Carlo Diaz is a musician, designer, and artistic researcher. He received his Bachelor of Music in composition, interdisciplinary arts, and music technology from Northwestern University in 2016 and his Master of Music in composition from the Conservatorium van Amsterdam in 2018 before beginning the docARTES PhD trajectory at Leiden University and the Orpheus Institute later the same year. He has studied composition with Hans Thomalla, Jay Alan Yim, Patricia Alessandrini, Wim Henderickx, Willem Jeths, and Richard Ayres, and his PhD research was supervised by Anna Scott and Richard Barrett. His music has been performed by artists including the Nieuw Ensemble, wild Up, Ensemble Linea, Ugly Pug, and the experimental baroque orchestra Stile Nu, which he founded in 2017. From 2013 to 2019, Carlo worked as a concert and festival producer for Rush Hour Concerts, Make Music Chicago, and the Chicago Philharmonic. Since 2019, Carlo has been a member of staff at The University of Chicago, first at the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory and then at the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU) and the Urban Theory Lab. Since 2023, he has also taught music composition and audio technology at Harper College, and in 2024 he will begin teaching design practice to CEGU students at The University of Chicago.

More information about Carlo Diaz

Research

The fields of historical performance and contemporary composition may not seem on first impression to share much. Insofar as the former is dedicated to reproducing the oldest music and the latter to inventing the newest, they can easily be understood as fundamental opposites. In context of this precise disciplinary opposition, however, this dissertation locates an opportunity for the advancement of both fields through an interdisciplinary practice and theorisation across them. Much cross-polination has certainly occurred between the two fields already, but it has largely been confined to performance spheres. Theorisations across the two remain rare. Key to the productivity of this dissertation is the identification of a complementary pair of analyses coming out of the two fields in the 1980s: critiques of the authenticity of historical performance on the one hand, with Richard Taruskin providing the classic example, and critiques of the possibility of artistic originality on the other, especially by Rosalind Krauss.

Viewed independently, each of these critiques can seem to present a vexing impasse. If historical performers cannot reproduce the past, what are they doing and why does it matter? Likewise, if contemporary composers cannot make anything new, the same questions apply. What can one do but acknowledge one’s shortcomings and carry on? As these debates of the 1980s wound down, this is exactly what happened. Each discipline resigned itself to its shortcomings and carried on as if the critiques had never been made. But a reevaluation is worthwhile, as something much more interesting happens when they are viewed across each other. The ontological problems they describe begin to look eerily similar, and a wide array of practices within both disciplines come to look like fundamental syntheses of mimesis and invention, memory and imagination. What previously obscured or devalued types of music might be freshly empowered by renewed attention to this synthesis?

Through comparative study of historical theory, critical theory, art theory, Englightenment and anti-Enlightenment philosophy, and the recent histories of historical performance and contemporary composition, alongside artistic experiments in a potent gray space between the two, this dissertation seeks to understand artistry and historicity in relation to broad ontological and epistemological problems of making and remaking in music. Special potency is found in archival manuscripts of long 18^th–century Britain containing anonymous, fragmentary, or damaged notation. Through both compositional and interpretive experiments with these historical extracts of music notation,  as well as theoretical reflection upon them, novel ways are found for aurally presenting the rich and complex intertemporality of musical practice and its surrounding cultures and histories.

CV

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Publications