The composition of posthuman bodies

ABSTRACT

A collision of two thoughts on prostheses provides a point of theoretical ignition for this article: the first is that ‘the musical instrument is a prosthetic augmentation of the human body, enabling the body to exceed itself’ [Johnson, Julian. 2015. Out of Time: Music and the Making of Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press]; the second is that ‘the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate’ [Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press]. I consider how musical prostheses critically bring into focus the cultural and material conditions of recent modernity. I suggest that by compositionally engineering bodies in posthuman terms, one may dissolve the body into its nonhuman extensions, such that it may be, paradoxically, located therein; through engaging, for example, cyborg identities, bodily extensions enable the body’s possession, in transformed terms, during a historical moment when the embodied nature of the subject is in crisis. Brian Ferneyhough’s Time and Motion Study cycle (1971–1977), in which the composer entangles performers with technological networks, provides a principal frame of musical and historical reference.

KEYWORDS:

• Materiality
• cyborg
• Brian Ferneyhough
• musical instrument
• voice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Samuel Wilson is Lecturer in Contextual Studies at London Contemporary Dance School and Tutor in Music Philosophy and Aesthetics at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, after completing his PhD in 2013 at Royal Holloway, University of London. Sam’s research focuses principally on the material and intellectual conditions of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century musical modernity. He has published on contemporary music and is the editor of Music – Psychoanalysis – Musicology (Routledge: forthcoming).

Notes

1. In preparing this article, I am indebted to Sita Popat, Sarah Whatley, and the peer reviewers for their insightful comments.

2. Van Noortwijk (1997) includes a performance of Study II by Reynard Rott.

3. My use of the term ‘modernity’ signifies a longstanding historical era and set of socio-cultural practices, in line with the work of Jameson, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marshall Berman and others.

4. A phrase he also used to describe Study III. See Ferneyhough (1995, 93).

5. In a lengthy review article, Pace (2015) has identified a number of trends in scholarly discourse about Ferneyhough and his music, including contrasting characterisations of this ‘complexity’.

6. In Study II, Ferneyhough draws on a source text from Artaud. For a more detailed discussion of Ferneyhough’s treatment of this text see Iddon (2006, 97–103). Iddon also reflects briefly on the gendering of the voice (see endnote 3).

7. Ferneyhough (1995, 94 and 97) mentions as specific sources Duchamp, Christopher Marlowe, as well as classical philosophy.