The Memory of Remembering: Exomologesis and Exagoreusis in the Experiment

Abstract

As an Undergraduate Composer I had the great fortune to be taught cultural studies by Sue Rowley whose principal legacy was to establish critical thinking as the commencement point for my creative practice. Craft and aesthetic affect can always be refined or adapted, but too often artists operate under mythologies of muse, inspiration and other subjective mysticism: metaphoric obfuscation of the linkage between idea, transmission and reception of culture. I was henceforth disposed, or rather primed, to resist dialecticism, particularly the mismatched binary of style versus technique. All music must address both, but the ideal practice eschews the dominance of one over the other. Rowley delivered training wherein [t]he critical awareness that informs such questions is crucial for understanding the conceptual basis and social implications of the distinction we make between art and craft. Certainly to promote such awareness in our students is preferable to teaching them to accept dogmatically whatever distinctions they inherit. (Markowitz, 1994:66)