Elin Kanhov

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Encounters between music and nature

This thesis examines encounters between music and nature through a productive and transversal approach to music analysis with examples from the contemporary Western art music repertoire. In three analytical chapters, I study how contemporary music potentially reframes the positions and relations between music, humans and nature by engaging with transversal concepts from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s thinking and drawing upon Judy Lochhead’s approach to productive music analysis. In Joan La Barbara’s Les Oiseaux qui chantent dans ma tête for solo voice (1976) and Kaija Saariaho’s Laconisme de l’aile for solo flute and optional electronics (1982), I study affinities between humans and birds through the concept of becoming-bird. In John Luther Adam’s Inuksuit for percussion ensemble (2009), I engage with the notion of coexistence between humans and the environment with the concepts of milieu, rhythm, and deterritorialization. Lastly, in Helena Tulve’s Extinction des choses vues for large orchestra (2007), I argue that her music confronts aspects of musical organicism by producing ruptures from its own modes of order, activated by the concept of the Body without Organs. I particularly investigate contemporary music from perspectives that question human-centered ways of thinking and being, as well as ostensibly rigid conceptions of nature that appear separate from the domain of culture. From these perspectives, I understand nature and culture as entangled material-discursive processes, where the relations between music, humans and nature are constantly renegotiated. In extension, I hope this thesis demonstrates how these encounters between music and nature may foster new and fruitful understandings of the contemporary world we all inhabit. This is a doctoral thesis in Musicology at Stockholm University, Sweden 2023