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RESEARCH ARTICLES
To talk about the fragile is to engage in a negotiation of aesthetic concerns that is all too prone to its own fracture and subsequent failure. Allan Hepburn in his book Enchanted Objects: Visual Art in Contemporary Fiction notes the paradox in the status of fragility and its value in objects, stating that 'fragility is a physical trait in an object, yet fragility cannot be proven until tested'.1It is not the proof of an object's fragility - as this renders the object broken, and therefore no longer the same object - but rather the object's apparent fragility that renders it desirable. Hepburn's fragility is not a destination or ultimate state of being, but is, rather, situated in the tension between an object's potential failure, and the desire to put that object to use. This tension belies a sense of beauty, and it is in the intertwining of beauty and danger that fragility becomes a subject worthy of close scrutiny.
Fragility in this sense is entwined with objecthood, tied up in the notion of the object: there must be an object that is prone to failure for this tension to exist. Whilst this tension is relatively easy to comprehend, it is less clear what fragility means when it is given as a quality of an abstract and impermanent phenomenon such as a sound. This is not to say that the object-centred fragility described by Hepburn cannot be found in sound. Evan Johnson's Hyphen (2002), for crotales, demonstrates this quite clearly, asking the performer to use a mixture of mallets and hands to strike the crotales as softly as possible. The combination of dynamic and playing technique creates a performance situation in which the possibility of certain gestures not sounding - whether literally being too quiet, or being lost in the resonance of the instrument's overtones - is extremely high. This is highlighted in Johnson's performance notes for the piece where he states that
All mallet attacks should be absolutely as quiet as possible (pppp possibile). The performer may find that the notated tempi are impossible to meet while playing as quietly as possible; in this event, quietness should be given a higher priority than tempo.2
Johnson's insistence that the...