Hearing through Our Eyes: Musical Archives and Authentic Performance (original) (raw)

The Past in Music: Introduction

In this introduction to a selection of case studies on the theme 'the past in music' I offer a few thoughts on the nature of the past and the role of memory in constructing historical narrative, with reference to the way in which these concepts have been theorised by historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and ethnomusicologists. In reviewing the different ways in which echoes of the past can still be heard in the music of the present, I consider the capacity of music to evoke, embody and transform the past and, by so doing, to act as a medium for history and its interpretation.

Reading Early Music Today: Between Reenactment and New Technologies

2017

Since the revival of Historically Informed Performance in the 1960s, the interpretation of Early Music has continuously raised questions many of which remain unanswered. Nevertheless, understanding of earlier practice continues to grow and performers have long surpassed the strict historical urtext approach that initially prevailed, largely due to the growing body of evidence that instrumentalists of earlier times relied heavily on aurally transmitted improvised musical traditions, which can only be re-imagined today. The modern musician must also improvise in order to reconstitute or re-invent missing elements belonging to a long-forgotten tradition. From a philosophical point of view, therefore, the performance of early music today is closely related to hermeneutics, and the multiple questions involved in the interpretative process.

AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF LISTENING: A TEMPORAL STRATOPHONY OF MUSICAL DISCOURSES

This paper discuss the idea of an archaeology of listening. In the same way an archaeologist observes an ancient spoon, or a piece of ceramic and speculates on the possible practices and social behaviors related with that object, we could also imagine, based on certain remains, which were the aural practices of a community, by studying its sound objects and its aural memory devices. Through this dialectic relationship among produced sound and listened sound we could observe, on a historical grid, how our listening is a transformable device and how these transformations occurs –or not- following the structures of the prevaling musical discourses.

THE WAY WE LOOK TO A SONG: Five compositions and the envoicing of musical inheritance

PhD dissertation, UC San Diego, 2022

This dissertation discusses a portfolio of five recent compositions: 'Onomastic Gymnastics' (2019), a three-part contrapuntal song for flexible instrumentation; 'a loose affiliation of alleluias' (2019), a concerto for an instrumental improvisor, three offstage vocalists, and orchestra; 'the way we look to a song' (2020), for three voices; 'Pierre' (2021), an orchestral score for the dance-theater work by Bobbi Jene Smith; and 'the power of moss' (2021), for voice and instrument. In all five works, the singing voice plays a central role: both in the performing musical forces, as well as in the processes by which the works were composed. My discussion of these pieces therefore reflects on the various ways in which my compositional practice navigates between historical knowledge and technique—especially that which guides and shapes my singing voice—and creative agency. Drawing from scholarly frameworks such as Ben Spatz on technique, Carrie Noland on agency, and Diana Taylor on the “scenario” and the “repertoire”, I understand this negotiation of historical knowledge to be neither limiting nor regressive, but rather precisely the means by which creative and artistic agency can be exercised. At the same time, I discuss my critical engagement with historical materials and technique in my compositional practice, which seeks to excavate the socio-political structures within which musical practices resonate, both historically and in the present day. These reflexive efforts to trace and highlight the historical formations which shape and animate my compositional practice I liken to Edward Said’s insistence on making explicit the “affiliations”—between practices, individuals, classes, and formations—which tend to be covered over, but whose excavation is a precondition for political change. All in all, I see this creative practice as contributing to a broader artistic and scholarly current of efforts to challenge the cultural and artistic hegemonies inherited from Eurological classical music, and instead build creative practices out of highly particular, provincial, and personal inflections of our musical inheritances.

Musical Time, Embodied and Reflected

This article, which is a contribution to a Festschrift for Christopher Hasty, develops a view of musical time through the lens provided by recent research in cognitive science, and especially on human memory. It includes analyses of compositions by Toru Takemitsu, and thus makes a pair with my "Remembering Music," which was published in 2012.