In Haunthenticity: Musical Replay and the Fear of the Real, musicologist and jazz performer Tracy McMullen examines the motivations and implications of Western culture's unhealthy obsession with capturing and controlling the musical past. This book investigates clone bands in the late 20th century which aim to re-enact not just the sounds but also the material specifics and bodily presence of a past musical event. Drawing on critical theory, psychoanalysis and anthropology to contextualise the tension between our desire for and fear of true interconnected reality, McMullen examines the Western anxiety surrounding the inevitable loss inherent in our day-to-day experiences. Haunthenticity takes case studies ranging from Glenn Miller re-enactments to ABBAmania as its material, but the book does not merely examine the details of the reperformances themselves; rather, McMullen targets the origin of this desire to recreate and possess a particular moment of time. This book argues convincingly that by re-enacting the visual, auditory and embodied details of a past performance event, re-enactment groups are seeking to appease the desire for the Real while simultaneously holding it at arm's length.
The first of two key terms that ground McMullen's work, her use of the term ‘Real’ originates in psychoanalytic and philosophical discourse, and refers to that which lacks a locatable subject; its emptiness is defined instead through interrelationship. The practice of musical ‘Replay’, then, is an effort to contain and command the Real by painstakingly gathering and recreating every possible gesture, object and sound that was part of a performance event. Rather than fully embracing the true nature of the Real as made up of empty identities and an interconnected past and present, Replay serves to keep the Real at a controlled and safe distance. McMullen's case studies convincingly demonstrate the way in which Replay accomplishes this by offering the illusion of possessing the Real in order to recreate it on demand, seemingly ensuring that the captured events are never lost.
Haunthenticity ultimately takes readers through a research landscape that features studies including David Bowie's performance personae and the 2008 film Synecdoche, New York, but its most in-depth case study on The Musical Box opens the book by offering the clearest and most precise example of musical Replay. Drawing on interviews, promotional materials and accounts of live performances, McMullen paints a picture of The Musical Box as a group that is dedicated to offering fans an experience that is as close as possible to the original concerts performed by Genesis. This case study clearly lays the ground work for future chapters by showing how performance events —‘chunks of time’— came to be interpreted as objects and works that could be dissected and recreated. McMullen articulates a coherent lineage for this idea, detailing Genesis’ roots within the progressive rock genre and the connection between that genre and the values of Western classical music, which prize ‘fidelity to the work’. Here McMullen makes a valuable contribution to the scholarly dialogue on liveness and the work-concept, and it is this chapter that may be best suited for use as a course reading.
After travelling with McMullen through numerous case studies, readers might wonder where a confrontation with such avoidances of the Real leaves us. Haunthenticity's conclusion offers one possibility, with an intriguing final case study to serve as an illustration. McMullen writes of her personal experience attending a concert by jazz pianist Jason Moran in which the performer engaged with recorded material by Thelonious Monk, not in order to create a note-for-note re-enactment, but as a collaboration in which Moran was playing improvised material with Monk, blending past and present, live and recorded, tradition and innovation. Rather than seeking to recreate Monk's past work, Moran drew on the past to constitute a living present that reflected Monk's influence. In Haunthenticity, then, McMullan offers us a different lens through which to view self and other. The book's parting offering is the idea that the self, in its emptiness, can truly exist not as a subject that requires acknowledgement from the other, but as a ‘giving subject’ —which is precisely how Moran's concert treats the work of Monk.
McMullen's approach to research for this conclusion is noteworthy: no recording of Moran's concert was available, and McMullen acknowledges places in which her memory of the performance may be blurry or inaccurate. She suggests that this is apt, and that obsessing over the facts of an event is less important than focusing on its emotional impact. This approach does exemplify McMullen's arguments, but stands in sharp contrast to the very rigour and detailed work that lends strength to the rest of Haunthenticity. Notably absent from the conclusion is engagement with Jason Stanyek and Benjamin Piekut's influential work on ‘Deadness’, which in 2010 reframed the terminology and conversation around complex forms of performative rearticulation and collaboration between living performers and those who are no longer living. Stanyek and Piekut's work on what they have termed the ‘intermundane’ —including events such as the duet between Natalie and Nat ‘King’ Cole— has much in common with McMullen's work and could have significantly enriched the discussion in Haunthenticity.
While the conclusion may have benefitted from a consideration of these implications and discussions, overall, McMullen's work serves as a compelling call for a reconsideration of our fear of the Real and an acknowledgement of the interconnected nature of self and other. Haunthenticity offers a new and interdisciplinary approach to theorising identity and authenticity. The majority of the book's chapters may be too detailed for use in an undergraduate course, but its value lies in the new contributions it makes to related conversations in musicology about text and act, liveness and mediation, drastic or gnostic. An engaging read with case studies that will hold the interest of scholars across a range of fields, McMullen's work is worth the attention of anyone addressing questions of liveness or identity in popular music.
