The twilight of novelists. The search for a multidimensional model of contemporary musical biography
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| Year of publication | 2015 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | During the preparation of the biography of the exiled Czech composer Jan Novák (1921-1984), a student of Aaron Copland and Bohuslav Martinů, a certain need appeared to revoke basic questions of the structure and function of the musical biography in the early 21st century. For a description of the structures of recently published biographies on classical music, models derived from space dimensions could be used. As it turns out, many of the present biographies are structured according to the zero- (closed chapters) or one-dimensional (linear narrative) structural model. At a time of standardized hypertext (rhizomatic) structure, however, such methods of content organization cannot be considered a sufficient intellectual challenge. The contemporary reader cannot be satisfied with a merely one-dimensional linear narrative, which hardly absorbs, e.g., contextual ranges, axes of problems intersecting the production of a particular composer or detailed analyses. The architecture of contemporary biographies should respect not only the competences of the author, but also the intellectual requirements of the actual readers. |
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