1.Understanding Music through Modern Technology 

d) The Composition and Its Role in the Ensemble

What is a composition and what role does it play in the music ensemble? A composition is not merely a score explaining the outlines of the performed music. Indeed, we often sing, play or hum melodies that are not even based on a score and yet these also count as compositions. How do we explain the genesis of such an apparently abstract structure? This question is even more problematic when we consider the fuzzy boundaries between interpretation and composing: How much can an existing melody be altered before it is an entirely different composition? The composition constitutes the ‘rules of conduct’ for the musicians but if the very same musicians are at the same time making or radically changing these rules, it seems we are dealing with a circular process. This philosophical project attempts to describe this process in terms of epistemic logic, a branch of logic that aims at formalising arguments containing statements about the knowledge or belief agents may have of a given piece of information. The adequacy of this method will be seen when one considers the composition as common knowledge in the ensemble: something that everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows etc. and therefore coordinates the actions of each musician. The relevance of analyzing the composition and its interaction in ensemble playing to the area of Computer Music Modelling and Information Retrieval should be apparent: to be able to identify a given work of music, one must be able to identify its boundaries, and to create serious virtual accompanists one must also here be able to define how one can ‘move’ within the composition as a set of rules.

Completed work:

The PhD dissertation Playing by the Rules? A Philosophical Approach to Normativity and Coordination in Music Performance was successfully defended by SRFM at The University of Southern Denmark on October 7, 2010.

Committee:

Institute for the Study of Culture Institut for Kulturvidenskaber (IKV)   Research Director for The Aesthetics of Music and Sound and Editor and Webmaster for www.soundmusicresearch.org: Cynthia M. Grund cmgrund@sdu.dk     Projects   (For descriptions, please click on the tabs at the top of the page.)   1.Understanding Music through Modern Technology a) Recognizing Music b) Recognition of Expressive Styles in Music Performance c) Autonomous Agents – An Accompanist in VR d) The Composition and Its Role in the Ensemble 2. Intermediality a) Intermediality b) Lyric and Meaning in Music c) Towards an Aesthetic Theory of Correlativity d) Are Treatments of the Metaphysics of Music in Medieval Literature Relevant for Current Theories of Musical Meaning and Significance? 3. Learning through Music a) Music Communication b) Children's Knowledge Creation with Intelligent Agents in Music Education - Understanding for Optimizing Motivations c) Adaptable Interfaces & Augmented Avatar - Introducing Tools for the Disabled and Musicians in VR d) Community Singing and/or Ideology e) Creating Creativity f) Understanding Musical Creativity and Aesthetics in a Digital-Based Youth Cultural Context g) The Sound of Movement - the Sound of Learning 4. Practice-based Research a) Analysis and Implementation of Practice-Based Research b) Relationship of Gesture to Communicative Authenticity in Performance c) Musical Implications of the Work of Selected Philosophers d) Employing the Methods of Discourse Narrative to Support Interpretive Choices Faced by the Practicing Musician e) Soundmapping the Genes f) A Program of Practice-based Research Designed to Examine Listener Reaction to Olivier Messiaens Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jesus g) The Interrelationship of Notation and Performance h) Technological and Aesthetic Investigations of the Physical Movements of Pianists 5. Selective Bibliography