Research Platform 2023

May 20, 2023

The research platform of Tzlil Meudcan aims at promoting research on contemporary music and contemporaneity, while studying at the wider cultural, aesthetic, and fiscal networks that constitute it. The musicological roundtables will be directed by Assaf Shelleg (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Christopher Fox (Akademie der Künste, Berlin).

The 2023 Tzlil Meudcan research group includes young scholars in historical musicology, composition, and music theory from Israel, U.S., England, Germany, and Spain. All roundtables will be held at the Goethe Institute in Tel Aviv in two 90-minute sessions: 12:30-14:00 and 14:30-16:00. Each session opens with a discussion on yesterday’s repertoire and performances, after which the following topics will be brought to the table:

July 3 (Goethe Institute, Tel Aviv), 2-5pm

Greetings; round of introduction; preliminary discussion on the festival programme and the roundtables ahead; assignments

Toward the performance of Neue Vocalsolisten, we will discuss Alex Ross’ piece on Jennifer Walshe while considering the manifestos by Walshe and Bauckholt; and toward the performance of Klaus Lang’s cantica christinae III (2020) we will address Daniel Wilson’s arguments and methodology in his essay on Lang’s Trauermusik.

July 4 (Goethe Institute, Tel Aviv), 10:30am-5pm

10:30-11:30 Looking back; yesterday’s performances

11:30-12:00 Coffee break

12:00-1:30 The Justification of Music Criticism

Based on an English translation of Adorno’s lecture Reflections on music criticism [will be published on partisan-notes.com – see the German text and a deepl translation below], we would discuss the question how to justify art critical judgments in general and music criticism in particular. Justification will be understood in a twofold way: first, what are good kinds of reasons one can give in order to defend a music critical judgment? What are valid arguments in a music critical debate? And second, what is art criticism itself good for, what is the reason for music criticism to exist, what is its utility or necessity?

1:30-2:30 Lunch break

2:30-4 Paradoxes of Contemporary Music and the Meanings of Contemporaneity

This discussion follows Christoph Haffter’s critique and afterthoughts on the Festival Musikinstallationen Nürnberg alongside Terry Smith’s latest attempt to map the aesthetics of contemporaneity (read his introduction and ch. 1). This would be a combined opportunity to discuss not just the aesthetics and ethnographies of contemporary music and contemporary music festivals, but also to consider prospective shared aesthetic grounds with art historians of the contemporary, their methodologies and historiographies.

4-5 Q & A with Neue Vocalsolisten

July 5 (Goethe Institute, Tel Aviv), 10:30-5pm

10:30-11:30 Looking back; yesterday’s performances

11:30-12:00 Coffee break

12:00-1:30 Throwntogetherness

Taking our cue from Orvar Löfgren, the discussion will address the meshing of musical temporalities in contemporary music as well as the sedimentary dimension of these temporalities on our hearing of and writing about contemporary music. Participants are invited to bring examples of their choice to this theoretical framework, including examples concerning the ethnographies (and auto-ethnographies) of the contemporary

1:30:-2:30 Lunch break

2:30-4 The Voice in Modernism and Posthumanism

Based on Roland Barthes’ “The Grain of the Voice” and Jennifer Walshes “Ghosts of the Hidden Layer” we will discuss the varied significance of the voice as an embodied and political instrument in contemporary music of the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries.

4-5 Roundtable with Composer Alex Paxton

July 6 (Goethe Institute, Tel Aviv), 10:30-5pm

10:30-11:30 Looking back; yesterday’s performances

11:30-12:00 Coffee break

12:00-2:00 WORKSHOP; presentations by TM fellows I

Ed Cooper (Leeds University),

Sarit Shley-Zondienr (Hebrew University of Jerusalem),

Zola Rebecca (Columbia University),

Littler Sapphire (Leeds University),

1:30:-2:30 Lunch break

3-5 WORKSHOP; presentations by TM fellows II

Tuchynska Tetiana (Max Plank Institute for Empirical Aesthetics),

Ziv Slama (Hebrew University of Jerusalem),

Sikau Lea Luka (Cambridge University) | “Rehearsing Tempo”

Enmeshing Tempo with the festival Tzlil Meudcan (updated tone), I explore the times and datedness of new music. When referring to a musical work (20**), the date following the composition title usually refers to the date of composition or the first performance. What remains left out are the times of temporal negotiation – between performers and composers, schedules and spaces, instruments, and technologies. This article calls for an inclusion of the rehearsal process in the temporal narratives that new music tells via its dates. Music emerges from collaborative processes in compound temporalities, not from singular numbers or a singular author figure.

From dates to timespans, I use Tempo as a narrative platform to introduce temporal analysis as a framework for understanding the complex agential relations in the creation of new works. Enabling tones to be “updated” and music to be “new”, the rehearsal probes unheard-of sounds in scheduled times. From notated tempi to the histories of the material which orchestrates it, from the musician’s lifetime devoted to rehearsal over the time the composer invested for their drafts, from the deep time of metals used in computers, over the noumenal half-life period of plastics, to the timings of algorithms. The nesting of protean temporalities produces syncopations that relationally affect each other and turn new music into more-than-human times. This article specifically focuses on dynamics of schedules, material deep times and algorhythms (to use Shintaro Miyazaki’s term) in rehearsals of new music theater projects. I conceptualize rehearsals as structuring an in-between phase which produces a looping rhythm, while cutting apart new music’s datedness.

*All roundtables will be held in English