Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge

Director of Studies in Music

Martin worked at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge as a Director of Studies in Music

Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge

College Teaching Associate

Martin worked at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge as a College Teaching Associate

St John's College, Cambridge

College Teaching Associate in Music

Martin worked at St John's College, Cambridge as a College Teaching Associate in Music

University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education

Tutor

Course content for the MSt in Liberal Arts

University of East Anglia

Research Associate, Electroacoustic Music Studios

I set up the Sonic Arts Research Archive.

Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge

Tutor & Bye-Fellow

Martin worked at Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge as a Tutor & Bye-Fellow

St Edmund's College, Cambridge

Director of Studies in Music

Martin worked at St Edmund's College, Cambridge as a Director of Studies in Music

Art and Life: John Cage, Avant-gardism and Technology

Frankfurter Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 5, 86-93

Art and Life: John Cage, Avant-gardism and Technology

Frankfurter Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 5, 86-93

The Poet Sings: Resonance in Paul Valery's Poietics

Humanities

This paper analyses Paul Valéry’s theories relating to his stated goal of poetic production: the attainment of “resonance” and a “singing-state”. My intention is to defend Valéry’s theory as a valid and consistent model of the creative process in poetry. To that end, I will draw support from T. W. Adorno’s claim that Valéry’s manner of reflective journalising in his Notebooks can furnish us with what he calls “aesthetic insight”. The consistency of Valéry’s theory will be supported by comparisons with the inferentialist understanding of semantics. Valéry proves to be a reliable exemplar of what might be called a “practice-led” aesthetics. Keywords: Paul Valéry; Adorno; poetry; practice-led aesthetics; inferentialism; resonance

Art and Life: John Cage, Avant-gardism and Technology

Frankfurter Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 5, 86-93

The Poet Sings: Resonance in Paul Valery's Poietics

Humanities

This paper analyses Paul Valéry’s theories relating to his stated goal of poetic production: the attainment of “resonance” and a “singing-state”. My intention is to defend Valéry’s theory as a valid and consistent model of the creative process in poetry. To that end, I will draw support from T. W. Adorno’s claim that Valéry’s manner of reflective journalising in his Notebooks can furnish us with what he calls “aesthetic insight”. The consistency of Valéry’s theory will be supported by comparisons with the inferentialist understanding of semantics. Valéry proves to be a reliable exemplar of what might be called a “practice-led” aesthetics. Keywords: Paul Valéry; Adorno; poetry; practice-led aesthetics; inferentialism; resonance

Composition and Adorno’s Rhetoric of the New

Scottish Music Review, Vol 3

In this article I will be exploring Adorno’s treatment of the concept of the new with a view to proposing a pattern in the rhetorical tone of his thinking on this matter. In brief, I will show that Adorno’s critique of New Music in the post-war period operated on two rhetorical registers: these I will term the exoteric and the esoteric. By exoteric, I mean to portray the process whereby Adorno produced an open philosophical scrutiny of the cognitive claims of New Music, with the act of composition itself being redescribed with the resources of dialectical philosophy. Adorno deployed both immanent and normative techniques of evaluation, but in every case he assumed that the philosophy of subject and object, and the critique of rationality and capitalism that the Frankfurt School had already thoroughly rehearsed, could be redeployed in the context of composition with confidence and with sufficient force to reorientate – and for the better – the fundamental approach of composers. Criteria of successful composition could (and probably should) be devised directly from philosophical principles.

Art and Life: John Cage, Avant-gardism and Technology

Frankfurter Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 5, 86-93

The Poet Sings: Resonance in Paul Valery's Poietics

Humanities

This paper analyses Paul Valéry’s theories relating to his stated goal of poetic production: the attainment of “resonance” and a “singing-state”. My intention is to defend Valéry’s theory as a valid and consistent model of the creative process in poetry. To that end, I will draw support from T. W. Adorno’s claim that Valéry’s manner of reflective journalising in his Notebooks can furnish us with what he calls “aesthetic insight”. The consistency of Valéry’s theory will be supported by comparisons with the inferentialist understanding of semantics. Valéry proves to be a reliable exemplar of what might be called a “practice-led” aesthetics. Keywords: Paul Valéry; Adorno; poetry; practice-led aesthetics; inferentialism; resonance

Composition and Adorno’s Rhetoric of the New

Scottish Music Review, Vol 3

In this article I will be exploring Adorno’s treatment of the concept of the new with a view to proposing a pattern in the rhetorical tone of his thinking on this matter. In brief, I will show that Adorno’s critique of New Music in the post-war period operated on two rhetorical registers: these I will term the exoteric and the esoteric. By exoteric, I mean to portray the process whereby Adorno produced an open philosophical scrutiny of the cognitive claims of New Music, with the act of composition itself being redescribed with the resources of dialectical philosophy. Adorno deployed both immanent and normative techniques of evaluation, but in every case he assumed that the philosophy of subject and object, and the critique of rationality and capitalism that the Frankfurt School had already thoroughly rehearsed, could be redeployed in the context of composition with confidence and with sufficient force to reorientate – and for the better – the fundamental approach of composers. Criteria of successful composition could (and probably should) be devised directly from philosophical principles.

Blackbirds rise from a field...: Production, Structure and Obedience in John Cage's Lecture on Nothing

Neo-Avantgarde. D. Hopkins (Ed.): Amsterdam: Rodopi, 389-402

This essay explores and develops an observation which appears – albeit in passing – at the beginning of Peter Bürger’s seminal Theory of the Avant-Garde. In order to grasp the full import of the observation, which concerns the question of how artistic “means” and “procedures” are treated within the historical avant-garde, it will first be necessary to outline the dialectical model of historical understanding – a critical hermeneutics – which generates Bürger’s interpretative insight.

Art and Life: John Cage, Avant-gardism and Technology

Frankfurter Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 5, 86-93

The Poet Sings: Resonance in Paul Valery's Poietics

Humanities

This paper analyses Paul Valéry’s theories relating to his stated goal of poetic production: the attainment of “resonance” and a “singing-state”. My intention is to defend Valéry’s theory as a valid and consistent model of the creative process in poetry. To that end, I will draw support from T. W. Adorno’s claim that Valéry’s manner of reflective journalising in his Notebooks can furnish us with what he calls “aesthetic insight”. The consistency of Valéry’s theory will be supported by comparisons with the inferentialist understanding of semantics. Valéry proves to be a reliable exemplar of what might be called a “practice-led” aesthetics. Keywords: Paul Valéry; Adorno; poetry; practice-led aesthetics; inferentialism; resonance

Composition and Adorno’s Rhetoric of the New

Scottish Music Review, Vol 3

In this article I will be exploring Adorno’s treatment of the concept of the new with a view to proposing a pattern in the rhetorical tone of his thinking on this matter. In brief, I will show that Adorno’s critique of New Music in the post-war period operated on two rhetorical registers: these I will term the exoteric and the esoteric. By exoteric, I mean to portray the process whereby Adorno produced an open philosophical scrutiny of the cognitive claims of New Music, with the act of composition itself being redescribed with the resources of dialectical philosophy. Adorno deployed both immanent and normative techniques of evaluation, but in every case he assumed that the philosophy of subject and object, and the critique of rationality and capitalism that the Frankfurt School had already thoroughly rehearsed, could be redeployed in the context of composition with confidence and with sufficient force to reorientate – and for the better – the fundamental approach of composers. Criteria of successful composition could (and probably should) be devised directly from philosophical principles.

Blackbirds rise from a field...: Production, Structure and Obedience in John Cage's Lecture on Nothing

Neo-Avantgarde. D. Hopkins (Ed.): Amsterdam: Rodopi, 389-402

This essay explores and develops an observation which appears – albeit in passing – at the beginning of Peter Bürger’s seminal Theory of the Avant-Garde. In order to grasp the full import of the observation, which concerns the question of how artistic “means” and “procedures” are treated within the historical avant-garde, it will first be necessary to outline the dialectical model of historical understanding – a critical hermeneutics – which generates Bürger’s interpretative insight.

The Horror of Disconnection: The Auratic in Technological Malfunction

Transformations, 15

What is a technology when it behaves in unexpected or undesirable ways? In this paper I wish to attend closely to technology in the moment of its malfunction and try to discover deeper significance in such moments beyond the merely irritating. It would be a mistake, though, to hear in this project something like the tones of a Luddite ressentiment; malfunction is rather a component of our technological experience. And it is emotionally and psychically charged. Moreover, as I will hope to show here, malfunction is equivocal: it occasions frustration and delight; it is to be feared and at another level longed for. Notable also is that a failing technology is aesthetically appealing and is often treated as aesthetic material. In order to try and capture some of the significance of malfunction, I will attempt to think the moment of failure in relation to Benjamin’s notion of aura. The interpretation of technical malfunction as auratic stabilises our thinking of what are highly disparate phenomena and points us towards more profound questions. Aura alerts us to the possibility that technology is a site of the re-enchantment of consciousness, potential regression or, in some interpretations, something like a Utopian appearing. Our usual appraisal of the technological is that which banishes the cultic, destroys aura and reconfigures the real; all of which, if true, is only true insofar as technology behaves “properly” (as we intend it to), insofar as it works. I hope to show that technology is always haunted by an auratic dimension; aura is more or less suppressed, more or less overt, and ideologies, economies and systems – I have in mind the global media – that rely on technology will be dogged by a problematic auratic shadow.

Art and Life: John Cage, Avant-gardism and Technology

Frankfurter Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 5, 86-93

The Poet Sings: Resonance in Paul Valery's Poietics

Humanities

This paper analyses Paul Valéry’s theories relating to his stated goal of poetic production: the attainment of “resonance” and a “singing-state”. My intention is to defend Valéry’s theory as a valid and consistent model of the creative process in poetry. To that end, I will draw support from T. W. Adorno’s claim that Valéry’s manner of reflective journalising in his Notebooks can furnish us with what he calls “aesthetic insight”. The consistency of Valéry’s theory will be supported by comparisons with the inferentialist understanding of semantics. Valéry proves to be a reliable exemplar of what might be called a “practice-led” aesthetics. Keywords: Paul Valéry; Adorno; poetry; practice-led aesthetics; inferentialism; resonance

Composition and Adorno’s Rhetoric of the New

Scottish Music Review, Vol 3

In this article I will be exploring Adorno’s treatment of the concept of the new with a view to proposing a pattern in the rhetorical tone of his thinking on this matter. In brief, I will show that Adorno’s critique of New Music in the post-war period operated on two rhetorical registers: these I will term the exoteric and the esoteric. By exoteric, I mean to portray the process whereby Adorno produced an open philosophical scrutiny of the cognitive claims of New Music, with the act of composition itself being redescribed with the resources of dialectical philosophy. Adorno deployed both immanent and normative techniques of evaluation, but in every case he assumed that the philosophy of subject and object, and the critique of rationality and capitalism that the Frankfurt School had already thoroughly rehearsed, could be redeployed in the context of composition with confidence and with sufficient force to reorientate – and for the better – the fundamental approach of composers. Criteria of successful composition could (and probably should) be devised directly from philosophical principles.

Blackbirds rise from a field...: Production, Structure and Obedience in John Cage's Lecture on Nothing

Neo-Avantgarde. D. Hopkins (Ed.): Amsterdam: Rodopi, 389-402

This essay explores and develops an observation which appears – albeit in passing – at the beginning of Peter Bürger’s seminal Theory of the Avant-Garde. In order to grasp the full import of the observation, which concerns the question of how artistic “means” and “procedures” are treated within the historical avant-garde, it will first be necessary to outline the dialectical model of historical understanding – a critical hermeneutics – which generates Bürger’s interpretative insight.

The Horror of Disconnection: The Auratic in Technological Malfunction

Transformations, 15

What is a technology when it behaves in unexpected or undesirable ways? In this paper I wish to attend closely to technology in the moment of its malfunction and try to discover deeper significance in such moments beyond the merely irritating. It would be a mistake, though, to hear in this project something like the tones of a Luddite ressentiment; malfunction is rather a component of our technological experience. And it is emotionally and psychically charged. Moreover, as I will hope to show here, malfunction is equivocal: it occasions frustration and delight; it is to be feared and at another level longed for. Notable also is that a failing technology is aesthetically appealing and is often treated as aesthetic material. In order to try and capture some of the significance of malfunction, I will attempt to think the moment of failure in relation to Benjamin’s notion of aura. The interpretation of technical malfunction as auratic stabilises our thinking of what are highly disparate phenomena and points us towards more profound questions. Aura alerts us to the possibility that technology is a site of the re-enchantment of consciousness, potential regression or, in some interpretations, something like a Utopian appearing. Our usual appraisal of the technological is that which banishes the cultic, destroys aura and reconfigures the real; all of which, if true, is only true insofar as technology behaves “properly” (as we intend it to), insofar as it works. I hope to show that technology is always haunted by an auratic dimension; aura is more or less suppressed, more or less overt, and ideologies, economies and systems – I have in mind the global media – that rely on technology will be dogged by a problematic auratic shadow.

Creativity and Possessive Interests

"Concepts of Music and Copyright", Edward Elgar Publishing

What I explore in this paper is the idea that the legal concepts of paternity and integrity have a strong resonance with the possessive interest of the artist. There are two affective logics that interest me: (a) I made (created) X and this fact entitles me to insist that I am in a privileged and unique position with respect to X, this is how X’s ‘being-mine’ is experienced. And (b) because X is mine, I don’t want it interfered with by someone else. This status of ‘being-mine’ is alienable: if X is tampered with by someone else, its organic, declared or demonstrable link back to me is lost. It ceases to be mine, and someone else can derive benefit from work which I began and I believe I should retain. I want the object to be judged as having value, and I want to be the one responsible for it. These are indeed very simple observations but they are, in nascent form at least, genuine affective dimensions – the anxieties if you will – of the creative process.

Art and Life: John Cage, Avant-gardism and Technology

Frankfurter Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 5, 86-93

The Poet Sings: Resonance in Paul Valery's Poietics

Humanities

This paper analyses Paul Valéry’s theories relating to his stated goal of poetic production: the attainment of “resonance” and a “singing-state”. My intention is to defend Valéry’s theory as a valid and consistent model of the creative process in poetry. To that end, I will draw support from T. W. Adorno’s claim that Valéry’s manner of reflective journalising in his Notebooks can furnish us with what he calls “aesthetic insight”. The consistency of Valéry’s theory will be supported by comparisons with the inferentialist understanding of semantics. Valéry proves to be a reliable exemplar of what might be called a “practice-led” aesthetics. Keywords: Paul Valéry; Adorno; poetry; practice-led aesthetics; inferentialism; resonance

Composition and Adorno’s Rhetoric of the New

Scottish Music Review, Vol 3

In this article I will be exploring Adorno’s treatment of the concept of the new with a view to proposing a pattern in the rhetorical tone of his thinking on this matter. In brief, I will show that Adorno’s critique of New Music in the post-war period operated on two rhetorical registers: these I will term the exoteric and the esoteric. By exoteric, I mean to portray the process whereby Adorno produced an open philosophical scrutiny of the cognitive claims of New Music, with the act of composition itself being redescribed with the resources of dialectical philosophy. Adorno deployed both immanent and normative techniques of evaluation, but in every case he assumed that the philosophy of subject and object, and the critique of rationality and capitalism that the Frankfurt School had already thoroughly rehearsed, could be redeployed in the context of composition with confidence and with sufficient force to reorientate – and for the better – the fundamental approach of composers. Criteria of successful composition could (and probably should) be devised directly from philosophical principles.

Blackbirds rise from a field...: Production, Structure and Obedience in John Cage's Lecture on Nothing

Neo-Avantgarde. D. Hopkins (Ed.): Amsterdam: Rodopi, 389-402

This essay explores and develops an observation which appears – albeit in passing – at the beginning of Peter Bürger’s seminal Theory of the Avant-Garde. In order to grasp the full import of the observation, which concerns the question of how artistic “means” and “procedures” are treated within the historical avant-garde, it will first be necessary to outline the dialectical model of historical understanding – a critical hermeneutics – which generates Bürger’s interpretative insight.

The Horror of Disconnection: The Auratic in Technological Malfunction

Transformations, 15

What is a technology when it behaves in unexpected or undesirable ways? In this paper I wish to attend closely to technology in the moment of its malfunction and try to discover deeper significance in such moments beyond the merely irritating. It would be a mistake, though, to hear in this project something like the tones of a Luddite ressentiment; malfunction is rather a component of our technological experience. And it is emotionally and psychically charged. Moreover, as I will hope to show here, malfunction is equivocal: it occasions frustration and delight; it is to be feared and at another level longed for. Notable also is that a failing technology is aesthetically appealing and is often treated as aesthetic material. In order to try and capture some of the significance of malfunction, I will attempt to think the moment of failure in relation to Benjamin’s notion of aura. The interpretation of technical malfunction as auratic stabilises our thinking of what are highly disparate phenomena and points us towards more profound questions. Aura alerts us to the possibility that technology is a site of the re-enchantment of consciousness, potential regression or, in some interpretations, something like a Utopian appearing. Our usual appraisal of the technological is that which banishes the cultic, destroys aura and reconfigures the real; all of which, if true, is only true insofar as technology behaves “properly” (as we intend it to), insofar as it works. I hope to show that technology is always haunted by an auratic dimension; aura is more or less suppressed, more or less overt, and ideologies, economies and systems – I have in mind the global media – that rely on technology will be dogged by a problematic auratic shadow.

Creativity and Possessive Interests

"Concepts of Music and Copyright", Edward Elgar Publishing

What I explore in this paper is the idea that the legal concepts of paternity and integrity have a strong resonance with the possessive interest of the artist. There are two affective logics that interest me: (a) I made (created) X and this fact entitles me to insist that I am in a privileged and unique position with respect to X, this is how X’s ‘being-mine’ is experienced. And (b) because X is mine, I don’t want it interfered with by someone else. This status of ‘being-mine’ is alienable: if X is tampered with by someone else, its organic, declared or demonstrable link back to me is lost. It ceases to be mine, and someone else can derive benefit from work which I began and I believe I should retain. I want the object to be judged as having value, and I want to be the one responsible for it. These are indeed very simple observations but they are, in nascent form at least, genuine affective dimensions – the anxieties if you will – of the creative process.

Writing as Life Performed

Adorno and Performance - Palgrave MacMillian

In this chapter I explore the interrelatedness of practice, rehearsal and performance and their applicability in the domain of “life”. These relationships are complicated when, in reference to Adorno’s Minima Moralia, the content of critical-essayistic production (which is analogous to aesthetic production in many ways) is ultimately that of the life of the author. I propose that to a large extent, the categories of practicing, rehearsing and performing that are derivable from artistic-productive experience can be extended to lived experience. Working and living seriously and critically have significant points of convergence. What I attempt to disrupt is the presupposition of any “natural” hierarchy between these categories, whereby, for example, performance – connoting the tangible accomplishment of goals and the visibility of that accomplishment – takes precedence over the open-ended tasks of practice and rehearsal. In essayisic mode, I am interested in loosening the arrangement and priority of these categories and in evading finality and talking up the lesser partner in a litany of dualisms that subtend our judgments: seriousness/play, public/private, realized/unrealized, commitment/postponement, decision/indecision, planned/unplanned, action/delay, success/disappointment.

Art and Life: John Cage, Avant-gardism and Technology

Frankfurter Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 5, 86-93

The Poet Sings: Resonance in Paul Valery's Poietics

Humanities

This paper analyses Paul Valéry’s theories relating to his stated goal of poetic production: the attainment of “resonance” and a “singing-state”. My intention is to defend Valéry’s theory as a valid and consistent model of the creative process in poetry. To that end, I will draw support from T. W. Adorno’s claim that Valéry’s manner of reflective journalising in his Notebooks can furnish us with what he calls “aesthetic insight”. The consistency of Valéry’s theory will be supported by comparisons with the inferentialist understanding of semantics. Valéry proves to be a reliable exemplar of what might be called a “practice-led” aesthetics. Keywords: Paul Valéry; Adorno; poetry; practice-led aesthetics; inferentialism; resonance

Composition and Adorno’s Rhetoric of the New

Scottish Music Review, Vol 3

In this article I will be exploring Adorno’s treatment of the concept of the new with a view to proposing a pattern in the rhetorical tone of his thinking on this matter. In brief, I will show that Adorno’s critique of New Music in the post-war period operated on two rhetorical registers: these I will term the exoteric and the esoteric. By exoteric, I mean to portray the process whereby Adorno produced an open philosophical scrutiny of the cognitive claims of New Music, with the act of composition itself being redescribed with the resources of dialectical philosophy. Adorno deployed both immanent and normative techniques of evaluation, but in every case he assumed that the philosophy of subject and object, and the critique of rationality and capitalism that the Frankfurt School had already thoroughly rehearsed, could be redeployed in the context of composition with confidence and with sufficient force to reorientate – and for the better – the fundamental approach of composers. Criteria of successful composition could (and probably should) be devised directly from philosophical principles.

Blackbirds rise from a field...: Production, Structure and Obedience in John Cage's Lecture on Nothing

Neo-Avantgarde. D. Hopkins (Ed.): Amsterdam: Rodopi, 389-402

This essay explores and develops an observation which appears – albeit in passing – at the beginning of Peter Bürger’s seminal Theory of the Avant-Garde. In order to grasp the full import of the observation, which concerns the question of how artistic “means” and “procedures” are treated within the historical avant-garde, it will first be necessary to outline the dialectical model of historical understanding – a critical hermeneutics – which generates Bürger’s interpretative insight.

The Horror of Disconnection: The Auratic in Technological Malfunction

Transformations, 15

What is a technology when it behaves in unexpected or undesirable ways? In this paper I wish to attend closely to technology in the moment of its malfunction and try to discover deeper significance in such moments beyond the merely irritating. It would be a mistake, though, to hear in this project something like the tones of a Luddite ressentiment; malfunction is rather a component of our technological experience. And it is emotionally and psychically charged. Moreover, as I will hope to show here, malfunction is equivocal: it occasions frustration and delight; it is to be feared and at another level longed for. Notable also is that a failing technology is aesthetically appealing and is often treated as aesthetic material. In order to try and capture some of the significance of malfunction, I will attempt to think the moment of failure in relation to Benjamin’s notion of aura. The interpretation of technical malfunction as auratic stabilises our thinking of what are highly disparate phenomena and points us towards more profound questions. Aura alerts us to the possibility that technology is a site of the re-enchantment of consciousness, potential regression or, in some interpretations, something like a Utopian appearing. Our usual appraisal of the technological is that which banishes the cultic, destroys aura and reconfigures the real; all of which, if true, is only true insofar as technology behaves “properly” (as we intend it to), insofar as it works. I hope to show that technology is always haunted by an auratic dimension; aura is more or less suppressed, more or less overt, and ideologies, economies and systems – I have in mind the global media – that rely on technology will be dogged by a problematic auratic shadow.

Creativity and Possessive Interests

"Concepts of Music and Copyright", Edward Elgar Publishing

What I explore in this paper is the idea that the legal concepts of paternity and integrity have a strong resonance with the possessive interest of the artist. There are two affective logics that interest me: (a) I made (created) X and this fact entitles me to insist that I am in a privileged and unique position with respect to X, this is how X’s ‘being-mine’ is experienced. And (b) because X is mine, I don’t want it interfered with by someone else. This status of ‘being-mine’ is alienable: if X is tampered with by someone else, its organic, declared or demonstrable link back to me is lost. It ceases to be mine, and someone else can derive benefit from work which I began and I believe I should retain. I want the object to be judged as having value, and I want to be the one responsible for it. These are indeed very simple observations but they are, in nascent form at least, genuine affective dimensions – the anxieties if you will – of the creative process.

Writing as Life Performed

Adorno and Performance - Palgrave MacMillian

In this chapter I explore the interrelatedness of practice, rehearsal and performance and their applicability in the domain of “life”. These relationships are complicated when, in reference to Adorno’s Minima Moralia, the content of critical-essayistic production (which is analogous to aesthetic production in many ways) is ultimately that of the life of the author. I propose that to a large extent, the categories of practicing, rehearsing and performing that are derivable from artistic-productive experience can be extended to lived experience. Working and living seriously and critically have significant points of convergence. What I attempt to disrupt is the presupposition of any “natural” hierarchy between these categories, whereby, for example, performance – connoting the tangible accomplishment of goals and the visibility of that accomplishment – takes precedence over the open-ended tasks of practice and rehearsal. In essayisic mode, I am interested in loosening the arrangement and priority of these categories and in evading finality and talking up the lesser partner in a litany of dualisms that subtend our judgments: seriousness/play, public/private, realized/unrealized, commitment/postponement, decision/indecision, planned/unplanned, action/delay, success/disappointment.

Dwelling and the Sacralisation of the Air: A note on acousmatic music

Organised Sound / Volume 16 / Issue 02 / June 2011, pp 115-119

This paper adapts Martin Heidegger's philosophy of ‘dwelling’ in order to effect a liaison between acousmatic music and ecological concern. I propose this as an alternative to both the propagandist use of music as a means of protest and to using the science of ecology as a domain that might furnish new compositional means. I advance the interpretation that acousmatic music ‘occupies the air’ in ways that transform the meaning of that dimension. It allows the sky to be sky and the earth, earth. I use the precedent of bell ringing as an example of sonic activity that occupies the air in order to further dwelling.

Art and Life: John Cage, Avant-gardism and Technology

Frankfurter Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 5, 86-93

The Poet Sings: Resonance in Paul Valery's Poietics

Humanities

This paper analyses Paul Valéry’s theories relating to his stated goal of poetic production: the attainment of “resonance” and a “singing-state”. My intention is to defend Valéry’s theory as a valid and consistent model of the creative process in poetry. To that end, I will draw support from T. W. Adorno’s claim that Valéry’s manner of reflective journalising in his Notebooks can furnish us with what he calls “aesthetic insight”. The consistency of Valéry’s theory will be supported by comparisons with the inferentialist understanding of semantics. Valéry proves to be a reliable exemplar of what might be called a “practice-led” aesthetics. Keywords: Paul Valéry; Adorno; poetry; practice-led aesthetics; inferentialism; resonance

Composition and Adorno’s Rhetoric of the New

Scottish Music Review, Vol 3

In this article I will be exploring Adorno’s treatment of the concept of the new with a view to proposing a pattern in the rhetorical tone of his thinking on this matter. In brief, I will show that Adorno’s critique of New Music in the post-war period operated on two rhetorical registers: these I will term the exoteric and the esoteric. By exoteric, I mean to portray the process whereby Adorno produced an open philosophical scrutiny of the cognitive claims of New Music, with the act of composition itself being redescribed with the resources of dialectical philosophy. Adorno deployed both immanent and normative techniques of evaluation, but in every case he assumed that the philosophy of subject and object, and the critique of rationality and capitalism that the Frankfurt School had already thoroughly rehearsed, could be redeployed in the context of composition with confidence and with sufficient force to reorientate – and for the better – the fundamental approach of composers. Criteria of successful composition could (and probably should) be devised directly from philosophical principles.

Blackbirds rise from a field...: Production, Structure and Obedience in John Cage's Lecture on Nothing

Neo-Avantgarde. D. Hopkins (Ed.): Amsterdam: Rodopi, 389-402

This essay explores and develops an observation which appears – albeit in passing – at the beginning of Peter Bürger’s seminal Theory of the Avant-Garde. In order to grasp the full import of the observation, which concerns the question of how artistic “means” and “procedures” are treated within the historical avant-garde, it will first be necessary to outline the dialectical model of historical understanding – a critical hermeneutics – which generates Bürger’s interpretative insight.

The Horror of Disconnection: The Auratic in Technological Malfunction

Transformations, 15

What is a technology when it behaves in unexpected or undesirable ways? In this paper I wish to attend closely to technology in the moment of its malfunction and try to discover deeper significance in such moments beyond the merely irritating. It would be a mistake, though, to hear in this project something like the tones of a Luddite ressentiment; malfunction is rather a component of our technological experience. And it is emotionally and psychically charged. Moreover, as I will hope to show here, malfunction is equivocal: it occasions frustration and delight; it is to be feared and at another level longed for. Notable also is that a failing technology is aesthetically appealing and is often treated as aesthetic material. In order to try and capture some of the significance of malfunction, I will attempt to think the moment of failure in relation to Benjamin’s notion of aura. The interpretation of technical malfunction as auratic stabilises our thinking of what are highly disparate phenomena and points us towards more profound questions. Aura alerts us to the possibility that technology is a site of the re-enchantment of consciousness, potential regression or, in some interpretations, something like a Utopian appearing. Our usual appraisal of the technological is that which banishes the cultic, destroys aura and reconfigures the real; all of which, if true, is only true insofar as technology behaves “properly” (as we intend it to), insofar as it works. I hope to show that technology is always haunted by an auratic dimension; aura is more or less suppressed, more or less overt, and ideologies, economies and systems – I have in mind the global media – that rely on technology will be dogged by a problematic auratic shadow.

Creativity and Possessive Interests

"Concepts of Music and Copyright", Edward Elgar Publishing

What I explore in this paper is the idea that the legal concepts of paternity and integrity have a strong resonance with the possessive interest of the artist. There are two affective logics that interest me: (a) I made (created) X and this fact entitles me to insist that I am in a privileged and unique position with respect to X, this is how X’s ‘being-mine’ is experienced. And (b) because X is mine, I don’t want it interfered with by someone else. This status of ‘being-mine’ is alienable: if X is tampered with by someone else, its organic, declared or demonstrable link back to me is lost. It ceases to be mine, and someone else can derive benefit from work which I began and I believe I should retain. I want the object to be judged as having value, and I want to be the one responsible for it. These are indeed very simple observations but they are, in nascent form at least, genuine affective dimensions – the anxieties if you will – of the creative process.

Writing as Life Performed

Adorno and Performance - Palgrave MacMillian

In this chapter I explore the interrelatedness of practice, rehearsal and performance and their applicability in the domain of “life”. These relationships are complicated when, in reference to Adorno’s Minima Moralia, the content of critical-essayistic production (which is analogous to aesthetic production in many ways) is ultimately that of the life of the author. I propose that to a large extent, the categories of practicing, rehearsing and performing that are derivable from artistic-productive experience can be extended to lived experience. Working and living seriously and critically have significant points of convergence. What I attempt to disrupt is the presupposition of any “natural” hierarchy between these categories, whereby, for example, performance – connoting the tangible accomplishment of goals and the visibility of that accomplishment – takes precedence over the open-ended tasks of practice and rehearsal. In essayisic mode, I am interested in loosening the arrangement and priority of these categories and in evading finality and talking up the lesser partner in a litany of dualisms that subtend our judgments: seriousness/play, public/private, realized/unrealized, commitment/postponement, decision/indecision, planned/unplanned, action/delay, success/disappointment.

Dwelling and the Sacralisation of the Air: A note on acousmatic music

Organised Sound / Volume 16 / Issue 02 / June 2011, pp 115-119

This paper adapts Martin Heidegger's philosophy of ‘dwelling’ in order to effect a liaison between acousmatic music and ecological concern. I propose this as an alternative to both the propagandist use of music as a means of protest and to using the science of ecology as a domain that might furnish new compositional means. I advance the interpretation that acousmatic music ‘occupies the air’ in ways that transform the meaning of that dimension. It allows the sky to be sky and the earth, earth. I use the precedent of bell ringing as an example of sonic activity that occupies the air in order to further dwelling.

Echo's Body: Play and Representation in Interactive Music Software

Contemporary Music Review, vol. 25, number 1/2, 17-26

Art and Life: John Cage, Avant-gardism and Technology

Frankfurter Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 5, 86-93

The Poet Sings: Resonance in Paul Valery's Poietics

Humanities

This paper analyses Paul Valéry’s theories relating to his stated goal of poetic production: the attainment of “resonance” and a “singing-state”. My intention is to defend Valéry’s theory as a valid and consistent model of the creative process in poetry. To that end, I will draw support from T. W. Adorno’s claim that Valéry’s manner of reflective journalising in his Notebooks can furnish us with what he calls “aesthetic insight”. The consistency of Valéry’s theory will be supported by comparisons with the inferentialist understanding of semantics. Valéry proves to be a reliable exemplar of what might be called a “practice-led” aesthetics. Keywords: Paul Valéry; Adorno; poetry; practice-led aesthetics; inferentialism; resonance

Composition and Adorno’s Rhetoric of the New

Scottish Music Review, Vol 3

In this article I will be exploring Adorno’s treatment of the concept of the new with a view to proposing a pattern in the rhetorical tone of his thinking on this matter. In brief, I will show that Adorno’s critique of New Music in the post-war period operated on two rhetorical registers: these I will term the exoteric and the esoteric. By exoteric, I mean to portray the process whereby Adorno produced an open philosophical scrutiny of the cognitive claims of New Music, with the act of composition itself being redescribed with the resources of dialectical philosophy. Adorno deployed both immanent and normative techniques of evaluation, but in every case he assumed that the philosophy of subject and object, and the critique of rationality and capitalism that the Frankfurt School had already thoroughly rehearsed, could be redeployed in the context of composition with confidence and with sufficient force to reorientate – and for the better – the fundamental approach of composers. Criteria of successful composition could (and probably should) be devised directly from philosophical principles.

Blackbirds rise from a field...: Production, Structure and Obedience in John Cage's Lecture on Nothing

Neo-Avantgarde. D. Hopkins (Ed.): Amsterdam: Rodopi, 389-402

This essay explores and develops an observation which appears – albeit in passing – at the beginning of Peter Bürger’s seminal Theory of the Avant-Garde. In order to grasp the full import of the observation, which concerns the question of how artistic “means” and “procedures” are treated within the historical avant-garde, it will first be necessary to outline the dialectical model of historical understanding – a critical hermeneutics – which generates Bürger’s interpretative insight.

The Horror of Disconnection: The Auratic in Technological Malfunction

Transformations, 15

What is a technology when it behaves in unexpected or undesirable ways? In this paper I wish to attend closely to technology in the moment of its malfunction and try to discover deeper significance in such moments beyond the merely irritating. It would be a mistake, though, to hear in this project something like the tones of a Luddite ressentiment; malfunction is rather a component of our technological experience. And it is emotionally and psychically charged. Moreover, as I will hope to show here, malfunction is equivocal: it occasions frustration and delight; it is to be feared and at another level longed for. Notable also is that a failing technology is aesthetically appealing and is often treated as aesthetic material. In order to try and capture some of the significance of malfunction, I will attempt to think the moment of failure in relation to Benjamin’s notion of aura. The interpretation of technical malfunction as auratic stabilises our thinking of what are highly disparate phenomena and points us towards more profound questions. Aura alerts us to the possibility that technology is a site of the re-enchantment of consciousness, potential regression or, in some interpretations, something like a Utopian appearing. Our usual appraisal of the technological is that which banishes the cultic, destroys aura and reconfigures the real; all of which, if true, is only true insofar as technology behaves “properly” (as we intend it to), insofar as it works. I hope to show that technology is always haunted by an auratic dimension; aura is more or less suppressed, more or less overt, and ideologies, economies and systems – I have in mind the global media – that rely on technology will be dogged by a problematic auratic shadow.

Creativity and Possessive Interests

"Concepts of Music and Copyright", Edward Elgar Publishing

What I explore in this paper is the idea that the legal concepts of paternity and integrity have a strong resonance with the possessive interest of the artist. There are two affective logics that interest me: (a) I made (created) X and this fact entitles me to insist that I am in a privileged and unique position with respect to X, this is how X’s ‘being-mine’ is experienced. And (b) because X is mine, I don’t want it interfered with by someone else. This status of ‘being-mine’ is alienable: if X is tampered with by someone else, its organic, declared or demonstrable link back to me is lost. It ceases to be mine, and someone else can derive benefit from work which I began and I believe I should retain. I want the object to be judged as having value, and I want to be the one responsible for it. These are indeed very simple observations but they are, in nascent form at least, genuine affective dimensions – the anxieties if you will – of the creative process.

Writing as Life Performed

Adorno and Performance - Palgrave MacMillian

In this chapter I explore the interrelatedness of practice, rehearsal and performance and their applicability in the domain of “life”. These relationships are complicated when, in reference to Adorno’s Minima Moralia, the content of critical-essayistic production (which is analogous to aesthetic production in many ways) is ultimately that of the life of the author. I propose that to a large extent, the categories of practicing, rehearsing and performing that are derivable from artistic-productive experience can be extended to lived experience. Working and living seriously and critically have significant points of convergence. What I attempt to disrupt is the presupposition of any “natural” hierarchy between these categories, whereby, for example, performance – connoting the tangible accomplishment of goals and the visibility of that accomplishment – takes precedence over the open-ended tasks of practice and rehearsal. In essayisic mode, I am interested in loosening the arrangement and priority of these categories and in evading finality and talking up the lesser partner in a litany of dualisms that subtend our judgments: seriousness/play, public/private, realized/unrealized, commitment/postponement, decision/indecision, planned/unplanned, action/delay, success/disappointment.

Dwelling and the Sacralisation of the Air: A note on acousmatic music

Organised Sound / Volume 16 / Issue 02 / June 2011, pp 115-119

This paper adapts Martin Heidegger's philosophy of ‘dwelling’ in order to effect a liaison between acousmatic music and ecological concern. I propose this as an alternative to both the propagandist use of music as a means of protest and to using the science of ecology as a domain that might furnish new compositional means. I advance the interpretation that acousmatic music ‘occupies the air’ in ways that transform the meaning of that dimension. It allows the sky to be sky and the earth, earth. I use the precedent of bell ringing as an example of sonic activity that occupies the air in order to further dwelling.

Echo's Body: Play and Representation in Interactive Music Software

Contemporary Music Review, vol. 25, number 1/2, 17-26

Labour, Work and Action in the Creative Process

The Discipline of Creativity: Exploring the Paradox. B. Porter (Ed.): Cambridge: CUP, 47-59.

In this chapter I argue that our coming to terms with the organisation of and any subsequent capitalising on ‘creative’1 activity today, will need to reckon with – but not decide between – differing and conflicting accounts of what brings about these so-called ‘created’ objects. The narrative accounts that are given pertaining to the origin of a created object, and the claims that are wrapped inside those accounts, I will refer to as ‘genetic stories’. In summary, such accounts can be analysed into one of three categories: the story of labour, work or action. Laborious production will emphasise effort, toil, ‘perspiration’; workly production will emphasise planning, craft, technique and execution; actional production will emphasise spontaneity, decisiveness and risk. Descriptions of formation and origination can be used to bestow upon an artefact a meaning and a value, the genetic story told of the work, be it laborious, workly or actional, inclines our opinion of it significantly. We suppose we know something essential of an artefact when we know (or think we know) from whence it came.

Art and Life: John Cage, Avant-gardism and Technology

Frankfurter Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 5, 86-93

The Poet Sings: Resonance in Paul Valery's Poietics

Humanities

This paper analyses Paul Valéry’s theories relating to his stated goal of poetic production: the attainment of “resonance” and a “singing-state”. My intention is to defend Valéry’s theory as a valid and consistent model of the creative process in poetry. To that end, I will draw support from T. W. Adorno’s claim that Valéry’s manner of reflective journalising in his Notebooks can furnish us with what he calls “aesthetic insight”. The consistency of Valéry’s theory will be supported by comparisons with the inferentialist understanding of semantics. Valéry proves to be a reliable exemplar of what might be called a “practice-led” aesthetics. Keywords: Paul Valéry; Adorno; poetry; practice-led aesthetics; inferentialism; resonance

Composition and Adorno’s Rhetoric of the New

Scottish Music Review, Vol 3

In this article I will be exploring Adorno’s treatment of the concept of the new with a view to proposing a pattern in the rhetorical tone of his thinking on this matter. In brief, I will show that Adorno’s critique of New Music in the post-war period operated on two rhetorical registers: these I will term the exoteric and the esoteric. By exoteric, I mean to portray the process whereby Adorno produced an open philosophical scrutiny of the cognitive claims of New Music, with the act of composition itself being redescribed with the resources of dialectical philosophy. Adorno deployed both immanent and normative techniques of evaluation, but in every case he assumed that the philosophy of subject and object, and the critique of rationality and capitalism that the Frankfurt School had already thoroughly rehearsed, could be redeployed in the context of composition with confidence and with sufficient force to reorientate – and for the better – the fundamental approach of composers. Criteria of successful composition could (and probably should) be devised directly from philosophical principles.

Blackbirds rise from a field...: Production, Structure and Obedience in John Cage's Lecture on Nothing

Neo-Avantgarde. D. Hopkins (Ed.): Amsterdam: Rodopi, 389-402

This essay explores and develops an observation which appears – albeit in passing – at the beginning of Peter Bürger’s seminal Theory of the Avant-Garde. In order to grasp the full import of the observation, which concerns the question of how artistic “means” and “procedures” are treated within the historical avant-garde, it will first be necessary to outline the dialectical model of historical understanding – a critical hermeneutics – which generates Bürger’s interpretative insight.

The Horror of Disconnection: The Auratic in Technological Malfunction

Transformations, 15

What is a technology when it behaves in unexpected or undesirable ways? In this paper I wish to attend closely to technology in the moment of its malfunction and try to discover deeper significance in such moments beyond the merely irritating. It would be a mistake, though, to hear in this project something like the tones of a Luddite ressentiment; malfunction is rather a component of our technological experience. And it is emotionally and psychically charged. Moreover, as I will hope to show here, malfunction is equivocal: it occasions frustration and delight; it is to be feared and at another level longed for. Notable also is that a failing technology is aesthetically appealing and is often treated as aesthetic material. In order to try and capture some of the significance of malfunction, I will attempt to think the moment of failure in relation to Benjamin’s notion of aura. The interpretation of technical malfunction as auratic stabilises our thinking of what are highly disparate phenomena and points us towards more profound questions. Aura alerts us to the possibility that technology is a site of the re-enchantment of consciousness, potential regression or, in some interpretations, something like a Utopian appearing. Our usual appraisal of the technological is that which banishes the cultic, destroys aura and reconfigures the real; all of which, if true, is only true insofar as technology behaves “properly” (as we intend it to), insofar as it works. I hope to show that technology is always haunted by an auratic dimension; aura is more or less suppressed, more or less overt, and ideologies, economies and systems – I have in mind the global media – that rely on technology will be dogged by a problematic auratic shadow.

Creativity and Possessive Interests

"Concepts of Music and Copyright", Edward Elgar Publishing

What I explore in this paper is the idea that the legal concepts of paternity and integrity have a strong resonance with the possessive interest of the artist. There are two affective logics that interest me: (a) I made (created) X and this fact entitles me to insist that I am in a privileged and unique position with respect to X, this is how X’s ‘being-mine’ is experienced. And (b) because X is mine, I don’t want it interfered with by someone else. This status of ‘being-mine’ is alienable: if X is tampered with by someone else, its organic, declared or demonstrable link back to me is lost. It ceases to be mine, and someone else can derive benefit from work which I began and I believe I should retain. I want the object to be judged as having value, and I want to be the one responsible for it. These are indeed very simple observations but they are, in nascent form at least, genuine affective dimensions – the anxieties if you will – of the creative process.

Writing as Life Performed

Adorno and Performance - Palgrave MacMillian

In this chapter I explore the interrelatedness of practice, rehearsal and performance and their applicability in the domain of “life”. These relationships are complicated when, in reference to Adorno’s Minima Moralia, the content of critical-essayistic production (which is analogous to aesthetic production in many ways) is ultimately that of the life of the author. I propose that to a large extent, the categories of practicing, rehearsing and performing that are derivable from artistic-productive experience can be extended to lived experience. Working and living seriously and critically have significant points of convergence. What I attempt to disrupt is the presupposition of any “natural” hierarchy between these categories, whereby, for example, performance – connoting the tangible accomplishment of goals and the visibility of that accomplishment – takes precedence over the open-ended tasks of practice and rehearsal. In essayisic mode, I am interested in loosening the arrangement and priority of these categories and in evading finality and talking up the lesser partner in a litany of dualisms that subtend our judgments: seriousness/play, public/private, realized/unrealized, commitment/postponement, decision/indecision, planned/unplanned, action/delay, success/disappointment.

Dwelling and the Sacralisation of the Air: A note on acousmatic music

Organised Sound / Volume 16 / Issue 02 / June 2011, pp 115-119

This paper adapts Martin Heidegger's philosophy of ‘dwelling’ in order to effect a liaison between acousmatic music and ecological concern. I propose this as an alternative to both the propagandist use of music as a means of protest and to using the science of ecology as a domain that might furnish new compositional means. I advance the interpretation that acousmatic music ‘occupies the air’ in ways that transform the meaning of that dimension. It allows the sky to be sky and the earth, earth. I use the precedent of bell ringing as an example of sonic activity that occupies the air in order to further dwelling.

Echo's Body: Play and Representation in Interactive Music Software

Contemporary Music Review, vol. 25, number 1/2, 17-26

Labour, Work and Action in the Creative Process

The Discipline of Creativity: Exploring the Paradox. B. Porter (Ed.): Cambridge: CUP, 47-59.

In this chapter I argue that our coming to terms with the organisation of and any subsequent capitalising on ‘creative’1 activity today, will need to reckon with – but not decide between – differing and conflicting accounts of what brings about these so-called ‘created’ objects. The narrative accounts that are given pertaining to the origin of a created object, and the claims that are wrapped inside those accounts, I will refer to as ‘genetic stories’. In summary, such accounts can be analysed into one of three categories: the story of labour, work or action. Laborious production will emphasise effort, toil, ‘perspiration’; workly production will emphasise planning, craft, technique and execution; actional production will emphasise spontaneity, decisiveness and risk. Descriptions of formation and origination can be used to bestow upon an artefact a meaning and a value, the genetic story told of the work, be it laborious, workly or actional, inclines our opinion of it significantly. We suppose we know something essential of an artefact when we know (or think we know) from whence it came.

Art and Life: John Cage, Avant-gardism and Technology

Frankfurter Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 5, 86-93

The Poet Sings: Resonance in Paul Valery's Poietics

Humanities

This paper analyses Paul Valéry’s theories relating to his stated goal of poetic production: the attainment of “resonance” and a “singing-state”. My intention is to defend Valéry’s theory as a valid and consistent model of the creative process in poetry. To that end, I will draw support from T. W. Adorno’s claim that Valéry’s manner of reflective journalising in his Notebooks can furnish us with what he calls “aesthetic insight”. The consistency of Valéry’s theory will be supported by comparisons with the inferentialist understanding of semantics. Valéry proves to be a reliable exemplar of what might be called a “practice-led” aesthetics. Keywords: Paul Valéry; Adorno; poetry; practice-led aesthetics; inferentialism; resonance

Composition and Adorno’s Rhetoric of the New

Scottish Music Review, Vol 3

In this article I will be exploring Adorno’s treatment of the concept of the new with a view to proposing a pattern in the rhetorical tone of his thinking on this matter. In brief, I will show that Adorno’s critique of New Music in the post-war period operated on two rhetorical registers: these I will term the exoteric and the esoteric. By exoteric, I mean to portray the process whereby Adorno produced an open philosophical scrutiny of the cognitive claims of New Music, with the act of composition itself being redescribed with the resources of dialectical philosophy. Adorno deployed both immanent and normative techniques of evaluation, but in every case he assumed that the philosophy of subject and object, and the critique of rationality and capitalism that the Frankfurt School had already thoroughly rehearsed, could be redeployed in the context of composition with confidence and with sufficient force to reorientate – and for the better – the fundamental approach of composers. Criteria of successful composition could (and probably should) be devised directly from philosophical principles.

Blackbirds rise from a field...: Production, Structure and Obedience in John Cage's Lecture on Nothing

Neo-Avantgarde. D. Hopkins (Ed.): Amsterdam: Rodopi, 389-402

This essay explores and develops an observation which appears – albeit in passing – at the beginning of Peter Bürger’s seminal Theory of the Avant-Garde. In order to grasp the full import of the observation, which concerns the question of how artistic “means” and “procedures” are treated within the historical avant-garde, it will first be necessary to outline the dialectical model of historical understanding – a critical hermeneutics – which generates Bürger’s interpretative insight.

The Horror of Disconnection: The Auratic in Technological Malfunction

Transformations, 15

What is a technology when it behaves in unexpected or undesirable ways? In this paper I wish to attend closely to technology in the moment of its malfunction and try to discover deeper significance in such moments beyond the merely irritating. It would be a mistake, though, to hear in this project something like the tones of a Luddite ressentiment; malfunction is rather a component of our technological experience. And it is emotionally and psychically charged. Moreover, as I will hope to show here, malfunction is equivocal: it occasions frustration and delight; it is to be feared and at another level longed for. Notable also is that a failing technology is aesthetically appealing and is often treated as aesthetic material. In order to try and capture some of the significance of malfunction, I will attempt to think the moment of failure in relation to Benjamin’s notion of aura. The interpretation of technical malfunction as auratic stabilises our thinking of what are highly disparate phenomena and points us towards more profound questions. Aura alerts us to the possibility that technology is a site of the re-enchantment of consciousness, potential regression or, in some interpretations, something like a Utopian appearing. Our usual appraisal of the technological is that which banishes the cultic, destroys aura and reconfigures the real; all of which, if true, is only true insofar as technology behaves “properly” (as we intend it to), insofar as it works. I hope to show that technology is always haunted by an auratic dimension; aura is more or less suppressed, more or less overt, and ideologies, economies and systems – I have in mind the global media – that rely on technology will be dogged by a problematic auratic shadow.

Creativity and Possessive Interests

"Concepts of Music and Copyright", Edward Elgar Publishing

What I explore in this paper is the idea that the legal concepts of paternity and integrity have a strong resonance with the possessive interest of the artist. There are two affective logics that interest me: (a) I made (created) X and this fact entitles me to insist that I am in a privileged and unique position with respect to X, this is how X’s ‘being-mine’ is experienced. And (b) because X is mine, I don’t want it interfered with by someone else. This status of ‘being-mine’ is alienable: if X is tampered with by someone else, its organic, declared or demonstrable link back to me is lost. It ceases to be mine, and someone else can derive benefit from work which I began and I believe I should retain. I want the object to be judged as having value, and I want to be the one responsible for it. These are indeed very simple observations but they are, in nascent form at least, genuine affective dimensions – the anxieties if you will – of the creative process.

Writing as Life Performed

Adorno and Performance - Palgrave MacMillian

In this chapter I explore the interrelatedness of practice, rehearsal and performance and their applicability in the domain of “life”. These relationships are complicated when, in reference to Adorno’s Minima Moralia, the content of critical-essayistic production (which is analogous to aesthetic production in many ways) is ultimately that of the life of the author. I propose that to a large extent, the categories of practicing, rehearsing and performing that are derivable from artistic-productive experience can be extended to lived experience. Working and living seriously and critically have significant points of convergence. What I attempt to disrupt is the presupposition of any “natural” hierarchy between these categories, whereby, for example, performance – connoting the tangible accomplishment of goals and the visibility of that accomplishment – takes precedence over the open-ended tasks of practice and rehearsal. In essayisic mode, I am interested in loosening the arrangement and priority of these categories and in evading finality and talking up the lesser partner in a litany of dualisms that subtend our judgments: seriousness/play, public/private, realized/unrealized, commitment/postponement, decision/indecision, planned/unplanned, action/delay, success/disappointment.

Dwelling and the Sacralisation of the Air: A note on acousmatic music

Organised Sound / Volume 16 / Issue 02 / June 2011, pp 115-119

This paper adapts Martin Heidegger's philosophy of ‘dwelling’ in order to effect a liaison between acousmatic music and ecological concern. I propose this as an alternative to both the propagandist use of music as a means of protest and to using the science of ecology as a domain that might furnish new compositional means. I advance the interpretation that acousmatic music ‘occupies the air’ in ways that transform the meaning of that dimension. It allows the sky to be sky and the earth, earth. I use the precedent of bell ringing as an example of sonic activity that occupies the air in order to further dwelling.

Echo's Body: Play and Representation in Interactive Music Software

Contemporary Music Review, vol. 25, number 1/2, 17-26

Labour, Work and Action in the Creative Process

The Discipline of Creativity: Exploring the Paradox. B. Porter (Ed.): Cambridge: CUP, 47-59.

In this chapter I argue that our coming to terms with the organisation of and any subsequent capitalising on ‘creative’1 activity today, will need to reckon with – but not decide between – differing and conflicting accounts of what brings about these so-called ‘created’ objects. The narrative accounts that are given pertaining to the origin of a created object, and the claims that are wrapped inside those accounts, I will refer to as ‘genetic stories’. In summary, such accounts can be analysed into one of three categories: the story of labour, work or action. Laborious production will emphasise effort, toil, ‘perspiration’; workly production will emphasise planning, craft, technique and execution; actional production will emphasise spontaneity, decisiveness and risk. Descriptions of formation and origination can be used to bestow upon an artefact a meaning and a value, the genetic story told of the work, be it laborious, workly or actional, inclines our opinion of it significantly. We suppose we know something essential of an artefact when we know (or think we know) from whence it came.