Perspectives of electroacoustic music : a critical study of the electroacoustic music of Jonathan Harvey, Denis Smalley and Trevor Wishart.

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From the creative drive to the musical product : a psychoanalytic account of musical creativity

This thesis is the result of a life's work dedicated to re-introducing people of all ages to their inherent musicality which, more often than not, has been denied and invalidated by society's rigid adherence to the reified status of `creativity'. The main premise sine qua non is that creativity is no more, and no less, than the re-realization of things that already exist, and that it is indeed the ubiquitous mode of Eros itself (libidinal energy). In explaining the means whereby the existents of music per se are imprinted in the minds of us all, and then why only certain people choose to manipulate these existents into musical compositions, we proceed from the universal experience of intra-uterine life. The importance to us all of sound impingement upon the fetus is explained, for it is revealed to be foundational to the genesis of the Self. However, as each one of us has different sound-experiences, the affective reactions to those experiences inform our unconscious attitudes towards music. These are revealed in our projections into `the containing space of music'. Furthermore, it is posited that, in utero, not only are we initiated through sound-impingements into that which is dissonant to the Self (necessitating integration), but we also acquire three paradigmatic schemes of reference which thereafter inform all that we do. Our aesthetic sense is rooted here too, through tactility and even visibility. Choosing the mode d'emploi of musical composition is first dependent upon extrinsic environmental factors, but the imperative to compose arises intrinsically. The process though, is one available to us all, as we already possess the necessary mental function. This is explicated by Freud as the dream-work. The thesis culminates in a three-way synthesis predicated upon the dynamics of the transference and counter-transference, between the work that takes place in psychoanalysis, the tripartite teleology of a musical work from composer to performer and listener, and the musical structure known as sonata form. The first movement of Beethoven's third symphony, the Eroica is used as exemplar. ' Appendices are designed to accommodate information pertaining to both disciplines, while comments are to be understood as the opinions of no-one else but mysel

Brian Ferneyhough : the logic of the figure

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TUTTI! - Music Composition as Dialogue

As an engineer, when I could not comprehend a physical phenomenon, I turned to mathematics. As a mathematician, when I could not link sciences to humanity, I turned to music. As a music composer, I no longer see things, I see others. The novel method of music composition presented herein is a first comprehensive framework, system and architectonic template relying on the ideologies of Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogism as well as on research in auditory perception and cognition to create music dialogue as a means of including and engaging participants in musical communication. Beyond immediate artistic intent, I strive to compose music that fosters inclusiveness and collaboration as a relational social gesture in hope that it might incite people and society to embrace their differences and collaborate with the 'others' around them. After probing aesthetics, communication studies and sociology, I argue that dialogism reveals itself well-suited to the aims of the current research. With dialogism as a guiding philosophy, the chapters then look at the relationship between music and language, perception as authorship, intertextuality, the interplay of imagination and understanding, means of arousal in music, mimesis, motion in music and rhythmic entrainment. Employing findings from Gestalt psychology, psychoacoustics, auditory scene analysis, cognition and psychology of expectation, the remaining chapters propose a cognitively informed polyphonic music composition method capable of reproducing the different constituents of dialogic communication by creating and organizing melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and structural elements. Music theory and principles of orchestration then move to music composition as examples demonstrate how dialogue scored between voice-parts provides opportunities for performers to interact with each other and, consequently, engage listeners experiencing the collaboration. As dialogue can be identified in various works, I postulate that the presented Dialogical Music Composition Method can also serve as a method of music analysis. This personal method of composition also supplies tools that other musicians can opt to employ when endeavouring to build balanced dialogue in music. If visibility is key to identity, then composing music that potentially enters into dialogue which each and every voice promotes 'humanity' through inclusivity, yielding a united Tutti

The Structural and Aesthetic Capacity of Sonic Matter: Remarks on Sonic Dramaturgy

This research study focuses on my compositional practice and its related creative strategies. It describes a series of ideas relevant to the structural and aesthetic capacity of sonic matter and the notion of sonic dramaturgy. Its thread of enquiry is based upon transformational logic and the inner nature of sound. The ontology of sound matter, its intrinsic nature and perceptual and cognitive effects, is of primary relevance. This can be contrasted with a permutational approach – the ars combinatoria – that has prevailed in Western Music after the Renaissance. There are four boundaries in which my conceptual compass operates: 1. The intrinsic logic of the sound-material 2. Form as organisation immanent to sonic matter 3. Form as Sonic Dramaturgy 4. The relevance of listeners’ perceptual and cognitive capacities. It is easily understandable that an empirical and experiential attitude manifests itself from the above. My aim is to examine in practice, that encounter and that creative friction which occurs between sound-matter and the human mind, and as a result a priori schemas have been avoided

Measuring Expressive Music Performances: a Performance Science Model using Symbolic Approximation

Music Performance Science (MPS), sometimes termed systematic musicology in Northern Europe, is concerned with designing, testing and applying quantitative measurements to music performances. It has applications in art musics, jazz and other genres. It is least concerned with aesthetic judgements or with ontological considerations of artworks that stand alone from their instantiations in performances. Musicians deliver expressive performances by manipulating multiple, simultaneous variables including, but not limited to: tempo, acceleration and deceleration, dynamics, rates of change of dynamic levels, intonation and articulation. There are significant complexities when handling multivariate music datasets of significant scale. A critical issue in analyzing any types of large datasets is the likelihood of detecting meaningless relationships the more dimensions are included. One possible choice is to create algorithms that address both volume and complexity. Another, and the approach chosen here, is to apply techniques that reduce both the dimensionality and numerosity of the music datasets while assuring the statistical significance of results. This dissertation describes a flexible computational model, based on symbolic approximation of timeseries, that can extract time-related characteristics of music performances to generate performance fingerprints (dissimilarities from an ‘average performance’) to be used for comparative purposes. The model is applied to recordings of Arnold Schoenberg’s Phantasy for Violin with Piano Accompaniment, Opus 47 (1949), having initially been validated on Chopin Mazurkas.1 The results are subsequently used to test hypotheses about evolution in performance styles of the Phantasy since its composition. It is hoped that further research will examine other works and types of music in order to improve this model and make it useful to other music researchers. In addition to its benefits for performance analysis, it is suggested that the model has clear applications at least in music fraud detection, Music Information Retrieval (MIR) and in pedagogical applications for music education

SOUNDCASTLES: Play and process in field-recording composition

Soundcastles: Play and process in field-recording composition is a practice-led research in experimental music, which investigates the medium of field-recording as a contested vanguard between the listener and the listened; the self and the soundscape; the composer and the material. The research consists of a portfolio of nine field-recording compositions and a corresponding commentary exploring the ideas, approaches, and discourses behind. It studies the complex boundary where the listener and the sonic environment meet, and explores the music potential of sounds in the urban everyday between the immediacy of their emergence, and the cognitive-emotional context of their subjective perception. In the tradition of soundscape composition with field recordings, a main focus of this research is the integration of the affective and the effective qualities of being in the world and listening. The music properties of urban soundscapes can thus be both emphasised and transfigured, so as to include the subjective aesthetic perception without losing the unique connection to their place of origin. The resulting compositions—soundcastles—become mediations between subject and object, soundscape and inner-scape, the actualised and the potential. This research investigates this liminal space of convergence where a listener encounters the sonic environment, and explores the potency of this encounter. It thus problematises the perceived bifurcation of subject and object of listening, and treats the soundscape in terms of imbricated processes within a network of relationships. Each soundcastle is a process of reducing the continuous acoustic environment to a concrete form as perceived from a standpoint. In particular, the methodology of this practice utilises modern signal processing and editing tools to highlight the subjective experience of a soundscape, while preserving the connection of the composition to the specific place and occasion of its recording. In this way, the Soundcastles project aims to situate itself at the in-between space between phonography and acousmatic music within the field of soundscape composition

"Nec tecum nec sine te" : Language-Music Interplays in Musical Responses to Samuel Beckett

Intermediality is rarely a one-way street: Throughout his career, Samuel Beckett employed a variety of modes of expression and media in his works, and – vice versa – it is partly owing to the strong role played by music in his works that Samuel Beckett's works figure so prominently in compositional history from 1930 to the present day. In fact, with more than 250 Beckett-based compositions of different genres and styles and from various countries responding to virtually the entire Beckettian œuvre, Beckett's poems, plays and prose have exerted an influence on composers unequalled by those of any other 20th-century author. This study shows that Beckett's double-coded language, sounds and images have served as a blueprint for crossing medial and social gaps in favor of a de-hierarchization of both the author-audience relationship and the intermedial interplay. As a result of this paradigm shift toward more participatory artistic modes and toward a postmodern "radical pluralization" (Wolfgang Welsch) of meaning and expressive vehicles, Beckett regarded music as an equal interlocutor of language and, vice versa, composers have become more receptive to entirely new modes of text-setting. "Nec tecum nec sine te," a Latin phrase by Ovid cited by Beckett to describe the double-edged relationship between Hamm and Clov from Endgame – interdependent yet noncommittal – equally applies to the text-music interplays portrayed in the present work

The structural and aesthetic capacity of sonic matter : remarks on sonic dramaturgy

This research study focuses on my compositional practice and its related creative strategies. It describes a series of ideas relevant to the structural and aesthetic capacity of sonic matter and the notion of sonic dramaturgy. Its thread of enquiry is based upon transformational logic and the inner nature of sound. The ontology of sound matter, its intrinsic nature and perceptual and cognitive effects, is of primary relevance. This can be contrasted with a permutational approach – the ars combinatoria – that has prevailed in Western Music after the Renaissance. There are four boundaries in which my conceptual compass operates: 1. The intrinsic logic of the sound-material 2. Form as organisation immanent to sonic matter 3. Form as Sonic Dramaturgy 4. The relevance of listeners’ perceptual and cognitive capacities. It is easily understandable that an empirical and experiential attitude manifests itself from the above. My aim is to examine in practice, that encounter and that creative friction which occurs between sound-matter and the human mind, and as a result a priori schemas have been avoided.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo