Georgina Born: Improvising Ontologies and Double Mutabilities: Digitisation, Reification Digitalisation, Reification and Place in Musics

In this paper I address the analysis of music’s mediation, linking this to attempts to theorise music’s changing ontology. This thinking is part of ongoing work on music, mediation and ontology, some of it presented in a forthcoming essay for the journal Twentieth Century Music. I begin by discussing Goehr’s critique of the musical work concept, Bohlman’s attempt to pluralise the analysis of music’s ontologies, and Adorno’s contribution to mediation theories. I outline three arguments that build on this perspective. The first concerns music’s social and temporal mediation and its nature as a distributed object. The second argument is that music’s mediations have taken a number of forms, cohering into assemblages, which themselves endure and take particular historical forms. I define a musical assemblage as a combination of mediations (sonic, discursive, visual, artefactual, technological, social, temporal) characteristic of a certain historical period. The third argument is that this approach has value in highlighting shifts in the dominant historical forms of musical assemblage. Later in the paper I focus on jazz and improvised musics, and in particular on recent digital experiments in music. The aim is to show how we can use these tools to conceptualise changing forms of musical creativity, which themselves evidence new music ontologies that became ascendant over the 20th century. Taking current examples in which music is engaged with digital technologies and which evidence new kinds of creative process, I develop concepts of social creativity, relayed creativity and of the provisional work. By the end, I hope to probe the shifting relations of improvised musics to, on the one hand, reification, objectification, commodification and, on the other, process or what I call relay, performance or event. Relatedly, I’m interested in distinguishing those musics that are concerned with place – with the specific locations and contexts of performance - and those that are indifferent to place in this sense. (And at this point, I may raise analogies between site-specific sculpture and what has come to be known as site-specific music or sound art).