Facing Digital Realities: Where Media Do Not Mix

Abstract

Wagner's vaunted model of artistic synthesis persists in scholarly assessments of his work. But at its centre, the composer argued that the media of voice and orchestra do not mix: they retain their identities as separate channels of sound that can neither duplicate nor substitute for one another. Taking as a starting point Wagner's claims for the nonadaptability of media, this article addresses the adaptation of Wagner's music to the modern digital technologies of HD cinema and video game. Drawing on a wide circle of writers, from Schiller and Žižek to Bakhtin, Augé, Baudrillard and second-generation media theorists, it interrogates the concept of 'reality' within live acoustic performance, both historically, as a discursive concept, and technologically, via the sensory realism of digital simulcasting and telepresence. The philosophical opposition of appearance and reality fails when reality is defined by the intimate simulation of a sensory event as it is registered on the body. And by contrasting the traditions of high fidelity in (classical) sound recording with that of rendering sound in cinema, I suggest ways in which unmixable media appear to have an afterlife in modern technologies. This raises questions -in a post-Benjamin, post-McLuhan contextabout our definition of 'liveness', the concept of authenticity within mediatised and acoustic sounds, and our vulnerability to the technological effects of media.Technologies are artificial, but … artificiality is natural to humans. (Walter Ong) 1 Wagner and WirklichkeitThe rhetoric of synthesis is hard to get away from in writings about Wagner. As a principle of logic, its force -derived in part from classical dialectics, a discursive mode -can be read and applied broadly. It has shaped discussion of artistic media, as per Jack Stein's interest in the all-pervasive infinity of the Gesamtkunstwerk, 2 and of sexual difference, as per Jean-Jacques Nattiez's critique of telescoped gender as an aesthetic platform. 3 It has been applied to metaphysics, as per Bryan Magee's reading of Schopenhauer as the lynchpin for Wagner's music-theatre-philosophy triumvirate. 4 And it underpins Adorno's reading of Wagnerian sonority as a concealment (or synthetic unification) of the division of mental and physical labour in the composer's orchestration, aligning it with the commodity: 'sound from which the traces of its production have been removed '. 5 I am most grateful to Justin Williams for offering thoughts on an earlier version of this article. 1

The influence of formats and preferences on the aesthetic experience of classical music concert streams.

“…In music, media, and performance studies, there is a large body of historical, theoretical, and market- and consumer-oriented research on musical live performances and the various mediatized forms of music distribution (Auslander, 1999/2008; Baade & Deaville, 2016; Fischer-Lichte, 2004/2008; Fritsch & Strötgen, 2012; Negus, 2006; Phelan, 1993; Pitts, 2005; Tröndle, 2011, 2020). Recently, digital forms of music distribution and reception have also sparked interest among scholars (Harvey, 2014; Nowak, 2016; Trippett, 2014), not only in and of themselves but also in comparison to live events (Holt, 2010; King, 2018; Mueser & Vlachos, 2018). Empirical research on music frames and media, however, is still relatively scarce.…”