Articles
Whilst at Cambridge, and after, I have written a lot of articles. Several I'm going to be publishing, copies of which are beneath.
Musical Crimes: Forgery, Deceit, and Socio-HermeneuticsForgeries are the touchstone of musical criticism, stylistic analysis and aesthetic appreciation. Yet, are forgeries necessarily bad? This dissertation will investigate what a forgery can teach us about music and its relation to ourselves, in two connected sections. The first will establish the distinctions between forgery in music and those in the other arts. The key themes and ideas will be explored: inventive versus imitative forgery, the cognitive stock and appearance theories, and what a musical forgery even is. Limitations of the current literature will be highlighted. From this, the second section will propose a new approach to the musical forgery - one that takes account of the listener. It will use forgery as a gateway to exploring how we appreciate music, and how we are affected by a forgery. Hermeneutic and social theories will be incorporated to further investigate our relation to forgery, to musicology, and to music. |
Gender, Gesture, and Composition: The Aesthetics of Conducting in France, 1821 to 1867For Berlioz there are clear associations between music and the body: music can have a profoundly sublime affect upon his physical sensations, bypassing his rational mind to produce uncontrollable gestures. When Berlioz took to the podium, however, this relationship become complex; now, it was Berlioz's physical gestures that had an affect upon the music. The one-way relationship between music and the body became a problematic symbiosis between the two - which influences which, and through what medium? The medium, as the dissertation will explore, is gesture. Gesture was a blossoming aesthetic genre in Paris at the time: sign-language had been established in the previous century and was becoming more widespread; mime exploded with Gaspard Deburau's Theatre des Funambles; and, with Habeneck and especially Berlioz, conducting developed a new vocabulary of gestures. This dissertation will investigate the interdisciplinary connections between these forms of physical gesture, and how they all find a locus in Berlioz's conducting during this period. Further, it will be argued that in this period the physical gesture of conducting was inexorably wedded to the social concerns with gender ambiguity; that the bodily aspect of conducting was seen not only artistically but also medically; and, how the relationship between the conductor, the composer and the performer became a problematic consideration for Berlioz: in conducting his own works the boundaries between composition and conducting began to dissolve. |