As part of the musikprotokoll within the festival steirischer herbst, an international workshop „Perception, Listening, Mimesis and Critique: Concepts and Theories of Aesthetic Experience“ will take place at the University of Graz from October 4th to October 6th 2024, dedicated to different concepts of aesthetic experience, artistic perception and reception as well as their relevance for researching composition with audio scores.

I will give a talk under the title

Neumic Mimesis and Audio-Scripted Reproduction 

An Adornian Reading of Sandeep Bhagwati’s “L’animal que donc je suis”

In his sketches for a “theory of musical reproduction”, Adorno distinguishes three aspects that are in play when a musician interprets a score: the material, the idiomatic and the neumic aspect. The neumic aspect concerns musical gestures that are hinted at in the score and are mimetically reproduced by the performer while playing. In my contribution, I would like to consider the potential of this conceptual distinction with regard to the elaborate audio scores developed by Sandeep Bhagwati, especially in his “Exercises in Estrangements II: L'animal que donc je suis”. 

My working hypothesis is that audio scripts allow for a particular kind of timing that is intimately related to the mimetic-neumic aspect of musical reproduction. Furthermore, this specific formal quality might be connected to Adorno’s more general considerations about mimesis in modern art and to the expressive content of Bhagwati’s piece pointed at by quoting Derrida. In both endeavours — Adorno’s concept of artistic mimesis and Bhagwati’s new forms of musical reproduction —, there is an ambition to articulate a relation between subjectivity and nature that goes beyond the instrumental rationality of mastery, control and exploitation. 

The attempt to find a non-instrumental relationship to nature, however, always falls the risk of romanticising and celebrating irrationalism. Musically, it risks turning into sentimentality and ambient kitsch. To criticise instrumental reason without falling into irrationalism is the crucial challenge of the mimetic reproductions of nature, and this challenge concerns the artistic works as much as their theoretical interpretation.

21.-22. November 2024

On November 28 2024, I will give a talk on Musical Materialism at the MDW in Vienna

Die Lebendigkeit der Musik. Liveness, Organisches und Exzess

Musik ist kein Lebewesen. Aber sie kann erscheinen, als sei sie lebendig. Wer so spricht, verwendet den Begriff des Lebens als ästhetische Kategorie. Lebendigkeit bezeichnet dann eine besondere Erfahrungsqualität musikalischer Darbietungen. Diese Kategorie des Lebens gehört zu den Kernthemen der idealistischen Musikästhetik: Gelungene Werke erscheinen ihr als lebendige Organismen. Der jüngeren Musik wurde dieses Ideal des Organismus aus unterschiedlichen Gründen zum Problem, nicht zuletzt weil die elektronische Musik auf die Bühnenpräsenz lebendiger Subjekte verzichten kann. Die musikalische Kategorie des Lebens nimmt in der Gegenwart daher neue Formen an. Im Vortrag sollen drei solcher Formen diskutiert werden: Die elektroakustische Inszenierung von Liveness (Steven Takasugi), die Formmodell des organischen Wucherns (Pierluigi Billone) und die Kompositionsprinzip des kontrollierten Exzesses (Saturationismus).