ACPA PhD Candidate Gabriel Paiuk will be guest speaker at the coming UNM – Young Nordic Music Days to take place in Aarhus, Denmark in August 2021.
Ung Nordisk Musik is an annual festival for young composers, sound artists, and performance artists based in any of the Nordic countries. In 2021 the festival takes place from the 9th to the 15th of August in Aarhus, Denmark. Since its beginning in 1946, UNM has been an important window for young, nordic music. On the occasion of its 75th year anniversary, this edition of the 2021 festival will include an overview of the most prominent sound installations presented in the festival in the last 15 years. Gabriel Paiuk has been invited to co-curate this exhibition and as a guest speaker. The theme of the 2021 festival is (un)common ground.
Below an abstract of the lecture Gabriel Paiuk will give in August 11th at Domen, Aarhus.
Plural grounds: Engaging with the audible
Gabriel Paiuk
In the realm of music and other sonorous practices, enquiring on the notion of a common ground prompts questions on the nature of the communicable. Leaving aside fantasies of transparent communication, the communicable can be addressed by tackling the way the audible is constituted.
Discourses anchored on the notion of musical material seem unfit for this task, whereas postmodern perspectives seemingly more open to external conditions tend to fall flat as well, too often rooted on inherited categories – of linear history, of a dialectic understanding of institutions, of monolithic cultural assumptions – which they end up perpetuating.
Engaging with the audible implies engaging with the conditions in which audibilities are formed. Audibilities, understood as the capacity of listening to occur in a certain way, emerge as part of collective and material configurations. The diverse modalities in which they occur express the plural nature of listening. Practices of sound-making can engage with the audible by plunging into the collective realms which render acts of listening relevant.