Second-degree composition: the hypertextual music of Otomo Yoshihide and John Zorn - Mercredi de STMS

In his seminal book, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, Gerard Genette coined several useful terms to analyse literature written in response to previous texts. Chief among these was ‘hypertextuality’, which Genette defined as ‘any relationship uniting a text B (which I shall call the hypertext) to an earlier text A (I shall, of course, call it the hypotext), upon which it [the hypertext] is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary’. Recently, Genette’s terms and ideas have been adapted to the analysis of classical, popular, and avant-garde musics.

This talk examines several cases of musical hypertextuality at the twentieth-century’s end. First, I consider how composer-improvisor Otomo Yoshihide’s work Peking Revolutionary Opera, Ver. 1.28 (1996) incorporates both ‘autographic’ and ‘allographic’ hypertextual transformations of previous music, including the ‘model revolutionary Peking opera’, Shajiabang. I then address how hypertextuality can work across media, through examples from the early ‘file card compositions’ of John Zorn. File card pieces, like Godard (1985) or Spillane (1986), adapt the ‘world’ of an especially chosen dedicatee, transforming not only musical, but also literary and audio-visual hypotexts into a new, hypertextual composition. Lastly, I consider how ‘compositions in the second degree’, like those of Otomo or Zorn, might themselves become hypotexts for future artworks. This is considered through a brief discussion of the para-cinematic adaptation of Zorn’s Godard by experimental filmmakers Ela Troyano and Tessa Hughes-Freeland.