Description
Book SynopsisLogic of Experimentation offers several innovative and ground-breaking perspectives on music performance, music ontology, research methodologies and ethics of performance. It proposes new modes of thinking and exposing past musical works to contemporary audiences, arguing for a new kind of performer, emancipated from authoritative texts and traditions, whose creativity is propelled by intensive research and inventive imagination. Moving beyond the work-concept, Logic of Experimentation presents a new image of musical works, based upon the notions of strata, assemblage and diagram, advancing innovative practice-based methodologies that integrate archival and musicological research into the creative process leading to a performance. Beyond representational modes of performance--be it mainstream or historically informed performance practices--Logic of Experimentation creates an ontological, methodological and ethical space for experimental performance practices, arguing for a new mode of performance. Written in an experimental style, its eight chapters appropriate music performance concepts from post-structural philosophy, psychoanalysis, science and technology studies, epistemology, and semiotics, displaying how transdisciplinarity is central to artistic research. An indispensable contribution to artistic research in music, Logic of Experimentation is compelling reading for music performers, composers, musicologists, philosophers and artist researchers alike.
Trade Review“This is an outstanding book in every way. It demarcates a new field—that of artistic research as an experimental activity—and then provides an original theoretical framework within which to relate the field to music. All the chapters address issues that transcend music and are of great import for aesthetics, ethics, epistemology, ontology, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural theory.” - Ronald Bogue, University of Georgia, US
“Reading Logic of Experimentation is an intellectual adventure. The reader comes away with a much more flexible and more powerful context for engaging in performance as scholarship, corporeality, and the manifestation of energy.” - Neely Bruce, Wesleyan University, US
This is a remarkable work, rich in ideas and provocative in its conclusions. Assis offers a transformative approach to music performance, which serves as a paradigmatic instance of artistic research. But he also provides the conceptual framework for a general ontology and epistemology of art, one that has implications well beyond the domain of music. This is a book that deserves the attention of researchers throughout the disciplines of the arts, humanities and social sciences.
Bogue, Ronald, jar-online.net. 19/12/2019. https://doi.org/10.22501/jarnet.0023
Table of ContentsPreface: A Transdisciplinary Conjuncture
Introduction: Experimentation versus Interpretation
Part 1. Assemblage Theory for Music
Chapter 1: Virtual Works—Actual Things
Rasch — The limits of music philosophy and the role of artistic
research — Music ontologies: some problems — Beyond
transcendence: approaching a Deleuzian ontology — Virtual
works, actual things: towards a new image of musical work —
Strata — Rasch25: . . . vers la nuit
Chapter 2: Assemblage, Strata, Diagram
Musical works as assemblages — Agencement, logic of assemblage,
assemblage theory — Intermezzo: a note on translation —
From structure to assemblage — Strata — Diagram — Logic of
assemblage
Part 2: Experimental Systems in Music
Chapter 3: Experimental Systems and Artistic Research
An epistemology for artistic research? — A methodology for
artistic research — Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s experimental systems
— Thought collective and ensembles of experimental systems:
MusicExperiment21 — Series of experiments and modules of
research
Chapter 4: Epistemic Complexity in Music Performance
Complexity and epistemic complexity — Epistemic complexity
in biology — Epistemic complexity in technology — Epistemic
complexity in music — Experimentation in music performance:
how to make the future?
Part 3. Beyond Interpretation: Bodies-in-Action
Chapter 5: Transduction and the Body as a Transducer
Transduction in music performance: relaying f lows of intensities;
— Gilbert Simondon’s various definitions of transduction —
Discharge (potentiality); — Passage (time and temporality);
— Energy (thermodynamics): potential, scales, entropy
— Information theory: structural germs and singularities
(structuration) — Haecceity: from haecceitas (Duns Scotus) to
eccéité (Simondon) to heccéité (Deleuze and Guattari) to microhaecceity
— Topology: in-formation — Corporeality: somatic
transduction — Permanent transduction: being-in-the-world and
fluctuatio animi; 11. Conclusion
Chapter 6: Rasch26: The Somatheme
The somatheme — Roland Barthes at the piano: musica practica —
The impact of Julia Kristeva: phenotext and genotext —
New musical concepts: geno-song, pheno-song, somatheme —
Intermezzo: fourteen somathemes — The impact of Jacques
Lacan: signifier and jouissance — Lacan’s desire — Situating the
somatheme within Lacan’s graphs of desire — Conclusion: artistic
research and transdisciplinarity
Part 4. A New Ethics of Performance
Chapter 7: The Emancipated Performer:
Musical Renderings and Power Relations
Music performance and power relations — The dominant image
of work and the problem of interpretation — The tacit authorities:
Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control” — Nietzsche’s
three modes of relation to history: monumental, antiquarian,
critical — A new image of work — The emancipated performer
Chapter 8. . . . at the borders of time that surround our presence . . .
What is the contemporary? — Agamben’s contemporary: Barthes
reading Nietzsche — Nietzsche’s untimely: lost in translation —
. . . at the border of time that surrounds our presence . . . — Artistic
research as the carrier of the contemporary
Appendix 1: Beyond Urtext: A Dynamic Conception of Musical Editing
On notation and time — The urtext era — Urtext editions: an
epistemological obstacle — Critical editing of music and different
types of editions — Music editing and performance practice: a
dynamic conception
Appendix 2: The Conditions of Creation and the Haecceity of Musical Material: Philosophical-Aesthetic Convergences between Helmut Lachenmann and Gilles Deleuze
Helmut Lachenmann and Gilles Deleuze: an unconnected
connection — Helmut Lachenmann: toward an aestheticostructural
methodology — Helmut Lachenmann’s three “theses”
on composing — Gilles Deleuze’s diagnostic function of art, capture
of forces, and body without organs: first convergences with Helmut
Lachenmann — Helmut Lachenmann’s four conditions of the
musical material — Gilles Deleuze’s opinion, corporeity, fold, and
latitude: further convergences with Helmut Lachenmann — The
conditions of creation and the haecceity of musical material: a
philosophical-aesthetic Erewhon
Acknowledgements
Index
