Performance Archive

Welcome to the Archives of Sounds Provocative. Here we will post short video excerpts of concerts we have documented and analysed in our research, as well as interview excerpts and context. The complete archives of Sounds Provocative are housed at the University of Guelph.

Index

• Barnyard Drama
• Black Auks
• Charlotte Hug
• François Houle
• Gordon Monahan & Jesse Stewart
• I Have Eaten the City
• Laura Kavanaugh and Ian Birse
• Lori Freedman
• Mankind
• Minibloc
• Pauline Oliveros & Anne Bourne
• SAFA
• Warren Burt & Catherine Schieve

Why Document Experimental Performance?
The issue of documenting interdisciplinary performance-based music is particularly urgent, because such works are not reducible to traditional storage media such as written scores and sound recordings. This research will develop multi-valence documentary and archival methodologies that take into account the articulation of embodied gestures, instrumental and vocal techniques, staging, visual media, electronics, software, and audience reception in performances of experimental music.

Why Analyse Experimental Performance?
Following recent calls in Canadian music scholarship for an integral relationship between critical theory and fieldwork (Shepherd, Beverley Diamond), an important objective of this research program is to develop a performance studies approach to documentation and analysis that assesses not only what experimental music performance means but what it does: "What does it accomplish in the world? What sorts of intervention does it perform? These are political questions" (Knowles 2005, 2). An important tool in answering such questions is found in theories of performativity. Performativity may be defined as a theory of how meaning is created within and through discourse. The concept was first described in linguistics by J. L. Austin, and developed in speech-act theory (Searle), poststructuralism (Derrida), and postmodern theory (Lyotard, Jameson, Hutcheon). The relationship between performativity and identity has been most closely articulated in feminist and queer theory (Butler, Parker and Sedgwick, Braidotti, Haraway), and has given rise to a burgeoning scholarship in performance studies (Auslander, Phelan, Elin Diamond). Recent music scholarship has begun to explore the performative (i.e. cultural, social, political) effects of music (Cook, Cusick, Fast, Moisala and Beverley Diamond, Kisliuk, Monson, Threadgold, Wong). Moving beyond these studies, Sounds Provocative will develop and codify methodologies and analytical strategies for a performance studies approach to musical performance. A performative analysis of experimental musical performance will answer two key questions: 1) "what kinds of identities are articulated through experimental musical performance, and by what means," and 2) "what effects does experimental music performance have on broader social, cultural, and institutional values in Canadian music."