Imagining the Non-Present: Thought Experiments on Rich Temporality in Sound

Imagination is part of the practice of nearly every musician. But does this faculty only aid in the preparation of music-practicing, rehearsing, devising, composing-or is it more fundamental to the art form? By recasting temporality from a chronology of past, present, and future to a phenomenology of present and non-present, this publication seeks to elucidate the relationship between one's situation within and curiosity beyond the present across a variety of musical practices. Through studies of sampling and archiving, variation and silence, history and utopia, forgery and counterfactuals, the contributors articulate in popyphony a chronologically conjoined identity for the not here, not now.

Content:

• Introduction - Carlo Diaz
• Not Yet and Already There: On the Imagination of Real Life - Tim Ingold
• Other Presents - Jennifer Walshe
• Transcending Time and the Self: The Shared Political and Social Potential of Contemporary Composition and Historically-Minded Performance - Priya Satia
• Speaking Nearby History: The Fictional, the Historical, the Imagined, and the Real - Mark Dyer
• Imagining the Past Through the Present: Questioning Notions of Sameness and Difference Through the Virtual and the Actual - Bryn Harrison
• Mental-Dependent Musical Objects: Framing and Objectification in My Musical Practice - Pablo Galaz Salamanca
• Sonic Images, Dreams, and Hallucinations - Caroline Wilkins
• Plastic Time: An In-Progress Provocation to Dialectic Immaterialism - James Wood
• Closing Forum - Carlo Diaz, João Carlos Santos, Priya Satia, and Michael Shanks