On Error, Accident and Contingency in Music
Nick Prior · Focal Press eBooks · 2024
What do we gain by re-writing an account of music through contingency? In this chapter, I explore the domains of error, happenstance and accident. The chapter proposes a typology that splits contingent phenomena into four quadrants according to the slippery concepts of intention and visibility. I suggest that we gain a more detailed, realistic and extended notion of what production involves if we think of contingency not as normatively “other” but as ordinary, constitutive and a permanent feature of music. The chapter is based on a mix of primary interviews with musicians, observations of live concerts, secondary commentary and conceptual engagement with theories of the accidental and the contingent. The rather startling implication is that a good deal of scholarship on music across varied disciplines has ignored a whole corpus of relevant action that includes breakdowns, errors and accidents. The chapter therefore explores what it means to register the fundamental contingency of action, agency and objects .