Les mercredis de STMS welcome Maurice Windleburn, member of the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. His presentation is entitled “Second-degree composition: the hypertextual music of Otomo Yoshihide and John Zorn.”
Abstract:
In his seminal book, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, Gerard Genette coined several useful terms to analyse literature written in response to previous texts. Chief among these was ‘hypertextuality’, which Genette defined as ‘any relationship uniting a text B (which I shall call the hypertext) to an earlier text A (I shall, of course, call it the hypotext), upon which it [the hypertext] is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary’. Recently, Genette’s terms and ideas have been adapted to the analysis of classical, popular, and avant-garde musics.
This talk examines several cases of musical hypertextuality at the twentieth-century’s end. First, I consider how composer-improvisor Otomo Yoshihide’s work Peking Revolutionary Opera, Ver. 1.28 (1996) incorporates both ‘autographic’ and ‘allographic’ hypertextual transformations of previous music, including the ‘model revolutionary Peking opera’, Shajiabang. I then address how hypertextuality can work across media, through examples from the early ‘file card compositions’ of John Zorn. File card pieces, like Godard (1985) or Spillane (1986), adapt the ‘world’ of an especially chosen dedicatee, transforming not only musical, but also literary and audio-visual hypotexts into a new, hypertextual composition. Lastly, I consider how ‘compositions in the second degree’, like those of Otomo or Zorn, might themselves become hypotexts for future artworks. This is considered through a brief discussion of the para-cinematic adaptation of Zorn’s Godard by experimental filmmakers Ela Troyano and Tessa Hughes-Freeland.
Biography:
Maurice Windleburn is a member of the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. His current work examines the sonic, vibratory, and musical cosmologies of philosophers, occultists, scientists, and critics in modernist France (1880–1940). He has also written on late-twentieth-century avant-garde music, music philosophy, and intermedia, publishing in several musicological and interdisciplinary journals including Musurgia, Tempo and Organised Sound. His first book, John Zorn’s File Card Works: Hypertextual Intermediality in Composition and Analysis, was recently published with Routledge.