School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University

Music, Culture and Society: Lawrence Harvey Auditory City: Realising an Auditory Spatial Awareness Lawrence Harvey The role of the electroacoustic music studio and associated domains of practice have significantly transformed in recent years. Institutional studios were originally necessary to aggregate expensive equipment for a small body of expert users to undertake research in musical, technical and perceptual topics. However the democratisation of technology and widely available technical information has forced a shift in the focus of such sites of auditory production. The SIAL Sound Studios were established in 2004 in RMIT University’s School of Architecture and Design. As the Studios are located in a school of spatial studies and not a traditional music or media arts school the research, teaching and cultural agenda pursued in the Studios has been developed to address a unique set of cultural, spatial and musical concerns. Research in the Studios is primarily situated in three domains: urban soundscape research and design, spatial sound concerts and acoustic design. This paper will report on a series of public performances and new work in urban-based electroacoustic performances and installations that addresses two of these domains. In 2007 the Studios produced Auditory City, a pilot series of three events for the Arts and Culture Branch of the City of Melbourne. The aim of the series was to present a free series of spatial music concerts in the city using diverse locations: the local town hall and grand-organ, a laneway and a multi-channel soundscape system. Each of the performances used components of the Studios’ 40 speaker sound diffusion system and software, and involved collaboration with a solo performer. Extending this project is current practice-based research into large-scale urban soundscape systems for electroacoustic sound design. The paper considers the place of sound design in the experience of urban spaces and proposes how this type of work exemplifies the new cultural role that a studio can play in the auditory life of a city and its inhabitants.

Music, Culture and Society: Michael Bull Sounding Out Cosmopolitanism: iPod Culture and Recognition Michael Bull (Sussex) In this lecture I argue that iPod culture represents the antithesis of the ideal of the cosmopolitan citizen inscribed in Western culture, that cosmopolitanism increasingly resides in the content of users iPods. That users increasingly turn away from the complexities and contingencies of urban everyday life. iPod culture signifies the development of a new listening self that calibrates the personal use of sound to the desire of the user – iPod culture represents a culture in which individuals increasingly micro-manage their experience. The lecture will discuss the social ramifications of what I refer to as a hyper-post-fordist appropriation of social space. Michael Bull is Reader in Media and Film at the University of Sussex and has written widely on sound, music and technology. He is the author of Sounding Out the City. Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life (Berg 2000), Sound Moves:iPod Culture and Urban Experience (Routledge 2007) and is co-editor of The Auditory Culture Reader (Berg 2003). He is also the founding editor of The Senses and Society Journal published by Berg. He was until recently a consultant to Portalplayer, California and is a core member of New Trends Forum, a European Thinktank funded by Bankinter, Spain.

Music, Culture and Society: Eduardo de la Fuente That Other Modern Musical Persona: John Cage and the Minimal Self Eduardo de la Fuente This paper is derived from a larger research project on twentieth century music/musicians that uses that musical tradition to think about dynamics in modern culture. In this paper, I draw on Christopher Lasch’s notion of the ‘minimal self’ to think about the compositional aesthetic of John Cage. Lasch argues that Cage, and his creative partner Merce Cunningham, were at the forefront of a post-1950 development in avant-garde art he terms the ‘minimal self’. The minimal self rejects the need for ‘self assertion’ associated both with Romantic expressivism and the rational control of aesthetic materials (for e.g., serialism in music). The aesthetic outlook in question cultivates a creative personality based around the themes of self-effacement and impersonality. Lasch sees the minimal self as stemming from a fundamental anxiety in modern culture regarding the self and its relationship to the non-self, with Cage’s ‘tossing of coins, consulting the I Ching and using a stopwatch to time performances’ reflecting a rejection of the aesthetics of ‘tension and release’ for that of ‘psychic oneness’. Lasch’s assessment is decidedly neo-Freudian. He describes the Cagean aesthetic project as a form of narcissism that seeks that ‘blissful feeling of oceanic peace’ that comes from re-fusion with the world at large. He suggests something similar occurs in New Age therapies and forms of spirituality that ‘seek the shortest road to Nirvana’. My own analysis of Cage’s musical aesthetic begins with a consideration of his work, Indeterminacy, presented with David Tudor at the Brussels World Fair of 1958. I argue that Lasch is only partly correct in his depiction of Cage as the example par excellence of the composer as minimal self. I suggest the following additional considerations: firstly, that characterizing Cage as the purveyor of an aesthetic based ‘on the shortest road to Nirvana’ ignores the deep-seated asceticism and vocational impulse that underlies his approach to merging music with life; and, secondly, that the ‘cult of impersonality’, which Cage could be said to be emblematic of, is itself a product of modern culture’s obsession with an aestheticized self. Drawing on Max Weber’s typology of ‘religious rejections of the world’ as tending towards the ideal-typical extremes of ‘emmisary’ and ‘exemplary’ prophecy, I argue that Cage represents an avant-garde persona that employs a logic that might be termed ‘the charisma of impersonality’. As against the Faustian model of the creative person, as someone seeking transcendence through imposing their will on the world, the exemplary avant-gardist eschews seeking followers and appears to defy the modern ideology of ‘art for art’s sake’. I will argue, however, that in letting sounds be themselves and in withdrawing his personality from the creative process, Cage is employing an important alternative paradigm of modern creativity: the artist as mystical and detached; a prankster who is deadly serious; a teacher who teaches through exemplification; the leader who refuses to lead - in short, charisma through impersonality. I conclude by suggesting that this cultural type recurs in both modern ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture, and represents an important variant of the modern creative self.

Music, Culture and Society: Peter Murphy Bob Dylan Ain’t Talking: One Man’s Vast Comic Adventure in American Music, Dramaturgy, and Mysticism Peter Murphy Bob Dylan is the Augie March of American music, a Bellovian character who is engaged in an endless relentless picaresque journey through the vast landscape of American music, adopting and readopting one musical character type after another, a wanted man pursued by his original fans, the egregious sixties protest generation, whose idolatry he reviles—a musical chameleon, evasive, shape-shifting, identity changing, metamorphosing, impugner of romantic authenticity. The talk explores Dylan’s mystic propensity not to talk, his preference for dramaturgical masks and theatrical collaborators, the disappearance of his original self (Zimmerman) and its replacement with an enigmatic persona—an astonishingly original impersonator-mimic whose unending touring is an emblem of a life that is a comic masterpiece where the aw-shucks sly humor of Huck Finn meets the allusive mercurial word play of Shakespearean drama meets a kind of Quixote-like misidentification of self, misunderstanding by audiences and a mysterious transcendentalist metaphysics that is a peculiarly American mix of Calvinist necessity, bohemian experimentalism and mystical disdain for messages. Please allow me to introduce you to the Augustinian Jew, the philosophical entertainer, the jokerman born out of time. He is one hell of a bunch of interesting guys.

Three Theories of Comedy | Agnes Heller Lecture 2: Three Theories of Comedy Professor Agnes Heller Lecture 2: 'Three Theories of Comedy' by Agnes Heller. Apologies for the very poor sound quality in this episode. We hope it's tolerable.

Performance and Cultural Pragmatics in Social Action Jeffrey Alexander (Yale) Jeffrey Alexander presents an overview of his current work on the role of performance and cultural pragmatics in social action. He leads a discussion about the fruitful interaction of contemporary cultural sociology and performance studies—and the place of dramaturgy, narrative, audience and performance in social inquiry. Jeffrey Alexander is the author of The Civil Sphere (2006), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (2004 co-author), The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology (2003), Neofunctionalism and After (1998), Fin-de-Siècle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction and the Problem of Reason (1995), Structure and Meaning: Relinking Classical Sociology (1989), Action and Its Environments: Towards a New Synthesis (1988), Twenty Lectures: Sociological Theory Since World War Two, Columbia University Press (1987), Theoretical Logic in Sociology (1982-83). Today, Alexander is leading a team of researchers at Yale University dedicated to developing a ‘strong program in cultural sociology’. A preliminary version of Alexander’s work on social performance can be found in the volume he recently edited with Bernhard Giesen and Jason Mast, Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual (Cambridge, 2006).

The Greeks: Vrasidas Karalis Associate Professor Vrasidas Karalis (Sydney) Vrasidas Karalis is the author of Nikos Kazantzakis and the Palimpsest of History (Kanakis, 1995) and a number of translation-studies of books by Michael Psellos, Michael Doukas, and Leo the Deacon. He is also the translator of Patrick White’s Voss and A Cheery Soul into Greek. “The Greeks”: Muses, Myths, and Modernities. Vrasidas Karalis is the author of Nikos Kazantzakis and the Palimpsest of History (Kanakis, 1995) and a number of translation-studies of books by Michael Psellos, Michael Doukas, and Leo the Deacon. He is also the translator of Patrick White’s Voss and A Cheery Soul into Greek.

The Greeks: Vassilis Lambropoulos Governance, Violence, and Justice in Modern Tragedy: on the 1946 tragedy 'Capodistrian' by Nikos Kazantzakis Professor Vassilis Lambropoulos (Michigan) “The Greeks”: Muses, Myths, and Modernities. Vassilis Lambropoulos is author of The Tragic Idea (Duckworth, 2006), The Rise of Eurocentrism (Princeton University Press, 1993), and Literature as National Institution (Princeton University Press, 1988). Vassilis Lambropoulos is author of The Tragic Idea (Duckworth, 2006), The Rise of Eurocentrism (Princeton University Press, 1993), and Literature as National Institution (Princeton University Press, 1988).

The Greeks | Luis David The Reclamation of Classical Antiquity For Post-Modern Times Associate Professor Luis David (Ateneo de Manila) “The Greeks”: Muses, Myths, and Modernities. Luis David is editor of Budhi, the leading journal of ideas and culture in the Philippines. Luis David is editor of Budhi, the leading journal of ideas and culture in the Philippines.

The Greeks: Louis Ruprecht Modern shrines to an ancient muse: a religious history of the modern public art museum Associate Professor Louis Ruprecht Jr. (Georgia State) Louis Ruprecht is author of Was Greek Thought Religious? On the Use and Abuse of Hellenism, From Rome to Romanticism (Palgrave, 2002), Symposia: Plato, the Erotic and Moral Value (SUNY, 1999), Afterwords: Hellenism, Modernism and the Myth of Decadence (SUNY, 1996), Tragic Posture and Tragic Vision: Against the Modern Failure of Nerve (Continuum, 1994).

The Greeks | Peter Murphy Troy and Gallipoli: The Australian Myth of Foundation Peter Murphy (Monash) Peter Murphy is the author of Civic Justice (Prometheus/Humanity Books, 2001), coauthor of Dialectic of Romanticism (Continuum, 2004), and coeditor of Agon, Logos, Polis (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2001).

Public Lecture: Professor Agnes Heller The Autonomy of Art or the Dignity of Artworks? Professor Agnes Heller Both “autonomy ” and “dignity” are moral concepts. The moral category “autonomy” is traditionally applied to art, and understood sometimes dogmatically, like by Adorno. Yet it never becomes clear what is autonomous: Art as such? The sphere of Art? Or the single artwork? This paper suggests substituting the normative word “dignity” for the heavily evaluative term “ autonomy”. In the case of the ‘dignity of man’ the norm of dignity prohibits using man as mere means - so it is in the case of works of art. They can serve as means, yet they need always also be treated as ends in themselves. The concept “dignity” of art will be illuminated - not illustrated – by examples of contemporary works.

Abel Ferrara Book Launch On the 21st of March Edward Colless launched Adrian Martin's translation of Nicole Brenez's Abel Ferrara (illinois University Press 2007). A crowd of friends and staff of Film and Television Studies at Monash were witness to Edward's extraordinary appraisals of both Nicole's authorship and Adrian's translation and Nicole Brenez herself e-mailed her appreciation to Adrian which was read out by Deane Williams. The launch was followed by a rare screening of Ferrara's Mary (2005) accompanied by wine and food. The launch was very successful with all available copies of Abel Ferrara selling. More copies have been ordered by the Monash Bookshop.