Tuvan art invokes a particular construction of 'nature' (and of an experience of nature) as a tot... more Tuvan art invokes a particular construction of 'nature' (and of an experience of nature) as a total cosmos embracing both 'this' and 'other' worlds. The concept of küsh bridges the boundary between art and shamanism, but does not abolish it. Both art and shamanism set in motion a movement of the imagination that extends beyond everyday modes of representation. They diverge, finally, in three ways: first, by the degree to which occasion is determinative: second, by the direction of movement between material and imaginary planes (being there/ being away with the spirits): third, by the specific role given to the shaman in relation to the imagined.
Mysticism appears in music either as musical content or as an intervention into the process of mu... more Mysticism appears in music either as musical content or as an intervention into the process of music-making. This article discusses the latter in terms of the experience of the improvising musicians Tim Hodgkinson and Ken Hyder. During their search for a method of improvising without ...
NOTES ON SUBJECTIVATION, CAVE ART, & WHY WE HAVE EXPERIENCES, 2020
The question I'm addressing in these short notes is whether the concept of subjectivation 1can f... more The question I'm addressing in these short notes is whether the concept of subjectivation 1can fruitfully be applied to the quite sudden emergence of a new pictorial culture in the cave art of the upper palaeolithic. This will involve speculating about human mental evolution – and will eventually lead to a more general discussion about the nature of subjective experience.
I begin with a kind of disclaimer: there is nothing new in this essay. Ideas have an enormously e... more I begin with a kind of disclaimer: there is nothing new in this essay. Ideas have an enormously elastic relation to temporal succession. Take the article that I wrote in 1983 that stole ideas developed perhaps thirty years before that: those ideas had brought together a new diagrammatic vision of the world with the mythical systems of Amazonian societies that had no temporal alignment with our own histories or calendars. Now, in 2018, I am stealing from Gilbert Simondon, who worked more or less at the same time as Lévi-Strauss, but whose thinking grew from an engagement with the Presocratic philosophy of Thales. Free collective improvisation of music also emerged in the 1950's. Like all forms of aesthetic thought, it makes important transductive connections across different orders of organisation and different scales of measurement of space-time. In music the different orders are, most importantly, the order of simultaneity and the order of succession: the differences of scale embrace everything from evolutionary time, through individual ontogenesis and lifespan , down to the minute temporal intervals in which we discern the starting transients of a single sound. Improvisation disdains, of course, the claim to immortality enshrined in even the most transient of written texts. It also un-fixes and renders as a variable the integration of players into pre-structured groups and in so doing makes the relationship between player and group central to its handling of the order of simultaneity. This makes it a unique cultural weapon in the struggle to bring into relation with itself the matter of existence for a simultaneously biological, psychological and social being.
Examines the work of composer Iancu Dumitrescu in terms of the politics, ideology, and practice o... more Examines the work of composer Iancu Dumitrescu in terms of the politics, ideology, and practice of spectral music. Discusses Dumitrescu's phenomenological method. Originally published in "COSMIC ORGASM: The Music of Iancu Dumitrescu", UnKant, 2013, ed. Andy Wilson.
Tuvan art invokes a particular construction of 'nature' (and of an experience of nature) as a tot... more Tuvan art invokes a particular construction of 'nature' (and of an experience of nature) as a total cosmos embracing both 'this' and 'other' worlds. The concept of küsh bridges the boundary between art and shamanism, but does not abolish it. Both art and shamanism set in motion a movement of the imagination that extends beyond everyday modes of representation. They diverge, finally, in three ways: first, by the degree to which occasion is determinative: second, by the direction of movement between material and imaginary planes (being there/ being away with the spirits): third, by the specific role given to the shaman in relation to the imagined.
Begin at the other end. Begin with the physics of sound, the old ear and the old physics. Play a ... more Begin at the other end. Begin with the physics of sound, the old ear and the old physics. Play a clarinet: tongue stopping the reed briefly, lungs pushing up air pressure this side of it, then the tongue's sudden flip downwards off the reed releases a burst of energy, and the reed crash-starts into motion. Held by ligatures, the reed moves only vertically. Restoring forces would simply return this disturbed object to its former restful state, but the reed's inertia first delays this return, then exaggerates it. Elastic, the reed bends backwards and forwards, passing repeatedly through its equilibrium point, vibrating with constant frequency and decreasing amplitude. Attached however, it communicates its disturbance to the pipe of the clarinet, an almost one-dimensional cavity that itself begins to resonate and to pass its own vibration back to the reed.
This paper outlines from a personal perspective our work on music and shamanism in Siberia from 1... more This paper outlines from a personal perspective our work on music and shamanism in Siberia from 1990 onwards, starting out from our first preconceptions of what shamans were doing, our early encounters with a wider shamanic culture that seemed to provide a source for artistic inspiration, and leading, through a deeper and more long-term engagement, to the development of artistic, organisational and research-orientated projects.
Mysticism appears in music either as musical content or as an intervention into the process of mu... more Mysticism appears in music either as musical content or as an intervention into the process of music-making. This article discusses the latter in terms of the experience of the improvising musicians Tim Hodgkinson and Ken Hyder. During their search for a method of improvising without ...
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