CMRC Seminar – Mark Hutchinson: Prosciutto, photography and fan-fiction: quotation and affect in Caroline Shaw’s Gustave Le Gray (2012)
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Scholarly discussions of quotation and borrowing in contemporary music often focus on questions of history, originality and influence, in particular as they relate to the tension between modernist and postmodernist viewpoints. Yawn. I’ve always been interested in composers whose use of quotation seems to have more to do with immediate, affective engagement with particular pieces or historical moments – borrowing as an act of love, not primarily of critique – and how these instances of borrowing might be talked about analytically in a way that prioritises their immediate sensory effect/affect over their broader cultural significance (though both are of course important). This session is going to be a mix of seminar paper and open discussion: I’ll start by presenting some recent work on a piece by Caroline Shaw that’s a kind of extreme point of this approach to quotation, a sort of love-letter to (or lovestruck photograph of?) Chopin’s piano music; then I’m hoping it will open out into a wider group chat about people’s attitudes (as composers and scholars of new music) towards quotation and borrowing of historical materials.
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About the speaker
Mark Hutchinson
Mark Hutchinson is a Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of York. His research focusses upon creative approaches towards the analysis of recent contemporary music. His book Coherence in New Music: Experience, Aesthetics, Analysis (Ashgate, 2016) uses ideas from a variety of different disciplines to argue for a novel concept of coherence within recent classical music. He has published articles examining overlaps between music, literature and philosophy in works by György Kurtág, Tōru Takemitsu and Georg Friedrich Haas, as well as music theory pedagogy and piano duet performance. He also likes to play piano (lots) and oboe (sadly more rarely).
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