Musical Materialism (original) (raw)
Related papers
Sound as Musical Material. Three Approaches to a Material Perspective on Sound and Music
In: Papenburg, Jens, Holger Schulze (Eds.): Sound as Popular Culture. A Research Companion. Cambridge, MA: MIT press 2016, p. 53-64., 2016, 2016
Is music made of elaborated melodic and harmonic structures that must be retraced through conscious listening? Or is music an initiated affective process derived from the forces of (acoustic) vibrations? How we answer these questions about the "primary material of music" is essential for the role that media technology can play in musical contexts. Even if we adopt the Solomonic approach of "on the one hand but on the other," we will usually also make some form of judgment that is informed by musical aesthetic traditions of thought. The paper discusses three approaches to 'material': The Sonic, Traditional Notation and - borrowing some thoughts from Th.W.Adorno - "Musical Material".
New Music and the Crises of Materiality: Sounding Bodies and Objects in Late Modernity
2021
This book explores the transformation of ideas of the material in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century musical composition. New music of this era is argued to reflect a historical moment when the idea of materiality itself is in flux. Engaging with thinkers such as Theodor Adorno, Sara Ahmed, Zygmunt Bauman, Rosi Braidotti, and Timothy Morton, the author considers music's relationship with changing material conditions, from the rise of neo-liberalisms and information technologies to new concepts of the natural world. Drawing on musicology, cultural theory, and philosophy, the author develops a critical understanding of musical bodies, objects, and the environments of their interaction. Music is grasped as something that both registers material changes in society whilst also enabling us to practice materiality differently.
As a composer of music and an art educator, I delved into C. S. Peirce’s theory of semiotics searching for possible connections between both practices and to other arts and disciplines. The application of peircean semiotics to the study of the artistic use of sound has confirmed the inherent interdisciplinary nature of music. Semiotics has provided clear methods to reveal and construct significant relations between artistic sound and other areas of knowledge. What this model offers is a method of observation of the processes of signification in experiences in the artistic use of sound. The model’s first categorical proposition is the recognition of three moments of artistic communication: Reception, Production and Analysis. These describe differentiated participations of interpreters in musical events and rituals. A second set of categories organizes the referential potential of sound, music and musical experiences, and establishes three planes of signification: Temporal, Spectral and Ritual. Both trichotomies respond to an application to music of Peirce’s tri-relative sign unit of Representamen, Object and Interpretant and his phenomenological categories of Quality, Relation and Law. The model takes metaphor, understood by Peirce as a hypoicon, as guiding principle and mediator between the model’s proposed categories.
La Deleuziana, 2019
This article sketches a new image of musical works, situated beyond the «work concept», critically rethinking existing music ontologies, and grounded on Gilles Deleuze's central ontological commitments. After situating the problem (1), the paper discusses current issues in music ontol-ogy (2), explores specific Deleuzian and Deleuzo-Guattarian ontological concepts (3), and argues for a new image of musical works (4), which are more aptly described as assemblages (5), as highly complex, historically constructed multiplicities defined by virtual structures, intensive processes, and actual things.