ABSTRACT
Liveness is a dynamic and versatile concept. As performance practices in any cultural form change, shared understandings of what makes those performances live or not live will also change. Similarly, as the technologies against which the concept of liveness is measured are brought into performances once considered incompatible with technological mediation, relationships between liveness and mediatization must be reconsidered. In innumerable different regions of modern musicking, electronic technologies have become important parts of everyday practice. Musicological scholarship, however, has not yet developed to the point where these technologies are fully understood as significant contributors to many experiences of musical liveness. In fact, the use of electronic technologies is often seen as a threat to conventional values of music performance. I attempt to demonstrate in this volume that mediatization may also be construed as a productive way to project new and necessary understandings of performative meaning in music. By theorizing various qualities of liveness emerging from relationships between musickers and electronic technologies, we may begin to understand how performance has become mediatized while still maintaining many of the qualities that make it performative, revealing the ever-changing social values reflected in the presentation and reception of musical performance.
