Anarchy in the Unity: Compositional and Aesthetic Tensions in Mauricio Kagel\u27s Antithese für einen Darsteller mit elektronischen und öffentlichen Klängen (1962)

In 1962 the Argentine-German composer Mauricio Kagel (1931-2008) completed an innovative multimedia/interdisciplinary piece, Antithese für einen Darsteller mit elektronischen und öffentlichen Klängen. The unique compositional style and formal structure consisting of heterogeneous compositional components reflected his profound insights into issues inherent in postwar avant-garde music. Kagel remarked strikingly that “anarchy in the piece was omnipresent.” Indeed, his use of the term ‘anarchy’ is a keystone not only of the structural features of Antithese, but also of Kagel’s aesthetic of music in the piece. The present study seeks to reveal Kagel’s idea of anarchy in musical context and how he attempts to epitomize this particular thought in the complex and transliterate formal structure of Antithese. This study first reviews Kagel’s Buenos Aires period in terms of the cultivation and development of his musical composition and notion of anarchy. The review also incorporates problematic aspects of postwar new music in Europe which emerged in the period chronologically parallel to Kagel’s Argentinian era. The next stage deals with Kagel’s engagement in electroacoustic composition in Germany and the development of his own compositional method and style in its realm, where he consciously distanced himself from controversy between Parisian musique concrète and Cologne elektronische Musik. Because Antithese is a unique form of Instrumental Theater – a compositional approach Kagel invented – and a piece he dedicated to John Cage, this study examines distinctive features of Kagel’s theatricalization in the piece in contrast to his other theatrical pieces, as well as to Cage’s musical theater work. This examination clarifies the aesthetic distinction between Kagel and Cage which underlies their theatrical-theoretical differences. Intriguing in terms of compositional aesthetic content is that Antithese encompasses Kagel’s serial thought and an approach of Grenzüberschreitung of art genres which may seem antithetical in compositional-characteristic terms. This feature suggests that a latent part of his aesthetic intention was to create tension as a concealed component derived from the coexistence of heterogeneous ideas and elements on various levels of Antithese’s complex structure. Indeed, tension, as an indispensable element of the piece, is a key to deciphering Kagel’s notion of anarchy in music

Experimental practices of music and philosophy in John Cage and Gilles Deleuze

In this thesis we construct a critical encounter between the composer John Cage and the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. This encounter circulates through a constellation of problems found across and between mid-twentieth century musical, artistic, and philosophical practices, the central focus for our line of enquiry being the concept of experimentation. We emphasize the production of a method of experimentation through a practice historically situated with regards to the traditions of the respective fields of music and philosophy. However, we argue that these experimental practices are not reducible to their historical traditions, but rather, by adopting what we term a problematic reading, or transcendental critique, with regards to historical givens, they take their historical situation as the site of an experimental departure. We follow Cage through his relation to the history of Western classical music, his contemporaries in the musical avant-garde, and artistic movements surrounding and in some respects stemming from Cage’s work, and Deleuze through his relation to Kant, phenomenology, and structuralism, in order to map the production of a practice of experimentation spanning music, art, and philosophy. Some specific figures we engage with in these respective traditions include Jean-Phillipe Rameau, Pierre Schaeffer, Marcel Duchamp, Pierre Boulez, Robert Morris, Yoko Ono, La Monte Young, Edmund Husserl, Maurice-Merleau-Ponty, Alain Badiou, and Félix Guattari. In so doing we seek to find between these practices points of both conjunction and disjunction which enrich our understanding of Cage’s and Deleuze’s work, and, more widely speaking, of the passage of twentieth century music and philosophy in general. Here we hope to make contributions to the fields of continental philosophy and music theory especially, and to open a point of engagement with the nascent field of sound studies

The Sampling of Bodily Sound in Contemporary Composition: towards an embodied analysis

Full version unavailable due to 3rd party copyright restrictions.The listener’s experience as an embodied subject is at the centre of this work. Embodied experience forms the basis for analyses of three contemporary compositions that sample bodily sound, in order to question how such works represent and mediate the body. The possible applications of this embodied methodology are illustrated through three case studies: Crackers by Christof Migone (2001), A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure by Matmos (2001) and Ground Techniques (2009) by Neil Luck. The findings of each analysis are placed within discussion of critical and theoretical concerns related to the (re)presentation, mediation and manipulation of the body both as materiality and as social construct, using, in particular, work by Hansen (2004) and Wegenstein (2006). The sampling practices of these works lead to the fragmentation of the represented bodies, in which margins between bodily interiors and exteriors are frequently crossed, bringing about a reconfiguration of the musical subject. Furthermore, the celebration of the bodily origins of these works complicates notions of recorded sound as disembodied. The analytical methodology developed in this thesis derives from a consideration of approaches in a number of fields: feminist musicology, music psychology, embodied cognition, phenomenology, music and gesture and new media theory. The sensations and affective responses of the listening body are discussed alongside an examination of how listening is shaped by processes of technological mediation. This thesis attends to both the body that is listening and the body that is listened to. I argue that it is not adequate to understand the works studied as merely representing the body, but suggest it would be more appropriate to understand the relationship between work and body as multi-faceted, conceptualising the body and recorded sound as mutually framing. This uncovers not only technology as mediation, but also the body as mediation. Finally, the case studies are used to reflect upon the limits of the embodied analysis methodology and its potential for wider application.This study was part-financed with the aid of a studentship from University College Falmouth and a grant from The Sir Richard Stapley Educational Trust