This paper argues that, contrary to what many musicologists and classical musicians have maintained, music can, and should, be analysed as discourse. It then surveys a number of approaches to the critical analysis of musical discourse and applies these approaches to a range of examples, including sonatas, advertising jingles and news signature tunes.

Despite frequent valorizations of music in the west, the art has also been perceived as a threat to philosophy and theology, ostensibly on the grounds of its potential for danger to the polis (Plato and Aristotle), temptation to impiety (Augustine and Calvin), coercion (Kant), or lack of objective content (Hegel). Accompanying these doubts is a longstanding anxiety concerning music's relation with inarticulation or silence. Debates over the definition and ontology of music persist today in both analytic and continental traditions, with (...) neither approach succeeding in forging consensus. Musical Platonism (Kivy, Norris) is today's uneasy default position in the academy. However, recent reassessments of speech acts (Miller) and of the Derridean world as phantasm (Naas) can return music to its structural constitution in différance – to an alternation between sound and silence. This redefinition of music and its parallel with language can contextualize Derrida's most extended engagement with the topic, his interview with Ornette Coleman. (shrink)

Electronic dance music has much about it to interest philosophers. In this article, I explore facets of dance music cultures, using the issue of authenticity as a framing question. The problem of sorting real or authentic dance music from mainstream or commercial clubbing can be treated as a matter of history and genre-definition; as a matter of defining scenes or subcultures; and as a matter of blackness. In each case, electronic dance music, and critical discourse surrounding it, offers fresh illumination (...) of aesthetic questions. I briefly characterise the main genres of dance music, match conversations about the hardcore continuum with philosophers’ accounts of genre, survey sociologists’ ways of thinking about cultures and their connections to taste and personal identity, and link criticisms that dance music now lacks blackness to conceptions of black aesthetics. This article is Part I of two; Part II focusses on dancers, DJs, and the aesthetics and ontology of dance music itself. Video abstract. (shrink)

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari refer to Glenn Gould as an illustration of the third principle of the rhizome, that of multiplicity: ‘When Glenn Gould speeds up the performance of a piece, he is not just displaying virtuosity, he is transforming the musical points into lines, he is making the whole piece proliferate’ (1987: 8). In an attempt to make sensible their ostensibly modest statement, I proliferate the relationships between Glenn Gould's philosophy of sound recording, Deleuze's theory of (...) passive synthesis, and Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the stutter. I argue, ultimately, that Glenn Gould's radical recording practice stutters and deterritorialises the temporality of the recorded performance. More generally, the Deleuzian perspective broadens the scope of Gould's aesthetic practices that highlights the importance of aesthetic acts in the redistribution of sensory experience. But the study serves a broader purpose than celebrating a pianist/recordist that Deleuze admired. Rather, while his contemporaries began to use the studio as a compositional element in sound recording, Gould bypassed such a step towards the informational logics of recording studios. Thus, it is inappropriate to think of Gould as having immersed himself in ‘technology’ than the broader concept of a complex, one that redistributed the striated listening space of the concert hall. (shrink)

This paper analyzes what may have been a mistake by pianist Thelonious Monk playing a jazz solo in 1958. Even in a Monk composition designed for patterned mayhem, a note can sound out of pattern. We reframe the question of whether the note was a mistake and ask instead about how Monk handles the problem. Amazingly, he replays the note into a new pattern that resituates its jarring effect in retrospect. The mistake, or better, the mis-take , was “saved” by (...) subsequent notes. Our analysis, supported by reflections from jazz musicians and the philosopher John Dewey, encourages a reformulation of plans, takes, and mis-takes as categories for the interpretation of contingency, surprise, and repair in all human activities. A final section suggests that mistakes are essential to the practical plying and playing of knowledge into performances, particularly those that highlight learning. (shrink)

Benjamin and Barthes provide the starting point for a series of inter-connected propositions which seek to return the theorization of photography to the primacy of the pro-filmic. The index is reclaimed as a trace of the photographic event, capable only of delivering what Barthes termed the corps. The resulting contingency and exorbitance are the basis of photography’s prophetic and ‘troubling’ potential which free us from viewing photography as simply a screen for the social. The argument is advanced largely using material (...) from India and a case is made for a new conception of ‘world system photography’ which folds ‘belated’ histories into the ‘global’. (shrink)

While the groundbreaking insights that contemporary theorists have formulated with regards to space---as a multiplicity without essence, as an active event, and as inseparable from subjectivity, power, Otherness and time---have ostensibly purged it of its traditional understanding as absolute, a specific visuality characteristic of Cartesian perspectivalism remains privileged in its theorization which force it to remain so. While the complexity of space cannot be recovered from an abstract contemplation of its visual geometry in a way that reflects these contemporary concerns, (...) there have unfortunately been relatively few attempts to imagine space away from the visual in a way that challenges its traditional absoluteness. To this end, it is argued that because sound and music contain implicit and explicit spatialities, the sonic represents a rich and unexplored area from which to imagine a radical non-visual space that discursively organizes space according to a different economy through which to challenge its assumed visuality. And yet, even when space has been approached through sound, there is a tendency to exteriorize sound into an object or a set of practices that robs it of its defining quality---its own "soundfulness". By breaking down those factors that are considered salient to how space is conceived today along sonic rather than visual lines, the argument is made that the "soundfulness" of sound's physical properties gives it a complex texture of excess that is corporealized within the body and forwards the philosophical possibility of unfolding the spatiality of sound according to vectors beyond the visible in a way that, while reflecting contemporary concerns, prevents its return to absoluteness. To take seriously this "soundfulness" thus allows us to recuperate the sonic as a philosophical and political way of experiencing and knowing the world, including that of space. The arguments, as well as being drawn from the insights of contemporary spatial theory, the physics of sound, the phenomenology of listening, rhizomatic and feminist theory, quantum mechanics and musicology, will be explained through an understanding of space as sound and exemplified in The Disintegration Loops, a post-minimalist musical piece by sonic artist William Basinski. (shrink)

This article explores the connection between politics and music; in particular it asks how music might be incorporated into accounts of political thought and action. Despite the fact that political science has tended to neglect the place of music in politics, there are a number of writers, such as Jean‐Jacques Rousseau, who have taken a different course. For them, music is intimately linked, via its aesthetics, to ethical judgements and to social order. The article develops these latter claims and connects (...) them to work of a similar kind in music studies to propose a framework which helps to make sense of, and give due weight to, the place of music – as organised sound – in political thought and action. Music, it is argued, should not be viewed just as a footnote to, or appendage of, political thought and action, but rather as an integral feature of them. (shrink)

Straipsnyje, remiantis Gilles’io Deleuze’o ir Felixo Guattari konceptais, analizuojama natūralaus, į muzikinį kūrinį iš aplinkos netikėtai patenkančio, nemuzikinio, dar kitaip įvardijamo kaip nesuformuoto, garso įtaka multimedijų projektui Sidabro dulkės. Andriaus Šarapovo audiovizualusis projektas yra tarpdisciplininių jungčių paieškos inovatyvi forma, bandymas atskirų meno rūšių savitą kalbėjimą, atskiras istorijas suvesti draugėn. Tai eksperimentas, kuriame kūrėjams svarbu rasti ir savitu būdu išreikšti tai, kas nematoma, nenusakoma, nereprezentuojama, gal tik nujaučiama. Deteritorizacija muzikoje, remiantis nesuformuotu garsu / triukšmu, yra minima G. Deleuze’o ir F. Guattari (...) knygose Kas yra filosofija? bei Tūkstančiai plokštikalnių: kapitalizmas ir šizofrenija ir interpretuota G. Deleuze’o filosofijos tyrėjų. Šiame straipsnyje svarstoma, kaip į multimedijų kompoziciją patekęs netikėtas garsas / triukšmas deteritorizuoja refreną ir kaip nulemia skirtingų meno rūšių „susikabinimą“. Teigiama, kad heterogeninių elementų suartėjimas ir susijungimas įvyksta pirmiausia juos nutolinant, kai atlikėjai reaguoja į atsitiktinį garsą ir kartu yra inspiruojami improvizuoti, ieškoti naujų sankabų. Po to, atsiradusią garsų įvairovę įtraukus į garso redagavimo ir montažo mašiną, muzikiniai garsai susipina su atsitiktiniais, garsas su vaizdu, jie perkuriami, multiplikuojami. Darbinis vaizdas, arba tai, kas yra „už scenos“, analogiškai atsitiktiniam garsui ar triukšmui, yra įtraukiama į kompozicijos redagavimo mašiną. Kompozicijos rezultatą, remiantis tyrimu, lemia ne tik autorius ir kiti kompozicijos kūrėjai, bet ir G. Deleuze’o įvardijamas juodasis pirmtakas. (shrink)

Blanchot took Mallarmé’s “Book” as the paradigm for an artwork that aspired to such excess it could not exist. And yet it partly did, in the form of the poem Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard. For Blanchot, this ultimate literary work acted as a model for a relentless deconstructing not just of what existed but also of that which did not. His emptying theoretical perspective is ideally suited to analyse the phenomenon that is harsh noise wall music. (...) This type of music aims to be both total and static, an extreme stilling of the music impulse, and even of noise itself. This stilling will of course fail, in the shape of recordings, concerts, recognizable “pieces,” but this failing puts it into the same realm as the Book, as glossed and mobilized by Blanchot, in that it exists but it should not. It cannot happen and yet it unfolds. Rather than failure, then, I argue that this type of noise music is one realization of Blanchot’s thinning, dissipating and disappearing of Mallarmé’s project. This completion, present in these writers and in harsh noise wall, notably in the work of Romain Perrot is not just resemblance but is something that enables a reading, a return completion of Blanchot. This article looks to stage this double reading, a reading that produces nothing. Actually, not even nothing. (shrink)

Morten Søndergaard examines the curatorial and techno-material genealogies of sonic infrastructures: from early artistic pioneers like Nicolas Schöffer and Max Neuhaus to curatorial experiments and contextual considerations in the exhibition Under Cover - Sound/art in Social Spaces project.

This article argues that the example of laughter continues to trouble the human/machine binary that so many have troubled, from Descartes to Zupančič. Sounding various objects of “recorded” laughter through psychoanalytic tweeters, deconstructive warps, and object-oriented woofers implicates ontology as so much noise for the projection of certainty. Derivatively speaking, I argue for the primacy of a rhetorical ethics.

The introduction to this special issue addresses the production of intimacy in the labour of research. It explores the sensory, emotional and affective relations which form an integral, if often invisible, part of the process through which researchers engage with, produce, understand and translate `research'. The article argues that these processes inform the making of knowledge, shape power relations and enable or constrain the practical negotiation of ethical problems. These issues are not, however, often foregrounded in debates on methods or (...) methodology and are frequently erased from researchers' own accounts of their work. The article explores some of the possible reasons for this, which include institutional and cultural conventions of academic practice, the historical legacies with which disciplines often struggle, and the difficult issues and decisions that individual researchers face as they try to negotiate the relations between scholarly research and personal relationships across time, and between scholarly research and, for example, creativity, fiction, or sensationalism. The article concludes with a review of the main themes in the special issue, focusing in particular on the ways in which the contributors use the concept of intimacy to challenge the boundaries between creativity and analysis; spatial and temporal proximity and distance; freedom and censorship; subjects and objects. (shrink)

This article examines how the twentieth-century composer dealt with the paradox of communicating with the composer's own self and with other musicians, but not with the public at large.

Jean-Luc Nancy's phenomenology of listening makes a series of claims about the sonic/auditory nature of the subject. First among these is the claim that the subject is a subject to the extent that it is listening, that it is all ears. The subject emerges on the back of the resonance of timbre in the body and the body's becoming-rhythmic. These claims are phrased often in musical terms, or making use of terms and rhetoric from the domains of music theory and (...) music psychology. This article explores the role of music in Nancy's phenomenology with a particular view to the nature of listening in the contemporary world: both how listening is figured as a part of what Nancy terms the inoperative community and how listening figures the cognitive and phenomenological constitution of the subject. (shrink)

This article examines the limits and potential of hospitality through struggles over auditory space in care at the end of life. Drawing upon empirical research and a nurse’s account of noisy mourning in a multicultural hospice ward, I argue that the insurgent force of noise as corporeal generosity can produce impossible dilemmas for care, while also provoking surprising ethical relations and potentialities. Derrida’s ideas about the aporias of the gift and absolute responsibility are used to make sense of the pushy (...) generosity of alterity as it is made to matter through sound. (shrink)

For nearly a quarter of Darwin's Descent of Man , it is the singing bird whose voice presages the development of human aesthetics. But since the 1950s, aesthetics has had a perilous and contested role in the study of birdsong. Modern ornithology's disillusionment with aesthetic knowledge after World War II brought about the removal of musical studies of birdsong, studies which were replaced by work with the sound spectrograph, a tool that changes the elusive sounds of birdsong into a readable (...) graphic image called a spectrogram. This article narrates the terms under which the image, rather than the sound, of birdsong has become a sign of humanity's ability to reason objectively. Drawing examples from the strange evolutionary tales that exist at the juncture of ornithology, music history, illustration, and linguistics, this story suggests how it was that the human ear disappeared in the unbridgeable gap between the sciences and the study of aesthetics so tellingly termed "the humanities.". (shrink)

Performing and listening to music occurs in specific situations, requiring specific media. Empirical research on music listening and appreciation, however, tends to overlook the effects these situations and media may have on the listening experience. This article uses the sociological concept of the frame to develop a theory of an aesthetic experience with music as the result of encountering sound/music in the context of a specific situation. By presenting a transdisciplinary sub-field of empirical (concert) studies, we unfold this theory for (...) one such frame: the classical concert. After sketching out the underlying theoretical framework, a selective literature review is conducted to look for evidence on the general plausibility of the single elements of this emerging theory and to identify desiderata. We refer to common criticisms of the standard classical concert, and how new concert formats try to overcome alleged shortcomings and detrimental effects. Finally, an empirical research program is proposed, in which frames and frame components are experimentally manipulated and compared to establish their respective affordances and effects on the musical experience. Such a research program will provide empirical evidence to tackle a question that is still open to debate, i.e., whether the diversified world of modern-day music listening formats also holds a place for the classical concert – and if so, for what kind of classical concert. (shrink)

The article pays homage to the leading authority of 20th century Hungarian music aesthetics, József Ujfalussy, by connecting his heritage to more recent research on the problems of musical time and notably to the study pursued by Raymond Monelle. Rather than a perennial invariant, Monelle interpreted musical time as a historically changing phenomenon constituting implicitly the basic levels of musical semantics, as they have developed throughout the Baroque, Classical and Romantic eras. The present study focuses on the last of these (...) paradigms, claiming that the Romantic experience of musical time has dominated both the production and the reception of music culture up to this day. The Romantic musical experience is based on a latent ‘framework contract’ between composition and audience, which drives the meanings attached to the experience of musical temporality. This latent agreement warrants a need for conventional compositional forms and simultaneously the insufficiency thereof. (shrink)

On the plateau 1837: Of the Refrain, Deleuze and Guattari set the stage for an idea of sound as an affective and political entity, whose role is at the core of the construction of subjectivity. The analysis of the Deleuze and Guattari’s plateau allows to highlight the ways in which sound creates affective and cultural territories and their subsequent subjective positions. In this respect, the body becomes a political battlefield through its ability to experience sound both passively and actively. In (...) the central part of the text, the study of Deleuze and Guattari will be approached by the distinction introduced by Steve Goodman concerning two different developments in sonic forces: a dispersive, centrifuge effect and an attractive, centripetal one. Through this examination, will be possible to draw a common line in the works of certain artists and contemporary researcher such as Kodwo Eshun, Ben Frost and Brian Massumi. The peculiarity of their projects lies in the ability to use sound as an instrument to make non- anthropocentric forces audible and perceptible. One of the main challenge of contemporary times is the ethical and political question on sound and its relation to the human subject. How can we remove the human subjectivity to analyze a sonic approach to the Anthropocene? This question will bring to the examination of certain sonic practices that could be seen as fundamental critical instruments for our present. (shrink)

The doctoral dissertation is defined as an original contribution to a field. By definition, this makes the dissertation a creative product, and the result of a creative process. The creative process of doctoral work has historically not been highlighted. The same is true for education as a whole. While there is an increasing call for greater creativity in education, they remain aspirational. In this article we describe the underlying premises and some of the practices of a doctoral degree that has (...) been designed with the intention of foregrounding the creative process. (shrink)

Glitches pose expressive challenges for digital motion pictures. These problematics reveal a “material function” that determines their identification and prescribes their semantics on-screen. These issues of materiality are familiar from the ideological critiques of avant-garde film in the 1970s, but have not been explored in relation to the semiotics of digital cinema. Developing an understanding of these problematics shows the complex problematics of using glitches for critical and expressive purposes in motion pictures.

(1998). Composition, improvisation, constitution: forms of life in the music of pierre boulez and ornette coleman. Angelaki: Vol. 3, The love of music, pp. 75-102.