Le 29 juin 2017
de 14h30 à 15h00
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3202
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Nora Engebretsen
Difficulties with music-analytical discussions of timbre are well known: timbre is readily perceptible yet inherently ineffable; its aspects (spectral spread, envelope, etc.) can be quantified, but its multi-dimensionality confounds; sounds’ physical properties do not always conform to our experience them. Recent works by Rebecca Leydon (2012) and David Blake (2012) forego objective approaches to timbre as physical phenomenon, instead drawing upon phenomenological theory and ethnomusicologist Cornelia Fales’ (2002) notion of the “perceptualization” of timbre—in Leydon’s words, “the notion of timbre as a thing largely forged in the listener’s head”— to propose discursive frameworks for timbral analysis based in Blake’s case on “contextually meaningful, complementarily perceived adjectives” and in Leydon’s on a mapping of spectral purity and noise onto concepts of spirituality and corporeality in works of 20th-century Western art music.
This paper explores the epistemological assumptions underlying characterizations of timbre 1) as subjectively constructed and experienced, rather than objectively determined, and 2) as a bearer of musical meaning. Specific questions center on negotiations of timbre’s perceptual and physical ontologies: What concepts guide our perceptualizations of timbre and metaphoric mappings? To what extent do these vary by context and experience? Do the same concepts apply in both acoustic and electroacoustic contexts for all listeners, for example? Can meaning be understood as fixed in relation to specific physical phenomena, and is this a necessary condition for the development of a theory of timbral semiotics? Discussion will be grounded through reference to analytical examples drawn from recent spectral and electroacoustic compositions.
