Martin Scherzinger
Biographic Data
| ID | 954766 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Martin Scherzinger |
| GIVEN NAMES | Martin |
| FAMILY NAME | Scherzinger |
| SIGNATURE | SCHERZINGER M |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Joseph Hanson Kwabena Nketia, The Music of Africa , 1974
On African Music
Having established himself as an award-winning semiotician of European classical music in the early 1990s, Kofi Agawu embarked on a research agenda that would critically engage African music from multiple angles—the semiotics of African rhythm, the contours of its intellectual representations, and the imaginative impetus at the heart of its production, to name a few. On African Music consists of seven essays that distill Agawu’s critical interven…
Physics and Metaphysics of Post-Truth (Or, Do Realia Deliver us from Artefacts of False Witness?)
This article outlines one of three systemic conditions underwriting misleading, deceptive, and false content in the socio-digital ecosystem today. Against philosophical realism, which attempts to offer a useful diagnostic bulwark against misinformation, the argument takes up both deliberate and nondeliberate misinformation—from intentional disinformation of all stripes (driven by State, corporate, and other actors), deep fakes, pseudo-science, li…
In Defense of African Harmony
K. Agawu (2016). The African imagination in music. Oxford University Press, 372 pp. For the music scholar Kofi Agawu, it is impossible to consider cultural phenomena apart from their discursive historical conditions. But the critique that drives his oeuvre is not merely cultural in nature, but
African Music and the History of Time
This article aims to decentralize the dominant temporalities of the colonial era with reference to an ephemeral fragment of precolonial music from Uganda. The article outlines two overarching temporal frameworks—unilinear developmentalism and cultural relativism—as the fundamental global antinomies of colonial governance. By examining inherent pattern formation and beat entrainment in amadinda music, the article directs its findings to the genera…
Temporalities
This chapter examines the question of musical temporality in broad historical perspective. Through a series of reflections on the philosophy of time, theories of musical time, and the material history of time in the past 250 years, the chapter outlines the basic temporal antinomies of the West. This modern conception of temporality, broadly construed as a precisely-segmented linear time set against narratives of alternative, cyclical time, is sho…
The Ambiguous Ethics of Music’s Ineffability
Michael Gallope’s book Deep Refrains is an in-depth study of the ineffable core of musical experience. 4 But it engages ineffability without eliminating the pragmatic material of music’s economic, technological and even ethical mediations; and it posits a synergistic relationship between these realms. Gallope casts equal doubt on the determinism that construes music’s ineffability as wholly absorbed in mediation and on the vitalism that construes…
Afro-Electric Counterpoint
Using Electric Counterpoint as a central reference, this chapter outlines the constitutive role played by audible cultures of the non-West in shaping the distinctive sound of Steve Reich’s music. Reich’s involvement with African music, in particular, extends beyond the common historical narrative of “influence” (construed as mostly confirmation and encouragement for an already formed style). Electric Counterpoint draws on a host of African musica…
Whose ‘White Man Sleeps’?
From Torrent to Stream
Music production in the 21st century shifted from a largely commodified industrial model to a radically decentralized one, technologically facilitated by new efficiencies in search of functionality, delivery, and peer-to-peer connectivity. In the older music economy, the media of music (its tangible forms—vinyl, cassette, compact disc, etc.) were fused with its contents (its sounding forms—songs, pieces, etc.), thereby facilitating their efficien…
Software Physiognomics
In "Radio Physiognomics" Theodor W. Adorno outlines the social features of music's radio broadcast, a still relatively new technology for music transmission and listening in the 1930s. The present article deploys Adorno's "physiognomic" analytics to diagnose the kinds of perceptual technics at work in the data-encoding methods associated with digital technologies today, from compression and decompression schemes for file formats to software for i…
Musical Property: Widening or Withering?
Wagner Redux
Alain Badiou's book Five lessons on Wagner contests and revises the widespread critical reception of Richard Wagner. Badiou offers a counterpoint to 6 charges made against the composer: (1) Wagner created seductively sensual musical edifices; (2) Wagner indulges identitarian thought; (3) Wagner spectacularizes suffering; (4) Wagner's musical forms contain differences in a false unity; (5) Wagner theatricalizes the drama; and (6) Wagner's temporal…
On Sonotropism
Temporal Geometries of an African Music
[1] This paper is a brief and preliminary sketch culled from a much larger study that describes and defines geometric perspectives of temporal patterning in various musical genres found in southern Africa. Of particular interest for this study is the music of the lamellaphone-type, including that of the njari, the mbira, the matepe, and the kalimba, found in Zimbabwe and Mozambique. This paper will focus on one of these lamellaphones, the mbira d…
From blatant to latent protest (and back again)
This paper explores ambiguities of political resistance and anti-war protest in Madonna's music video, 'American Life'. We begin by tracing the history of the making, promotion and eventual withdrawal of the video in the context of the military build-up and media campaign that preceded the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. In these opening sections, we focus in particular on the (perhaps deliberately generated) controversy surrounding the work, …
György Ligeti and the Aka Pygmies Project
At the turn of the twentieth century, György Ligeti's late piano music was performed in various European concert halls alongside music of the Aka Pygmies of Central Africa. The acclaimed project culminated in a CD on the Teldec label entitled Ligeti/Reich: African Rhythms (Pierre Laurent Aimard/Aka Pygmies) featuring works by Ligeti, alongside works by Steve Reich and music of the Aka. This paper describes and evaluates the uneven critical recept…
Music in the Thought of Deconstruction / Deconstruction in the Thought of Music (For Joseph Dubiel)
This article critically speculates on points of affinity and difference between, on the one hand, musicological writings and the musical practices they attempt to represent and, on the other, the operation of deconstruction (defined in terms of the differential structure of our grip on presence and plenitude). The article outlines two prominent instances of misreading Derridean deconstruction in the context of musical writing (Subotnik, Korsyn). …
The Pleasure of Modernist Music
The Finale of Mahler's Seventh Symphony
The last decade has witnessed the opening of a gap within music theory between two distinct modes of inquiry.* These may be loosely identified as 'Analysis' and 'Criticism'. Criticism, by employing hermeneutic techniques derived from poststructuralism and cultural studies, contests the so-called 'formalism' of Analysis. The 'formalist' approach is taken to treat the musical work as a 'self-contained', 'trans-cultural' or 'trans-historical' entity…
The 'New Poetics' of Musical Influence
György Ligeti and the Aka Pygmies Project
At the turn of the twentieth century, György Ligeti's late piano music was performed in various European concert halls alongside music of the Aka Pygmies of Central Africa. The acclaimed project culminated in a CD on the Teldec label entitled Ligeti/Reich: African Rhythms (Pierre Laurent Aimard/Aka Pygmies) featuring works by Ligeti, alongside works by Steve Reich and music of the Aka. This paper describes and evaluates the uneven critical recept…
Temporal Geometries of an African Music
[1] This paper is a brief and preliminary sketch culled from a much larger study that describes and defines geometric perspectives of temporal patterning in various musical genres found in southern Africa. Of particular interest for this study is the music of the lamellaphone-type, including that of the njari, the mbira, the matepe, and the kalimba, found in Zimbabwe and Mozambique. This paper will focus on one of these lamellaphones, the mbira d…
Software Physiognomics
In "Radio Physiognomics" Theodor W. Adorno outlines the social features of music's radio broadcast, a still relatively new technology for music transmission and listening in the 1930s. The present article deploys Adorno's "physiognomic" analytics to diagnose the kinds of perceptual technics at work in the data-encoding methods associated with digital technologies today, from compression and decompression schemes for file formats to software for i…
From blatant to latent protest (and back again)
This paper explores ambiguities of political resistance and anti-war protest in Madonna's music video, 'American Life'. We begin by tracing the history of the making, promotion and eventual withdrawal of the video in the context of the military build-up and media campaign that preceded the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. In these opening sections, we focus in particular on the (perhaps deliberately generated) controversy surrounding the work, …
The 'New Poetics' of Musical Influence
The Finale of Mahler's Seventh Symphony
The last decade has witnessed the opening of a gap within music theory between two distinct modes of inquiry.* These may be loosely identified as 'Analysis' and 'Criticism'. Criticism, by employing hermeneutic techniques derived from poststructuralism and cultural studies, contests the so-called 'formalism' of Analysis. The 'formalist' approach is taken to treat the musical work as a 'self-contained', 'trans-cultural' or 'trans-historical' entity…
The Pleasure of Modernist Music
Music in the Thought of Deconstruction / Deconstruction in the Thought of Music (For Joseph Dubiel)
This article critically speculates on points of affinity and difference between, on the one hand, musicological writings and the musical practices they attempt to represent and, on the other, the operation of deconstruction (defined in terms of the differential structure of our grip on presence and plenitude). The article outlines two prominent instances of misreading Derridean deconstruction in the context of musical writing (Subotnik, Korsyn). …
György Ligeti and the Aka Pygmies Project
At the turn of the twentieth century, György Ligeti's late piano music was performed in various European concert halls alongside music of the Aka Pygmies of Central Africa. The acclaimed project culminated in a CD on the Teldec label entitled Ligeti/Reich: African Rhythms (Pierre Laurent Aimard/Aka Pygmies) featuring works by Ligeti, alongside works by Steve Reich and music of the Aka. This paper describes and evaluates the uneven critical recept…
From blatant to latent protest (and back again)
This paper explores ambiguities of political resistance and anti-war protest in Madonna's music video, 'American Life'. We begin by tracing the history of the making, promotion and eventual withdrawal of the video in the context of the military build-up and media campaign that preceded the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. In these opening sections, we focus in particular on the (perhaps deliberately generated) controversy surrounding the work, …
Temporal Geometries of an African Music
[1] This paper is a brief and preliminary sketch culled from a much larger study that describes and defines geometric perspectives of temporal patterning in various musical genres found in southern Africa. Of particular interest for this study is the music of the lamellaphone-type, including that of the njari, the mbira, the matepe, and the kalimba, found in Zimbabwe and Mozambique. This paper will focus on one of these lamellaphones, the mbira d…
Wagner Redux
Alain Badiou's book Five lessons on Wagner contests and revises the widespread critical reception of Richard Wagner. Badiou offers a counterpoint to 6 charges made against the composer: (1) Wagner created seductively sensual musical edifices; (2) Wagner indulges identitarian thought; (3) Wagner spectacularizes suffering; (4) Wagner's musical forms contain differences in a false unity; (5) Wagner theatricalizes the drama; and (6) Wagner's temporal…
On Sonotropism
Musical Property: Widening or Withering?
From Torrent to Stream
Music production in the 21st century shifted from a largely commodified industrial model to a radically decentralized one, technologically facilitated by new efficiencies in search of functionality, delivery, and peer-to-peer connectivity. In the older music economy, the media of music (its tangible forms—vinyl, cassette, compact disc, etc.) were fused with its contents (its sounding forms—songs, pieces, etc.), thereby facilitating their efficien…
Software Physiognomics
In "Radio Physiognomics" Theodor W. Adorno outlines the social features of music's radio broadcast, a still relatively new technology for music transmission and listening in the 1930s. The present article deploys Adorno's "physiognomic" analytics to diagnose the kinds of perceptual technics at work in the data-encoding methods associated with digital technologies today, from compression and decompression schemes for file formats to software for i…
Whose ‘White Man Sleeps’?
Afro-Electric Counterpoint
Using Electric Counterpoint as a central reference, this chapter outlines the constitutive role played by audible cultures of the non-West in shaping the distinctive sound of Steve Reich’s music. Reich’s involvement with African music, in particular, extends beyond the common historical narrative of “influence” (construed as mostly confirmation and encouragement for an already formed style). Electric Counterpoint draws on a host of African musica…
Temporalities
This chapter examines the question of musical temporality in broad historical perspective. Through a series of reflections on the philosophy of time, theories of musical time, and the material history of time in the past 250 years, the chapter outlines the basic temporal antinomies of the West. This modern conception of temporality, broadly construed as a precisely-segmented linear time set against narratives of alternative, cyclical time, is sho…
The Ambiguous Ethics of Music’s Ineffability
Michael Gallope’s book Deep Refrains is an in-depth study of the ineffable core of musical experience. 4 But it engages ineffability without eliminating the pragmatic material of music’s economic, technological and even ethical mediations; and it posits a synergistic relationship between these realms. Gallope casts equal doubt on the determinism that construes music’s ineffability as wholly absorbed in mediation and on the vitalism that construes…
African Music and the History of Time
This article aims to decentralize the dominant temporalities of the colonial era with reference to an ephemeral fragment of precolonial music from Uganda. The article outlines two overarching temporal frameworks—unilinear developmentalism and cultural relativism—as the fundamental global antinomies of colonial governance. By examining inherent pattern formation and beat entrainment in amadinda music, the article directs its findings to the genera…
In Defense of African Harmony
K. Agawu (2016). The African imagination in music. Oxford University Press, 372 pp. For the music scholar Kofi Agawu, it is impossible to consider cultural phenomena apart from their discursive historical conditions. But the critique that drives his oeuvre is not merely cultural in nature, but
Physics and Metaphysics of Post-Truth (Or, Do Realia Deliver us from Artefacts of False Witness?)
This article outlines one of three systemic conditions underwriting misleading, deceptive, and false content in the socio-digital ecosystem today. Against philosophical realism, which attempts to offer a useful diagnostic bulwark against misinformation, the argument takes up both deliberate and nondeliberate misinformation—from intentional disinformation of all stripes (driven by State, corporate, and other actors), deep fakes, pseudo-science, li…
Joseph Hanson Kwabena Nketia, The Music of Africa , 1974
On African Music
Having established himself as an award-winning semiotician of European classical music in the early 1990s, Kofi Agawu embarked on a research agenda that would critically engage African music from multiple angles—the semiotics of African rhythm, the contours of its intellectual representations, and the imaginative impetus at the heart of its production, to name a few. On African Music consists of seven essays that distill Agawu’s critical interven…
Art (16 works) · Music History and Culture (11 works) · Literature (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Aesthetics (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · History (8 works) · Musical (8 works) · Visual arts (8 works) · Musicology and Musical Analysis (7 works)