Here’s the abstract for my forthcoming article in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, ‘Strategies of Conquest and Defence: Encounters with the Object in Twentieth-Century Music’:
Reacting to recent materialist developments in music studies and beyond, I argue for the value of dialectics in accounting for compositional orientations vis-à-vis its objects – be these objects sound-producing, nonhuman entities, such as musical instruments, or the object that is ‘sound itself’. Engaging the compositional thought and practice of Busoni, Russolo, Varése, Cage and Tudor by way of example, I highlight two intersecting tendencies: the first constitutes a presumed mastery over the object in question, the second is suggestive of an exploration of the object on its own terms. Interweaving aspects of post-Marxist and psychoanalytic theory, I argue that, ultimately, our orientation toward the object manifests a negotiation of the self in a changing material world.
