Sounding Fragilities enacts a polyphony of writing on contemporary composition, music and performing arts in relation to music theatre. Co-edited by a theatre and performance scholar and by a composer and artistic researcher, this anthology considers its field of investigation through the lens of positionalities. Irene Lehmann and Pia Palme invite readers into intimate encounters with an artist’s practice, feminist and queer perspectives, and personal explorations into aspects of musicology, theatre studies, technology and ecology. By presenting female* composers who write with/through/about their own practice, Sounding Fragilities is a remarkable contribution to an interdisciplinary debate around the agency of artistic research. With this synthesis, the editors evaluate how moving beyond the binary of art and science reveals the rich yet fragile territories of artistic knowledge-production and literacy in music theatre.
Sounding Fragilities. An Anthology brings together essays, discussions and interventions on contemporary music, dance and music theatre to offer a polyphony of new approaches to listening, watching, composing and performing. Artistic and academic researchers present reflections and insights into the fragilities of artistic materials, collaborations and the communities that build around live performances. Challenging the idea of isolated composers, choreographers, audience members and academic researchers, they stress instead the interconnectedness of these positions as indispensable elements of thriving performance and research. This feature of all live performance is envisaged by several of the book’s contributors as linked to political, democratic thought and ecological or feminist thinking. Sounding out the relationality, brittleness, fragility, transitoriness, and beauty of live performance, this anthology stresses the urgency of coming together and interacting as a foundation for human and political relations; an urgency intensified by the current overlapping crises in politics, health and ecology. (Verlagstext)
Contents
I. Preliminaries
An anthology as polyphony. An introduction
Pia Palme
Fragile soundings. A collection of compositions as case studies
Pia Palme
Fragmented fragilities. An introduction
Irene Lehmann
Three fragilities. Introduction to the contributions
Irene Lehmann
II. Fragile communities
Composing futures. Activism and ecology in contemporary music
Pia Palme
On the fragilities of music theatre. A conversation
Elisabeth Schimana, Susanne Kogler, Pia Palme, Irene Lehmann
How feminism matters. An exploration of listening
Christina Fischer-Lessiak
Listening is a browser. On the fragility of listening online
Margarethe Maierhofer-Lischka
Regarding listening. On the theatricality of experimental
listening situations
Irene Lehmann
Hannah Arendt and the ‘fragility of sounds.’
Aesthetics and politics in the 21st century
Susanne Kogler
An infinite echo-system: Reflecting on the ‘fragility of sounds’
Suvani Suri
III. Fragile materialities
The silent draw
Flora Könemann
The voice that touches also has a skin. Exploring the exercise of vocal touch
Veza Fernández
ELP—a choreographic research project
Paola Bianchi
Rifts in time. Distortion, possession and ventriloquism in my operatic works
Liza Lim
The development of Brittle. On the delicacies of minerals
Electric Indigo
IV. Fragile collaborative processes
On the epistemic potential of (live) electronic music. Essay-in-progress
Germán Toro Pérez
¿ (Hair) variations—variation of sensibility
Chikako Morishita
In the thick of it. Further reflections on the mess and the magic of collaborative partnerships
Juliet Fraser
Undefined spaces. In pursuit of imprecision in instrumental technique
Molly McDolan
On the interaction of composition and musicology
Malik Sharif
‘A dialogue between two fragilities.’ A conversation
Chaya Czernowin, Pia Palme
Acknowledgements
Notes on contributors