Pub Date : 2022-07-04DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2087390
Anna Schürmer
Social distancing is a central (un)word of the pandemic year 2020. Now, music culture thrives on performative ‘liveness’—even in classical music, where live experience has become the core of the musical artwork in the age of its mechanical reproduction. At the same time, the history of music can be read as a history of the dissolution of boundaries: from the body (voice), to mechanical instruments, to electronic extensions. Accelerated by regulations in response to the COVID-19 crisis, music culture passes another media transformation, entering new virtual stages. In fact, crisis always implies changes and chances too: economists call it ‘creative destruction’, artists call it innovation. And indeed, ‘social distancing’ in interaction with accelerated digitalisation also holds media-aesthetic potential. With the support of new media, and this is the hypothesis of this essay, the contemporary music scene in particular can form new dramatic forms that go far beyond the classical one-way stream: by enabling virtual participation instead of physical co-presence.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2087392
J. Freitas
While an image may be worth a thousand words, a meme can be worth much more. From politics to videos, games to social media, memes are an integral part of today’s online communication and content production in the paradigm of participation culture that is prevalent on the internet and in society. By looking at memes as a socially constructed and intertextual discourse which represents different voices, perspectives, and creative insights, these cultural units are also a reflection of how cybercommunities think about, circulate, and imbue content with meaning in their everyday lives. Among many varieties of meme categories, music plays an important role in the production and consolidation of this online dimension, especially on YouTube and other social media. From rock to classical music, most music genres are featured either in static or audiovisual memes, except for one (large) period of music that is commonly referred to as ‘modern’ music. Despite niche and specialised meme pages, groups and forums related to contemporary music, this broad category is quite overlooked by YouTube compilations, social media featuring classical music, and other online spaces, thus mixing and confusing repertoires and stereotypes. With recurrent tropes regarding gender, power, and aesthetics that can be found either in pages dedicated to western contemporary art music and on other generalised platforms labelling it as ‘ugly’, ‘male’ or ‘white’, this paper aims to examine how the musical dimension affects the production of music memes and related online content, thus analysing its role in popular culture today and how cybercommunities—with or without audiovisual literacy—relate to and spread this (musical) phenomenon.
{"title":"‘Make Classical Music Great Again’: Contemporary Music, Masculinity, and Virality in Memetic Media in Online Spaces","authors":"J. Freitas","doi":"10.1080/07494467.2022.2087392","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2022.2087392","url":null,"abstract":"While an image may be worth a thousand words, a meme can be worth much more. From politics to videos, games to social media, memes are an integral part of today’s online communication and content production in the paradigm of participation culture that is prevalent on the internet and in society. By looking at memes as a socially constructed and intertextual discourse which represents different voices, perspectives, and creative insights, these cultural units are also a reflection of how cybercommunities think about, circulate, and imbue content with meaning in their everyday lives. Among many varieties of meme categories, music plays an important role in the production and consolidation of this online dimension, especially on YouTube and other social media. From rock to classical music, most music genres are featured either in static or audiovisual memes, except for one (large) period of music that is commonly referred to as ‘modern’ music. Despite niche and specialised meme pages, groups and forums related to contemporary music, this broad category is quite overlooked by YouTube compilations, social media featuring classical music, and other online spaces, thus mixing and confusing repertoires and stereotypes. With recurrent tropes regarding gender, power, and aesthetics that can be found either in pages dedicated to western contemporary art music and on other generalised platforms labelling it as ‘ugly’, ‘male’ or ‘white’, this paper aims to examine how the musical dimension affects the production of music memes and related online content, thus analysing its role in popular culture today and how cybercommunities—with or without audiovisual literacy—relate to and spread this (musical) phenomenon.","PeriodicalId":44746,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Music Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42984679","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-27DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2087391
Caitlin Schmid
In September 2020, Nashville Opera released a new opera by composer Dave Ragland and librettist Mary McCallum that brought together ‘the Women’s Suffrage Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the disenfranchisement of modern-day voters’. Set in a parallel present, One Vote Won centres sonic and visual markers of Black sorrow, rage, and joy during a year defined by police brutality and widespread protests in support of #BlackLivesMatter in the United States. This article explores Nashville Opera’s attempt to navigate the possibility of opera at the intersection of youth culture and activism. One Vote Won has been variously positioned by its creators as a nonpartisan vehicle of civic engagement; a model of Black representation in the world of opera; a record of Black history making connections to present-day social movements; and an example of ‘accessible’ opera that aims to curate new audiences through educational outreach efforts targeted at socially-conscious students. Building on Naomi André’s practice of ‘engaged musicology’ to posit an ‘engaged opera performance’ that considers the lived experience of audiences during the creation of the work, I show how the use of social media networks as both content and context for One Vote Won illustrates competing visions of operatic ‘engagement’.
{"title":"Nashville Opera’s One Vote Won (2020) and the Challenge of Engaged Opera Performance","authors":"Caitlin Schmid","doi":"10.1080/07494467.2022.2087391","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2022.2087391","url":null,"abstract":"In September 2020, Nashville Opera released a new opera by composer Dave Ragland and librettist Mary McCallum that brought together ‘the Women’s Suffrage Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the disenfranchisement of modern-day voters’. Set in a parallel present, One Vote Won centres sonic and visual markers of Black sorrow, rage, and joy during a year defined by police brutality and widespread protests in support of #BlackLivesMatter in the United States. This article explores Nashville Opera’s attempt to navigate the possibility of opera at the intersection of youth culture and activism. One Vote Won has been variously positioned by its creators as a nonpartisan vehicle of civic engagement; a model of Black representation in the world of opera; a record of Black history making connections to present-day social movements; and an example of ‘accessible’ opera that aims to curate new audiences through educational outreach efforts targeted at socially-conscious students. Building on Naomi André’s practice of ‘engaged musicology’ to posit an ‘engaged opera performance’ that considers the lived experience of audiences during the creation of the work, I show how the use of social media networks as both content and context for One Vote Won illustrates competing visions of operatic ‘engagement’.","PeriodicalId":44746,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Music Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43043623","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-21DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2080469
Martin Iddon, Emily Payne, Philip Thomas
Published in Contemporary Music Review (Vol. 41, No. 2-3, 2022)
发表于《当代音乐评论》(第41卷，第2-3期，2022)
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Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2080455
James Mooney, Owen Green, Sean Williams
While many previous studies have explored indeterminacy as a compositional technique, in this article we explore the concept of indeterminacy, not only from the perspective of the composer, but also from the perspectives of performer and archival researcher, drawing upon our experiences of researching and performing several live electronic music compositions by British experimental musician Hugh Davies (1943–2005). Our core argument is that beneath the surface level of composed indeterminacy—that is, beyond the notations and instructions that a composer employs to prescribe indeterminate musical results—there exist further ‘nested’ planes of indeterminacy that reveal themselves through the acts of archival research, rehearsal and performance. ‘Instrumental’ indeterminacy has to do with the instruments that are used to perform the music, and specifically to situations where the boundaries of the instruments are experienced (by performers or audience members) as ambiguous, fluid, reconfigurable, or undefinable, or where the behaviour of the instrument(s) is unpredictable or uncontrollable in the moment of performance. ‘Hermeneutic’ indeterminacy concerns the composer’s intentions and the ways in which these are revealed, through the processes of archival and performance research, to be incompletely, ambiguously, contradictorily, and/or diffusely represented in documents (including but not limited to scores) and material configurations (including the instruments and apparatus used to perform the music). ‘Ontological’ indeterminacy is signalled by uncertainty (on the part of the researchers) about the ontological status of the piece to be performed. By sharing these perspectives, we aim to contribute to scholarly understandings of the ‘afterlives’ of indeterminacy, beyond the circumscriptions of a composer.
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Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2080453
K. S. Carithers
Building upon research on the performance practices engendered in avant-gardism of the mid-to-late twentieth century, this essay introduces a theoretical framework for the creative work of realising experimental music, here labeled interpretive labour (IL). The Executive model of IL is discussed in detail, bringing together ideas about authorship, representation, and exploitation. Performances of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Plus Minus (1963) provide an ideal case study for this issue, as historical performances highlight the challenges inherent in its realisation. Drawing on these performances’ sketches, archival recordings, and reception history, it becomes apparent that Stockhausen is effectively outsourcing his compositional responsibilities in this work, suggesting the usefulness of radically reframing indeterminate music performance-practice as a mode of production.
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Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2080467
Benjamin Piekut
This article explores composer John Cage’s turn to practice in the 1960s, placing it in a history of chance that extends into the nineteenth century, when the speculations of finance capitalism, the measurement of norms and their deviations, the statistical analysis of population and disease, and the assessment and management of risk all produced ways of calculating and mitigating risk. Cage and his primary collaborator, the pianist and electronic musician David Tudor, eschewed discrete, individual works and developed shared techniques and materials that flowed from night to night and problematised the notion of individual authorship. This improvisatory mode of action opened Cage up to complexities of indeterminacy that might have escaped him previously, most notably how one narrows the vast range of unforeseen possible outcomes by working with trusted partners and developing shared expectations and desires in a manner congruent with Michel Foucault’s classic definition of power: an action upon possible future or present actions. The article focuses on Cage’s work with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and especially Cunningham’s important Event format, as well as Tania Bruguera’s Tatlin’s Whisper #5 (2008), Cage’s Variations IV (1963), and Pauline Oliveros’s In Memoriam: Nikola Tesla, Cosmic Engineer (1969).
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Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2080459
L. Redhead
This essay posits that the practices of notation, composition, and performance are not creatively distinct from each other when observed, in particular, in radical works of graphic or text notation that make no or little reference to the western tradition of music notation, and whose composers offer no or few indications of the methods by which they should be interpreted or their intended performance outcomes. In such works of experimental music, performer choice and creativity are highlighted, but issues of composer choice and creativity may be equally observed, alongside the performative practices of notation. Understanding these practices as iterations of the same process means that the activities of notating, composing and performing can be considered as equal without the need to posit the performance of experimental scores as a compositional practice in and of itself. These ideas will be explored in examples from the works ijereja (2015–2016) and glíwmæden (2016)
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Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2080466
J. Saunders
The paper applies theory drawn from game studies to music composition in order to consider ways in which rules and goals create environments that promote critical play and manage the balance between purpose, play and task subservience. It explores correspondences between rules in games and indeterminate music, and considers how constraints create agency for players through presenting them with choices and goals that can be linked to values. Game studies research shows that games rely on interactivity, goals, competitors and conflict (Crawford 2003), and consequently effort from its players so as to attach value to its outcomes (Juul 2003). In rule-based compositions, rules are used to present choices, allowing individual players to make autonomous decisions that are focused on achieving a specified goal. Some rule-based compositions, however, specify processes and actions that have no explicit purpose. A process is initiated, perhaps with an end condition, but there is no specified purpose, other than undertaking the tasks. Game studies research suggests ways in which games might create approaches for harnessing specific motivations of players in such contexts. Tasks in persuasive games (Bogost 2010) are designed to embody real-world challenges, while Flanagan and Nissenbaum (2014) propose an approach to game design that communicates embedded values. Such approaches translate to rule-based music, presenting models for linking tasks to purpose and play, and with it relationships with the world.
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Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2080458
M. Iddon
Agamben argues that, in the art of the twentieth century, two forms of art thematize a fracturing of the regime of production: in the case of conceptual ready-mades, the reproducible cannot take on the status of originality; in the case of pop art, that which “ought” to be unreproducible becomes just that. In these cases, Agamben contends, the “bringing forth” of art continues to take place, but what is brought forth is στέρησης [sterēsis], privation, an art which is necessarily alienated. This privation, in Agamben's terms, must be understood through the dyad of ϵνϵργϵια [energeia] and δυναμις [dynamis] to insist that potentiality, unactualized δυναμις is the “existence of a non-Being, a presence of an absence”, which is to say that δυναμις is only what it is because of its relationship to the potential not to take place, to αδυναμία. I argue, following Katschthaler, that a similar case must be made for Cage's 4′33″ (1952), in that it represents the possibility of inaction: the performer could always have not played. I contend that, however, the bringing forth of absence is necessarily, a sort of dead end since, in an important sense, nothing has already taken place: the performer of 4′33″ does not have the option not to play, without the performance ceasing to be a performance of 4′33″. It is my claim here, if only provisionally, that Cage’s turn to indeterminacy, and in particular his use of transparencies in his Variations piece from Variations I (1958) onwards, may be seen as a way out of, or a solution to, the impasse of a privative abyss, be that as found in conceptual art or as formulated in 4′33″.
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