McLaughlin, S orcid.org/0000-0001-5869-1869 (2022) On Material Indeterminacy. Contemporary Music Review. ISSN 0749-4467
Abstract
‘Material indeterminacy’ is the term I use to discuss how my work since 2010 has explored the consequences of placing materiality, indeterminacy, and responsiveness at the centre of a compositional practice, and what means for the relationships between instrument, player, and score. I propose that the structural consequence of contingency in instrumental performance is an underexplored aspect of experimental composition, which has historically tended to focus on models that either control contingency or obviate its consequences. ‘Material indeterminacy’ is proposed as a third way that folds the emergent consequences of contingency back into meaningful relation with the unfolding structure. This research is framed by theoretical perspectives on materiality: Andrew Pickering’s performative ontology of human and material agencies, specifically his ‘dance of agency’ between human and material; anthropologist Tim Ingold’s phenomenological approach to materiality that valorises the relational ‘working-with’ of human and material. The liveliness of materiality is considered in relation to Lucy Suchman’s work on situatedness and the entwined nature of plans and actions, and then returned to a musical context via listening and the discourse of improvisation as response-to-contingency. Finally, I discuss these ideas via examples of my own work from the Garden of Forking Paths compositional project (2019–2021).
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. |
Keywords: | Indeterminacy; Materiality; Agency; Responsiveness; Situatedness; Improvisation |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of Music (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number AHRC (Arts & Humanities Research Council) AH/S006893/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 12 Jul 2022 10:32 |
Last Modified: | 25 Jun 2023 23:02 |
Status: | Published online |
Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/07494467.2022.2080456 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:188418 |