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.
