Melbourne Conservatorium of Music - Theses
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ItemStaking temporary territories: reconceptualising music performance( 2019)This thesis is a philosophical inquiry into the conceptualisation of music and, specifically, music performance. The purpose of the research is to establish a substantial discourse that directly addresses creativity in music performance, shifting the weight of focus from music as a written art to music as a practised craft. This inquiry is a process of unravelling normative concepts, pulling apart fundamental assumptions, and reassembling the remaining pieces to form a new standpoint. This research draws primarily on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze in order to aid the locating and critique of habitual approaches, support an emergent music performance conceptualisation, and offer a perspective through which music performance can be viewed as a locus of creativity. Looking at Lydia Goehr’s The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works and Thomas Clifton’s Music and the a Priori, this thesis shows how traditional approaches to conceptualising music performance events rely on representations of abstract, a priori concepts. Linking this critique with Deleuze’s philosophy in Difference and Repetition, this research establishes the key concept of the Image to articulate these abstract concepts. This critique will show how the Image is problematic because it is an idealised interpretation or representation of music that serves as the goal for performance, that in turn provides the framework within which performance is understood. What precipitates from this problem is an approach to performance that views performers as inhabiting the periphery, subordinate to the idealised musical Image such as the notated score. Furthermore, traditional approaches to music performance is often in terms of what it ought to have been, rather than what it was, or how it took place. Music performance, then, is posited as always derivative, seldom addressed on its own ‘terms,’ and little understood outside of the definitions anchored in a pre-existing of musical works. This thesis contends that that music performance is inherently variable. Thus, thinking about music performance must account for the vicissitudes of a temporal and mobile event, and regard the wider contingents, such as audience, space, and venue, as forming part of the terms of understanding. Concepts and terms extrapolated from key texts by Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, A Thousand Plateaus, The Fold, and Francis Bacon, builds a vocabulary in this research to discuss music performance events as they present in reality. Deleuze’s philosophy provides a positive way of articulating difference in music performance. The study is divided into two parts: the first addresses the normative concepts that limit the understanding of what music performance is, or what constitutes a performance. The fulcrum of the thesis tips the discussion from what constitutes music performance to how music performances actually create. Drawing on two Deleuzean texts, The Fold and A Thousand Plateaus, Part 1 concludes with the findings that music performance is a folded assemblage: thus this reconceptualisation of music performance must abandon the focus on what it is or should be, and redirect the question towards how it presents and how music performances are created. The second part addresses the persistence of normative concepts in the approach to creativity as uncovered particularly in Modernist aesthetics. Highlighting the caution needed when employing Deleuze’s concept of deterritorialisation, Part 2 establishes the importance of grounding the music performance conceptualisation in material reality where the terms that emerge from the moment of performance involve the creative choices that lead to performances taking place. Analyses of actual performances are included to build and incorporate vocabulary and terms that directly specify music performance as a folded assemblage.