Papers
Whose utopia? : Institutionalised ideologies and the case of the creative individual
To be given at the 10th International Belgrade Conference "Between Nostalgia, Utopia and Realities"
Our culture thrives on fabricated histories and idealistic prospects; the temporal voids of the past and the future are filled and glorified through the social, political, artistic, critical and economic apparatus of the present. The past and future may well be temporal antitheses, identified by their orientation to the ever changing here-and-now, but their cultural content is defined by our current nostalgic-utopian outlook.
Academic, commercial and political institutions exert significant influence over the individual, and are thus largely responsible for contextual understanding of our cultural present and the upkeep of its historical ideologies. Through financial or intellectual transaction, we elect these institutions to propagate canonised musical trajectories. At the same time, our access to knowledge enables the development of divergent nostalgic-utopian attitudes, which are subsequently used to inform the establishment’s musico-historical propaganda. The reflexive nature of our social infrastructure begs the question: is institutionalised utopia or individual ideology more formative in the creative present? I propose that musical progress is catalysed by the friction between widely accepted idealism and equally idealistic refutations thereof by individuals.
LikeStories without Meaning: Narrative Theory in Music
Given at the School of Music Postgraduate Study Day, May 2009, University of Leeds
We have all encountered the notion that music has the capacity to relate a story of some kind. Yet, we also accept that music in itself has no specific meaning. Thus, in order to interpret musically-intoned tales, we have relied on the idea that music can evoke literary models, wherein we can find meaning: the allusive ‘truth’. When Jean-Jacques Nattiez asked the question ‘can one speak of narrativity in music?’ it was precisely this dual habit (firstly requiring meaning and secondly seeking that meaning in literature rather than music itself) that led him to a negative conclusion. But why should we depend on this habit if we are seeking a purely musical narrative? Semiotics and narratology – the science of narrative itself – have shown that causal relations and discourse-like structures can exist without the need for external signification (i.e. extra-musical meaning).
We interpret music, first and foremost, by listening. Building a paradigm for the organisation of that listening can help inform our resulting musical interpretations, including the reading of a musical discourse in narrative terms. Translation is the art of failure has been composed with this in mind, thus lending itself as a practical example of narrative theory at work in music. By analysing the piece as a series of audible relationships – indices of listening – its narrative secrets will be revealed.
Symphonic Narrative: Alternative Analyses of Beethoven's Third and Mahler's Fourth
Given at the School of Music Postgraduate Study Day, December 2008, University of Leeds
There has been a long tradition of interpreting ‘traditional’ symphonic works in literary narrative terms. Narrative being a structure of communication rather than of literary communication specifically, this has led to a myriad of superficial and misleading commentaries on music exhibiting strong and more remarkable musico-narrative structures. Such is the case with Beethoven’s Eroica and Mahler’s Symphony No. 4. Often, judgement on these works is clouded by their programmatic subtexts (heroism and childish innocence respectively). While harmonic and thematic analyses unearth interesting, purely musical devices, used alone they seldom isolate important narrativistic traits.
Neither the Eroica nor Mahler’s Fourth Symphony is cast in ‘traditional’ symphonic terms and so we must assess whether judging them within such a tradition – or as exceptions to it, justified by a superficial reading of their programmatic elements – is viable. Analysing the narrative trajectory in these works unearths a series of new relationships between their constituent elements (or new perspectives on already acknowledged relationships) and offers new ways of reconciling the differences between musical analyses and programmatic readings, providing further and more profound illumination of their construction and working.
Composition and Musicology: A Research Symbiont
Given at CePRA's 'Investigating practice-led research in the arts' symposium, November 2008, University of Leeds
Music, in its very nature, incorporates the act of communication. The study of music, too involves several levels of communication (both at the immediate research level and in the dissemination of that research). For centuries we have accepted talking about music, communicating verbally on a subject originally cast in a non-verbal language, as acceptable; yet, in recent years there has been a long running debate about the validity of composition as a musical research method, despite the fact that such a process inherently uses the language of music itself. The root of the problem is that musical languages carry no precise meaning, have no sense of veracity and cannot express fact. With the need to produce quantifiable and qualifiable research outcomes it is hardly surprising that we turn, time and time again, to the written or spoken word in our study of music, despite our awareness that verbal languages cannot fully express many aspects of musical communication. The question ‘is composition a valid form of research?’ ought to become ‘how can composition contribute to research?’ In combining musicological research, penned in a verbal language, and compositional research, undertaken using the language of music, it is possible to communicate more thoroughly and profoundly musical research ideas by being more faithful to the subject matter.
James Bond, The Bends, Hungarian Church Music, Kevin Spacey's Mid-Life Crisis and Me: A Composer's Guide to Inspirational Pillaging
Given to FOCAM, October 2008, University of Leeds
'Where to start?': a question often uttered by composers. With the multitude of musics available at our fingertips today, our quest for personal musical identity can be swamped by the overwhelming volume of existing works. Yet, that gargantuan mass need not cast shadows of doubt, it need not dwarf the individual – it can be the greatest impetus, the richest source of inspiration. Ignoring the crude classifications so often assigned to musical styles, the musical universe, brimming with compositional bounty, reaches out far beyond the horizon. The only question now is: 'where to end?'
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