Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-7qhmt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-26T19:47:39.024Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

ARE YOU SERIOUS? ANALYSING EXAGGERATION IN RICHARD AYRES'S NO. 37B

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2020

Abstract

Exaggeration as a deliberate aesthetic device has seen increased popularity with composers working in the western art music tradition in the last few decades. Their music promotes a feeling of excessiveness as an intentional compositional effect, worthy of being taken seriously. This would seem to encourage the development of analytical techniques for understanding how it works, but almost by definition exaggeration tends to be resistant to analysis, its transgressive, anti-rational character appearing incompatible with the systematic approaches associated with this discipline. This article analyses the forms of exaggeration employed in Richard Ayres's orchestral piece No. 37b (2006) and the techniques used to achieve them, developing a framework for how we might attempt to analyse exaggeration in a manner that is rigorous but sensitive to the nature of musical exaggeration. The article finishes by making the case for how exaggeration can be interpreted as sincere as well as ironic and why deliberate exaggeration has become an appropriate and attractive device for composers in the last few decades

Type
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Sontag, Susan, ‘Notes on Camp’, in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 292Google Scholar.

2 Sheinberg, Esti, Irony, Satire, Parody and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich: A Theory of Musical Incongruities (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000)Google Scholar.

3 Düttmann, Alexander García, Philosophy of Exaggeration (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), p. 2Google Scholar.

4 Ritter, Joshua, ‘Recovering Hyperbole: Rethinking the Limits of Rhetoric for an Age of Excess’, Philosophy & Rhetoric, 45/4 (2012), p. 407Google Scholar.

5 Johnson, Christopher, Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

6 Adorno, Theodor W., Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 323CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Olalquiaga, Celeste, The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), pp. 84 and 291Google Scholar.

8 Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’, pp. 275 and 283–4.

9 Feller, Ross, ‘Resistant Strains of Postmodernism: The Music of Helmut Lachenmann and Brian Ferneyhough’, in Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, ed. Lochhead, Judith and Auner, Joseph (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 253Google Scholar.

10 Downes, Stephen, Music and Decadence in European Modernism: The Case of Central and Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 28Google Scholar.

11 Ritter, ‘Recovering Hyperbole’.

12 Ritter, ‘Recovering Hyperbole’, p. 417.

13 Richard Ayres, NONcertos and others, NMC D162 (2010).

14 Downes, Music and Decadence, p. 28.

15 Baudelaire, Charles, ‘De l'essence du rire’, in Oeuvres completes, ed. Pichois, Claude (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), vol. 2, p. 526Google Scholar.

16 Berry, Wallace, Structural Functions in Music (New York: Dover Publications, 1987), pp. 209–15Google Scholar.

17 Quoted in Ritter, ‘Recovering Hyperbole’, p. 420.

18 Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings (Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

19 See, for example, Lochhead, Judy and Auner, Joseph, eds, Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought (New York: Routledge, 2002)Google Scholar.

20 Lyotard, Jean-François, trans. Bennington, Geoff and Massumi, Brian, The Postmodern Condition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 4951Google Scholar.

21 Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor and Cukier, Kenneth, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), p. 9Google Scholar.

22 James Wood, ‘Human, All Too Inhuman’, The New Republic, 24 July 2000.

23 notably, Most, Kahneman, Daniel, Slovic, Paul and Tversky, Amos, Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

24 Chalmers, David, ‘Facing up to the Hard Problem of Consciousness’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 2/3 (1995), pp. 200–19Google Scholar.