Search

International audience; "Sound commitments: ethics and politics", special issue of the journal Circuit, musiques contemporaines (vol. 28, no 3). This issue aims to explore the links between ethics and politics in musical creation in the 20th and 21st centuries.3 Its objective is to examine the political dimension of the situations in which musical action takes place, as well as the way in which composers, musicians and listeners mobilise ethical reflection within events that force them to think in a new way about their relationship to the world.; "Engagements sonores : éthique et politique", numéro spécial de la revue Circuit, musiques contemporaines (vol. 28, no 3). Ce numéro se propose d’explorer les liens entre éthique et politique dans la création musicale des XXe et XXIe siècles. Son objectif est d’examiner la dimension politique des situations dans lesquelles l’action musicale a lieu ainsi que la façon dont les compositeur·rice·s, les musicien·ne·s et les auditeur·rice·s mobilisent une réflexion éthique au sein d’événements qui les obligent à penser d’une façon nouvelle leur rapport au monde.

International audience; Introduction to the issue "Sound commitments: ethics and politics" of the journal Circuit, musiques contemporaines (vol. 28, no 3). This issue aims to explore the links between ethics and politics in musical creation in the 20th and 21st centuries.3 Its objective is to examine the political dimension of the situations in which musical action takes place, as well as the way in which composers, musicians and listeners mobilise ethical reflection within events that force them to think in a new way about their relationship to the world.; Introduction au numéro "Engagements sonores : éthique et politique" de la revue Circuit, musiques contemporaines (vol. 28, no 3). Ce numéro se propose d’explorer les liens entre éthique et politique dans la création musicale des XXe et XXIe siècles. Son objectif est d’examiner la dimension politique des situations dans lesquelles l’action musicale a lieu ainsi que la façon dont les compositeur·rice·s, les musicien·ne·s et les auditeur·rice·s mobilisent une réflexion éthique au sein d’événements qui les obligent à penser d’une façon nouvelle leur rapport au monde.

Based on over two years of research in and around Asheville, North Carolina, this dissertation is a comparative ethnography of class difference in the contemporary US, focused on three distinct groups: working-class musicians, middle-class revivalists, and anarchist ‘punks.’ Through fine-grained analysis of interactions and practices in the space of ‘traditional’ music-making, where regular cross-class interactions made class differences particularly salient for participants, I develop a theoretical conception of classed ethics. This approach to the ethnography of class improves on existing frameworks in its ability to account for striking contrasts between middle-class and working-class stances towards ethical sociality, which I show to be based on reflexive notions of ‘the good.’ This dissertation provides a comparative and relational account of these differing class-cultural ethics as they are brought to bear in practices associated with space, temporality, hierarchy, and social categorization. Traditional music scenes around Asheville provided an unusually rich setting for the study of class in the contemporary US. In particular, a long history of white middle-class revivalism; the valorization and objectification of ‘local’ expressive culture; and a vital white working-class musical tradition all contributed to a social space where ideas about the everyday interaction of class and culture were explicit (even as race was largely absent from conscious reflection). The politics of class in Asheville music scenes were given clearer focus by the arrival in the mid-2000s of a large population of transitory musicians (‘punks’), committed to learning traditional music as a central practice in an anarchist project aimed at realizing an anti-capitalist and anti-hierarchical mode of sociality. As I describe, punks imagined the possibility of developing or acquiring ‘new’ everyday ethics—and the distinct kinds of sociality and collectivity they engender—as a utopic vision aimed at re-making middle-class selves in the mold of an imagined, politically virtuous, working-class subject. In effect, the familiar musical-aesthetic valorization of ‘working-class culture’ by middle-class revivalists, was thrown into stark relief by the political idealization of ‘working-class cultural ethics’ by punks, resulting in a situation where normative moral evaluations of class were inverted: where (aspects of) ‘working-class culture’ were imagined to be a space of ‘the good.’ As these three groups—middle-class revivalists, working-class musicians, and punk musicians—interacted, the deep entanglement of class and ethics of sociality came to the fore in the form of misunderstandings, differing evaluations, and revealing contradictions, which I explore in the dissertation. Beyond an exploration of classed ethics in the particular space of music, this work develops two broader conclusions. The first is a reflexive critique of the subtle but pervasive universalization of middle-class cultural assumptions in academic theories of class. Interpretive frameworks that rely on registers like performance, tastes, competencies, or structural reproduction tend to import a middle-class version of selfhood or subjectivity as the default basis of how class ‘works,’ marginalizing working-class perspectives on what class ‘is.’ A deeper comparative understanding of the classed ethical stances of the academy can help to correct blind spots in class theory. The second conclusion is that ‘classed cultural ethics’ have a de facto politics: there are meaningfully different outcomes that result from particular classed ethical stances in realms like collectivity, solidarity, and sociality. An awareness of the politics of classed cultural ethics helps illuminate the assumptions, contradictions, and promises of radical leftism in the US.

Soundscape, as the inevitable environment of a modern man, has changed in its quality and intensity, especially after the industrial and electronic revolution, as well as the urbanization. Besides polluting of its own as well as neighbouring surroundings, soundscape also emerges with regard to the optimal and subjective quality of the sonic perception of the environment Our investigation is based on the premise that soundscape is a complex sounding system that is changed by the development of society, shaping our understanding of the site and space. Using Acoustic Ecology as the study that operates with a variety of methodological parameters, we will present a collaborative work that involves humanistic and technical sciences, such as ethno musicological and electro acoustical approaches to sound design with the purpose to achieve a new aural and semantic experience of the space. In this paper we will present the two preliminary concepts which are related to the re-creation of sound in the space such as the Tourist Information Office in the town of Krk and the Ronjgi Interpretative Centre in Viškovo/Rijeka.

International audience

From Debussy to today's contemporary music, from rock to electronica, from the first musique concrète to nowadays electroacoustic music, from the Electronic Poem to the most recent interartistic collaborations, sound has become one major issue for music. It is as if, during about one century, music has realized a paradigmatic shift, leaving the civilisation focused on tone and developing a civilization focused on sound. This shift is probably as important as the one which, four centuries ago, gave birth to tonality. In respect to XXth century avant-garde music, we could say that its description as "atonal" corresponds only to its potential of destructing the past, while the focus on sound determines its constructive face. Understanding XXth-XXIth centuries music history means reading the history of the emergence of sound. This history is plural, because it is composed from six parallel histories: timbre, which became a central category for music composition; noise and the exploration of its musical potential; listening, the awareness of which opens to the generality of sound; more and more deeply immersion in sound; the substitution of composing the sound for composing with sounds; space, which is progressively viewed as composable. It is while crossing, combining and converging each other that these histories finally produce, inside music itself, the paradigmatic shift analyzed by this book, and which leads from music to sound. This book offers thus an original history of recent music. It illustrates it with numerous musical examples. Mixing well-know works with lesser known works, analytical with synthetic developments, it is directed at a wide as much as specialized audience., De Debussy à la musique contemporaine de ce début de XXIe siècle, du rock à l'electronica, de la première musique concrète à l'électroacoustique actuelle, du Poème électronique aux collaborations interartistiques les plus récentes, le son est devenu l'un des enjeux majeurs - sinon l'enjeu majeur - de la musique. Tout s'est passé comme si, durant un siècle environ, la musique avait amorcé un changement de paradigme, quittant la civilisation centrée sur le ton au profit d'une civilisation du son. Et l'on pourrait parier que cette mutation est au moins aussi fondatrice que la révolution qui, il y a quatre siècles, fit naître la tonalité : eu égard à la musique la plus avancée du XXe siècle, on s'aperçoit avec le recul que le qualificatif d'" atonale " ne correspond qu'à son potentiel de destruction du passé, le recentrement sur le son, lui, en constituant la face constructive. Relire l'histoire de la musique des XXe- XXIe siècles signifie en partie lire l'histoire mouvementée de l'émergence du son. Cette histoire est plurielle, car elle est composée de six mouvements parallèles : du timbre qui devient catégorie centrale de l'écriture musicale ; du bruit et de l'exploration de son potentiel musical ; de l'écoute dont la prise de conscience ouvre au son dans sa généralité ; de l'immersion de plus en plus poussée dans le son ; de la substitution de la composition du son à la composition avec des sons ; de l'espace qui est progressivement pensé comme composable. C'est en se croisant, en se combinant et en convergeant que ces histoires finissent par provoquer, de l'intérieur même de la musique, le changement de paradigme qu'analyse ce livre et qui mène de la musique au son. Ce livre propose donc une histoire originale de la musique récente, qu'il illustre à travers de nombreux exemples musicaux. Mêlant œuvres connues et œuvres peu connues, développements analytiques et synthétiques, il s'adresse tant aux spécialistes qu'au grand public.

International audience; Dissonances in music have had a long evolution history dating back to days of strictly prohibition to times of en-richeness of musical motives and forms. Nowadays, dis-sonances account for most of the musical expressiveness and contain a full application theory supporting their use making them a frequently adopted resource of composition. This work partially describes their theoretical background as well as their evolution in music and finally proposing a new model for their computational use