Polyphonizing as a Contemplative Practice

When music incorporates borrowed material within repetitive structures, listeners often experience a dual perception, shifting focus from the borrowed material's representational meaning to its immediate sonic qualities. This shift is described as aesthetic contemplation. The author presents an artistic exploration of how contemplative practices can guide compositional techniques, drawing on experiments with repetition and fragmentation of musical borrowings and on meditative experience. A central insight is that moments of dual perception are inherently polyphonic, leading to a compositional approach called "polyphonizing." The work integrates perspectives from sound studies, phenomenology, and metacognition.

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Abstract

When composing with musical borrowings within repetitive structures, a dual perception often occurs, in which listening shifts its focus from the inherent representation of the borrowings to their immediate sonic presence. This shift in attention is frequently characterized as a form of aesthetic contemplation.This paper demonstrates an artistic exploration of how the concept of aesthetic contemplation, along with contemplative practices, can inform the compositional process and what techniques this might require. The research draws on a series of compositional experiments with repetition and fragmentation of musical borrowings as well as on experiences from meditative practice. A central insight of the project is that the aforementioned moments of dual perception are inherently polyphonic in nature. Building on this, a compositional approach of "polyphonizing" is developed. keywords: composition, contemplation, contemplative practice, contemplative reseach, repetition, musical borrowings, fragmentation, polyphony, polyphonizing, listening practices, Sound Mediation, Metacognition, aesthetic experience, temporal structures, resonance, presence, memory, Forgetting, quotation, circling time, poly-temporality, network structures, microphenomenology, semantic satiation