'You Don’t Go to These Kinds of Concerts for Fun’: The Practise of Taste in Contemporary Art Music - Simon Chambers

Date: Thursday, 31 October 2019
Time: 11.30am–1pm
Venue: EB.G.02, Parramatta South campus, Western Sydney University

'You Don’t Go to These Kinds of Concerts for Fun’: The Practise of Taste in Contemporary Art Music

Presenter: Simon Chambers (The MARCS Institute, Western Sydney University)

Discussant: Professor Tony Bennett

Abstract

It would seem unremarkable to expect notions of ‘taste’ and ‘pleasure’ to be closely intertwined. Taste, as a relatively stable set of preferences, is presumed to provide us with an orientation toward cultural practices which we able to enjoy in diverse ways, spanning the hedonic, intellectual and other forms of appreciation. Furthermore, these aspects of stability and pleasure can be traced to sociological approaches to analysing taste in terms of social reproduction and stratification.

This paper seeks to disrupt these common understandings of taste, by instead drawing attention to the specific practices and strategies which music fans employ in ‘practising’ their taste. Focussing in particular on Sydney’s contemporary art music scene, my research draws on interviews with participants after co-attending a concert with them to argue how a fluid and emergent negotiation of taste is necessary to practise their appreciation of a genre of music marked by ambiguity and vulnerability.

Biography

Simon Chambers is a PhD student at the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour, and Development, Western Sydney University. He has worked in a range of digital design and development roles in the cultural sector at organisations such as ABC Radio National, Classic FM, the Australian Music Centre, and APRA. As an industry partner he has been involved in a range of Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage projects, spanning the development of digital music research infrastructure, to personalised recommendation algorithms, and the value of music exports.

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