I post blog posts here. They could be short essays conveying ideas, like a developed conference comment or question :)

A Musical Approach to Mikhail Bakhtin’s Theory of Carnivalesque.

Mikhail Bakhtin introduced the concept of the carnivalesque to literary criticism. The idea of the carnivalesque is rooted in folk culture, when festivity suspends everyday life’s structures, such as occupations, norms, and power dynamics within a community. A carnival creates a moment where these structures are less pronounced and more dynamic. Bakhtin writes: “Carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions” (p. 10). Bakhtin formulated this concept in his examination of the works of François Rabelais and Fyodor Dostoevsky to study the ways in which novels mirrored this structural suspension…

The Chord of Nature or Natural Randomness

Enacting, reinterpreting, and representing nature have been central to art since the concept of mimêsis was introduced in the works of Plato and Aristotle. In music, tonality is an organic relationship between notes, emerging from the “natural” perception of sound. Tonal music, in Western traditions and beyond, has more or less operated within this organic system, resulting in the edifice of tonal music over the centuries. Sound became music through this “natural” perception, and organic relations justified musical constructs and pieces. This progress was indeed parallel to developments in the principles of causality, logic, and organization, and supported by the idea that there is nothing without a reason…