Gianni Zucchet
5 December 2021
Sound: Redeeming The Age of Mechanical Reproduction
No philosopher is content with mechanical reproduction, most tend to agree that it is the devaluation and perhaps bastardization of art. That being said, if we take the picture out of the picture, mechanical reproduction has enabled music to flourish to an otherwise impossible degree. It seems that Deleuze, Baudrillard, and Benjamin, among others, have completely omitted the role of music as an art-form in the age of reproduction. I encountered, online, a man known as “The Mad Arranger”, Jacob Koller, an Arizona-born pianist who made a career for himself in Tokyo, Japan. A video which specifically caught my eyes, but mostly my ears, is titled Ghibli Jazz Piano Suite - Howl’s Moving Castle, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Spirited Away. Shot in the town that inspired Hayao Miyazaki’s films, Ginzan Onsen, Koller delivers an incredible performance, with some awe-inspiring improvisation, in the very town that inspired the original compositions.
Namely, a YouTube video, yes, Baudrillard and the Anti-Mechanical Reproduction gang would roll in their graves just by reading this sentence. However, why is sound never mentioned when critiquing mechanical reproduction, notably there is a critique on the camera, the “Simulacra” that “invert the causal and logical order of the real and its reproduction” (Baudrillard, 478), as well as the “images, those which unfurl upon and invade our daily life” (Baudrillard, 484). Don’t get me wrong, I am not pro-imagery, especially at the extent that it has reached in modernity, however, in our lockdown reality, with the Coronavirus pandemic specifically, mechanical reproduction has allowed us to travel, whether in a fictitious manner, an illegitimate manner, and perhaps a meaningless one as well, it still allows our mind to exit the locked down abode, and explore that which is inaccessible. Sure, it is not the same thing, I agree, but is not a fragment, a sliver of the real thing, the 1% of the whole, worth more than none?
If mechanical reproduction has destroyed visual art, it has at least empowered, and enlightened the world of music. I repeat this, a man from Arizona, who now lives in Tokyo, can freely share his arrangements, his compositions, with the rest of the world, an opportunity otherwise impossible due to 1.) Can’t travel into Japan currently, and probably not for long, and 2.) $1,300 round trip ticket last I checked. It is a shame that most of the fine arts are locked behind a pay-wall, unable to be enjoyed by the masses, perhaps those who most need the inspiration in their otherwise mundane and repetitive existence. And yet, it seems that, with technological advances, ordinary and extraordinary people can share their artistic endeavors freely with other ordinary and extraordinary people, mechanical reproduction has allowed for equality of access to the arts.
Baudrillard, I implore you, wherever you may be, up or down, left or right, in whichever dimension, click on this video, and don’t say anything about the images. A simple instruction: don’t look, listen. Music, this video, allows you to completely evade the issue that images present, music is not limited to imagery. Jacob Koller’s devotion to his art, the decades of work, as well as any number of extraordinary musical artists out there, allow you to close your eyes. If the images invade our daily lives, it is because we allow them to do so, nothing is stopping us from watching a movie with a blindfold on, creating our own images, more so with music however, with a bit of effort, carries you outside of wherever it is that you are. The notes and chord progressions, create, destroy, and move worlds, through the senses.
Works Cited
Cazeaux, Clive. The Continental Aesthetics Reader. Routledge, 2011.
Ghibli Jazz Piano Suite - YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpwNmztIxDc