Keir GoGwilt - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Videos by Keir GoGwilt
From a talk at the Indiana University Symposium on Research in Music. I discussed connections bet... more From a talk at the Indiana University Symposium on Research in Music. I discussed connections between Westhoff's Partita in d minor, and Chen's "Study on Westhoff's Partita in d minor."
audio recordings from my album "re: d": https://kgogwilt.bandcamp.com/album/re-d
121 views
Articles by Keir GoGwilt
BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute, Vol. 55, No. 1, 2024, 2024
This article brings together my personal reflections on performing J. S. Bach’s Chaconne from the... more This article brings together my personal reflections on performing J. S. Bach’s Chaconne from the Violin Partita No. 2 in D Minor BWV 1004 in the work of choreographer Bobbi Jene Smith, with critical discussions of the Chaconne’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century pedagogical and reception history. While my performance of Bach’s movement has over the last decade favored a modern, historically informed style, witnessing the emotional and narrative potentials of this choreographed Chaconne prompted me to revisit nineteenth- and twentieth-century editions, recordings, and commentary on the work. I make connections between the physicality of the dancers (Or Schraiber, Yaya Logothetis, and Mouna Soualem), Smith’s choreographic establishment of personal psychology and interpersonal relationships, and Romantic-violinistic ideals of tone as a marker of subjective interiority. In contexts of both dance and violin practice, I point to the ways in which the idealistic potentials of Bach’s music—so lauded in nineteenth- and twentieth-century accounts—are in fact carefully cultivated effects generated by corporeal means. By connecting these pedagogical ideals to my own experiences as a violin student and professional performer, I draw attention to the enduring relevance of these material and pedagogical histories. And, in drawing together Smith’s choreography with contexts of the Chaconne’s generic prehistory, composition, and performances, I advocate for imaginative and interdisciplinary interpretations of Bach’s Chaconne, which nonetheless maintain critical perspectives on the work’s spiritualization and canonization.
Current Musicology, 2021
This article is written from our perspectives as a performer and a composer, focusing on our viol... more This article is written from our perspectives as a performer and a composer, focusing on our violin concerto, “a loose affiliation of alleluias”, which we created and premiered in 2019. Making this concerto was an exercise in excavating the material histories that guide our creative practice. Our purpose in doing so was to work towards a clear and necessarily complex appraisal of how our current practices are motivated by, and reproduce, historically-determined knowledge, authority, and cultural attitudes. We think through our own reproductions of historical knowledge via Ben Spatz’s exegesis of “technique”, and via Edward Said’s notion of “affiliations” as the networks which build up cultural associations and cultural authority. With this theoretical frame, we contextualize some of the musical techniques and tropes engaged in our concerto—for instance polyphony, ornamentation, and the concerto soloist as heroic subject.
We contextualize our reflections next to critical positions staked circumscribed by what Ben Piekut calls “elite avantgardism”—an analytical category which we see ourselves as operating within. We discuss, for instance, the critical gestures of musical modernism which (per Adorno’s analysis) conspicuously arrest and negate historical musical grammars and logics – and yet continue to reproduce its structuring values. In our concluding statements we gesture towards some of the pedagogical implications of this work, considering how creative practice can be leveraged to re-appraise the histories shaping our practices of composition, improvisation, and performance.
Naxos Musicology International, 2019
This essay takes a close look at the work of the little-known eighteenth-century Italian professo... more This essay takes a close look at the work of the little-known eighteenth-century Italian professor, Francesco Galeazzi, whose ‘Art of Playing the Violin’ forms the second part of his four-part Elementi teorico-pratici di musica (Theoretical-Practical Elements of Music, published in 1791/1819). Galeazzi’s art of the violin provides specific examples of the manner in which, as Emily Dolan and John Tresch put it, ‘instruments...have changed their material configuration, their mode of activity, their relations to other objects and people, and their aims’. Within Galeazzi’s treatise, the violin appears as a manipulator of passions, a tool of the trade, and an instrument measuring sound and perception.
Galeazzi takes an expansive view of the art of the violin, addressing its physical, metaphysical, and social components. In each of these domains exists an operative dialectic between disciplinary order and free expression, in one’s body, mind, and in the social dynamics of the rehearsal room or the interpretive process. At stake in this dialectic is the violinist’s ability to consciously mediate between the freedom of the individual and the collective understanding of disciplinary identity.
Thesis Chapters by Keir GoGwilt
UC San Diego, 2021
This dissertation tracks the historical abstraction and dissociation of performing bodies from mu... more This dissertation tracks the historical abstraction and dissociation of performing bodies from musical composition in classical music. I show that while dominant pedagogical traditions have historically distinguished between bodily practice and musical ideation, corporeal performance has always guided the construction of musical thought and creativity. While I attend to the progressive disciplining of bodies through formulaic exercises and regulative canons of musical works, I also draw out the hugely variable historical configurations of performers’ practices and knowledge. Throughout the dissertation I compare historical accounts of performing bodies as measuring sensoria, perceiving subjects, finely-tuned instruments, and generative structures for musical creation. These bodies have historically arbitrated musical aesthetics as both the perception and cognition of tones, and as judgments of taste, beauty, and truth.
The dissertation consists of close-readings of pedagogical treatises, compositions, and recordings of violinists from the mid-18th to the mid-20th centuries. A first glance at this literature unsurprisingly reveals disciplinary programs which reinforce the enduring image of performance as the reproduction (rather than creation) of musical works. Yet a closer reading of these texts, scores, and recordings renders an image of the violinist’s resounding body as a locus of music’s material, social, and intellectual histories.
Within this corpus of violin practice, musical knowledge is developed, suppressed, and resurfaced in elliptical cycles of disciplining and experimentation. In contrast to the predominantly patrilineal trees of violin teachers and their teachers’ teachers used to justify and consolidate pedigree and cultural authority, this genealogy of performance pedagogy attends to the generational cycles of willful amnesia and selective recall characterizing the passage of embodied knowledge. I address the neglected influence of these negotiations of violinistic listening and corporeal practice on familiar histories of musical abstraction.
UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
This essay presents a philosophical account of musical performance within the tradition of Europe... more This essay presents a philosophical account of musical performance within the tradition of European art music. Although the 19th and 20th century formulation of performance as reproduction has been critiqued in recent scholarly texts, I will argue the case that reproduction—when not exclusively conceived of as the reproduction of the musical work—still provides a useful and accurate characterization of the performance process.
The questions that logically follow are “who” and “what” is reproduced? Answering the question of “who,” I will refer to Naomi Cumming’s account of subjectivity as it is maintained in the synthesis of musical signs. Answering the question of “what,” I will diagram the work’s object ontology proposed by Theodor W. Adorno. Having followed these nuanced approaches to the development and maintenance of music’s subjects and objects, I will propose that it would be useful for scholars and musicians to think of templates for musical reproduction. The template concept on the one hand draws attention to the technical and technological nature of performance, the structures of which emerge historically. On the other hand, templates index the subject’s unique cultural position and voice.
To this end, the essay will look at three case studies of templates for performance: Fritz Kreisler’s distinctive lilt (deriving from Viennese Ländler and Waltz rhythms), elements of Jascha Heifetz’s bodily formalism (tracking these specifically from some of his teacher, Leopold Auer’s, pedagogical instructions), and Hilary Hahn’s conformity to a metric and sonic consistency as it appears represented in notation.
BOOKS by Keir GoGwilt
Deleuze’s and Guattari’s philosophy in the field of artistic research Gilles Deleuze’s intriguin... more Deleuze’s and Guattari’s philosophy in the field of artistic research
Gilles Deleuze’s intriguing concept of the dark precursor refers to intensive processes of energetic flows passing between fields of different potentials. Fleetingly used in Difference and Repetition, it remained underexplored in Deleuze’s subsequent work. In this collection of essays numerous contributors offer perspectives on Deleuze’s concept of the dark precursor as it affects artistic research, providing a wide-ranging panorama on the intersection between music, art, philosophy, and scholarship.
The forty-eight chapters in this publication present a kaleidoscopic view of different fields of knowledge and artistic practices, exposing for the first time the diversity and richness of a world situated between artistic research and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Within different understandings of artistic research, the authors—composers, architects, performers, philosophers, sculptors, film-makers, painters, writers, and activists—map practices and invent concepts, contributing to a creative expansion of horizons, materials, and methodologies.
Contributors
VOLUME 1: Paulo de Assis, Arno Böhler, Edward Campbell, Diego Castro-Magas, Pascale Criton, Zornitsa Dimitrova, Lois Fitch, Mike Fletcher, Paolo Galli, Lindsay Gianoukas, Keir GoGwilt, Oleg Lebedev, Jimmie LeBlanc, Nicolas Marty, Frédéric Mathevet, Vincent Meelberg, Catarina Pombo Nabais, Tero Nauha, Gabriel Paiuk, Martin Scherzinger, Einar Torfi Einarsson, Steve Tromans, Toshiya Ueno, Susanne Valerie, Audronė Žukauskaitė
VOLUME 2: Éric Alliez, Manola Antonioli, Jūratė Baranova, Zsuzsa Baross, Anna Barseghian, Ian Buchanan, Elena del Río, Luis de Miranda, Lucia D’Errico, Lilija Duoblienė, Adreis Echzehn, Jae Emerling, Verina Gfader, Ronny Hardliz, Rahma Khazam, Stefan Kristensen, Erin Manning, John Miers, Elfie Miklautz, Marc Ngui, Andreia Oliveira, Federica Pallaver, Andrej Radman, Felix Rebolledo, Anne Sauvagnargues, Janae Sholtz, Mhairi Vari, Mick Wilson, Elisabet Yanagisawa
With support from
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant agreement n° 313419.
BOOKS (Edited) by Keir GoGwilt
Deleuze’s and Guattari’s philosophy in the field of artistic research Gilles Deleuze’s intriguin... more Deleuze’s and Guattari’s philosophy in the field of artistic research
Gilles Deleuze’s intriguing concept of the dark precursor refers to intensive processes of energetic flows passing between fields of different potentials. Fleetingly used in Difference and Repetition, it remained underexplored in Deleuze’s subsequent work. In this collection of essays numerous contributors offer perspectives on Deleuze’s concept of the dark precursor as it affects artistic research, providing a wide-ranging panorama on the intersection between music, art, philosophy, and scholarship.
The forty-eight chapters in this publication present a kaleidoscopic view of different fields of knowledge and artistic practices, exposing for the first time the diversity and richness of a world situated between artistic research and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Within different understandings of artistic research, the authors—composers, architects, performers, philosophers, sculptors, film-makers, painters, writers, and activists—map practices and invent concepts, contributing to a creative expansion of horizons, materials, and methodologies.
Contributors
VOLUME 1: Paulo de Assis, Arno Böhler, Edward Campbell, Diego Castro-Magas, Pascale Criton, Zornitsa Dimitrova, Lois Fitch, Mike Fletcher, Paolo Galli, Lindsay Gianoukas, Keir GoGwilt, Oleg Lebedev, Jimmie LeBlanc, Nicolas Marty, Frédéric Mathevet, Vincent Meelberg, Catarina Pombo Nabais, Tero Nauha, Gabriel Paiuk, Martin Scherzinger, Einar Torfi Einarsson, Steve Tromans, Toshiya Ueno, Susanne Valerie, Audronė Žukauskaitė
VOLUME 2: Éric Alliez, Manola Antonioli, Jūratė Baranova, Zsuzsa Baross, Anna Barseghian, Ian Buchanan, Elena del Río, Luis de Miranda, Lucia D’Errico, Lilija Duoblienė, Adreis Echzehn, Jae Emerling, Verina Gfader, Ronny Hardliz, Rahma Khazam, Stefan Kristensen, Erin Manning, John Miers, Elfie Miklautz, Marc Ngui, Andreia Oliveira, Federica Pallaver, Andrej Radman, Felix Rebolledo, Anne Sauvagnargues, Janae Sholtz, Mhairi Vari, Mick Wilson, Elisabet Yanagisawa
With support from
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant agreement n° 313419.
Papers by Keir GoGwilt
Current Musicology
This article is written from our perspectives as a performer and a composer, focusing on our viol... more This article is written from our perspectives as a performer and a composer, focusing on our violin concerto, “a loose affiliation of alleluias”, which we created and premiered in 2019. Making this concerto was an exercise in excavating the material histories that guide our creative practice. Our purpose in doing so was to work towards a clear and necessarily complex appraisal of how our current practices are motivated by, and reproduce, historically-determined knowledge, authority, and cultural attitudes. We think through our own reproductions of historical knowledge via Ben Spatz’s exegesis of “technique”, and via Edward Said’s notion of “affiliations” as the networks which build up cultural associations and cultural authority. With this theoretical frame, we contextualize some of the musical techniques and tropes engaged in our concerto—for instance polyphony, ornamentation, and the concerto soloist as heroic subject. We contextualize our reflections next to critical positions s...
From a talk at the Indiana University Symposium on Research in Music. I discussed connections bet... more From a talk at the Indiana University Symposium on Research in Music. I discussed connections between Westhoff's Partita in d minor, and Chen's "Study on Westhoff's Partita in d minor."
audio recordings from my album "re: d": https://kgogwilt.bandcamp.com/album/re-d
121 views
BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute, Vol. 55, No. 1, 2024, 2024
This article brings together my personal reflections on performing J. S. Bach’s Chaconne from the... more This article brings together my personal reflections on performing J. S. Bach’s Chaconne from the Violin Partita No. 2 in D Minor BWV 1004 in the work of choreographer Bobbi Jene Smith, with critical discussions of the Chaconne’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century pedagogical and reception history. While my performance of Bach’s movement has over the last decade favored a modern, historically informed style, witnessing the emotional and narrative potentials of this choreographed Chaconne prompted me to revisit nineteenth- and twentieth-century editions, recordings, and commentary on the work. I make connections between the physicality of the dancers (Or Schraiber, Yaya Logothetis, and Mouna Soualem), Smith’s choreographic establishment of personal psychology and interpersonal relationships, and Romantic-violinistic ideals of tone as a marker of subjective interiority. In contexts of both dance and violin practice, I point to the ways in which the idealistic potentials of Bach’s music—so lauded in nineteenth- and twentieth-century accounts—are in fact carefully cultivated effects generated by corporeal means. By connecting these pedagogical ideals to my own experiences as a violin student and professional performer, I draw attention to the enduring relevance of these material and pedagogical histories. And, in drawing together Smith’s choreography with contexts of the Chaconne’s generic prehistory, composition, and performances, I advocate for imaginative and interdisciplinary interpretations of Bach’s Chaconne, which nonetheless maintain critical perspectives on the work’s spiritualization and canonization.
Current Musicology, 2021
This article is written from our perspectives as a performer and a composer, focusing on our viol... more This article is written from our perspectives as a performer and a composer, focusing on our violin concerto, “a loose affiliation of alleluias”, which we created and premiered in 2019. Making this concerto was an exercise in excavating the material histories that guide our creative practice. Our purpose in doing so was to work towards a clear and necessarily complex appraisal of how our current practices are motivated by, and reproduce, historically-determined knowledge, authority, and cultural attitudes. We think through our own reproductions of historical knowledge via Ben Spatz’s exegesis of “technique”, and via Edward Said’s notion of “affiliations” as the networks which build up cultural associations and cultural authority. With this theoretical frame, we contextualize some of the musical techniques and tropes engaged in our concerto—for instance polyphony, ornamentation, and the concerto soloist as heroic subject.
We contextualize our reflections next to critical positions staked circumscribed by what Ben Piekut calls “elite avantgardism”—an analytical category which we see ourselves as operating within. We discuss, for instance, the critical gestures of musical modernism which (per Adorno’s analysis) conspicuously arrest and negate historical musical grammars and logics – and yet continue to reproduce its structuring values. In our concluding statements we gesture towards some of the pedagogical implications of this work, considering how creative practice can be leveraged to re-appraise the histories shaping our practices of composition, improvisation, and performance.
Naxos Musicology International, 2019
This essay takes a close look at the work of the little-known eighteenth-century Italian professo... more This essay takes a close look at the work of the little-known eighteenth-century Italian professor, Francesco Galeazzi, whose ‘Art of Playing the Violin’ forms the second part of his four-part Elementi teorico-pratici di musica (Theoretical-Practical Elements of Music, published in 1791/1819). Galeazzi’s art of the violin provides specific examples of the manner in which, as Emily Dolan and John Tresch put it, ‘instruments...have changed their material configuration, their mode of activity, their relations to other objects and people, and their aims’. Within Galeazzi’s treatise, the violin appears as a manipulator of passions, a tool of the trade, and an instrument measuring sound and perception.
Galeazzi takes an expansive view of the art of the violin, addressing its physical, metaphysical, and social components. In each of these domains exists an operative dialectic between disciplinary order and free expression, in one’s body, mind, and in the social dynamics of the rehearsal room or the interpretive process. At stake in this dialectic is the violinist’s ability to consciously mediate between the freedom of the individual and the collective understanding of disciplinary identity.
UC San Diego, 2021
This dissertation tracks the historical abstraction and dissociation of performing bodies from mu... more This dissertation tracks the historical abstraction and dissociation of performing bodies from musical composition in classical music. I show that while dominant pedagogical traditions have historically distinguished between bodily practice and musical ideation, corporeal performance has always guided the construction of musical thought and creativity. While I attend to the progressive disciplining of bodies through formulaic exercises and regulative canons of musical works, I also draw out the hugely variable historical configurations of performers’ practices and knowledge. Throughout the dissertation I compare historical accounts of performing bodies as measuring sensoria, perceiving subjects, finely-tuned instruments, and generative structures for musical creation. These bodies have historically arbitrated musical aesthetics as both the perception and cognition of tones, and as judgments of taste, beauty, and truth.
The dissertation consists of close-readings of pedagogical treatises, compositions, and recordings of violinists from the mid-18th to the mid-20th centuries. A first glance at this literature unsurprisingly reveals disciplinary programs which reinforce the enduring image of performance as the reproduction (rather than creation) of musical works. Yet a closer reading of these texts, scores, and recordings renders an image of the violinist’s resounding body as a locus of music’s material, social, and intellectual histories.
Within this corpus of violin practice, musical knowledge is developed, suppressed, and resurfaced in elliptical cycles of disciplining and experimentation. In contrast to the predominantly patrilineal trees of violin teachers and their teachers’ teachers used to justify and consolidate pedigree and cultural authority, this genealogy of performance pedagogy attends to the generational cycles of willful amnesia and selective recall characterizing the passage of embodied knowledge. I address the neglected influence of these negotiations of violinistic listening and corporeal practice on familiar histories of musical abstraction.
UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
This essay presents a philosophical account of musical performance within the tradition of Europe... more This essay presents a philosophical account of musical performance within the tradition of European art music. Although the 19th and 20th century formulation of performance as reproduction has been critiqued in recent scholarly texts, I will argue the case that reproduction—when not exclusively conceived of as the reproduction of the musical work—still provides a useful and accurate characterization of the performance process.
The questions that logically follow are “who” and “what” is reproduced? Answering the question of “who,” I will refer to Naomi Cumming’s account of subjectivity as it is maintained in the synthesis of musical signs. Answering the question of “what,” I will diagram the work’s object ontology proposed by Theodor W. Adorno. Having followed these nuanced approaches to the development and maintenance of music’s subjects and objects, I will propose that it would be useful for scholars and musicians to think of templates for musical reproduction. The template concept on the one hand draws attention to the technical and technological nature of performance, the structures of which emerge historically. On the other hand, templates index the subject’s unique cultural position and voice.
To this end, the essay will look at three case studies of templates for performance: Fritz Kreisler’s distinctive lilt (deriving from Viennese Ländler and Waltz rhythms), elements of Jascha Heifetz’s bodily formalism (tracking these specifically from some of his teacher, Leopold Auer’s, pedagogical instructions), and Hilary Hahn’s conformity to a metric and sonic consistency as it appears represented in notation.
Deleuze’s and Guattari’s philosophy in the field of artistic research Gilles Deleuze’s intriguin... more Deleuze’s and Guattari’s philosophy in the field of artistic research
Gilles Deleuze’s intriguing concept of the dark precursor refers to intensive processes of energetic flows passing between fields of different potentials. Fleetingly used in Difference and Repetition, it remained underexplored in Deleuze’s subsequent work. In this collection of essays numerous contributors offer perspectives on Deleuze’s concept of the dark precursor as it affects artistic research, providing a wide-ranging panorama on the intersection between music, art, philosophy, and scholarship.
The forty-eight chapters in this publication present a kaleidoscopic view of different fields of knowledge and artistic practices, exposing for the first time the diversity and richness of a world situated between artistic research and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Within different understandings of artistic research, the authors—composers, architects, performers, philosophers, sculptors, film-makers, painters, writers, and activists—map practices and invent concepts, contributing to a creative expansion of horizons, materials, and methodologies.
Contributors
VOLUME 1: Paulo de Assis, Arno Böhler, Edward Campbell, Diego Castro-Magas, Pascale Criton, Zornitsa Dimitrova, Lois Fitch, Mike Fletcher, Paolo Galli, Lindsay Gianoukas, Keir GoGwilt, Oleg Lebedev, Jimmie LeBlanc, Nicolas Marty, Frédéric Mathevet, Vincent Meelberg, Catarina Pombo Nabais, Tero Nauha, Gabriel Paiuk, Martin Scherzinger, Einar Torfi Einarsson, Steve Tromans, Toshiya Ueno, Susanne Valerie, Audronė Žukauskaitė
VOLUME 2: Éric Alliez, Manola Antonioli, Jūratė Baranova, Zsuzsa Baross, Anna Barseghian, Ian Buchanan, Elena del Río, Luis de Miranda, Lucia D’Errico, Lilija Duoblienė, Adreis Echzehn, Jae Emerling, Verina Gfader, Ronny Hardliz, Rahma Khazam, Stefan Kristensen, Erin Manning, John Miers, Elfie Miklautz, Marc Ngui, Andreia Oliveira, Federica Pallaver, Andrej Radman, Felix Rebolledo, Anne Sauvagnargues, Janae Sholtz, Mhairi Vari, Mick Wilson, Elisabet Yanagisawa
With support from
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant agreement n° 313419.
Deleuze’s and Guattari’s philosophy in the field of artistic research Gilles Deleuze’s intriguin... more Deleuze’s and Guattari’s philosophy in the field of artistic research
Gilles Deleuze’s intriguing concept of the dark precursor refers to intensive processes of energetic flows passing between fields of different potentials. Fleetingly used in Difference and Repetition, it remained underexplored in Deleuze’s subsequent work. In this collection of essays numerous contributors offer perspectives on Deleuze’s concept of the dark precursor as it affects artistic research, providing a wide-ranging panorama on the intersection between music, art, philosophy, and scholarship.
The forty-eight chapters in this publication present a kaleidoscopic view of different fields of knowledge and artistic practices, exposing for the first time the diversity and richness of a world situated between artistic research and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Within different understandings of artistic research, the authors—composers, architects, performers, philosophers, sculptors, film-makers, painters, writers, and activists—map practices and invent concepts, contributing to a creative expansion of horizons, materials, and methodologies.
Contributors
VOLUME 1: Paulo de Assis, Arno Böhler, Edward Campbell, Diego Castro-Magas, Pascale Criton, Zornitsa Dimitrova, Lois Fitch, Mike Fletcher, Paolo Galli, Lindsay Gianoukas, Keir GoGwilt, Oleg Lebedev, Jimmie LeBlanc, Nicolas Marty, Frédéric Mathevet, Vincent Meelberg, Catarina Pombo Nabais, Tero Nauha, Gabriel Paiuk, Martin Scherzinger, Einar Torfi Einarsson, Steve Tromans, Toshiya Ueno, Susanne Valerie, Audronė Žukauskaitė
VOLUME 2: Éric Alliez, Manola Antonioli, Jūratė Baranova, Zsuzsa Baross, Anna Barseghian, Ian Buchanan, Elena del Río, Luis de Miranda, Lucia D’Errico, Lilija Duoblienė, Adreis Echzehn, Jae Emerling, Verina Gfader, Ronny Hardliz, Rahma Khazam, Stefan Kristensen, Erin Manning, John Miers, Elfie Miklautz, Marc Ngui, Andreia Oliveira, Federica Pallaver, Andrej Radman, Felix Rebolledo, Anne Sauvagnargues, Janae Sholtz, Mhairi Vari, Mick Wilson, Elisabet Yanagisawa
With support from
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant agreement n° 313419.
Current Musicology
This article is written from our perspectives as a performer and a composer, focusing on our viol... more This article is written from our perspectives as a performer and a composer, focusing on our violin concerto, “a loose affiliation of alleluias”, which we created and premiered in 2019. Making this concerto was an exercise in excavating the material histories that guide our creative practice. Our purpose in doing so was to work towards a clear and necessarily complex appraisal of how our current practices are motivated by, and reproduce, historically-determined knowledge, authority, and cultural attitudes. We think through our own reproductions of historical knowledge via Ben Spatz’s exegesis of “technique”, and via Edward Said’s notion of “affiliations” as the networks which build up cultural associations and cultural authority. With this theoretical frame, we contextualize some of the musical techniques and tropes engaged in our concerto—for instance polyphony, ornamentation, and the concerto soloist as heroic subject. We contextualize our reflections next to critical positions s...