Proceedings of the Electroacoustic Music Studies Network Conference Meaning and Meaningfulness in Electroacoustic Music

This paper will explore ways in which mastered improvisation practice, with the studio as an instrument, is a proposed avenue to bridge the historical dichotomy between what Ted Gioia describe as ‘the aesthetics of perfection’ and ‘the aesthetics of imperfection’. It is proposed as a way to re-embody fixed music, as experimented by the author through the composition of his last fixed-media work. This will be put in the context of a wider trend observed amongst the current emerging generation of composers interested in the aesthesics of the work, by opposition to the previous generations that placed the value of the work in its poietics. The vital and primal importance of practice outcome as practice-based research’s main document will also be advocated for, as these trends are happening in the laboratory of live music. 1. A Research Context 1.1 Disclaimer: on Practice-Based Research This paper is a tale from the field. It is a report from a practitioner whose research is mainly practice-based: composition, performance, and improvisation of electronic music, with or without instruments, within different musical scenes. The author is not a musicologist, at least in the historical or analytical definition of the field; if a wider definition of the field is accepted, then the author has many musicological activities: pedagogue, producer, technicalartisticand production-director of concerts/festivals/conferences, director of electronic music studios, and computer programmer. However, all of these are the fruit of his practice, are completely at its service, and therefore their perspective is highly biased. Such a view is not necessarily a bad thing, as many other subjects have embraced this bias for its strengths. In anthropology, for instance, it is now accepted, though frequently questioned and criticised, that the field anthropologist will write highly biased reports. There is a good reason for this: to be able to understand the subtleties of a culture, one needs to live in the cultural area one is specialised in, inducing personal bias; we can see such a practice as a bottom-up perspective. Armchair anthropologists, on the other hand, will have a top-down view: taking multiple reports from adjacent cultural area, they will be able, with their critical 1 Here the author refers to the German tradition of the term, as illustrated in (Duckles et al.). 2 An interesting text showcasing the tension in this field is (Ingold and Ingold). Proceedings of the Electroacoustic Music Studies Network Conference Meaning and Meaningfulness in Electroacoustic Music, Stockholm, June 2012