Music as play: a dialogue

Abstract

During the Academy, Lydia Goehr discussed the notion of "discomposition" as a philosophical and musical concept, reading Stanley Cavell's 1965 essay "Music Discomposed" through the lens of Adorno. David Davies first addressed "musical practice" and "metaphysical principles," focusing on what participants in artistic practice do rather than on what they say or think they are 7 Most of the comments were made via email, in a rather informal mode of communication that also included comments within the written files. These comments have been integrated into the main text, and the author of the comment only appears (as a footnote) in those cases where a clearly different voice made or suggested some sort of clarification that positively influenced the essay. 8 The only exception is Gunnar Hindrichs, who due to several other commitments could not take part in this exchange of thoughts and comments. 9 A special case is Lydia Goehr's essay, which is followed by three formal "responses" that were written independently of the Orpheus Academy 2016. Earlier versions of Goehr's paper had been presented at the University of Toronto ( 2015), and at the Philosophy Department at the New School for Social Research, New York (see Chapter Six, footnote 2). On that occasion, Goehr received two written responses to her presentation, which, given their interest, and in line with our idea of a collective discourse, are published here for the first time. My own comment to her essay can be seen as a third response, making also the bridge to the concrete artistic presentations that took place during the Orpheus Academy 2016, which are briefly described in the concluding Appendix. 10 I wish to deeply thank David for his generous analysis of our statements, and for including us in his elaborated map of ontologies. I think he is correct from the point of view of currently available music ontologies, though I will argue that MusicExperiment21 operates outside such ontologies, suggesting a new image of work that is, at the same time, "more ideal" than Platonism's views (including an "excess" of virtual singularities), and more empirical than nominalistic accounts (being grounded on actual, individual singularities). I will briefly explain these notions further on, and in greater detail in my forthcoming book Logic of Experimentation: Rethinking Music Performance in and through Artistic Research (De Assis 2018).

De Assis, Paulo. 2018. Logic of Experimentation: Rethinking Music Performance Through Artistic Research. Leuven: Leuven University Press.

“…Examples of this ideal do exist: the writings of the "Occulture" group (2017); of those who emerged from the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Kodwo [1998], Fisher [2014], Goodman, Heys and Ikoniadou [2019]); the recent "prose poems" of David Grubbs (2018); the plays and dialogues of Andreas Dorschel (2018); and the kinds of absolutism found in avant-garde and modernist manifestos, as well as early "gonzo" style rock journalism. We may also go back to Roland Barthes, who as Assis mentions, "did not trust the search for structural codes (analysis), nor all those interminable accounts and commentaries so characteristic of musicological studies" (160).…”