Department of Musicology: University of Innsbruck

Composing Music Today: The Gestural as a Parameter in Contemporary Music Notations

“Writing and instrument, the poles of interpretation” (Adorno 2001). This note can be found in Theodor W. Adorno’s book Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction. The central question in his reflections is whether music had become uninterpretable. Especially in Contemporary Music after 1945, a paradigm change took place: the quantitative increase of compositional applicable sounds and the invention of new styles of playing an instrument, required new signs. These signs also produced new enigmatic pictures of musical notation (Borio 2015). In this context, the “presentability” of sound in musical notation was doubted. Adorno’s remarks pro-vide food for thought about the “inadequacy of writing”, as writing is not able to express its inherent “certain intangibles” (Adorno 2001). Furthermore, he suggests a closer examination of the relationship between musical notation which includes the process of composing and the interpreter. Whereas, in the past, musicology was primarily seen as “a philological discipline of texts” (Hinrichsen 2013), in which notation was treated as a storage media, the current understanding is that musical writing is more than the mere phonological transcript of sound since it combines discursive, notational, and iconic aspects (Nanni 2013). This realignment brought particularly the visual attributes of writing into the focus of research. Phenomena like the movement of writing (Schriftbewegung) and the pictorial character of writing (Schriftbildlichkeit), which did not get attention in a phonological perspective, provide new findings concerning a “deictic Logos of music” (Nanni 2013) and a “third referential element”, which is inherent in musical notation. Under a material and performative perspective on music, we have to assume that musical notation brings together textual as well as performative aspects in itsspecific pictorial character. Herein lie certain dynamics that refers to a particular interplay between composing and inter- preting a piece of music. In this context, the author’s proposition is, that the gestural, as a mimic-mimetic component, is the latent third element in musical notation, linking both the composer to the interpreter. Thus, musical notation possesses the quality to graphically embody paths of movement of musical gestures. Based on the assumption, that the gestural had a discernable impact on the development of music writing, the presentation wants to examine the role of gestures in contemporary music notations and compositions. Therefore, two main question will be addressed: 1) Can the gestural be treated as a separate parameter and sign in contemporary music composition and its analysis and 2) are musical gestures, as “certain intangibles” of writing music, represented as a form of inscribed physicality in contemporary music notation? The presentation will try to answer these questions on the basis of an empirical examination of convincing sketches, autographs and prints of contemporary music notation.

Biography

Bernhard Achhorner studied musicology and anthropology at the University of Innsbruck. He finished his master’s degree with a thesis on “the functionalization of music for cultural policy purposes during the Nazi era”. His research focuses on the intersections between music and identity, music and politics, as well as intermediality and performance studies. Currently, he is working on his dissertation about “Inscribed Physicality: Musical Gesture in Manuscripts and Prints” as a member of and international research group from the Universities of Innsbruck, Vienna (Austria), Basel (Switzerland) and Gießen (Germany). For the academic year of 2017/18 he is a visiting research fellow at the “Center Austria: The Austrian Marshall Plan Center for European Studies” at the University of New Orleans.