Music Between Sounds: Relational Aesthetics The Poetics Of Wandelweiser (original) (raw)
Related papers
Elements, Forms, Behaviours: Music as Definitions of Processes
In this thesis, I seek to explore alternative ways of thinking about sound material and different strategies to treat this material in time, namely by the usage of generative algorithms and a network-inspired data flow. For this purpose, I have designed and implemented a framework that is meant to facilitate this exploration in the context of computer music composition; it is therefore a dissertation concerned with aspects of relationships, inter- dependencies and interactions of sound objects. A detailed account of these processes will be covered along with musical concerns that motivated the creation of the framework. The chosen environment for the implementation of the system is SuperCollider. The thesis will cover as well examples of own compositions made with the framework and a concise analysis of potentials and consequences of these strategies.
Nutida Musik, 2018
Often when a group of people hear a piece of postmodern music, for example Alvin Curran's Vindobona Blues, a common reaction is: even I could have done that. In such situations what usually seems uncontroversial for the person who made the judgment is that she regards herself as competent of producing an object identical to that which is given the situation at hand with regard to the sonorous properties of the object. What is usually neglected is the intentional, theoretical context in which the composer has placed her object with which it is transformed and weaved together into a unit in which perception is understood through conception and vice versa. To reply the person mentioned above with: what do you understand about the given piece?, can equal out a balance between the perceptual and conceptual conditions that have historically determined the identity of a work of music. Why modernists have a difficulty in accepting such an equality is, in my view, because of the ontological expansion of a work of music; to be understood through a diversity of identifying contexts , which does not guarantee the autonomy of a work of music based on either its purely conceptual or purely perceptual self-reflexive conditions. With that being said, it does not necessarily follow a resolution of the final or immanent worth or specific criteria of a work of music. The conception of music today encompasses what can be regarded as categorical errors or paradoxes, such as both dialectical modernistic and culturally relative expressions. To refute the history of the conception of European music would be contradictive, while at the same time, the criteria determining the value of music today are not necessarily identical or dialectical of a given historical epoch. It is against the situation sketched above, which I will refer to below as the cultural and historical ‘inscribedness’ of music, that I consider a pluralism and sensitivity of cultural relativism more apt of understanding music in a wide sense, than the influential dialectic of G. W. F. Hegel. To recall and actualize a given theoretical frame work of a historical epoch to show its relevance today is referred to below as an ‘actualizing act’. My intention with this text is to render an ontological perspective on contemporary music. Oddly enough, given the situation sketched above of perceptual and conceptual unity in contemporary music, there are not only modernists but also contemporary critics and philosophers of music who have made normative claims preferring tonally centered European classical music over serial and atonal music. Roland Barthes approach to understanding music through a hedonistic framework, which is discussed below in chapter two, is in my view problematic because of its primarily perceptual perspective. R. A. Sharpe’s approach of music and language being analogous to each other contrasts with Barthes’ but it is equally problematic because of its predetermined conceptual perspective. Sharpe’s approach is discussed in the third chapter. In the fourth chapter I will give a brief summary of the discussions held, offer a few conclusive remarks as well as my speculative intuition of what the future of ontology of music may concern.
Ontological topics of music composition
Древен Египет, светът на Средиземноморието и Изтока, 2022
Inspired in part by the ancient Egyptian notion of the real in art, Alexandra Fol presents a part of her philosophical theory of music. She differentiates between art and craft, lists their properties, and defines them as ontological imperatives. Fol claim that craft and art can be distinguished most clearly on teleological bases whilst acknowledging that the philosophical distance between the two is measured in a continuüm rather than binary oppositions because of the temporal aspects of the composition, performance and listening processes. She subsequently discusses the manifestation of the ontological imperatives in a musical composition from a semiotic stantpoint. The author explores the nuanced definitions of semiotics and symbolism that invite the semantic separation between them, establishing of the prominence of the former in the realm of ontology and of the latter in the realm of aesthetics. In conclusion, Fol outlines the relevant research, including performance practice and hermeneutics, and defines aesthetics as appreciated cognition.
"It is not a question of junking these concepts, nor do we have the means to do so. Doubtless it is more necessary, from within semiology, to transform concepts, to displace them, to turn them against their presuppositions, to reinscribe them in other chains, and little by little to modify the terrain of our work and thereby produce new configurations" (Derrida 1981:24). Following Derrida, in this paper we hope to reinscribe the familiar musicological concepts of analysis and performance, drawing them into new relationships, in order to turn them against their presuppositions and produce new configurations. Through an exploration of analysis, performance, and images of musical sound, these new configurations highlight surface details and offer an alternative approach to previous analysis and performance paradigms, leading to a reformulation of the concept of the musical “work.”
Musical You - Extrinsic significance in music and the composers relationship with reality
This paper outlines a new basic model of extrinsic significance in music. Simply, a map of how things 'about' or 'from' the world can make their way into pieces of music. It will be founded on the somewhat artificial distinction between two forms of musical reality: 1. Musical experience that exists “without concept, object, purpose” (Dahlhaus, 1991) that is music that is self-referential; that rejects analysis that is based in any way on the external world. 2. Musical experience that exists as a result of it's relationship with reality. Although both of these realities are in operation in every piece of music, the research is particularly concerned with the second definition, which is often given misnomers like “conceptual”, “programmatic” or “extra-musical”. In the paper, it will be stressed that no musical experience ever be dismissed under a term such as “extra-musical”. I will talk about my own work as a composer dealing with referentiality, mimetic behaviour, the movement of thought, self-awareness, irony, critique and many other challenging, world-relating things. I will give many examples of existing music, selected from across history and culture for how clearly they contain a particular worldly trait. For this reason, I hope that the research feels most like a piece of cartography for navigating your way through the world with music, and for navigating your way through music with the world. After describing how things about the world make their way into music, I will briefly offer collected observations and my own personal experiences as to why this might happen in the composer's process. This will be to talk of inspiration as much as technique. I will talk about how my compositional process has become more aware of these pathways, and eventually included their use as part of a new understanding of the material of music.
Are musical works sound structures?
Filozofija i društvo, 2019
This paper is about the dilemma raised against musical ontology by Roger Scruton, in his The Aesthetics of Music: either musical ontology is about certain mind-independent "things" (sound structures) and so music is left out of the picture, or it is about an "intentional object" and so its puzzles are susceptible of an arbitrary answer. I argue the dilemma is merely apparent and deny that musical works can be identified with sound structures, whether or not conceived as abstract entities. The general idea is this: both Platonism and nominalism about musical works are a kind of fetishism: musical works are not "things", in Danto's sense of "mere real things"; they rather involve complex relationships between objects, events, and different kinds of functional properties. For this, I draw on Levinson and Howell's notion of indication, combined with Searle's approach to institutional reality... with a little twist of my own.