Paradigms Lost & Paradigms Regained: an evaluation of a performative approach to music and words

Word and Music Studies: Seventh International Conference

University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, WMA Dates: 10th June 2009 - 13th June 2009

Paradigms Lost & Paradigms Regained: an evaluation of a performative approach to music and words

The naming of things has concerned philosophers from Wittgenstein to Chomsky. The epithet “performative” relates to an expanding stream of concepts derived from the writings of Austin and Butler. This paper seeks to demonstrate that although named in the last century, the practice of performativity reflects a history which might relate back as far as the development of language and music itself (Blackling, Mithen). Music and language may be seen to inhabit many parallel developments: both are affected deeply by incessant technological inventions which seek to concretise the ephemeral beyond memory, through writing, printing and sound recording itself. This led to cyclical processes of iconisation, where the medium - the object itself - became the subject of veneration, a pretension of immortality. Meanwhile, the process of creativity became shrouded in myth and mystery, reflecting a quasi-religious status to art, with the accompanying concepts of cognoscenti and heretical potential. There have been frequent realignments in the most unexpected places: it was not a coincidence that the concept of performativity spread at about the same time as the popular invention of Karaoke, reflecting a shared rebalancing of processural aspects over product. When the twentieth century threatened to commoditise everything on a global, industrial scale, performative theory reminded us of alternatives.
Yet this is not a uniquely contemporary experience: Patsy Rosenburg has written about the long-waged battle between oralcy and literacy; Huysmans articulated literature as a commodity in the nineteenth century; and Bach epitomised the concept of composer as craftsman, as unconcerned with the burden of immortality as he was obsessed by his daily task.
In the twenty-first century, performative theory provides an alternative, personal and subjective definition of value and meaning in words and music, and an opportunity to rebalance priorities between artistic process and product.

'"Putting It Together": Teaching Musical Theatre in UK Higher Education'

See resources at bottom of webpage to uplaod paper

Bath Spa University, 27-28 March 2009, Palatine

Paper:
The Importance of the New in Today’s Music Theatre.
Music theatre is by its nature interdisciplinary. As a form it provokes complexity because it requires performing and creating skills to be developed, honed and executed symbiotically. Our educational heritage rather expects us to atomise disciplines into smaller units, separately, often leaving the performer with an impossible task of juggling too many balls for the first time in public.
This paper underlines the symbiotic connection between performing and creating, and from there the inherent unity of performance through singing, acting and movement. Central to this educational experience lies the concept of ownership of material; a method by which students may gain a new perspective of authority over material, rather than subservience.
The history of music theatre starts with the student today.

Concepts of Peace: Performance and War

LSE Peace Conference 2008

Mew Zick Ann Dwerds

Presented at the Song, Stage & Screen conference, Portsmouth UK, 28-30 APRIL 2006

Abstract:
The paper aims to:
• briefly explore and contextualize through historical and sociological evidence, the residence of meaning in performance.
• demonstrate that opera and musical theatre may be seen to be out of step with developments in theatre and music in this respect, but some examples are illustrated in music theatre.
• elucidate and example a historical performative practice whereby creative roles such as author and composer are merged alongside those of performer.
• summarise that the non-rational relationship between music and text may be codified as a non-rational equation, in reference to the alchemy of the title.

Keywords: words, music, sound, meaning, alchemy, heresy.