Virtuosity in the Age of Electronic Media

This book evaluates emergent forms of musical virtuosity within American musical cultures during the age of electronic media, a period spanning from 1920—when radio became a household technology and sound recording and playback both gradually became electrified—down to the present. Rather than focusing on instruments that arose during this period—electric guitars, midi controllers, or turntables, for example—this book explores how electronic mediation shapes the experience of virtuosity, even if the music or the instruments used might have been quite at home in earlier centuries. The wide array of genres addressed in this book motivates its project of theorizing virtuosities that differ from the dominant nineteenth-century model. Although many forms of virtuosity are intelligible when viewed through this lens, it is incapable of illuminating the myriad ways that people present, encounter, and value musical skill in the age of electronic media. Drawing on phenomenology and scholarly voices from multiple disciplines, this book defines virtuosities as skills made apparent and socially meaningful, offering an approach that accounts for the persistent role of mediation and the diffusion of agency and authority that accompanies it.