José Luis Besada Portas (Universidad Complutense, Madrid)
Sketch studies: a true challenge for music theory?

The scrutiny of Western art composers’ sketches has lived different periods during the last decades. Sketch studies were an important branch of Music Theory in the US in the seventies, were put into question as a fruitful field with the arrival of the New Musicology and are reemerging since the turn of the 21st. century. Methods and communicative styles of these proposals have varied over time, but the main goals of sketch studies, such as trying to unveil compositional processes or to evaluate their consistency, haver remained relatively unaltered for a large part of the scholarly community.
Scholars in this field often isolate their case studies from larger questions that circulate in the milieu of music theory which require sometimes a broader abstraction. The aim of my exposition is to show through 2 case studies – namely Iannis Xenakis and Philippe Manoury – how sketch studies may serve, by contrast, to enter into the discussion of wider theoretical problems beyond these particular cases, such as the way we define serial music or the suitability of Klumpenhouwer networks as an analytic tool for post-tonal music. This lecture preludes the publishing of my analyses in leading journals of music theory.

After two post-doctoral periods at IRCAM and at the University of Strasbourg, José L. Besada currently works at the Complutense University of Madrid as a mid-term research fellow. His research primarily focuses on the formal and cognitive features of both contemporary musical practices and music theory. His book Metamodels in Compositional Practices: The Case of Alberto Posadas's Liturgia Fractal was published with the support of the IRCAM. He has also published in leading journals of contemporary music such as Organised Sound, Tempo, Perspectives of New Music, and Contemporary Music Review. He has been guest co-editor of a double special issue in the latter, a second special issue is ongoing. Dr. Besada currently serves in the executive board of the Société Française d’Analyse Musicale (SFAM), is a founding member of the Sociedad de Análisis y Teoría Musical (SATMUS) in Spain, and is the art editor of the Journal of Mathematics and Music.

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