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The paper gives an overview of several of the surviving live and studio recordings of the song Fire, as performed by the Jimi Hendrix Experience between 1967 and 1969. The pivotal points consist in two versions of the song dating to January-February 1967 and February 1969; the first was released on the group’s debut album Are You Experienced? (1967), and the latter on the posthumous Valleys of Neptune (2010). A favorite opening number for their shows, Fire underwent some major changes in its structure between the two studio recordings, step-by-step documented by sources such as radio and television broadcasts, as well as live performances.
What emerges from a comparison of the 1967 and 1969 versions is the influence of the song’s performance history, underlining the normative value of recordings only in respect to a specific time, place, and conditions of production and consumption. Besides witnessing the creative work behind a song as an ongoing process taking place between the studio and the stage, the second studio recording of Fire also outlines a particular point of view from which Hendrix’s musicianship is understood today. By highlighting his image as a flamboyant and virtuoso guitarist, the posthumous release plays with material evidence of the past and consciously manipulates it according to our idea of Jimi Hendrix –the legendary performer who burned his guitar at Monterey Pop– overshadowing his own efforts to approach composition as a studio-based practice.
When dealing with the analysis of recorded tracks, transcription no longer represents a reliable tool able to account for the performative qualities of a song, but must be complemented with other forms of sound representation such as sonograms, spectrograms and maps of temporal markers. A crucial performative feature of Fire is the fluctuation of the beat duration within the same take, giving rise –as the song progresses– to distinctive patterns of tension and relax in each version. Digital tools can help to represent and account for such patterns, that cannot be thought of as pertaining to performance alone. Rather they became one of the central compositional dimensions of the song, as witnessed by the several live recordings before and after the two studio versions. Careful observation of the different temporal distribution of beat durations, together with other elements directly related to the performative dimension of the song in different recordings of Fire, could reveal which features descend from live performance and which are related to work into the recording studio. On the whole, such processes highlight how the elaboration of a song over time requires a dynamic and practice-based conception of the creative process in popular music. Its reconstruction involves analytical attention to musical details, as well as a careful historical investigation based on written, oral and audiovisual sources.
This case study is thought to be relevant as regards the study of creative processes in popular music because it underlines crucial issues such as:
What these issues underline is a concept of the creative process that not only chronologically predates the publication of a record –for which accessing documentation is often difficult (if not impossible) in the current framework of the popular music industry–, but that also continues after the release of the song, in its live performances or subsequent studio versions. On the whole, these documents witness an extended process of elaboration which can go on as long as the song is performed (and eventually re-recorded). Such later versions are often more relevant from the point of view of the audience and fans, as they reflect the specific needs of the contexts for which they have been produced. Here the unique personality of the star lies at the core of a complex strategy of representation, as the point of convergence of an overall intermedial image which is the result of the partial elements found in records, live performances, visual style, media appearances, interviews and historical accounts.
Such a vision of the creative process is typical of popular music as an expressive form of art in which recording and live performance give rise to peculiar configurations of production and reception. As the example of Jimi Hendrix’s 1969 version of Fire shows, song is a compositional form that always tends to be “in progress”: from point of view of its modular structure, its repetition night after night as part of the performative habits of popular music, and its nature as a cultural object in which conciseness and brevity are both aesthetic options and requisites for commercial circulation.
Often it may seem that electroacoustic music provides fewer resources and less evidence for musicologists to work on when investigating creative processes. Electroacoustic works are produced in the studio, often composed directly onto disc
9 octobre 2015 26 min
Sustainability, a computer music work’s chance of surviving far into the future, even if the composer and the performer at the première are no longer supporting the work and the implementation technology has long become obsolete and/or una
9 octobre 2015 30 min
1. Introduction L’analyse des processus de création musicale ne cesse d’élargir son domaine d’action vers les musiques faisant appel aux moyens électroniques et informatiques. Les contributions récentes sont nombreuses, notamment dans
9 octobre 2015 27 min
The musical composition process has been studied so far mostly from an individual perspective (e.g. Donin07). Alternatively some studies have addressed the issue of collaborative composition (Donin06). In this study, we are interested in a
9 octobre 2015 31 min
In an autonomous field such as that of contemporary music, or new music as it is commonly called in the American context, it is the creators themselves who are called on to evaluate the work of their peers. This evaluative work is familiar
9 octobre 2015 29 min
La dimension créative de l'interprétation musicale constitue l'un des postulats fondateurs des performance studies : constater la variété des interprétations d'une même œuvre, y mettre de l'ordre, considérer ce qu'elles signifient et
9 octobre 2015 27 min
Since the beginning of recording, there have been debates about the balance of and interaction between the technological and artistic processes at play in the recording studio. It would seem that in classical music, recording has not achiev
9 octobre 2015 30 min
En psychologie cognitive, plusieurs recherches auprès de musiciens experts ont permis de définir ce qui constitue des répétitions efficaces (Parncuttt and McPherson, 2002; Jørgensen and Lehmann 1997), d’identifier le rôle de l'expressi
9 octobre 2015 28 min
This paper presents some key results from a doctoral study undertaken by the author into elite performers’ decision making. Professional concert soloists spend many hours developing and refining their performances via a complex process of d
9 octobre 2015 27 min
It has been well argued that ‘the score’ underdetermines performance in significant ways, leaving room for unique performance outcomes (Cook 2004, Clarke 2012), the products of which underpin the current classical music economy. The attribu
9 octobre 2015 33 min
Following a cross-disciplinary approach, we will explore two different musical improvisation cultures, one issuing from the jazz tradition in the United States, the other from Northern Indian classical named Hindustani music. At the crossro
9 octobre 2015 28 min
When playing an acoustic instrument, the musician applies force from his body to the instrument’s exciter, which is amplified by the resonator. Except for vocal music and electronic music, the hands of the musician are the main vectors of s
9 octobre 2015 31 min
Since the digitization of the realization tapes of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (Stockhausen, 1955-56) and their availability for research from 2012 it has been possible to gain new insights into the creative process of the
9 octobre 2015 30 min
Simha Arom and Susanne Fürniss (1992) assert that Aka polyphony is fundamentally pentatonic, yet does not operate under any sense of absolute pitch or fixed interval size. Their groundbreaking study of this phenomenon documents various ins
9 octobre 2015 23 min
The goal of this practice-led research is to apply concepts drawn from ecological psychology, namely affordance and effectivity (J. Gibson, 1979), and also the hallmarks of human behaviour (E. Gibson and Pick, 2003), to the author’s composi
9 octobre 2015 28 min
The exchange of ideas and sounds generated from combining Chartwell Dutiro’s mbira music from the Shona tradition of Zimbabwe with a classically trained string quartet results in a creative practice that defines its boundaries through the a
9 octobre 2015 29 min
Bien que la musique d’avant-garde après la Deuxième guerre mondiale ait plus que jamais valorisé la figure de l’« auteur » (le compositeur) au détriment de ses médiations (commanditaires, interprètes, exégètes, etc.), certaines figu
9 octobre 2015 29 min
The study of collaboration between performers and composers is a flourishing area of research, but an aspect of creative work that remains unexplored is contemporary compositions that employ period instruments. These projects add another di
9 octobre 2015 28 min
Serious art music may seem to have lost its relational aspect and to be veering off into modernist oblivion lost in the noise of exponential technological development. Whether or not this is fanciful, there’s no doubt there are challenges —
9 octobre 2015 21 min
The music of Flemish composer Cipriano de Rore (1515/6-1565) was eagerly sought by patrons and printers alike. One of the most coveted of his compositions was the monumental setting of the eleven-stanza canzona in honor of the Virgin Mary b
9 octobre 2015 26 min
9 octobre 2015 01 h 10 min
Prologue Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931—the same year that Stravinsky began composing his Duo Concertant. Huxley quoted from The Tempest and other Shakespearean plays in his New World, whereas Stravinsky in his Duo quoted from
9 octobre 2015 27 min
Entre 1903 et 1904, le compositeur Déodat de Séverac (1872-1921) écrit une suite pour piano intitulée En Languedoc, dans laquelle un ensemble de procédés compositionnels relevant de ce qu'on peut nommer une "écriture imrpovisatrice"
9 octobre 2015 25 min
La dialectique, bien connue dans la critique génétique, entre la reproduction de modèles pré- composés et la transgression de ces modèles est un angle d’approche qui permet de se demander comment un compositeur produit une œuvre origi
9 octobre 2015 30 min
La dialectique, bien connue dans la critique génétique, entre la reproduction de modèles pré- composés et la transgression de ces modèles est un angle d’approche qui permet de se demander comment un compositeur produit une œuvre origi
9 octobre 2015 30 min
Communément appelés par les journalistes sportifs à « laisser parler [leur] créativité » (Natation Magazine, n° 93, 2008), les entraîneures et le musicien de l’équipe de France sont en réalité contraints à composer avec ce qu’ils
9 octobre 2015 29 min
Communément appelés par les journalistes sportifs à « laisser parler [leur] créativité » (Natation Magazine, n° 93, 2008), les entraîneures et le musicien de l’équipe de France sont en réalité contraints à composer avec ce qu’ils
9 octobre 2015 29 min
Dans le champ des musiques actuelles et de la chanson, coexistent deux types de supports : le disque (ou version phonographique) et le concert (ou version scénique). Si ces supports cohabitent, leur statut ontologique ainsi que leur proces
9 octobre 2015 19 min
Dans le champ des musiques actuelles et de la chanson, coexistent deux types de supports : le disque (ou version phonographique) et le concert (ou version scénique). Si ces supports cohabitent, leur statut ontologique ainsi que leur proces
9 octobre 2015 19 min
Collaboration has been a constant feature of electroacoustic music, due to the complexity of the technology. Since the beginning, all laboratories and electronic music studios have involved the presence of different individuals with diverse
9 octobre 2015 24 min
Collaboration has been a constant feature of electroacoustic music, due to the complexity of the technology. Since the beginning, all laboratories and electronic music studios have involved the presence of different individuals with diverse
9 octobre 2015 24 min
Bien que la musique d’avant-garde après la Deuxième guerre mondiale ait plus que jamais valorisé la figure de l’« auteur » (le compositeur) au détriment de ses médiations (commanditaires, interprètes, exégètes, etc.), certaines figu
9 octobre 2015 29 min
9 octobre 2015 25 min
This paper aims at deepening the relationship between digital technology from the one side and compositional thought and techniques from the other, focusing on Marco Stroppa’s music of the late 1980s and early 1990s. This relationship will
9 octobre 2015 28 min
Friedemann Sallis’ Music Sketches (2015) is the first comprehensive overview of sketch studies research. For all its impact on musicology since its rise in the 1970s, this field has only rarely been considered critically, e.g. Thomas M. Whe
9 octobre 2015 01 h 10 min
9 octobre 2015 01 h 36 min
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