“What Can Be Learned to Be Observed”: Technical and Theoretical Reflections on the Clarke Distributions

Zucker, Benjamin Bartels

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-mxm0-6s28

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“What Can Be Learned to Be Observed”: Technical and Theoretical Reflections on the Clarke Distributions

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This dissertation is an in-depth exploration of Clarke Distributions (for 10), an original musical composition based on the use of text to establish interrelational listening and performance patterns between performers, in place of any fixed musical material. Inspired by research into improvisation, cognition, aesthetics, and linguistics, these patterns manifest as acts of applied attention and “real-time category formation,” based on a combination of the score’s linguistic features and the unique capabilities of its performers. In order to assess the work’s “success” in terms of generating novel musical interactions with a salient connection to the score’s instructions, two distinct realizations of the piece are analyzed, combining narrative accounts, performer interviews, and waveform analysis. The challenges of performing the work point towards the nuances of individual and shared sensibilities when encountering works of indeterminate music. Drawing on theories by Nelson Goodman, George Lakoff, Ludwig Wittgenstein, I propose that such works can operate on our broader frameworks for sense-making as particular objects: highly flexible yet still singular “containers” of rules and concepts whose legibility through specific modes of metaphorical transfer propels a creative yet methodological process of reworking our experience of our worlds. Through the practice of intentional manipulation of sensible categories, of which Clarke Distributions is used here as an exemplary case, I posit the importance of musical indeterminacy as a unique means of knowledge creation.

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