This chapter offers a critique of traditional Western accounts of timbre to propose that, instead of a secondary parameter subordinated to pitch and rhythm, timbre is a general category—a condition of possibility for listening—that depends on embodied perception and makes difference audible. The chapter draws from phenomenology as well as psychoacoustic and ethnographic research, focusing on case studies ranging from Fatima Al Qadiri to Julius Eastman, alongside ethnographic analyses of Barundi Whispered Inanga, sonic encounters in nineteenth-century Colombia, and readings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Eduard Hanslick, and Guido Adler, to provide a broader account of timbre that encompasses the imbrication of acoustic components with memory, affect, and language. In this respect, timbre emerges as an important critical and musicological category that helps us address issues of embodied difference and culturally dependent forms of listening, while reassessing the prominence of Eurocentric conceptions of musical values.
This paper focuses on the role of mimesis and more specifically, the role of musical performance in creating communities by examining the oscillations between muthos and logos that inform contemporary thinking around community and institutions.The starting point is Jean-Luc Nancy’s (1991) intervention—or interruption— into the totalitarian or “immanentist” tendency of myth, a tendency that is especially at play in European modernity’s image of itself as a myth-less community as well as in contemporary or “(new) fascism” (Lawtoo 2019). For Nancy, the notion of myth must not be rejected but “interrupted,” so that “there is a voice of community articulated in the interruption, and even out of the interruption itself” (1991). What replaces myth in his account is “literature” a notion that arguably informs the contemporary movement of performance philosophy (Corby 2015). Why literature and not musical performance? In posing this question, this paper turns back to ancient Greek mousikē as a sonorous performance that interrupts the interruption, giving rise to the interval. Countering the myth of myth, I develop an account of mousikē that mobilizes rhythm, spacing, and iterability to suggest a notion of community that exchanges communion for performative communication, producing an intervened institution interrupted from within: an in— stitution.
Lawrence Kramer reveals the main aims of a trilogy that also includes Interpreting Music (2011) and Expression and Truth (2012a): to situate the brand of musicology that he has defended since the 1990s within the contemporary academic panorama, and to argue for its continued relevance. (1) The conceptual transformations of the last decade have pulled the rug out from under the objects that musical hermeneutics seemed to depend on: the work, its context, its meanings, and its emotional effects. In his new contribution, Kramer seeks to show that these recent turns in musicology toward affect and performance often depend on false oppositions-between work and performance, text and context, and meaning and ineffability. In clarifying their usage, he shows how these concepts serve to recalibrate musical hermeneutics as "an entirely open and open-ended project" undergoing constant change (The Thought of Music, 142; hereafter ThM ). In his final chapter, Kramer describes a "newer musicology" that focuses on works as much as performances, as well as genres, actions, institutions, and materials, arguing that all of these should be treated similarly, not as things but as events to be interpreted.
In Convolute N, Benjamin claims that both the Arcades Project and the Trauerspielbuch reject a historiography based on the notion of periods of decline. Reflecting on the sonorous dimension of the dialectical image as presented in Convolute N, I suggest allegory as another link between the two works, which I explore in connection to sound and noise through an example from Monteverdi's Orfeo while remarking on the role of sound in Benjamin.
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