Performing Musical Silence
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Guy Livingston
This exposition is in review and its share status is: visible to all.
This dissertation considers performed silences in composed music and suggests that musicians often use markers to communicate the dimensions of silence. These markers may shape, summon, or impose silence. Markers are signals or cues that may be visible, audible, or multimodal. This research consists of an archive of examples from the author's pianistic practice, as well as three case studies drawn from works of Beethoven, Cage, and Antheil.
Full title: "Performing Musical Silence: Markers, Gestures, and Embodiments"
Diabelli Machines
(last edited: 2018)
author(s): Paulo de Assis, Lucia D'Errico
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Diabelli Machines is a series of performances, lectures, articles, or installations that operate different forms of problematisation of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, op. 120. Every single instantiation of this research project questions the original work, disclosing its ruptures, and reconfiguring it in a different regime of perception and signification. Beyond historiographical, philological, organological, or sociological investigations, this project aims at creatively, yet rigorously, engaging with the historically available materials related to Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations and its compossible futures.
Diabelli Machines 2 : Deleuzabelli Variations I
(last edited: 2018)
author(s): Paulo de Assis
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Diabelli Machines 2 — Deleuzabelli Variations I was produced by ME21 at the Orpheus Institute (Ghent), in collaboration with the Royal Antwerp Conservatoire and HERMESensemble. The subtitle is a triple homage: to Beethoven, Gilles Deleuze and Anton Diabelli. Beethoven’s music functions as the backbone structure of the performance, while Deleuze’s idea of differential repetition provides a sort of method related to processes of continuous transformation and permanent becoming; and Diabelli’s name must be highly praised, for without him none of this would ever have happened.
DELEUZABELLI VARIATIONS #4
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Paulo de Assis
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Paulo de Assis | Orpheus Institute, Ghent, BE
Day 1, De Bijloke Concert Hall, 19:00-20:00
Grounded in Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, William Kindermans’s book Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations (1987), and Michel Butor’s Dialogue avec 33 variations de Ludwig van Beethoven sur une valse de Diabelli (1971), the Deleuzabelli Variations expose Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, op. 120, to several musical encounters, letting other times and styles interfere with Beethoven and making unconnected connections happen. In the time frame of the original piece, diverse techniques of elimination, substitution, and replacement are used. Alongside interventions from other times and styles, including composers such as Bach, Mozart, and Cramer, six new pieces were especially written for this performance.
Pre-concert screening: Untimely Variations, an interview with Paulo de Assis by Thomas Heiber and Gerhard Schabel.
