Two performance-lectures about music
- Submitting institution
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University of Southampton
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 54372390
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- February
- Year
- 2020
- 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
- These pieces investigate the potential of the lecture format within an artistic context. This research extends the nature and scope of work being made for the concert hall by interrogating how quasi-didactic text can shape experiences of music. The work is distinctive in conflating commentary with experience, asking audiences to critically reflect on the nature and structure of listening at the moment of reception. Whereas programmatic musical works represent an external aspect (idea, story, object), this research is original in engaging the lecture format to directly address the nature of the music being presented to explore the types of psychological, physiological, and intellectual experiences it might engender and what external factors might be at play in shaping such encounters. Theories and concepts from a range of disciplines including philosophy, cultural studies, sociology and musicology are articulated and explored through musical examples and interactive psychological experiments. For example, Bad Music explores the role of exposure, classical formal proportions and subjective experience in aesthetic value judgements. Listening to Music investigates how listening is shaped by musical form, listening within distracting environments and non-aesthetic contexts (e.g. games), and how repetition can induce perceptual shifts. Inverting conventional lecture practice, short pieces within the works are often presented prior to commentary to allow space for unmediated experience and as a quasi-dramatic set-up for that commentary. Through the didactic and neutral tone of delivery, pursuit of categorical distinctions, positivistic knowledge claims, and assertions about audience experience (e.g. “You will have found that piece boring”), the work aims to provoke as well as stimulate and inform. The claims made in the commentary straddle the plausible (ideas can be taken at face value) and the ridiculous or objectionable.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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