Composing ‘Narrative Dissolution’: Framing Subjectivity in Music Composition

This thesis discusses my exploration of a musical language in which the performer’s and audience’s subjectivity plays a key part in the formation of a composition’s core meaning. Following an introductory chapter elaborating on a constellation of concepts surrounding the Japanese aesthetics of ma, the chapters correspond to three phases of research. The first phase considers strategized ideas of silence, the relations of determinacy-indeterminacy, and spatio-temporal architecture examined in the Lizard series within a framework informed by the ma concept. In the second phase with the Skin, Gelatine, Soot cycle, I use paradoxical states, such as sounds-silence and elements of indeterminacy to extend concepts of an architecture of presence and absence into a more complex polyphony of lines. This chapter also describes how the theatricalization of the performer’s body and their vocalisation are used to challenge linear thought. In the final chapter with One Arm series, I discuss ventriloquism effects between the performer and their performance as a means to bring an interplay of paradoxical sensibility onto the stage. Shifting performative modes between a kind of first and third-person stance result in a slippage or interstice in which the performer might ‘communicate’ with him or herself. In conclusion, I summarize my quest for certain qualities of aesthetic experience and where this might lead me musically and aesthetically in addition to giving a perspective on how my viewpoints on ‘culture’ and ‘identity’ have been established and transformed.