RNCM Research Forum: Some Paradoxes of Time in…

Speakers Dr Samuel Wilson Guildhall School of Music and Drama About In this talk I?ll examine some aspects of contemporary British ?new music? and suggest that this can tell us something about the paradoxical time that is ?the contemporary?. In particular, I will outline two apparently contradictory responses to the problematic time of the contemporary: the turn towards advanced technologies on the one hand (for example, digital culture and AI), and archaic and arcane knowledges of folklore and magic on the other. Reflecting on music by composers Ben Nobuto (b.?1996) and Neil Luck (b.?1982) will focus the discussion. These very different responses to (musical) time make more sense if we keep in mind art theorist and philosopher Peter Osborne?s proposal that ?the contemporary? comprises a historical moment of multiple and disjunctive experiences of temporality. Building on this insight, I?ll explore how, despite their outward differences, both compositional tendencies address and reformulate a cultural condition (?the contemporary?) that is both shared yet disjunctive. Indeed, closer examination of the technology/folk-magic opposition also suggests that the picture isn?t as clear as on first sight: often the technological and the arcane intermingle generatively, in-keeping with science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke?s famous adage that ?[a]ny sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic?. These paradoxical engagements with time can, furthermore, be more fully appreciated if conceptualised as part of a longer historical ? modernist ? project of addressing temporality?s cultural embeddedness. Musical modernism?s temporal commitments ? which in its twentieth-century instantiations were unpinned by what Franco ?Bifo? Berardi characterises as a trust in the future ? now become refracted through the problem that is ?the contemporary?. I suggest that in their reengagement with modernist attendances to time, these contemporary modernist modalities express something of collective orientations towards the past, present, and future, at a contemporary moment that is conflictual, multiple, and without trust in the future. Biography Dr Samuel J Wilson?s work explores critical approaches to contemporary music and performing arts. His publications include a monograph, New Music and the Crises of Materiality: Sounding Bodies and Objects in Late Modernity (Routledge, 2021), the edited collection Music?Psychoanalysis?Musicology (Routledge, 2018), a coedited special issue of Contemporary Music Review on ?Musical Modernisms? (2020); articles in journals such as the Journal of the RMA, Music and Letters, and Twentieth-Century Music; and book chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Time in Music (2022), The Sound of ?i?ek: Musicological Perspectives on Slavoj ?i?ek (2023), and The Music of Absence: An Aesthetics of Loss in the New Millennium (in press). He is the Events Coordinator for the Music and Philosophy Study Group of the Royal Musical Association and enjoys collaborative projects and events. He teaches critical performance theory at London Contemporary Dance School and music aesthetics at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where he is also a Research Fellow. More details are available at samueljwilson.com. Tickets Free admission, no ticket required This event will end at approximately 5.30pm. FREE Wednesday 25 February 2026, 4.15pm