What is Slow Music?

On December 10, 1989, a manifesto written by Slow Food movement co-founder Folco Portinari and signed by members from fifteen different countries was circulated to the public:

Our century, which began and has developed under the insignia of industrial civilization, first invented the machine and then took it as its life model.

We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods.

To be worthy of the name, Homo Sapiens should rid himself of speed before it reduces him to a species in danger of extinction.

A firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life.

May suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency.

Our defense should begin at the table with Slow Food.
Let us rediscover the flavors and savors of regional cooking and banish the degrading effects of Fast Food.

In the name of productivity, Fast Life has changed our way of being and threatens our environment and our landscapes. So Slow Food is now the only truly progressive answer.

That is what real culture is all about: developing taste rather than demeaning it. And what better way to set about this than an international exchange of experiences, knowledge, projects?

Slow Food guarantees a better future.

Slow Food is an idea that needs plenty of qualified supporters who can help turn this (slow) motion into an international movement, with the little snail as its symbol.

I would like to extend this opposition between fast and slow to the experience of listening to music. The stakes are not quite so high with listening as they are with ecologies of food and economies of eating, but what is translatable between music and food, between listening and eating, is the line: "May suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency."

My contention is not quite so archaic or Modernist as to postulate a distinction between listening and merely hearing. Nothing of Slow Music will moralize—not on that score, anyway. I would, however, like to put a stress on certain aspects of music listening that seem to have fallen by the wayside as convenience has come to trump all. These aspects include, but are not limited to:

• the relationship between sound and actual, physical space

• the acoustic, physical, and social dimensions of these spaces

• the physical and immaterial mediums (hardware and software) that we use to listen to recorded music

• the ecological and economic lives of the music-object, whether it is a 45 RPM single, a home-recorded cassette, radio broadcast, compact disc, digital music file, streaming audio file, live performance, etc.

The arguments will all come later. For now, I will merely point to stressed terms alongside of which we have encountered the digitization of recorded music—first in the popularization and mass-dissemination of the CD in the mid-1980s and later the proliferation of the mp3 at the end of the '90s. Above all is convenience, but it has taken a number of different forms. The CD came with promises of precision and exactitude; the compact disc does not deteriorate as you play it and, theoretically, the musical performance is perfectly preserved and does not physically deteriorate the way the vinyl record or analog cassette do.^{1Yesterday, a colleague who teaches in my institution's music department pointed out to me: it turns out that, while the CD does not degenerate each time that it is played, it does nonetheless degrade as time passes—irrespective of being played. Which is to say that the sound-data on all CDs will eventually erode into static; how quickly depends on the quality of the disc and the burning process.}

The mp3, on the other hand, offered transitivity. A single digital music file could transcend physical medium (the CD, the CD-R), digital medium (WAV, mp3, FLAC), or interface (computer or portable player; iTunes, web-based player, iPod, etc.) Again, theoretically, the same listening experience could follow you from the clock-radio when you wake up, to the stereo as you eat breakfast, to the car as you drive to work, to the laptop at work, to the iPod as you walk to the food cart for lunch, etc. And underlying all of this is the convenience that the current interface age demands: the same experience, when you want it, where you want it, how you want it.^{2All of these experiences are, of course, actually quite different, both in terms of social form and affective intensity. The writing to come will explore, and ultimately seek to restore, the specificity of our heterogeneous listening experiences.}

Slow Music attempts to return a sense of specificity to listening, to extricate the immaterial and transitive piece of music from the meta-interface. Above all, it pursues a sense of ceremony that now rarely accompanies listening, and with this ceremony material social relations. Against convenience, perhaps difficulty is in order. This is not a jeremiad against iPod; it is a suggestion that making the iPod more difficult might uncover a richness of listening that even the iPod can offer. This, I contend, is the promise of the Slow.

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1. Yesterday, a colleague who teaches in my institution's music department pointed out to me: it turns out that, while the CD does not degenerate each time that it is played, it does nonetheless degrade as time passes—irrespective of being played. Which is to say that the sound-data on all CDs will eventually erode into static; how quickly depends on the quality of the disc and the burning process.

2. All of these experiences are, of course, actually quite different, both in terms of social form and affective intensity. The writing to come will explore, and ultimately seek to restore, the specificity of our heterogeneous listening experiences.