Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation offers a new approach to understanding, interpreting, and performing music, by variously reframing these practices as processes of translation. I develop a theory of translation that considers music as a form of cultural transfer, but also considers the interpretative act of musical performance—amidst increasingly circumscribed conventions in musical modernity—in relation to the philosophical literature concerned with imperatives of fidelity and authorship in the work of translation. Focusing my study through the piano music of Franz Liszt (1811–1886) and Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)––whose works were often themselves already programmatic “translations” of contemporary arts and literature––I argue that translation enables a renewed understanding of musical virtuosity as a cultural and gestural mediation of composed scores and performance conventions relative to changing aesthetic, cultural, and technological contexts between Romanticism and modernism. My first chapter introduces a framework of materialist, cultural, technical, and embodied concepts of translation to explore how music can be commodified and translated across cultural milieus, function as a technique of inter-modal meaning transfer, and prescribe gestures that create a sense of embodied meaning in performance. My second chapter examines Liszt’s cosmopolitan virtuoso career as a translation of the virtuoso persona through different languages and behaviours, alongside his changing piano practices that increasingly masked the virtuoso body, translating it via a spiritualizing aesthetic. Chapter 3 explores the ways Liszt’s composed virtuoso gestures in his “Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude” (1853) and Mephisto Waltz no. 3 (1883) likewise translated musical ideals of transcendence through religious and demonic tropes. My fourth Chapter traces Ravel’s (dis)continuous cultural and technical translations of Liszt’s infamous virtuoso pianism for a French modernist milieu concerned with both composer control and technological progress. And Chapter 5 considers the virtuosic gestures of Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit (1908) as phantasmagorical translations of machinic and magical techniques in performance. Through a combined historical, philosophical, and performance-based approach, this dissertation contributes new thinking about translation in musicology to address the challenges of deciphering meaning in musical performance, while also deepening the historical view of changing approaches to virtuoso aesthetics across musical modernity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".