Papers by Kiene Brillenburg Wurth
In histories of pop music, Giorgio Moroder is celebrated as the enabler of electronic dance music... more In histories of pop music, Giorgio Moroder is celebrated as the enabler of electronic dance music (EDM). 1 Moroder is a renowned musician, producer, and since more recently also a DJ who took his road to stardom with memorable albums recorded with Donna Summer in the 1970s. One song, in particular, cemented his fame: 'I Feel Love', co-produced by Pete Bellotte, and co-written by Summer. Soon after its release on 2 July 1977, it became a number one hit in Europe and Australia, while reaching number six in the US charts. Originally never intended as a single, 'I Feel Love' became a queer anthem and the trigger for a new kind of disco, stripped bare to its rhythmical bones and produced almost entirely on the Moog synthesiser (Steingo 2014). Except for a kick drum and Summer's voice, Moroder and Bellotte had used no other acoustic instruments. Thus, they tried to mediate a sound of the future: a sound almost purely electronically generated and seemingly robotic. This sound had not been notated on paper. It had been created and stored electronically without the intervention of a writing hand, with the guidance of a sound engineer (Robert Wedel) aiding the two producers. Taking the genesis of 'I Feel Love' as a case study, I explore the consequences of a new technology-the Moog systems of electronic music modules-to processes of musical creativity. The question I raise is the following: did a departure from paper-based music notation lead to a departure from the regulative musical work, i.e. the work as a secured, printed entity created by a composer, reflecting his/her intentions and unique personality? Did, in other words, the regulative work concept as it had been defined in the Romantic era (Goehr 1989) lose ground when music notation gave way to-what I will here call-music mutation in the electronic age? Using modernist notions and practices of sonic manipulation as a starting point, I define music mutation as a process that enables the alteration and mimicry of sounds and the production of new sounds in time through a reproductive technology. I should note that mutation is still dependent on inscription (see for instance, Magnusson 2019). In mutation, however, such inscription can be said to be read as a code rather than a text; it doesn't represent some kind of ideal object, but sets into motion processes of reproduction and transformation. This process is mutative as it allows for the creation of sounds in a spectrum that can be constantly altered, combined, or adapted. Mutation is a process that blurs the boundaries between creation and reworking-indeed, reframes creation as recycling, mixing, and sampling. Thus, I hypothesise, mutation begs for different notions of musical authorship and creativity than those attached to notation as of the later eighteenth century. I propose distributed creativity as an alternative model. As my case study shows, this shift from personal to distributed creativity was a complicated one. It left an inventive German composer, Eberhard Schoener, in the cold
Parallax, 2014
In this article, I focus on primary entanglements as the co-materialization of the verbal and vis... more In this article, I focus on primary entanglements as the co-materialization of the verbal and visual in contemporary literary handwriting. As we will see, this is a special kind of writing. It is a writing meant to be seen and engaged with as matter. It tends to be non-linear and almost completely illegible. We find such literary handwriting in the work of the French-Canadian book artist Louise Paille who copies or overwrites. Her artistic method is that she copies by hand complete literary works into second-hand books: textbooks, atlases, medical books, or books of literature. Once these literary works have been copied they are no longer (completely) legible, as are the books they have been written into. In this way, I show, by using the method of overwriting, Paille makes literary texts present and absent at once. On the one hand, overwriting literary texts by hand, she makes them materially and visually present as patterns of handwriting; she creates these texts anew as visual patterns. Paille forges a writing to be looked at rather than a writing to be read. Another way of putting this is to say that Paille is creating texts anew as opaque webs, rather than as ‘see-through’ texts: she is weaving text, through a handwriting that cannot be read, as a visual surface that is ‘just’ a surface, rather than a medium for reading. So, on the other hand, this means that literary texts disappear as text in Paille’s work: they appear as visual artwork to disappear as a matter for reading. How should we read this remove of literature? What does the illegible signal in Paille’s project Livres-livres (1993-2004) – books handwritten and transfigured within books – that came into fruition in an age of digitization and information overload? Using Vilem Flusser’s philosophical work on writing alongside Paille, I show how handwriting morphs into visual rhythms and intensity patterns in Livres-livres: rhythms of lines, ink, and colour, and patterns of interferences that record the interlacing of written and printed text. I then argue that these rhythms and patterns materialize as scores for a diffractive reading of a most radical kind. We are not simply reading one text through another, the one tangled in the other. We are reading this entwinement itself as an intra-medial event.
Material Cultures of Music Notation, 2022
In histories of pop music, Giorgio Moroder is celebrated as the enabler of electronic dance music... more In histories of pop music, Giorgio Moroder is celebrated as the enabler of electronic dance music (EDM). 1 Moroder is a renowned musician, producer, and since more recently also a DJ who took his road to stardom with memorable albums recorded with Donna Summer in the 1970s. One song, in particular, cemented his fame: 'I Feel Love', co-produced by Pete Bellotte, and co-written by Summer. Soon after its release on 2 July 1977, it became a number one hit in Europe and Australia, while reaching number six in the US charts. Originally never intended as a single, 'I Feel Love' became a queer anthem and the trigger for a new kind of disco, stripped bare to its rhythmical bones and produced almost entirely on the Moog synthesiser (Steingo 2014). Except for a kick drum and Summer's voice, Moroder and Bellotte had used no other acoustic instruments. Thus, they tried to mediate a sound of the future: a sound almost purely electronically generated and seemingly robotic. This sound had not been notated on paper. It had been created and stored electronically without the intervention of a writing hand, with the guidance of a sound engineer (Robert Wedel) aiding the two producers. Taking the genesis of 'I Feel Love' as a case study, I explore the consequences of a new technology-the Moog systems of electronic music modules-to processes of musical creativity. The question I raise is the following: did a departure from paper-based music notation lead to a departure from the regulative musical work, i.e. the work as a secured, printed entity created by a composer, reflecting his/her intentions and unique personality? Did, in other words, the regulative work concept as it had been defined in the Romantic era (Goehr 1989) lose ground when music notation gave way to-what I will here call-music mutation in the electronic age? Using modernist notions and practices of sonic manipulation as a starting point, I define music mutation as a process that enables the alteration and mimicry of sounds and the production of new sounds in time through a reproductive technology. I should note that mutation is still dependent on inscription (see for instance, Magnusson 2019). In mutation, however, such inscription can be said to be read as a code rather than a text; it doesn't represent some kind of ideal object, but sets into motion processes of reproduction and transformation. This process is mutative as it allows for the creation of sounds in a spectrum that can be constantly altered, combined, or adapted. Mutation is a process that blurs the boundaries between creation and reworking-indeed, reframes creation as recycling, mixing, and sampling. Thus, I hypothesise, mutation begs for different notions of musical authorship and creativity than those attached to notation as of the later eighteenth century. I propose distributed creativity as an alternative model. As my case study shows, this shift from personal to distributed creativity was a complicated one. It left an inventive German composer, Eberhard Schoener, in the cold
Topics in Humor Research, 2015
This article explores Anne Carson's Nox (2010) in the light of remediation. Nox is a book abo... more This article explores Anne Carson's Nox (2010) in the light of remediation. Nox is a book about death and the recording of loss: lost time, a lost brother, and lost presence. It conveys this loss through the logic of hypermediacy and a word-for-word translation of Catullus 101. Nox reworks the materiality of an original notebook, yet hides its paper materiality in the very act of displaying it. It translates every word of Catullus 101 in a separate entry so as to make us aware of the impossibility of a full retrieval of meaning, and ends up making the integral translation entirely illegible. Both hypermediacy and translation, I argue, function as metaphors for the inability of the speaker to represent her deceased brother Michael. Both effectuate a deferral, or screening-out, of presence. This screening out of presence at once affirms the visuality of textuality in Nox: Carson's book revolves around the image of a paper-based text. This dimension of the imaginary in a litera...
The Printed Book in Contemporary American Culture, 2019
Combining a media studies approach with the theoretical framework of new materialism, Kiene Brill... more Combining a media studies approach with the theoretical framework of new materialism, Kiene Brillenburg Wurth probes how Anne Carson’s folded book Nox puts its own mediality on display to reflect on the intertwining of its material and symbolic dimensions. Brillenburg Wurth shows that Carson simulates the hand-crafted authenticity of artist’s books through the use of technologies like Xeroxing and scanning, aesthetic methods like scrap booking and collage, and poetics that combine (auto)biographical writing with translation. Tracing the US avant-garde context in which Roland Barthes’s seminal essay “The Death of the Author” was first published, Brillenburg Wurth explores how book fictions and quasi-artist’s books like Carson’s Nox reintroduce a concern with authorship to contemporary literature while continuing to champion avant-garde practices of depersonalization.
Uploads
Papers by Kiene Brillenburg Wurth