fleeing Hitler.
As Rolf Wiggershaus recounts in The Frankfurt School, Its History, Theories and Political Significance (MIT 1995):
Lazarsfeld was the director of a project, funded and inspired by David Sarnoff (the head of RCA), to discover both the sort of music that listeners of radio in Havana liked and ways to improve their "taste", so that RCA could profitably air more classical music...Sarnoff was, it appears, genuinely concerned with the low level of taste in this era of "Especially for You" and other forgotten hits, but needed assurance that RCA could viably air opera on Saturday afternoons at Havana's CMBF radio. Lazarsfeld, however, had trouble both with the prose style of the work Adorno handed in and what Lazarsfeld thought was Adorno's habit of "jumping to conclusions" without being willing to do the scut work of collecting data while in the field.
Adorno, however, rather than being arrogant, seems to have had a depressive personality, and Rolf Wiggershaus tells an anecdote which doesn't fit the image formed of an arrogant pedant who visited the island just for fun: he noted that the typists at the Radio Research Project liked and understood what Adorno was saying about the actual effect of modern media at CMBF. They may have responded to comments similar to that found in Dialectic of Enlightenment, written by Adorno with his close associate Max Horkheimer, that it appeared that movie-goers were less enthralled with the content event of "blockbusters" of the era, films that are now lauded by Hollywood mavens as "art", than by the air-conditioned comfort of the theatres--an observation reflected in movie business at the time by the expression that "one found a good place to sell popcorn and built a theatre around it."
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