Fragment: Accordances - Enactments

Fragments are entities which display complex relationships with totality. Our engagement with music has become essentially fragmentary. In modern contexts, the attention devoted to experiencing a closed work, a recording, or a concert from beginning to end is now mediated by curated playlists, recommendation algorithms, and the slow but inevitable shift from physical media to streaming. Musical behaviours of creation and production are themselves often fragmentary and iterative in nature. Not only practices of listening, but also practices of imagination are deeply entwined with notions of fragmentation. Musical experience is mediated through curation and becomes a deliberate act of fragmentary collage, creating new configurations. This behaviour is connected to the shift in perspective on musical identities; no longer seen as fixed entities, they are viewed as behavioural practices of social connection, a result of the aforementioned curation. “A sense of self and identity is viewed as constructed out of the discourses which are culturally available to us and which we use when communicating with others.” Centring research on fragmentation draws attention to the processes of music making and musical experience, and the ideas, materials, and experiences which are neglected or excluded from conventional discourses. Treating fragments not only as a particular type of material, but as the foundational element of artistic practices and musical processes creates a transhistorical space in which fragments are not defined by their origins, but emerge as a mode of perception, generation, and experience.

Fragmentation is an essential part of a wide range of musical practices and behaviours. Conventional instrumental and vocal practices consist largely of unseen and fragmentary repetitions - the illusion of wholeness presented on the concert stage is the result of behaviours which implicitly rely on fragmentation, and musical performance and musical research often rely upon the deliberate exclusion of “critical splinters” deemed irrelevant to the desired final product and therefore they remain unexamined. Through their critical engagement with closed totalities and the accordances between the discarded splinters and open-ended entities, fragments create liminal spaces in which new connections, tensions, and symmetries may be generated. Fragmentation in the twenty-first century is not focused on objects, but is an artistically and interpretationally conditioned mode of experience.

The roots of this development in fragmentation are found in the course of the long nineteenth century, particularly in the light of Romantic thought and aesthetic philosophy. Fragments offer openness and potentiality. These elements bring a potential for fluidity and flexibility into the approaches and performances of the repertoire of this time into the 21st century, reflecting topics of contemporary salience such as the questions of individual and collective identity, and the nature of musical experience and relevance. Fragmentation is no longer a physical characteristic, but a mode of perception and engagement, an invitation to creative intervention and rediscovery. This is a starting point for the work of the cluster project Fragment: Accordances - Enactments. “Fragments” refer to a category recognisable through their reflexive and critical interactions with concepts of totality, and which is defined by its focus upon processes rather than fixed results. Physical manifestations of musical fragments are the total of the enactments which have shaped their current appearances, the traces of contact and interaction between fragments and their contexts. Enactments are actions which influence and form the fragmentary entity and its trajectories. The fragment concept of F: A-E is also a palimpsest-like representation of its own trajectory, creating a liminal space for connection and intervention. This leads to questions of conventional historiographies, narratives, and processes of canonisation, always centred upon the idea of the “critical splinters”, cast aside as extraneous to social and aesthetic teleologies.

The transhistorical nature of the fragmentary perspectives taken by the cluster F: A-E draw the interpretation and realisation of the repertoire of the long nineteenth century into the present, linking its practices and aesthetic-philosophical approaches to discourses in a wide spectrum of fields, including new developments in e-textiles, gender studies, and the investigation of types of marginalisation in musical practices.

The focus on fragmentation leads to exploratory approaches to new modes of interpretation and performance. These share common emphases on process rather than result, and are driven by the search for critical splinters of material and experience which are used to draw attention to the unseen, intangible, and excluded elements. Aesthetic and musical practices which arise from notions of curation, collation, and reconfiguration are central to the work of the cluster, generating dynamic perspectives on the construction of musical identity and the nature of musical experience. Fragments are transhistorical, in that they bear the traces of their previous contexts, but retain a radical openness and modernity through the potential for disruption and recombination. Practices which respond to this recognition are highly varied in their output, including research into the construction of compositional, interpretative, and performative identity in the contexts of musical variation and the search for an acoustic representation of the dispersion of attention and physical anticipation and retention in piano performance. These areas of focus share a common sense of constructive fracture and freedom from preconceived forms. In this sense, deliberate engagement with material and experience requires a fundamental recognition of their fractured natures, reflecting the increasingly fragmented nature of individual patterns of attention (itself a curatorial act) in modern and postmodern contexts. This allows a transfer from individual curation and attention to those occurring in collective and collaborative spaces. Concentration on the dynamic and transhistorical nature of the fragment allows for novel syntheses in which questions of musical marginalisation, identity, and discovery are prioritised over adherence to particular stylistic, performative, or historical gestures.