Logic of Experimentation: Reshaping Music Performance in and through Artistic Research(Orpheus Institute Series)

Logic of Experimentation offers several innovative and ground-breaking perspectives on music performance, music ontology, research methodologies and ethics of performance. It proposes new modes of thinking and exposing past musical works to contemporary audiences, arguing for a new kind of performer, emancipated from authoritative texts and traditions, whose creativity is propelled by intensive research and inventive imagination. Moving beyond the work-concept, Logic of Experimentation presents a new image of musical works, based upon the notions of strata, assemblage and diagram, advancing innovative practice-based methodologies that integrate archival and musicological research into the creative process leading to a performance. Beyond representational modes of performance--be it mainstream or historically informed performance practices--Logic of Experimentation creates an ontological, methodological and ethical space for experimental performance practices, arguing for a new mode of performance. Written in an experimental style, its eight chapters appropriate music performance concepts from post-structural philosophy, psychoanalysis, science and technology studies, epistemology, and semiotics, displaying how transdisciplinarity is central to artistic research. An indispensable contribution to artistic research in music, Logic of Experimentation is compelling reading for music performers, composers, musicologists, philosophers and artist researchers alike.

Table of Contents:
Preface: A Transdisciplinary Conjuncture Introduction: Experimentation versus Interpretation Part 1. Assemblage Theory for Music Chapter 1: Virtual Works—Actual Things Rasch — The limits of music philosophy and the role of artistic research — Music ontologies: some problems — Beyond transcendence: approaching a Deleuzian ontology — Virtual works, actual things: towards a new image of musical work — Strata — Rasch25: . . . vers la nuit Chapter 2: Assemblage, Strata, Diagram Musical works as assemblages — Agencement, logic of assemblage, assemblage theory — Intermezzo: a note on translation — From structure to assemblage — Strata — Diagram — Logic of assemblage Part 2: Experimental Systems in Music Chapter 3: Experimental Systems and Artistic Research An epistemology for artistic research? — A methodology for artistic research — Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s experimental systems — Thought collective and ensembles of experimental systems: MusicExperiment21 — Series of experiments and modules of research Chapter 4: Epistemic Complexity in Music Performance Complexity and epistemic complexity — Epistemic complexity in biology — Epistemic complexity in technology — Epistemic complexity in music — Experimentation in music performance: how to make the future? Part 3. Beyond Interpretation: Bodies-in-Action Chapter 5: Transduction and the Body as a Transducer Transduction in music performance: relaying f lows of intensities; — Gilbert Simondon’s various definitions of transduction — Discharge (potentiality); — Passage (time and temporality); — Energy (thermodynamics): potential, scales, entropy — Information theory: structural germs and singularities (structuration) — Haecceity: from haecceitas (Duns Scotus) to eccéité (Simondon) to heccéité (Deleuze and Guattari) to microhaecceity — Topology: in-formation — Corporeality: somatic transduction — Permanent transduction: being-in-the-world and fluctuatio animi; 11. Conclusion Chapter 6: Rasch26: The Somatheme The somatheme — Roland Barthes at the piano: musica practica — The impact of Julia Kristeva: phenotext and genotext — New musical concepts: geno-song, pheno-song, somatheme — Intermezzo: fourteen somathemes — The impact of Jacques Lacan: signifier and jouissance — Lacan’s desire — Situating the somatheme within Lacan’s graphs of desire — Conclusion: artistic research and transdisciplinarity Part 4. A New Ethics of Performance Chapter 7: The Emancipated Performer: Musical Renderings and Power Relations Music performance and power relations — The dominant image of work and the problem of interpretation — The tacit authorities: Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control” — Nietzsche’s three modes of relation to history: monumental, antiquarian, critical — A new image of work — The emancipated performer Chapter 8. . . . at the borders of time that surround our presence . . . What is the contemporary? — Agamben’s contemporary: Barthes reading Nietzsche — Nietzsche’s untimely: lost in translation — . . . at the border of time that surrounds our presence . . . — Artistic research as the carrier of the contemporary Appendix 1: Beyond Urtext: A Dynamic Conception of Musical Editing On notation and time — The urtext era — Urtext editions: an epistemological obstacle — Critical editing of music and different types of editions — Music editing and performance practice: a dynamic conception Appendix 2: The Conditions of Creation and the Haecceity of Musical Material: Philosophical-Aesthetic Convergences between Helmut Lachenmann and Gilles Deleuze Helmut Lachenmann and Gilles Deleuze: an unconnected connection — Helmut Lachenmann: toward an aestheticostructural methodology — Helmut Lachenmann’s three “theses” on composing — Gilles Deleuze’s diagnostic function of art, capture of forces, and body without organs: first convergences with Helmut Lachenmann — Helmut Lachenmann’s four conditions of the musical material — Gilles Deleuze’s opinion, corporeity, fold, and latitude: further convergences with Helmut Lachenmann — The conditions of creation and the haecceity of musical material: a philosophical-aesthetic Erewhon Acknowledgements Index

About the Author :
Paulo de Assis is a researcher affiliated with the Orpheus Institute of Ghent. He is an experimental performer, pianist and music philosopher, with transdisciplinary interests in composition, philosophy, psychoanalysis and epistemology.

Review :
This is a remarkable work, rich in ideas and provocative in its conclusions. Assis offers a transformative approach to music performance, which serves as a paradigmatic instance of artistic research. But he also provides the conceptual framework for a general ontology and epistemology of art, one that has implications well beyond the domain of music. This is a book that deserves the attention of researchers throughout the disciplines of the arts, humanities and social sciences. Bogue, Ronald, jar-online.net. 19/12/2019. https://doi.org/10.22501/jarnet.0023 “Reading Logic of Experimentation is an intellectual adventure. The reader comes away with a much more flexible and more powerful context for engaging in performance as scholarship, corporeality, and the manifestation of energy.” - Neely Bruce, Wesleyan University, US “This is an outstanding book in every way. It demarcates a new field—that of artistic research as an experimental activity—and then provides an original theoretical framework within which to relate the field to music. All the chapters address issues that transcend music and are of great import for aesthetics, ethics, epistemology, ontology, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural theory.” - Ronald Bogue, University of Georgia, US