Description tTimbre and Labor: Theory and Praxis uses analysis and performance to demonstrate the value of a theory of timbre that involves consideration of musical labor. Ligeti’s Atmospheres (1968) is analyzed in dialogue with Jennifer Iverson’s writing on the role of electronic composition influence on Ligeti’s acoustic writing. This analysis shows that key to the emergence of timbre is the labor of the orchestra, which is derived from the reified labor of the electronic music studio. This theory is then backed up with a performance of Bahar Royaee’s Tombstone (2017), a score which is imminently concerned with the performer’s labor.

Integrating Culture and Brutality uses autoethnographic investigation and theoretical analysis of the Cleveland National Air Show to expose the cultural trends of Neoliberalism and its material consequences. Inspired heavily by Achille Mbembe, J. Martin Daughtry, and rooted in Henri Lefenvre and the critique of political economy, the air show is cast as a unique class of propaganda which relies on sound more than image. This approach illuminates the latent brutality and masochism of Neoliberal culture that may be elided by critiques which do not consider sound as a source of violence. The implications of this approach show how the air show does not only produce an oppressive cultural landscape, but also has material consequences in producing the space of Cleveland. Perhaps problematizing the popularized notion of equating silence and capital, this paper investigates what it means when capital introduces violent noise. 

The Aesthetic Implications of Isang Yun’s Glisseés is a paper that seeks to situate Isang Yun as an important composer in the decolonization of western concert music via analysis of his highly individual solo cello work Glisseés. Yun does not seek to represent an East Asian subject in the supposedly universal world of Western composition; he instead hybridizes the two. Using methodologies of generating pitch and building form that are drawn from East Asian and Western musical practices, Yun is able to create a work that blurs the borders between purportedly disparate cultures. Crucially, it is impossible to say which culture is most fundamental in the piece. The language deployed in Glisseés therefore necessarily elides many of the “deformations” that latently orientalist discourses are prone to. As such, Glisseés is exemplary in its contribution to the cultural creolization laid out by George Lewis as fundamental to revitalizing concert music.