Powers of Divergence

An Experimental Approach to Music Performance

Lucia D'Errico

Regular price €0.00 Sale

Monograph - free ebook - PDF

VIEW Monograph - paperback

Beyond resemblance: creative divergence in music performance

What does it mean to produce resemblance in the performance of written music? Starting from how this question is commonly answered by the practice of interpretation in Western notated art music, this book proposes a move beyond commonly accepted codes, conventions and territories of music performance. Appropriating reflections from post-structural philosophy, visual arts and semiotics, and crucially based upon an artistic research project with a strong creative and practical component, it proposes a new approach to music performance. The approach is based on divergence, on the difference produced by intensifying the chasm between the symbolic aspect of music notation and the irreducible materiality of performance. Instead of regarding performance as reiteration, reconstruction and reproduction of past musical works, Powers of Divergence emphasises its potential for the emergence of the new and for the problematisation of the limits of musical semiotics.

Ebook available in Open Access.
This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).
Erratum: Table of contents
In the table of contents of the printed books the description of Book I, Book II and Book III is incorrect. This information is correct in the table of contents below and in the PDF version of the book.

Preface
Acknowledgments
Specific Terminology
Introduction

BOOK I Description of the Practice
The Problem of Resemblance
Beyond Improvisation
A Series of Anamorphic Glances
On Methodology
Phonographic Writing
The Phantasmic Image of the Musical Work
The Vectors of the Body
The Musical Work as a “Manifold”
A Peripheral Instrument
Modes of Exposition
 
BOOK II Derivatives
Derivative I: On Three Different (Musical) Eyes
Derivative II: The Phonocentric Vision of Music
Derivative III: An Eye That Sees Itself
Derivative IV: The Joyous Power of Simulacra
Derivative V: How to Defy Perspective through Perspective
Derivative VI: Automaton
Derivative VII: How to Produce a Phantasm? Part I: Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Derivative VIII: How to Produce a Phantasm? Part II: Francis Bacon
Derivative IX: How to Produce a Phantasm? Part III: Salvatore Sciarrino
Derivative X: How to Produce a Phantasm? Part IV: Carmelo Bene
 
BOOK III Five Glances upon the Unspeakable Body
Appendix 1: Techniques of Minoration
Appendix 2: List of Musical Examples
Closing Remarks
References
Biographical Note

Format: Monograph - free ebook - PDF

198 pages

14 black & white images

ISBN: 9789461662514

Publication: July 10, 2018

Series: Orpheus Institute Series

Languages: English

Download: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/29716

Lucia D’Errico is a musician and artistic researcher. She is research fellow at the Orpheus Institute Ghent.
“An original and valuable contribution to the field of artistic research, integrating theory and practice and charting a clear pathway through the work of a great number of artists, philosophers, and composers by way of philosophy, art and media theory, semiotics, and musical composition.” - Edward Campbell
 

“‘Woe to those who do not have a problem,’ Gilles Deleuze exhorts his audience during one of his seminars. And a ‘problem’ in this philosophical sense is not something to dispense with, a difficulty to resolve, an obstacle to eliminate; nor is it something one inherits ready-made. Just as a ‘concept’ in the paradigmatic repertoire of Deleuze’s philosophy is a creation, a ‘problem’ must be invented; it needs to be developed, its strength measured by the force of the path it breaches across an already established field - reconstructing it, reorganising it. The principal virtue of Lucia D’Errico's book is that it constructs precisely such a problem.” - Zsuzsa Baross