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2014, EuTropes: The Paradox of European Empire, University of Chicago: Chicago 2014 (Parisian Notebooks, 7), p. 385–408.
Aesthetic experience and, more specifically in the context of my research, musical composition (and to some degree, musical listening), can be analyzed as the experience of a shift in the relationship between Self and Otherness. I propose calling this shift de-identification and suggest that this dynamic can be traced to the compositional level of music. This paper focuses on aspects of Otherness in the arts; namely, the plurality of idioms and styles, as well as the hybridization of expression. For this purpose, Michail M. Bakhtin’s concepts of heteroglossia and hybridity in the literary novel are discussed in order to consider Gustav Mahler’s music from this theoretical perspective.
2018 •
The dissertation „Cross-genre composition: encoding characters in the chamber opera I.th.Ak.A. with semiotic elements derived from commercial music genres“ employs methods of artistic research to create aesthetic and musicological foundations for analysing the compositional practice of the author, in reference to an opera composed specifically for the dissertation, I.th.Ak.A. (Premiere: 06.04.2018, Hamburg State Opera). Such a method is new to the German academic landscape, where artistic research in music had not yet penetrated into dissertation practices, however prevalent they may be in other arts or international musical artistic research. Central to the research is the term “Cross-genre”, used in the dissertation to describe a specific process of hybridity between the classical music tradition and commercial music genres. All thoughts and compositional follow the central research question: How is it possible to enrich the contemporary classical music tradition through elements of commercial music genres? Compositional research – the act of composing the opera – was performed with explicit attention to the central research question. It thereby served as an artistic ‘experiment’, researching the central question via the composition of musical materials. After completion, the score was analysed and theorised around a discursive-theoretical framework built on the ideas of Cross-Genre as defined by the author, for which two external metatheories are employed. Firstly, the essay “On the New” by Boris Groys was explored, which describes a field of interaction between the conservation of art history and the production of the “new”, compared in this instance to the interaction between contemporary classical music tradition and elements of commercial music genres (respectively). Secondly, the post-colonial theory of Homi K. Bhabha was addressed to provide a set of vocabulary from which terms for Cross-Genre composition are created, including “hybridity”, “stereotype” and “mimicry”, for example. These two intellectual points of reference are then demonstrated to be essential keys for understanding the ‘artistic experiment’ of the new opera via a score-analysis, the method for which was developed anew according to Cross-Genre, whilst being founded technically upon narrative semantics. It aims to provide a substantial map of interaction between the contemporary classical music tradition and elements of commercial music genres, and how it builds the core operatic dramaturgy of the work. The analytic method, the aesthetic thoughts on Cross-Genre and the artistic component itself (the score for I.th.Ak.A.) are offered as research artefacts. In short, the core of the dissertation is a process of making the author’s own creative process more cognitive.
2013 •
The theory of the aesthetic of reception proposed by Jauss in the field of literature can be applied to research into the reception of the music of Gustav Mahler. In creating his symphonies ‘with every means of accessible technique’, the composer achieved what might be described as a reinterpretation of the conception of selected genres. In this way he disturbed the traditional ‘horizon of expectations’ of the potential audience, and significantly distanced himself from it. The most important consequence of this was the lack of understanding of his music by a section of his contemporary audience. Mahler justified the rightness of his own creative intuition with the famous sentence ‘my time will come’. In her article the author presents the fundamental theses of Jauss’s aesthetic of reception relating to his understanding of the ‘horizon of expectations’. She also indicates the manner in which Mahler distanced himself from that ‘horizon’, and how in individual symphonies he contribut...
Intertextuality in Music. Dialogic Composition
Tijana Popović Mladjenović & Leon Stefanija The Musical Text as a Polyphonic Trace of Otherness2021 •
EXCESS. FORUM FOR PHILOSOPHY AND ART (4.-7.8.2016) 48th International Summer Course for New Music Darmstadt Jörn Peter Hiekel, Dieter Mersch, Michael Rebhahn and Fahim Amir (CURATORS) This forum, consisting of an opening, a closing discussion and three panels, seeks to probe the current state of the relationship between music and philosophy, as well as the mutual consonances and dissonances. With a view to the present, it is of particular interest to ask what questions are stimulating New Music today, what challenges it faces, and what shared themes or »contemporaneities« unite and separate philosophy and New Music today. In this way — and very much following on from earlier discussions in Darmstadt — the forum will attempt to show how compositional strategies and concepts exemplify reflections on changes within the whole of contemporary culture. The forum, which will take place in two languages (German and English, with simultaneous interpretation), defines itself as an open-ended discussion whose topics will be introduced in keynote speeches. In each case, one composer and one philosopher will act as hosts and play the part of structuring and further developing, with their guests, the discussion that already started before the course. PANEL 1: SURPLUS Dieter Mersch ChristianGrüny, Jennifer Walshe, Ashley Fure, Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Michael Pisaro, Bernhard Waldenfels The term»surplus, «which is also implied in the over- all title EXCESS, allues to today’s increasing expansion of the compositional through approaches like intermediality, heterogeneity of material, body/performance, theatricality, etc. Thus the term »surplus« relates on the one hand to the »derestriction« of the arts towards different forms of expression, representation and production; but, on the other hand, also to a political aspect between the critique of art as a productive force in modern capitalism and the surplus of the aesthetic as something that does not submit to the cycles of economic exploitation. PANEL 2: THE POLITICAL Michael Rebhahn Douglas Barrett, Dror Feiler, Fahim Amir, Chaya Czernowin, Harry Lehmann, Mathias Spahlinger The political dimension touched on in the first group of themes will be explicitly foregrounded in the second complex. It addresses the ever pressing question of the relationship between art, reality and politics, which constantly arises in new ways for music too. Just as the »worldrelation« of music is being intensely debated at the moment, the concern is at once a far more fundamental analysis of the relationship be- tween the aesthetic and all that characterizes and constitutes the polis, the political and lastly the »community«. What is the role of art in this, especially if the practice of art identifies itself first and foremost as critique, as an element of resistance or subversion against claims to political power? A substantial element of this fundamental problem also encompasses the interplay between music and the historical, as expressed in notions of »contemporaneity« and »witness.« Intervention: Fahim Amir and Tomás Saraceno Every work of art is an uncommitted crime After the critique of Eurocentrism new approaches demand to also »provincialise the human«. If dogs are indeed the new feminists as Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, curator of dOCUMENTA (13), famously stated in relation to the seminal work of Donna Haraway, what is there to be done in the realms of aesthetics, production and politics? Philosopher Fahim Amir and artist Tomás Saraceno engage in a conversation about challenges and promises of multi species constellations in art starting from both Saracenos work with spiders and Haraways Companion Species Manifesto (2003). A Cyrtophora citricola spider will join the conversation as guest speaker. PANEL 3: MUSIC AS PHILOSOPHY Jörn Peter Hiekel, Simone Mahrenholz, ManosTsangaris, Brian Ferneyhough, Patrick Frank, Gunnar Hindrichs, Albrecht Wellmer Music, like art in general, constitutes its own form of thought and insight that is every bit as advanced as philosophy, but uses other means and follows different »logics.« It is not only a matter of initiating a dialogue between music and philosophy in order to evoke mutual tensions or proximities, but rather of showing how music, or the musical and »compositional,« can be viewed as »a form of philosophy« — and of attributing to it an »epistemic« power of its own. On the one hand, this raises such time-honored questions as that of »truth« in art, which after Hegel was taken up most significantly by Heidegger and Adorno; and on the other hand, it needs to be readjusted to the present conditions. One must therefore interrogate the »self-will« of aesthetic thought and ask what music — especially New Music, as the most »abstract« and at once the most emotional art — »knows,« or how it organizes and reveals its knowledge.
PhD thesis. Goldsmiths 2007.
2021 •
Proceedings Volume of the 3rd International Multidisciplinary Scientific Conferences on Social Sciences and Arts - SGEM2016
Cultural and Stylistic Interferences in the Musical Work „Adjoined Contrasts” by MAIA CIOBANU2016 •
This paper concerns the interference of many historical, cultural and stylistic features in a musical work composed by Romanian woman composer, Maia Ciobanu. Contraste apropiate (Adjoined Contrasts) is a trio for flute, piano and percussion, in which musical themes were taken from three other different works, created by great composers (Ludwig van Beethoven and Charles Ives) or inspired by folkloric songs originating in ancient musical tradition (The song of Voivode Lupu's wife). This trio is conceived as a complex synthesis of three melodic items, which are in contrast from many points of view (sonorous system, rhythmic and metric structure, stylistic features, semantic meaning) and also concerning the originating culture (German-Viennese culture at the edge between the XVIIIth-XIXth centuries, American musical culture of the XXth century and Romanian tradition from the XVII century). The title of the work is very suggestive for bringing together different musical ideas, leading to a historical intersection, a "meeting" of contrasts, where they become close, adjoined by annexation, superposition, degradation of initial patterns, reconfiguration. These techniques of composition offer a challenging perspective on the concept known as unity in diversity. The analysis of this work is focused on structural conception, aesthetical observations and stylistic marks, aiming towards discovering specific elements which give coherence and make Maia Ciobanu's trio a valuable artistic work.
2022 •
My study is an attempt to philosophically account for the competing influence in the 20th century musical understanding and practice of two radical and opposed aesthetics: the ideal of transgressive art (defined by Anthony Julius) associated with the avant-garde and the ideal of recovering the original and authentic art associated with extreme nationalism. My thesis is that these perspectives, under their extreme formulations, are, in fact, kindred sides of the broader philosophy of Modernity as developed since the Enlightenment. Also, as a consequence, by deconstructing the historical meaning and justification of these aesthetic forms of radicalism, one can reinterpret the artistic profiles of personalities such as Arnold Schönberg, thought of either as a revolutionary who totally rebelled against the musical past (as Theodor W. Adorno considered), or as not revolutionary enough (as Pierre Boulez thought). My historical methodology is based on using the two key-terms, “originality” and “transgression”, as regulative concepts within the constellation (a concept proposed by Theodor Adorno in Negative Dialectics) of musical modernism. Thereby, I will show how these key-terms are connected to a network of other romantic concepts: organism, authenticity, aura (Walter Benjamin’s sense), integrity, folklore, and contemplation, in order to reveal how the structural and social meaning ascribed to this set of concepts greatly influenced the process of redefining musical thinking and musical reception. The main philosophies I will use as conceptual landmarks to clarify these interconnections are Martin Heidegger’s remarks about the work of art and Theodor Adorno’s critique of Heideggerian terminology and presuppositions. My overall conclusion will point towards the necessity of going beyond such radical modern oppositions with the aim of finding new types of theoretical principles and perspectives, more adequate as conceptual tools for dealing with contemporary artistic realities. LINK: musicologytoday.ro/49/MT49studiesStoicescu.pdf
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2019 •
Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie [Journal of the German-Speaking Society of Music Theory]
Once more on musical topics and style analysis. A critical examination of Agawu’s analysis of the introduction to Beethoven’s Pathetic Sonata2010 •
ARTES. Journal of Musicology
Polystylism in the context of Postmodern Music. Alfred Schnittke's Concerti Grossi2021 •
1991 •
Nineteenth-Century Music Review
Gustav Mahler, Symphonie Nr. 5. Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Band V, edited by Reinhold Kubik (Frankfurt am Main: CF Peters, 2002). 384pp. &89. …2008 •
2012 •
Musical Analysis: Historia - Theoria - Praxis - vol.V
Discourse, Interdiscourse and Intertextuality in the Process of Construction of the Musical Meaning: Semiotic Tools for the Analysis and Discussion of Rachmaninoff's Vocalise, Op. 34 No. 14Naharaim: Zeitschrift für deutsch-jüdische Literatur und Kulturgeschichte. Berlin: de Gruyter
Immigration, Identity, and Change: Émigré Composers of the Nazi Period and Their Perceptions of Stylistic Transformation in their Creative Work2009 •
Perspectives on Gerhard
Serial and melodic evolution in the work of Roberto Gerhard: an explorer in the avant-garde.2014 •
DEDALUS 22-23 ( Word – Body – Music)
Between Intangible and Corporeal: Word, Body, and Music in German Romanticism2019 •
2006 •
2010 •
2023 •
2007 •
Rasprave Instituta za hrvatski jezik i jezikoslovlje
The theory of polystylism as a tool for analysis of contemporary music in the postsoviet cultural space: some terminological aspectsNews About Mahler's Research
Come suono di natura. Metafisica della melodia nella Prima Sinfonia di Gustav Mahler2021 •