Composition portfolio and commentaries

In an attempt to provide an analytical entry point into my compositional practice, I have identified eight themes which are significantly recurrent: reduction – the selection of a small number of elements; imperfection – a damaged or warped characteristic of sound; hierarchy – a concern with the roles of instruments with regard to their relative prominence; motion – apparently static sound masses consist of fine internal movement; listener perception – expectations for change influence the experience of affect; translation – the transitioning of electronic sounds to the acoustic realm, and vice versa; immersion – the creation of an accommodating soundscape; blurring – smearing and overlapping sounds or genres. Each of these eight factors is associated with relevant precedents in the history and theory of music that have been influential on my work. These include the minimalist compositions of Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt; the lo-fi aesthetic of Boards of Canada and My Bloody Valentine; concerns with political hierarchy in the work of Louis Andriessen; the variations of dynamics and microtonal shifts of Giacinto Scelsi; Leonard B. Meyer's account of expectation in music; cross-fertilisation of the acoustic and electronic in pieces by Gérard Grisey and Gyorgy Ligeti; the immersive technique of Brian Eno's ambient music; and the overlapping sounds of Aphex Twin. These eight factors are variously applicable to the eleven submitted pieces, which are individually analysed with reference to the most significant of the categories. Together they form a musical language that sustains the interaction of a variety of techniques, concepts and genres.

Monstrative acts and becoming-monster: on identity, bodies, and the feminine other

Using two examples of literary monsters, the Creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and Grendel’s Mother in Beowulf, this thesis demonstrates the bearing fictional identities have on “real” bodies, through an examination of two further literary texts, David Henry Hwang’s play, M. Butterfly (1986) and J. M. Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace (1999). Western definitions of Being have historically divided body and mind, favouring the mind as formative of subjective experience and denigrating the body as secondary and impure. This thesis demonstrates that this mind/body binary is symptomatic of the masculine ontological imperative to disown the body and its effects on Being, simultaneously ridding itself of the feminine it believes is its irrational opposite. Using recent feminist reviews of the canon, which emphasise the body’s importance to ontology and demonstrate the conceptual association between the feminine and the corporeal, this thesis links performative identity practices to theories of monstrosity, explaining how fictional qualities adhere to monstrous bodies by proposing a new theoretical category, the “monstrative.” The monstrative is a performative force that makes the Other into a living sign of Otherness; however, unlike earlier theories of Othering, the monstrative accounts for the Other’s being other to herself. This thesis also attempts to read the misrepresented body of the Other as a possible site for more empowered identity performances, where the monstrous “I” is interpreted as a potentially positive model for identity practice, through the conceptualisation of identity as a process of Becoming rather than Being. The transferal from a noun to a verb not only emphasises the performativity of identity, but also suggests fluidity and multiplicity in identity practice, which always already indicates a monstrosity at work. Thus, while monstrative acts constitute bodies as monstrous, Becoming-monster is an empathetic response to the Other’s monstrosity.