The Birth of kd lang’s Hallelujah out of the ‘Spirit of Music’: Performing Desire and ‘Recording Consciousness’ on Facebook and YouTube (original) (raw)
Related papers
Nietzsche’s Artistic Ideal in Human, All Too Human and the Case of Music
Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, 2021
The aim of this paper is to consider if and how music can satisfy the demands of Nietzsche’s conception of successful art in Human, All Too Human and its two supplements. The two main criteria of his artistic ideal, I argue, are the artist’s successful demonstration of a “dance in chains” and a certain realism in the work’s subject matter. I intend to show that music’s satisfaction of this ideal as a whole hinges on its expressive capacities, which Nietzsche progressively reconsiders in these texts, as well as on how the composers manage them.
Nietzsche and Music: Philosophical Thoughts and Musical Experiments
Nietzsche and Music: Philosophical Thoughts and Musical Experiments, 2022
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was not only a philosopher who loved and wrote about music; he was also a musician, pianist, and composer. In this ground-breaking volume, philosophers, historians, musicians, and musicologists come together to explore Nietzsche’s thought and music in all its complexity. Starting from the role that music played in the formation and articulation of Nietzsche’s thought, as well as the influence that contemporary composers had on him, the essays provide an in-depth analysis of the structural and stylistic aspects of his compositions. The volume highlights the significance of music in Nietzsche’s life and looks deeply at his musical experiments which led to a new and radically different style of composition in relation with his philosophical thought. It also traces the influence that Nietzsche had on many other musicians and musical genres, from Russian composers to current rock music and heavy metal.
2019
Theorists and musicologists have asked what particular musical works mean, what particular musical objects represent, what they narrate or disclose, and how those meanings got there. Recently, some thinkers have jettisoned music-language parallels in favor of investigating music’s ineffability, its sensuous effects, and the materialities of its performances. However, both routes of inquiry, whether sympathetic to the music-language analogy or not, rest on assumptions about the concept of meaning itself. Both typically ground the music-language analogy in the semantic aspects of language meaning—how language repressents, refers to, or discloses the world. If meaning and semantic representation are conflated, music’s efficacy—which exceeds its representational modalities—becomes, dissatisfyingly, the other of its meanings. This project challenges the status of representation in conceptions of the music-language analogy, developing an alternative foundation for understanding musical meaning from philosopher J. L. Austin’s concept of “performative utterances.” Austin and other thinkers in a tradition now called “ordinary language philosophy” rejected the view that language meaning is chiefly a matter of how it represents states of affairs or states of mind—its constative dimension. The performative dimension of language, however, names the ways words and sentences are used to accomplish semiotic actions and produce effects. This concept grounds language meaning in the efficacy of language use in social praxis. In Chapter 1, I develop an analogous theory of musical meaning, grounded in the semiotic actions and effects produced by music as utterance. Music is often said to be, if anything, expressive; but expression—strictly speaking, the mapping of inner content to outer signifying form—is a weak conceptual basis for what we think of when describe music as expressive. Instead, conceiving of music’s meaningfulness in terms of its efficacy as sonic utterance supplies the condition of possibility for musical expression, reference, and disclosure while also eliminating the false dichotomy between music’s meanings and its effects. In Chapters 2 through 4, drawing on fieldwork at European festivals of new music including the Darmstadt Summer Courses and Donaueschinger Musiktage, I explore works by four living composers and sound artists: Michael Beil, Peter Ablinger, Stefan Prins, and Ashley Fure. These works exemplify what I call an aesthetics of efficacy, and their meanings centrally involve the performance of communicative actions such as: the incitement of particular modes of listening, the construction of narrative identities, and the enactment of changed attitudes through musical sound and story. For instance, Ashley Fure’s The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects (2016) is a musical engagement with the problems of the Anthropocene. Through the lens of performative utterance, I characterize it as an ecocritical intervention. Fure’s work creates an abstract narrative that seeks to bring out a sense of the vibrancy and animacy of the non-human objects that star in the piece: vibrating speaker cones, percussion instruments, and elements of the mise-en-scène. Fure aims to incite listeners to leave the concert space with stronger senses of empathy and productive anxiety towards the vibrational events of the Anthropocene, including fracking-induced earthquakes or the calving of glaciers into warming oceans. The encouragement of empathies and incitement of anxieties towards the planetary ecosystem are highly salient aspects of the piece’s meaning, and these are, fundamentally, semiotic actions performed by musical sound. To fully probe performative utterance and understand its value for musical study, we must expand beyond the study of art music to investigate music in contemporary social life. Like scholars who have used Austin’s work to investigate the injurious efficacy of hate speech, I turn to examine the ethico-political stakes of the performative utterance concept, theorizing music’s potential to become injurious utterance. In Chapter 5, I critique tendencies to frame discussions concerning music as violence in materialist terms, and expose some shortcomings of this materialist, vibrational model. In Chapter 6, I conduct an observational cyber-ethnography of web forums for adult entertainers and their patrons, showing how both groups discuss strip club music’s capacity to elicit erotic dance and facilitate forms of sex work that take place in adult entertainment establishments. I argue that, for victims trafficked into strip clubs, music’s efficacy surpasses its prompting and facilitating functions, becoming the semiotic enactment of sexual violence. Music functions contextually to induce behaviors that promote precarity and rob victims of sexual agency, prompting striptease and lap dances as well as the forced solicitation of commercial sex within grossly uneven power differentials. The final chapters offer a corrective to the admittedly attractive view that music is inherently personally and socially therapeutic, arguing that such thinking is ideological and politically inefficacious.
Nietzsche on Music: Perspectives from The Birth of Tragedy
2004
Since the first appearance of The Hirth ofTragedy Ollt ofthe Spirit of Music, Nietzsche has arguably proved to he amongst the most influential intellectuals upon European artistic practice. Indeed, four musicians with strong Nietzschean traces who immediately come to mind are Richard Strauss (Also Sprach Zarathustra, 1895) and Gustav Mahler (Symphony NO.3 in D Minor, 189511896), Frederick Delius (A Mass of Life, 19°4119°5) and Arnold Schoenberg (Der Wanderer in E~'tht Songs, Opus 6, 19°3119°5). Yet this paper is not concerned with the vicissitudes of Nietzsche's influence upon musicians over the last four or five generations, let alone with the influence of a Richard Wagner or a Georges Bizet upon him, nor, for that matter, with his own attempts at composition. The Birth ofTragedy, in common with Nietzsche's other publications, verges upon the potentially intimidating. Even on a cursory reading, it presents its readers with significant problems of how they are to orient ...
" THE CENTRE IS EVERYWHERE " : NIETZSCHE'S OVERCOMING OF MODERNITY THROUGH MUSICAL DISSONANCE
This dissertation argues that musical dissonance is a master metaphor in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche claims that musical dissonance constitutes the “foundations of all existence.” I contend that it forms the foundation of a radical, life-affirming, and dynamic epistemology. Musical dissonance provides Nietzsche with the means to “overcome” the ascetic, life-denying, metaphysical philosophies that he believes have enervated and depleted Western civilization since the advent of Platonic and Judeo-Christian thought. An analysis of Nietzsche’s major works through the lens of musical dissonance reveals that it constitutes a powerful extended metaphor throughout his writings, and inspires his understanding of tragedy, science, eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, the will to power, Bildung, and other concepts. The theoretical approach taken is informed by Arnold Schoenberg’s concept of the “emancipation of the dissonance,” which he claims to be the guiding principle of his twelve-tone system of musical composition. Nietzsche “emancipates” dissonance from the constrictions of metaphysical philosophies––a category that includes modern science in Nietzsche’s outlook––in order to facilitate a complete “revaluation of all values,” a project that Nietzsche outlines in his late works, which I contend involves the continual rethinking of all values with respect to a musical, dissonant epistemology. Musical, dissonant thinking does not rely upon a central authority for deriving truth and meaning, but rather a dynamic and pluralistic method of understanding that is without a unitary, fixed centre. This study demonstrates how Nietzsche’s fascination with musical dissonance in his early texts inspired the “revaluation of all values”––an act that represents the overcoming of modernity––through a close reading of The Birth of Tragedy, The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Ecce Homo. Gilles Deleuze, Claude Lévesque, Sarah Kofman, and Bruce Benson are among the other key thinkers whose works inspire the framework for my analysis. The concluding section explores the far-reaching implications of Nietzsche’s musical, dissonant philosophy and aesthetics in the twentieth century through an exploration of its legacy in the writings of Thomas Mann, Theodor Adorno, and Arnold Schoenberg.
Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture
Music, as sung and listened to, has been described in many a tale as powerful and transformative. Yet, the important question is not so much if that claim is true or whether it may be verified, but what kind of power and transformation are alluded to in those mythical and literary sources? Taking these symbolic claims and elaborating on their possible meaning, alongside thinkers such as Carolyne Abbate or Roland Barthes, proceeds to find ways in which these claims may suggest different roles that music and singing play in human lives. As much as current musicological and anthropological academic narratives point to the power and its negotiation in society, there is more to singing voices' charms than this. The author points to an important transformation that happens when the human existential qualities found in the voice's imperfections (its materiality) are matched with the music's aesthetic qualities (its beauty, sublimity, its symmetry, its impression) to transform the listener and make her listen.
Feeling the Funk: Taking Up Nietzsche’s Prophecy of a Music-Making Philosophy
Insofar as this paper is now returning to Nietzsche’s prophecy of a music-making philosophy, I am, in a sense, with Hegel as my exemplar, working out the preface or preliminaries of Being and Learning after its completion. All work after Being and Learning is a working out of its genre, which is variously called ‘poetic phenomenology,’ ‘hermeneutic phenomenology,’ ‘originary thinking.’ In this paper I am drawing on Nietzsche as a herald of this genre, and offering a piece of the prolegomenon of ‘music-making philosophy.’ The paper culminates with the following: "The blues is a practical pessimism that endures this bad mood, the funk of the passion play that is the hell of other people. As philosophy, specifically, educational philosophy, it is an experiment in the possible ways of not simply surviving, that is sharing of what is, but enduring and thriving through a making of what is not yet; the baking of the bread of life. In sum, the blues in the form of an educational music-making philosophy is both a working out and working with the heat generated from the blood, sweat and tears of the funk of living together with others."