Rhetorically Performative Early Music: YouTube Videos as Statements

Abstract

Increasing history consumption in today’s society creates, in different social formations, a common expectation of what historical music is, can and should be. In this chapter, we draw on music education and Baradian agential realism perspectives to offer what we perceive as a promising procedure for studying early music performance from a less anthropocentric stand. We ask: How does early music performance intra-act with YouTube as medium, and how does this intra-action enable informal learning? We first address the significance and prevailing interpretation of rhetoric in this context, and what a move from a single-case rhetoric to an ecological one offers. Subsequently, we introduce agential realism as an approach to studying early music performance, particularly through the lense of Barad (2007). Here, we offer a discursive practice that can contribute to future studies, which we follow up with an exemplary case study. The case is later discussed and analysed, and in conclusion we draw attention to the online media’s role both in sustaining historical culture for new generations, and in cumulatively reinventing itself as a pedagogical process both within and outside educational settings.