Artistic voice in music performance as/and complex thinking

Artistic practice typically aims toward expressing the ineffable aspects of life. Yet neither the ineffable nor the lived experience of the expressive act is fully claimed by the observable object. This irreducibility is constituted through a process and/as its product. Within this co-dependent interaction there inheres hidden aspects of our creative being. Artistic practice involves ambiguity and uncertainty. Artists navigate fluctuating conditions of possibility and chance-experiences. Risk-taking and choice-making are an inherent part of the art-making process as artistic goal-seeking aims toward the disruptive as the norm, in communicative creation of the distinction that resonates with the complexities of our lives. This study examines artistic expression as forms of thought. Music performance is treated as heightened praxis that supposes inherent ability and expertise acquired through practice. Diverging from reducing performative action to the material object or observable behaviours, a post-metaphysical attitude navigates the terrain of active creation through the principles and processes of “General Complexity”, pioneered by Edgar Morin (1921–) and Paul Cilliers (1956–2011). Complex thought is enacted as the logic of living things, giving rise to the phenomena of transformation and emergence. The seemingly opposing constructs of reasoning and artmaking invite a thinking beyond strategy by placing the self at the limit of the known to risk the leap into the unknown. Evaluation enacts validity at the limit as the in-between, with the ethical ingrained into constructing the real. Voice functions as both origin and limit concept to expose the subject’s organizing force in a self-world relationship that opens to the potential of a self in interaction with an infinite world. The thesis projects a viewpoint that situates the performative act within the entity of the event, retrieving for infinite possibility, the paradigm of time for processes of creation.

Grantor dc:publisher

Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University

Year dc:date.issued

2026

Author dc:creator

• Jacobs, Erika

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Muller, Stephanus

Language dc:language.iso

en

Repository record dc:identifier.uri

https://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/136087

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholar.sun.ac.za:10019.1/136087