Royal Holloway, University of London

Graduate Student, Music

About

I am currently working towards a PhD at Royal Holloway University of London on the subject of the aesthetics of contemporary music:

'An Aesthetics of Past-Present Relations in the Experience of Contemporary Art Music'

Focusing on a range of art musics from within three genres – symphony, string quartet, and the solo piano repertoire – I argue that the experience of music from the late 20th- and early 21st-centuries must be understood in terms of mediation by the past, not simply through reference to past musical formal materials, but (more importantly) in the inscription of philosophical experiential issues into these materials. Following this logic, I explore a discursive strategy based around philosophical tensions central to the aesthetics of post-Enlightenment musical experience – in particular, the dialectics of nature and culture, and mind and body. This allows me to closely interweave strands of musicological and philosophical thought, exploring and developing the latter as they have been taken into, exhibited, and played with in a range of contemporary modernistic musics; in works that draw attention to their historical situatedness (including but not limited to works by Wolfgang Rihm, Valentin Silvestrov, Alfred Schnittke, Salvatore Sciarrino, and Helmut Lachenmann). In doing so, I outline the need to go beyond Theodor Adorno’s dialectic of ‘handed down musical material’, yet also foster an understanding of musical experience situated between past and present without recourse to explicitly postmodern quotation or ‘intertextuality’, something itself I implicitly critique. This range of musics leads me to draw together seemingly disparate methodological approaches in the search for musical meaning’s relationship with the past, including musical semiotics, Critical Theory, embodied phenomenology, and psychoanalytic theory.