Editorial: Historical continuum, mimetic fissures

Philosophical Inquiries, 2021

[draft only, final version published in Philosophical Inquiries 9(2), section focus ‘Philosophy of Art: New Directions’, eds. Elisa Caldarola and Jerrold Levinson: 111-132. doi: 10.4454/philinq.v9i2.324] This paper is concerned with the aesthetic and discursive gap between music and contemporary art, and the recent attempts to remedy this in the field of New Music through a notion of "New Conceptualism." It examines why, despite musical sources being central to the emergence of conceptual artistic strategies in the 1950s and '60s, the worlds of an increasingly transmedial "generic art" and music have remained largely distinct. While it takes New Music's New Conceptualism as its focus, it argues that the perspective on New Music it takes has wider implications in music and art. It begins by defining what exactly "New Music" refers to, and outlines some of the conditions for the recent rise of conceptualism in New Music. It then takes the work of the composer Johannes Kreidler as a key example of some artistic tendencies and theoretical presuppositions in New Conceptualism. Following this it draws on work in the field of sound studies in order to critically examine the theoretical attempt to connect New Music with contemporary art that is found in the notion of "Music in the Expanded Field." To conclude it offers some reflections on how a more robust conversation between contemporary art and New Music can begin to be conceived.

Sound Art and Music: Philosophy, Composition, Performance, 2020

This volume explores the mutually beneficial, but occasionally uneasy, relationship between sound art and music. It reveals how practices and theories associated with these art forms frequently result in corroboration, and contains chapters from both practitioners and theoreticians who work in areas where innovative synergies between sound art and music can be identified. Although practice and theory are inseparable, discourses surrounding practice are elusive but informative, and, as such, are given particular recognition and exploration in this volume. Taken as a whole, the book provides a snapshot of contemporary research across a range of sound art and music disciplines, showcasing the variety, scope and scale of this exciting, if bewildering, area of study.

Organised Sound, 2017

Sound art as a category has no clear definition, and there are several opinions about what the essential characteristics of sound art are. Is the key feature combinations of sounds that through their referential character provoke new associations and interpretations, or is sound art essentially concerned about space and the deliberate construction of spacesand consequently about the more 'objective' aspects of psychoacoustics and human perceptionor is sound art best characterised as experiments in music as an expanded field, in the tradition of, for example, Cage, Lucier and de Monte Young? These different understandings bring different theories to bear in the exchanges about singular works and which traditions they can best be placed in, and often fall between existing discourses in music and the visual arts. It is this lack of correspondence and coherence in the discourses that initially triggered the editors of this book to gather the colloquium that the book is based on. The book is composed by provocations, responses and discussions from the colloquium with the same title Sound Art-Music, hosted by the editors in 2012 at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts. The agenda of the colloquium was to contribute to the current debate about the relationship between sound art and music, and more specifically to investigate the possibility of arriving at a common framework for discussion and criticism-'on whether and how sound art and music meet in practice, in discourse and in listening' (p. 3). Colloquium participants were

2019

The aims of this paper are three: (1) To explain the structure of my epistemological critique of traditional musical analysis and draw its consequences, (2) to show how a musical analysis that focus on a sonic praxis and aims to generate knowledge on and through music can benefit from sound studies and (3) to outline the program of musical analysis as the analysis of sonic mediated processes of subjectivation. The structure of this paper is the following one: In the first part I'll explain the method of my epistemological critique of musical analysis and draw its consequences. I hope to reveal problems of musical analysis and show the motivations for, if not the necessity to, transform the concept of music and the purposes of analysis in mainstream musical analysis. In the second part I'll discuss two key concepts of sound studies from which musical analysis can benefit: Relationality and Materiality. I argue here that musical analysis should involve the analysis of a historical, cultural and media specific sonic praxis, in which techniques and technologies are constitutive to what music is. In the third part I'll outline my project of musical analysis as the analysis of sonic mediated processes of subjectivation.