'Nothing Really Changes': Musical Processes in and as Time in ingenga and Related Works / Whose Liberation? Iranian Popular Music and the Fetishisation of Resistance'

Location
The Dome, Bramall Music Building
Dates
Wednesday 28 February 2018 (12:00-14:00)
redhead-lauren-315
Lauren Redhead
  • Music Colloquium series 2017-2018

Speakers: A double session with Lauren Redhead (Canterbury Christ Church University) and Lauden Nooshin (City University)

Venue: The Dome, Bramall Music Building (3rd Floor)

All Students and Staff are welcome to attend. Attendance is required for all MA Music Students.

Abstracts

'Nothing Really Changes': Musical Processes in and as Time in ingenga and Related Works - Lauren Redhead

My practice research in composition examines processes that treat time and space as a concurrent and singular material to be experienced and manipulated during both the composition and performance of a work. This approach builds on Nicholas Bourriaud’s (2010) conception of the work as a ‘journey form’ (pp106-131) and the artist as a ‘semionaut’ (p.103). Bourriaud writes that ‘[t]his spontaneous conception of space-time […] has its sources in a nomadic imaginary universe that envisages forms in motion and in relation to other forms’, (2010, p.117). This approach viatorizes forms (p.184). My enactment of these concepts in my compositional practice encompasses the notation, materials, processes and performance practices of my music. In particular, multiple temporal layers are negotiated through anti-aesthetic spatial-temporal processes enacted as notation, editing procedures within a DAW, and indeterminate performance situations.

This presentation explores these processes in the piece ingenga for viola da gamba, fixed media sound and video, and in related works (leoþwide and glíwmæden) for organ and electronics. These pieces share materials that have been inspired by Anglo Saxon art and language. As such they not only explore musical time through the compositional processes mentioned above, but issues of ‘pastness’ and ‘presentness’ in sound and notation. These processes and issues are considered as expressions of what Kramer (1981) describes as ‘internal temporal processes’ (p.544) and of MacTaggart’s (1993) exploration of the ‘unreality’ of time. Within these works, I conclude—as does MacTaggart—that, ‘[n]othing is really present, past, or future. Nothing is really earlier or later than anything else or temporarily simultaneous with it. Nothing really changes’ (p.34). Thus, the processual approach to time demonstrated in ingenga opens up the possibility of exploring time as a material rather than the medium in which the music takes place

Whose Liberation? Iranian Popular Music and the Fetishisation of Resistance' - Lauden Nooshin

In November 2013, Pharrell Williams’ song ‘Happy’, originally written for the soundtrack to ‘Despicable Me 2’, was re-released as a single together with a music video billed as ‘the world’s first 24-hour music video’. Comprising images of people in Los Angeles dancing and miming along to the song, the video was posted on the website 24hoursofhappy.com. Soon after, tribute videos started appearing online and within a short period ‘Happy’ went viral with videos of happy, dancing people from all over the world.

Wanting to be part of this global phenomenon, in the spring of 2014 a group of young Tehranis made their own video and posted it on youtube. Many aspects of ‘Happy in Tehran’ - including the public expression of joy, dancing in public, and women without head covering - challenged local cultural and legal boundaries on behaviour in public space. The young people were arrested, prompting an outcry, both within Iran and internationally; they were released soon after and eventually received suspended sentences in September 2014.

This talk will focus on the case of ‘Happy in Tehran’ and what it reveals of the representation of Iranian popular music outside Iran, and specifically the somewhat romanticized discourses of ‘resistance’ and ‘freedom’ which have tended to characterise both journalistic and scholarly writings in this area. I consider the ways in which the ‘Happy in Tehran’ incident was reported in the media outside Iran and offer alternative readings of the video and its meanings. The paper considers how such reductionist views feed into wider regimes of orientalist representation and ultimately asks whose agenda such fetishisation of resistance serves.