Liveness and Participation in Bootleg Opera Recordings

Moeckli, Laura Elisabeth (14 November 2020). Liveness and Participation in Bootleg Opera Recordings (Unpublished). In: AMS Annual Conference 2020.

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In typical testimonies of rock concert bootlegging, interviewees describe their motivation for illicit recording as a dedication to the preservation of cultural heritage beyond the hegemony of record companies, concert venues and even artists themselves. Similarly, the gay opera enthusiast Leroy Allan Ehrenreich (1929–2016), whose daytime job as a speech writer at the New York Stock Exchange enabled him to finance his evening passion as an opera bootlegger, agreed with this viewpoint. As a self-proclaimed "pirate-queen", belonging to a network of like-minded bootleggers, he compiled an impressive collection of over 2000 reel-to-reel tapes of recordings made between 1965 and 2010 at the major opera venues in New York. After his death, his lifework was donated to the Bern University of the Arts (HKB) with the specific request of making available for research any contents valuable for posterity
While bootlegging has traditionally featured in popular music genres, the Ehrenreich collection affords an unrivalled opportunity to investigate this cultural practice with respect to opera. Due to its unauthorized and transgressive nature, bootlegging practice has until recently been bypassed or ignored in scholarly literature. In the field of popular music studies, the importance of bootlegging has received some attention in recent years (Heylin 1995, Marshall 2005), but in opera discourse the quality and relevance of such recordings as documents of musical cultural practice have yet to receive any sustained critical attention.
In this paper I contextualize this unique collection within the social phenomenon of bootlegging, focusing specifically on aspects of listener/audience experience and participation. Utilizing notably Eric Clarke's ecological approach to the perception of music (Clarke, 2005), I examine the affordances of the virtual spaces and audience sounds captured in the Ehrenreich tapes. Specific attributes of these recordings, such as the reverberation of the vocal and instrumental music, the distance from the stage, as well as the quality of the murmuring, coughing, grunting, shuffling, clapping and shushing noises of audience members, vary over time and between the different New York venues which Ehrenreich used for his bootlegging. The collection as a whole, therefore, provides evidence of the experience of opera as embodied participatory event in which the audience plays a key part (Burland/Pitts 2014). I explore how the distinct sounds of musical experience contained within these bootlegs enrich and enfold our understanding of operatic practices, social networks and audience identities both past and present.
This study fills important knowledge gaps in the area of bootlegging practice with respect to classical music and, by extension, the acousmatic character of audience behaviour in the construction of meaning. The almost unexamined phenomenon of opera bootlegging reveals fresh insight into how the opera listener can become a co-creator of the event, thus placing the production and consumption of 20th/21st-century opera at the intersection between recording practices, the ephemerality of performance and the democratization of art.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Division/Institute:	06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Art and Cultural Studies > Institute of Musicology
UniBE Contributor:	Moeckli, Laura Elisabeth
Subjects:	700 Arts > 780 Music
Language:	English
Submitter:	Laura Elisabeth Moeckli
Date Deposited:	28 Jul 2021 11:35
Last Modified:	05 Dec 2022 15:42
URI:	https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/149508