Autopoiesis and Xxxxxxx Xxx’x Sijo_241015 Sample Clauses

Autopoiesis and Xxxxxxx Xxx’x Sijo_241015. I. Dramatis personae How much can an instrument be augmented, prepared or diminished before it ceases to be the same instrument? To what extent can a notation replace, exchange, and remove parameters before its internal consistency as a notation vanishes? To which extremes can a performer dissociate their physical and mental actions before their existence as a holistic performing body is threatened, perforated, disintegrated? In a traditional performing practice, the barriers and boundaries to the edges of technique, notation, and instrumentation are sacrosanct. Even the common expression “extended techniques” states implicitly that there is a limit to normal, traditional, or proper technique, a limit that, once overstepped, is replaced or enhanced by a technique that is inherently and fundamentally other. Such characterizations of technique—bounded, delineated—plague the discussion of instrumental techniques and notations. Both technique and notation are subject to implicit assumptions about what may be normal, traditional, or proper, words which can all too easily become synonymous with the expectable and the predictable. But if standard instrumental technique or music notation is somehow bounded, and other techniques or notations exist somehow external to that standard, then where precisely are these boundaries? Attempting to accurately place these limits quickly becomes an exercise in Xxxx’x paradox: a limit ever more closely approached but never reached, never realized. Nonetheless, the difference between traditional and extended techniques can seem intuitively, if deceptively, clear from a casual perspective. Despite the lack of any rigorous definition in this boundary-drawing exercise, the realm of the “extended” technique and the “nonstandard” notation remain implicitly separate, quarantined, externalized. In many cases, this externalization and these implicit demarcations can be navigated with a minimum of fuss. When a performer needs to engage with a single nonstandard notation, with an extra parameter here or a graphic, descriptive element there, the demands can be relatively easily incorporated into a traditionalist approach. Often, the traditional practice facilitates the internalization of the more standard material in a more embodied, subconscious way, thus opening up the primary foci of the performer’s attention and deliberation for the less standard material. Extended techniques are often treated similarly, which is to say, as extensions a...