In Harmonium

Posted By Marc on January 26, 2010

The Medium is the Massage (no, that isn’t a spelling error), is the name of a rather famous work produced by Marshall McLuhan and Quenten Fiore in 1967.  It is, in many ways, a popularizing, as well as exemplar, version of McLuhan’s  major research focus on how media influences messages or, in it’s better known version, “the medium is the message”.  But is it?

What is the message?

One of the problems with the popular meme that “the medium is the message” is the implication that the content and intention of the message is irrelevant, and subservient to the medium used for communication.  The other version, “the medium is the massage“, is closer to the position held by McLuhan who tended to view the influence of a given medium as “massaging” rather than “dominating” the consciousness of the receiver.  This massaging effect came to mind today when the choir I sing in, the Ottawa Bach Choir, finally started it’s own YouTube channel (about time!).

As I watched / listened to the five videos from our last concert, I came to several tentative conclusions regarding the nature of the “message”.  Now, this concert was programmed as a fairly “classical” Christmas concert which, as almost any singer will tell you, means that it is a lot of “feel good” standards .  We certainly didn’t do anything that was up to the complexity of our next concert!  So what, one might ask, was the “message” being sent by this concert?

Well, as I mentioned, most Christmas concerts are “feel good” concerts.  The programming tends to be of “old favorites” that the audience knows, even if they may not know a particular arrangement of them.  Part of the reasoning behind these choices is based on pragmatics; people expect it and, in fact, demand it.  Another part of the reasoning, which many conductors don’t think out (which is why I really enjoy working with professionals, because Lisette does), is that Christmas is one of the two “High Holidays” of the Christian year cycle; one of the two points in the liturgical year when Mircea Eliade’s concept of in illo tempore is critical.

Now this idea of in illo tempore is really pretty simple – it means “at [or in] that time”, and Eliade used it to refer to foundation myths.  Now, the purpose of foundation myths in ritualized settings is to transport the person outside of time (day to day, lived reality) into a mythic time where they become a part of events that happened in the past.  So, in effect, the programming at Christmas concerts is not designed to convey a formalized piece of information but, rather, access to an experience.  It does this by evoking an emotional response in the listener that triggers off mental images in them (if they have been set there) and, in order to succeed, it requires that the listener have a certain amount of familiarity with the music so that they don’t have to “work” at it.  Basically, the audience for this type of event shouldn’t have to “think” about the words or the music; they should know them.

Now, if the audience doesn’t have to work at or think about the music, then it is going to have to be fairly simple and well know, which is pretty much what the programming at our concert was like.  Here’s an example of a quite well known Christmas carol

Of course, “simple” and “known” doesn’t necessarily mean the same stuff over and over again.  It is often enough to have one major point of equivalence (say, a well known text or tune) to achieve pretty much the same result.  Consider this version of the same carol:

Different language, different arrangement, but the same tune and, if you happen to know it (which most people will, even if they don’t understand either the German or Swedish words), it will still convey some part of the “message”.

Message or Massage?

When I first listened to these YouTube videos, I was struck by how different an experience they evoked in me.  Now, admittedly, I’m singing in them (on the far right side of the screen), and performing is quite a different experience from being in the audience.  For one thing, I can actually hear the balance which, believe me, is impossible when you are in a performance!  But there were two absolutely critical differences that I noticed.

The first of these differences was that there was no feeling of “connection”.  When you perform for a live audience, or when you sit in an audience at a live performance, there is a feeling of connection between the audience and the performer that is hard to describe, but most people know from experience.  That wasn’t there, and I felt its loss keenly.

The second difference is, I believe, related to the first, and it has to do with the physical “feel” (kinesthetics) of the music.  Even cranked up to full volume, these videos don’t convey the same physical sensation as a live performance does, from either the audience or performer’s stance.  It isn’t really a difference in kind so much as a difference in both quantity and work required to achieve a similar kinesthetic level.  Maybe I’d better pull that out…

One of the crucial components in music is the effect it has on our bodies in two ways.  First, acoustic waves have a physical impact on our bodies which cause changes in certain physiological responses such as heart rate, pattern of breathing, swaying of the body, etc.  This is highly related to the rhythm or beat of a piece.  The second impact has to do with a combination of tonality (actually timbre for you musicians), and note progression.  Put simply, musical systems, like other symbol systems, condition people to certain emotional (read neuropsychological and neurophysiological) responses; take a look at Daniel J. Levitin’s This Is Your Brain on Music for a good overview.  But it appears that these responses are, in part, triggered by the kinesthetic effect of the volume and the listening environment (both acoustic and other).

So, is the medium the message or the massage?

I am beginning to think that the answer to that depends on a) how much you “know” and b) how hard you are willing to work.  I am also starting to think that a significant part of the answer lies in what type of message one is trying to convey; is it “information”, “experience”, “argument” or what?  It may be more useful to start examining the taxonomy of messages and asking ourselves what,  we are trying to evoke in our audiences than to concentrate on the minutia of various media.

Category: Communications Theory, Music
Tags: Canadian Communications Tradition, Marshall McLuhan, Ottawa Bach Choir