Encoding the Archetype: The Cases of Repetition and Contrast in Music (original) (raw)
Related papers
2007
"The essay considers, in a positive light, Ockelford's zygonic theory and its implications as presented in his recent book. An analysis of Mozart's K.333 is discussed in regard to vocabulary, notation, and relations to other analytic theories, such as Schenker's, Schoenberg's, and Hanninen's. Ockelford's approach to atonal music differs from Forte's but introduces an intriguing set of new mathematical measures for atonal pitch sets, which are clarified, formalized, and presented in an appendix to the essay. The second half of the essay delves into metatheoretical issues, regarding perception, cognition: Ockelford critiques Lewin's transformation theory for being insufficiently sensitive to the realities of music perception. Yet Ockelford's critique fails to recognize the broad set of contexts of perception and cognition that Lewin's theory encompasses. Specific details of Lewin's GIS theory together with a survey of views (Korsyn's, Margulis's, Dubiel's) about music perception and cognition illustrate and inform the considerations of the metatheoretical issues that Ockelford raises."
Repetition in Music and Literature
Samuel Beckett, Repetition and Modern Music, 2018
Chapter 2 of my monograph opens out to laterally investigate repetition’s place in music and literature. Here, I offer a survey of repetition theory and explore the differences between the artforms, music and literature, and their traditional tolerances of repetition. I explore how the transmedial (shared) device of repetition is fundamental to both artforms and discuss Deleuzian insights into the impossibility of exact repeats at the reception level.
Repetition as a Principle of Mythological Thinking and Music of the Twentieth Century
Musicologica Brunensia, 2017
Art of the 20th century is characterized by the rise of the mythical thought and transformation of the myth into an artistic creativity. In music we can encounter manifestations of conscious and unconscious neo-mythologism in various forms. The methodological foundations of our text are concepts by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Carl Gustav Jung, Gilles Deleuze or Victoria Adamen-ko. The text focuses on the basic identification of the repetition as a mythological sign and its manifestation in the music of the 20th century (Arnold Schoenberg, George Crumb, minimal music etc.). Constitutive principle of repetition in music is connected with categories such as musical space and time, contrast, difference, musical thought.
Charting the Phenomenology of Music [preprint]
2016
The present paper forms part of a complex research project and is designed to be a chapter in the book based on a closed-reading approach I am conducting in opera semiotics and literary and philosophical anthropology with the aim to provide a series of interpretations of drama and opera of selected operas of Mozart and plays of Shakespeare, inviting Nietzsche and Kierkegaard as our guides. The thorough study of the subject invites comparisons which should lead to new insights into the musical drama, i.e. the way drama is conveyed by the musical form. To quote Osip Mandelstam, "Music is no guest here called in from outside, but an active participant in the debate, or to put it more precisely, the one who promotes discourse”. The term I have coined as the "phenomenology of music” refers to the methodology of outward or perceptible indications depicted (or the depictability of such indications) in form(ation)s and configurations related to and conditioned by the musical expression. The findings presented in this paper are intended to serve as a stepstone for close-reading based analyses of other operas. In the first part of this paper I offer a close-reading analysis of a scene from a Musorgsky opera leading us to identify a "musical trope” – the musical metaphor – which I term as the "musical synecdoche.” Musical tropology, likewise metaphor in language, becomes a key tool in approaching the musical work. One of the characteristic elements in the poetic arsenal of Gogol, a technique termed by Boris Eikhenbaum as the "Gogolian mask,” reappears in Musorgsky's last opera, Khovanshchina, having a musical genre adapt a literary legacy. The second part of the paper approaches the subject in a more pragmatical way, insofar it examines an opera staging set, the Figure of the Child from Andrei Tarkovsky's production of Musorgsky's Boris Godunov, intending to draw attention to the importance of selecting the right tools in designing the visuality of an opera performance.
Back to structures and signs – remarks on the possibilities of structural aesthetics of music
Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology, 2020
Is it possible to talk of mental patterns underlying aesthetic reflections, and has the constant recurrence of particular ideas in the area of aesthetics some deeper explanation? Structural aesthetics of music is an authorial research conception which enables interpretation of phenomena from the area of history of music aesthetics, and in this way provides its systematised picture. The conception uses the ideas of structural linguistics: binary phonological opposition and the historicalliterary process in the approach of Jan Mukařovský. The article also contains an example of using this conception in relation to the aesthetics of antiquity (sophists, Plato, Aristotle), Descartes and impressionism.