Expanded musical form

This project presents a model of expanded musical form. Arguing that music’s expanded field is a field of experiences, rather than of discrete things, it sets out an approach to composition that centres not on the creation of aesthetic works, but on supporting an aesthetic attitude. Integrating theory and practice, this research endeavours to give definition to an attitude that apprehends music as experience. Under this attitude, the perceiver assumes no distance from the perceived as she produces the content of her musical experience in and through her dynamic bodily interactivity. This project comprises a thesis and four ephemeral performance sound installations. The thesis sets out the terms of music’s expanded condition, drawing upon a range of disciplines – artistic, aesthetic, philosophical – to chart the pluralistic, indeterminate, open-ended structure of the expanded field. The performance sound installations explored the operations of expanded artistic practice, critiquing conceptual, ideological, and institutional terms of music and sound installation to foreground the productivity of the perceiver. In both theory and practice, this research contests the concept of “sound art” as a distinct category. It makes the case that expanded musical form is not a break with the musical past, but its background made focal. It proposes that the presence, physicality, and place in which expanded musical form consists are music’s always presupposed foundation