The Media-Critical Conditions in Music Composition
Short description
Doctoral thesis by Mersid Ramičević.
Full title: The Media-Critical Conditions in Music Composition: Indexical Notations and Epistemic Demands
In order to create a practice-research environment, this project seeks to reframe the concept of sonic materiality in relation to the acoustic assumptions central to normative understandings of musical literacy. The urge of the New and Post- Media to go beyond the New Music, a preposition that may be debatable in today’s music culture, connects generic sound realities with the concept of the medium functioning as a new heritage site and its episteme. In this sense, the composer's role in this context is one of morphing rather than disintegrating, as formalized listening still seems relevant to modelling perceptual approaches.
With respect to the indexical notations of music and the epistemic demands of music composition, the theory and practice of media-critical conditions will develop in the following ways:
- In the tradition of composition-in-performance, which is a usage-based performativity of formulaic and idiomatic inventiveness in improvisation; the importance of critical audiences for establishing authorship as a medium of publicness and knowing in the form of a memory variant is examined
- By approaching the issue of "unfinished" in relation to the incompleteness of the score and the openness to multimodal enactments, a dialog will be established with some of the most iconic composers of the first half of the 20th century, such as Alban Berg and Béla Bartók.
- In line with my interest in instrumental acousmatic music and the state of uncertainty, that is, a general notion of composition as an emergent and self-exploratory discipline conditioned by its prosthetic environments.
- Proposing a research-creation in reference to the distant experiences of post-nature in relation to the structural utopias of the urban environment, considering a certain state of abandonment functional as a new heritage that has evolved into a habitat developed by the absence of its human actors.
The arbitrariness of the work is contemplated through its differing transpositions, conditioned by the reception of social conventions and a set of interventions in the given techno-aesthetic landscape. The tools (instruments of automatization and dynamization) that perform the concerted projection of meaning are key figures to which more attention should be paid in this regard. By leaving the natural, body's primary receptive organs, the senses, behind in the era of new media, they become obsolete. This gives rise to the conclusion that technology manifests the sensus communis, i.e., the result of musical expression as a social score.
But, beyond conventional notation, how do different media inform and determine creative practice and how might we treat them as prosthetic modalities whose specificities can be highlighted and transformed through music composition? Not necessarily in the service of the performance of the composition but as a way to complete the connection of man with its human (digital) im/pulses.
A continuous resemanticization that occurs in relation to media affordances assist the audience to perceive materiality, which refers to the normative understanding of music's literate practices in relation to the notion of trace and the preconditions of the historical, i.e., the process of signification.