published_or_final_version / Music / Master / Master of Philosophy

高慧玲. / 手稿本(複印本) / Thesis (M.A.)--香港中文大學, 1991. / Shou gao ben (fu yin ben) / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 87-99). / Gao Huiling. / Thesis (M.A.)--Xianggang Zhong wen da xue, 1991. / Chapter ´第¡章 --- 音樂的意義 / Chapter （一） --- Hospers的觀點 --- p.3-6 / Chapter （二） --- 對Hospers的駁斥 --- p.7-11 / Chapter （三） --- 音樂與符號 --- p.Dec-18 / Chapter （四） --- 表徵與表現 --- p.19-22 / Chapter ´第Ł章 --- 表徵論 / Chapter （一） --- 三種符號 --- p.23-26 / Chapter （二） --- 歌曲與表徵作用 --- p.27-31 / Chapter （三） --- 樂曲與表徵作用 --- p.32-51 / Chapter ´第Ø章 --- 表現論 / Chapter （一） --- 「表情」的三個向度 --- p.52-57 / Chapter （二） --- 音樂與情感的抒發 --- p.58-60 / Chapter （三） --- 音樂與情感的喚起 --- p.61-66 / Chapter （四） --- 音樂與情感的顯露 --- p.67-76 / 總結 --- p.77-79 / 註釋 --- p.80-86 / 書目 --- p.87-99

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While the groundbreaking insights that contemporary theorists have formulated with regards to space---as a multiplicity without essence, as an active event, and as inseparable from subjectivity, power, Otherness and time---have ostensibly purged it of its traditional understanding as absolute, a specific visuality characteristic of Cartesian perspectivalism remains privileged in its theorization which force it to remain so. While the complexity of space cannot be recovered from an abstract contemplation of its visual geometry in a way that reflects these contemporary concerns, there have unfortunately been relatively few attempts to imagine space away from the visual in a way that challenges its traditional absoluteness. To this end, it is argued that because sound and music contain implicit and explicit spatialities, the sonic represents a rich and unexplored area from which to imagine a radical non-visual space that discursively organizes space according to a different economy through which to challenge its assumed visuality. And yet, even when space has been approached through sound, there is a tendency to exteriorize sound into an object or a set of practices that robs it of its defining quality---its own "soundfulness". By breaking down those factors that are considered salient to how space is conceived today along sonic rather than visual lines, the argument is made that the "soundfulness" of sound's physical properties gives it a complex texture of excess that is corporealized within the body and forwards the philosophical possibility of unfolding the spatiality of sound according to vectors beyond the visible in a way that, while reflecting contemporary concerns, prevents its return to absoluteness. To take seriously this "soundfulness" thus allows us to recuperate the sonic as a philosophical and political way of experiencing and knowing the world, including that of space. The arguments, as well as being drawn from the insights of contemporary spatial theory, the physics of sound, the phenomenology of listening, rhizomatic and feminist theory, quantum mechanics and musicology, will be explained through an understanding of space as sound and exemplified in The Disintegration Loops, a post-minimalist musical piece by sonic artist William Basinski.

Some artists strive to create artwork that has aesthetic value. If a piece of artwork has the ability to capture the attention of an audience, it must contain strong sensual attributes. Thus, understanding how to design an art form to contain strong sensual attributes may increase the possibility of an aesthetic experience. Since aesthetics is an experience of sensations perceived when in contact with a creative form in any artistic discipline, it is necessary for an artist to understand the nature of the sensual experience. In understanding the sensual experience, artists may be able to create techniques to enhance the aesthetic experience of their work. My video piece, entitled Ararat is a study of methods to enhance the sensual experience. I hope to accomplish this by means of using techniques that optimize an audience's perceptual experience.

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Lai Nga Ting Ada. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 86-101). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / Acknowledgements --- p.iii / Prologue --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter 1 --- The Notion of Time --- p.3 / Chapter Chapter 2 --- The Music of Time --- p.17 / Chapter Chapter 3 --- The Technique of Musical Time --- p.27 / Epilogue --- p.80 / Appendix I --- p.82 / Appendix II --- p.83 / Bibliography --- p.86

This essay discusses the work of the Venetian composer Luigi Nono (29 January 1924 - 8 May 1990) in the context of Marxist aesthetics. Nono is the most explicitly political member of the Darmstadt generation. A card-carrying member of the Communist party whose titles and texts often directly refer to political personages and events, Nono bids the listener or critic to confront the problematic of political expression in instrumental music, a subject of inquiry at least as old as Plato (to whom Nono explicitly refers in Fragmente , his late string quartet that is the subject of examination here) and of crucial relevance since World War II, the cold war, and the rise of mass media. Yet the majority of literature devoted to his work has largely ignored the question of where his work and philosophical attitude locate themselves within the four major strands of Marxist aesthetics. The relationship between Nono's his work and his political perspective is either treated in an imprecise, undisciplined fashion, relying on cliches of existentialism, mysticism, or vaguely defined alternative modes of perception to stand in for the notion of opposition (Nono's fascination with Hölderlin is often invoked); or the element of ideology is ignored altogether, and the works are submitted to traditional post-serial analysis of compositional technique. Whereas both of these approaches do shed light on a challenging body of work, a brief examination of the four major models of a Marxist approach to art - the Marx/Engels, the Benjaminian, the Adorno,and the Bloch/Jameson - and the attempt to contextualize Nono's work within or against them situates this complex personality within the universe of the poltical talis qualis. A narratological take on Nono's late sting quartet Fragmente provides a demonstration of invoking literary theory to create a productive analogy between political readings of instrumental music and that of other artforms. Various analytic techniques employed by critical theory - techniques examining communication, culture, and political consciousness which themselves are drawn from linguistic and analytic philosophy, symbolic interactionism, structural linguistics, hermeneutics, semiology, poststructural psychoanalysis, and deconstruction - may not simply be borrowed by the musicologist. These strategies can be fruitfully transposed, in the mathematical sense, wherein a limited number of elements within the critical structure are exchanged provided that others are fixed. The essays explores one example of such an exchanged element: Nono's use of polyvalent quotations. Other elements are available to the musicologist via the classic Husserlian move of Einklammerung, the "phenomenological reduction." Jameson had no particular personal or professional association with Nono, and Jameson has no important writings on music. Nevertheless, Jameson was Nono's historical contemporary; Jameson was born only ten years after Nono; and Nono's work is much closer to the Bloch / Jameson model than that of Adorno, the passionate anti-bourgeois devotee of the Second Viennese School; or that of Benjamin, the passionate anti-bourgeois proponent of the "fragment," the thinker who plays the most superficially salient role in Nono's work. Jameson's 1981 book The Political Unconscious, written at the same time Nono wrote Fragmente, describes three non-dialectical analytical approaches, or "horizons," shared by the critic, the spectator, and the artist: the political, the social, and the historical. They form concentric circles. By situating Nono's work within Jameson's theory, Nono is revealed, far from the mystical/naive poet in the style of a Rothko or a Tarkovsky, as a wily, canny dramatist whose technique is conservative and neoromantic, if never regressive, always consciously bent against the postmodernity, properly speaking, of Cage.

This dissertation is comprised of a recent series of compositions, titled the Nightmare series, and this thesis. The three compositions are Nightmare for JACK (a ballet) (2013), Second Nightmare, for KIKU/2.5 Nightmares for Jessie (2014), and Child of Chimera (2015). The thesis describes the aesthetic impulse behind this series of works, and identifies sociological and technological elements in the work. The primary topic of investigation is the “Uncanny Valley,” a term used primarily in robotics and gaming in reference to empathy towards androids and digital humanoid characters. This thesis investigates the uncanny valley in film, gaming, and psychology; examines the potential of the concept for use in experimental art; and describes the methods I have used to incite the emotion in my compositions.

Educational philosophy generally and the Philosophy of Music Education in particular have been slow to consider in any real depth the findings of those sciences most concerned with explaining human nature, that is, the attributes (capacities, aptitudes, predilections, appetites) we have in common because we share the same genome, much of which we also share with other species. There are several such sciences which may collectively be called Darwinian Science in that they all take as axiomatic Darwin‘s explanation for how life evolves according to the law of natural selection – a simple, mindless and purposeless algorithm that has played out for over four billion years and which continues to do so, driving not only biological evolution but, as this study argues, cultural evolution as well. Evolutionary Psychology (including Biomusicology and Evolutionary Aesthetics), Cognitive Neuroscience and Gene- Culture Coevolution Theory are the overlapping fields that this study draws from in developing an understanding of the adapted mind useful for engaging with questions germane to the Philosophy of Music Education, principally those concerning the nature and value of music and how best it should feature in general education. These are questions that have not hitherto been addressed from a Darwinian perspective. This study develops such a perspective and applies it not only to questions around music‘s educational values and possibilities, but to more encompassing philosophical questions, wherein the goals of music education are made accountable in relation both to Dewey‘s ideal of society as a function of education, and to an ecozoic vision of a sustainable planetary habitat of interdependent and interconnected life forms. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2011.