About - "Found Performance": Towards a Musical Methodology for Exploring the Aesthetics of Care by Stuart Wood
Response
It is very appealing what Duchamp calls ‘readymade’ which means ‘works of art he made created from pre-existing manufactures objects’. I feel that engaging with other types of music, as spectralism or post-minimalism, for example, that could be consider as 'pre-existing objects’, taking part of their techniques and ideas, and having them as knowledge for future composition works, is a sort of similar thought. In my opinion, a composer is a Duchamp of music, looking very close to what is already done in others types of music, schools and genres and having those as inspirational fragments for his present or future works.
It is true that this concept applies more with physical object as, for example, the Duchamp’s “urinal”, Steve Reich’s "City Life”, John Cage’s 4’33'’ or Oliver Messiaen’s exploration into transcriptions of bird songs. However, it is possible to apply this term into a more subjective field as “readymade” considering as pre-existing types or genres of music.
Notes
It’s great because he is doing a ethnographic study, without referring that he’s doing it. The only reference that is possible to find about ethnography is ‘This methodology has a correlation in ethnographic practices…” in page 5, 5.- Towards an Aesthetics of Care.
On Chapter 2.- A First-Person Vignette from Music Therapy is the only part where it’s possible to recognise that Stuart Wood is telling a story, and for that reason is using an ethnographic technique where is looking back and telling what he lived with his patient.
The following chapters are related with all the information he knows about the field he want to investigate. He’s making relationships between different subjects that relate with art, healthcare and everyday-life. In a way this could be a ethnographic parameter where he explore all the experiences he had have.
References:
[1] - Kostelanetz, R; Cage, J. The Aesthetics of John Cage: A Composite Interview. Kenyon Rev. 1987, 9, 102-130.
[3] - Butler, J. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity; Routledge Publisher: New York, NY, USA, 1990.
[4] - Deleuze, G. Difference and Repetition; Columbia University Press: New York, NY, USA, 1994.
[5] - Nietsche, F. The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music; Penguin: London, UK, 1993.
[6] - Latour, B. Reassembling the Social; Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 2005.
[7] - Law, J. After ANT: Topology, Naming and Complexity. In Actor Network Theory and After; Law, J., Hassard, J., Eds.; Blackwell and the Sociological Review: Oxford, UK, 1999; pp. 1-14.