The Birth of kd lang’s Hallelujah out of the ‘Spirit of Music’: Performing Desire and ‘Recording Consciousness’ on Facebook and YouTube (original) (raw)

This essay offers a discussion of what musicologists would call k.d. lang’s performance practice not by way of the influence of performance on art on k.d. lang’s musical persona but rather more theoretically in terms of what Nietzsche (similarly technically) named the “spirit of music” using the example of her several interpretation(s) of Leonard Cohen’s composition, Hallelujah. I also discuss, with some necessary reference to Adorno and others, music and the new media in addition to new social styles of interaction, as well as and beyond Adorno, the objectification of women (as opposed to men). In the second half, I further develop the question of what Nietzsche analysed as the role of the chorus and of music in ancient Greek tragedy as well as what he called the “problem” of the artist. See a video version of this lecture: http://digital.library.fordham.edu/cdm4/item\_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/VIDEO&CISOPTR=214