Musical Videos as Works: Documenting Audiovisual Jazz Practices in Social Media Communities
Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: Recent philosophical writing on jazz lacks attention to practices outside the instrumental, live, solo-based jazz ontology.Drawing on anthropological work theory, this study explores two examples of collaborative, social media-based jazz video practices: Jacob Collier's #IHarmU fan-collaboration videos, and video transcription practices on the Facebook group "Jam of the Week."I use Goehr's idea of the work-concept to argue that there can be different work-concepts for different forms of music even within the same genre, which are related to their social, technological, and cultural context.Using Gell's ideas on the interrelations of corpuses of work as well as his ideas of the social impact of technical facility, I contrast the collaborative social environments, video work-concepts, and aesthetic expectations at play against the "standard view" of jazz.I show that due to the affordances of social media platforms, the ontologies of these practices combine elements of film, live music, and recorded music ontologies, and argue that the impact of new online reception environments on changing aesthetic ideals and work-concepts must be accounted for in future ontological discourse.
Author: Chris J. Cottell
Institution: University of London
Language: English
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W3132422689