Encounters Between Music and Nature : A Productive and Transversal Approach to Contemporary Music Analysis

Abstract: This thesis examines encounters between music and nature through a productive and transversal approach to music analysis with examples from the contemporary Western art music repertoire. In three analytical chapters, I study how contemporary music potentially reframes the positions and relations between music, humans and nature by engaging with transversal concepts from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s thinking and drawing upon Judy Lochhead’s approach to productive music analysis. In Joan La Barbara’s Les Oiseaux qui chantent dans ma tête for solo voice (1976) and Kaija Saariaho’s Laconisme de l’aile for solo flute and optional electronics (1982), I study affinities between humans and birds through the concept of becoming-bird. In John Luther Adam’s Inuksuit for percussion ensemble (2009), I engage with the notion of coexistence between humans and the environment with the concepts of milieu, rhythm, and deterritorialization. Lastly, in Helena Tulve’s Extinction des choses vues for large orchestra (2007), I argue that her music confronts aspects of musical organicism by producing ruptures from its own modes of order, activated by the concept of the Body without Organs. I examine moments when the music functions on the edge of discursivity, and when the materiality of sound, bodies, instruments, and technology informs and reshapes musical discourses and cultural conceptions of nature. I further position the study within the field of ecomusicology, and draw upon aspects of posthumanist and new materialist theory. I particularly investigate contemporary music from perspectives that question human-centered ways of thinking and being, as well as ostensibly rigid conceptions of nature that appear separate from the domain of culture. From these theoretical perspectives, I understand nature and culture as entangled material-discursive processes, where the relations between music, humans and nature are constantly renegotiated.The contributions of the study are threefold. Firstly, it contributes to a deeper understanding of the musical works and composers studied in the thesis, and the cultural context to which they belong. La Barbara’s and Saariaho’s compositions expand upon bird music in the Western art music repertoire; Adams is positioned within American percussion music and American environmentalism; and Tulve’s work reconfigures the aesthetic paradigm of musical organicism. Secondly, this thesis manifests how the fields of Deleuze-Guattarian philosophy, ecomusicology, as well as aspects of posthumanist and new materialist thought fruitfully contribute to one another, and how music research benefits from expanding its theoretical perspectives. Lastly, I demonstrate how the study of contemporary Western art music can encourage new methodological approaches, such as a productive and transversal approach to music analysis, as contemporary music and its changeable compositional techniques and strategies require creative solutions to analytical problems. In extension, I hope this thesis demonstrates how these encounters between music and nature may also foster new and fruitful understandings of the contemporary world we all inhabit.