This lecture-performance aims to legitimate why Björn Schmelzer would prefer to change the name of his ensemble Graindelavoix (a name stolen from the French essayist Roland Barthes) into “A Pair of Trousers,” another, rather neglected concept by the same author, used in a text on the painter CyTwombly.
The lecture elaborates on some performative ideas of Adorno and will engage once more in defending early music against its devotees, or in other words, showing why we have never been historicist enough.
Together with four singers of Graindelavoix, Andrew Hallock, Albert Riera, Marius Peterson, and Arnout Malfliet, Schmelze rattempts to show in a concrete way the difference betweena musical work, a score, and its incarnation (against embodiment); how musical scores are capturing diagrams that engage materialities in order to produce a gestural, floating musical plasticity; how we could perform scores like walking in dark corridors, and how we can engage with phantasmata—Domenico da Piacenza’s term for the unwritten signs or puncta of the horizon of a score, its gaps, absences, lacunas and in-between zones, which are unseen or neutralized within the historicist informative approach; how we can get rid of the false universality of Absolute Music and produce a concrete absolute through the total exhaustion of a score in performance, in anattempt not to realize the score, but to un-realize or de-realize it.
