Conference CFP: Musical Materialities in the Digital Age (original) (raw)
Related papers
British Journal of Aesthetics 51(1): 13-29., 2011
Very roughly, Musical Materialism is the view that musical works (and other "repeatable" artworks) have more in common, metaphysically speaking, with cats and tables than with numbers and Platonic properties. This view is typically dismissed on three grounds: concrete manifestations of a work are many, while the work is one; works are particularly good and concrete manifestations are particularly bad at surviving the destruction of concrete manifestations; and works differ in important modal ways from their concrete manifestations. I argue that the Musical Materialist has good replies to all of these arguments. Additionally, works bear some hallmarks of the concrete. So we should accept Musical Materialism in place of the view that works are Platonica or special purpose abstracta.
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.
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".
Architectures of Emptiness Musical Sources the Digital Derive and the Senses
With this paper I investigate the relationship between musical sources, modern and postmodern archiving technologies for archiving and repercussions on the sensuous experience of such musical artefacts: how the utilization of physical sources such as books, scores, manuscripts, vinyls and tapes has changed with the advent of digitalisation and online databases; how visual and tactile exposure to physical sources has been drastically modified by what philosopher Vilem Flusser calls ‘technical images’; how distinct and diverse personal relationships with physical sources of input have been progressively neutralised, standardised and perhaps even equalised by the introduction of digital devices, impersonal objects with multifarious performative purposes. Moreover, I examine epistemological and ontological implications of the emergence of contemporary sources of input that arise from programs which are exclusively digital, fully absorbed in the domain of the virtual, existing only in the realm of binary numbers, ephemeral virtualities (engraving and editing software suites for audio and video production, digital photography, design, tridimensional rendering, etc). I will investigate how proliferation of such sources impinges on the domain of the sensuous and on the social fabric, altering our very notion of history, chronology, tradition. Finally I will suggest futurabilities, pathways and methods of study for evaluating musical sources, and in doing so, I bring into play Jorge Luis Borges’s short story The Library of Babel, Elias Canetti’s masterpiece Auto da Fé, and the ancient Chinese divination text I Ching.