Music to Hear on Here

Thursday, October 20, 2011

"Perfect, immaculate performance in the latest style preserves the
work at the price of its deﬁnitive reiﬁcation...The performance sounds like its own
phonograph record. The dynamic is so predetermined that there are no
longer any tensions at all. The contradictions of the music material are
so inexorably resolved in the moment of sound that it never arrives at
the synthesis, the self-production of the work, which reveals the meaning of every Beethoven symphony."

Adorno to me, seems to suggest that the fetish character of music and its industry drives musicians to compose for perfectly reproducible performances. It is as if the pieces were to be played on a phonograph the same every time, rather than created to be listened to, or to be played. I'm placing these two versions of Kenna side by side. The first is the recorded/produced version off of his album. The second is a live performance. While the musical shape of these two performances is generally the same, in the live version there are stylistic nuances not only in the vocals but also the instrumentals. For these two examples (and for the juxtaposition of many other live/recorded pieces): I'm very accustomed to the album recording, and expects its sonic gestures, so while listening to this live version, I encounter a tension between what I anticipate and what I'm given. As the listener, I was forced into their own process of synthesis and self-production of the work.

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Course Description

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." Martin Mull (or Elvis Costello)

Thinking about the meaning and value, intellectual, affective and neurological experiences, and aesthetics of music has occupied an important position in modern and contemporary philosophical writings. Central to the philosophy of music is a questioning of what music is insofar as it is an art form and practice, akin to but different from other arts, such as drama, literature, painting, sculpture, to name but a few examples. Claims have been made, in fact, that music’s effect, when performed and listened to, surpasses those of the other arts because of its abstact purity, of its universality, and of its singular capacity to express, represent and incite emotions. This course will explore such issues in 19th-20th century philosophy. We will begin with introductory readings of what composes the field and discipline of the philosophy of music. We will read—among other philosophers, novelists, critics and musicologists—Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Barthes and Adorno’s writings on music. Finally, we will have the occasion to read about and listen to specific musicians, both high and low, and explore the contexts of their work, concentrating on the historical and political dimensions of the practice, performance and art of making music.