Journal articles on the topic 'Harmonica music (Blues)'

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1

Kitts, Thomas M. "Classic Harmonica Blues." Popular Music and Society 36, no. 4 (October 2013): 554–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2013.814225.

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2

Parler, Samuel. "DeFord Bailey in Country Music's Multiracial Canon." Journal of the American Musicological Society 73, no. 1 (2020): 53–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jams.2020.73.1.53.

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DeFord Bailey (1899–1982), an African American harmonica virtuoso, performed regularly on the Grand Ole Opry radio program from 1926 to 1941 and afterward fell into obscurity. Decades later, however, he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame (2005), overseen by the Country Music Association (CMA), amid calls to diversify a predominantly white country music canon. Motivated by racially progressive ideals and seeking to rehabilitate the genre's image, many fans and industry advocates misrepresented Bailey's achievements in the surrounding conversations, or they relied upon essentializing notions of black music in their advocacy on his behalf. Resistance to his candidacy for the Hall was cited as evidence of the industry's institutionalized racism. While his eventual induction allowed the CMA some room in which to refute that charge and promote a multiracial narrative for the genre's history, consistent with its long-standing desire to cultivate middle-class respectability, that same multiracial narrative obscured Bailey's role in the production of a distinctly white image for country music in the 1920s and 1930s. Highlighting this discrepancy, this article compares the historical and contemporary reception of Bailey's music and legacy, drawing upon newspaper accounts, Opry promotional materials, archival interviews, and commercial recordings. Opry broadcasts played host to blues, blackface, and other racially coded repertoires; Bailey's blues-based style did not distinguish him from his white Opry peers. Opry marketing worked assiduously to present a singular white image for the show and its repertoire, marginalizing or obscuring Bailey's racial identity in its programming and publicity. In this manner, Bailey's career has paradoxically been made to serve narratives asserting both the whiteness and the multiracialism of country music.
3

Katz, Jonah. "Harmonic Syntax of the Twelve-Bar Blues Form." Music Perception 35, no. 2 (December 1, 2017): 165–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/mp.2017.35.2.165.

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This paper describes the construction and analysis of a corpus of harmonic progressions from 12-bar blues forms included in the jazz repertoire collection The Real Book. A novel method of coding and analyzing such corpus data is developed, with a notion of “possible harmonic change” derived from the corpus and logit mixed-effects regression models that describe the difference between actually occurring harmonic events and possible but non-occurring ones in terms of various sets of theoretical constructs. Models using different sets of constructs are compared using the Bayesian Information Criterion, which assesses the accuracy and efficiency of each model. The principal results are that: (1) transitional probabilities are better modeled using root-motion and chord-frequency information than they are using pairs of individual chords; (2) transitional probabilities are better described using a mixture model intermediate in complexity between a bigram and full trigram model; and (3) the difference between occurring and non-occurring chords is more efficiently modeled with a hierarchical, recursive context-free grammar than it is as a Markov chain. The results have implications for theories of harmony, composition, and cognition more generally.
4

SAGEE, ALONA. "Bessie Smith: ‘Down Hearted Blues’ and ‘Gulf Coast Blues’ revisited." Popular Music 26, no. 1 (January 2006): 117–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s026114300700116x.

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A re-examination of Bessie Smith's first two released blues recordings – ‘Down Hearted Blues’ and ‘Gulf Coast Blues’ – demonstrates that her interpretative originality and expressive individuality were evident from the start of her recording career in 1923. The micro-components of Bessie's early vocal tendencies are revealed through full transcriptions of her vocal line on each of these recordings combined with detailed description and analysis of the pitch content, the main rhythmic and melodic characteristics, and the melodic-harmonic and text-music relationships. The method demonstrates that, although Bessie's phrases display some similarities with each other, they constantly vary in imaginative ways, matching her with true jazz improvisers.
5

GIVAN, BENJAMIN. "Apart Playing: McCoy Tyner and “Bessie's Blues”." Journal of the Society for American Music 1, no. 2 (May 2007): 257–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1752196307070095.

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Jazz pianist McCoy Tyner's improvisation on the theme “Bessie's Blues,” recorded with the John Coltrane Quartet in 1964, exemplifies the traditional Afrodiasporic performance practice of “apart playing.” A formulation of the art historian Robert Farris Thompson, apart playing occurs whenever individual performers enact different, complementary roles in an ensemble setting. For interpretative purposes, the concept helps to provide a cultural context for certain pitch-based formal devices, such as substitute harmonies and playing “outside” an underlying chord or scale, which Tyner uses in the course of his solo.
6

Huron, David. "Interval-Class Content in Equally Tempered Pitch-Class Sets: Common Scales Exhibit Optimum Tonal Consonance." Music Perception 11, no. 3 (1994): 289–305. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/40285624.

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Pitch-class sets (such as scales) can be characterized according to the inventory of possible intervals that can be formed by pairing all pitches in the set. The frequency of occurrence of various interval classes in a given pitch-class set can be correlated with corresponding measures of perceived consonance for each interval class. If a goal of music-making is to promote a euphonious effect, then those sets that exhibit a plethora of consonant intervals and a paucity of dissonant intervals might be of particular interest to musicians. In this paper, it is shown that the pitch-class sets that provide the most consonant interval-class inventories are the major diatonic scale, the harmonic and melodic minor scales, and equally tempered equivalents of the Japanese Ritsu mode, the common pentatonic scale, and the common "blues" scale. Consonant harmonic intervals are more readily available in these sets than in other possible sets that can be drawn from the 12 equally tempered pitch chromas.
7

Rohrmeier, Martin. "The Syntax of Jazz Harmony: Diatonic Tonality, Phrase Structure, and Form." Music Theory and Analysis (MTA) 7, no. 1 (April 30, 2020): 1–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.11116/mta.7.1.1.

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The regularities underlying the structure building of chord sequences, harmonic phrases, and combinations of phrases constitute a central research problem in music theory. This article proposes a formalization of Jazz harmony with a generative framework based on formal grammars, in which syntactic structure tightly corresponds with the functional interpretation of the sequence. It assumes that chords establish nested hierarchical dependencies that are characterized by two core types: preparation and prolongation. The approach expresses diatonic harmony, embedded modulation, borrowing, and substitution within a single grammatical framework. It is argued in the second part that the proposed framework models not only core phrase structure, but also relations between phrases and the syntactic structures underlying the main forms of Jazz standards. As a special case, the Blues form relies heavily on the plagal derivation from the tonic and is analyzed in comparison with other analytical approaches to the Blues. The proposed theory is specified to a sufficient level of detail that it lends itself to computational implementation and empirical exploration, and this way it makes a step towards music theory building that embraces the close links between formal, mathematical, and computational methods.
8

Costa, Marco, and Mattia Nese. "Perceived Tension, Movement, and Pleasantness in Harmonic Musical Intervals and Noises." Music Perception 37, no. 4 (March 11, 2020): 298–322. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/mp.2020.37.4.298.

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Perceived valence, tension, and movement of harmonic musical intervals (from the unison to the octave presented in a low- and high-register) and standard noises (brown, pink, white, blue, purple) were assessed in two studies that differed in the crossmodal procedure by which tension and movement were rated: proprioceptive device or visual analog scale. Valence was evaluated in both studies with the visual analog scale. In a preliminary study, the proprioceptive device was calibrated with a psychophysical procedure. Roughness of the stimuli was included as covariate. Tension was perceived higher in dissonant intervals and in intervals presented in the high register. The higher the high-pitch energy content in the standard noise, the higher the perceived tension. The visual analog scale resulted in higher tension ratings than the proprioceptive device. Perception of movement was higher in dissonant intervals, in intervals in the high register, and in standard noises than in musical intervals. High-pitch spectrum noises were associated with more sense of movement than low-pitch spectrum noises. Consonant intervals and low-register intervals were evaluated as more pleasant than dissonant and high-register intervals. High-pitch spectrum purple and blue noises were evaluated as more unpleasant than low-pitch spectrum noises.
9

Larkey, Edward. "Austropop: popular music and national identity in Austria." Popular Music 11, no. 2 (May 1992): 151–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143000004980.

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The diffusion of rock and popular music from the US and British mass entertainment industries since the 1950s has had a profound impact on the music traditions world-wide. Several generations of youth have been socialised to the musical accompaniment of rock and roll music of the 1950s, the ‘beat music’ of the 1960s, the so-called ‘psychedelic’ or ‘underground’ rock music of the 1970s, disco, punk and new wave music in the 1970s and 1980s. It has resulted in the transplantation of these ‘foreign’ styles into music cultures with small groups of fan communities for rock and roll, country and western, blues, punk, reggae and others which were previously unheard of there before their introduction. In addition, domestic traditions have been profoundly affected by the diffusion of these new music styles and have integrated some of their musical, technical and other components into their own repertoires. The Schlager music in the German-speaking countries has been one of the most prominent in this respect, adapting syncopated rhythm but modifying its harmonic attributes in order to maintain its own prominence and cultural legitimacy in the music culture. Even the volkstümliche or folk-like music, a commercialised genre of traditional folk music, has undergone changes as a result of the diffusion of the newer forms of popular music. A third type of impact upon music tradition is that of ‘transnational’ or ‘transcultural’ styles. When imported musical and cultural innovations are mixed with domestic styles and traditions, these new styles and conventions are ultimately created. These, in turn, form a primary thrust in the cultivation and development of innovations in musical traditions, which eventually evolve into changes in the cultural identity of the particular country.
10

Herbst, Jan-Peter. "Distortion and Rock Guitar Harmony." Music Perception 36, no. 4 (April 1, 2019): 335–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/mp.2019.36.4.335.

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Research on rock harmony accords with common practice in guitar playing in that power chords (fifth interval) with an indeterminate chord quality as well as major chords are preferred to more complex chords when played with a distorted tone. This study explored the interrelated effects of distortion and harmonic structure on acoustic features and perceived pleasantness of electric guitar chords. Extracting psychoacoustic parameters from guitar tones with Music Information Retrieval technology revealed that the level of distortion and the complexity of interval relations affects sensorial pleasantness. A listening test demonstrated power and major chords being perceived as significantly more pleasant than minor and altered dominant chords when being played with an overdriven or distorted guitar tone. This result accords with musical practice within rock genres. Rather clean rock styles such as blues or classic rock use major chords frequently, whereas subgenres with more distorted guitars such as heavy metal largely prefer power chords. Considering individual differences, electric guitar players rated overdriven and distorted chords as significantly more pleasant. Results were ambiguous in terms of gender but indicated that women perceive distorted guitar tones as less pleasant than men. Rock music listeners were more tolerant of sensorial unpleasant sounds.
11

Ridout, Sam. "Ellen Arkbro and Marcus Pal; Claudia Molitor, Decay, hcmf//, 16 November 2019." Tempo 74, no. 292 (March 6, 2020): 85–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s004029821900130x.

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Ellen Arkbro has been much fêted in experimental scenes (though not – or not yet – so much in the sort of new music scenes with which hcmf// remains associated) for her two records, For Organ and Brass (2017) and CHORDS (2019). Her performance with Marcus Pal in St Paul's Hall in Huddersfield follows a number of other shows in the UK, including at TUSK festival in Newcastle and at the Barbican in London. The pair are based in Stockholm, where they seem to be part of a burgeoning experimental organ scene. Their just intonation drone music comes with impeccable credentials: both studied with La Monte Young, and Pal also studied with Catherine Christer Hennix. The organ emitted a quiet diminished octave as the audience filed in, a dissonance resolved as soon as Arkbro sat down at the organ manual. What followed appeared to be a reworked and extended version of CHORDS for organ: the organ articulating perfect intervals and single tones, sounding something like a harmonic series and something like the I–IV–V of rock and blues, while Pal's computer-generated additive synthesis, speakers carefully directed upwards parallel to the organ's pipes, combine with the organ's familiar sound to create dense and jagged masses, chords transforming into timbres and back again.
12

Yakymchuk, O. M. ,. Belova N. V. "Messiaen analyzes Messiaen: author’s comments on the piano cycle «Twenty Contemplations on the Infant Jesus»." Aspects of Historical Musicology 14, no. 14 (September 15, 2018): 36–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.34064/khnum2-14.03.

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Background. Most of Messiaen’s works has an author’s comment. The composer usually prefaces his compositions with preambles, epigraphs, analytical notes. There are also two wide theoretical works devoted to explaining the technique of Messiaen’s compositions and grounds of his system: «Technique of my musical language» (1942) and «Treatise Messiaen addresses to a listener, when he commented on the thematic structure of the cycle, providing semantic and figurative orientations for perception. The composer immediately determines the cross-cutting themes that pass through the cycle: the theme of God, the theme of mystical love, the theme of the Star and the Cross, the theme of chords, showing in what plays they sound and how they are transformed. It all looks quite understandable and can really help the listener navigate in music. However, it may seem that Messiaen deliberately disorients the reader of his Notes. For example, the theme of chords, in his definition, is “abstract, it is similar to the series, but very specific and very easily recognizable due to its colors: gray-and-blue, steel, supersaturated red and bright orange, violet-and-lilac, shrouded brown and surrounded by purple-and-crimson” [4: 32]. It is clear that the addressee of such a text is an extraordinary listener of academic concerts, and, it should be admitted, – an extraordinary performer. The same conceptual multidirectionality is also characteristic for the treatise «Technique of My Musical Language» created shortly before the «Twenty Contemplations on the Infant Jesus». In the treatise one does not to look for a good statement on the bases of the musical composition – it is a colorful and mysterious mix of concepts, images, various spheres of human knowledge and arts. Such a complicated explanation of a mixture of different concepts can lead to hopelessness even a musicologist who operates by traditional notions of musical form. How can one understand the form where «development precedes the exposition»? How does the principle of fugue combine with the Indian rhythms? How can be the traditional principles of Gregorian chorus unfolded through the modes of limited transposition? We should admit that if we only read the texts of Messiaеn, we would definitely go to a dead end. However, the problem someway disappears, if you start listening to his music, especially the one that is being discussed. Based on music, not text, one can find that the musical process is entirely explained by the concepts used by Messiaen, although some, undoubtedly, require certain effort to decrypt. Messiaen’s musical (including thematic) material is represented traditionally in complex, where the melodic-harmonic basis is inseparable from its rhythmic realization. As for the musical forms and principles of musical organization, presented in the Messiaen’s works, «Twenty Contemplations on the Infant Jesus» can be considered as the “catalog” of those and others. Some concepts the composer introduced he uses for the first time, some of these he re-thinks in a new way in his system. Thus, the entire musical theory, presented by Messiaen in his “Notes”, may be translated into “a normal” language comprehensible for us. Why would Messiaen complicate the perception of his texts if he wanted to be clear? Indeed, even a musicologist (not to mention a listener or a performer) has to make some effort for expanding his knowledge beyond the scope of musicology in order to understand adequately his comments. It is likely that the Word used by Messiaen is a kind of invitation to co-creation. The programs of his works, according to the definition of musicologist K. Zenkin, preserve “the entire impossibility of translation” of the musical images, returning “music into music that has absorbed all the fullness of color and poetic sensations” [1: 8]. Another explanation for such a strong connection of Messiaen’s music with the Word lies, obviously, in his belonging to the French Church, particularly, to its organ tradition. The desire to interpret and explain is characteristically for the Church tradition. Throughout his life Messiaen was performed the duties of a church organist in the St. Trinity Church in Paris, and he could not fail to be influenced by the Church. Among the most important for the composer ideas and concepts, which appear in the texts of his verbal comments, those that related to Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular are predominant. Conclusions. If we go deep into the question of the religiosity of Messiaen, then it will lead us very far, since religiosity was one of the most important foundations of his outlook in general. Is it a possible to listen to his music without the comments? Of course, the magic of Messiaen’s music will influence onto an audience and without the texts, but the quite substantial component will disappear from it. We can conclude that a person who meets with the music of Messiaen – and it does not a matter, simply he listens to it, performs it or analyzes it with notes – becomes involved in the orbit of the Messiaen’s Universe, where the music embodies the Word in a Divine sense, and where the Word filled with life and meaning of the Music. ornithology» (1949–1992, not finished). Obviously, that the composer tries to present his ideas to the audience. But whom are his words turned to? To the listener, performer, to the musicologist analyzing his compositions? Why is his music not enough, and the composer obviously tries to clothe his ideas in a wordy form yet? Understanding of the composer’s intentions is important and for performing of his music, and for its adequate perception. In addition, a composer’s word in the XX century became usual for us, it is a part of the modern cultural paradigm. The objective of this research is the studying of author’s comments on the piano cycle «Twenty Contemplations on the Infant Jesus» and identification of the meaning of a Word and its communicative purpose for the commented music. The article used the analytical and comparative methods applying to author’s texts of Messiaen («Notes on the piano cycle “Twenty Contemplations on the Infant Jesus”», «Technique of My Musical Language») as well as to the results of the musicological studies related to these texts, with there after generalization of the observations and the opinions. Results of the study. The cycle «Twenty Contemplations on the Infant Jesus» is indicative for Messiaеn’s creativity. «Notes on the piano cycle “Twenty Contemplations on the Infant Jesus”» were written in 1978 and published in the edition “Hommage à Olivier Messiaen” by Paris publishing house “La recherché artistique”, 1978. In the first edition, the composer presented an epigraph and a brief explanation to each of the twenty plays. But over time, he understood that this was not enough, so he added to the first short comments the more detailed explanations on composition methods (including his own), the construction of musical forms, specificity of imaginative content, the designation of leitmotivs and their transformation.
13

Mykhailova, Olha. "The figurative world of Florent Schmitt’s piano works (following the diptych “Mirages”)." Aspects of Historical Musicology 19, no. 19 (February 7, 2020): 230–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.34064/khnum2-19.13.

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Statement of the problem. An important place in the creative heritage by F. Schmitt (1870–1958) is occupied by music for piano, which in the last decade actively entered to the repertoire of many foreign pianists. At the same time, it remains beyond the focus of Ukrainian performers. From this viewpoint, the relevance of the study is seen in revealing characteristic features of F. Schmitt’s composing style and shaping national musicians’ vision of the creative work of the composer. The purpose of the paper is to fill in the gaps in knowledge about the work of F. Schmitt, to analyze the figurative world of the composer’s piano pieces, to evaluate the influence of cross creative inspirations using the example of the diptych “Mirages”. In this regard, cultural-historical, comparative and structuralfunctional research methods are used. Presentation of the main material. F. Schmitt turned to piano music during all his creative life, leaving more than 30 works, among which cyclic compositions predominate. The range of images is extremely wide: genre scenes, environmental conditions, lyricism, fantasy, etc. Here the influence of impressionism and the art of C. Debussy can be traced. Musicians all over the world were in awe of the talent of this master. Suffice it to recall the unprecedented collaborative work by famous European composers at the turn of the centuries – the multi-genre series of miniatures “Le Tombeau de Claude Debussy”, written in memory of the great creator. F. Schmitt also showed his admiration of the genius of “Claude de France” in the piece “Et Pan, au fond des bles lunaires, s’accouda”. At first, it existed as one of the numbers of “Le Tombeau de Claude Debussy” (1920), and later, together with “La tragique chevauchée”, it made up the diptych “Mirages” (1921). The poem “Philomela” by a French poet Paul Fort was a kind of inspiring impetus for writing the diptych. The appeal for creative inspiration to related art forms was a frequent occurrence in France at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. This took place due to a special cultural environment, marked by a fruitful co-working of writers, artists and musicians. Poets were composed verses inspired by the works of visual art they had seen, artists were created illustrations for literary works that had affected them, composers, in turn, were written music pieces, which embodied poetic images. Paul Fort’s poem have several interwoven semantic plans. In the piece “Et Pan, au fond des bles lunaires, s’accouda” F. Schmitt follows the multiplicity of these plans. On the one hand, he preserves the plot narrative, on the other hand, he emphasizes landscape descriptiveness. According to the content of the poem, the music is divided into episodes, and each of which reveals a new facet of the narrative. This is expressed by a change in pace, key signatures and texture. The sound image of the piece, its texture, metro-rhythm, composition, recording techniques were equally determined both by the inspiration that came from the lines by P. Fort, and by the dedication to the memory of C. Debussy. The piece is characterized by all-encompassing register, juxtaposition of colors, chiaroscuro – the features, by which the musical language of C. Debussy is recognized. At the same time, the contrast of texture, registers and metro-rhythmic complexes involves certain redundancy of information that contradicts the signs of Debussy’s manner of expression, who tended to be more compact and monolithic. This suggests that F. Schmitt creates a kind of anthology of C. Debussy’s legacy, organizing the piece on the principle of stringing small, diverse fragments. Parallels with the cycles “Images”, “Estampes”, and “Préludes” can be noticed in the resulting microsuite composition. In the piece “La tragique chevauchée” F. Schmitt clearly recreates the spirit of the dramatic events of the poem by George Byron, following the literary plot in music. Two contrasting thematic spheres prevail. The first sphere, which sets the main tone, is characterized by the rapid pace remarked by the author’s notice “Emporté et violent”, a bouncing dotted rhythm, acute accentuation, toccata texture, sudden dynamic changes, dissonant tremolo harmonies. It reflects the outer side of the action – a crazy gallop of a horse running wild with fear, overcoming an endless series of obstacles on the way, and the physical suffering of an exhausted rider. The other one, which is less amplitudinous, is represented by a melancholic, as if crying, cantilena, symbolizing the inner experiences of the tormented hero. The grotesque expressive means in the foreground are a kind of scenery for the action, while the cantilena element, as if remaining in the background, bears the stamp of the inner drama of G. Byron’s poem. Conclusions. Despite the fact that the diptych “Mirages” is not a program composition, the pieces that make it up give rise to vivid, distinct images. Emotional richness, play of timbres, picturesqueness endowed the work with orchestral potential, which drew the attention of contemporaries. At the initiative of S. Koussevitsky, it was instrumented and found a new life on the symphonic stage. It is noteworthy that the eminent conductor’s interest in the timbre side of F. Schmitt’s music did not end there and was realized in “Symphonie Concertante pour piano & orchestra”, op. 82 (1931), written at the request of S. Koussevitsky. This fact opens up new turn in the perspectives for the study of F. Schmitt’s creative work. The symphonic version of the diptych “Mirages” arouses curiosity in terms of the original idea implementation. The composer’s piano works require study taking into account their orchestral potential.
14

Kalinina, A. S. "Peculiarities of the embodiment of H. Heine’s poetry translations in the vocal cycle of D. Klebanov." Aspects of Historical Musicology 13, no. 13 (September 15, 2018): 74–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.34064/khnum2-13.06.

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Statement of the problem. There are a lot of works in the national musicology focusing on the study of vocal chamber music for voice and piano by Ukrainian composers of the 20th century. Researchers cover quite a wide range of issues regarding vocal pieces and touch upon the problems of cyclocreation, dramaturgy, features of musical and linguistic means, etc. However, they rarely pay attention to translation, though there are many vocal opuses, in which composers use foreign poetry. In this case, the specifi c choice of the translated sample helps to determine the principles of the composer’s approach to the embodiment of the poetic text, especially in comparison with other works based on the same sources. Hence separate songs from D. Klebanov’s vocal cycle on the poems of H. Heine did not become an exception, thereby confi rming the relevance of the proposed topic. The purpose of the article is to determine specifi c features of the embodiment of H. Heine’s poetry translations in the vocal cycle of D. Klebanov on the basis of two romances – “In a grove, on a wild path”, “My love, lay your hand on my heart”, as compared to the works of other composers of the twentieth century . To achieve the research objectives the following methods were used: historical, structural-functional, genre-style and comparative. Results. Under consideration are peculiarities of the embodiment of H. Heine’s poetry translations in the vocal cycle of D. Klebanov, one of the founders of Kharkiv composition school. For this work the author took eight verses from the fi rst two cycles of the “Book of Songs” by the German poet. They were based on the motives of love poems with vivid images of nature; sometimes the poems are full of sadness, a sense of loneliness. When D. Klebanov was choosing certain samples from different poetic cycles, he tried to stick to the plot of the “Book of Songs”, since he ordered the poems in the same way they were written in the collection. Another indicator of the composer’s relation to Heiner’s texts is the choice of poetic works which are given in the cycle in Ukrainian and Russian languages. The composer’s individual vision of Heine’s lyric poetry is clearly seen when compared to the vocal works of other composers of the twentieth century, M. Medtner and E. Denisov, written on the same poetic texts. In cross-romances, similar musical-linguistic means are used, including the metrical principle of vocalization of the poetic text, homophonic-harmonic structure, harmony of classical-romantic type. However, each of the composers renders the fi gurative and semantic implications of the poems in their own way. M. Medtner builds his romance “My love, lay your hand on my heart” according to the crescendo principle. Beginning with a quieter dynamics, the composer gradually increases the volume of the sound, which at the end leads to a general climax that moves from the point of the golden section. D. Klebanov chose a different way – to reinforce the dramatism of the poem. This was possible thanks to various musical and linguistic means: a strict, intense melody in the bass doubled in the sixth with a chromatic motion and semiquavers at the end of each bar in the last line of the fi rst stanza, designation Meno mosso, chromaticized vocal melody. The composers’ choice of poetic translations depends on the place and role of the romance in the general structure of the cycle. The eight-part composition of D. Klebanov is based on the wave principle of the plot development. The original four romances pave the way to the fi rst climax – unrequited love in the fi rst romance (“Every morning I awake and ask”), painful memories in the second one (“In a grove, on a wild path”), a tragic image in the third one (“My love, lay your hand on my heart “), and an attempt to overcome the pain in the fourth romance (“First I was afraid of darkness”). Further on, the development is based on contrast: the image of death in the fi fth romance (“Your lovely face, so fair and dear”), a subtle feeling of love in the sixth one (“Oh, let me plunge my heart”), worries because of the marriage of a loved one to another guy in the seventh romance (“I hear the fl ute and the fi ddle”) and disappointment in her spiritual values in the last one (“The violets blue”). Such a location of the third romance justifi es the choice of translation, where the colours are thickening and the content becomes even darker. Such kind of a fi gurative and semantic plot resembles the tradition of a romantic vocal cycle, in which the emotional state of the lyrical character, his emotional collisions сome to the fore. In this perspective, “ 3 Poems of H. Heine” by D. Medtner demonstrate another relationship between the romances of the cycle. All of them have feelings of sorrow, despair circle, a no-go. At the same time, distancing from the immediate events is felt, as if it is a look at someone else’s life, which is evidenced by the storytelling from the third person in the second and third romances. Therefore, the fi rst romance, based on the poem “My love, lay your hand on my heart”, is a kind of “preface” to the cycle, which involves some personal detachment. This leads to the selection of softened content in the translated version of the poem. The second romance, “In a grove, on a wild path”, has a similar function in the vocal cycle of D. Klebanov as it became the preparation for the climax of the third one. The semantic line of his poem is based on two storylines: the external one is the “theme of the journey” that is refl ected in the image of nature, and the internal one is the “theme of sadness”, which focuses on the feelings of the lyrical hero. The composer here, like Анна in the third romance, deepens the line of inner experiences. This became possible thanks to the Tranquillo tempo, fl at minor tonality, massive discordant accompaniment chords, variable measure, melody of the recitative-oratorial type. H. Heine’s poem, presented in the work of D. Klebanov, became the basis of the fi fth romance of E. Denisov’s vocal opus. Like the Ukrainian master, E. Denisov builds his cycle in the spirit of the romantic tradition, but in revealing the fi gurative structure of the poem he goes a different way. He makes a clear distinction between two fi gurativesemantic lines. This is refl ected in the form of a romance that has the features of binarity and variability, the embodiment of the metro-rhythmic structure of the verse based on two opposing principles - metric and cantilena, as well as other means of musical expression. Thus, choosing the same poem by H. Heine, D. Klebanov and E. Denisov represent their own vision of its content. Conclusions The comparative analysis of the embodiment of Heine’s texts by D. Klebanov and other composers of the twentieth century helps to highlight the individual approach of the Ukrainian artist. Despite the fact that the composer chooses similar means of musical expression, he fi nds his own way of refl ecting the semantics of the poetic source. In the above mentioned romances – “In a grove, on a wild path” and “My love, lay your hand on my heart” – the author focuses on the inner confl icts of the lyrical hero, his experiences. Attention paid to the sensory side of the poems also determined the selected translations, since the rejection of translators from the original results in a certain deformation of its meaning and fi gurative structure, which infl uences the musical embodiment of the poetic source.
15

Thompson, Bill. "Evoking terror in film scores." M/C Journal 5, no. 1 (March 1, 2002). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1939.

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It is peculiar that we so urgently seek out the emotion of fear in film. We have a thirst for fear, and we go to elaborate means to experience it. It would be convenient if we could invoke the experience of fear without the apparatus of a cinema, but such intermediaries are necessary. We cannot will ourselves to be afraid. To evoke an emotion, we must organize our environment -- or invoke mental images of such an environment -- which then triggers the emotion. One of the great discoveries of the 20th century was the powerful effect of combining film with musical representations of emotion. It is possible to combine these two media in a way that reflects no naturally occurring visual-auditory correlation, such as the correlation between the sight and sound of a person running. That two such distinct media should combine so readily may seem puzzling. Background music is not part of the diegesis of the film and has the potential to create confusion (Cohen, 2). This potential was illustrated in Mel Brooks' comedy Blazing Saddles (1974). A sheriff rides in the desert set to suitable background music, but then meets the Count Basie Band performing the now foreground music. The music, initially interpreted on a subconscious or emotional level, is unexpectedly thrust into the fictional component of the film and processed on a conscious level. Such exceptions aside, there is usually no such confusion because film and music are integrated on an emotional rather than an analytic level. Fear responses do not require brain structures needed for consciousness and analytic thought but can be processed without conscious awareness by subcortical structures (i.e., the amygdala). A frightening score that is not part of the diegesis of the film combines with visual information at sub-cortical levels to create a unified experience of fear, with no sense that there are two sources of emotional meaning -- fictional and musical. The lack of literal connection between visual and auditory sources is not confusing. We do not question the logic of musicians playing triumphant music at every battle in Star Wars, or sentimental music inside the police station on Hill Street Blues. The combination of film and music is exceptionally potent because both are highly influential media. Economic activity reflects their influence (Huron, 3). In the United States, the largest export sector is entertainment, led by music and film. Film makers are so confident that they invest billions of dollars in them. In 1999 the average budget for a single Hollywood film was 76 million. The prevalence of music in industrialized society is also massive: the music industry is larger than the pharmaceutical industry. As a film composer, I've learned that I can induce fear most readily by turning my attention away from conventional music structures. In an important sense, writing fearful music should not involve composition in the usual sense of the term. Rather, one may rely on the fact that sound is inherently frightening when stripped of the comforting structuring properties of language and music. It is difficult to express fear using conventional forms. Fear is sometimes expressed in Opera but using unconventional forms. Fear is also associated with the bhayanaka rasa in Classical Indian music, but evidence suggests that sensitivity to rasas is related to basic acoustic properties such as pace, loudness, and complexity (Balkwill & Thompson, 1). The major and minor modes in Western music are associated with happiness and sadness, but the evocation of fear seems antithetical to such conventions. When music is recognizable, as in a melody with a traditional harmonic accompaniment, we experience reassurance. Conventional music evokes a comforting feeling that we are "among our own" and there is safety in numbers. The possibility of fear arises when familiar music structures are removed. It is certainly possible to create a creepy atmosphere using traditional forms by repeatedly pairing a musical segment with a frightening image or event. Such learned associations are used in the practice of leitmotiv, in which a musical theme is paired repeatedly with a character until it comes to represent that character. Consider Mike Oldfield's circular melody in The Exorcist or Beethoven's ninth symphony in A Clockwork Orange. Through learned association, both scores created extremely disturbing atmospheres. The most effective way to induce terror, however, is to manipulate basic acoustic properties, also called secondary musical parameters. Primary parameters include melody and harmony: aspects of music that are culturally shaped and recognizable as traditional forms. Secondary parameters include pace, loudness, timbre, and pitch height: elements of sound that are perceived similarly across cultures. The use of musical convention is deeply connected with one's emotional intention. We create fear most powerfully by stripping music of conventional forms. Composers aiming to design a fearful score often import and embed frightening sounds into traditional compositional structures, such as a melody with harmonic accompaniment. They do this as a musical challenge or out of concern that their score might otherwise be perceived as unsophisticated. What evokes fear, however, are not those recognizable conventions of composition but rather, elements of the score that are unrelated to conventional structures. We fear surprising or unfamiliar sounds: sudden changes in loudness, jittery sounds, deep hollow textures, and unpredictable pitch combinations or movement. Sounds are more frightening than visual images, and hence soundtracks are essential to thriller flicks. Visual images are experienced as "out there" and emotionally distant. We've learned to detach ourselves emotionally from visual images by habituating to the continuous stream of horrifying TV and film images. When we actually witness a terrifying event, it seems "like a movie." Sounds are experienced as both outside and inside our heads. We feel sound in our bones, making it difficult to distance ourselves from them. They are less easily localized than visual images, creating nervousness about possible escape routes. Their sources are not always identifiable, creating uncertainty. Prey rely heavily on sounds to alert them of predators, linking sound to fear. The fear centre of the brain -- the amygdala -- lies deep inside the temporal lobe, which processes sound (LeDoux, 4). From an evolutionary standpoint, we can assume that humans, like all animals, evolved a sensitivity to the potential dangers associated with sounds. Brain systems that generate fear are highly conserved throughout evolutionary history, suggesting that fear responses in modern brains are similar to fear responses in early hominids. Large, aggressive, or unfamiliar animals are potentially life-threatening and it is adaptive for us to fear them. Low pitches are associated with large sound-producing cavities and hence, animals with big mouths. Loud low-pitched sounds signal aggression. High-pitched screeches are perceived as alarm calls. During the stabbing scene in the film Psycho, repeated screeching sounds or "alarm-calls" combine with the visual scene to induce excruciating fear. In industrialized society, fear of predation is largely non-existent, replaced with a fear of our own technology: car and airplane accidents, nuclear disasters, weapons. But fear responses today are the result of adaptive pressures that took place thousands of years ago when predation was a constant threat. We are acutely sensitive to alarm calls and predatory sounds. When predators of humans are portrayed in film, as in Jaws or Jurassic Park, the experience of fear is unbearable. Why do we so urgently seek out this unpleasant emotion? One possibility relates to social cohesion. Group solidarity is enhanced when there is a common enemy. The object of fear in film distinguishes "us against them" and secures a bond between those experiencing the terror. The representation of fear identifies an enemy (the object of fear) to enhance solidarity. Teenagers -- who have the greatest need for social bonding and self definition -- are voracious consumers of terror films. Shared experiences of film-induced fear are extremely widespread. In the week ending May 28th, 2000, there were over 3,100 screening of Gladiator in the United States. America dominates the world market in film and music (only India has resisted this domination). For better or worse, Hollywood emotions are globally shared. People from Japan, China, Italy, Spain, and Brazil have a common bond on the basis of having seen The Matrix or The Exorcist. Fear in film also performs another function. Films are externalized representations of cultural memory, and of culturally significant or meaningful experiences. They are a mechanism for accumulating and transmitting knowledge of the environment, preparing ourselves for circumstances in which we might find ourselves. Terror films stimulate the development of cognitive strategies for coping with challenging circumstances. All of us -- teenagers especially -- feel a need to prepare ourselves for hostile environments. Terror films not only nurture social bonding, they motivate the refinement of an essential human trait: courage. By situating ourselves within an environment that presents various hypothetical sources of terror, we test our courage, and we activate the development of important strategies for coping with the very real fears with which we will inevitably be confronted. References Balkwill, L.L. & Thompson, W.F. "A cross-cultural investigation of the perception of emotion in music: Psychophysical and cultural cues." Music Perception, 17, 43-64, 1999. Cohen, A. "Music as a source of emotion in film." In Patrik Juslin & John Sloboda (Ed.) Music and Emotion: Theory and Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Huron, D. "Is music an evolutionary adaptation?" In Robert Zatorre & Isabelle Peretz (Ed.), The Biological Foundations of Music. New York: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Volume 930. New York, 2001. LeDoux, J. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. New York: Touchstone, 1996. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Thompson, Bill. "Evoking Terror In Film Scores" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.1 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/evoking.php>. Chicago Style Thompson, Bill, "Evoking Terror In Film Scores" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 1 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/evoking.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Thompson, Bill. (2002) Evoking Terror In Film Scores. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(1). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/evoking.php> ([your date of access]).
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Stover, Chris. "Musical Bodies: Corporeality, Emergent Subjectivity, and Improvisational Spaces." M/C Journal 19, no. 1 (April 6, 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1066.

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IntroductionInteractive improvisational musical spaces (which is to say, nearly all musical spaces) involve affective relations among bodies: between the bodies of human performers, between performers and active listeners, between the sonic "bodies" that comprise the multiple overlapping events that constitute a musical performance’s unfolding. Music scholarship tends to focus on either music’s sonic materialities (the sensible; what can be heard) or the cultural resonances that locate in and through music (the political or hermeneutic; how meaning is inscribed in and for a listening subject).An embodied turn, however, has recently been manifesting, bringing music scholarship into communication with feminist theory, queer theory, and approaches that foreground subjectivity and embodiment. Exemplary in this area are works by Naomi Cumming (who asks a critical question, “does the self form the sound, or the sound the self?;” Cumming 7), Suzanne Cusick, Marion Guck, Fred Maus, and Susan McClary. All of these scholars, in various ways, thematise the performative—what it feels like to make or experience music, and what effect that making or experiencing has on subject-formation.All of these authors strive to foreground the role of the performer and performativity in the context of the extended Western art music tradition. While each makes persuasive, significant points, my contention in this paper is that improvised music is a more fruitful starting place for thinking about embodiment and the co-constitutive relationship between performer and sound. That is, while (nearly) all music is improvised to a greater or lesser degree, the more radical contexts, in which paths are being selected and large-scale shapes drawn in the “heat of the moment,” can bring these issues into stark relief and serve as more productive entry points for thinking through crucial questions of embodiment, perspective, identity, and emergent meaning.Music-Improvisational ContextsA musical improvisational space is a “context,” in Lawrence Grossberg’s sense of the term (26), where acts of territorialisation unfold an ongoing process of meaning-constitution. Territorialisation refers to an always-ongoing process of mapping out a space within which subjects and objects are constituted (Deleuze and Guattari 314). I posit that musical acts of territorialising are performed by two kinds of bodies in mutually constitutive relationships: interacting corporeal performing bodies, with individual pasts, tendencies, wills, and affective attunements (Massumi, Semblance), and what I term musical-objects-as-bodies. This second category represents a way of considering music’s sonic materiality from an affective perspective—relational, internally differentiating, temporal. On the one hand musical-objects-as-bodies refer to the materiality of the now-ongoing music itself: from the speeds and slownesses of air molecules that are received by the ear and interpreted as sound in the brain, to notes and rhythms and musical gestures; to the various ways in which abstract forms are actively shaped by performers and interpreted by listeners, with their own individuated constellations of histories, tendencies, wants, attunements, and corporeal perspectives. On the other hand, musical-objects-as-bodies can refer to the histories, genres, dislocations, and nomadic movements that partially condition how sonic materialities are produced and perceived. These last two concepts should be read both in terms of how histories and genres become dislocated from themselves through the actions of practitioners, and as a priori principles—that is, not as aberrations that disrupt a norm, but as norms themselves.This involves two levels of abstraction: ascribing body-status to sound-complexes, and then doing the same for historical trajectories, cultural conditionings, and dislocations. Elizabeth Grosz asks us to theorise the body as “the threshold or borderline concept that hovers perilously and undecidably at the pivotal joint of binary pairs” (Grosz, Volatile 23); one such binary that is problematised is that of production and perception, which within the context of an improvising music ensemble are really two perspectives on the same phenomenon. The producers are also the perceivers, in other words. This is true of listeners too: acts of perception are themselves productive in the sense that they create contexts in which meanings emerge.In Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s language (46–54), an emerging context represents a plurality of milieux that are brought together in acts of territorialisation (and deterritorialisation; see below). The term “milieu” refers to the notion that acts of territorialisation always take place in the middle—they are always already bound up in ongoing processes of context-building. Nothing ever emerges from whole cloth; everything modifies by differential degree the contexts upon which it draws. In musical contexts, we might consider four types of milieux. External milieux are articulated by such factors as syntactic norms (what makes a piece of music sound like it belongs within a genre) and cultural conditionings. Internal milieux refer to what gives the elements of a piece of music a sense of belonging together, including formal designs, motivic structures, and melodic or harmonic singularities. An intermediary milieu involves the way gestures acquire sign-status in a context, thereby becoming meaningful. Annexed milieux are locations where new materials are absorbed and incorporated from without.Bodies ImprovisingA small example should put these points into focus. Four jazz musicians are on stage, performing a version of the well-known (in that community) song “Stella by Starlight.” External milieux here include the conventions of the genre: syntactic expectations, prescribed roles for different instruments, certain perspectives on historical performance practices. Internal milieux include the defining features of this song: its melody, harmonic progression, formal design. The performers’ affective attunements to the history of the song’s complex life so far form an intermediary milieu; note that that history is in a process of modification by the very act of the now-ongoing performance. Annexed milieux might include flights into the unexpected, fracturings of stylistic norms, or incorporations of other contexts into this one. The act of territorialisation is how these (and more) milieux are drawn together as forces in this performance, this time. Each performer is an agent, articulating sounds that represent the now-emerging object, this “Stella by Starlight.” Those articulated sounds, as musical-objects-as-bodies, conjoin with each other, and with performers, in ongoing processes of subject-formation.A double movement is at play in this characterisation. The first is strategic: thinking of musical forces as bodies in order to consider how relationships unfold between them in embodied terms—in terms of affect. But simultaneous with this is a reverse move that begins with affective forces and from there constructs those very bodies—human performing bodies as well as musical-objects-as-bodies. In other words, in order to draw lines between bodies that suggest contextual co-determinations where each exists in a continual process of engendering the other, we can turn to a consideration of the encounters between, and impingements of, affective forces through which bodies are constructed and actions are mobilised. This double movement is a paradox that requires three presuppositions. First, that bodies are indeed constituted through encounters of affective forces—this is Deleuze’s Spinozist claim (Deleuze, Spinoza 49–50). Second, that identity is performative within the context of a discourse. This is Judith Butler’s position, which I modify slightly to consider the potential of non- (or pre-) linguistic discourse, such as what can stem from drastic (active, experiential) music-syntactic spaces (Abbate). And third, that concepts like agency and passivity involve force-relations between human actors (with embodied perspectives, agencies, histories, tendencies, and diverse ranges of affective attunements), and the musical utterances expressed by and between them. Therefore, there is value in considering both actor and utterance as unfolding along the same plane, each participating in the other’s constitution.What is at stake when we conceive of sonic materiality in bodily terms in this way? The sounds produced in interactive music-improvisational settings are products of human agency. But there is a passive element to human musical-sound production. There is a degree of passivity that owes to learned behaviors, habits, and the singularities of one’s own history—this is the passive nature of Deleuze’s first synthesis of time (Deleuze, Difference 71–79), where past experiences and activities are drawn into a now-present action, partially conditioning it. Even overtly active selection in the living present is founded on this passivity, since one can only draw upon one’s own history and experience, which provides a limiting force on technique, which in turn directs expressive possibilities. In music-improvisation pedagogy, this might be phrased as “you can only play what you can hear.” Another way to say this is that passive synthesis conditions active selection.One way to overcome the foreclosure of possibility that necessarily falls out of passive synthesis is through interaction and engagement with the affective forces at play in interactive encounters. Through encounters, conditions for new possibilities emerge. The limiting concept “you can only play what you hear” is mitigated by an encounter with newly received stimuli: a heard gesture that invites further excavation of a motivic idea or that sparks a “line of flight” into a thus-far unthought-of next action. The way a newly received stimulus inspires new action is an affective encounter, and it re-conditions—it deterritorialises—the ongoing process of subject-formation. The encounter is a direct line drawn between the two types of bodies—that is, between the situated body of a producing and perceiving subject and the sonic materiality of a musical-object-as-body. While there are other kinds of encounters that unfold in the course of interactive musical performance (visual cues, for example, or tactile nearnesses), the events of heard sounds are the primary locations where bodies are constituted or subjects are formed. This is made transparent in a recent study by Schober and Spiro, where jazz musicians improvised together with no visual or tactile connection, relying solely on sound for their points of interactive contact. This suggested that jazz musicians are able to communicate effectively with only sonic data exchanged. That many improvisers play with their eyes closed, or with their backs to one another, only reinforces this.There are three aspects of sound that I wish to offer as support for a reading of musical objects as bodies. First is that sounds are temporally articulated and perceived. The materiality of sound is bound up with its temporality in ways that are more directly perceivable than many other worldly materialities. The obviousness of its temporally bound nature is one reason that music is used so often as an entry point for thinking through the ontological nature of time and process; viz. Husserl’s utilisation of musical melodies to explicate his phenomenology of internal time-consciousness, and Deleuze and Guattari’s location of acts of territorialisation in the (musical) refrain. Of course the distinction between sonic and other materialities is only a matter of degree: all matter, including bodies, is “continually subjected to transformation, to becoming, to unfolding over time” (Grosz, Time 79), but music foregrounds temporality in ways that many philosophers have found vivid and constructive.Second, musical sounds acquire meaning through their relationships with other sounds in contexts, both in the immediate context of the now-ongoing performance and in extended contexts of genre, syntax, and so on. Those relationships are with histories of past sounds, now-ongoing sounds, and future sounds expressed as results of accumulations of meaning-complexes. A gesture is played, and it acquires meaning through the ways it is “picked up” by differently attuned performers and listeners.In this sense, third, the line is blurred between action and agent; the distinction between the gesture and the execution of the gesture is effectively erased. From the performer’s perspective, how a gesture is “picked up” is made somewhat evident by the sonic materiality of the next gesture. This next gesture is a sign that represents the singularity of the performer’s affective attunement, or an expression of a stage (or, better, some now-ongoing aspect) of what Whitehead would call her “eventful” subjectivity (166–167). What is expressed is the way the performer is (actively or passively) attuning to the constellations of meanings that resonate in the event of the encounter with the musical-object-as-body, as that musical-object-as-body in turn expresses the history of past encounters that (actively or passively) engendered it. The present action as most-contracted expression of the past is Deleuze’s second synthesis of time, while the eventful way an action cuts into the future marks the time of his third synthesis (Deleuze, Difference 80–91).What is at stake in a turn to corporeality in music analysis? Nietzsche admonishes us to turn from the “facts” that the senses take in, process, and evaluate and re-begin our inquiry by questioning the body (272). This means, for music analysis, turning away from certain quantifiable aspects of sonic materiality (pitches, chords, rhythms, formal designs), towards the ways in which sounds are articulated by bodies in interactive contexts. This has been attempted from various perspectives in recent music scholarship, but again the reading of musical bodies I am pursuing foregrounds affective forces, eventful subject-formation, and performativity as identity, on the ground of improvised interaction. Improvising bodies engage in spaces where “all kinds of affects play their game” (Nietzsche 264), and they exist in constant states of change as they are impinged on by events (and as they impinge on events), those events also forming conduits to other bodies. Subjects are not just impinged on by events; they are events, processes, accumulations, and distributions of affective forces. As Grosz puts it, “the body codes the meanings projected onto it” (Volatile 18). In musical improvisation, performers are always in the process of becoming a subject, conditioned by the ways in which they are impinged upon by affective forces and the creative ways those impingements are taken up.Musical-objects-as-bodies, likewise, unfold as ongoing processes, their identity emerging through accumulations and distributions of relationships with other musical-objects-as-bodies. A musical gesture acquires meaning through the emerging context in which it participates, just as a performer acquires a sense of identity through acts of production and perception in, and that help create, a context. Moreover, an affective consideration of performer (as corporeal body) and musical gesture (as sonic utterance) involves “the torsion of one into the other, the passage, vector, or uncontrollable drift of the inside into the outside and the outside into the inside” (Grosz, Volatile xii). Grosz is describing the essential irreducibility of body and mind, but her language is compelling for thinking through the relationships between bodies and musical-objects-as-bodies as an ongoing co-constitutive, boundary-dissolving process.Bodies and/as AffectAffect begins in the in-between, in the productive space of the event in which bodies encounter one another. This is not, however, a pure in-between. Bodies are constructed by the ways in which affective forces impinge on them, but affective forces also stem from bodies. Bodies affect and are affected by one another, as Deleuze is fond of repeating (Spinoza 49). No affect, no bodies, but also no bodies, no affect. What does this mean? The in-between does not subvert corporeality, perspective, intention, or subjectivity, nor is there a hierarchical relation between them (that is, bodies do not emerge because of affective relations, nor the reverse). If we think of bodies as emergent subjectivities—as processes of subject-formation irreducibly connected to the ecological conditions in which they are acting—then the ways in which their identities come to be constructed are intricately connected to the performative utterances they are making and the variable ways they are taking up those utterances and folding them into their emergent processes of becoming. Here, the utterer–utterance distinction begins to break down. Judith Butler (24-25) argues that the ways in which bodies are defined emerge from performative acts, and that every such act constitutes a political action that contributes to the constitution of identity. As Butler writes, “that the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality” (136). Gender is a status that emerges through one’s actions in contexts—we perform gender, and by performing it we undergo a process of inscribing it on ourselves. This is one of many key points where music scholarship can learn from feminist theory. Like gender, musical identity is performed—we inscribe upon ourselves an emergent musical subjectivity through acts of performance and perception (which is itself a performance too, as an interaction with a musical-object-as-body).Performative acts, therefore, are not simply enacted by bodies; if identity is performed, then the acts themselves are what define the very bodies performing them. Again, the hierarchy breaks down: rather than beginning with a body (a subject) that acts, actions comprise what a body is, as an emergent subject, as the product of its actions. For Deleuze and Guattari, performed acts involve masks; masks do not disguise expression or identity but rather are expressions through which identity is drawn. “The mask does not hide the face, it is the face” (115); “the mask assures the […] construction of the face, the facialization of the head and the body: the mask is now the face itself, the abstraction or operation of the face. […] Never does the face assume a prior signifier or subject” (Deleuze and Guattari 181). In Butler’s terms, the performance does not presuppose the performer; the performer is the performance.Affect corresponds, then, not only to the pre-linguistic (Deleuze’s “dark precursor;” Difference 119–121) but also to the super-discursive: to the multiple embedded meaning-trajectories implicit in any discursive utterance; to the creative ways in which those meaning-trajectories can be taken up variably within the performance space; to the micro-political implications of both utterance and taking-up. Bergson writes: “[m]y body is […] in the aggregate of the material world […] receiving and giving back movement, with, perhaps, this difference only, that my body appears to choose, within certain limits, the manner in which it shall restore what it receives” (Bergson 4–5; also cited in Grosz, The Nick 165). This is exactly Grossberg’s “context,” by the way. The “manner in which it shall restore what it receives” refers, in the case of musically performing (corporeal) bodies, to how a gesture is taken up in a next performed action. In the case of musical-objects-as-bodies, conversely, it refers to how a next gesture contributes to the ongoing sense of meaning-accumulation in response to the ongoing flux of musical-objects-as-bodies within which it locates.In music-improvisational spaces, not only does the utterer–utterance, agent–action, or performer–­performed gesture distinction break down, but the distinction between performed and received gesture likewise blurs, in two senses: because of the nature of eventful subject-formation (whereby a musical gesture’s meaning is being drawn within its emergent context), and because the events of individual musical gestures are subsumed into larger composite events. This problematises the utterer-utterance breakdown by blurring the threshold between individual performed events, inviting a consideration of a paradoxical, but productive, excluded middle where musical-objects-as-bodies are both expressions of corporeal performative acts (engendering contextual subject-formations) and constituent elements of an emergent musical subjectivity (“the performance.” See Massumi (Parables) for more on productive engagements with the excluded middle). While beyond the scope of this paper, we might consider the radical co-constitution of different kinds of bodies in this way as a system, following Gregory Seigworth’s description: “the transitive effect undergone by a body (human or otherwise) in a system—a mobile and open system—composed of the various, innumerable forces of existing and the relations between those forces” (161).Performing Bodies and the Emergent WorkThis, ultimately, is my thesis: how to think about musical performance beginning with performing bodies rather than with a reified notion of musical materiality. Performing bodies are situated within the emerging context of improvised, interactive music-making. Musical utterances are enacted by those bodies, which are also taking up the utterances made by other bodies—as musical-objects-as-bodies. The context that is being built through this process of affective exchange is the performance (the this performance, this time of the jazz example above). Christopher Hasty writes,to perform, from per-formare is to really, actually (fully) form or shape. The ‘-ance’ of performance connotes action and process. The thing performed apart from or outside the forming is problematic. Is it a fixed, ideal form above or beyond (transcending), or beneath or behind (founding) the actual doing, a thing that can be known quite apart from the situated knowing itself? (200)The work–performance dichotomy that animates Hasty’s question (as well as those of Abbate, Goehr, and others) is not my question, since I suggest that using improvised music as an entry point into musical inquiry makes a turn to performance axiomatic. The improvised work is necessarily an active, emergent process, its particularities, boundaries, and meanings being drawn through its performed actions. Perhaps the question that underlies my query is, instead, how do we think about the processes of subject-formation that unfold through interactive music-making; how are performing and performed bodies being inscribed through what kinds of relationships with musical materialities?Is there, in the end, simply a musical body that subsumes both utterer and utterance, both subjectively-forming body and material sonic gesture? I do not wish to go quite that far, but I do wish to continue to problematise where one body stops and the next begins. To paraphrase one of themes of this special issue, where do the boundaries, thresholds, and intersections of musical bodies lie? Deleuze, following Spinoza, tells us frequently that we do not yet know what a body is capable of. This must be at least in part because we know not what a body is at any given point—the body, like the subject which we might now think of as no more than a sign, is in a process of becoming; there is no is (ontology), there is only and (conjunction). And there is no body, there are only bodies, for a body only exists in a complex and emergent ecological relationship with other bodies (see Grosz, Volatile 19). To conceive of porous thresholds between performing bodies and musical-objects-as-bodies is to foreground the performative aspects of improvised music-making and to break down the hierarchy, and possibly even the distinction, between agent, action, and the content of that action. Bodies of all types inscribe one another in ongoing acts of meaning-constitution: this is the properly drastic starting place for inquiry into the nature of musical process.ReferencesAbbate, Carolyn. “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry 30.3 (2004): 505–536.Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1919.Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.Cumming, Naomi. The Sonic Self: Musical Subjectivity and Signification. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2000.Cusick, Suzanne. “Feminist Theory, Music Theory, and the Mind/Body Problem.” Perspectives of New Music 32.1 (1994): 8–27.———. “On Musical Performances of Gender and Sex.” Audible Traces: Gender, Identity, and Music. Eds. Elaine Barkin and Lydia Hamessley. Zurich: Carciofolo Verlagshaus, 1999. 25–48.Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley. Eugene, OR: City Lights Books, 1988.———. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.Goehr, Lydia. The Quest for Voice: On Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.Grossberg, Lawrence. Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham: Duke UP, 2010.Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994.———. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Durham: Duke UP, 2004.———. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham: Duke UP, 2005.Guck, Marion. “A Woman’s (Theoretical) Work.” Perspectives of New Music 32.1 (1994): 28–43.Hasty, Christopher. “If Music Is Ongoing Experience, What Might Music Theory Be? A Suggestion from the Drastic.” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie (Sonderausgabe 2010): 197–216.Husserl, Edmund. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time. Trans. John Barnett Brough. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991.Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2002.———. Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurent Arts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011.Maus, Fred Everett. “Musical Performance as Analytic Communication.” Performance and Authenticity in the Arts. Eds. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 129–153.McClary, Susan. “Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert’s Music.” Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology. Ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas. New York: Routledge, 2006. 205–234.Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and Reginald John Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.Schober, Michael, and Neta Spiro. “Jazz Improvisers’ Shared Understanding: A Case Study.” Frontiers in Psychology 5 (2014). 10 Mar. 2016 <http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00808/abstract>.Seigworth, Gregory. “From Affection to Soul.” Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts. Ed. Charles J. Stivale. Montreal: McGill–Queens UP, 2005. 159–169.Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. New York: Free Press, 1978.
17

Ryan, Robin Ann. "Forest as Place in the Album "Canopy": Culturalising Nature or Naturalising Culture?" M/C Journal 19, no. 3 (June 22, 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1096.

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Every act of art is able to reveal, balance and revive the relations between a territory and its inhabitants (François Davin, Southern Forest Sculpture Walk Catalogue)Introducing the Understory Art in Nature TrailIn February 2015, a colossal wildfire destroyed 98,300 hectares of farm and bushland surrounding the town of Northcliffe, located 365 km south of Perth, Western Australia (WA). As the largest fire in the recorded history of the southwest region (Southern Forest Arts, After the Burn 8), the disaster attracted national attention however the extraordinary contribution of local knowledge in saving a town considered by authorities to be “undefendable” (Kennedy) is yet to be widely appreciated. In accounting for a creative scene that survived the conflagration, this case study sees culture mobilised as a socioeconomic resource for conservation and the healing of community spirit.Northcliffe (population 850) sits on a coastal plain that hosts majestic old-growth forest and lush bushland. In 2006, Southern Forest Arts (SFA) dedicated a Southern Forest Sculpture Walk for creative professionals to develop artworks along a 1.2 km walk trail through pristine native forest. It was re-branded “Understory—Art in Nature” in 2009; then “Understory Art in Nature Trail” in 2015, the understory vegetation layer beneath the canopy being symbolic of Northcliffe’s deeply layered caché of memories, including “the awe, love, fear, and even the hatred that these trees have provoked among the settlers” (Davin in SFA Catalogue). In the words of the SFA Trailguide, “Every place (no matter how small) has ‘understories’—secrets, songs, dreams—that help us connect with the spirit of place.”In the view of forest arts ecologist Kumi Kato, “It is a sense of place that underlies the commitment to a place’s conservation by its community, broadly embracing those who identify with the place for various reasons, both geographical and conceptual” (149). In bioregional terms such communities form a terrain of consciousness (Berg and Dasmann 218), extending responsibility for conservation across cultures, time and space (Kato 150). A sustainable thematic of place must also include livelihood as the third party between culture and nature that establishes the relationship between them (Giblett 240). With these concepts in mind I gauge creative impact on forest as place, and, in turn, (altered) forest’s impact on people. My abstraction of physical place is inclusive of humankind moving in dialogic engagement with forest. A mapping of Understory’s creative activities sheds light on how artists express physical environments in situated creative practices, clusters, and networks. These, it is argued, constitute unique types of community operating within (and beyond) a foundational scene of inspiration and mystification that is metaphorically “rising from the ashes.” In transcending disconnectedness between humankind and landscape, Understory may be understood to both culturalise nature (as an aesthetic system), and naturalise culture (as an ecologically modelled system), to build on a trope introduced by Feld (199). Arguably when the bush is cultured in this way it attracts consumers who may otherwise disconnect from nature.The trail (henceforth Understory) broaches the histories of human relations with Northcliffe’s natural systems of place. Sub-groups of the Noongar nation have inhabited the southwest for an estimated 50,000 years and their association with the Northcliffe region extends back at least 6,000 years (SFA Catalogue; see also Crawford and Crawford). An indigenous sense of the spirit of forest is manifest in Understory sculpture, literature, and—for the purpose of this article—the compilation CD Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests (henceforth Canopy, Figure 1).As a cultural and environmental construction of place, Canopy sustains the land with acts of seeing, listening to, and interpreting nature; of remembering indigenous people in the forest; and of recalling the hardships of the early settlers. I acknowledge SFA coordinator and Understory custodian Fiona Sinclair for authorising this investigation; Peter Hill for conservation conversations; Robyn Johnston for her Canopy CD sleeve notes; Della Rae Morrison for permissions; and David Pye for discussions. Figure 1. Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests (CD, 2006). Cover image by Raku Pitt, 2002. Courtesy Southern Forest Arts, Northcliffe, WA.Forest Ecology, Emotion, and ActionEstablished in 1924, Northcliffe’s ill-founded Group Settlement Scheme resulted in frontier hardship and heartbreak, and deforestation of the southwest region for little economic return. An historic forest controversy (1992-2001) attracted media to Northcliffe when protesters attempting to disrupt logging chained themselves to tree trunks and suspended themselves from branches. The signing of the Western Australian Regional Forest Agreement in 1999 was followed, in 2001, by deregulation of the dairy industry and a sharp decline in area population.Moved by the gravity of this situation, Fiona Sinclair won her pitch to the Manjimup Council for a sound alternative industry for Northcliffe with projections of jobs: a forest where artists could work collectively and sustainably to reveal the beauty of natural dimensions. A 12-acre pocket of allocated Crown Land adjacent to the town was leased as an A-Class Reserve vested for Education and Recreation, for which SFA secured unified community ownership and grants. Conservation protocols stipulated that no biomass could be removed from the forest and that predominantly raw, natural materials were to be used (F. Sinclair and P. Hill, personal interview, 26 Sep. 2014). With forest as prescribed image (wider than the bounded chunk of earth), Sinclair invited the artists to consider the themes of spirituality, creativity, history, dichotomy, and sensory as a basis for work that was to be “fresh, intimate, and grounded in place.” Her brief encouraged artists to work with humanity and imagination to counteract residual community divisiveness and resentment. Sinclair describes this form of implicit environmentalism as an “around the back” approach that avoids lapsing into political commentary or judgement: “The trail is a love letter from those of us who live here to our visitors, to connect with grace” (F. Sinclair, telephone interview, 6 Apr. 2014). Renewing community connections to local place is essential if our lives and societies are to become more sustainable (Pedelty 128). To define Northcliffe’s new community phase, artists respected differing associations between people and forest. A structure on a karri tree by Indigenous artist Norma MacDonald presents an Aboriginal man standing tall and proud on a rock to become one with the tree and the forest: as it was for thousands of years before European settlement (MacDonald in SFA Catalogue). As Feld observes, “It is the stabilizing persistence of place as a container of experiences that contributes so powerfully to its intrinsic memorability” (201).Adhering to the philosophy that nature should not be used or abused for the sake of art, the works resonate with the biorhythms of the forest, e.g. functional seats and shelters and a cascading retainer that directs rainwater back to the resident fauna. Some sculptures function as receivers for picking up wavelengths of ancient forest. Forest Folk lurk around the understory, while mysterious stone art represents a life-shaping force of planet history. To represent the reality of bushfire, Natalie Williamson’s sculpture wraps itself around a burnt-out stump. The work plays with scale as small native sundew flowers are enlarged and a subtle beauty, easily overlooked, becomes apparent (Figure 2). The sculptor hopes that “spiders will spin their webs about it, incorporating it into the landscape” (SFA Catalogue).Figure 2. Sundew. Sculpture by Natalie Williamson, 2006. Understory Art in Nature Trail, Northcliffe, WA. Image by the author, 2014.Memory is naturally place-oriented or at least place-supported (Feld 201). Topaesthesia (sense of place) denotes movement that connects our biography with our route. This is resonant for the experience of regional character, including the tactile, olfactory, gustatory, visual, and auditory qualities of a place (Ryan 307). By walking, we are in a dialogue with the environment; both literally and figuratively, we re-situate ourselves into our story (Schine 100). For example, during a summer exploration of the trail (5 Jan. 2014), I intuited a personal attachment based on my grandfather’s small bush home being razed by fire, and his struggle to support seven children.Understory’s survival depends on vigilant controlled (cool) burns around its perimeter (Figure 3), organised by volunteer Peter Hill. These burns also hone the forest. On 27 Sept. 2014, the charred vegetation spoke a spring language of opportunity for nature to reassert itself as seedpods burst and continue the cycle; while an autumn walk (17 Mar. 2016) yielded a fresh view of forest colour, patterning, light, shade, and sound.Figure 3. Understory Art in Nature Trail. Map Created by Fiona Sinclair for Southern Forest Sculpture Walk Catalogue (2006). Courtesy Southern Forest Arts, Northcliffe, WA.Understory and the Melody of CanopyForest resilience is celebrated in five MP3 audio tours produced for visitors to dialogue with the trail in sensory contexts of music, poetry, sculptures and stories that name or interpret the setting. The trail starts in heathland and includes three creek crossings. A zone of acacias gives way to stands of the southwest signature trees karri (Eucalyptus diversicolor), jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata), and marri (Corymbia calophylla). Following a sheoak grove, a riverine environment re-enters heathland. Birds, insects, mammals, and reptiles reside around and between the sculptures, rendering the earth-embedded art a fusion of human and natural orders (concept after Relph 141). On Audio Tour 3, Songs for the Southern Forests, the musician-composers reflect on their regionally focused items, each having been birthed according to a personal musical concept (the manner in which an individual artist holds the totality of a composition in cultural context). Arguably the music in question, its composers, performers, audiences, and settings, all have a role to play in defining the processes and effects of forest arts ecology. Local musician Ann Rice billeted a cluster of musicians (mostly from Perth) at her Windy Harbour shack. The energy of the production experience was palpable as all participated in on-site forest workshops, and supported each other’s items as a musical collective (A. Rice, telephone interview, 2 Oct. 2014). Collaborating under producer Lee Buddle’s direction, they orchestrated rich timbres (tone colours) to evoke different musical atmospheres (Table 1). Composer/Performer Title of TrackInstrumentation1. Ann RiceMy Placevocals/guitars/accordion 2. David PyeCicadan Rhythmsangklung/violin/cello/woodblocks/temple blocks/clarinet/tapes 3. Mel RobinsonSheltervocal/cello/double bass 4. DjivaNgank Boodjakvocals/acoustic, electric and slide guitars/drums/percussion 5. Cathie TraversLamentaccordion/vocals/guitar/piano/violin/drums/programming 6. Brendon Humphries and Kevin SmithWhen the Wind First Blewvocals/guitars/dobro/drums/piano/percussion 7. Libby HammerThe Gladevocal/guitar/soprano sax/cello/double bass/drums 8. Pete and Dave JeavonsSanctuaryguitars/percussion/talking drum/cowbell/soprano sax 9. Tomás FordWhite Hazevocal/programming/guitar 10. David HyamsAwakening /Shaking the Tree /When the Light Comes guitar/mandolin/dobro/bodhran/rainstick/cello/accordion/flute 11. Bernard CarneyThe Destiny Waltzvocal/guitar/accordion/drums/recording of The Destiny Waltz 12. Joel BarkerSomething for Everyonevocal/guitars/percussion Table 1. Music Composed for Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests.Source: CD sleeve and http://www.understory.com.au/art.php. Composing out of their own strengths, the musicians transformed the geographic region into a living myth. As Pedelty has observed of similar musicians, “their sounds resonate because they so profoundly reflect our living sense of place” (83-84). The remainder of this essay evidences the capacity of indigenous song, art music, electronica, folk, and jazz-blues to celebrate, historicise, or re-imagine place. Firstly, two items represent the phenomenological approach of site-specific sensitivity to acoustic, biological, and cultural presence/loss, including the materiality of forest as a living process.“Singing Up the Land”In Aboriginal Australia “there is no place that has not been imaginatively grasped through song, dance and design, no place where traditional owners cannot see the imprint of sacred creation” (Rose 18). Canopy’s part-Noongar language song thus repositions the ancient Murrum-Noongar people within their life-sustaining natural habitat and spiritual landscape.Noongar Yorga woman Della Rae Morrison of the Bibbulmun and Wilman nations co-founded The Western Australian Nuclear Free Alliance to campaign against the uranium mining industry threatening Ngank Boodjak (her country, “Mother Earth”) (D.R. Morrison, e-mail, 15 July 2014). In 2004, Morrison formed the duo Djiva (meaning seed power or life force) with Jessie Lloyd, a Murri woman of the Guugu Yimidhirr Nation from North Queensland. After discerning the fundamental qualities of the Understory site, Djiva created the song Ngank Boodjak: “This was inspired by walking the trail […] feeling the energy of the land and the beautiful trees and hearing the birds. When I find a spot that I love, I try to feel out the lay-lines, which feel like vortexes of energy coming out of the ground; it’s pretty amazing” (Morrison in SFA Canopy sleeve) Stanza 1 points to the possibilities of being more fully “in country”:Ssh!Ni dabarkarn kooliny, ngank boodja kookoorninyListen, walk slowly, beautiful Mother EarthThe inclusion of indigenous language powerfully implements an indigenous interpretation of forest: “My elders believe that when we leave this life from our physical bodies that our spirit is earthbound and is living in the rocks or the trees and if you listen carefully you might hear their voices and maybe you will get some answers to your questions” (Morrison in SFA Catalogue).Cicadan Rhythms, by composer David Pye, echoes forest as a lively “more-than-human” world. Pye took his cue from the ambient pulsing of male cicadas communicating in plenum (full assembly) by means of airborne sound. The species were sounding together in tempo with individual rhythm patterns that interlocked to create one fantastic rhythm (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Composer David Pye). The cicada chorus (the loudest known lovesong in the insect world) is the unique summer soundmark (term coined by Truax Handbook, Website) of the southern forests. Pye chased various cicadas through Understory until he was able to notate the rhythms of some individuals in a patch of low-lying scrub.To simulate cicada clicking, the composer set pointillist patterns for Indonesian anklung (joint bamboo tubes suspended within a frame to produce notes when the frame is shaken or tapped). Using instruments made of wood to enhance the rich forest imagery, Pye created all parts using sampled instrumental sounds placed against layers of pre-recorded ambient sounds (D. Pye, telephone interview, 3 Sept. 2014). He takes the listener through a “geographical linear representation” of the trail: “I walked around it with a stopwatch and noted how long it took to get through each section of the forest, and that became the musical timing of the various parts of the work” (Pye in SFA Canopy sleeve). That Understory is a place where reciprocity between nature and culture thrives is, likewise, evident in the remaining tracks.Musicalising Forest History and EnvironmentThree tracks distinguish Canopy as an integrative site for memory. Bernard Carney’s waltz honours the Group Settlers who battled insurmountable terrain without any idea of their destiny, men who, having migrated with a promise of owning their own dairy farms, had to clear trees bare-handedly and build furniture from kerosene tins and gelignite cases. Carney illuminates the culture of Saturday night dancing in the schoolroom to popular tunes like The Destiny Waltz (performed on the Titanic in 1912). His original song fades to strains of the Victor Military Band (1914), to “pay tribute to the era where the inspiration of the song came from” (Carney in SFA Canopy sleeve). Likewise Cathie Travers’s Lament is an evocation of remote settler history that creates a “feeling of being in another location, other timezone, almost like an endless loop” (Travers in SFA Canopy sleeve).An instrumental medley by David Hyams opens with Awakening: the morning sun streaming through tall trees, and the nostalgic sound of an accordion waltz. Shaking the Tree, an Irish jig, recalls humankind’s struggle with forest and the forces of nature. A final title, When the Light Comes, defers to the saying by conservationist John Muir that “The wrongs done to trees, wrongs of every sort, are done in the darkness of ignorance and unbelief, for when the light comes the heart of the people is always right” (quoted by Hyams in SFA Canopy sleeve). Local musician Joel Barker wrote Something for Everyone to personify the old-growth karri as a king with a crown, with “wisdom in his bones.”Kevin Smith’s father was born in Northcliffe in 1924. He and Brendon Humphries fantasise the untouchability of a maiden (pre-human) moment in a forest in their song, When the Wind First Blew. In Libby Hammer’s The Glade (a lover’s lament), instrumental timbres project their own affective languages. The jazz singer intended the accompanying double bass to speak resonantly of old-growth forest; the cello to express suppleness and renewal; a soprano saxophone to impersonate a bird; and the drums to imitate the insect community’s polyrhythmic undercurrent (after Hammer in SFA Canopy sleeve).A hybrid aural environment of synthetic and natural forest sounds contrasts collision with harmony in Sanctuary. The Jeavons Brothers sampled rustling wind on nearby Mt Chudalup to absorb into the track’s opening, and crafted a snare groove for the quirky eco-jazz/trip-hop by banging logs together, and banging rocks against logs. This imaginative use of percussive found objects enhanced their portrayal of forest as “a living, breathing entity.”In dealing with recent history in My Place, Ann Rice cameos a happy childhood growing up on a southwest farm, “damming creeks, climbing trees, breaking bones and skinning knees.” The rich string harmonies of Mel Robinson’s Shelter sculpt the shifting environment of a brewing storm, while White Haze by Tomás Ford describes a smoky controlled burn as “a kind of metaphor for the beautiful mystical healing nature of Northcliffe”: Someone’s burning off the scrubSomeone’s making sure it’s safeSomeone’s whiting out the fearSomeone’s letting me breathe clearAs Sinclair illuminates in a post-fire interview with Sharon Kennedy (Website):When your map, your personal map of life involves a place, and then you think that that place might be gone…” Fiona doesn't finish the sentence. “We all had to face the fact that our little place might disappear." Ultimately, only one house was lost. Pasture and fences, sheds and forest are gone. Yet, says Fiona, “We still have our town. As part of SFA’s ongoing commission, forest rhythm workshops explore different sound properties of potential materials for installing sound sculptures mimicking the surrounding flora and fauna. In 2015, SFA mounted After the Burn (a touring photographic exhibition) and Out of the Ashes (paintings and woodwork featuring ash, charcoal, and resin) (SFA, After the Burn 116). The forthcoming community project Rising From the Ashes will commemorate the fire and allow residents to connect and create as they heal and move forward—ten years on from the foundation of Understory.ConclusionThe Understory Art in Nature Trail stimulates curiosity. It clearly illustrates links between place-based social, economic and material conditions and creative practices and products within a forest that has both given shelter and “done people in.” The trail is an experimental field, a transformative locus in which dedicated physical space frees artists to culturalise forest through varied aesthetic modalities. Conversely, forest possesses agency for naturalising art as a symbol of place. Djiva’s song Ngank Boodjak “sings up the land” to revitalise the timelessness of prior occupation, while David Pye’s Cicadan Rhythms foregrounds the seasonal cycle of entomological music.In drawing out the richness and significance of place, the ecologically inspired album Canopy suggests that the community identity of a forested place may be informed by cultural, economic, geographical, and historical factors as well as endemic flora and fauna. Finally, the musical representation of place is not contingent upon blatant forms of environmentalism. The portrayals of Northcliffe respectfully associate Western Australian people and forests, yet as a place, the town has become an enduring icon for the plight of the Universal Old-growth Forest in all its natural glory, diverse human uses, and (real or perceived) abuses.ReferencesAustralian Broadcasting Commission. “Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests.” Into the Music. Prod. Robyn Johnston. Radio National, 5 May 2007. 12 Aug. 2014 <http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/intothemusic/canopy-songs-for-the-southern-forests/3396338>.———. “Composer David Pye.” Interview with Andrew Ford. The Music Show, Radio National, 12 Sep. 2009. 30 Jan. 2015 <http://canadapodcasts.ca/podcasts/MusicShowThe/1225021>.Berg, Peter, and Raymond Dasmann. “Reinhabiting California.” Reinhabiting a Separate Country: A Bioregional Anthology of Northern California. Ed. Peter Berg. San Francisco: Planet Drum, 1978. 217-20.Crawford, Patricia, and Ian Crawford. Contested Country: A History of the Northcliffe Area, Western Australia. Perth: UWA P, 2003.Feld, Steven. 2001. “Lift-Up-Over Sounding.” The Book of Music and Nature: An Anthology of Sounds, Words, Thoughts. Ed. David Rothenberg and Marta Ulvaeus. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2001. 193-206.Giblett, Rod. People and Places of Nature and Culture. Bristol: Intellect, 2011.Kato, Kumi. “Addressing Global Responsibility for Conservation through Cross-Cultural Collaboration: Kodama Forest, a Forest of Tree Spirits.” The Environmentalist 28.2 (2008): 148-54. 15 Apr. 2014 <http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10669-007-9051-6#page-1>.Kennedy, Sharon. “Local Knowledge Builds Vital Support Networks in Emergencies.” ABC South West WA, 10 Mar. 2015. 26 Mar. 2015 <http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2015/03/09/4193981.htm?site=southwestwa>.Morrison, Della Rae. E-mail. 15 July 2014.Pedelty, Mark. Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment. Philadelphia, PA: Temple UP, 2012.Pye, David. Telephone interview. 3 Sep. 2014.Relph, Edward. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion, 1976.Rice, Ann. Telephone interview. 2 Oct. 2014.Rose, Deborah Bird. Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness. Australian Heritage Commission, 1996.Ryan, John C. Green Sense: The Aesthetics of Plants, Place and Language. Oxford: Trueheart Academic, 2012.Schine, Jennifer. “Movement, Memory and the Senses in Soundscape Studies.” Canadian Acoustics: Journal of the Canadian Acoustical Association 38.3 (2010): 100-01. 12 Apr. 2016 <http://jcaa.caa-aca.ca/index.php/jcaa/article/view/2264>.Sinclair, Fiona. Telephone interview. 6 Apr. 2014.Sinclair, Fiona, and Peter Hill. Personal Interview. 26 Sep. 2014.Southern Forest Arts. Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests. CD coordinated by Fiona Sinclair. Recorded and produced by Lee Buddle. Sleeve notes by Robyn Johnston. West Perth: Sound Mine Studios, 2006.———. Southern Forest Sculpture Walk Catalogue. Northcliffe, WA, 2006. Unpaginated booklet.———. Understory—Art in Nature. 2009. 12 Apr. 2016 <http://www.understory.com.au/>.———. Trailguide. Understory. Presented by Southern Forest Arts, n.d.———. After the Burn: Stories, Poems and Photos Shared by the Local Community in Response to the 2015 Northcliffe and Windy Harbour Bushfire. 2nd ed. Ed. Fiona Sinclair. Northcliffe, WA., 2016.Truax, Barry, ed. Handbook for Acoustic Ecology. 2nd ed. Cambridge Street Publishing, 1999. 10 Apr. 2016 <http://www.sfu.ca/sonic-studio/handbook/Soundmark.html>.
18

Fuller, Glen. "Punch-Drunk Love." M/C Journal 10, no. 3 (June 1, 2007). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2660.

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For once I want to be the car crash, Not always just the traffic jam. Hit me hard enough to wake me, And lead me wild to your dark roads. (Snow Patrol: “Headlights on Dark Roads”, Eyes Open, 2006) I didn’t know about the online dating site rsvp.com.au until a woman who I was dating at the time showed me her online profile. Apparently ‘everyone does rsvp’. Well, ‘everyone’ except me. (Before things ended I never did ask her why she listed herself as ‘single’ on her profile…) Forming relationships in our era of post-institutional modes of sociality is problematic. Some probably find such ‘romantically’ orientated ‘meet up’ sites to be a more efficient option for sampling what is available. Perhaps others want some loving on the side. In some ways these sites transform romance into the online equivalent of the logistics dock at your local shopping centre. ‘Just-in-time’ relationships rely less on social support structures of traditional institutions such as the family, workplace, and so on, including ‘love’ itself, and more on a hit and miss style of dating, organised like a series of car crashes and perhaps even commodified through an eBay-style online catalogue (see Crawford 83-88). Instead of image-commodities there are image-people and the spectacle of post-romance romance as a debauched demolition derby. Is romance still possible if it is no longer the naïve and fatalistic realisation of complementary souls? I watched Paul Thomas Anderson’s third film Punch-Drunk Love with the above rsvp.com.au woman. She interpreted it in a completely different manner to me. I shall argue (as I did with her) that the film captures some sense of romance in a post-romance world. The film was billed as a comedy/romance or comedy/drama, but I did not laugh either with or at the film. The story covers the trials of two people ‘falling in love’. Lena Leonard (Emma Watson) orchestrates an encounter with Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) after seeing a picture of him with his seven sisters. The trajectory of the romance is defined less by the meeting of two people, than the violence of contingency and of the world arrayed by the event of love. Contingency is central to complexity theory. Contingency is not pure chance, rather it exists as part of the processual material time of the event that defines events or a series of events as problematic (Deleuze, The Logic of Sense 52-53). To problematise events and recognise the contingencies they inculcate is to refuse the tendency to colonise the future through actuarial practices, such as ‘risk management’ and insurance or the probabilistic ‘Perfect Match’ success of internet dating sites (mirroring ‘Dexter’ from the 1980s dating television game show). Therefore, through Punch-Drunk Love I shall problematise the event of love so as to resuscitate the contingencies of post-romance romance. It is not surprising Punch-Drunk Love opens with a car crash for the film takes romance on a veritable post-Crash detour. Crash – novel and film – serves as an exploration of surfaces and desire in a world at the intersection of the accident. Jean Baudrillard, in his infamous essay on Crash (novel), dwells on the repositioning of the accident: [It] is no longer at the margin, it is at the heart. It is no longer the exception to a triumphal rationality, it has become the Rule, it has devoured the Rule. … Everything is reversed. It is the Accident that gives form to life, it is the Accident, the insane, that is the sex of life. (113) After the SUV rolls over in Punch-Drunk Love’s opening scene, a taxi van pauses long enough for an occupant to drop off a harmonium. A harmonium is a cross between an organ and a piano, but much smaller than both. It is a harmony machine. It breathes and wheezes to gather potentiality consonant sound waves of heterogeneous frequencies to produce a unique musicality of multiplicative resonance. No reason is given for the harmonium in the workings of the film’s plot. Another accident without any explanation, like the SUV crash, but this time it is an accidental harmony-machine. The SUV accident is a disorganising eruption of excess force, while the accidental harmony-machine is a synthesising organisation of force. One produces abolition, while the other produces a multiplicative affirmation. These are two tendencies that follow two different relations to the heterogeneous materialism of contingency. Punch-Drunk Love captures the contingency at the heart of post-romance romance. Instead of the layers of expectation habituated into institutional engagements of two subjects meeting, there is the accident of the event of love within which various parties are arrayed with various affects and desires. I shall follow Alain Badiou’s definition of the event of love, but only to the point where I shall shift the perspective from love to romance. Badiou defines love by initially offering a series of negative definitions. Firstly, love is not a fusional concept, the ‘two’ that is ‘one’. That is because, as Badiou writes, “an ecstatic One can only be supposed beyond the Two as a suppression of the multiple” (“What Is Love?” 38). Secondly, nor is love the “prostration of the Same on the alter of the Other.” Badiou argues that it is not an experience of the Other, but an “experience of the world [i.e. multiple], or of the situation, under the post-evental condition that there were Two” (“What Is Love?” 39). Lastly, the rejection of the ‘superstructural’ or illusory conception of love, that is, to the base of desire and sexual jealously (Badiou, “What Is Love?” 39). For Badiou love is the production of truth. The truth is that the Two, and not only the One, are at work in the situation. However, from the perspective of romance, there is no post-evental truth procedure for love as such. In Deleuze’s terminology, from the perspective of post-romance the Two serves an important role as the ‘quasi-cause’ of love (The Logic of Sense 33), or for Badiou it is the “noemenal possibility [virtualite]” (“What Is Love?” 51). The event of the Two, and, therefore, of love, is immanent to itself. However, this does not capture the romantic functioning of love swept up in the quasi-cause of the Two. Romance is the differential repetition of the event of love to-come and thus the repetition of the intrinsic irreducible wonder at the heart of the event. The wonder at love’s heart is the excess of potentiality, the excitement, the multiplicity, the stultifying surprise. To resuscitate the functioning of love is to disagree with Badiou’s axiom that there is an absolute disjunction between the (nominalist) Two. The Two do actually share a common dimension and that is the radical contingency at the heart of love. Love is not as a teleological destiny of the eternal quasi-cause, but the fantastic impossibility of its contingent evental site. From Badiou’s line of argument, romance is precisely the passage of this “aleatory enquiry” (“What is Love?” 45), of “the world from the point of view of the Two, and not an enquiry of each term of the Two about the other” (49). Romance is the insinuation of desire into this dynamic of enquiry. Therefore, the functioning of romance is to produce a virtual architecture of wonder hewn from seeming impossibility of contingency. It is not the contingency in itself that is impossible (the ‘chaosmos’ is a manifold of wonderless-contingency), but that contingency might be repeated as part of a material practice that produces love as an effect of differentiating wonder. Or, again, not that the encounter of love has happened, but that precisely it might happen again and again. Romance is the material and embodied practice of producing wonder. The materiality of romance needs to be properly outlined and to do this I turn to another of Badiou’s texts and the film itself. To explicate the materialism of romance is to begin outlining the problematic of romance where the material force of Lena and Barry’s harmony resonates in the virtuosic co-production of new potentialities. The practice of romance is evidenced in the scene where Lena and Barry are in Hawaii and Lena is speaking to Barry’s sister while Barry is watching her. A sense of wonder is produced not in the other person but of the world as multiplicity produced free from the burden of Barry’s sister, hence altering the material conditions of the differential repetition of contingency. The materialism in effect here is, to borrow from Michel Foucault, an ‘incorporeal materialism’ (169), and pertains to the virtual evental dimension of love. In his Handbook of Inaesthetics, Badiou sets up dance and theatre as metaphors for thought. “The essence of dance,” writes Badiou, “is virtual, rather than actual movement” (Handbook of Inaesthetics 61), while theatre is an “assemblage” (72) which in part is “the circulation of desire between the sexes” (71). If romance is the deliberate care for the event of love and its (im)possible contingency, then the dance of love requires the theatre of romance. To include music with dance is to malign Badiou’s conception of dance by polluting it with some elements of what he calls ‘theatre’. To return to the Hawaii scene, Barry is arrayed as an example of what Badiou calls the ‘public’ of theatre because he is watching Lena lie to his sister about his whereabouts, and therefore completes the ‘idea’ of theatre-romance as a constituent element (Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics 74). There is an incorporeal (virtual) movement here of pure love in the theatre of romance that repotentialises the conditions of the event of love by producing a repeated and yet different contingency of the world. Wonder triggered by a lie manifest of a truth to-come. According to Badiou, the history of dance is “governed by the perpetual renewal of the relation between vertigo and exactitude. What will remain virtual, what will be actualized, and precisely how is the restraint going to free the infinite?” (Handbook of Inaesthetics 70). Importantly, Badiou suggests that theatrical production “is often the reasoned trial of chances” (Handbook of Inaesthetics 74). Another way to think the materiality of romance is as the event of love, but without Badiou’s necessary declaration of love (“What Is Love?” 45). Even though the ‘truth’ of the Two acts as quasi-cause, love as such remains a pure (‘incorporeal’) Virtuality. As a process, there is no “absolute disappearance or eclipse” that belongs to the love-encounter (“What Is Love?” 45), thus instead producing a rhythmic or, better, melodic heterogeneous tension between the love-dance and romance-theatre. The rhythm-melody of the virtual-actual cascade is distributed around aleatory contingencies as the event of love is differentially repeated and is therefore continually repotentialised and exhausted at the same time. A careful or graceful balance needs to be found between potentiality and exhaustion. The film contains many examples of this (re)potentialising tension, including when Lena achieves the wonder of the ‘encounter’ by orchestrating a meeting. Similarly, Barry feigns a ‘business trip’ to Hawaii to meet up with Lena. This is proceeded by the increased urgency of Barry’s manipulation of the frequent flyer miles reward to meet with up with Lena. The tension is affective – both anxious and exciting – and belongs to the lived duration of contingency. In the same way as an actual material dance floor (or ‘theatre’ here) is repeated across multiple incorporeal dimensions of music’s virtuality through the repotentialisation of the dancer’s body, the multiple dimensions of love are repeated across the virtuality of the lovers’ actions through the repotentialisation of the conditions of the event of love. Punch-Drunk Love frames this problematic of romance by way of a second movement that follows the trajectory of the main character Barry. Barry is a depressive with an affect regulation problem. He flies into a rage whenever a childhood incident is mentioned and becomes anxious or ‘scared’ (as one sister described him) when in proximity to Lena. He tries to escape from the oppressive intimacy of his family. He plays with ‘identity’ in a childlike manner by dressing up as a businessman and wearing the blue suit. His small business is organised around selling plungers used to unblock toilets to produce flow. Indeed, Barry is defined by the blockages and flows of desire. His seven-sister over-Oedipalised familial unit continually operates as an apparatus of capture, a phone-sex pervert scam seeks to overcode desire in libidinal economy that becomes exploited in circuits of axiomatised shame (like an online dating site?), and a consumer rewards program that offers the dream of a frequent-flyer million-miles (line of) flight out of it all. ‘Oedipal’ in the expanded sense Deleuze and Guattari give the term as a “displaced or internalised limit where desire lets itself be caught. The Oedipal triangle is the personal and private territoriality that corresponds to all of capitalism’s efforts at social reterritorialisation” (266). Barry says he wants to ‘diversify’ his business, which is not the same thing as ‘expanding’ or developing an already established commercial interest. He does not have a clear idea of what domain or type of business he wants to enter into when diversifying. When he speaks to business contacts or service personnel on the phone he attempts to connect with them on a level of intimacy that is uncomfortably inappropriate for impersonal phone conversations. The inappropriate intimacy comes back to haunt him, of course, when a low-level crook attempts to extort money from him after Barry calls a phone sex line. The romance between Lena and Barry develops through a series of accident-contingencies that to a certain extent ‘unblocks’ Barry and allows him to connect with Lena (who also changes). Apparent contingencies that are not actually contingencies need to be explained as such (‘dropping car off’, ‘beat up bathrooms’, ‘no actual business in Hawaii’, ‘phone sex line’, etc.). Upon their first proper conversation a forklift in Barry’s business crashes into boxes. Barry calls the phone sex line randomly and this leads to the severe car crash towards the end of the film. The interference of Barry’s sisters occurs in an apparently random unexpected manner – either directly or indirectly through the retelling of the ‘gayboy’ story. Lastly, the climatic meeting in Hawaii where the two soon-to-be-lovers are framed by silhouette, their bodies meet not in an embrace but a collision. They emerge as if emitted from the throngs of the passing crowd. Barry has his hand extended as if they were going to shake and there is an audible grunt when their bodies collide in an embrace. To love is to endure the violence of a creative temporality, such as the production of harmony from heterogeneity. As Badiou argues, love cannot be a fusional relation between the two to make the one, nor can it be the relation of the Same to the Other, this is because the differential repetition of the conditions of love through the material practice of romance already effaces such distinctions. This is the crux of the matter: The maximum violence in the plot of Punch-Drunk Love is not born by Lena, even though she ends up in hospital, but by Barry. (Is this merely a masculinist reading of traditional male on male violence? Maybe, and perhaps why rsvp.com.au woman read it different to me.) What I am trying to get at is the positive or creative violence of the two movements within the plot – of the romance and of Barry’s depressive social incompetence – intersect in such a way to force Barry to renew himself as himself. Barry’s explosive fury belongs to the paradox of trying to ‘mind his own business’ while at the same time ‘diversifying’. The moments of violence directed against the world and the ‘glass enclosures’ of his subjectivity are transversal actualisations of the violence of love (on function of ‘glass’ in the film see King). (This raises the question, perhaps irrelevant, regarding the scale of Badiou’s conception of truth-events. After Foucault and Deleuze, why isn’t ‘life’ itself a ‘truth’ event (for Badiou’s position see Briefings on Existence 66-68)? For example, are not the singularities of Barry’s life also the singularities of the event of love? Is the post-evental ‘decision’ supposed to always axiomatically subtract the singular truth-supplement from the stream of singularities of life? Why…?) The violence of love is given literal expression in the film in the ‘pillow talk’ dialogue between Barry and Lena: Barry: I’m sorry, I forgot to shave. Lena: Your face is so adorable. Your skin and your cheek… I want to bite it. I want to bite on your cheek and chew on it, you’re so fucking cute. Barry: I’m looking at your face and I just wanna smash it. I just wanna fucking smash it with a sledgehammer and squeeze you, you’re so pretty… Lena: I wanna chew your face off and scoop out your eyes. I wanna eat them and chew them and suck on them… Barry: [nodding] Ok…yes, that’s funny… Lena: Yeah… Barry: [still nodding] This’s nice. What dismayed or perhaps intrigued Baudrillard about Crash was its mixing of bodies and technologies in a kind of violent eroticism where “everything becomes a hole to offer itself to the discharge reflex” (112). On the surface this exchange between Barry and Lena is apparently an example of such violent eroticism. For Baudrillard the accident is a product of the violence of technology in the logistics of bodies and signs which intervene in relations in such a way to render perversity impossible (as a threshold structuration of the Symbolic) because ‘everything’ becomes perverse. However, writer and director of Punch-Drunk Love, Paul Anderson, produces a sense of the wondrous (‘Punch-Drunk’) violence that is at the heart of love. This is not because of the actual violence of individual characters; in the film this only serves as a canvas of action to illustrate the intrinsic violence of contingency. Lena and Barry’s ‘pillow talk’ not so much as a dance but a case of the necessary theatre capturing the violence and restraint of love’s virtual dance. ‘Violence’ (in the sense it is used above) also describes the harmonic marshalling of the heterogeneous materiality of sound affected by the harmonium. The ‘violence’ of the harmonium is decisively expressed through the coalescence of the diegetic and nondiegetic soundtracks at the end of the film when Barry plays the harmonium concurrently with Jon Brion’s score for the film. King notes, the “diegetic and nondiegetic music playing together is a moment of cinematic harmony; Barry, Lena, and the harmonium are now in sync” (par. 19). The notes of music connect different diegetic and nondiegetic series which pivot around new possibilities. As Deleuze writes about the notes played at a concert, they are “pure Virtualities that are actualized in the origins [of playing], but also pure Possibilities that are attained in vibrations or flux [of sound]” (The Fold 91). Following Deleuze further (The Fold 146-157), the horizontal melodic movement of romance forms a diagonal or transversal line with the differentially repeated ‘harmonic’ higher unity of love. The unity is literally ‘higher’ to the extent it escapes the diegetic confines of the film itself. For Deleuze “harmonic unity is not that of infinity, but that which allows the existent to be thought of as deriving from infinity” (The Fold 147, ital. added). While Barry is playing the harmonium in this scene Lena announces, “So here we go.” These are the final words of the film. In Badiou’s philosophy this is a declaration of the truth of love. Like the ‘higher’ non/diegetic harmony of the harmonium, the truth of love “composes, compounds itself to infinity. It is thus never presented integrally. All knowledge [of romance] relative to this truth [of the Two, as quasi-cause] thus disposes itself as an anticipation” (“What is Love?” 49). Romance is therefore lived as a vertiginous state of anticipation of love’s harmony. The materiality of romance does not simply consist of two people coming together and falling in love. The ‘fall’ functions as a fatalistic myth used to inscribe bodies within the eschatological libidinal economies of ‘romantic comedies’. To anneal Baudrillard’s lament, perversity obviously still has a positive Symbolic function on the internet, especially online dating sites where anticipation can be modulated through the probabilistic manipulation of signs. In post-romance, the ‘encounter’ of love necessarily remains, but it is the contingency of this encounter that matters. The main characters in Punch-Drunk Love are continually arrayed through the contingencies of love. I have linked this to Badiou’s notion of the event of love, but have focused on what I have called the materiality of romance. The materiality of romance requires more than a ‘fall’ induced by a probabilistic encounter, and yet it is not the declaration of a truth. The post-evental truth procedure of love is impossible in post-romance romance because there is no ‘after’ or ‘supplement’ to an event of love; there is only the continual rhythm of romance and anticipation of the impossible. It is not a coincidence that the Snow Patrol lyrics that serve above as an epigraph resonate with Deleuze’s comment that a change in the situation of Leibnizian monads has occurred “between the former model, the closed chapel with imperceptible openings… [to] the new model invoked by Tony Smith [of] the sealed car speeding down the dark highway” (The Fold 157). Post-Crash post-romance romance unfolds like the driving-monad in an aleatory pursuit of accidents. That is, to care for the event of love is not to announce the truth of the Two, but to pursue the differential repetition of the conditions of love’s (im)possible contingency. This exquisite and beautiful care is required for the contingency of love to be maintained. Hence, the post-romance problematic of romance thus posited as the material practice of repeating the wonder at the heart of love. References Badiou, Alain. Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology. Trans. Norman Madrasz. Albany, New York: State U of New York P, 2006. ———. Handbook of Inaesthetics. Trans. Alberto Toscano. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 2005. ———. “What Is Love?” Umbr(a) 1 (1996): 37-53. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. Crawford, Kate. Adult Themes: Rewriting the Rules of Adulthood. Sydney: Macmillan, 2006. Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. ———. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Laster and Charles Stivale. European Perspectives. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia UP, 1990. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. Foucault, Michel. “Theatricum Philosophicum.” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. D. F. Bouchard. New York: Cornell UP, 1977. 165-96. King, Cubie. “Punch Drunk Love: The Budding of an Auteur.” Senses of Cinema 35 (2005). Citation reference for this article MLA Style Fuller, Glen. "Punch-Drunk Love: A Post-Romance Romance." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/03-fuller.php>. APA Style Fuller, G. (Jun. 2007) "Punch-Drunk Love: A Post-Romance Romance," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/03-fuller.php>.

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