The War on the Critical Condition. Volume 1

Abstract

In my so called 'serious' research (into best practice realisation of ancient and medieval music), a major theme has been the preparation of multiple realisations of a text or musical work, in response to music that has no critical or singular edition. This has applied to both scores and recorded works and this premise has had a profound effect on both my realised early music and new art music composition. This paper documents two methods of consciously working against the notion of a critical edition. The first is three recorded realisations of the prologue to Hildegard of Bingen's 12th Century music drama Ordu Virtutum (ABC Classics 2007). Each realisation becomes an existing work in itself and sets to prove that early music notation allows the space for significant new composition. The second case study, Namu Amida Butsu, a new piece of honkyoku for solo shakuhachi, is the genesis of another process. An existing scored and recorded work is currently being deconstructed with the purpose of being recomposed either on Garageband or a comparable music sequencing program. The ramifications of this method are significant because the technique of 'comping' , from which this is derived, is common in popular and image based music where it is used to produce a critical edition similar to that of a score. However in this case new technology is not used to reinforce an existing structure, but to find multiple new structures from the source material.