Over the years, counter)induction has performed several concerts thematically related to our up-coming concert, Where words leave off: New Voices, Talk Dirty to Me, drama: music and its double.
This persistent recapitulation of a thematic is rare for us, and indicates either a shortfall of our programmatic imagination (unlikely, it seems) or a question that keeps resurfacing, an unsolvable question, an aporia in the discursive network of musicking.
This endless interrogatory recapitulation shouldn't surprise us, as it is a continuation of traditions' inability to resolve the question;– as a survey of the Muses and their domains shows us that the line between music and speech was a blurry one from antiquity. Whether we consider Hesiod's Euterpe, muse of flutes and lyric poetry or Pausanias' Aoide (the muse of song), the muses with musical attributes are linked to poetry and sung text.
Nor are these Classical linkages simply a confusion that modernity sorted out;– the wrangling of of the Council of Trent, the monody of the Florentine camerata, the rise of instrumental music in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the synthesizing aspirations of Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerke show us not a gradual clarification, but a return again and again to this unresolvable tension and ineluctable linked between speech and music.
What this makes me think of, actually, is a different source from antiquity - the closing of Plato's Phaedrus, in particular the readings of the passage by Derrida and Ricoeur. There's a nice summary of the Derridean take [ here ], and for Ricoeur's take, it's probably just best to read Memory, History, Forgetting. Derrida expands Rousseau's notion of the supplement - it is that which comes to aid to something ‘primary’ or ‘original.' In this aiding, the supplement displays that which is absent from the original form.
What this makes me think of here is not that music is a supplement to speech or that speech is a supplement to music, but rather that the relationship seems to alternate, each becoming the supplement of the other. This transductive loop does not render the question of primacy moot, though it does become unanswerable; rather, the positioning and re-position of the two domains becomes generative, a source for next question, the next concert, the next work of music, and the next piece of verse. And this constant generation of new question seems very much what we do here at c)i.
This persistent recapitulation of a thematic is rare for us, and indicates either a shortfall of our programmatic imagination (unlikely, it seems) or a question that keeps resurfacing, an unsolvable question, an aporia in the discursive network of musicking.
This endless interrogatory recapitulation shouldn't surprise us, as it is a continuation of traditions' inability to resolve the question;– as a survey of the Muses and their domains shows us that the line between music and speech was a blurry one from antiquity. Whether we consider Hesiod's Euterpe, muse of flutes and lyric poetry or Pausanias' Aoide (the muse of song), the muses with musical attributes are linked to poetry and sung text.
Nor are these Classical linkages simply a confusion that modernity sorted out;– the wrangling of of the Council of Trent, the monody of the Florentine camerata, the rise of instrumental music in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the synthesizing aspirations of Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerke show us not a gradual clarification, but a return again and again to this unresolvable tension and ineluctable linked between speech and music.
What this makes me think of, actually, is a different source from antiquity - the closing of Plato's Phaedrus, in particular the readings of the passage by Derrida and Ricoeur. There's a nice summary of the Derridean take [ here ], and for Ricoeur's take, it's probably just best to read Memory, History, Forgetting. Derrida expands Rousseau's notion of the supplement - it is that which comes to aid to something ‘primary’ or ‘original.' In this aiding, the supplement displays that which is absent from the original form.
What this makes me think of here is not that music is a supplement to speech or that speech is a supplement to music, but rather that the relationship seems to alternate, each becoming the supplement of the other. This transductive loop does not render the question of primacy moot, though it does become unanswerable; rather, the positioning and re-position of the two domains becomes generative, a source for next question, the next concert, the next work of music, and the next piece of verse. And this constant generation of new question seems very much what we do here at c)i.
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