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| Author(s): |
Max Packer
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Doctoral Thesis |
| Press: | São Paulo. |
| Institution: | Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Escola de Comunicações e Artes (ECA/SBD) |
| Defense date: | 2018-10-19 |
| Examining board members: |
Silvio Ferraz Mello Filho;
Maurício Funcia de Bonis;
Sergio Kafejian Cardoso Franco;
Denise Hortência Lopes Garcia;
Gustavo Rodrigues Penha
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| Advisor: | Silvio Ferraz Mello Filho |
| Abstract | |
This thesis investigates compositional processes that are triggered out from preexisting and finished musical works. Among the wide variety of possible creative approaches to preexisting musical materials, the current study is interested in the practice of compositional commentary (as originally named by Luciano Berio): processes which are distinguished for operating intrinsically upon the work from which they stem, i.e., by endeavoring to unfold a preexisting work through the exploration of latent potentialities in the work itself and its inherent formative processes. For this, our approach is oriented by a twofold investigation of (a) the openness that can be identified within the works (on its folds), as well as (b) the openness that emerges by means of new compositional processes (through its refolding and unfolding). In order to widely investigate the conditions required for a preexisting musical work to be taken as the starting point - and as a problematic object - to a new composition, we initiate our exposition (Chapter I) by examining a principle of compositional openness which, accordingly to our hypothesis, would be immanent in the works and apprehensible as a surplus of potentialities that emerges from the incompleteness and the non-univocity of its inherent formative processes. The notions of actual and virtual as elaborated by Deleuze and the dynamic circuit of virtualization and re-actualization in which they interact are taken as a conceptual key for the examination of this principle of intrinsic openness in pieces by several composers, including Pergolesi, J.S. Bach, Schumann, Stravinsky, Berio and Andriessen. Chapters II and III are respectively focused on two modalities of reworking of preexisting works which activate in their own peculiar ways the tension between the completeness of the work and the incompleteness of the composition (i. e., of the compositional process). In Chapter II, we approach the practice of transcription in order to investigate to what extent its basic operation (namely, the reconstruction of a musical piece in a different instrumental medium) entails a compositional intromission which brings to question the completeness of the work by reactivating its incompleteness. Through the notion of reduced model elaborated by the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, and based the analysis of transcriptions by J.S. Bach, Stravinsky, Webern, Messiaen, Sciarrino and Kurtág, we propose that transcription may be understood as a process of re-actualization, which brings up aspects which remained latent within the original version and thus assures its compositional openness. In Chapter III, we examine a variety of examples - including, among other works, a couple madrigals by Monteverdi as well as a few of Berio\'s Chemins - in which a preexisting work, taken as the object for a compositional commentary, is fully conserved within an expanded ensemble and/or amidst the unfolding of its formative processes. The general aim of this research is to provide theoretical ground - supported by musical examples from different historical periods - to a compositional practice which consists in an explicit and direct form of reflection on preexisting works and musical processes. At last we report a set of commentary strategies developed in our own compositional practice. (AU) | |
| FAPESP's process: | 14/08908-4 - Oppeness - gesture - myth: the commentary as a composicional problem stemming from Luciano Berio´s work |
| Grantee: | Max Packer |
| Support Opportunities: | Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate |