Martin Scherzinger

György Ligeti and the Aka Pygmies Project

At the turn of the twentieth century, György Ligetis late piano music was performed in various European concert halls alongside music of the Aka Pygmies of Central Africa. The acclaimed project culminated in a CD on the Teldec label entitled Ligeti/Reich: African Rhythms (Pierre Laurent Aimard/Aka Pygmies) featuring works by Ligeti, alongside works by Steve Reich and music of the Aka. This paper describes and evaluates the uneven critical reception of the project in relation to the precise formal connections between Ligetis etudes, on the one hand, and the music of the Aka, in particular, and African music, in general, on the other. It traces some of the African citations in Ligetis etudes to specific source materials, briefly describes the original function and context of the music (even if they are not demonstrably known by the composer), and assesses the ideological dimensions implicit in the way the African materials are put to use in a Western context.

Wagner Redux: Badiou on Music for the Future

Alain Badious book Five lessons on Wagner contests and revises the widespread critical reception of Richard Wagner. Badiou offers a counterpoint to 6 charges made against the composer: (1) Wagner created seductively sensual musical edifices; (2) Wagner indulges identitarian thought; (3) Wagner spectacularizes suffering; (4) Wagners musical forms contain differences in a false unity; (5) Wagner theatricalizes the drama; and (6) Wagners temporalities are underwritten by the latent telos of affirmative dialectics. Badiou argues against these charges point by point. Badiou then shifts attention away from plot structures and toward the musics formal protocols. For Badiou, musicalized transitions proffer vectors for transformation beyond the conceptual scope of plot meanings alone. The paper describes and evaluates Badious claims. Using Die Meistersinger as a central referent, the paper argues that Badiou unwittingly construes music as a signifying medium at argumentatively crucial junctures, which permits an equivocal case of Wagner to persist.

Music in Contemporary Philosophy

1. Introduction: On Sonotropism Martin Scherzinger 2. Vibrating Colors and Silent Bodies. Music, Sound and Silence in Maurice Merleau-Pontys Critique of Dualism Amy Cimini 3. Ernst Blochs Utopian Ton of Hope Michael Gallope 4. Awakening Dead Time: Adorno on Husserl, Benjamin, and the Temporality of Music Stephen Decatur Smith 5. Heideggers Ears: Hearing, Attunement, and the Acoustic Shaping of Being and Time Jennifer L. Heuson 6. Destination Unknown: Jean-Francois Lyotard and Orienting Musical Affect Trent Leipert 7. Jean-Luc Nancy and the Listening Subject Brian Kane 8. Slavoj Zizek: Responding from the Void Holly Watkins 9. Wagner Redux: Badiou on Music for the Future Martin Scherzinger 10. Rancieres Equal Music Jairo Moreno and Gavin Steingo 11. Another Music, A Time to Forget: Reflections on Edward Saids Late Style James Currie

Harmonic Fractals in the Music of the Lamellaphone

i. At stake in this article is a demonstration of the fractal-like logic undergirding harmonic processes found in the archaic lamellaphone music of Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Mozambique. Harmonic practices of African music are a largely neglected aspect of the intellectual discourse on Africa. Most ethnographic writing on the music of this region (no less than the African continent at large) limits its music-analytic findings to general observations, most notably to aspects of rhythm alone, often with a special interest in the music’s kinesthetic aspects. These include analyses of timelines and other asymmetric rhythmic patterns, polymeter and polyrhythm, pulse-based temporal structures, hocketing techniques, shifting metric groupings, etc., and their relation to performance practices (dance steps and the like). Of the technical approaches to African music, very few examine its non-rhythmic dimensions, such as pitch spaces or pitch processes—melody, harmony, counterpoint, and so on—and, of those that do, most remain within the limits of mere pitch or chord labeling, often hesitantly and provisionally, thereby apparently avoiding the false premises of Eurocentric assignation. There is almost no work on the relation between pitch processes and rhythm. The literature on African music is vast and varied, but the demonstrably overarching preoccupation with rhythmic complexities of this sort simultaneously traduces a kind of default perspective (or commonplace—what Kofi Agawu would call a “topos”) that contains African cultural practice within a zone of excluded cultural conformity.2 The relation of such a widespread default perspective to ideologies of cultural difference across geopolitical zones of economic disparity is a matter of urgent investigation. While global geopolitics will not be explicitly examined here, the analytic inquiry to follow is premised on vigilance toward, and resistance to, this kind of commonsensical ideological relation. Hence, this analysis deflects attention from rhythmic practices in an African music and toward its harmonic processes, in particular its fractal-like geometries. Nonetheless, much is assumed, and hence provisional, in depicting mathematical ideas expressed in music. I will mention only three starkly reductive assumptions. First, the analysis largely bypasses ethnographic evidence. Apart from occasional pronouncements by mbira and matepe players about the omnidirectionality of the music they play—its movements both “forward and backward,” “in every direction [...] like the ocean,” and so on—there is a dearth of indigenous terminology for the kinds of invertible geometric properties outlined below.3 Some mbira specialists even claim that the vast majority of traditional Shona musicians “do not talk about [the music] much, or even at all.”4 Leaving aside this kind of ethnographic observation, it is unlikely that music can be reduced to a linguistically bound conduit for contextually determined meanings alone. This is probably especially true for music that transcends the everyday, such as the music of the matepe and the mbira, which is identified with spirit possession. harmonic Fractals in thE music oF thE lamEllaPhonE1