Audiotactility, Culture, Improvisation

A Lecture & Presentation by Prof. Laurent Cugny

The theory of audiotactile music, developed by the Italian scholar Vincenzo Caporaletti, is based on a few simple ideas.

1. The expression popular music uses a sociological category, but the music it encompasses (jazz, pop-rock, rap, world music, etc.) can also be defined by its modes of music production.
2. A specific mode of production is phonography, which produces a trace ex post (coming after the sonic production of the music) and not a priori (before the sound exists), as is the case with written music and its privileged tool, the score.
3. This difference between phonography and written music has numerous consequences, including the distinct phenomenon, that phonography fixes every idiomatic feature of the music, while the score leaves the majority of them up to the performer (sonority, tempo, phrasing, etc.). This difference is also created by cognitive mediation: it is visual in written music through the score and audiotactile in phonographic music (hence the qualification of audiotactile music)

This new theoretical framework opens the field to different approaches to fundamental notions such as improvisation and the relationship with culture.

A multilingual review, the Journal of Jazz and Audiotactile Musics Studies, was founded by three scholars from three different countries: Vincenzo Caporaletti (Italy), Fabiano Araújo Costa (Brazil) and Laurent Cugny (France). The journal’s first issue presents the basic principles of the theory as well as a few case studies, such as the shift from one production system to another in New Orleans jazz with the advent of phonography.  This shift is exemplified by the sources of « Tiger Rag » as recorded by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (Vincenzo Caporaletti).  The other case studies include a new reading of the history of Brazilian popular music through its relation to printed music and the role of phonography (Fabiano Araújo Costa), and the analysis of an appropriation experience of three solos by Bill Evans (Laurent Cugny).

Wednesday, April 24, 2019

6pm to 8pm

701C Dodge Hall

2960 Broadway at West 116th Street , New York, NY 10027