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Deconstruction in Music

Deconstruction In Music is the title of my PhD dissertation from 2002. It was the first online, interactive
and OA dissertation of Erasmus University Rotterdam (NL). It consists of five different entries to
discover how deconstruction can articulate itself in/through/as music.

In The Gift Of Silence [donner les bruits]: On Music, Noise And Silence the apparantly clear borderlines
between music, noise, and silence are questioned, mainly through the work of John Cage.
Specters Of Bach: On Gerd Zacher’s Kunst einer Fuge deals with a project of German church organist
Gerd Zacher in which he deconstructs the first counterpoint of J.S. Bach’s Kunst der Fuge (The Art of
Fugue).
In a totally different way deconstruction appears in the music of John Zorn. Restitutions, Shibboleth or
Aporias: On John Zorn and Burt Bacharach shows how deconstruction is at work in Zorn’s CD Great
Jewish Music: Burt Bacharach.
The Truth in Teaching: On Deconstruction in Music Education knows a different approach. Point of
departure here is the practice of teaching jazz music at a music school. What can deconstruction
imply for teaching materials, teachers, and students in jazz education.
These four parts are, as it were, framed by Outwork. Deconstruction In Music: An Introduction. Besides
some important ‘credentials’ (e.g. the ethical implications of deconstruction), this part focusses on the
relation between this PhD dissertation and other musicological works informed by post-
structuralism and deconstruction.

Five times around music. Wandering about/along/with music. Five times. Wandering from the straight
and narrow of the order, of linearity, i.e. the teleology of an end in a beginning.
Around music … Hesitating … Groping … ‘Reticence, as you know, is the figure of a deliberate keeping-
quiet so that more than eloquence can be heard in it’, Derrida writes in Of Hospitality (p.95). How does
one write with restraint? How is this task fulfilled?
Five times around music. Not denying the existence of gaps and uncertainties, not disguising problems,
not trying to be complete or rounded-off. Not a clear method that seeks to decipher a truth but a series of
encounters that affirms play. No conclusions. To arrive at conclusions would be to assume an authority I
do not have.
So, without any decisive ending … Not knowing where and when to end my writing
around/beside/through music … Not knowing where to begin my writing … But … it has already
begun. It has always already begun …

Go to the complete online dissertation

2 Comments

Joe Peters
21/01/2013 at 19:18
I think you are doing something that has to be emulated. I am teaching at a university in Thailand
where I am trying to make my students see the need to move text away from a book and to the actual
timeline of the music. I would love to have a talk withj you on SKYPE: sonic_asia.

Best Wishes

Joe Peters

Reply
cobussenma
31/01/2013 at 19:18
Hi Joe,

Many thanks for your post. Apologies for not having been able to answer you any sooner. There
were some private circumstances which made it simply impossible.
What you’re trying to do with your students seems to have a direct correspondence with my own
work which is (among others) driven by the question how to write ‘about’ (I prefer: around)
music? How not to kill the musical in music through language? Or, in more general terms, how to
respect the other’s otherness and not reducing it to functions of ‘the Same’? To give more ‘space’
to the sonic, lead me to make an online PhD-dissertation (Deconstruction in Music), an OA online
Journal of Sonic Studies (www.sonicstudies.org) and, currently, the preparation of an e-pub on
musical improvisation.
I would love to hear more about your takes on this topic …

All best,
Marcel

Reply

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