Multi-voice commentary for sample-based music: an inclusive approach

Blackburn, Manuella

Abstract

Discussions of sample-based music as found within academic literature traditionally operate as single authored documents, despite the frequency of multi-genre content found within this repertoire, enabled so via sampling. This article builds a case for a new inclusive approach applicable within future analyses, commentaries and communications of such works. This new approach is justified by highlighting repertoire that embeds samples from different genres, times and cultures, that inherently calls upon a wide variety of disciplinary expertise, to attend to these disparate interior contents. Multi-voice commentary is an approach that includes insider voices to speak to the assorted content within sample-based music, building a reception network that by process runs counter to single authorial modes, broadening the narrative and storytelling around sample-based music and its inherited musical lineage. A case is made as to why certain sample-based music works are most in need of this new approach, based on situations of ‘sampling up’, ‘down’ or ‘sideways’ which are directional acquisition tendencies developed from Laura Nadar’s anthropological concept of ‘studying up’ and Robert Walser’s writings on “appropriations from below” based on the social climbing missions of “raising the artistic level of rock”. Theoretical concepts from Stanley Fish’s model of ‘Interpretive communities’ and Roland Barthes’s essay ‘The Death of the Author’ are also brought into this discussion to further the case for a multiplicity of readings for one work and its sample-based interior.

Citation

Blackburn, M. (in press). Multi-voice commentary for sample-based music: an inclusive approach. Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 150(2), 47

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Nov 12, 2024
• Deposit Date: Dec 16, 2024
• Journal: Journal of the Royal Musical Association
• Print ISSN: 0269-0403
• Publisher: Routledge
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 150
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 47
• Keywords: sampling, commentary, reception, interpretive communities, musical borrowing
• Public URL: https://keele-repository.worktribe.com/output/1018597
• Additional Information: This is due for publication in Vol.150.2 (Autumn 2025). A DOI has not been provided yet