Music, In-Between Spaces and the Sonosphere (Or, a Musicologist’s Very Short Introduction to Relational Skills) (original) (raw)
The Science of Music is About Relations
The Science-Music Borderlands: Reckoning with the Past and Imagining the Future, 2023
From "The Science-Music Borderlands: Reckoning with the Past and Imagining the Future", edited by Elizabeth H. Margulis, Psyche Loui, Deirdre Loughridge. MIT Press, 2023. "Researchers using scientific methods and approaches to advance our understanding of music and musicality have not yet grappled with some of the perils that humanistic fields concentrating on music have long articulated. In this edited volume, established and emerging researchers—neuroscientists and cognitive scientists, musicians, historical musicologists, and ethnomusicologists—build bridges between humanistic and scientific approaches to music studies, particularly music psychology. Deftly edited by Elizabeth H. Margulis, Psyche Loui, and Deirdre Loughridge, The Science-Music Borderlands embodies how sustained interaction among disciplines can lead to a richer understanding of musical life." "The essays in this volume provide the scientific study of music with its first major reckoning, exploring the intellectual history of the field and its central debates, while charting a path forward." "The Science-Music Borderlands is essential reading for music scholars from any disciplinary background. It will also interest those working at the intersection of music and science, such as music teachers, performers, composers, and music therapists."
For a Relational Musicology: Music and Interdisciplinarity, Beyond the Practice Turn
Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 2010
What would contemporary music scholarship look like if it was no longer imprinted with the disciplinary assumptions, boundaries and divisions inherited from the last century? This article proposes that a generative model for future music studies would take the form of a relational musicology. The model is drawn from the author's work; but signs of an incipient relational musicology are found scattered across recent research in musicology, ethnomusicology, and jazz and popular music studies. In support of such a development, the article calls for a reconfiguration of the boundaries between the subdisciplines of music study – notably musicology, ethnomusicology, music sociology and popular music studies – so as to render problematic the music/social opposition and achieve a new interdisciplinary settlement, one that launches the study of music onto new epistemological and ontological terrain. In proposing this direction, the article points to the limits of the vision of interdisci...
Intimate Space in Music as a Means of Crystallising Artistic Ideas
BFE/RMA Research Students’ Conference, University of Aberdeen, 2025
The author investigates the issue of the specificity of various types of space in music and the characteristics of their interpenetration, based on the proxemics theory of American anthropologist Edward T. Hall. To describe the hidden rules of communication in different cultures, Hall’s method of experimental sociology becomes the foundational approach for studying intimate space in music. Using the examples of nocturnes by John Field and Frédéric Chopin, the study explores the inner monologue as a means of expressing intimate space in music. As a result, the author concludes that a constitutional principle – the principle of fractality – has been identified for organising intimate space in music. This principle is created based on the communicative archetype of circling, rotating, and the semantic connections between the processes of an individual’s inner life and the natural world.
Music Between Sounds: Relational Aesthetics The Poetics Of Wandelweiser
Introduction, Background, or, How We Arrived Here To work with an ontology of music is to be engaged in a perpetually renewing object and perspectives. Traditionally, music has been regarded as the organization of sound, and implied in this is an organizing subject. We might identify this subject as a performer or composer or producer or any number of cultural roles, but what remains across all of these distinctions is the act of fixing relations between objects so as to create a specific experiential circumstance. Its objects can consist of pitches, melodies, rhythms, and harmonies, but more broadly any events, processes, and concepts recognized ontologically as a single entity. Fixing relations also includes setting them in a state of possibility as opposed to actuality: rather than a musical event happening or not happening, it may happen depending on the immediate circumstances of performance. Referred to as indeterminate, chance, or aleatoric music, this practice opened up inscription and performance into a continuum 1 of potential music, one of the many paradigm shifts that altered art and aesthetics in the twentieth century. Composer Michael Pisaro describes these shifts as "truth procedures," in which a founding event makes recognizable a site of conceptual rupture from which subjects pursue the rupture's widest consequences and implications. 2 Among the truth procedures he recognizes is one he calls the "experimental" in which the musical is no longer necessarily contingent upon a knowable outcome. If any singular piece of music did the most to break down music into this 1 With reference to Adam Harper's conception of musical variables. This idea will return as a system of mapping qualitative points of musical practice.
Proceedings of the 11th Wseas International Conference on Acoustics Music Theory Applications, 2010
Music is traditionally considered as a temporal art. At the same time, a musical work supposes organisation, unity, continuity. These are attributes of spatiality. By consequence, we are talking in music about a special kind of space -not surfaces or volumes, but a metaphorical one, which we call here the virtual musical space. It is important not only to admit its presence among the musical language elements, but especially to comprehend its structure, and its influence in the modern forms of art.
Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, 2014
Ineffability of musical meaning is a frequent theme in music philosophy. However, talk about musical meaning persists and seems to be not only inherently enjoyable and socially acceptable, but also functionally useful. Relying on a phenomenological account of musical meaning combined with a naturalist explanatory attitude, we argue for a novel explanation of how ineffability is a feature of musical meaning and experience and we show why it cannot be remedied by perfecting language or musico-philosophical study. Musical meaning is seen as an experiential phenomenon that consists of layers, some recent, others archaic. As such, musical meaning is strongly characterized by asubjectivity. It is in-between, in a state where the division of subject and object is not yet valid or valid anymore. A naturalistic interplay of experiential layers in music brings about a non-reified dynamics driving for expressions, interpretations, engenderings of (musical) subjects and objects or even for political action. Generally speaking, the inbetweenness of musical meaning can never be universally reified or symbolic nor can it ever be "subjective," "mine" or present "at the origin." In this view, ineffability has two primary reasons. First, the criteria offered for defining musical meaning are often too strict, resulting in untenable pretensions of universality. Second, the processual and relational nature of the in-between keeps meaning in flux; any snapshot creates a new situation and new meanings.