Martin Scherzinger | New York University (original) (raw)

Papers by Martin Scherzinger

Journal of the Royal Musical Association

Michael Gallope’s book Deep Refrains is an in-depth study of the ineffable core of musical experi... more Michael Gallope’s book Deep Refrains is an in-depth study of the ineffable core of musical experience.4 But it engages ineffability without eliminating the pragmatic material of music’s economic, technological and even ethical mediations; and it posits a synergistic relationship between these realms. Gallope casts equal doubt on the determinism that construes music’s ineffability as wholly absorbed in mediation and on the vitalism that construes it as radically open. Framed by and theoretically grounded in the thinking of four twentieth-century philosophers (Ernst Bloch, Theodor W. Adorno, Vladimir Jankélévitch and Gilles Deleuze), the book deftly steers between the Scylla of music’s irreducible sensuous materiality (and its attendant invitation to decipherment) and the Charybdis of its elusive ineffability (and its attendant vanishing act in the face of decipherment). The book begins by reflecting on the fascinations and prohibitions of the harmoniaia in ancient Greek philosophy. A...

Rhythm: Africa and Beyond

This paper is a brief and preliminary sketch culled from a much larger study that describes and d... more This paper is a brief and preliminary sketch culled from a much larger study that describes and defines geometric perspectives of temporal patterning in various musical genres found in southern Africa. Of particular interest for this study is the music of the lamellaphone-type, including that of the njari, the mbira, the matepe, and the kalimba, found in Zimbabwe and Mozambique. This paper will focus on one of these lamellaphones, the mbira dza vadzimu, played by the Zezuru people of Mashonaland East. First, I will introduce and demonstrate some elementary ambiguities of meter-formation in the rhythmic figures of mbira music; second, describe the basic kinesthetic processes that underlie these figures; and third, suggest a conceptual affinity these rhythmic processes have with the cross-penetrating symmetries and near-symmetries that characterize harmonic patterning in these musics. By focusing on rhythmic patterns and their relationship to both kinesthetic motor movements and abstract harmonic ones-effectively oscillating between an understanding of this music as embodied material practice no less than formal conceptualization-this intervention hopes to expand the coordinates of the field of African music theory. While the analyses are largely grounded in a well-established "Western" theory of rhythm and meter, this theory is frequently expanded or revised to capture otherwise unassimilable details of the music. In the final analysis, the point is as much to challenge as to embrace the theory in the context of non-Western modes of music-making. Most musictheoretical literature on mbira music (with a few notable exceptions) limits its analytic findings to general observations. To the extent that music theory is engaged at all, most analyses of traditional African music examine aspects of rhythm alone, such as interlocking performance techniques, asymmetric melodic lines, polyrhythmic interlacing of parts, shifting metric downbeats, and inherent patterns. Indeed, there is an impressive literature on African rhythmic processes; including technical analytic excursions (Locke 1987 and Anku 1992), theories grounded in anthropological narrative (Jones 1959 and Chernoff 1979) and even political critique of the very elevation of rhythmic complexity as a peculiarly African musical trait (Agawu 2003, Scherzinger 2003). For all this methodological richness, the overarching preoccupation with rhythm-figured as an autonomous musical parameter-simultaneously marks a kind of deaf spot in the literature. For example, there is very little scholarly work involving non-rhythmic aspects of African music, such as pitch spaces or pitch processes (melody, harmony, counterpoint, etc.), and still less work on the relation between pitch processes and rhythm. [2] It would be easy to claim, in a quick pseudo-Orientalist way, that this one-sided textual production is simply the ideological legitimization of a kind of racialist 'Africanism'; an exotic invention of rhythmic complexity that maps onto geopolitical zones of economic exclusion and cultural difference. Kofi Agawu, for example, has amply described the ways African rhythm is invented in scholarly discourse, linking this default perspective with an a priori projection of Africa's cultural difference from the West (Agawu 2003, 55-70). Resisting the tendency to keep the African aboriginal in a state of excluded cultural conformity, this position recommends de-exoticizing African cultural practice by emphasizing its points of affinity (instead of difference) with Western practice. This is an important critique, but it bears the marks of another kind of limit in the current scholarly context, which has substantially expanded its horizons. In the last two decades non-Western musics have been demonstrably mainstreamed and canonized in both academic and popular cultural circles in the United States.

Oxford Handbooks Online

This chapter examines the question of musical temporality in broad historical perspective. Throug... more This chapter examines the question of musical temporality in broad historical perspective. Through a series of reflections on the philosophy of time, theories of musical time, and the material history of time in the past 250 years, the chapter outlines the basic temporal antinomies of the West. This modern conception of temporality, broadly construed as a precisely-segmented linear time set against narratives of alternative, cyclical time, is shown to be bound up with the project of colonial expansion. The chapter furthermore argues that the value brought to analyses of global time by new phenomenologies of listening, on the one hand, and by disjunctures and differences of polychronic scale, on the other, are grounded in ab initio exclusions of certain modes of practice and thought. By scrutinizing the double conceptions of rhythm and meter in relation to African musical practice, the chapter suggests an opening for thinking outside of hegemonic time.

New German Critique, 2016

Artistic Citizenship, 2016

Http Dx Doi Org 10 1093 Jrma 126 1 117, Jan 29, 2009

... Indeed, Erlmann increasingly, and with disconcerting ease, invents unwieldy constructions (li... more ... Indeed, Erlmann increasingly, and with disconcerting ease, invents unwieldy constructions (like the generic com-munity of &#x27;black performers at the end of the century&#x27;) as the argument 3 For Nelson Mandela, ed. Jacques Derrida and Mustapha Tlili (New York, 1987). ...

Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2006

A 2006 review of Decentering Music: A Critique of Contemporary Musical Research, by Kevin Korsyn

Current Musicology, May 18, 2015

Current Musicology, 2001

Reviewed by Martin Scherzinger Introduction: A Historical Note Since the invention of aesthetics ... more Reviewed by Martin Scherzinger Introduction: A Historical Note Since the invention of aesthetics in the eighteenth century, philosophers have long taken music as a paradigm case for asserting a realm that is beyond the reach of linguistic signification and implicated instead in an ineffable higher truth about the workings of the world. Whether this interest took the form of Wackenroder's idealism (in which music occupied a pure angelic domain independent of the actual world), or Schopenhauer's endlessly striving Will (to which music bore the closest of all possible analogies), or Nietzsche's Dionysian strain (which represented the rapturous musical frenzy that destroyed the veils of maya and freed us from norms, images, rules and restraint), or Kierkegaard's analysis of the absolutely musical (which best exemplified the highly erotic striving of the pure un mediated life force), music has frequently served as a discursive site for speculation on the limits of philosophy, knowledge, and meaning. A central metaphor for that which resists epistemological certainty, music in philosophical discourse has functioned as a kind of discourse of the unimage, the non-significant, the unsayable par excellence. Less apparent, perhaps, today is the way that this kind of theorizing of fundamental negativity (which came out of German metaphysics) has impacted the current French philosophical, psychoanalytic and literarytheoretical scene. While the explicit reference to music has receded in most post-structuralist writings, the form of the inquiry has not changed much. Like the older figure of music, the operations of deconstruction, for example, mark what is semantically slippery, and puzzle the divide between hardened historical oppositions. Coming out of the Hegelian principle of non-identity, what counts as meaning in the deconstructive

Current Musicology, 2005

was a watershed year in the life of Steve Reich. Following numerous experiments with magnetic tap... more was a watershed year in the life of Steve Reich. Following numerous experiments with magnetic tape, he had, while creating his tape piece It's Gonna Rain, identified a fascinating process that would serve as the basic compositional tool of his output until about 1971, and as a foundational component of his output thereafter. l Reich's preoccupation with processoriented music in turn helped define a musical trend that shifted the standard historical narrative of twentieth-century concert music away from the reigning high modernist serialism of the 1950s toward minimalism. Defenders of the new style emphasize the cultural triumph of minimalism. For Susan McClary, minimalism is "perhaps the single most viable extant strand of the Western art-music tradition;" for K. Robert Schwarz, a specialist in this style, minimalism is "a potent force ... its influence is pervasive and enduring;" and for the composer John Adams, minimalism is "the only really interesting, important stylistic development in the past 30 years" (McClary 2004:289-98; Schwarz 1997:1-17; Adams quoted in Schwarz 1996a:177). These writers often attend to minimalism's programmatic reaction to the perceived structural complexities of high modernism with its ametric rhythms and pervasive intervallic dissonances. In contrast to high modernism, minimalism offered musical structures dearly audible to the listener; its rhythms were pulse-based, often elaborated in the context of extended repetition of short musical figures, and its pitch structures were simple, usually associated with, though not identical to, traditional diatonic constellations. Commentators may differ on the relationship minimalism takes to modernism-McClary argues in terms of a qualified Oedipal "reaction formation" to modernism; Wim Mertens argues in terms of a negative dialectical "final stage" of high modernism-but few commentators fail to situate high modernism as the central referent in describing the emergence of minimalism in music (McClary 2004:292; Mertens 2004:308). Whether the argument hinges on a theory of history beholden to Freud or one beholden to Hegel, modernism under these readings remains minimalism's basic condition of possibility. Most minimalist composers have themselves been outspoken about their aversion to certain forms of modernism, especially institutionalized

The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music, 2004

Critical Interventions, 2012

The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, Volume 1, 2014