Resistance always resists more or less well, first of all against itself, more or less powerfully. And more is less here. A resistance is never simple, and might is always a play of resistances with an intensity differential. —Jacques Derrida, H.C. for Life, That is to Say… If there was no resistance, there would be […]
Author Archives: Ty Bouque
… writes about opera: its slippery histories, its sensual bodies, and the work of mourning for a dead genre. Elsewhere, Bouque sings in various solo, ensemble, and opera configurations around the world. Bouque lives in Chicago.
Posted inEssay
Sitting Down, Standing Up
His very first composition journal is dated 1983, one year after completing his university studies in Vienna and so the first year he could properly consider himself a composer. Peter Ablinger was forever putting things in varying piles and compartments, time and space very much included. “Sometimes I think I might have been an archivist […]
Posted inProfile
This Body, Given (noli me tangere)
Let there be writing, not about the body, but the body itself. Not bodihood, but the actual body. Not signs, images, or ciphers of the body, but still the body. This was once a program for modernity, no doubt already it no longer is. —Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus She is known, absolutely—by her blue hair and […]
Posted inBarTálk
The Constant Organism
On Sunday, a new opera by Beat Furrer, “Das grosse Feuer” (“The Great Fire”), premiered at the Zurich Opera House. Directed by Tatjana Gürbaca and based on a novel by the Argentine author Sara Gallardo, the work, also conducted by Furrer, tells the story of an Indigenous shaman named Eisejuaz, whose community and individual being […]
Posted inEssay
The Sacral End
Strange and uneasy, her relation to new music, and in hindsight only growing ever more so. Which is not to say Sofia Gubaidulina did not belong to the field: she carried excellent early modernist credentials handed on from 1950s Moscow, having earned herself a censorship from the Kremlin and, in 1992, the requisite flight into […]
Posted inReview
On Shame
Shame effaces itself; shame points and projects; shame turns itself skin side out; shame and pride, shame and dignity, shame and self-display, shame and exhibitionism are different linings of the same glove. Shame, it might finally be said, transformational shame, is performativity. —Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling 1. Two things about shame. First: it is […]
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Befores and Afters
I know, I imagine that this unanalyzable feeling changed what there remained for him of existence. As if the death outside of him could only henceforth collide with the death in him. “I am alive. No, you are dead.”—Maurice Blanchot, “The Instant of My Death” When a poet puts off an old style… he or […]
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Heads Will Roll
We do not speak of horror. (Well, not in public, anyway.) It has been the tacit agreement of two generations of new music that cinematic horror is the forbidden aesthetic referent: a real and prevalent influence but one whose admittance is generally deemed more detrimental to the cause than worth its expository fruit. In private conversation, […]
Posted inReview
Anti-Thematic
Ours is the age of themes. Drowning in the deluge of streaming content whose rush, flow, and surge defines what Anna Kornbluh last year termed our too-late capitalism, any and all aspirant media—entertainment, art, or otherwise—is increasingly compliant with that dictatorial imperative handed down from marketing departments on high: brand or bust. Streamlined themes get […]
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epistle; possessive
I. At 12:27 on September 30, you wrote me three lines that read “Just caught TV glimpses of dreadful flooding in New York.Hope you are OK.M xx” I replied only much later, half-past, (you, surely asleep) My darling M,(Will I ever stop using that ‘my’?)— And though you didn’t know it—how could I have expected you […]