Toward a Music of Exegetic Becoming and Actualized Work

Abstract

If it is almost exclusively the project of academic composers to make music for classical concert situations with some connection to the classical tradition, it is the responsibility of those composers to consider carefully the space their music creates, and whether it leverages that tradition toward improvement, instead of relying on that tradition's imperialistic authority. As artists we must carve out a space in which to work, a space in which that authority is rendered powerless, in which our work can be radically open, in which our sense of self can resound. Herein I present six musical works that, each from their own direction, attempt to define aspects of this artistic space, that take as their artistic project a vitality-for-self both for the exegetic position of the listener, and the actualized productive position of the artist. I highlight these works for their transparency, physicality, estrangement effect, and masochistic potential, alongside an examination of how each of these facets are achieved, and why it is vital that the artist's—and the listener's—original space contain them. What results is a report, not on the music's relative success or efficacy, but on working as an artist in an academic setting, on developing as a sensitive and shrewd humanist as well as a technically proficient, imaginative, original, and actualized artist. This report hopefully provides a useful and revelatory look at the process of one of these artists today, and how that process can, rendered generally, nourish one course toward a radically open, self-knowing artistic community.