Intonations (Journal)
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Editorial Preface
Get PDFOn behalf of the Editorial team, welcome to the inaugural issue of Intonations, a journal of interdisciplinary arts. Previously affiliated solely with the Department of Music, in 2019 Intonations expanded to include the Departments of Art and Design, and Drama. It was at that time that three new Editors-in-Chief, one from each department, were appointed. The first year was a time for redefinition as we came together from across academic silos to forge a new identity for the journal. Our mandate is to promote multidisciplinary/transdisciplinary collaboration and to encourage dialogue between different modes of scholarly, artistic, disciplinary, and professional engagement. Intonations focuses on the convergences of theory and artistic practice in various domains of the fine arts, as well as intersections with the humanities, sciences, and beyond. Our goal is to support the work of current scholars and creative practitioners by generating dialogue and innovative thinking, both locally and internationally.
Our first Call for Papers was released in early-January 2020, and now just over a year later, we are very excited to share our first full issue which includes three articles in response to our call, “We Other Fairies”, “Saskatoon Berries”, and “Having Walked Alongside”, which have been bundled with two previously published articles submitted prior to the merge: “Blipvert Method” and “Sinfonia de Babel”. With this evolutionary process in mind, we are now proud to share this body of work. Written by graduate students and practicing artists, the articles in this issue are wide ranging in scope and style while still tethered through several points of intersection.
2020 was not an easy year. However, the difficulties of living through a global pandemic have also led to new and exciting forms of research and reassessment. Authors Xavia Publius in “We Other Fairies” and Tyler Stewart and Miguelzinta Solís in “Having Walked Alongside” both address the global pandemic by drawing attention to the challenges of not being able to gather together. In Publius’s case, this has necessitated a turn to diary-writing and greater self-reflection. For Stewart and Solís, social distancing from close friends gave way to scholarly collaboration and an experimental audio project that engaged with distance communication, landscape, and decolonial theories.
For many, greater engagement with space and place has been a necessary outcome of the pandemic. In both the audio project of Stewart and Solís and the writing of Kufre Usanga “Saskatoon Berries”, we follow the footsteps of the authors as they traverse their lived experience through land. Between two valleys and spanning two Alberta rivers, the North Saskatchewan and the Oldman, these articles perform “place-thinking” (Usanga) through the intersection of embodied knowledge, Indigenous teachings, and personal reflection. Similarly, in “We Other Fairies”, Publius seeks to decentre patriarchal and heteronormative spaces through her exploration of theatre and film as a site for the proliferation and celebration of queer voices: the “Others” that have so frequently been elided from theatre and other forms of cultural production. For Publius, theatre represents a space for the carnivalesque – where norms and mores are suspended, and queer characters are free to assert themselves, for however temporary a time, “oscillating between liminal and liminoid spaces” (Publius).
An important aspect of this issue is the inclusion of extra-textual and multimedia elements. Stewart and Solís’s contribution takes the form of an hour-long recorded dialogue, mediated by an engaging walk through the weirs, gullies, and coulees of Lethbridge’s Old Man River Valley. Using both textual and multimedia platforms, William Northlich and Nicolas Arnáez each lead the reader through multiple levels of unity and/or integration between musical, sonic, visual, and textual elements. Their textual components are accompanied by audio and visual elements which enrich the reading experience and, in fact, are necessary for understanding the text. Arnáez’s “La Sinfonia de Babel” demonstrates how musical citation and an imaginary sound archive add parameters to the experience of a sonic library based on a creative approach toward citation from musical and literary perspectives. Northlich’s “Blipvert Method” provides a structural and performative analysis of his electronic music composition through which the virtual sound, improvisatory character, and body movements sit in a musical collage.
At the same time that Western and Settler hegemony are being questioned within the pages of this issue, so too is the attendant dominance of the visual. These articles open space for oral, aural, tactile, imaginative, and emotional forms of knowledge and experience. Shared amongst the disciplines of the Fine Arts is this emphasis on praxis and embodied experiences which are qualities that cannot be universalised, and which must be specified and expressed at a personal level. Therefore, whether through the form of diary, personal essay, artist’s statement, multimodal analysis/description, or mediated dialogue, the articles that make up Volume 1, Issue 1 of Intonations are profoundly reflective and meditative. They invite us to slow down, engage with ourselves, our communities, and the natural world around us. In a year that has become increasingly difficult as time goes on, the authors, researchers, and practitioners published here offer not only new perspectives on the world, but alternative ways of being and existing in the world
“Having Walked Alongside You”: A Conversational Exchange on Territory and Sound in Motion
Get PDFAs two artist-scholars engaged in research-creation, our goal with this project was to enact a performance/discussion regarding settler-colonialism, sound, performance, and our relationships to land, body and time. During the initial “lockdown phase” of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, we carried out a mediated conversation via WhatsApp voice memos, hiking towards each other along and across the Oldman River, then retracing the other’s path back to our respective points of origin.
This collaborative project aims to decolonize the academic paper through a process which combines textual analysis, experiential learning, improvisational performance, and activated writing to ask questions of the relationships between sound, land, and colonial institutions. How does movement through space, and hearing the land, affect our experience of discussing texts? How is discussion informed by, say, the participants being separated (or connected) by a river? What richness exists in oral/aural exchanges that are lost in the textualizing process? What does it mean to move through occupied Blackfoot territory while discussing decolonialism?
The structure of this conversational exchange unfolds in loops rather than in the linear standard of academic writing. This “essay” was originally devised as an audiovisual text, but during further revisions, we continued our experimentations with form. The result has taken shape in dual outputs of both sound and text, each form containing affective and sensorial elements not found in the other, creating parallel yet distinct “texts.” While this is an imperfect strategy for those who experience sight/hearing related disabilities, we also recognize that some sensorial experiences are untranslatable into the language of the other senses. We hope that we have encoded each experience of sound and text with enough richness for them to be enjoyed individually, and we invite those who can, to experience how the two forms play off of each other.
To this effect, the form of this text focuses on the relationship between the content of our conversation and how it is presented, and between our conversation and the writers, artists and movements we have referenced. We also hope to emphasize our relationality with the land we walked through, the creators of the sounds we listened to, between us, the co-creators of this “text,” as well as the relationship we create with you, the listener/reader experiencing it. As artists/writers/curators, it is a challenge to find alternative textual formats that appropriately reflect artistic research-creation methodologies while also satisfying the demands of academic knowledge dissemination. This collaboration explores the possibility for academic conversations to escape the confines of learning institutions into a space of praxis and embodied experience in motion
We Other Fairies
Get PDFThe ontology of characters onstage has long been a concern of performance theory, but the stakes of this hauntological question for the characters themselves is rarely addressed. How and why do queer beings both corporeal and ethereal inhabit the stage, and how do they communicate with us (and each other)? In the metatextual context of a general exam, as my writing style wanders between poetry and prose, research and reflection, I diarize my journey through this question and the ways ritual, performativity, and the carnivalesque function to bring forth these spirits onto our plane. I play off of Michel Foucault’s musings on “other Victorians” to demonstrate how plays such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Zanna, Don’t!; Shakespeare’s R&J, Three Mysterious Women; and Lenin’s Embalmers illustrate the queer politics of memory, performance, and affect. The theatrical memory machine restages queer genealogy in ways that traditional methods of memorialization in Western culture do not. Furthermore, the thin veil between realities during these performances allows queer utopic visions that entice performers, audiences, and characters alike
The BlipVert Method: Consonance at the Intersection of Composition and Performance
Get PDFThe confluence of composition and performance is a compelling phenomenon which confronts many 21st century electronic music artists, brought about primarily through an independent “DiY” ethos to creativity and the ubiquity of advanced musical, and non-musical, technology. Techniques of software programming, improvisation, reconstitution of electric and acoustic instruments, sampling, and manipulation of audio in a live setting (to name a few) may all find a place in an artist’s methodology regardless of style. It may be even be said that the techniques employed by an artist delineate the style itself, e.g. “controllerism,” “turntablism,” “live PA,” etc. The following paper offers an in-depth structural analysis of the composition and performance fundamentals of BlipVert, a pseudonym under which I have been presenting electronic music to the general public for almost two decades. The BlipVert composition “New Choomish,” from BlipVert’s 2010 release “Quantumbuster Now” (Eat Concrete Records, NL), is examined as a construct which manifests an expressive faculty in both live and studio environments, consequently demonstrating a profoundly synthesized framework of sonic and gestural principles.
Keywords: composition, performance, improvisation, movement, building-blocks, Northlich, BlipVert, New Choomis
La Sinfonía de Babel [Babel’s Symphony]
Get PDFoai:ojs3sbx_intonat:article/20At its core, the practice of creating sound installations as sonic art involves presenting and manipulating audio in a gallery-like setting. In the case of "La Sinfonía de Babel" the usage of pre-existing musical and literary phrases, or "quoting," formulates the substantive basis for a non-interactive quadraphonic piece that challenges preconceptions of appropriation, citation, and plagiarism where it concerns composition. Inspired by the works “Sinfonia” by Italian composer Luiciano Berio, and “La Biblioteca de Babel” by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, "La Sinfonía de Babel" recontextualizes conventional ideas of musical narratives by combining and indeterminately presenting excerpts of six hundred and forty looped musical works from different time periods, thus generating a thick and immersive cluster of audio. Within this milieu, auditors are invited to sit and read Borges’ text whilst simulataneously identifying musical familiarities within the cluster, hence experiencing quoting on a multi-dimensional level. This paper offers a methodological and aesthetic overview of Berio and Borges\u27 works, focusing specifically on how citation is approached from musical and literary perspectives. Furthermore, structural and technical methodologies are analyzed as a means of better understanding the overarching creative process
When Revolution Conflicts with Resolution: A Contemporary Issue Based on the Revisit of a Modern Compositional Approach
Get PDFResponding to a common feature in atonal music— the lack of consistent sound organization, Charles Seeger pioneered a pre-compositional method, called dissonant counterpoint (1913). In Seeger’s method, all consonances must be prepared and resolved by dissonances. To distinguish the quality of each interval, Seeger categorizes all intervals into consonances or dissonances. However, within this categorization, he intentionally leaves the tritone undefined. Problematically, if the tritone is defined neither a consonance nor a dissonance, its use in a chord will also affect the quality of the corresponding harmony, making that harmony essentially indeterminate as well. It is puzzling that if Seeger’s dissonant counterpoint carries such an inherent problem, how would composers put this problematic pre-compositional theory into practice? Do their derived compositions project a similar image, preserving this problem and presenting a succession of chords with ambiguous harmonic qualities? Or, perhaps, in these compositions, we may find an alternative solution, which can be further adopted to solve the problem as described above? Using a dissonant contrapuntal string quartet by Ruth Crawford as a case study, my analysis shows that it is difficult to consistently describe the harmonic qualities of all the chords that are used.Testing the limits of Seeger’s method and also seeking ways to consistently describe the chords in Crawford’s composition, I develop a harmonic measurement that further refines Seeger’s method. With this new measurement, my analysis reveals relevant harmonic progressions, ones that, I believe, solve the problem inherent in Seeger’s dissonant counterpoint, and explain Crawford’s practical application of this method
Unsung Heroes? A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Lip-Syncing in American and Indian Film
Get PDFThroughout the history of Hollywood, actors and actresses have resorted to voice-dubbing in the films in which they have had singing numbers. However, in American music performance practices, especially in the popular music and film industries, lip-syncing is often criticized, leading to debate over the technique. In comparison, Bollywood films also feature voice-dubbing and although there is hostility towards this technique in Hollywood it is perfectly acceptable in the Indian film industry. The majority of Bollywood films feature singing, and in all, it is the role of the voice-dubbers, also known as playback singers, to provide voices for the film stars. In addition, many of Bollywood’s playback singers have become as popular as the actors and actresses for whom they sing. Much of the reason for this stark difference in acceptance of voice-dubbers is found in the differentiating ideologies of authenticity surrounding the use of lip-syncing. In North America, listeners expect perfection in the performances, yet are disappointed when discovering that there are elements of inauthenticity in them. Yet in India, both film producers and audiences have accepted the need for the talents of multiple people to become involved in the film production. In this paper, I will first discuss ideologies surrounding musical authenticity then compare how these discourses have shaped and influenced the acceptance or rejection of voice-dubbers in Hollywood and Bollywood films
A Study in Violin Pedagogy: Teaching Techniques from Selected Works by Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Bartók, and Delerue
Get PDFThis article is an outline and analysis of a few specific methods of composition used by the composers Sergei Rachmaninoff, Sergei Prokofiev, Béla Bartók, and Georges Delerue for the purpose of reproducing the styles and techniques for an intermediate level violinist. This will be accomplished by gathering information concerning each composer and their style and then reproducing that style in an original composition at the intermediate level. Each composer will be dealt with in a section divided into several parts: relevant biographical and historical information, stylistic analysis, and methods employed to incorporate these stylistic characteristics into the intermediate level composition