Theorizing Sound through Conductors’ Movement in Experimental Music Drake Andersen Despite John Cage’s insistence that his compositions were devoted to letting the sounds “be themselves,” it is this dictum, rather than any particular sound, that most reliably persists in listeners’ minds.1 In fact, in looking back at postwar experimental music as a whole, it seems that the aesthetic theories …
The Choreographic Politics of Sound and Motion Gerko Egert Singing at Night A child walks through the night, gripped with fear. They try to fight their fear by territorializing the vastness of the dark night surrounding its body. And how do they do it? By singing. They use the sonic rhythm to modulate the darkness. And by repeating their …
Amy Ming Wai Tai 1 “Beauty is not a thing but an act.”Friedrich Theodor Vischer, (1922)1 Many musicians consider meter to be a hierarchy of pulses, which are conceived sometimes as discrete, isochronous, and durationless time points, and other times as time spans demarcated by these time points.2 In this model, when we hear expressive variation, we quantize the …
Perceptual Aspects from the Field of Eurhythmics Dorothea Weise “Beauty is not a thing but an act.”Friedrich Theodor Vischer, (1922)1 To Stumble Is to Perceive The ability to arrange and connect sensory impressions in such a way that the brain can generate meaningful perceptions, emotional reactions, thoughts, and motor actions appropriate to a situation is continuously formed during the …
Materialities of Dance Practices in Metal during COVID-19 Daniel Suer and Florian Heesch Introduction Among the numerous practices that constitute popular music cultures, dancing seems to belong to those that are generally less dependent on material things. In contrast to practices such as DJing and other instrumental activities, mediatized listening, or production practices, the materiality of dance, not unlike …
Echoes and Anticipations Stephanie Jordan “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Mickey Mouse” must be one of the most unforgettable sub-titles in dance scholarship. It appears in 2006 in The Opera Quarterly dance issue, heading an article by American composer Barbara White.1 Meanwhile, the term music visualization rings familiar to dance theorists and historians (those, at least, …
Interferences Between Music and Movement Stephanie Schroedter Preconditions “All music is danceable if you understand what it is about,” emphasizes Lukas Ligeti, whose witty individuality and humorous originality immediately remind one of his father.1 In order to be able to agree with this statement, we need to understand the concept of music that underlies it. Although this concept lies …
A Musical-Gestural Perspective Winnie Huang Some view their body as their temple—something one treats with respect, adorns or decorates with beauty, and celebrates in this mortal realm. It is what gives us a sense of agency. But for others it feels like a prison—a life sentence with this material matter. An incarceration within an object that doesn’t fully represent …
Sketches on an Artistic Investigation of Spatial Phenomena Hanne Pilgrim , Adrián Artacho , Leonhard Horstmeyer , and Markus Kupferblum Introduction The objective of the artistic research project “Atlas of Smooth Spaces”1 is to investigate spatial phenomena in the audio-corporeal arts. Audio-corporeal artistic practices share an alertness for and a certain tacit knowledge about space.2 We seek to notate, …
