The Play of Music Memory: A Performative Presentation
As an independent composer / performer / scholar, I offer a perspective concerning a shift of time between today’s music memory and that of the past. By lifting, removing and sliding through different contexts of music tradition, I deconstruct the process of their original meaning. Time and technology are profoundly embedded in this approach, reflecting in turn the inscription of our cultural human memory within that of machines (Stiegler, 1998) [1].
Drawing on my own compositions, I reveal how the play of music memory occurs between the historical and the contemporary, our natural environmental sound-world and that of machines, the live and the virtual, the analogue and the digital. Objects of technology, musical instruments and the voice are examined within the phenomenon of material memory and performer/audience experience. My working process involves re-embracing the granular sonority of early recording methods / music machines and combining them with an equally experimental approach to instrumental / vocal / electronic sound. A resultant abstraction away from musical narrative is deliberately explored, one that manages to retain elements of a sound’s original ‘presence’ whilst at the same time obliging us to refigure it within a newer contemporary parameter. A dialogue can occur, for example, between our memory of mechanical sounds and those currently associated with the acoustic movement of everyday objects, or between music machines and sounds heard in nature. These compositional explorations are contextualized within those of contemporary philosophy and artistic practice (Stiegler, Varela, Impett) that deal with the role of memory in music performance and offer valuable reference points with regard to my own concern.
Today’s music memory has been altered by the spatialization of time, its extension, but also its intensification through our current ability to absorb multiple musical events in one moment as a ‘vertical’ rather than a narrative experience. Digital technology is a temporal extension of a process that began with the advent of the industrial twentieth century and its digitization of signs. Since the invention of recording techniques, we have had the possibility of analysing a sonic source and thus apprehending acoustic reality as ‘another nature’ by means of sound reproduction. Like Bergson’s camera, the microphone ‘without a consciousness’ (Wilkins, 2003) [2] has replaced our former capacity of aural retention with that of the limitless repetitions offered by machine memory. Consequently, along with our perception of time, music memory has metamorphosed into a subjective experience of contradictions, collisions and fragments, extending the very parameters of our contemporary awareness.
Keywords: time, technology, contemporary composition
Biography
Independent composer/researcher Dr Caroline Wilkins comes from a background of new music performance, composition and theatre, and has worked extensively on solo and collaborative productions involving these. Her particular interest lies in creating new forms of presentation, whether in the field of inter-medial sound theatre, sound poetry or performance art. Current activities include conference presentations and academic publications.
Independent Scholar, United Kingdom – juillet1953@gmail.com