Samuel Wilson
Please see https://www.samueljwilson.com/ as I am not longer updating my Academia.edu page.
I am the Lecturer in Critical Performance Theory at London Contemporary Dance School and Tutor in Music Philosophy and Aesthetics at Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
I am the Lecturer in Critical Performance Theory at London Contemporary Dance School and Tutor in Music Philosophy and Aesthetics at Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
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Drawing on musicology, cultural theory, and philosophy, the author develops a critical understanding of musical bodies, objects, and the environments of their interaction. Music is grasped as something that both registers material changes in society whilst also enabling us to practice materiality differently.
A distinct if diverse musical research area has begun to emerge in recent years. While there is enough common ground to define it as a research field, its objects and themes are not yet delineated, its methodologies are divergent and multi-disciplinary, and its key players dispersed over many areas. These developments and their critical discursive exchanges contribute to the emergence—and contestation—of materialist approaches to music. This area in music research currently takes the shape of an intellectual and creative meeting point, an interest shared by music and sound researchers of differing backgrounds. One can trace in contemporary musical materialisms various genealogies arising from theoretical traditions—prominently including Marxian, Deleuzian, Spinozan, and feminist and queer theoretical perspectives—as well as from contributors working within historical musicology, compositional and performance practice-research, popular music studies, ethnomusicology, and beyond.
Articles
E-print accessible here: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/4crd5cUFMaTXx6pZhUzR/full
Book chapters
The symphony has historically provided a space in which the dialectics of nature and culture are explored (Beethoven, Mahler). Georg Simmel saw the ruin as destabilising established dialectics of nature and culture. One finds an analogous process of destabilising occurring in Silvestrov’s monumental symphonic ruin, a process that unfolds in light of these musical and philosophical legacies.
In formal terms, the architecture of symphonic form appears as a ruin in Silvestrov’s Symphony; the symphonic space is characterised by collapse. This is evidenced through analytic examples. In historical, heterogeneous terms, this Symphony explores the past as both present (presence) and absent. Silvestrov’s Symphony recalls symphonic spaces no longer habitable for an expressive subject. These symphonic ruins nonetheless bear traces of this now-passed expressive function. This chapter therefore provides a reading of the late twentieth-century symphony through an aesthetics of ruins.
Citation: Samuel Wilson, 'Valentin Silvestrov and the Symphonic Monument in Ruins', in Transformations of Musical Modernism, ed. Erling E. Guldbrandsen and Julian Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 201-220.
Ph.D. Dissertation
Papers
The conference website can be found at londoncritical.org
Call for Papers
Deadline: Monday 16th March 2015
Authored by the LCCT collective and respective stream organisers.
Drawing on musicology, cultural theory, and philosophy, the author develops a critical understanding of musical bodies, objects, and the environments of their interaction. Music is grasped as something that both registers material changes in society whilst also enabling us to practice materiality differently.
A distinct if diverse musical research area has begun to emerge in recent years. While there is enough common ground to define it as a research field, its objects and themes are not yet delineated, its methodologies are divergent and multi-disciplinary, and its key players dispersed over many areas. These developments and their critical discursive exchanges contribute to the emergence—and contestation—of materialist approaches to music. This area in music research currently takes the shape of an intellectual and creative meeting point, an interest shared by music and sound researchers of differing backgrounds. One can trace in contemporary musical materialisms various genealogies arising from theoretical traditions—prominently including Marxian, Deleuzian, Spinozan, and feminist and queer theoretical perspectives—as well as from contributors working within historical musicology, compositional and performance practice-research, popular music studies, ethnomusicology, and beyond.
E-print accessible here: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/4crd5cUFMaTXx6pZhUzR/full
The symphony has historically provided a space in which the dialectics of nature and culture are explored (Beethoven, Mahler). Georg Simmel saw the ruin as destabilising established dialectics of nature and culture. One finds an analogous process of destabilising occurring in Silvestrov’s monumental symphonic ruin, a process that unfolds in light of these musical and philosophical legacies.
In formal terms, the architecture of symphonic form appears as a ruin in Silvestrov’s Symphony; the symphonic space is characterised by collapse. This is evidenced through analytic examples. In historical, heterogeneous terms, this Symphony explores the past as both present (presence) and absent. Silvestrov’s Symphony recalls symphonic spaces no longer habitable for an expressive subject. These symphonic ruins nonetheless bear traces of this now-passed expressive function. This chapter therefore provides a reading of the late twentieth-century symphony through an aesthetics of ruins.
Citation: Samuel Wilson, 'Valentin Silvestrov and the Symphonic Monument in Ruins', in Transformations of Musical Modernism, ed. Erling E. Guldbrandsen and Julian Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 201-220.
The conference website can be found at londoncritical.org
Deadline: Monday 16th March 2015
Authored by the LCCT collective and respective stream organisers.