Composing Listening

Abstract

The variably formulated, long-standing, and surprisingly common trope of (musical) listening as a form of immersive participation in being is examined in light of recent scholarship and twentieth century experimental music (John Cage and after). Listening's role in the constitution of subjectivity is considered. “Composing listening” is suggested as an artistic strategy not only insisting on listening's cultural, historical, and psychoanalytic grounding, but also reorienting and affirming its passivity. Composition as such is conceived as the auditioning of “new relational modes.”

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

With many thanks to C. Dietz and G. Steingo for their early readings.

Notes

¹ Roger Mathew Grant's description of Jean-Luc Nancy's Listening (2007) in his review of the book (Grant 2009: 748).

² The two volumes were originally published as No 87 in the series, ‘Taschenbücher zur Musikwissenschaft’ (Heister 1983).

³ See, for example, Weber (2004 [1975]).

⁴ Regarding this ‘power’, Nancy's ‘March in the Spirit of our Ranks’, included in Listening, is just one moment in this story.

⁵ My translation: ‘Every musical work played in concert and realized in a purely aesthetic concert situation [fulfills] at least the negative condition of autonomy in the sense of being “purposeless”. The generalized form of the term concert derives from this context.… As such, one can say that one gives ‘oneself’ a ‘concert’ … when, alone, for example, one plays oneself a piano reduction of a mass.’

⁶ My translation: ‘the space of realization of autonomous music’.

⁷ ‘We desire what nearly shatters us, and the shattering experience is, it would seem, without any specific content – which may be our only way of saying that the experience cannot be said, that it belongs to the nonlinguistic biology of human life. Psychoanalysis is the unprecedented attempt to psychologize that biology, to coerce it into discourse, to insist that language can be ‘touched by’, or ‘pick up’, certain vibrations of being which move us back from any consciousness of being’ (Bersani 1986: 39–40).

⁸ My usage is an extension of Ashley's in ‘Variations on the “Drone”’ (2010).

⁹ In European modernism, listening becomes an additional compositional ‘parameter’.

¹⁰ As echoed in the persistent ‘we’s and ‘you’s of his text.

¹¹ See Jacques Rancière (2007: 11) on these two ‘manners’.

¹² Herein may also be a key to distinguishing Szendy's examples of contemporary artists (John Oswald, Kagel) from the few nominally related artists (such as Christian von Borries) who have authentically sublated the musical into precisely what Barthes calls ‘sensuous intelligibility’ (1985: 264).

¹³ See Ashley's ‘We need more music’ (2010). Implicit here is the return of a form of narrative. Regarding this hint of a ‘psychoanalytic turn’, see, for example, Lucier's The Queen of the South (1972) and The Duke of York (1971) (or for that matter I Am Sitting in a Room [1969] read in relation to his stutter) or Ashley's Automatic Writing (1979) etc.

¹⁴ The organized and often professional body of receivers (applauders, booers, hissers) in the theatre, opera and concert hall throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth: ‘the members being dispersed about the theatre, knots of them mixing with the public in different coigns of vantage, and leading, sustaining or stimulating the applause with vraisemblance’ (Trevor 1919: 678–80). The best historical source on the claque is almost certainly Louis Castel's 1829 Memoires d'un Claqueur. See also Bettina Brandl-Risi (2010).

¹⁵ Here, inscription, as it may occur, is rather the byproduct, the artifact of the lived relational experience of listening.

¹⁶ Michael Bull's books (2000, 2008) are something of an exception.

¹⁷ ‘How certain sounds are to be perceived in a sonic world becomes as important as the sounds themselves’ (Amacher's italics, in the new preface to her 1977 article [2008: 10]).

¹⁸ As she put it in 2009 in a private memorandum she referred to as ‘the Agreement’, written in relation to her final, unfinished, work at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center.

¹⁹ A development not at all untypical for artists of her generation (think of James Coleman or, one of her favourite filmmakers, Hans-Jürgen von Syberberg, both of whom were born within a few years of her) but so atypical in music as to be all but illegible.

²⁰ Aside from the implicit composing (reiteration) of listening embodied in traditional composition, since Morton Feldman, a nascent composition of listening has also had a small, rarely understood place in ‘composition proper’. Chris Newman and Bunita Marcus are perhaps Feldman's most prominent heirs in this sense (with Newman going arguably further than Feldman by dispensing with individualized musical figures and instead utilizing formats irrespective of material). In a radically different sense, Peter Ablinger's notated instrumental music (alongside his installations and other performance works, which directly thematize composed listening) does not so much compose listening as turn listening in on itself, explicitly shifting the emphasis of ‘composition composition’ from material to listening.

²¹ ‘Impersonal intimacy asks of us what is the most inconceivable thing: to believe in the future without needing to personalize it. Without, as it were, seeing it in our own terms.… How would our lives be better if human relations were something other than the collusion of ego-identities, if the shared project was not the consolidation of selfhood, but its dissolution?’ Adam Phillips in (Phillips and Bersani 2008: 117) and ‘[T] his could be formulated as a prioritizing of being over knowledge – or, in other terms, a displacement from the search for psychic truth to an experience, and experiment, in relational transformations’ (Phillips and Bersani 2008: 120).