Centrality of Téchne for an Aesthetic approach on electroacoustic music

Abstract

Electroacoustic music poses methodological problems to purely hermeneutic and historical musicology — problems of epistemological nature betrayed by a lack of ethnomusicological awareness (in a sense to be defined). What is missing is a methodology capable of characterising the technical processes and the designing tools that make up the compositional environment, models, representations, and knowledge‐level strategies, which is understood as traces of cognitive and aesthetic paradigms specific to the medium. It is also shown that an analysis of such kind — drawing on the téchne of the making of music — is indispensable in order to shed light on the renewed relation of sound materials to musical form in electroacoustic music. Finally, the problem of whether the theoretical approach outlined here would lend itself to an outlook on normative aesthetics in the context of the presumed a‐normativity of postmodern intellectual endeavours is discussed.