Object and Idea

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Shaw-Miller
Keyword(s):  
Discursive Practice ◽  
Musical Meaning ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Absolute Music ◽  
Clement Greenberg

This chapter concentrates on the strain of modernism that flows from the work of French artist Marcel Duchamp and its relationship to ideas of music. While the significance of music as a paradigm for the development of “purist” modernism is well known—it is an ideology best encapsulated in the writing of Clement Greenberg, the development of abstraction in art, and is based on the model of musical meaning that was consequent on the concept of “absolute music”—what is less well known is the significance of music for the strain of modernism that came through Duchamp, forming a hybrid conceptual alternative to purism. It is argued that the idea of the readymade is consistent with idea of music as more than just sound, as a discursive practice, and that this “extra-musical” conception of music (as counterpoise to absolute music) provides a lineage linking Duchamp to Paik to Marclay.

Meaning and Scepticism

2020 ◽  
pp. 783-802
Author(s):  
Paul Boghossian
Keyword(s):  
Slow Movement ◽  
Piano Concerto ◽  
Musical Meaning ◽  
Absolute Music ◽  
Music And Meaning ◽  
Generic Sense

This chapter revisits the classic questions whether absolute music can express extra-musical meaning and whether such meaning should be thought of as playing an important role in our understanding and appreciation of music. It argues that music’s expressive ability plays a central role in our conception of its phenomenology and value—in our perception of music as expressive and in its capacity to move us, both in the understudied generic sense, and in the sense of arousing specific emotions in us. It examines a type of scepticism about music’s expressive ability made influential by Eduard Hanslick and considers to what extent it can be answered. The chapter concludes that, while the extreme scepticism espoused by Hanslick cannot be sustained, his discussion teaches us deep lessons about the expressive indeterminacy involved in music. The chapter illustrates some of the issues it deals with through an analysis of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major and explores the connection between meaning in music and meaning in poetry.

Interpretation and musical signification in acousmatic listening

2007 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Atkinson
Keyword(s):  
Electroacoustic Music ◽  
Sound Recording ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Musical Meaning ◽  
Music Psychology ◽  
Semiotic Model ◽  
Absolute Music ◽  
Integral Role ◽  
Recent Developments

AbstractThe challenges of understanding musical meaning are considered in light of ways in which electroacoustic practice and acousmatic listening might embody yet further nuances in how music can function as a signifying system. ‘Classical’ semiotics is discussed, as well as more recent developments with post-structuralist approaches and musical semantics in other areas of music scholarship. The idea, inherited from the tradition of ‘absolute music’, that musical meaning lies exclusively in the inner operations of the musical materials and their structural organisation, is questioned. Concepts from ecologically inspired music psychology are drawn upon to highlight the importance of interpretation, as well as perception, in acousmatic listening. It is argued that if new theoretical terminologies are needed, an invaluable project would be to develop a taxonomy (and thus theoretical framework) of how sound can ‘stand for something’, i.e. function as a sign in semiotic terms. It is also argued that such terminology should not reinforce distinctions between intra- and extra-musical that feature in many theoretical constructs used in relation to this music. Consideration of the Peircean semiotic model in electroacoustic music (as well as the more widely used Saussurean one), tropology in the study of literature, and a much more widely comparative and culturally explicit approach to analysis are suggested as practical starting points. A more critical approach to the integral role of sound recording and reproduction in relation to concepts of representation is needed.

Program Music

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Program Music ◽  
Musical Meaning ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
Absolute Music ◽  
Interpretive Strategies ◽  
Sociohistorical Context ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Programmatic Music

Studies of program music explore ways in which extra-musical material is expressed and interpreted through music. Conceptions of program music are broadly construed and vary throughout history in correlation with various aesthetic and philosophical perspectives—narrowly defined, programmatic compositions include an extra-musical program describing the musical expression, while a broader definition considers evocative titles, allusive musical material, and conventional musical significations as vehicles of extra-musical meaning. The question of aesthetic value arises in the debate surrounding the ability of music to communicate extra-musical ideas and the quality of music that claims to do so. This question is extensively explored through the polemics of the 19th-century “War of the Romantics,” pitting programmatic music against “absolute music.” Musical and theoretical writings of figures such as Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, and Hanslick provide rich source material informing many studies on program music. The distinction between program music and absolute music is blurred through various approaches to deriving meaning from both types of music. Theories of narrativity propose methods of interpreting formal structures, tonal progressions, and thematic devices interacting in ways reminiscent of literary narrative. Semiotic approaches explore meanings that arise from conventional significations of genre, style, and “topics,” evoking cultural understandings of social position, setting, and affect. Applying interpretive strategies such as these to programmatic music allows for hermeneutic readings mapping the extra-musical program onto the musical events to explore meaningful points of intersection or contradiction. Further studies draw connections to composer biography and sociohistorical context, positioning the music in philosophical perspectives and reception. Broader cultural and political situations inform readings of underlying implications such as nationalism or social commentary. Current studies of program music explore musical narratives in nuanced contexts that parse the historical and cultural atmospheres surrounding composers, their music, and reception to propose new readings and frames of interpretation.

Parrhesia as a Discursive Practice

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 217-245
Author(s):  
Namju Jo
Keyword(s):  
Discursive Practice

Hard Objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517
Author(s):  
Ned Hercock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Discrete Series ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
The World ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.

Music, Landscape, and the Sound of Place

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel M. Grimley
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Place ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Cultural Geography ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
British Library ◽  
Musical Meaning ◽  
Final Time ◽  
Walking Tour ◽  
Meaning Representation ◽  
Critical Literature

One of the most poignant scenes in Ken Russell’s 1968 film Delius: Song of Summer evocatively depicts the ailing composer being carried in a wicker chair to the summit of the mountain behind his Norwegian cabin. From here, Delius can gaze one final time across the broad Gudbrandsdal and watch the sun set behind the distant Norwegian fells. Contemplating the centrality of Norway in Delius’s output, however, raises more pressing questions of musical meaning, representation, and our relationship with the natural environment. It also inspires a more complex awareness of landscape and our sense of place, both historical and imagined, as a mode of reception and an interpretative tool for approaching Delius’s music. This essay focuses on one of Delius’s richest but most critically neglected works, The Song of the High Hills for orchestra and wordless chorus, composed in 1911 but not premiered until 1920. Drawing on archival materials held at the British Library and the Grainger Museum, Melbourne, I examine the music’s compositional genesis and critical reception. Conventionally heard (following Thomas Beecham and Eric Fenby) as an imaginary account of a walking tour in the Norwegian mountains, The Song of the High Hills in fact offers a multilayered response to ideas of landscape and nature. Moving beyond pictorial notions of landscape representation, I draw from recent critical literature in cultural geography to account for the music’s sense of place. Hearing The Song of the High Hills from this perspective promotes a keener understanding of our phenomenological engagement with sound and the natural environment, and underscores the parallels between Delius’s work and contemporary developments in continental philosophy, notably the writing of Henri Bergson.

Kurz. Historie

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomasz Szerszeń
Keyword(s):  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Man Ray

Tekst o wystawie "Dust / Histoires de poussière d’après Man Ray et Marcel Duchamp" w Le Bal w Paryżu.

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