Istanbul is home to a multimillion dollar transnational music industry; which every year produces thousands of digital music recordings; including widely distributed film and television show soundtracks. Today; this centralized industry is responding to a growing global demand for Turkish; Kurdish; and other Anatolian ethnic language productions; and every year; many of its top-selling records incorporate elaborately orchestrated arrangements of rural folksongs. What accounts for the continuing demand for traditional music in local and diasporic markets? How is tradition produced in twenty-first century digital recording studios; and is there a "digital aesthetics" to contemporary recordings of traditional music?In Digital Traditions: Arrangement and Labor in Istanbuls Recording Studio Culture; author Eliot Bates answers these questions and more with a case study into the contemporary practices of recording traditional music in Istanbul. Bates provides an ethnography of Turkish recording studios; of arrangers and engineers; studio musicianship and digital audio workstation kinesthetics. Digital Traditions investigates the moments when tradition is arranged; and how arrangement is simultaneously a set of technological capabilities; limitations and choices: a form of musical practice that desocializes the ensemble and generates an extended network of social relations; resulting in aesthetic art objects that come to be associated with a range of affective and symbolic meanings. Rich with visual analysis and drawing on Science Technology Studies theories and methods; Digital Traditions sets a new standard for the study of recorded music. Scholars and general readers of ethnomusicology; Middle Eastern studies; folklore and science and technology studies are sure to find Digital Traditions an essential addition to their library.
2016-05-23 2016-05-23File Name: B01G2MZR3E
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