The Logic of Nonsense: Personal Process towards Oppositionality and Reorganisation as Music Composition

This thesis explores the convergence of oppositions in my composition folio, and the idea of nonsense as the disorganisation and reorganisation of sense. It examines how, inspired by Lewis Carroll’s nonsense literature and portmanteau words, my folio experiments with stylistic juxtapositions and creates my own musical portmanteaus from the collision of art and vernacular sound-worlds, stretching both musical and literary forms. Together, the viscerality and groove of rock and post-minimalism, and the humour and structural games of Carroll, are fused with the architectural design of Modernism, and twentieth and twenty-first century art music. Textural, timbral, and sonority ideas are borrowed freely from both art and vernacular realms. My thesis investigates how the continual reorganisation of oppositions as and within sound-blocks, both horizontally and vertically, leads to a breakdown of linearity and produces its own type of juxtapositional logic.

My thesis outlines and provides context for key components of my portmanteau aesthetic; the engagement between music and literature, the use of voice, the primacy of rhythm, sonority juxtapositions and harmonic portmanteaus, controlled aleatoricism and expanded timbres, whimsical humour, and non-linear structures. It illuminates aspects of my creative process, from a practice-based research perspective, and explores how my performance practice as a percussionist and wind-player is embedded in my compositional techniques. Two chapters are dedicated to an analysis of the folio works, before concluding with reflection on the growth of my musical voice and its future.

Ultimately, this thesis shows, via the seemingly oxymoronic idea of the logic of nonsense, how the coexistence of oppositions strengthens, rather than subverts, the other, and how the friction created simultaneously challenges and demonstrates their compatibility, giving way to a double energy.