Music of Absence

Christine Dysers is Assistant Professor of Music at Aalborg University. Her research focuses on music after 1989, with a particular emphasis on repetitive aesthetics and the notion of the uncanny. Christine holds a PhD in music from City, University of London and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA). In 2021, she was appointed as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar in the Department of Music at Columbia University. She has published in peer-reviewed journals such as Perspectives of New Music, Twentieth-Century Music, TEMPO, and Musik & Ästhetik and has contributed to collections across several musicological disciplines. She is the author of Critical Guides to Contemporary Composers: Bernhard Lang (Intellect, 2023). Peter Edwards is Professor of Musicology at the University of Oslo. He has published in journals including Music Analysis and Music & Letters, as well as in edited volumes, exploring topics at the intersection of music philosophy and aesthetics, music analysis, cultural studies and critical musicology. His work spans themes from musical slapstick to music and death, engaging with a wide array of contemporary musical expressions and compositional practices. His monograph György Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre: Postmodernism, Musico-Dramatic Form and the Grotesque (Routledge, 2016) examines Ligeti’s creative process, the sketches for the opera, and the significance of the opera in the wider context of modern and postmodern aesthetics. Peter is also a composer and guitarist. Judith Lochhead is Professor of Critical Music Studies at Stony Brook University, New York. Lochhead’s research focuses on music of the present from analytical, historical, critical, and ethnographic perspectives. Lochhead’s recent co-edited book is Sound and Affect: Voice, Music, World (Chicago, 2021), with Eduardo Mendieta and Stephen Decatur Smith. Some recent publications include: ‘Émilie du Châtelet, Kaija Saariaho and Heroes of the 21st Century,’ The Heroic in Music, eds. Beate Kutsche and Katherine Butler (Boydell and Brewer, 2022); ‘Multiplicities, Truth, Ethics: A Queering Analysis of Chaya Czernowin’s Anea Crystal’, Queer Music Theory, Gavin Lee, ed. (Oxford, 2023); ‘Timbre Realities: A Phenomenological Study of Liza Lim’s Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus’, Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music, de Souza, Steege, Wiskus, eds. (Oxford, 2023); ‘Canonic Machines’, Repetition and Progressive Variation in Gubaidulina’s Fourth String Quartet’, Jeffrey Swinkin, ed. (Oxford, 2025); and ‘Undisciplined’, SMT Colloquy, Music Theory Spectrum (2023).

The years since 2000 have seen innumerable catastrophes: 9/11, global warming, pandemics, invasions, the erosion of civil rights. Throughout these difficult times, composers have produced music that bears witness and gestures toward the possibility of hope. Music of Absence brings together essays that deal brilliantly with this new music.

• FiguresAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Absence and Music Thinking Christine Dysers, Peter Edwards, Judith LochheadI. Residual Energies1. The Texture of Memory: Quotation as Absent Presence in Caroline Shaw’s Gustave Le GrayMark Hutchinson2. Presentifying Absence: Memorial Practices in Sample-based MusicLorenzo Montefinese 3. Vaporwave, Hypnosis and the Mimetic VoiceAlec Wood4. Voidgaze and Phantom Genres: Functions and Dysfunctions of Music Genres on Streaming PlatformsMattia MerliniII. Erasures5. On the Absence of Female Singing: Law and Praxis in IranPayam Pilvar6. Lacuna and Parergon in Late Vocal Works by Hans Joachim HesposClare Lesser7. Transitions into Absence: On the Musical Aesthetics of DisappearanceJakob Maria SchermannIII. Precarities8. The Lament, Loss and the Power of Speaking in Music Peter Edwards9. The Music of Trauma: Tracing the Real in Wang Xilin’s Piano Concerto Op. 56Arturo Irisarri Izquierdo10. Olga Neuwirth’s CoronAtion Cycle: Into the Void and BeyondMartina BratićIV. Overload11. Music for Uncertain Times: Excess, Loss and the AbyssChristine Dysers12. Absence, Non-Absence, Words and Music in Kurtág’s Fin de partieMark Berry13. Listening Within the Absence: The Musical Potential of Noise in the Compositions of Peter AblingerMarina SudoV. Negative Space14. The Ontoriography of Music in the Twenty-First Century: Absence and Identification Samuel J. Wilson15. ‘I Wish You Could Hear This’: Sonic Absence, Subjective Point-of-Audition and d/Deaf Sensoriality in Contemporary Television Peter Adams16. Spiritual and Aesthetic Spaces in Arvo Pärt’s Lamentate and Adam’s LamentKristina Socanski Celik17. On the Airy Touch of Music: Sonic Thinking in Pandemic TimesJudith LochheadWorks CitedContributorsIndex