Dissertation Index
Author: Sofer, Danielle, S Title: Making Sex Sound: Erotic Currents in Electronic Music Institution: University of Music and Performing Arts Graz Begun: October 2013 Completed: June 2016 Abstract: This dissertation examines electronic and electroacoustic music written after 1950 with a focus on works composers attribute with erotic connotations. It explores the ways in which music presents eroticism, how composers envision a musically erotic subject as well as what listeners find aurally stimulating or provocative about music. Compositions by Pierre Schaeffer, Luc Ferrari, Robert Normandeau, Annea Lockwood, Alice Shields, Barry Truax, Pauline Oliveros, Juliana Hodkinson, and Niels Rønsholdt, exhibit common musical idioms, such as the drive to climax, use of the female voice, and visual or textual imagery. But beyond these commonalities, the dissertation’s framing theoretical, critical, and philosophical analyses prove each work exhibits erotic qualities particular to its social, historical, and music-compositional climate. Early works aspire toward a Husserlian essence of the erotic, paralleling the scientific objectivity of the 1950s; in the 1980s and ’90s, many erotic works deemphasize male sexual pleasure to mirror second-wave feminist critiques of pornography; and, on the heels of this corrective, composers at the turn of the twenty-first century use digital processing to reorient gender and sexual markers. Reacting to electronic music’s historical disregard for gender and sexual difference, this dissertation exposes the philosophical, psychological, socio-cultural, and historical relevance of eroticism in electronic and electroacoustic works. Keywords: musicology, Music theory, electronic music, music and sexuality, gender, voice, music aesthetics, erotic art, cultural musicology TOC: TABLE OF CONTENTS *Preface xii What Is Eroticism, Anyway? xv Making Sex Sound xvii *Introduction 1 Erotic Representation 5 The Prevalence of the Erotic Soundscape 8 Dissertation Outline 21 *Chapter 1: The Object of Desire in Electroacoustic Music 31 Perceptual Experience From Psyche to Psycho 35 Reduced Sense, Beyond Sense 38 Pierre Schaeffer’s “Erotica†Movement 42 Erotics Anonymous: The Case of Luc Ferrari 47 Whose Voice Is It, Anyway? 55 Suspicion of the “Cinema for the Ear†63 Conclusions on the Object of Desire 86 Conclusion 92 *Chapter 2: The “Ongoing Interculturality†of Alice Shields’s Apocalypse 95 Alice Shields 101 Sexual Prohibition, the First Sign of the Apocalypse 111 Apocalypse, More Than Cultural Borrowing 115 “Cock Rock†Meets “Oriental†Transmigration: A Comparison 127 Intertextual Ruins 137 Conclusion 144 *Chapter 3: Identity and Orientation in Barry Truax’s Song of Songs 148 Barry Truax 157 Song of Songs 159 Textual Considerations 160 Analysis 162 Blurring Lines, Redefining Categories 177 Transforming Analysis 179 Chapter 4: Beyond the Posthuman: Augmenting Performance 183 The Making of Fish & Fowl (2011) 193 Perceptual Multitudes 195 Analysis 196 Theories of Repetition 200 Embodying Sound 202 On Banality 209 A Transhuman Existence 220 Conclusion 224 *Conclusion 228 *Appendices 231 Appendix A: List of Electronic Compositions with Erotic Elements Appendix B: Alice Shields, Apocalypse, Track List *Bibliography 234 Contact: daniellessofer@gmail.com |