Virtual Works Actual Things

ORPHEUS Beyond musical works: a new approach to music ontology ORPHEUS and performance What are musical works? How are they constructed in our minds? Which material things allow us to speak about them in the first place? Does a specific way of conceiving musical works limit their performative potentials? What alternative, more productive images of musical work can be devised? Virtual Works—Actual Things addresses contemporary music ontological discourses, challenging dominant musicological accounts, Virtual Works questioning their authoritative foundation, and moving towards dynamic perspectives devised by music practitioners and artist researchers. Specific attention is given to the relationship between the virtual multiplicities that enable the construction of an image of a musical work, and the actual, concrete materials that make such a construction possible. With contributions by prominent scholars, this book is a wide-ranging and Actual Things fascinating collection of essays, which will be of great interest for artistic research, contemporary musicology, music philosophy, performance studies, and music pedagogy alike. Essays in Music Ontology Virtual Works Virtual Paulo de Assis is a researcher affiliated with the Orpheus Institute, Ghent. He is an experimental performer, pianist, and music philosopher, with transdisciplinary interests in composition, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and epistemology. Contributors: David Davies (McGill University, Montreal), Gunnar Hindrichs (University of Basel), John Rink (University of Cambridge), Andreas Dorschel (University of the Arts Graz), Lydia Goehr (Columbia University, New York), Kathy Kiloh (OCAD University, Toronto), Jake McNulty (Columbia University, New York). ― Actual Things INSTITUTE Edited by Paulo de Assis IN S ISBN 9789462701403 TIT U T E 9 789462 701403 > SERIES VWAT cover final.indd 1 06/07/18 11:42 Virtual Works—Actual Things: Essays in Music Ontology VIRTUAL WORKS— ACTUAL THINGS: ESSAYS IN MUSIC ONTOLOGY Edited by Paulo de Assis Leuven University Press Table of Contents 9 Introduction Paulo de Assis 19 Virtual Works—Actual Things Paulo de Assis 45 Locating the Performable Musical Work in Practice: A Non-Platonist Interpretation of the “Classical Paradigm” David Davies 65 Towards a General Theory of Musical Works and Musical Listening Gunnar Hindrichs 89 The Work of the Performer John Rink 115 Music as Play: A Dialogue Andreas Dorschel 135 What Anyway Is a “Music Discomposed”? Reading Cavell through the Dark Glasses of Adorno Lydia Goehr 153 Three Responses to Lydia Goehr’s Essay “What Anyway Is a ‘Music Discomposed’?” Lydia Goehr 155 Response 1 What Is a Music Dis-discomposed? Kathy Kiloh 159 Response 2 Krenek, Cage, and Stockhausen in Cavell’s “Music Discomposed” Jake McNulty 163 Response 3 Stanley Cavell’s “Music Discomposed” at 52 Paulo de Assis 171 Appendix The International Orpheus Academy for Music and Theory 2016: Concerts and Installations 179 Notes on Contributors 183 Index 5 Acknowledgments This volume would have been impossible without the active and generous collaboration of all its authors—Andreas Dorschel, David Davies, Gunnar Hindrichs, John Rink, and Lydia Goehr—whom I warmly thank for their time, engagement, and enthusiasm. Further, I thank Kathy Kiloh and Jake McNulty for their willingness to be part of this project even without having attended the Orpheus Academy 2016. At the Orpheus Institute, I am particularly grateful to Heloisa Amaral and Lucia D’Errico, two advanced doctoral students who enormously helped me in designing, preparing, and running the Orpheus Academy 2016. Their professionalism and affability in communicating with the faculty members during the Academy contributed greatly to the success- ful unfolding of the discourse. My thanks also go to Juan Parra Cancino for his creative collaboration in the musical performances and his technical assis- tance throughout the Academy. Last but not least, I am grateful to the Orpheus Institute’s front-desk collaborators Heike Vermeire and Kathleen Snyers, who highly efficiently communicated with the faculty before, during, and after the Academy on any practical and logistical matter. Regarding this book, I am grateful to the Orpheus Institute’s series editor, William Brooks, who enthusi- astically embraced this publication from my very first proposal, and to Edward Crooks, who copy-edited the complete volume with the highest professionalism and intelligence. Finally, great thanks go to Peter Dejans, the director of the Orpheus Institute, who consistently facilitated and created all necessary conditions for the realisation of our Academies, as well as for the publications issuing from them. Paulo de Assis 7 Introduction Paulo de Assis Orpheus Institute Rasch On the morning of 4 April 2016, at the outset of the Orpheus Academy for Music and Theory 2016, together with other musicians of the ME21 Collective,1 I performed a new iteration of Rasch, an artistic research project around Robert Schumann’s piano fantasy Kreisleriana (1838, 1850).2 Under the title Rasch14: Loving Barthes(3), the complete musical score of Schumann’s piece was played on a modern grand piano. Additionally, the performance included pre-recorded sounds and live electronics, as well as video projections of texts, images, and film fragments. The performance had no perceptible beginning: when the doors opened, a sonic installation based upon a recorded reading of Roland Barthes’s 1979 essay “Loving Schumann” was diffused over four loudspeakers. Another essay by Barthes—“Rasch,” from 1975—functioned as a constant, recurrent conceptual layer throughout the complete performance, fragments of which were projected onto the walls or heard through the loudspeakers. At some points, the pianist, while scrupulously playing all the notes prescribed in the score, played them in extreme slow motion. At other times he sustained a chord, or even stopped playing for more than a minute. Other pieces of music were played live or through the loudspeakers at specific moments of the performance: Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte (especially number 6, “Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder,” at the end of Kreisleriana no. 2), Ignaz Moscheles’s Etude car- actéristique pour piano, op. 95, no. 1 (immediately before Kreisleriana no. 5), Bach’s Gigue from the second French Suite, BWV 813 (as a lead-in to Kreisleriana no. 1 The ME21 Collective is composed of artistic researchers involved in or collaborating with the research project MusicExperiment21, a five-year programme on practice-based research in music. The project brings together diverse artistic, performative, historical, methodological, epistemological, and philo- sophical approaches, creating experimental performance practices and new modes of thinking about music and its performance. The project crucially moves from interpretation towards experimentation, a term that is not used in relation to measurable phenomena, but rather to an attitude, to a willingness to constantly reshape thoughts and practices, to operate new redistributions of music materials, and to afford unexpected reconfigurations of music. The project is funded by the European Research Council and is hosted at the Orpheus Institute. The ME21 Collective is its performative extension. It is made of musicians, performers, composers, dancers, actors, and philosophers, and it has no stable formation. Its modes of communication include conventional formats such as concerts, performances, and installations, but also lectures, publications, and web expositions. It has performed in Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Germany, Ireland, Portugal, and the United Kingdom. 2 Rasch is a series of mutational performances, lectures, and essays grounded upon two fundamental materials: Robert Schumann’s Kreisleriana, op. 16 (1838, 1850), and Roland Barthes’s essays on the music of Schumann, written in 1970, 1975, and 1979 (see Barthes 1985a, 1985b, 1985c), particularly “Rasch,” a text exclusively dedicated to Schumann’s Kreisleriana. To these materials other components are added for each particular version: visual elements, other texts, or further aural elements. An overview of the complete instantiations of the Rasch series is available at Research Catalogue, https://www.researchcat- 11 alogue.net/view/64319/64320. A full-length video recording of Rasch1 : Loving Barthes[1], can be watched online at https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/99320/99321. 9 DOI https://doi.org/10.11116/9789461662521.ch00 Paulo de Assis 8), and very short fragments of the Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 (during the pre-performance sound installation), and also recordings of pianists like Yves Nat and Vladimir Horowitz playing Schumann’s Kreisleriana. Instead of the cus- tomary thirty or so minutes of a rendering of Kreisleriana, this performance had a duration of around fifty-five minutes. Clearly, this was not a performance “of” Kreisleriana, though all its pitches, rhythms, dynamics, and formal “proportions” have been played and “faithfully” respected. It was also not a performance “about” Kreisleriana, as it had no ped- agogical intention of revealing to the audience anything it didn’t know before (even if that happened as a side effect). And it was also not a performance “after” Kreisleriana, for the simple reason that the full score was played in an intended mainstream, modern mode of musical interpretation. Significantly, all materials external to Schumann’s score, all the various layers that were brought into dialogue with it, were not chosen incidentally

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