Le 1er juillet 2017
de 14h30 à 15h00
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3204
Séance - Challenges in the Analysis of Recent Music
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Tobias Tschiedl
Repetition seems conventionally to escape the grasp of music analysis, both on smaller scales (motive/rhythm/meter) and on larger scales (form) – it is often regarded as redundant, hence tends to be “reduced away” in analysis before it can be problematized. Given the stylistic developments of the last century (ubiquitous repetition in popular musics, its avoidance in modernist idioms), it is startling that music theory has yet to develop tools to satisfyingly address repetition as a musical phenomenon in its own right.
Drawing on the second chapter of Deleuze’s Difference et Répétition (1968), I respond to this challenge posed to theory by applying a Deleuzian view of time to music analysis. This entails an awareness of the multiplicity of musical time, and precisely of the role different kinds of repetitions play in establishing different times: E.g., the repetition of habit is different in nature from, and conditioned by, the repetition of memory – even though each implies a complete “time” containing the dimensions of past, present and future. Adapting process-oriented approaches in music theory such as Hasty 1997 and Hulse 2008, I attempt to convert these abstract philosophical notions of repetition into a mode of music analysis.
While a properly Deleuzian model of time as a basis for analysis is probably too unwieldy for wider application, an encounter with Deleuze’s thought can re-qualify our common notions of musical repetition. Cast into a more linguistically accessible form, these ideas help reconcile the processual aspect of repetition with the “representational” (i.e. “identifying”) demands of music theory/analysis.
