Kevin Volans Piano Etudes A Genealogical Analysis

Michael Watt
1946 In loving memory of Prof. Mary Rörich   unpublished
Perhaps the most striking quality of Kevin Volans's etudes is their clarity of thought. One is left with the impression that the material has been refined to its purest possible state, each note and each placement, exact. Consisting of ideas transcribed from his previous work, paradoxically, these etudes are in fact bursting with external references. How are Kevin Volans's etudes constructed internally? What historical conditions contributed to their formation? The etudes also raise a number of
more » ... secondary questions and paradoxes incorporated within the primary questions. Does the external referentiality of the pieces compromise their internal autonomy? Why has a composer whose self-confessed goal is to 'do away with content' (Volans, 2011) created what he has dubbed a 'mini-museum' (Rörich, 2005: 155)? Most traditional analytical technique is either confined to identifying the musical structures within a piece or preoccupied with the context surrounding a work. Neither approach would satisfactorily reconcile the works' internal autonomy with their external referentiality. By analyzing the works intertextually, within the theoretical framework of a Foucauldian genealogy, the author hopes to gain insight into these issues, and in so doing, demonstrate a fresh and relevant method of music analysis. There are a number of motivations for undertaking this research. Throughout his career, Kevin Volans has placed himself at the forefront of musical thinking. Despite this, as yet, not much has been written about him. Having grappled with modernity, the problem of the avantgarde, South African cultural identity, inter-cultural aesthetics and more recently tackling issues of style and content, his work has confronted many of the vital musical dilemmas of late modernity. In addition to this, Volans represents an extremely interesting position in relation to postmodernism. In an era when most composers have adopted a postmodern aesthetic, he has remained modernist in his sensibilities and approach to composition. His aim is to avoid the use of gesture or affectation and he is meticulous with regard to structure. As a pianist with formidable technique, familiar with the most virtuosic works of the repertoire, it is of particular interest how he applies his ideas when confronted with the piano. An etude is traditionally a technical work, but in addition to the usual dextrous material, the etudes include virtuosic extremes in dynamic, colour, rhythm and sonority. Each of these, usually secondary parameters, relates back to the overall structure and architecture. By making the realization of the architecture part of the technical argument, Volans expands our 1 In the interests of clarity, this chapter contains a literature review which briefly outlines the references and resources which were used to structure the broader arguments of the thesis. Texts pertaining to particular issues are dealt with in the chapters. 'Celebrating Composer Kevin Charles Volans, b.1949 provided useful background information. Her overview of Volans's string quartets 'The Landscape within: Kevin Volans and the string quartet' was the most detailed analysis of the musical material available at the time of this research. More broadly, Martin Scherzinger, Timothy Taylor, Christopher Fox and Mary Rörich are the other prominent writers who have entered into the debate over Volans's music. However, the nature of the debate generated by these writers is primarily contextual and not analytical. In two separate articles on Volans 'Art music in a Cross-Cultural Context: the case of Africa' (2004) and 'Of Sleeping White Men: Analytic Silence in the critical reception of Kevin Volans' (2004), Scherzinger argued against the misreadings of Volans's use of transcription and motivated in favour of serious analytical enquiry into the musical material itself, an argument in support of the premise of this dissertation. Christopher Fox, a close contemporary of Volans, provided first-hand knowledge of Volans's relationship with the other composers of the new Cologne school. His article: 'Where the river bends: the Cologne School in retrospect' (2007) was pivotal in formulating the important formative factors in Volans's time in Cologne. The author's primary access point to Volans's piano etudes was Mary Rörich's review of 2005. In this paper, Rörich outlined certain key concepts involved in the etudes around which this dissertation centred. These issues include the importance of transcription in the etudes, Volans's identity as a modernist, his self proclaimed desire to 'do away with content' and role as a pianist in the composition of the pieces. This review also included a useful summary of Johns's work in Figuring Jasper Johns (1994) supplemented with Jasper Johns' own comments in Jasper Johns: writings, sketchbook notes and interviews (1996). The topics of metonymy, metaphor and allegory were also investigated in detail to establish whether they operate in Volans's music. The last lens through which the author views the etudes in this dissertation is that of organicism. Through examining Kevin Korsyn's articulation of the concepts in 'Schenker's organicism reexamined ' (1993) and Ruth Solie's 'Organicism and Music Analysis' (1980), the author built a workable distinction between organic and mechanical composition methods. Superimposing Dan Warburton's definitions of minimalist techniques in his article 'A Working Terminology for Minimal Music' (1988) enabled me to identify certain important mechanical techniques used by Volans in the Etudes. Designing the theoretical framework for a Foucauldian analysis The primary role of the genealogical theoretical framework is to uncover the power relationships or web of influence of Volans's etudes. The web of influence acts on the etudes from within and without, dissolving the binary opposition between text and context, enabling answers to both the internal and external aspects of the research question. The structures provided by the Foucauldian genealogy, while being highly influential themselves, are deeply rooted in poststructuralism and are based on a number of poststructuralist principles. These principles provide the logic to tie complicated strands of thinking together. Due to the experimental nature of applying genealogy to music, the design of this framework is also methodological. The decisions as to how the theory will be applied to the analysis are handled at the same time as identifying the relevant theoretical principles. Poststructuralism and Foucauldian theory According to musicologist Jim Samson, historically, clear distinctions were made between the academic disciplines of performance/composition, theory/analysis and history/musicology (Samson in Cook, 1999: 43). Working within a modernist paradigm, those who specialized in analysis would treat musical works as autonomous objects, analyzing them independently of their historical context. More recently contextual and reception study has shown how a work's identity changes when confronted with different historical and ideological subjects (Samson in Cook, 1999: 44). This forces an analyst to acknowledge the historical context, not only of the work itself, but also of the questions they ask of it. Reception studies are still, however, limited by the construction of an opposition between text and context (Korsyn in Cook, 1999: 56). Volans's etudes are intricately woven texts which invite close scrutiny but end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author "confiding" in us' (Barthes, 1977: 143). Heavily influenced by Kristeva, Barthes argued that authors, rather than being the sole source of their writing, assemble texts from the 'already-written'. 'The origin of a text is not a unified authorial consciousness but a plurality of voices, of other words, other utterances and other texts' (Barthes, 1977: 145). For Barthes, all texts are intertextual constructs and all codes are forms of texts. Therefore, for Barthes, since we act and think in codes, there can be no emotion, thought or deed before it is represented textually (Allen, 2000: 73). According to Barthes, the entire cultural code, comprised of all its discourses, is an 'intertext', 'a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture' (Barthes, 1977: 146). The fact that Barthes ascribed such agency to language has been criticized by writers such as Harold Bloom for being totally abstract but in order to understand his approach, it is crucial we take into account the tensions that exist within Barthes's work. Barthes's writing is self-consciously intertextual (Allen, 2000: 94). Through writing, he explicitly sought to unleash the 'disruptive' forces of the text: 'the text is that uninhibited person who shows his behind to the political father' (Barthes, 1975: 53). Acutely aware of how culture is saturated with unconsciously accepted ideas, doxa, Barthes' texts set out to challenge these beliefs, para-doxa. Many of his later works such as The Pleasure of the Text (1973) are devoted to articulating the concept of para-doxa. Since doxa is not necessarily confined to a conservative point of view, even a liberal stance taken for granted becomes doxa, Barthes' own work faced the danger of also becoming an unchallenged position (Allen, 2000: 94). In order to eschew such a fate, Barthes, just like Kristeva, used language that defies any all-encompassing singular interpretation (Allen, 2000: 94). There is a sense that Barthes is presenting and exploring 'ways of looking' at texts rather than using them to promote fixed conclusions. Primarily, his task was to liberate language from the shackles of endlessly repeating 'that which has already been said'. In consequence, he consistently avoided elaborating on what he meant by the 'cultural code'. The American writer, Harold Bloom also refused to use cultural codes and ideological formations as a way of informing literary meaning (Bloom, 1976: 512). Although Bloom deliberately restricted his study to 'the interplay of tropes' in literature, he nevertheless dedicated himself to intertextual theory and practice (Bloom, 1976: 511). After examining (mostly 19 th century) poetry from a Freudian perspective, Bloom found that the motivating desire or drive behind the poems, was a kind of oedipal response, between the poet and his precursors. The poet has no choice but to imitate previous texts, whether willingly or unwillingly. In The Anxiety of Influence (1973), Bloom showed how 'willing imitators',
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