Récit Music: Musical community in the information age

Abstract

This article delineates a metaphysical concept, musical community, and considers its implications for material practices in the art world. It describes ways in which two theoretically distant categories of art music, namely, electroacoustic music and the concert-hall tradition, may converge given the emergent societal and technological shifts in the information age. The concepts of ‘networks’ and ‘reciprocity’, as developed by sociologists Manuel Castells and Marcel Mauss, respectively, constitute the theoretical lens for this analysis, which sees a number of musicological notions, including ‘musical society’ and ‘acousmatics’ reconsidered philosophically. Emphasis is placed, in lieu of the insular methodologies associated with the akousmatikoi, on broader Pythagorean society, its mythical links with present-day musical society, which are explored in relation to practical as well as structural proclivities permeating contemporary art music. These philosophical considerations are then used, so as to provide a general theory of récit music, a musical form designed by the author enabling creative employment of the impasses introduced in the information age. Finally, different reciprocities of the form with contemporary and traditional compositional philosophies are discussed, serving as an overview of the various theoretical and formal facets of récit music as methodology, approached in terms of three propositions.