IN-PERSON London Heritages. Section A

Abstract

While Western Classical music is often associated with traditional concerts and opera in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries in the imaginary of people, its performative practices are not bound to conventional performances and previous times. Contemporary cinema reflects the novel performative practices of this European artistic and cultural heritage. These representations keep (re)shaping the imaginary about classical music, setting forth complex questions of inter-mediality between music, performance, and cinema that illuminate our understanding of this musical heritage. In this regard, this paper seeks to explore the dominant conceptual discourses surrounding the temporality of classical music performance, how contemporary cinema contributes to, challenges, or neglects such dominant discourse, how they relate to broader discourses on gender, race, identity, class, and aesthetics, and ultimately that helps us (re)conceptualize the temporality of classical music performances. The paper brings Gilles Deleuze’s (1986, 1989) conceptualization of time in cinema in dialogue with Jonathan Kramer (2016, 2021, 2023) and his concepts of temporality in music. I hypothesize a conceptualization of the temporality of the performative practices of this artistic heritage based on Deleuzian procedural, becoming, non-essentialist, and thinking ontology. This paper helps to reimagine the performative temporality of classical music and its relation to past centuries and practices. It identifies and fills a knowledge gap in the intermedial study of classical music, developing an innovative musical-cinematic approach to the temporality of music as an invaluable cultural heritage of Europe.