Abstract

This dissertation is a defense of the playful in music and art. Taking its form from the strategies of play itself the discussion pivots around an interlude of words and images. Play and its frequent companion, irony, weave their way throughout the dissertation. ;Through the creative work of Marcel Duchamp and John Cage and the writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Johan Huizinga. and Claude Levi-Strauss, Chapter One develops an understanding of play as activity, entity, object and subject. Duchamp's readymades challenged the seriousness of the high art world and opened up a new way of perceiving all of life. Revisiting the familiar and stamping it with one's own creative mark is paralleled in the recurrent games of chess in both Duchamp's and Cage's work The second chapter juxtaposes the fragmented narratives of C.P.E. Bach's Second Symphony and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Chapter Three documents my encounter with the Italian contemporary composer Franco Donatoni's Refrain, with several different listenings illuminated by a refrain from Italo Calvino's novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. The Interlude opens up a space for free association and a play of ideas, leading us tangentially from the double-edged language of lovers to a geometric Labanotation inscribing the cakewalk. This hybrid dance form and the irony of its origins in cross-cultural play are the focus of the fourth chapter. African-American signifyin as a musical trope underpins Chapter Five's examination of groove as play in the music of James Brown. Henry Louis Gates' critical response to literature combines here with S. A. Floyd Jr.'s understanding of swing, in an analysis of groove which stands in stark contrast to the mechanistic approach of Charles Keil's theory of Participatory Discrepancies. Chapter Six ensues in which I discuss the cross-cultural tensions leading to my recent composition, W is for