Graz : Kunstuniversität Graz
Lecture - Composing with a thousand tiny things
A lecture by Juliana Hodkinson
in the series Music and Sexuality/Musikwissenschaft Aktuell
at Kunstuniversität Graz, 13th January 2015
In Juliana Hodkinson’s lecture, she describes her instrumental and electroacoustic composition practice as a kind of sonic writing that oscillates between musical notation for instruments and extramusical objects, and editing digital audio.
Milk and metal, bells and drums, toys and politicians, silence and noise, news media and field recordings: a multiplicity of wide-ranging points of reference leads the goals of compositional work away from the limited signifying economy of internal ontological coherence, and towards an aesthetics of proliferating sonic contexts and dynamic emergence.
Invoking Hélène Cixous’ term écriture feminine, to highlight these continually developing aspects of composition that are fed by diversity, and Elizabeth Grosz’ vibratory ontology, a handful musical works are viewed in a resonance field between sound and femininity where it is relevant to ask how the material and embodiment of music work on, and are worked upon by, the politics and bodily mechanics of gender.
