Performing Music, Performing the Figure : Deleuze and Painting
- Submitting institution
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Royal Conservatoire of Scotland
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 2540917
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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- Book title
- The Dark Precursor : Deleuze and Artistic Research
- Publisher
- Leuven University Press
- ISBN
- 9462701180
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2017
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- In his monograph on Francis Bacon ('Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation'), Gilles Deleuze establishes a central tension between figurative art and the notion of ‘the figure’, arguing that Bacon’s particular presentation of bodies in painting subverts figurative representation, to reveal a ‘force’ or ‘sensation’ - just as Bacon himself famously claimed to paint the sensation of a person, rather than their appearance.
My chapter explores musical performance as figural (a creative process in itself) rather than figurative (a reproduction of notation).
In doing this, I build on my work on Brian Ferneyhough and explorations of his complex notation. Ferneyhough has been understood to write ‘difficult’ scores in order to frustrate performers, but I argue that the notation is an attempt to engage the performer with notation as a problematic set of impossible instructions, setting his work in contrast with ‘transparent’ notation that permits the performer to interpret its signs without interrogating the process.
I have argued that Ferneyhough’s notation is a means of testing, provoking and demanding proactive solutions from the performer, and the significance of the visual impact of Ferneyhough’s notation, as well as his occasional references to Deleuze and Bacon, prompted me to develop this particular line of research.
My critique seeks to understand the motivation for this notational approach, shifting the focus onto the experience of the performer, and performer’s body in the act of realisation. This challenges established notions of the ‘work’ in music, which has traditionally been equated with the score. In fact, I argue that the ‘work’ is in the living performance, of which no two will be the same. This poses interesting questions in relation to the comparison with painting, since a painting endures in a way that a musical performance cannot, in a single ‘moment’.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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