Musiikki Research Journal 2014, peer-reviewed research article
DMus Assi Karttunen

Abstract
In this paper I discuss rhetorical obscuritas (obscurity) and claritas (clarity) as interdependent opposites in a music performance. I describe my working processes as a musician in a concert called Animal spirits II the 19th of October 2012. In my article the scale from obscurity to clarity, and vice versa, is understood as a primal bodily schema giving the basic idea for our interdisciplinary music performance. By studying both the composition’s and the actio’s (the actual performance’s) rhetorical perceptions from my point of being I suggest that the traditional rhetorical actio of the eighteenth-century France regarded music performance as a multisensory phenomenon, as sound and movement in time and space. The purpose of this article is to focus on the historically informed musician’s process with the performed music. By placing the rhetorical actio into the spotlight, I am able to describe how the music and the relevant historical information are embodied in this specific concert and during its rehearsals. My aim is to embrace the variety and possibilities we have as performers of the historical repertory and as researchers of the relevant historical information by paying attention to the qualitative changes of the historically informed musician’s intentions.

Rhetorical obscurité – musician’s historically informed working process

dictionnaire obscurite


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK4qc1hYkNA&index=6&list=UUU6sv6uoer87dvCuf1K8roA

Keywords: rhetorical actio, historically informed performance (HIP), phenomenology, baroque, embodiment

Dictionnaire de lAcademie obscurite 2


L´Obscurité article (pdf)


Watteau Pierrot engraving


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