Agency and Domination - MAi A published version

Music and Arts in Action, 2009

Communicative approaches to musical composition and performance promote symbolic dialogue between performers and audiences, and seek to expand agency for all participants. Such approaches include the altering of performance rituals, the destabilizing of the performance space, and the use of interactive compositional structures. This paper explores the relationship of communicative performance practices to the social context in which they are conceived and experienced. How can communicative practices address the issue of domination while remaining truly dialogical? Pierre Bourdieu's conceptions of the habitus and the field of cultural production emphasize the strategic action of agents: agents act in order to maximize real or symbolic capital. Jürgen Habermas readily acknowledges the prevalence of strategic action in social relations and in private speech acts, yet he argues in favor of communicative action as essential to the rehabilitation of the lifeworld in a democratic society. However, since Habermas pays little attention to the social status of speakers, his theory is vulnerable to the charge of being universalist and transcendental. The author argues that communicative performance practices create a dynamic space for the experience of communicative action, conducted through verbal and non-verbal means. Drawing on recent work of New Music New College, the author explains how issues of domination can be made thematic in experimental composition and performance, thus leading to reflexive awareness. In the context of the field of cultural production, such practices take on a strategic function, taking a position in the institutional debates about artistic and social value.

This paper will examine scores which present processes that constitute the composition and prerequisite or cause the formation of temporary or permanent collectivities. Formation of collectivity before or/and during the performance can be traced as common element in compositions such as Burdocks (Christian Wolff, 1971), Sonic Meditations (Pauline Oliveros, 1971), One minute is more than one minute (Porfiriadis, 2011/12). In Burdocks and in One minute is more than one minute, the musicians must decide about the macrostructure and the microstructure of their performance all together (Wolff, Porfiriadis). In the case of a large number of performers, the ensemble may also decide by choosing representatives (Wolff) or by working in smaller groups (Porfiriadis). In Sonic Meditations, Oliveros states that her verbal score is intended for groups whose performers work together for a long time and meet regularly. In all three cases, composition is synonymous with the process. In Wolff’s piece the performer is invited to be in constant and direct contact with her fellow players (through cueing techniques). In Oliveros’s piece s/he is invited to act in an esoteric way (through techniques of meditation) maintaining contact with her fellow players and the environment while in my score the performers are invited to create collectively a specific structure with the material given. Two of the compositions (Oliveiros’s and mine) make use of verbal notation, while Wolff’s composition in addition to verbal notation makes use of graphic notation as well as elements of conventional notation. The musical and social implications of such practices will be explored through the analysis of these three pieces, while the performance of my score will hopefully trigger a conversation on the meaning of composition as a process.

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.

The creative potential and work of the performer in new music extends from the moment of conceptualising a concert to the moment of presenting it on stage and comprises many areas between and around those two points. In this thesis I explore the nature of this activity, from the act of playing itself to the commissioning and creating of new pieces, curatorial and collaborative tasks, and the actual concert presentation. I deliberately include interrelations between performer and music promoters, composers and the audience. This leads me to further areas of investigation, namely the question of the performer's leadership, the charismatic bond with the audience and the creation of what I call "concert aura". I do not strive to offer all-purpose formulae for the "perfect concert" or for the ideal collaboration.

International Journal of Music and Performing Arts, 2014

The alienation of lay audiences from experimental music is broadly assumed today in the academe: composers of such music, it is alleged, address primarily their peers. This problem is symptomatic of the conditions of radical modernity, as analyzed by Jürgen Habermas, who distinguishes between the autonomous productions of expert culture (system) and the everyday experience of lay people (lifeworld). Under such conditions, Habermas advocates communicative action-verbal and nonverbal exchange, oriented toward understanding-as a form of mediation between these two cultural spheres (Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vols. 1 and 2, 1984 and 1987). Recent experimental projects of New Music New College may be understood as musical forms of communicative action. One such project, Hocket Science, was created collaboratively by seven composers, who developed this piece from a basic concept ("mediation") to a finished work for sixteen vocalists. The compositional structure of Hocket Science requires that performers engage in symbolic dialogue, an exchange of musical material that is transformational on the individual and collective level. Audience members participate vicariously in the transformation, and become mobile at key moments in the performance. The work thus addresses the boundaries of autonomous art-the boundary between performer and audience, and between individual and the collective in the compositional process. Hocket Science attempts to open the lifeworld of participants to the insights of "expert culture" by focusing on questions of agency: Who creates? Who participates? Who listens? Who controls the outcome? This article argues for the relevance of Habermas's social theory to contemporary compositional practice. ________________________________________________________________________

2019

Following the radical affordances of the then-recent technologies the microphone and tape, Musique Concrète proposed that all sound could now become music. In that moment, new boundaries in music were crossed, not just in the way theorists and composers acknowledged at the time as a flattening of sonic hierarchies, but also in the explicit revelations of meaning and power embedded in this newly recorded sound world. In arranging music from what I call s-sound for shorthand throughout (pronounced suh-sound), sound made not by musical instruments and voices but from traditionally regarded non-musical material sources or events, we are activating new ways and forms of both composing and hearing such that both the newly audible subject and the listener are implicated directly in the work, a recontextualising of what Barthes calls in his 1985 book T​he Responsibility Forms:​‘recognising oneself in the space’. The listener can no longer be unheard, they have become a collaborator essential to both mining the strata of meaning within, and the procedural functions of the work. Along with the capacity to hear or tell stories through sound, comes an ethical dimension. Who gets to tell whose story? If composers are aware of how audiences are listening to, or missing these meanings, then it follows that this awareness and accompanying power not only interacts with the fabric of the work, but can be a tool for composition itself. What follows is a contextualising of 25 years of practical research that culminated in a book called The Music​. PhD by publication, this thesis accompanies the following works :2​0 Pianos, A Nude, A Week in The Life of a Tree, Chorus, More More More, ONE PIG, ONE ROOM, Recomposed - Mahler’s 10th Symphony, Requiem, Speaker, The End of Silence, The Machines Our Buildings Used to Hear, The Music, The Recording, The Unheard​. This thesis is not intended to be a detailed analysis or exposition of my compositional techniques, or of technologies used. I shall look instead at how I have tried to amplify, construct and examine meaning in my music by using precise s-sound recordings to tell or retell specific stories and negotiate the correspondingly inferred power with musicians, collaborators and audiences. The end point of a music made this way, might well be the “birth of the listener” following the Barthesian death of the composer, and in C​horus​(2016), the final work in the thesis, the listener, as part of a temporary community finally becomes the composer.

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 paper offers a case-specific, critical evaluation of composition and performance made on the basis of devised graphic and action scores. In the presentation, I will be drawing on original scores created and performed collectively during a series of undergraduate University modules and summer workshops convened over the last few years in Greece.

2008

"‘SHUT UP ’N’ PLAY! Negotiating the Musical Work’ is a piece of artistic research that attempts to merge artistic practice, qualitative research methods and critical analysis in a project concerned with contemporary performance practices, and specifically how these practices are created and transmitted in the interaction between composer and performer. By way of a critical reading of the musico-philosophical discussion of the ontology of the musical work and by way of a deconstruction of the concept of musical interpretation I propose a model in which the identity of the musical work is analysed as the result of interaction between multiple agents: composer, performer, instrument, score and electronics, among others. My critique of the debate of authenticity in musical performance leads to the identification of a number of agents associated with the concept of authenticity that also exert their influence in the field of the work. I propose that musical interpretation can be divided into two kinds: analytic interpretation and thinking-through-practice. The former is dependent on language, but also on the abstraction of musical notation. The latter is basically performed by means of action and perception, and is dependent on the perceptual system and how it is attuned to the environment. Building on Gibson’s ecological theory of perception and his concept of affordances, I further elaborate on the various modalities of this second species of musical interpretation out of which, the two main categories are thinking-through-hearing (‘concrete listening’) and thinking-through-performing. ‘The Field of the Musical Work’, is applied to the analysis of a series of projects that I performed together with six composers. These projects were documented on video and this material was further structured according to qualitative research methods. The main topics that emerge in my analysis of the collaborative work are: the impact of the regulative work-concept in contemporary practice and how we can see different kinds of open works emerge; the significance of the interaction between composer and performer and the cultural tools that are used in this dynamic (notation, instrument, electronics but I also discuss changes in the agency of composer and performer, introducing the role of the ‘curator’ and ‘artistic director’; the function of musical interpretation in the practice of both composer and performer; the role of the performer in the transmission of a musical tradition. The main artistic results of the dissertation are two CD’s: Kent Olofsson’s Corde for guitarist and orchestra, recorded with the Gothenburg symphony and Mario Venzago on Phono Suecia and Tales From the North, the complete guitar works of Per Nørgård released on Caprice records."

Fields: journal of Huddersfield student research, 2016

With a view to uncovering the political implications of notational, technological and musical innovation in composer-performer relationships within Western art music, this paper examines three disparate works: Christian Wolff's Duo for Pianists II (1958); Brian Ferneyhough's Unity Capsule (1975); and Georg Hajdu's Schwer… unheimlich Schwer (2009). By first exploring two innovative 20th century works, Duo for Pianists II and Unity Capsule, the paper establishes a framework for a discussion of the political and ethical dimensions of composer-performer relationships in relation to the 21st century innovation manifest in Schwer… unheimlich Schwer (2009). This multidimensional examination draws on Warren's (2014) examination of the relationships between ethics and music, Godlovitch's (1998) philosophy of performance, and research carried out by practitioners such as Couroux (2002), Schick (2006) and Eigenfeldt (2011; 2014). The paper concludes that all three pieces demonstrate the potential for notation to have strong political implications, and that composers are ultimately responsible for the political implications of the performance experience.