Prince in the Early 80S: Considerations on the Structural Functions of Performative Gestures
Prince in the early 80s: considerations on the structural functions of performative gestures. Jacopo Costa To cite this version: Jacopo Costa. Prince in the early 80s: considerations on the structural functions of performative gestures.. colloque ”New Perspectives on Popular Music Resarch”, Université d’Agder (Kristiansand, Norvège), 5-6 décembre 2019, Dec 2019, Agder, Norway. hal-03049637 HAL Id: hal-03049637 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03049637 Submitted on 14 Dec 2020 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Jacopo Costa Prince in the early 80s: considerations on the structural functions of performative gestures. Transcribing Prince's music can be a very frustrating exercise, as the notes that are put on a score (often quite ordinary) do no justice to the expressive richness we perceive when we listen to his songs. In my intervention, I will propose an analysis of the performative gestures in Prince's music, focusing on a few excerpts from his production of the years 1980-1984 (in terms of albums, from Dirty Mind to Purple Rain). The hypothesis to be tested is that in Prince's music a certain gestural approach to the performance (both instrumental and vocal) has an authentic structural function for the music: in other words, this gestural approach is not simply related to the field of musical interpretation, but has a constitutive function at the formal level of composition.
[Show full text]