~Proceedings ICMCISMCI2014 14-20 September 2014, Athens, Greece
those theorists who rely on conventional methods to
bring about consistent, or in any case, proven analytical
results tend to incorporate alternative visualizations that
need not be condoned by the composer or geared
toward performance.
As Denis Smalley explains, there possibly exist for an
electroacoustic work "three types of score which might
contain perceptually relevant information": (1) a score
used by a performer in mixed works of live electronic
music, (2) a "technical" score, or a record of how the
piece was produced, and (3) a "diffusion score," "often
a free, sketchy, graphic representation of the sounding
context," which would be useful as an indication of
timing for engineers and composers diffusing the work
in a concert. "But," Smalley is quick to warn, outside of
these three variations, "we must be cautious about
putting too much faith in written representations"
[3:108]. And I extend this caution also to other forms of
visualization in the context of music analysis.
Though visual representations are tempting, they are
lacking for several reasons. First, images that display
the entirety of a composition, such as a spectrogram, do
not adequately convey the experience of music in time.
Secondly, as observed by Mary Simoni [5] (for
alternative examples, see also [6]), time-domain
representations, even those which compile in "realtime"-depicting frequency and amplitude as they
unfold-do not adequately convey timbral qualities, and
merely communicate, as with any analysis, only that
which the analyst intuits as relevant. From this, it is
surmisable that a third analytical framework, focusing
explicitly on the firsthand experience of music as it
unfolds in time, could bypass these secondary
visualizations. In this paper, I would like to focus on
this third analytical strategy, and to propose a timebased analysis of electroacoustic music absent
visualization.
Fish & Fowl (2011) by Juliana Hodkinson and Niels
R nsholdt is an electroacoustic work rife for suggestive
inferences. Coupled with clicking heels and cracking
whips, the sexualized breathing of the female
"protagonist" in Fish & Fowl is an allusion to a territory
typically, if tacitly, forbidden in scholarly rapport.
Stripping the character of her moaning, whipping, and
pleasurable exclamations, a spectrogram realization of
Fish & Fowl would barely turn heads, leaving behind
only a residue of strong and weak impulses. In the
visual realm, absent these timbral qualities, the semantic
meaning-though conveyed easily through audible
utterances-is all but lost. If music analysis is to be
reconceived to include the many semantic inferences
listeners experience synchronically in the midst of
hearing, we analysts must find a new method of
exploration, one that departs from a dependence on
visual representations.
Music theorist Brian Hulse's [7] musical engagement
with the "virtual," which he frames within a Deleuzian
reading of Bergson's philosophy, proposes a musical
1 This critique of phenomenological invocations in music theory has
recently been revisited by Maryam A. Moshaver [4].
hearing that acknowledges ambiguity and engages in
the pluralism of many possible aesthetic experiences.
As Hulse explains, "In the virtual, we find a technical
approach to thinking musical time whereby the rich
temporal depths of music, completely obscured by
traditional notation (which collapses time to an all-atonce spatial representation), become accessible to a
different kind of thought; a thought that is fully in
contact with music as a process rather than as a static
product" [7:50]. Taking to task Hulse's invitation
toward a Deleuzian "thinking music," this paper is
organized in three parts. I first outline the three
perspectives of the "virtual" through the synthesis as
conceived in Deleuze's framing of time through the
experience of difference and repetition. Second, I then
tie these perspectives to musical experience by way of
Hodkinson and R nsholdt's Fish & Fowl. And lastly, in
attempts to convey a theoretical framework for
electroacoustic music while also maintaining an openended interpretation, I then raise questions about the
manner in which listeners can potentially derive
meaning from music with erotic overtones without
essentializing or reducing the analysis to so-called
representative assumptions about the plot, subject,
source, essence, nature, or labor of this music and the
musicians involved in its creation and production.
2. TIME AS THE SYNTHESIS OF
DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION
"The primacy of identity, however conceived," writes
Gilles Deleuze, "defines the world of representation"
[8: xix]. For Deleuze, "identity" is always linked to a
foundation, a ground, or in other words, a hierarchical
construction of the "concept." This stilted, atemporal
concept comes to be a representation of the thing, an
infinite and unmovable truth. The flaw of representation
then arises from the myth that our perception of time
and indeed of life itself-is constituted as a sequence of
discrete events. As determined by Deleuze, the
atemporal invocation of the "concept" is a central
fallacy in Hegel's philosophy. Hegel's abstraction of
concepts gives a false sense of objectivity; the concept
arises independently, is unchanging, and remains frozen
in time-long after even Hegel has passed. In Deleuze's
words, "Hegel substitutes the abstract relation of the
particular to the concept of the general for the true
relation of the singular and the universal in the Idea. He
thus remains in the reflected element of
'representation"' [8:10].
Recognizing Deleuze's reformulation of the
"concept" as a temporally bound object, in her generous
reading, philosopher and feminist theorist Elizabeth
Grosz [9] explains that concepts, for Deleuze, "emerge
long before the human emerges... Concepts have a
date; they have a history." Breaking with the
Enlightenment tradition "that wants to link concepts to
the development of reason," Grosz incites Deleuze's
notion of "Chaos" as "the real outside representation."
In the chaos of the "real," prior to the rational
imposition of logic, a concept is constantly moving and
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