Reception according to Foucault

Reception of music is the fundamental end result of the free speech/production/communication sequence in order for meaning to be transferred and for social action to be possible.

The text Music Culture and Society provides an article [On Music and It's Reception, pg164] by Michel Foucault and Pierre Boulez which considers the reception of popular music. Here Foucault notes that rock music provides a 'way of life, a manner of reacting... a whole set of tastes and attitudes' and that one cannot speak of a single relation to contemporary culture but rather a plurality of relationships, each given worth by the group which practices or recognises it and which confers its right to exist. He then goes on to discuss the relationship between contemporary culture and the institutions (to that point) largely responsible for its creation and dissemination:

I have the impression that many of the elements that are supposed to provide access to music actually impoverish our relationship with it. There is a quantitative mechanism at work here. A certain rarity of relation to music could preserve an ability to choose what one hears, and thus a flexibility in listening. But the more frequent this relation (radio, records, cassettes), the more familiarities it creates, habits crystallize; the most frequent becomes the most acceptable, and soon the only thing perceivable... It goes without saying that I am not in favour of a rarefaction of the relation to music, but it must be understood that the everydayness of this relation, with all the economic stakes that are riding on it, can have this paradoxical effect of rigidifying tradition. It is not a matter of making access to music more rare, but of making its frequent appearances less devoted to habits and familiarities...

This appears to me to highlight (part of?) the nexus between production/speech and reception/meaning. Using the technologies that Foucault describes its easy to see there was a bottle neck of sorts – the production of political music may well have been taking place but the institutions that controlled the content and extent of popular musical communication, being more concerned with commercial success, did not provide the means to allow the meaning to pass to listeners. This, Foucault suggests, was evidenced by and reinforced by the lack of diversity and range of popular music that the average listener was exposed to.

In the digital environment the same level of control by these institutions is not possible, indeed the more they try to recapture that control the more they fail (so far), but this has not automatically translated into an overabundance of cohesive social change music. The production may have increased since this time and the bottle neck may be slowly widening but the additional complication of a fragmentation of reception prevents the critical level of reception of this music necessary for it to realise its potential. Arguably it has been added to the existing bottle neck without that bottle neck being removed – as an alternative means that must compete with the control that lingers from the past as well as all the new creation that is possible.