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E-book Powers of Divergence : An Experimental Approach to Music Performance

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Penilaian

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In approaching this introductory text, I am struck by the difficulty of a begin-ning. When painter Emilio Vedova was teaching at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice and one of his pupils would be paralysed in front of the empty canvas, he would dip a brush in the paint and lash it against the white surface. Was the pupil facing the void, and was Vedova’s gesture interrupting such a void? Massimo Recalcati (2011) suggests the opposite. This gesture looks for a void, it tries to scar the overabundance of images that crowd the canvas, intimidat-ing the pupil and preventing him or her from beginning. What the brushstroke breaks is not a void, but an array of prefigured knowledges, experiences, com-monplaces, memories, modes of thinking, clichés, rules, and vetoes. “The cum-bersome presence of dead signs is never a contingent experience. The white canvas is always full of dead knowledges, of inert elements, of monumental ide-als” (ibid., translation and emphasis mine).A creative act must always start in medias res, from the middle, as a break that looks for its void. The project that this book presents is in the field of artistic research, and thus includes a fundamental creative component. It takes as its field of creativity the performance of Western notated art music. What, then, is the empty, or rather the overfull, “canvas” for a performer approaching a piece of written music? What is the middle that his or her creative act starts from?For the moment, I would like to remain on the literal level of the phrase the performance of written music. “Written music” brings with itself the past, the already codified elements, the stratification of former practices; its “perform-ance” is the reiteration of its life— its future and simultaneously its comple-tion. Thus, the middle I want to and must start from is the—generally over-looked—preposition of. The performance of written music.The canvas of the of, devoid of actual materiality and at the same time bur-dened with the virtual inertia of the past, is the place of a crucial transforma-tion. Through it, the codified scores of the Western tradition are turned in a dimension that differs from them, both materially and operationally—that is to say, in the dimension of sound and gesture. Two different levels are put into correspondence; the performance of written music is thus a matter of semiotics, of representation. How does a system of signs allow a certain sonic and gestural materiality to take place? How is the correspondence between the notated sign and its material enactment constructed through performance? What dictates a resemblance between a score and its performance, given that their inscription occurs through materials and modalities that show no conformity with each other (the first through immaterial symbols and on material visual media; the second in vibratory, haptic, and n-dimensional spatial materialities)?As a team member of the research programme MusicExperiment21 (music-experiment21.eu), of which my own project is part, I have been engaged in the development of notions of “experimentation” with the aim of constituting and theorising new performance practices in the context of Western notated art music. One of the fundamental points of this programme was the move away from musical interpretation, regarded as the still dominant paradigm in the per-formative attitude towards past musical works. Whereas many performers in this musical context consider interpretation as the only possibility for describ-ing their activity,

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

780.72 DER p

Penerbit

Belgium : Leuven University Press., 2017

Deskripsi Fisik

200 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9789461662514

Klasifikasi

780.72

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Musicology

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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