Hearing Hearing

In his contribution to the first issue of Ear | Wave | Event, Peter Ablinger claims that there is an historical schism between visual and aural art practices along the axis of perception— of observing observation or subjective access. Quite simply, he asserts: “There has never been a Cézanne of music.” According to Ablinger, the history of music composition continues to further refine (if not continuously redefine) the processual activities of shaping sound into various configurations, be they tonal, atonal, or what-ever, while perpetually avoiding hearing. To hear (here reduced to a matter of mere passive reception) is itself simply assumed, and individualistic differences between that which sounds and that which is heard, while often acknowledged discursively, remain external to the imperatives of musical praxis; the circumscription of what is heard remains the focus, over that it is heard at all.

However, as we well know, hearing is marked as much by activity as passivity, in the form of otoacoustic emissions, directed attention (the cocktail party effect), etc. It is remarkable that neither the obviousness of hearing’s passivity, nor the latent, hidden potential of its activity, are often considered or even confronted as the object of artistic investigation. Ablinger makes a point, one that is perhaps demanding of more thorough examination, that except for a few cases (namely, works by LaMonte Young, Alvin Lucier, and James Tenney) auditory perception has not received “systematic handling” within Music. While I would suggest a more complicated and extensive set of cases/exceptions (something I might endeavor to follow up on in the future), I agree that largely, particularly as of late, composers have avoided the difficult question that hearing itself poses regarding the (co-)relation between what a sound sounds like and that a sound sounds.

Composers, when talking about their compositions (often through program notes), are often singularly focused on articulating intention— again, as an attempt to discursively circumscribe the ‘what’ of hearing. Increasingly common is the proclivity to unhinge descriptions of what is heard from any material ground, and to project an imagined listening forward (in attempted correspondence with others) on the basis of some subjectively feelingful content or some socio-cultural, or even overtly political, notion. It’s almost as if the composer’s own recognition of how her music’s differentiated appearance threatens its potential to retain any singular meaning (to function as an identifiable product) becomes inscribed in her attempt to condition its reception, to make what we hear ‘meaningful’ by drawing an a priori association between her music and the pre-given meaningfulness of some existing discourse enlisted as a necessary correlate of hearing. The necessity of such a contextualizing discourse is, of course, hardly ever stated as such; to outright require others to hear sound in relation to some particular ideational content would be (musically) totalitarian, so the necessity of any particular correlation is usually presented in the guise of mere ‘possibility’, a matter of thoughtful ‘exploration’ undertaken on the part of the composer, as if in fulfillment of her classical responsibility to explain the complexity of her work’s sound-universe for us, to alleviate any potential embarrassment on our part resulting from our naïve misinterpretations. What is interesting here is that politically-correct rhetoric can be leveraged toward the imposition of a universalized musical reception. Take for instance a program note for a fixed-media acousmatic work composed in 2013 and presented at the 2014 Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the U.S. National Conference:

In Mesopotamian mythology, the Cedar Forest is the glorious natural home of the gods. The Epic of Gilgamesh tells the story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu’s quest to chop down the tallest trees of the Cedar Forest to build a great cedar gate for the city of Nippur. The story centers on the conflict between humanity and nature, with Enkidu representing humanity’s “uncivilized” roots in nature.

[Piece title] (2013) explores this conflict as represented by relationships between the sounds of the natural world and human noise. Do sounds and noises that humanity creates convey significant messages to animals in the wild of which we are unaware? Will the sounds we make influence wild animals to evolve to create sounds that are distinctly separate from our constantly changing sonic footprint? Will human noise pollution, left uncontrolled, have the eventual effect of destroying the sonic landscapes of natural animal biomes and ecosystems around the world?

Here, not only is the socio-political discourse grounded in the historicity of an ancient epic poem and its interpretation, but also extended by way of rhetorical questions that point toward unforeseen (read: absurdly obvious and familiar) ecological consequences and disasters. Any sounds heard in relation to such unquestionably ‘serious’ (and by extension, significant) considerations must themselves be significant in their ability to, at the very least, heighten awareness or, perhaps even, motivate action, right? This music is certainly worth our time, no? I don’t buy it.

This is where our compositional pursuits concerning what is heard have taken us: liberal discourse becomes a tool for re-imposing a singular what-is-heard, while further eschewing the multiplicity of what-perceptions, given that some-thing is heard. The referential capacity of sound is not objectively analyzed, controlled for, or manipulated, but rather subjectively mined and represented in language to form a consistent musical identity. Is this not exactly what Ablinger means, when he speaks of our avoidance of hearing, of hearing hearing itself?

Today, is it too much to ask ourselves to confront (rather than merely accept) sound’s differentiated appearance? Perhaps the multiplicity of what-is-heard perceptions is not a threat to music, but its greatest opportunity, as of yet unrealized, to peer directly into that which remains consistent: that hearing mediates any emergence of musicality, referentiality, or affect in relation to sound.

© 2014, Sean Peuquet. All rights reserved.

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