According to Philip Auslander, due to the proliferation and development of sophisticated media techniques, the entire notion of the “live” is now contingent on comparisons to mediated experiences. In this thesis I examine how developments in music and media technology affect how people listen to and perform folk music. My goal was to expand on the concepts of "liveness" and "mediatization" through an analysis of the relationship between the use of media technology and the performance and education of folk music at the Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music.
Overview
This project explores how the rise of digital media reshapes the teaching and learning of folk music. Drawing on 15 in-depth interviews with long-time teachers at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music (OTSFM), I trace how concepts of “liveness” and “mediatization” play out in the classroom.
As both a teacher and a researcher at OTSFM, I occupied a semi-ethnographic position — observing from within while reflecting critically on my own practices. This dual perspective allowed me to capture the lived realities of teaching in a community where tradition and innovation constantly intersect.
With unrivaled reach, YouTube and other digital platforms have transformed how students encounter folk music before they ever set foot in a classroom. At the same time, teachers emphasize that students still seek something irreducibly “live”: the social connection, presence, and ritual of playing together.
Guiding Questions included:
How do teachers integrate (or resist) new technologies in their teaching practice?
How has the classroom experience of teaching folk music changed in the last 15–20 years?
In what ways do digital media and popular music shape students’ expectations and experiences of “live” music?
By situating these questions in the everyday work of OTSFM, this study demonstrates that liveness is not defined by the absence of technology, but by the ways digital tools interact with embodied, social practices of making music together.
Theoretical Foundations
The Frankfurt School scholars were among the first to grapple with how technological reproduction transformed cultural life. Their responses varied. Theodor Adorno saw live performance as the highest form of musical experience and worried that recordings risked standardization and passivity. Walter Benjamin, by contrast, emphasized the democratic potential of reproduction, suggesting that mechanical technologies could erode the aura of elite art and make culture accessible to broader publics. These early debates set the stage for understanding how mediation does not simply document culture, but actively reshapes it.
Within this landscape, “folk” traditions have often been imagined as standing outside mediation — authentic, communal, oral. Yet this image is itself deeply entangled with media history. From Alan Lomax’s field recordings to radio and television broadcasts of folk revivals, mediated technologies have been central to how folk music has been archived, circulated, and reimagined. Folk practice has long been both a response to and a product of media culture.
The concept of mediatization captures this dynamic. Scholars such as Philip Auslander and Paul Sanden argue that there is no pure, unmediated “live” event. Instead, our expectations of live experience are always already shaped by the mediated environments in which we live. Today, this condition has intensified: digital platforms saturate everyday life, providing the frameworks through which audiences and performers alike approach live performance. Jean Baudrillard takes this further, suggesting that contemporary life is so thoroughly mediated that simulation often precedes reality itself — a provocative reminder of how deeply media systems shape the possibilities of cultural experience.
Taken together, these perspectives suggest that to understand liveness in the digital age we must see it not as the opposite of mediation, but as one of its many forms. Liveness is relational, contingent, and plural: it emerges from the interplay of embodied presence, technological systems, and cultural expectation.
Methodology
The Old Town School of Folk Music (OTSFM) provided an ideal setting to explore questions of liveness and mediatization. Founded in 1957, OTSFM has grown into the largest community arts school in the United States, known for its egalitarian ethos and its emphasis on music as a participatory practice. The school has long been a crossroads of tradition and innovation: while rooted in the folk revival’s oral, communal ideals, it has continually adapted to new social and technological contexts. This made it an especially fertile site for investigating how “live” teaching and learning are reframed in a digital environment.
My methodological stance was semi-ethnographic. As a teacher at OTSFM during the research period, I occupied an insider position with access to the everyday rhythms of the school. At the same time, I maintained critical distance by treating my role as a lens through which to observe, record, and analyze practices I was also participating in. This dual role allowed me to reflect on my own experience as part of the ethnographic field while situating it within broader cultural analysis.
The core of the research consisted of open-ended interviews with fifteen long-time teachers, each with more than fifteen years at the school. The conversations focused on their perceptions of liveness, their engagement with new technologies, and their reflections on how students’ expectations had shifted over time. Because the interviews were open-ended, they encouraged teachers to share their experiences in their own terms, often weaving personal histories with pedagogical philosophies.
The data were transcribed and coded using the Constant Comparative Method (CCM), which allowed me to identify recurring patterns and themes across interviews. This process highlighted both points of convergence and areas of divergence in how teachers understood the role of mediation in their practice.
This methodology foregrounds lived experience, narrative, and reflexivity. By situating teacher voices at the center, I was able to trace how technological change is not only theorized abstractly but negotiated in the embodied, social practice of teaching and learning music.
Analysis
The interviews revealed four major themes that illustrate how digital technologies both reshape and reinforce the experience of liveness at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Teachers described how social media and email helped sustain classroom communities beyond their physical walls; how YouTube functioned as a sprawling archive that students increasingly relied upon; how shifts in listening practices and popular culture blurred the boundaries of what counts as “folk”; and how, despite all of these changes, the embodied discipline of practicing and playing together remained central.
What follows are narratives drawn from these themes, paired with teachers’ own reflections and memories. Their voices highlight the ways technology complicates, extends, and sometimes strengthens the live, communal ethos of folk education.
1. Social Media and the Live Community
Teachers repeatedly emphasized that digital tools did not replace live community — they often extended it. Email lists, group correspondence, and shared folders helped students keep in touch between classes, coordinate jams, and circulate song materials. For many, this extension beyond the classroom reinforced the social dimension of learning.
One teacher explained, “Email changed everything. Suddenly you could send sheet music, coordinate rehearsals, keep the momentum going outside of class.” Another reflected more broadly: “People go to OTSFM for human contact, for exchange with others — not just raw technique.”
At the same time, teachers were aware that mediation could only go so far. The energy of sitting in a circle, hearing mistakes and laughter in real time, remained central to the OTSFM experience.
As one put it, “You can share files online, but you can’t share the moment when twenty people strum the same chord and it just clicks.”
2. YouTube: Access, Affect, Archive
YouTube emerged in nearly every interview as a transformative tool. Teachers described it as a sprawling archive, offering students access to rare performances, international traditions, and countless tutorials. This availability shifted the dynamics of the classroom: students often arrived already familiar with specific riffs, arrangements, or songs they wanted to learn.
One teacher captured this change bluntly: “There are a million songs on YouTube. Students come in having already seen someone play the riff they want to learn.”
Others highlighted the benefits, noting that exposure could fuel curiosity and accelerate learning.
“It’s an archive we never had before. You can pull up Lead Belly, you can pull up Dylan, you can pull up something from halfway across the world.”
One quote highlights how teachers and students use YouTube to observe the physical gestures of performance, especially hand movements:
“YouTube allows students to see how people move their hands, how they shift between chords, or how they physically embody rhythm in ways that are impossible to capture in notation.”
Another quote expands on the experience of moving between originals, covers, and live versions, showing how this digital circulation reshapes the folk tradition:
A student might watch the original version of a song, then a dozen covers, and finally a live performance uploaded from someone’s phone. Each viewing creates a new sense of what’s ‘authentic’—the folk process now unfolds through clicks and algorithms rather than campfires.”
But YouTube also raised questions of authority. Teachers noted that not all content was accurate, and that part of their role was helping students navigate the deluge. As one explained,
“YouTube gives you access, but it doesn’t give you context. That’s what we do here — we help students sort through what they’re seeing and hearing.”
3. The Technology of Listening, Tastemaking, and Popular Culture
Beyond platforms, teachers reflected on how digital culture reshaped listening habits and ideas of taste. Students often carried fandoms into the classroom, blurring the line between folk traditions and pop influences. Teachers themselves modeled eclecticism, weaving pop songs into folk repertoires to show continuity across genres.
One teacher emphasized continuity: “The guitar has a back-porch mentality. You show your song, they show theirs — that’s how people have carried music for centuries.”
Another acknowledged the pull of pop culture: “Students want to play what they love, and often that’s not Woody Guthrie. It’s Taylor Swift or The Beatles. So we meet them where they are and show them how folk is always evolving.”
This flexibility was seen not as a threat but as a hallmark of folk practice itself: porous, adaptive, and democratic.
As one teacher put it, “There’s no gatekeeping here. If you can play it, it’s folk.”
4. Practicing, Playing, Listening
If digital tools provided access, teachers stressed that mastery still required embodied repetition. Several emphasized that no amount of online resources could substitute for the act of practicing in the room with others.
“You can’t download practice. It’s about showing up, again and again,” one teacher insisted.
Another noted, “Technology can show you the notes, but it can’t show you how it feels to play them with someone else.”
This tension between speed and patience, immediacy and endurance, was central to their teaching philosophy. In a world of instant downloads and fast-forward culture, the slowness of practice became almost radical.
“Folk music isn’t about perfection,” a teacher reflected. “It’s about listening, adjusting, staying in the moment. That’s something you can’t compress into a clip.”
Discussion
The themes that emerged from teacher interviews at OTSFM resonate strongly with broader theoretical debates about media, technology, and cultural practice. The Frankfurt School scholars were among the first to identify the profound changes brought by mechanical reproduction: Adorno worried that recordings standardized listening, while Benjamin saw the potential for reproduction to democratize access to culture. The teachers at OTSFM echo this ambivalence. They recognize that recordings and digital platforms expose students to a broader archive than ever before, yet they stress that the authority of those recordings must always be placed in context through live teaching and communal practice.
From this perspective, folk music traditions complicate the binary of live versus mediated. Teachers recalled how their own first encounters with folk music came through media — radio, records, television — before being translated into live performance. Mediation was not an obstacle but an entry point. In today’s digital environment, YouTube plays a similar role, serving as an archive and inspiration for students, while teachers help re-situate those mediated fragments within a living tradition.
The concept of mediatization is especially relevant here. Scholars like Philip Auslander and Paul Sanden argue that the “live” is always already framed by media. The teachers’ reflections support this: students arrive with mediated expectations, shaped by recordings and online performances, yet they seek out the unique presence of the classroom. Even Baudrillard’s provocation — that simulations can precede reality — finds echoes in the way YouTube tutorials or popular recordings become the benchmarks against which live performance is judged.
What OTSFM demonstrates is that liveness is not negated by mediation; it is produced through it. The live community extends through social media and email, repertoire expands through YouTube, and listening habits shaped by popular culture feed into folk pedagogy. Yet, at the core, teachers insist that live practice — the slow, embodied work of playing together — remains irreducible. This interplay of mediation and embodiment suggests that liveness today is best understood as a dynamic negotiation, where technology, tradition, and social practice continually shape one another
Types of Context
I delineated three ways that the school offers contexts to the “live” experience: a social context, a traditional context; and a physical, embodied context:
- Historical / Traditional Context: Folk traditions have always been mediated — from Lomax recordings to YouTube archives.
- Social Context: OTSFM fosters a live community where mediation supports participation rather than replaces it.
- Embodied Context: Students develop presence, rhythm, and spontaneity in ways that resist the standardized “authority” of studio recordings.
I conclude that the concept of “liveness,” is in agreement with Sanden’s (2013) redefinition of it: "Liveness is not simply the marked absence of technological mediation, but rather is manifest in a rich number of ways that people perform acts of live human expression within a larger technological context."
Conclusion
The Old Town School of Folk Music shows that liveness in the digital age is not defined by the absence of technology, but by the ways in which mediation and embodiment continually interact. Teachers and students alike navigate an environment saturated by recordings, YouTube clips, and social media, yet the school’s ethos insists on the irreplaceable value of live, communal practice.
By situating folk traditions within a mediated environment rather than outside of it, OTSFM challenges myths of authenticity that often surround folk culture. Instead, the school demonstrates how tradition and innovation are intertwined: teachers draw on archives and digital platforms while fostering spaces of presence, ritual, and collective participation.
In this sense, OTSFM cultivates a plurality of rhythms and temporalities. It resists the authority of studio recordings and the rush of digital culture by sustaining practices that are slow, embodied, and democratic. Folk education here is less about preserving a fixed canon than about opening possibilities — inviting students to listen, play, and create together in ways that are deeply social and continually evolving.
Key Findings
- Reproduction reshapes culture: Echoing Frankfurt School debates, OTSFM teachers recognize both the risks and opportunities of media technologies in shaping listening and learning.
- Folk traditions are mediated: Far from existing outside technology, folk music has always been carried by recordings, broadcasts, and archives. Mediation is part of its history.
- Mediatization frames the live: Students arrive with expectations formed by media — YouTube tutorials, popular recordings — yet they still seek the presence of live, communal experience.
- Digital tools extend community: Email, social media, and shared files sustain class relationships beyond the classroom, strengthening rather than replacing live interaction.
- Practice is irreducible: Despite technological access, teachers stress that learning music remains slow, embodied, and social. “You can’t download practice.”
- Plurality over purity: OTSFM resists myths of authenticity, instead cultivating flexible, democratic practices where tradition and innovation coexist.