Logic of Experimentation offers several innovative and ground-breaking perspectives on music performance, music ontology, research methodologies and ethics of performance. It proposes new modes of thinking and exposing past musical works to contemporary audiences, arguing for a new kind of performer, emancipated from authoritative texts and traditions, whose creativity is propelled by intensive research and inventive imagination. Moving beyond the work-concept, Logic of Experimentation presents a new image of musical works, based upon the notions of strata, assemblage and diagram, advancing innovative practice-based methodologies that integrate archival and musicological research into the creative process leading to a performance. Beyond representational modes of performance--be it mainstream or historically informed performance practices--Logic of Experimentation creates an ontological, methodological and ethical space for experimental performance practices, arguing for a new mode of performance. Written in an experimental style, its eight chapters appropriate music performance concepts from post-structural philosophy, psychoanalysis, science and technology studies, epistemology, and semiotics, displaying how transdisciplinarity is central to artistic research. An indispensable contribution to artistic research in music, Logic of Experimentation is compelling reading for music performers, composers, musicologists, philosophers and artist researchers alike.

About the Author
Paulo de Assis is a researcher affiliated with the Orpheus Institute of Ghent. He is an experimental performer, pianist and music philosopher, with transdisciplinary interests in composition, philosophy, psychoanalysis and epistemology.

Reviews

"This is an outstanding book in every way. It demarcates a new field-that of artistic research as an experimental activity-and then provides an original theoretical framework within which to relate the field to music. All the chapters address issues that transcend music and are of great import for aesthetics, ethics, epistemology, ontology, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural theory." - Ronald Bogue, University of Georgia, US

"Reading Logic of Experimentation is an intellectual adventure. The reader comes away with a much more flexible and more powerful context for engaging in performance as scholarship, corporeality, and the manifestation of energy." - Neely Bruce, Wesleyan University, US

This is a remarkable work, rich in ideas and provocative in its conclusions. Assis offers a transformative approach to music performance, which serves as a paradigmatic instance of artistic research. But he also provides the conceptual framework for a general ontology and epistemology of art, one that has implications well beyond the domain of music. This is a book that deserves the attention of researchers throughout the disciplines of the arts, humanities and social sciences.
Bogue, Ronald, jar-online.net. 19/12/2019. https://doi.org/10.22501/jarnet.0023

Book Information
ISBN 9789462701380
Author Paulo de Assis
Format Paperback
Page Count 260
Imprint Leuven University Press
Publisher Leuven University Press
Weight(grams) 745g
Dimensions(mm) 285mm * 190mm * 15mm