Maurice Windleburn

In a 1995 interview, contemporary American composer John Zorn stated: ‘I got involved in music because of fi lm […] There’s a lot of fi lm elements in my music’ (Duckworth, 1995, p. 451). Scholars and critics have since widely noted these cinematic elements, with emphasis being placed on Zorn’s genre of so-called ‘fi le card compositions’. Whilst these studies have primarily concentrated on how the arrangement of sound blocks – the disjointed segments of Zorn’s compositions – can be compared to cinematic montage, this article instead focusses on how sound blocks suggest the visual aspects of cinema. To delve deeper into the visuo-cinematic qualities of Zorn’s fi le card compositions, an idealised cinematic listener will be constructed, aided by various psychological, semiotic, philosophical and fi lm theories. I will suggest that a listener occupying a hypnogogic state projects moving images, akin to those of cinema, onto what Bernard Lewin fi rst called a ‘dream screen’. These projections occur due to intertextual associations made between fi le card compositions and the artistic fi gures to whom they are dedicated. These images combine with the sounds that brought them into being to form an audio-visual diegesis, which can be considered a type of half-imagined fi lm. The cinematic listener then actively draws out of this diegesis a narrative, via the semi-conscious process Boris Eikhenbaum called ‘inner speech’. I will conclude by giving some broader justifi cation for the methodology that brought this cinematic listener into being and suggest how the cinematic listener may be further utilised to provide musical analyses for fi le card works.

This chapter furthers recent reappraisals of Vladimir Jankélévitch’s music philosophy, working against Carolyn Abbate’s well-known claim that Jankélévitch’s ‘drastic’ thought opposes all hermeneutic methods. To do so, I illustrate how hermeneutic interpretation is itself a drastic act of doing, taking Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and outlining its drastic components through the prism of Abbate’s Jankélévitch-inspired terms. I then reconsider Jankélévitch’s music philosophy in the light of the drastic aspects of Gadamer’s thought, offering some surprising points of compatibility between the two thinkers. I show how for both philosophers, musical interpretation is a temporal event, one that develops as an interplay between listener and music, perception and preconception. Additionally, both Gadamer and Jankélévitch consider this interpretive process as potentially infinite, given music’s ineffability.Towards the chapter’s end I shift focus slightly, to claim that products of interpretation, like musicological essays and books, are not only formed by the drastic process of interpreting, but are also responsible for further ‘doings’ – entering a meta-drastic process of ‘musical work’. Rather than just act as mere after-the-fact inscriptions of interpretative doing, these texts have an effect on both performance and our general conception of music, and as such, they ‘do’ something. To conclude, I acknowledge Jankélévitch’s regular denunciation of writing, yet also note the important exception he makes for poetry, offering a brief declaration of the important role poeticism must play in a drastic hermeneutics, with both Jankélévitch and Gadamer acting as key exemplars.

While a familiar term in art history, philosophy and cultural studies, ‘hyperrealism’ is rarely applied to music. This is despite Noah Creshevsky’s use of the term to describe his unique compositional process and aesthetic approach. A composer of electroacoustic music and founder of the Brooklyn College Center for Computer Music, Creshevsky has described his musical hyperrealism as a ‘language constructed from sounds that are found in our shared environment (“realism”), handled in ways that are somehow exaggerated or excessive (“hyper”)’. In this article, I summarise the ideas behind Creshevsky’s hyperreal music and compare them to philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s theorisation of the hyperreal. Numerous similarities between Creshevsky and Baudrillard’s ideas will be made evident. The first half of this article focuses on Creshevsky’s sampling of sounds as ‘simulacra’ and how the interweaving textures and melodies that Creshevsky makes out of these samples are similar to ‘simulations’. In the article’s second half, Creshevsky’s creation of disembodied ‘superperformers’ is addressed and related to Baudrillard’s transhumanism. Towards the end of the article, Creshevsky’s aesthetic more broadly and what he calls ‘hyperdrama’ are linked to Baudrillard’s ‘transaesthetics’, before a concluding note addressing Baudrillard and Creshevsky’s different dispositions towards hyperrealism.