Philip Auslander remains an unquestionably influential figure in popular music and performance studies, and his new book In Concert: Performing Musical Persona underscores and updates his resounding achievements. This book brings together essays published between 2003 and 2015 in new, thoroughly updated versions. In Concert is not a collection about music as performance, but about musicians as performers. Musical performance is a social interaction, he argues; music is what musicians do.
Auslander's introduction establishes the importance of three key concepts within his performer-centric theory: frame, genre and persona. By frame, he means the fundamental contextualisation that enables social interaction and structures expectations (pp. 5–6); genre, then, is a categorisation, the most important frame for musical performances (pp. 9–10); persona for Auslander is the musical identity musicians perform (pp. 10–12). Musicians and audiences understand and negotiate the persona in relation to frames and genres. Within this framework, two additional concepts prove crucial, serving to define, effectively ex negativo, what constitutes a persona: persona is neither the ‘real person’, the performer's offstage personality (p. 10), nor their ‘character’, the performed entity musicians portray through their lyrics (p. 11).
The following 10 chapters are divided into three parts: ‘Preliminaries’, ‘The Interactionist Turn’ and ‘Contexts of Performance’. The first section traces an intellectual history of the musical persona and argues for the importance of visual dimensions in musical performances, while the final section comprises eclectic case studies on canonical pop stars such as The Beatles, Frank Zappa's The Mothers of Invention, Roy Wood's Wizzard, Sha Na Na, Lady Gaga and Nicki Minaj. Despite these excellent inclusions, this book's climax lands undoubtedly in the second section, Chapters 5–7. In Chapters 6 and 7, Auslander turns his attention to describing star identity and jazz improvisation, respectively. He builds on the work of Erving Goffman (particularly The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Reference Goffman1956) and Frame Analysis (Reference Goffman1974)) to argue that these constitute Goffmanian interactional accomplishments undertaken by musicians and audiences together. Throughout the book, Auslander pays almost as much attention to the audience as to the performers, an enlightening and validating methodological contribution in itself. The fifth chapter, ‘Musical Personae’, stands out especially as an expansion of his germinal and eponymous article (Auslander Reference Auslander2006). Over 41 pages, Auslander offers a complex theory for analysing musicians as social beings. ‘What musicians perform first and foremost is not music’, Auslander argues (p. 88), ‘but their own identities as musicians, their musical personae’. Concentrating on instances of corporeal co-presence, Auslander develops a framework in which ‘both the musical work and its execution serve the musician's performance of a persona’ (p. 88; emphasis mine). The most important revision to prior versions of his theory concerns the conceptual distinction between acting and self-representation. Whereas in earlier publications he asserted an intrinsic opposition between the presentation of the self and a fictional character, and so divided what actors do from what musicians do, he now emphasises that ‘actors and musicians are completely alike in the sense that both groups are engaged in performing a social identity’ (p. 84). In this way, he integrates the concept of theatricality as a ‘histrionic mode of communication’ (p. 96). I very much appreciated this heuristic update, now rendered more consistent with Goffman's concept of self-presentation (p. 95). This change provides Auslander space to analyse the construction of different musical personae, ranging from ‘real’, sincere and authentic, to completely fictitious identities.
Since Auslander understands the ‘performance of music as a social interaction’ (p. 9) and the musical persona as the ‘performance of a social role’ (pp. 83–4), I would have loved to read more about the author's thoughts on more recent forms of communication between stars and fans. Since his essay's original publication in 2006, the communications landscape has shifted tremendously. Although Auslander is more interested in the past than the present, as evidenced by his choice of case studies, I remain keen to hear his thoughts on the increasingly transmedial nature of musical personae, that is, how they are performed and negotiated across different media texts, including social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok (see also Fritsch Reference Fritsch and Austin2016; Hansen Reference Hansen2019; Palmer Reference Palmer2020; Rudolph Reference Rudolph2020). The total absence of the term transmedial begs for a follow-up. Moreover, while Auslander takes a sociological approach, this collection does not delve into the social politics of a persona, such as gender, class and race. As the author himself acknowledges, this gap ‘points the way forward for future work on musical personae’ (p. 3).
While the sixth chapter tilts in this direction, the tenth and final chapter (one of my favourites!) makes its approach only to take a new, revealing turn towards arguing that our current mediatised culture results in another, related phenomenon. Auslander coins the term ‘multiselfing’, once again following in the footsteps of Goffman, a ‘morphing and switching among identities to fulfill the multiple social roles demanded of us’ (p. 217). His incisive analysis shows how pop stars such as Nicki Minaj and Lady Gaga fulfill these social demands. ‘Gaga asks her fans to identify not with an identity’, Auslander states in the final paragraph of his book, ‘but with the ability to produce ever-changing identities in response to different settings and circumstances. Lady Gaga is a randomised algorithm that continuously generates, on demand and just in time, the personae Stefani Germanotta portrays’ (p. 226).
In addition to the attention Auslander pays to the audience, I would also like to highlight the useful introductions to each of the three sections. Here the author explicitly sets out the functions of the individual chapters, how they relate to one another and their significance in the development of his persona theory. Reminiscent of a director's commentary for a DVD's special features, these personal ‘backstage’ looks are full of eye-openers. Taken as a whole, this thought-provoking volume belongs on the bookshelf (or hard drive) of every researcher interested in musicians as performers. Furthermore, I can attest that this highly engaging and teachable book assists beautifully with effective classroom discussions about music/musicians as performance/performer. These groundbreaking texts truly help in understanding better what happens ‘in concert’, and not only in the commonplace sense of live musical events before an audience. Rather, Auslander provides rare insight into the classical sense, per the Latin ‘concertare’, of how musicians and audiences work, together and against each other, to co-create those very performances and social roles.
