Contingency and Necessity: A Musical Offering

Abstract

Contingency and Necessity: A Musical Offering

Abstract

This dissertation consists of the eight musical scores making up the respective work series of Georgic, Secundum Surdum, and Agnus. In addition, the score of Hlimman — Beneath the Earth, belonging to the work series Donnerwort, is included. Each of the works presented was composed between 2015 and 2021; cumulatively the nine pieces represent the six years of compositional work undertaken during my doctoral studies.

Each of the work series approaches, from a particular compositional perspective, the historicity of musical languages, and the concomitant notions of discursive contingency and formal necessity. Central aesthetic concerns including iconicity, effability, and emulation are understood within the respective works to be the object of self-reflexive compositional address.

Cumulatively the works open a poetic horizon on the broader socio-historical topics of individual autonomy, and the theater of language. Though committed to an assertive confrontation with these problematics, the project is born of a spirit of communicative urgency and is understood by its author to ethically affirm the tradition of critical discourse of which it itself is self-evidently a part.