L'art mass-médiatisé: l'exemple de la musique classique enregistrée

The Mass-Mediatized Art. The Example of the Recorded Classical Music. The functions of classical music are constantly being modified in accordance with the changes in aesthetic perception, and the most important is to know in what directions these mutations operate. From this point of view the problematics of the functionalization and defunctionalization of music, as proposed by Professor Supičić, are interesting as a point of departure. In this perspective three levels may be distinguished: the level of musical creation, the level of musical diffusion and, last, that of musical consumption. On the level of musical creation we have remarked, as mentioned by Supičić, a certain defunctionalization of music in the sense that its social functions have diminished to make more place for a purely aesthetic finality. On the level of musical diffusion, the experience gathered from research done in the record industry over a period of four years and, especially, with the editors of recorded classical music, leads us to develop more particularly, for example, the process of musical mass-mediatization within the framework of this industry. This study clearly shows that music takes possession of the function of its supporting outlets, determining ways of consumption increasingly alien to the traditional apprehension of classical music. On the level of consumption, recorded classical music, mass-mediatized with the aid of an increasing variety of reproductive outlets (records, cassettes, cartridges), is more and more involved in the field of games and leisure. Thanks to the recording industry, musical consumption in the home gives birth to a new ritual by sometimes identifying itself with a ceremony or a festival of sound within the framework of an electro-acoustic space of "high-fidelity". Such an evolution attacks the artistic nature of the musical contents which draw further and further away from the archetyps they are supposed to reproduce. It makes classical music enter the arsenal of the means of mass-communication and assigns it a function in this field.