In this video, I will discuss material processes and creative textual practices in contemporary music and art. In identifying ‘creative textual practices’ as strategies for composition, I describe the use of text, language and speech as both structuring and performative materials, and the ways that such creative textual practices themselves highlight the performative properties of text. In 'Revolution in Poetic Language', (1984) Julia Kristeva describes the semiotic-material meaning-making process, ‘productive violence’, (16) and revolutionary practice of working with text in this way, considering what aspects of meaning remain once linguistic meaning in textual communication is degraded.

In order to discuss this, I briefly consider artworks from other disciplines that employ concrete and sound poetry—such as by Amanda Stewart (sound poetry) and Annette Iggulden (visual art)—and some procedures employed by the Oulipo movement. This leads me to identify how these artists employ text to embrace the familiar, unfamiliar, and uncanny, by intertwining the symbolic and semiotic aspects of written and spoken textual communication. The art theorist Estelle Barrett describes this as the ‘hyper-differentiated realm of latent and possible values and meanings’ in the work. (2011, 19) Finally, I discuss my recent composition 'the whale' (2019) as an example of the creative textual practice and material processes in sound and notation that I have developed in my personal practice since 2013.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/30745