The Critique of Sample-Based Music Creating a Foundation for Understanding

Eliot Chayt

Date of Award

2005

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Miles, Stephen

Keywords

Music, Philosophy of Music, Cultural Critique

Area of Concentration

Music

Abstract

This thesis concerns the establishment of a discursive model for music in order to solve the problems implicit in purely technical or purely subjective criticisms of sample-based music. A purely technical criticism neglects this music's power to evoke cultural signifiers, and a purely subjective criticism has the potential to forget that that sample-based music is music at all. Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge provides the basis for the discursive model. Examples of structural and formal critique, in the form of Heinrich Schenker and Theodor Adorno, are used to reveal the limitations of formalism for both Popular and experimental music. John Oswald's Plunderphonics project, which contains aspects of both Popular and experimental music, is used as a focus for the specific problems of criticism for the genre-straddling form of sample-based music. Music-as-discourse, a model which views musical works as the simultaneous referent of many critical discourses, is presented as a possible new formal model for determining musical meaning in sample-based music--one that specifically opens up the discourse to broader cultural concerns raised by contextualists, but views sample-based music as a basically objective 'art object, ' albeit one that may represent the transition to a new status quo in music.

Rights

This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

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