No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 January 2025
The practice surrounding Éliane Radigue's Occam Océan works may be read as a new form of work concept, one which poses a productive contradiction against the work concept as it has been (and in some cases has been forgotten) and the work concept as we experience it today. Occam Océan poses a challenge to conventional conceptual understandings on many fronts, namely the practice's lack of notation; its collaborative creation; its particular structural criteria; its contingent, iterative and combinatorial manifestations; and, perhaps most significantly, its social reinscription within bodies. By historicising her work against the established work concept structures and identifying how its qualities create friction against them, Radigue's music is shown to create a small rupture at the heart of the concept itself, demonstrating the possibility of establishing radically alternative practices of music exchange and discourse.
1 Attali, Jacques, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, tr. Massumi, Brian (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 141Google Scholar.
2 As Radigue states, ‘Initially, Occam Océan was comprised of solos, which then expanded into combinations of ensemble pieces… Hence, the overall construction of the Occams that constitute Occam Océan implies, by nature, the impossibility of completing the oeuvre.’ Radigue, Éliane and Eckhardt, Julia, Intermediary Spaces (Brussels: Umland Editions, 2019), p. 158Google Scholar. ‘It would be deadening wanting to annotate [the sounds] once and for all. That would cut the music off from its ongoing process of maturation.’ Ibid., p. 177.
3 William Dougherty, ‘Imagining Together: Éliane Radigue's Collaborative Creative Process’ (DMA dissertation, Columbia University, 2021), pp. 27–36.
4 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, tr. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 2.
5 Ibid., p. 3.
6 Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. xvii.
7 Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 109.
8 Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, pp. 73–74.
9 Ibid., p. 20.
10 Ibid., p. 28.
11 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Modernity – An Incomplete Project’, tr. Seyla Ben-Habib, in The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), p. 8.
12 Rose Rosengard Subotnik, ‘Individualism in Western Art Music and Its Cultural Costs’, in Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 242.
13 Ibid., p. 244.
14 Radigue and Eckhardt, Intermediary Spaces, p. 169.
15 Ibid., p. 35.
16 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, tr. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2021), p. 13.
17 Peter Szendy, Listen: A History of Our Ears, tr. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), pp. 50–56.
18 Ibid., pp. 54–55.
19 Ibid., pp. 58–59.
20 Ibid., p. 60.
21 Ibid., p. 62.
22 Ibid., pp. 63–64.
23 Ibid., p. 66.
24 Roland Barthes, ‘The Grain of the Voice’, in Image, Music, Text, tr. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), pp. 180–81.
25 Brian Kane, ‘Jean-Luc Nancy and the Listening Subject’, Contemporary Music Review, 31 (5–6) (2012), p. 445.
26 Jean-Luc Nancy, quoted by Brian Kane. Ibid., p. 445.
27 Ibid., p. 446.
28 Ibid., p. 439.
29 As Habermas reminds us, ‘Nothing remains from a desublimated meaning or a destructured form; an emancipatory effect does not follow.’ Habermas, ‘Modernity’, p. 10.
30 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 45.
31 Ibid., p. 177.
32 Ibid., p. 181.
33 Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, tr. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020), p. 66.
34 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘The Sublime Offering’, in The Sublime, ed. Simon Morley, tr. Jeffrey S. Librett (London: Whitechapel Gallery), p. 47.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid.
37 Radigue, Éliane, ‘The Mysterious Power of the Infinitesimal’, Leonardo Music Journal, 19 (2009), p. 49Google Scholar.
38 Nancy, ‘The Sublime Offering’, p. 47.
39 Ibid., p. 51.
40 Radigue and Eckhardt, Intermediary Spaces, p. 49.
41 Ibid., p. 50.
42 Ibid., p. 159.
43 Attali, Noise, p. 141.
44 Scientism: ‘Western music theory is expressed essentially in the context of its relation to science and its crisis… It is linked to an abstraction of the conditions of functioning of the society taking root’. Imperial universality: ‘An elite, bureaucratic music… desires to be universal. In order to be universal, it diminishes its specificity, reduces the syntax of its codes.’ Depersonalisation: ‘The music of power no longer conveys information within a code. It is, like the ideology of the period, without meaning. Musical production is no longer configured.’ Deconcentration and manipulation of power: ‘In fact, the most formal order, the most precise and rigorous directing, are masked behind a system evocative of autonomy and chance… Managing chance, drawing lots, doing anything at all, consigns the interpreter to a powerlessness… like the administrator in a repetitive society.’ Ibid., pp. 113–14.
45 Ibid., p. 147.
46 Ibid., p. 144.
47 Ibid., p. 143.
48 Adorno, Theodor W., ‘Commitment’, in Notes to Literature, tr. Nicholson, Weber (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), p. 90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
49 Ibid., p. 93.
50 Attali, Noise, p. 141.
51 Ibid., p. 143.