Approaching Completeness (original) (raw)
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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.
This paper presents the final stages of a two-year action research project, where a number of insights into a single recording endeavour have been published along the way (Draper & Emmerson, 2009; Draper, 2010). The music itself dates from 1908, regarded by many as a landmark in the history of European Modernism, with some of the 20th century’s most remarkable composers finding their distinctive voice via seminal works for solo piano. These include Alban Berg’s ‘Sonata Op.1’, Arnold Schoenberg’s 3 ‘Piano Pieces Op.11’, and Béla Bartók’s ‘Bagatelles Op.6’. The works were performed as a centennial celebration in 2008, followed later by studio recordings involving a close collaboration between the authors – one a classical pianist and musicologist, the other a sound producer and electric guitarist. As such, this represents the meeting of two different paradigms in pursuit of a shared understanding of ‘artistic practice as research’ (QCRC, 2010). The recordings were recently released as...
Can the philosophical quest for the essence of music be informed by the transgressive attempts to make music within the means traditionally proper to other temporal arts, such as literature? What can we learn about the essence of music from such hybrids? And are they hybrids at all? Can musical novels and short stories be legitimate objects of scrutiny for the philosopher of music, alongside with symphonies, Lieder, popular songs and jazz standards? Can they count as (qualified, perhaps) instantiations of the musical art, rather than mere representations and descriptions thereof? In my attempt to address these questions in the lights of the contemporary Philosophy of Music on one hand and the Word and Music Studies on the other I interpret Antoni Libera’s 2012 short story Toccata in C Major as a work of textual music. I comment on some heuristic advantages of such well-defended inclusion for the philosophical study of the essence of music.
Transcription, Recording, and Authority in 'Classic' Minimalism
This article considers several prominent pieces of minimalism in their movement from primary sound recording to secondary transcription. In place of the score-based formalism of much musicological scholarship on minimalism, I draw on my own archival work and interviews to consider the frequency of transcriptions of minimalism, as well as the politico-historical aspects of minimalism's development that are elided when the distinction between score and transcription is not taken into account. I argue that defining minimalism in relation to material practices of composing, writing, performing, and listening – rather than to formal features like gradual process, long duration, and diatonicism – helps in defining minimalism as a cohesive field of musical production. Many of the most prominent pieces of minimalist music from the 1960s and 1970s were not originally planned as, or performed from, scores. The composers who would come to be known as minimalists rejected what Tony Conrad later called the 'authoritarian trappings of the score' , instead developing a non-coercive model of authorship that prioritized collaborative rehearsals recorded to magnetic tape in place of writing documents to hand off as delegation to other performers. 1 Performing their own music, and recording it to tape rather than to paper, were both central to the minimalist critique of art music authorship, as traditionally represented by the composer, hunched over a desk, inscribing marks on paper. In several prominent cases examined below, the 'scores' used for contemporary performance and analysis are in fact transcriptions created decades later by performers and scholars eager to engage minimalism as documented art music, often at the request of composers eager to declare sole propriety. Proper attention has not been paid to the authorial and political distinction between scores and transcriptions in historiography on minimalism. In this article, I rely on my own archival work and interviews with transcribers of minimalist works to argue that the absence of scores, and the retroactive creation of transcriptions, draws attention to the authorial politics of writing and listening that led to the music we now call minimalism.