Presentation on Sep. 14

I will do a presentation together with my collegue doctorate student Stefan Östersjö on September 14. His project is about interpretation and performance of contemporary music and we have found some very interesting overlapping areas between my own project and his. I am also going to write a piece for guitar and computer that we will collaborate on.

In his work he has presented some interesting ideas about authenticity. The way I understand it that when interpretating a work the question can be asked whether it is the composers wish the interpreter realizes or if it is the performers subjective understanding of the work that rules the interpretation. In the case of the latter the performer can be said to re-create or re-composethe piece at the performance which is much more closely related to improvisation in which the roles of the composer and the performer is one and the same.

This also expands to the somewhat more general question of what the music constitutes. <ul><li>Is it the score (as Dahlhaus, 1970 would argue)?</li><li>Is it the composers idea of the sonification of the score?</li><li>Is it the performers idea of the score?</li><li>Is it the listeners idea of the sonification of the score?</li></ul> These four cases can be divided into two categories where the main difference is whether the score or the sound is the object. This is a critical question for me. I will argue that the sound will have to be the object in any contemporary music, including improvised music. One simple and rational argument for this standpoint is that the system for notation that we have is simply not very well adopted to the notation of anything other than discrete pitches and one dimensional rhythms. On the other hand, any type of traditional musical analysis will be very difficult and vague if based on the sound rather than the score, partly because there is no common language to describe sound precisely.

I will try to expand on this subject tomorrow.