Papers
Lost in Music: understanding the hermeneutic process in creative musical composition
Published in the proceedings of the 5th International Music Theory Conference, Principles of Musical Composition. Creative Process, October 13-15, 2005, Vilnius, Lithuania
This paper presents a method of understanding the interpretive mechanism of creativity that occurs during composition, performance and improvisation.
In his seminal work ‘Truth and Method’, Hans Georg Gadamer wrote of being ‘lost in play’: the way towards understanding and interpretation was to recognize that we are only ‘truly’ capable of interpreting something if we are totally absorbed in it. A consideration of Gadamer’s concept of play provides the starting point for generating insights on how we think about doing something creative when we are actually doing it.
The paper also revisits the problem of the hermeneutic circle, seeks to unpack the relevance of Gadamer’s analogy for contemporary approaches to composition, performance and improvisation which it will also be suggested constitutes composition and performance in real time.
- 12 Views
-
Like (1)
Is music production now a composition process?
Published proceedings of the Conference, The Art of Record Production, Hosted by the Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM), University of Westminster, London, September 17-18, 2005.
Over the past decade advances in music technologies have unleashed a phenomenon in virtual software instruments and digital audio workstations have become refined to the point where they are used by professional producers for recording, creating and editing audio.
Today ‘VST’s can be complex real-time generators and manipulators of audio, to the extent that some even ‘play and produce themselves’. The availability and utility of professional Digital Audio Workstations has enabled pro studio quality production methods for everyone who wants to produce their music in the digital domain.
For music production this revisits old questions on the nature of craft including what levels of skill i.e. technical mastery and understanding, are or should be necessary in order that an audio product can be taken ‘seriously’.
While some think software instruments and processing is good news for those that want tools to stimulate musical creativity, others more traditional in their composition and production methods consider this to be anathema as almost ‘anyone’ can produce what appears to be interesting audio by merely changing various controls.
Though these issues are part of a wider discourse that includes the dialogue about what is and is not music, either in a commercial or academic sense and whether self taught digital music production is a valid enterprise to be considered in record production, this paper seeks to uncover where music production is going and how this will affect the nexus between composition, recording, engineering and production as a whole. In many senses this is answered by looking at the burgeoning selection of digital tools now available that blur the distinctions between these four processes. To the point where to use Cascone’s (2002) paraphrase of Marshall McLuhan “the medium is no longer the message; rather, specific tools themselves have become the message.”
The subject will be addressed by first considering whether the skill sets necessary for music production skills is changing from a shared group process to an individual one and what are the socio-technical differences in soft production processes that bring this about. This is elaborated by a discussion on interactivity as a way of understanding how the
production process is mediated at the software level, which considers interactivity and performance, production and composition.
- 18 Views
-
Like (1)
Things That Are Not – an Ontology of (De)compostion’
Published proceedings of the 7th International Music Theory Conference, Principles of Music Composing: Musical Text, Vilnius, Lithuania, May 9-11, 2007
This paper considers the nature of ideas and their position within a field of power relations by thinking about the discourse that takes place within musical forms in general on a social and institutional level and how music is controlled. It then moves to look at the opposing sides of the discourse in the form of the orthodox/heterodox positions taken by Boulez and Schaeffer with regard to compositional style and process of musique concrete by using Nietzsche’s dualist metaphor of Apollonian and Dionysian visions as essential but opposing creative forces.
Finally some aspects of John Cages thinking on the subject of
indeterminism are brought in which, seem to reconcile the two positions in a way Nietzsche and perhaps Schaeffer, but not Boulez may have agreed with.
- 6 Views
-
Like
Add Comment