Feeling Machines: Immersion, Expression, and Technological Embodiment in Electroacoustic Music of the French Spectral School

This dissertation considers the music and technical practice of composers affiliated with French spectralism, including Hugues Dufourt, Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, Jean-Claude Risset, and Kaija Saariaho. They regularly described their work, which was attuned to the transformative experiences that technologies of electronic sound production and reproduction could inspire in listeners, using metaphoric appeals to construction: to designing new sounds or exploring new illusory aural phenomena. To navigate a nascent but fast-expanding world of electronic and computer music, the spectralists appealed to physical musical attributes including gesture, space, and source-cause identification. Fascinated by gradual timbral transformations, they structured some of their pieces to invite speculative causal listening even while seeking to push it to expressive extremes. I hypothesize that, much as the immersive technology of the cinema can create the illusory feeling of flight in viewers, electronic music can inspire listeners to have experiences in excess of their physical capabilities. Those feelings are possible because listening can be understood as empathetic and embodied, drawing on a listener’s embodied and ecological sensorimotor knowledge and musical imagery alongside referential, semiotic, and cultural aspects of music. One way that listeners can engage with sounds is by imagining how they would create them: what objects would be used, what kind of gestures would they perform, how much exertion would be required, what space would they inhabit. I cite recent research in psychoacoustics to argue that timbre indexes material, gesture, and affect in music listening. Technologies of sound production and reproduction allow for the manipulation of these tendencies by enabling composers to craft timbres that mimic, stretch, or subvert the timbres of real objects. Those electronic technologies also suggest manipulations to composers, by virtue of their design affordances, and perform an epistemological broadening by providing insight into the malleability of human perceptual modes. I illustrate these claims with analytic examples from Murail’s Ethers (1978), Saariaho’s Verblendungen (1984), and Grisey’s Les Chants de l’Amour (1984), relating an embodied and corporeal account of my hearing and linking it to compositional and technological features of spectral music

Black Music Research Newsletter, Spring 1987

BMR Newsletter is published by the Columbia College Center for Black Music Research and is devoted to the encouragement and promotion of scholarship and cultural activity in black American music, and is intended to serve as a medium for the sharing of ideas and information regarding current and future research and activities in universities and research centers. Articles: Black Music in New Orleans: A Historical Overview /Curtis D. Jerde; Composers Corner: Six Composers of Nineteenth-Century New Orleans /Lucius R. Wyatt; Black Music Collections in New Orleans /Deborra Richardson; Researching Black Music in New Orleans: A National Conference on Black Music Research ; Introducing...Members of the National Advisory Board of the Center for Black Music Research /Bruce Tucker; News and Notes From...The Center for Black Music Research /Josephine Wright; Updated Music List: Six Composers of Nineteenth-Century New Orleans . Editor: Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. Managing Associate Editor: Marsha J. Reisser. Associate Editors: Calvert Bean and Orin Moe. Production Manager: Gerry Gall. Designer: Mary Johnson. Vol. 9, No. 1. 25 pages.https://digitalcommons.colum.edu/cbmrnews/1023/thumbnail.jp

Contemporary opera in Britain, 1970-2010

This study of contemporary opera in Britain considers first, the theoretical aspects of the creation of an opera, then moves to a survey of British opera companies and their productions of modern opera over the past 40 years. There follows a detailed study of three works produced in Britain during this time, all of which are of particular significance to this composer: Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse, Saariaho’s L’amour de loin, and Birtwistle’s The Minotaur. The final chapter concerns the production of my own opera, The Moonflower (2011). The study was informed by established theories about opera and its history; an examination of scores, libretti and programme booklets for some operas produced in Britain, 1970 – 2010; direct contact between the author and composers, co-creators, and the works themselves (including attendance at many recent operatic productions in London), and the analysis of excerpts from the three contemporary operas mentioned above, while investigation of opera companies active in the period aimed to identify some possible trends in programming. The creation and performance of the author´s own opera was the culmination of this investigation; it illuminated many of the issues raised above, concerning the process of composing, designing and staging an operatic work in the early twenty-first century

Medievalism in contemporary opera

This thesis discusses four operas, all written after 1990, that are based on medieval texts: Caritas (1991, by Robert Saxton and Arnold Wesker), The Tale of Januarie (2017, by Julian Philips and Stephen Plaice), L’Amour de loin (2000, by Kaija Saariaho and Amin Maalouf), and Gawain (1991, by Harrison Birtwistle and David Harsent). Each case study is approached as an adaptation of a different medieval literary genre: affective piety, the fabliau, the troubadour lyric, and the chivalric romance. This organizational method provides a point of access into the cultural, critical, and creative reception histories through which texts from the twelfth-to-fourteenth centuries are received by composers, librettists, performers, readers, and audiences today. Through those literary-critical legacies, I approach medievalism in contemporary opera by enacting queer hermeneutics as described by Elizabeth Freeman in Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Combining literary, theological, and music-theoretical modes of analysis, this thesis explores two overarching avenues for enquiry: 1. How can we account for the complexities of time in composite works that span several centuries, stage premodern temporalities for post-industrial audiences, and themselves operate within the ambiguities of narrative time? 2. What does it mean to perform and spectate upon medieval texts and lives in the twenty-first century? Can the ephemerality of song connect with the ephemerality of history to stimulate creative forms of historiography? In Freeman’s terms, is this mode of historiography itself a form of ‘close reading’? Reflecting on the surprising prevalence of Cistercian influences surrounding each of these operas’ source-texts, I suggest that medieval spirituality can provide powerful tools with which to approach questions of performance and temporality, as well as the intense modes of love and desire that these opera stage. With a particular emphasis on how medieval writers and queer theorists conceive of secrecy and revelation, I suggest that the way in which song transcends the boundaries between discrete bodies can create a vital link between pre- and postmodern modes of desire, that thrives in the temporal gaps created by historical alterity

Chamber Music in France Featuring Flute and Soprano, 1850-1950, and a Study of the Interactions Among the Leading Flutists, Sopranos, Composers, Artists, and Literary Figures of the Time

This dissertation, together with the accompanying recital recordings, constitute an examination of chamber music for flute, soprano, and piano and for flute, soprano, and chamber ensemble written by French composers between 1850 and 1950. This examination includes an annotated bibliography of the music, a written document studying the interactions of the leading flutists, sopranos, composers, artists, and literary figures of the time, and two recitals of representative works from the repertoire of about 120 minutes, which were recorded during performances at University of Maryland in March of 2004. The text examines the various types of chamber works written during this period for flute and soprano, with and without additional accompaniment. The amount of repertoire written for flute and voice during this period by composers of a single nationality is exceptional in the history of music. The annotated bibliography lists about 100 pieces in the genre, a truly substantial repertoire. As a performer, I was intrigued by the possibility that several generations of highly gifted, individualistic performers may have inspired these composers to produce this tremendous outpouring of repertoire. With the proximity of so many great singers and flutists in Paris at the time, it can hardly be coincidental that so many composers, both the most well-known and some who are quite obscure today, produced so many exceptional works for these combinations of instruments with voice. Indeed, I contend that the composers were influenced both by specific musicians and by their contemporaries and colleagues in literature and the visual arts, who inspired them to give so much attention to the development of what would have been regarded as a small form. Part of my historical research has been to search for the intersections between performer, poet, and composer and to determine some of the ways in which they affected one another. A second purpose of my study is to develop an annotated bibliography of these works, thus providing extensive, useful information regarding first performances, instrumentation, vocal range, flute range, keys, time signatures, dedications, timings of the works, publisher, availability, and the relative merit of the works themselves. Many of the compositions for soprano and flute are, admittedly, of dubious musical value, but some are masterworks of the chamber music repertoire, and few are actively performed today. In addition, a large number of the pieces listed in the bibliography are out of print. Because so many of the composers no longer have a significant prominence, their works today lay generally unperformed and undiscovered. The annotated bibliography also serves as a reference guide for today's performers of this repertoire. A final purpose of this study is the performance and preservation through audio recordings of a number of works associated with this project. The recordings will serve as a means of documenting some of this remarkable music

Two-piano performance : its classification, history, and challenges, with a compilation of a detailed catalogue of works

Research into the art of duo piano playing has been severely neglected. Repertoire is generally incorporated into books on solo piano playing and is often omitted from chamber work listings. With the exception of one outdated, out-of-print book by Hans Moldenhauer, I no author has attempted to submit a recent repertoire listing or a complete examination of the complications of duo pianism. The growth in the number of duos and the increasing number of concerts devoted to their repertoire indicates a previously unmatched public interest in the genre. The aim of this thesis is to serve as a reference guide for educators and pianists, in understanding the classification problems of the duo piano genre and how it relates to other pianistic combinations, an examination of the history of two-piano works until 1950, a look at professional and artistic challenges of duo piano playing, and a catalogue of works written for the medium. Confusion exists about the meaning of the word duet. At issue is whether the genre refers to two pianists at one keyboard exclusively, or whether it incorporates two pianists at two keyboards. Various sources were consulted to show that no uniform definition is available. In this initial chapter background to the study is given, available literature is reviewed and research methodology is explained

Winona Daily News

https://openriver.winona.edu/winonadailynews/1935/thumbnail.jp

Aurora, 1989

https://commons.emich.edu/aurora/1095/thumbnail.jp