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Abstract: - The goal of this text is to open a path to overcoming stereotypes, to reconsider some ideas and performing methods of the interpretation practice, use of musical texts in original form and present interpretive performance. Power to communicate emotion through music belongs to a creative interpreter, mediator between text and audience, between the message and the world. We light opportunities to participate in individual and collective to the experience of interactions from the interface mediated by the interpreter. Through the Magic of double play, the space of interpretation increases in meaning, conventions, culture. Key-Words: - Interpretation, interface, method, practice, actuality.
Artes. Journal of Musicology, 2018
Musicology, viewed as a general science regarding all the defining elements of music, can approach compositions using hermeneutical methods, both through a critical view on the interpretation, the stage performance of the creative act, and through the subsequent musicological writings, becoming a “meta-interpretation” that requires a thorough exegesis. The couplet hermeneutics-interpretation together with that of compositional concept versus stage production are the ones underlying our research, while hermeneutics is the very art of performing that penetrates the most cryptic elements present in the musical act, viewed from the perspective of the triad creation-interpretation-reception. In an attempt to emphasize the ways in which the composer suggests to the performer certain indications for stage performance, through writing, agogics, dynamics and special sound effects, we intend to study, from the standpoint of the musicologist, the piece 5 tablouri cu umbre(le) 1 by Constantin R...
2017
Ethology is a subfield of Zoology that studies animal behavior, gestures and patterns of expression in order to obtain information about their emotional state. These ideas can be used for the study of emotions evoked by music, in terms of musical listening and/or performance. This work investigates the occurrence of musical meaning generated by the manipulation of sound objects (in terms of expressed or perceived meaning), as well as its following effects in the listeners, such as evoked emotion. This article aims to relate analytical psychology, on symbols and the unconscious mind, with principles of ethology, on animal (including human) communication, in relation to the cognitive, emotional and behavioral processes related to music listening.
Lietuvos muzikologija, 2007
Commonly, music performance is thought of as a one-way system of communication, running from the composer to the listener through the medium of the performer. Each performance is also said to attempt mediating between tradition and innovation, or between ‘objective’ fidelity to the score and ‘subjective’ performative expressiveness. In all cases, the composer’s idea seems to be taken as a kind of absolute, and the performer is supposed to remain as ‘transparent’ as possible – all what matters are composer’s intentions and their effect on the listener. But, if to examine more closely, what and how actually does the performer mediate? The aim of the present article is to pay attention to a specific phenomenon of the music world, namely, the performers of music – the personas and their art. A few interrelated topics are discussed, such as the notion of mediation, as applied to the art of music performance, and different media through which the art of music performance is disseminated; related to that is the consumption and marketing of nowadays’ practices; the author briefly takes a look to the traditions, or schools, which also can tell us certain things about the music performance art; and, finally, the performer’s corporeality – i.e., the signs that are conveyed through the performer’s bodily qualities and actions – is examined. Key-words: performance, mediation, semiotic self, subjectivity, communication, consumer media, corporeality.
This study addresses the need for methodologies that can be used on the comprehension of musical works, with special reference to musical performance.
Musical Signification (ed. by Eero Tarasti), 1995
An attempt at showing how examples from musical practice can be used to elucidate theoretical issues. The theoretical issue in question is the conditions of possibility for the constitution and understanding of meaning in music. The field of practice that will provide examples is the interpretation of baroque music.
Music Theory Online, 2019
In this article, I theorize a new conception of musical meaning, based on J. L. Austin’s theory of performative utterances in his treatise How to Do Things with Words. Austin theorizes language meaning pragmatically: he highlights the manifold ways language performs actions and is used to “do things” in praxis. Austin thereby suggests a new theoretic center for language meaning, an implication largely developed by others after his death. This article theorizes an analogous position that locates musical meaning in the use of music “to do things,” which may include performing actions such as reference and disclosure, but also includes, in a theoretically rigorous fashion, a manifold of other semiotic actions performed by music to apply pressure to its contexts of audition. I argue that while many questions have been asked about meanings of particular examples of music, a more fundamental question has not been addressed adequately: what does meaning mean? Studies of musical meaning, I argue, have systematically undertheorized the ways in which music, as interpretable utterance, can create, transform, maintain, and destroy aspects of the world in which it participates. They have largely presumed that the basic units of sense when it comes to questions of musical meaning consist of various messages, indexes, and references encoded into musical sound and signifiers. Instead, I argue that a considerably more robust analytic takes the basic units of sense to be the various acts that music (in being something interpretable) performs or enacts within its social/situational contexts of occurrence. Ultimately, this article exposes and challenges a deep-seated Western bias towards equating meaning with forms of reference, representation, and disclosure. Through the “performative” theory of musical utterance as efficacious action, it proposes a unified theory of musical meaning that eliminates the gap between musical reference, on the one hand, and musical effects, on the other. It offers a way to understand musical meaning in ways that are deeply contextual (both socially and structurally): imbricated with the human practices that not only produce music but are produced by it in the face of its communicative capacities. I build theoretically with the help of various examples drawn largely from tonal repertoires, and I follow with lengthier analytical vignettes focused on experimental twentieth and twenty-first century works.
The question of musical meaning is one of the great practical and philosophical cruxes of the Western tradition especially since the rise of autonomous instrumental music in the eighteenth century broke the hitherto unquestioned links between musical performance and its verbal texts, and the propagation of the notion of absolute music in the nineteenth century detached music-making from its immediate social contexts. At the same time, however, whether from the viewpoint of what the medievals dubbed musica theoretica, or its less respectable cousin musica practica, the question of what music means, or how it means, paradoxically has been not so much raised as begged. Indeed such are the problems evoked by the notion of musical meaning, and how it relates to musical form, that a recent study explicitly drawing on a social-semiotic model , deliberately declines to use the key social semiotic concept of metafunction in order to analyse various semiotic uses of the modality of sound, including music. van Leeuwen chooses not to adopt the so-called metafunctional hypothesis whereby the expression plane of language is related to its interpretation plane(s), and through them to the social context, in terms of the three abstract generalized functions of ideational, interpersonal and textual meaning, concentrating instead on the materiality of sound, on the one hand, and its ideological implications, on the other. It is interesting to note how he justi es his decision, contrasting his earlier analysis of language and vision with that of sound and music:
2019
Theorists and musicologists have asked what particular musical works mean, what particular musical objects represent, what they narrate or disclose, and how those meanings got there. Recently, some thinkers have jettisoned music-language parallels in favor of investigating music’s ineffability, its sensuous effects, and the materialities of its performances. However, both routes of inquiry, whether sympathetic to the music-language analogy or not, rest on assumptions about the concept of meaning itself. Both typically ground the music-language analogy in the semantic aspects of language meaning—how language repressents, refers to, or discloses the world. If meaning and semantic representation are conflated, music’s efficacy—which exceeds its representational modalities—becomes, dissatisfyingly, the other of its meanings. This project challenges the status of representation in conceptions of the music-language analogy, developing an alternative foundation for understanding musical meaning from philosopher J. L. Austin’s concept of “performative utterances.” Austin and other thinkers in a tradition now called “ordinary language philosophy” rejected the view that language meaning is chiefly a matter of how it represents states of affairs or states of mind—its constative dimension. The performative dimension of language, however, names the ways words and sentences are used to accomplish semiotic actions and produce effects. This concept grounds language meaning in the efficacy of language use in social praxis. In Chapter 1, I develop an analogous theory of musical meaning, grounded in the semiotic actions and effects produced by music as utterance. Music is often said to be, if anything, expressive; but expression—strictly speaking, the mapping of inner content to outer signifying form—is a weak conceptual basis for what we think of when describe music as expressive. Instead, conceiving of music’s meaningfulness in terms of its efficacy as sonic utterance supplies the condition of possibility for musical expression, reference, and disclosure while also eliminating the false dichotomy between music’s meanings and its effects. In Chapters 2 through 4, drawing on fieldwork at European festivals of new music including the Darmstadt Summer Courses and Donaueschinger Musiktage, I explore works by four living composers and sound artists: Michael Beil, Peter Ablinger, Stefan Prins, and Ashley Fure. These works exemplify what I call an aesthetics of efficacy, and their meanings centrally involve the performance of communicative actions such as: the incitement of particular modes of listening, the construction of narrative identities, and the enactment of changed attitudes through musical sound and story. For instance, Ashley Fure’s The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects (2016) is a musical engagement with the problems of the Anthropocene. Through the lens of performative utterance, I characterize it as an ecocritical intervention. Fure’s work creates an abstract narrative that seeks to bring out a sense of the vibrancy and animacy of the non-human objects that star in the piece: vibrating speaker cones, percussion instruments, and elements of the mise-en-scène. Fure aims to incite listeners to leave the concert space with stronger senses of empathy and productive anxiety towards the vibrational events of the Anthropocene, including fracking-induced earthquakes or the calving of glaciers into warming oceans. The encouragement of empathies and incitement of anxieties towards the planetary ecosystem are highly salient aspects of the piece’s meaning, and these are, fundamentally, semiotic actions performed by musical sound. To fully probe performative utterance and understand its value for musical study, we must expand beyond the study of art music to investigate music in contemporary social life. Like scholars who have used Austin’s work to investigate the injurious efficacy of hate speech, I turn to examine the ethico-political stakes of the performative utterance concept, theorizing music’s potential to become injurious utterance. In Chapter 5, I critique tendencies to frame discussions concerning music as violence in materialist terms, and expose some shortcomings of this materialist, vibrational model. In Chapter 6, I conduct an observational cyber-ethnography of web forums for adult entertainers and their patrons, showing how both groups discuss strip club music’s capacity to elicit erotic dance and facilitate forms of sex work that take place in adult entertainment establishments. I argue that, for victims trafficked into strip clubs, music’s efficacy surpasses its prompting and facilitating functions, becoming the semiotic enactment of sexual violence. Music functions contextually to induce behaviors that promote precarity and rob victims of sexual agency, prompting striptease and lap dances as well as the forced solicitation of commercial sex within grossly uneven power differentials. The final chapters offer a corrective to the admittedly attractive view that music is inherently personally and socially therapeutic, arguing that such thinking is ideological and politically inefficacious.
Physics of Life Reviews, 2011
Stefan Koelsch has chosen a hard problem in exploring the responses of listeners to aspects of meaning in western common-practice period tonal-harmonic music. This is a highly culturally-particularized art-music that has accreted strata of discursive significance likely to condition its experience in ways that are intimately bound to the history of western culture. Music rooted in tonal dynamics is interwoven into the fabric of contemporary life in multifarious and disparate strands and in various stylistic manifestations, serving a range of functions from modulation of affective and associative responses in narrative contexts (as in film and advertisements), through framing the timing of joint action (as in dance, or marching in step), through managing and coordinating collective attentional focus and affect (as in singing or playing together), to serving as a focus for subcultural affiliation (as, e.g., in peer-to-peer file-sharing). As an auditory stimulus, it may carry traces of all these functions simultaneously for a listener, and the meanings that it may bear for any individual are likely to be as multifarious as its manifestations and functions.
Phenomenology of musical meaning, 2024
The article deals with the phenomenological analysis of music perception on the material of rock songs. The structure of a song is simpler than the structure of a classical piece of music, but all the results are valid for any music with appropriate complication. “Listening device” – a computer program that translates sounds into musical notation - perceives individual sounds. But the musical consciousness understands the specific musical thought. It groups sounds into motifs and phrases. The concept of musical thought has different interpretations and needs a thorough phenomenological analysis based on Husserl's doctrine of the constitution of sense. F. Tagg introduces the concept of “museme” – a unit of musical meaning. Musemes have meaning only for the understanding consciousness. Musemes of different levels include motifs and phrases, metric signature, rhythm, and the structure of the whole work. In a melody there may be "key sites" in which the concentration of musical thought is maximized. They are constituted by musical consciousness and are largely subjective. The phenomenon of key site is not specific to music; key sites are found in literature and philosophy. Their appearance sheds light on the peculiarities of acts of understanding. The understanding of a musical work takes place in time, and this allows the consciousness to mark out a segment of time, to arrange the intelligible structure in it. A melody is a meaningful whole that has its own logic of unfolding. It encompasses a segment of time and transforms it into something stationary. Melody can be represented in the form of a scheme. The subject of music is the compression of time into such structures. An interesting example of musical perception and understanding is psychedelic rock. When listening to psychedelic music, the constitutive activity of consciousness is reduced and an altered state of consciousness occurs. The horizon of meaning narrows, the protention disappears. Here we should recall the notion of “saturated phenomenon” introduced by J.-L. Marion. The saturated phenomenon does not allow for constitution and assimilation. Psychedelic music modifies the horizons of future meanings. The article concludes with a question about computer music: will it make sense to us? So far there is no unequivocal answer to this question.
This paper outlines a new theory of musical meaning, challenging the centrality of reference and representation in previous conceptualizations of meaning. There is a perplexity to questions of musical meaning. Scholars have asked what particular musical works mean, what particular musical objects represent, and how those meanings got there. Asking these questions, however, presupposes understandings of what meaning is. Hence, a more fundamental question remains: what does meaning mean? But, since questions of meaning always presuppose understandings of meaning, the question " what does meaning mean? " is infected with those very presuppositions. Questioning cannot interrogate that through which it already operates. To avoid this impasse, I construct a performative theory of musical meaning, drawn from J. L. Austin's theory of performative utterances in his treatise, How to Do Things with Words. Austin undertook to radically rethink language meaning by grounding language meaning in the actions that utterances perform, rather than what they represent propositionally. Representing, stating, and declaring, thus become simply a few ways to do things with words. This use-theoretic, actional model of musical meaning grounds music's meaningfulness in how music is used to generate effects, how music's efficacies entail social and imaginative transformations upon its contexts of audition, and how we skillfully comport ourselves to meaningful music around us. Asking the classical questions of what narratives musical works disclose, asking what they reveal about their composers or historical points of origin, and asking what messages music transmits—these are just a few ways of catching music in the act of doing things with sound. Ultimately, a performative, use-theoretic understanding of musical meaning underwrites both the meaningful effects of music, and its representational, referential capacities. I demonstrate by analyzing Manrico's introductory aria " Deserto sulla terra " (hereafter, DST) from Verdi's Il Trovatore, showing how performativity intertwines with otherwise representational logics. DST—an acousmatic song delivered from offstage—materializes Manrico, transforming diegetic potentiality into phenomenal presence. DST is semiotically performative, its meaningfulness inheres in the way it actively " presences " and brings into being the very operatic subjectivity that it otherwise seems merely to disclose.
International Journal of Music Education, 2007
A musical practice may have exclusive meanings shared only by some groups of people within a society. In fact, music has the capacity to create spaces for reserved communication between groups of individuals. Within these ambits, performance activity accompanies more or less articulated forms of thinking of the same performers and parts of competent listeners, since, if nothing else, each musical event is imagined previously and discussed afterwards. This shared knowledge impregnates the concreteness of musical expression, often explaining the variability which is perceptible when listening from outside the group. To investigate this kind of ambit of construction of meanings, it is necessary to try to get as close as possible to the cognitions shared by those who belong to it. To this end, a very significant contribution can come from heuristic approaches based on the strategies of dialogue, above all, negotiated dialogues (and not simple juxtapositions of different opinions) where, on the basis of deep mutual trust, through the intertwining and interaction of different points of view, elements of interpretation emerge for the scholar. This text aims to deal with this, based on a concrete methodological experience.
Routledge eBooks, 2022
The adoption of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis from psychology to consider musical meaning arises from the view of music as a participatory aspect of a lived-in world. Philip Bohlman describes this as the ‘ontology of world music’ and contrasts it with the Western ontology of music where music is treated as if it were an object, an autonomous entity possessing meaning in-and-of-itself. He has suggested that the complex aesthetic embeddedness of world music is radically different from Western music. As an example he describes how the aesthetic power and meaning of sacred music resides in its ability to do something, to effect change, to transform text, narrative and ritual into meaning. (2002: 13). Rather than being satisfied to say that it is a matter of discourse that defines the differences of music’s ‘epistemological status’ and that there are other cultures for which music as an object is foreign, this paper argues for an aspect of musical meaning fundamental to its nature as an experienced phenomenon (the ontology of musical experience if you like). It is the position of this paper that music’s transformational qualities form a significant part of the meaningfulness of all musical experience. And that with appropriate analytic tools and an informed epistemological outlook this kind of meaning might be considered more universally. Perhaps ethnomusicology (or at least Philip Bohlman) deserves some criticism for perceiving itself as something dealing with music as more embedded, as much as musicology does for insufficiently emphasising music as an experienced phenomenon.
NTNU Open Access, 2018
In this artistic research project, I have performed contemporary works and reflected upon my artistic practice in order to make the processes and insights accessible to a wider audience. This is presented in this pdf as a written reflection, as well as the website exposition www.makingsense.no showing a shortened presentation of my artistic research project, with video and sound examples, as well as the three final artistic presentations realized in November 2017. My reflections have been developed from a performer’s perspective; I have worked with both embodied knowing with my instrument and cognitively with interpretation and the performer’s development. I outline, explain and show a means by which this can be realized. In order to do this, I open the space before and after the musical performance through reflection on the complex process of preparing a work for concert: from practice, rehearsals, and musical analysis of the works, to what happens during the performance. I hope to awaken an interest in both performer and listener of contemporary art music with respect to the musician’s role and the psychophysical inner work of the musical performer. I have throughout the project aimed at developing my musical performance and tacit knowledge, broaden and contextualize my artistic research and performances in an international context, and to contribute to new knowledge about interpretation, embodiment and presence from a performer’s perspective. My initial research question and research aims have been guides and sources of motivation throughout my project and have helped me define the parameters of my research. I have built my reflections on and around concepts related to these aims as tools for understanding and artistic development. This project develops strategies for performing contemporary music, strategies that are inspired by rhetoric performance practices, the creation of presence in performing, and how to use such practices to become a freer interpreter of contemporary music. The artistic research project is by nature a multi-faceted endeavour and has created an intriguing laboratory setting in which my contemporary music performance could be continually thought and reworked. The title Making Sense refers to my intention to create an embodied feeling of sense through my performances both for performer and listener, without a logocentric meaning 1) Initial research question: How can I perform contemporary classical music to communicate more directly with the listener, by working with presence as a performer, and using prosody (the melody and rhythm of the language) as an inspiration for performance? My main research aims have been: * to explore different methods for reaching an intensified presence in performing. * to describe the process of learning and performing a musical work – both physically and mentally thus using and documenting a reflective practitioner approach to musical experience. * to create new understandings about practice with particular attention to contemporary music. This artistic research project has been inspired by music- as-speech. I aim to develop a more internally controlled playing, and to use affects as a sort of artistic “raw” material for expression, in other words, to develop “the psychophysical musician”. When I talk about affects I see them as autonomous intensities in the body, independent of our conscious self and happening before our feelings. I think of the embodied affects in the music as being not the actual notes on the score nor the personal feelings of the performer, but rather a use of the raw material in ourselves in the interpretation of the music. Jane O’Dea describes it as: ”[…] not their own personal emotions, but the expressive content enshrined in the score” (O’Dea, 2000, p. 57). As the performer I am not trying to add my feelings to the expressions of the music, but use these embodied affects as a resource in the performance. My writing communicates my reflections on working with artistic development. Language has become a key to communicate the thoughts and processes of a performative inquiry, and gives an explicit verbal account of the implicit knowledge and understanding embodied in artistic practices and products, while at the same time art may escape or go beyond what can be expressed by words and resist (academic) conventions of accountability. In my project, I studied these questions through one performer, myself, and give a reflective account of the lived experience of developing as a performer while broadening my knowledge through artistic research. My study accounts for the specific ways in which meaning is created as interaction between performer, embodiment, and audience, and opens up space for a more subjective type of reflection than traditional scientific research allows for. With this in mind, I could say that I have attempted to explore the world of musical performance rather than explain it.
Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie Sonderausgabe 2021 Musikalische Interpretation als Analyse. Historische, empirische und analytische Annäherungen an Aufführungsstrategien musikalischer Zyklen, 2021
Als Resultat des Forschungsprojekts PETAL (Performing, Experiencing and Theorizing Augmented Listening, 2017-2020) versammelt diese Sonderausgabe der Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie Beiträge, die auf eine Zusammenführung von hermeneutisch-qualitativen und empirisch-quantitativen Methoden der Interpretations-und Performanceforschung abzielen. 1 Mit dem im Titel des Projekts angesprochenen augmented listening wurde eine Formulierung von Nicholas Cook aufgegriffen, dessen 2013 erschienenes Buch Beyond the Score einen wesentlichen Ausgangspunkt der Projektarbeit bildete. Die in diesem Buch in Analogie zu den Methoden des close reading und distant reading in den Literaturwissenschaften eingeführten und ausführlich exemplifizierten Methoden des close listening und distant listening gehen aus Cooks grundlegender Forderung hervor, einerseits die Vorteile von Korpusstudien musikalischer Tonaufnahmen (›distant listening‹) anzuerkennen -insbesondere die Vermeidung tautologischer Forschungsergebnisse, in denen nur das herausgehoben wird, was Forscher*innen in Aufnahmen ›hin-einhören‹. Der dennoch oft begrenzten Aussagekraft solcher Korpusstudien hinsichtlich einzelner interpretatorischer Konzepte und ihrer Einbettung in einen umfassenderen Kontext begegnet Cook andererseits mit dem in der Musikforschung über Analysemethoden von jeher angelegten ›close listening‹, sodass mikro-und makroskopische Perspektiven auf Tonaufnahmen (und damit auf die interpretierten Werke) sich fortgesetzt wechselseitig kommentieren und korrigieren können: »I'd like to recommend the virtues of close listening, allied to notation, pencil and paper«, writes Leech-Wilkinson (2009a: chapter 8, paragraphs 20-21); he goes on to emphasise that it takes practice, but »after a time it's surprising how much detail one can hear, far more than in casual listening«. This is the kind of listening on which Robert Philip's seminal work was based. All the same, close listening has its own drawbacks. Perhaps the most insidious is its malleability: people hear what they expect, or want, to hear. In a research context, that can give rise to the 1 Das Projekt Performing, Experiencing and Theorizing Augmented Listening (1.9.2017-31.8.2020; ) wurde vom österreichischen Wissenschaftsfonds FWF (P30058-G26) gefördert und war an der Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Graz (Kunstuniversität Graz, KUG) lokalisiert. Unter der Projektleitung von Christian Utz arbeiteten Thomas Glaser als Postdoc-Forscher (Senior Scientist) und Majid Motavasseli (1.1.2019-31.8.2020) sowie Laurence Willis (1.9.2017-31.12.2018) als Doktoranden (Universitätsassistenten) in dem Projekt. Die Mitherausgeber*innen dieser Ausgabe, Cosima Linke und Kilian Sprau, waren dem Projekt als Associate Scientists verbunden, wirkten an mehreren Veranstaltungen mit und trugen wesentliche konzeptionelle Überlegungen bei. Weitere wichtige Beiträge zu den Analysen von Tonaufnahmen innerhalb des Projekts wurden von den Doktorand*innen (Universitätsassistent*innen) Petra Zidarić Györek und Tomislav Buzič geleistet. Ein Verzeichnis aller aus dem Projekt hervorgegangenen Publikationen (sämtlich im Open Access verfügbar) bietet die Projektwebseite (). Auch ein Abschlussbericht des Projekts kann über die Projektwebseite abgerufen werden (). Aus dem Projekt hervorgegangene Forschungsdaten sind über ein Github-Repositorium frei verfügbar (). Daneben können auch Partituren mit struktur-und interpretationsanalytischen Annotationen von Arnold Schönbergs Sechs kleinen Klavierstücken op. 19 (1911) und György Kurtágs Kafka-Fragmenten für Sopran und Violine (1985-87) sowie Forschungsdossiers zu Gustav Mahlers Lied von der Erde (1908) und Franz Schuberts Winterreise (1827) im Open Access abgerufen werden (). Der YouTube-Kanal des Projekts findet sich unter .
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