Towards a terminology for the practice of comic timing in contemporary composition: A practice-led engagement with humour in music across borders

走向当代作曲中​​喜剧时机实践的术语：以实践为主导的跨国界音乐幽默

• 批准号: 2245339
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Southampton
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2019 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2245339
• 关键词: Towards; terminology; practice; comic; timing

How might principles of comic timing from comedy be applicable to music composition? The principle of comic timing is well established in fields such as stand-up comedy, clowning, mime and physical theatre. For example, comedian Tim Vine plays with timing and expectation to make simple and even low-quality jokes funnier and stranger by reaching the punchline faster than the audience expects. Russian clown Slava Polunin, in one routine, carries out a mime sequence, establishing a scenario, before interrupting the flow of time through pausing, turning his head, and finally breaking the fourth wall to look at the audience. Composers may also use temporal devices such as unexpected pacing, pauses and repetition to dynamically provoke laughter and amusement. Gerald Barry's opera The Importance of Being Earnest (2012) forces Oscar Wilde's witty and complex language into short musical phrases, thus incongruously encoding unexpected new readings of the text. The slow movement of Jacob TV's String Quartet No. 3 disrupts the audience's perception of time passing with a repeated meditative phrase that rapidly crescendos and accelerates into an anti-climactic silence: it begins melodramatically but becomes farce. Yet, whilst there are countless examples of humorous music, scholarship on humour in music (let alone comic timing in music) is lacking and under theorised. In discussing challenges of analysing humour in the music of composer Erik Satie, Ann-Marie Hanlon suggests that "scholarly engagement with humour has been hindered by an uncertainty surrounding possible methodological approaches and the lack of a music-specific vocabulary for dealing with this subject" (Hanlon, 2013). To begin to address this deficit, my project will begin by engaging with historical and contemporary scholarship and theories of comic timing in other artistic practices to ascertain what principles might be translatable to music composition. The outputs of my PhD will comprise of both artistic research and scholarship. My artistic research will take the form of a portfolio of compositions, including a culminating one-hour music theatre work that will form the centrepiece of my submission. The work will be a realisation of comedy, clowning, and physical theatre mechanisms translated into musical mechanisms. It will be narrative-driven and feature simple lighting, costumes, and props. It will be staged by my ensemble Waste Paper Opera Company as part of Tete a Tete: The Opera Festival 2022. I will also engage with challenges related to ideas of comic timing in music across genres, cultural contexts and performance practices by reflecting on theories such as audience reception. I will apply these frameworks in a series of case-studies of humorous contemporary compositions, which will inform and inspire my own creative practice. The frameworks and terminology I establish will allow me to discuss and critically reflect on my own compositions in the second part of my commentary. I will also examine the politics of humour in a global and social context. Humour can expose the follies of the powerful and corrode existing power structures, such as in the work of Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby, who uses the historically male-dominated medium of stand-up comedy to lay bare its inherent complicity in maintaining male-dominated power structures. By contrast, the exclusionary and even destructive capacities of humour have become apparent, such as in recent critiques of comedian Louis CK, which have exposed his practice of making audiences complicit in his humiliating treatment of women by making them laugh. Humour in music works on a more abstract level. In that sense, music is socially embedded; humour in music, especially when created and performed in interdisciplinary contexts, has the potential to create a sense of social or transcultural togetherness, or to be perceived as exclusionary.

喜剧中的喜剧计时原则如何适用于音乐创作？喜剧时机的原则在单口喜剧、小丑、哑剧和体育戏剧等领域得到了很好的确立。例如，喜剧演员蒂姆·维恩玩弄时机和期望，让简单甚至低质量的笑话比观众预期的更快地到达笑点，变得更有趣和更奇怪。俄罗斯小丑斯拉瓦·波鲁宁在一个套路中表演了一段默剧序列，建立了一个场景，然后通过停顿、转过头，最后打破第四堵墙来看观众，打断了时间的流动。作曲家还可以使用意想不到的节奏、停顿和重复等临时手段来动态地引发笑声和娱乐。杰拉尔德·巴里的歌剧《认真的重要性》(2012)迫使奥斯卡·王尔德诙谐而复杂的语言变成了简短的音乐短语，从而对文本进行了意想不到的新解读。雅各布电视的第三弦乐四重奏的缓慢运动扰乱了观众对时间流逝的感知，反复冥想的短语迅速达到高潮并加速进入反高潮的沉默：它开始了戏剧性的旋律，但却变成了一场闹剧。然而，尽管有无数幽默音乐的例子，但关于音乐幽默的学术研究(更不用说音乐中的喜剧时机了)是缺乏的，而且是理论化的。在讨论分析作曲家埃里克·萨蒂的音乐中的幽默所面临的挑战时，Ann-Marie Hanlon提出，“围绕可能的方法论的不确定性，以及缺乏处理这一主题的音乐专用词汇，阻碍了学者对幽默的研究”(Hanlon，2013)。为了开始解决这一不足，我的项目将从历史和当代学术以及其他艺术实践中的喜剧计时理论开始，以确定哪些原则可以翻译到音乐创作中。我博士学位的成果将包括艺术研究和学术研究。我的艺术研究将以作品组合的形式进行，其中包括一部最长一小时的音乐戏剧作品，这将成为我提交作品的核心。这项工作将是将喜剧、小丑和物理戏剧机制转化为音乐机制的实现。它将是叙事驱动的，以简单的灯光、服装和道具为特色。它将由我的废纸歌剧团上演，作为太极：2022年歌剧节的一部分。我还将通过反思观众接受等理论，来应对与跨流派、文化背景和表演实践的音乐中喜剧时机的想法相关的挑战。我将把这些框架应用到一系列幽默当代作品的案例研究中，这将启发和启发我自己的创作实践。我建立的框架和术语将使我能够在我的评注的第二部分讨论和批判性地反思我自己的作品。我还将在全球和社会背景下研究幽默的政治。幽默可以揭露强大的权力结构的愚蠢之处，并侵蚀现有的权力结构，例如澳大利亚喜剧演员汉娜·加兹比的作品，她利用历史上男性主导的单口喜剧媒介，揭露了维护男性主导的权力结构的内在共谋。相比之下，幽默的排他性甚至破坏性已经变得显而易见，比如最近对喜剧演员路易斯·CK的批评，揭露了他通过逗女性笑来让观众共谋羞辱女性的做法。音乐中的幽默在更抽象的层面上发挥作用。从这个意义上说，音乐是植根于社会的；音乐中的幽默，特别是当在跨学科的背景下创作和表演时，有可能创造一种社会或跨文化的团结感，或者被认为是排外的。