“There are developments of sounds, detached sounds, silences, trills.” (Paul Valéry)
In “Max Black” (1998) I changed from tea to coffee: here actually the sound of an espresso pot is the starting signal for an explosive concert of things in a laboratory with chain reactions between thoughts, sounds, fire, images and words of Paul Valéry:
“I get up. I immediately go off to make the first ritual coffee not knowing whether it works as substance of my chemistry or as savor and stimulant more by affecting senses than by modifying molecular make-up or indeed whether it has a nervous effect, for all 3 hypotheses can be advanced.”
Valéry 1990a: 287
To all those moments in my previous work as a composer the presence of things might not yet act as a major character of the works in total, but the things rather show up, they capture the space, they conquer more and more the performances and the compositions, they choreograph the words, the movements and actions. The more they insist on their being, the more they call for respect, for their own timing—rather to speed something up—and they do not fade away, they stay; like in “Max Black” when using the live-sampling program called “LISA.” Or they decelerate the attention because they are featured in a prominent way. Those things mark the most intriguing moments for me and also for the spectator’s experience. Because the audience seems to be most attentive, since somehow those things break the logic and the sovereignty of the human performers and we do not ever know what comes next.
Originally it was a balance which interested me; a balance between the sound of things and the other acoustic events, which usually are ranked higher: the human voice in singing, the text, or the live performed music by instrumentalists. But rather the opposite happens. Those moments demonstrate an external structural power: creating a harmony or a pause, an unforeseeable chaotic element or a rhythm, which has to be followed by everybody, even the conductor. As soon as we hear the footsteps, the conductor has just to follow their speed. Or once the actor Andre Wilms has closed the espresso pot, he is faced with an unchangeable repetitive rhythm he has to follow with all his words and actions in the ongoing performance.
Those things were sometimes hard to manage in a composition when I did not have a sampler yet—like in the days when I worked with this smashing glass sound. In 1981 I had a couple of tape-machines instead and tried to run them in time, to start them in time, to go backwards and make a tape scratching, which was quite difficult and could not easily be incorporated in an academic sound system anyway.
“We suddenly heard a strange noise that neither of us had ever heard before.” (Adalbert Stifter)
Finally I wanted to dedicate a complete work to the things in an installative performance called “Stifters Dinge” (2007). It is a piece with five pianos, with water, rain, fog and ice, with stones, metal and a lot of different acousmatic voices. Adalbert Stifter, an Austrian writer in the first half of the nineteenth century, used the word “thing” on nearly every page of his novels and stories, and things are standing in his work for objects, people, for other techniques or unknown cultures; it also stands for ecological catastrophes, and nature observations like an icefall which he describes in a text I use in this production. “I had never seen that thing like this before.” Basically he calls the unknown part of the world “things,” and the Swiss specialist in German Studies, Heinrich Mettler, once said “out of reverence to things—aus Ehrfurcht vor den Dingen—as they are by themselves, Adalbert Stifter leaves them as they are, as they show themselves to us.” Actually the way he describes the sounds remembers us to the sound observations by Alain Robbe-Grillet, but Stifter is more modest. He doesn’t interpret them or even attach them with anthropomorphic or even obsessive emotional moments.
“While we were eventually nearing the valley where the forest lay across our road, from among the blackwood that stood to our right on some rocks we suddenly heard a strange noise that neither of us had ever heard before. It was as though thousands, if not millions of glass shards were rustling and clinking against each other and as if in this chaos the sounds were travelling into the distance. The blackwood was, however, still too far away for us to recognise the sound. In the silence that reigned on the earth and in heaven, the noise seemed very strange to us.”
Stifter 2007
While we hear this reading of Adalbert Stifter’s ice story, we see a picture by Jacob Isaacksz Ruisdael from the seventeenth century “called Swamp,” which is very slowly changing its color; so slowly, that it’s actually hard to perceive it at the same time while we try to understand the complex syntax of the language. This production was an experiment in creating a piece without any human body on stage: no musician, no performer, no dancer, no singer; just five pianos and a lot of things like motors, engines, stones moving on top of each other, and a few tubes.
It is also an experiment to change the order between things; to turn those things into protagonists, which in theater usually just have a serving and illustrative role—even the technique itself, the light, the engines, etc.—to turn the hierarchy upside down. For example when there is a musical communication between the sound of a shutter of a light projector and the shouting voice of a sailor in Papua New Guinea which we hear in an ethnographical recording made in 1904.
So regarding the sounds of things, or the sounds of thinking, or the sound of thinking things, especially when encountering performances of this piece, it demonstrates a different way of experiencing, or even confronting, the way we perceive the sounds of things on a day to day basis. It gives us a bigger freedom for our imagination and also it avoids this enormous reflex we have to upload things with an anthropomorphic center. Those sounds also avoid the reflex to mirror ourselves, to identify ourselves with what we see and hear. Sounds of the things do not allow an easy identification. And that is what I basically try to work on: not to work on a direct encounter with somebody we can recognize, but rather on an indirect encounter with alterity.
“We listened and stared; I don’t know whether it was amazement or fear of driving deeper into that thing.”
(Adalbert Stifter)
After a performance of this piece in Munich Manfred Eicher, the producer of ECM records, said: “Let’s make a CD.” “What?” I answered, “this is such a beautiful, visual piece—why do you want to make a CD?” and forgot his wonderful proposal for about two years until the sound engineer of Stifters Dinge, Willi Bopp, told me that he had made a 24 track recording out of the blue. And I “listened and stared.” And all of a sudden I discovered a lot of things, “a lot of things,” which I have not heard, neither in the rehearsals nor in hundreds of performances I have attended. Probably because, of course, the visuals very much dominate what we hear. Specially when there is an identity between what we hear and what we see, it is the acoustic stage which rather amplifies our visual senses. But in Stifters Dinge I work with a division of those two stages. A separation between the visual stage and the acoustic stage. And this division of these two different perception modes is first of all a space for imagination. But it also allows us to separate it—so you can just listen to it, to an only acoustically recorded and mixed down CD—originally against my own interest (Goebbels 2012).
Works cited
Goebbels, H. (1992), Berlin Q-damm 12.4.81, on Goebbels Heart, CD evva disk 33007.
Goebbels, H. (2012), Stifters Dinge, CD ecm new series 2216.
Lindwedel, M. (2004), Alain Robbe-Grillets intermediale Ästhetik des Bildes, trans. H. Goebbels, Dissertation Hannover. Available online: http://d-nb.info/979170117/34 (accessed October 6, 2015).
Poe, E. A. (2012), “Shadow—A Parable”, in Complete Stories and Poems. New York: Barnes & Noble.
Robbe-Grillet, A. (1959), Jealousy, trans. R. Howard. New York: Grove Press.
Robbe-Grillet, A. (1991), Ghosts in the Mirror. A Romanesque, trans. J. Levy. New York: Grove Press.
Sophocles (2014), Oedipus the King, trans. I. Johnston, line 1741. Available online: https://records.vi
u.ca/∼johnstoi/sophocles/antigone.htm (accessed October 6, 2015).
Stifter, A. (2007), Extract from “Die Mappe meines Urgrossvaters” [My Great Grandfather’s Portfolio]. Transcription of the third edition, file 149, trans. M. Heard, Programbook Stifters Dinge. Lausanne: Theatre Vidy.
Valéry, P. (1990a) Cahiers/Hefte, vol. 1, trans. H. Goebbels. Frankfurt: S. Fischer.
Valéry, P. (1990b) Cahiers/Hefte, vol. 4, trans. H. Goebbels. Frankfurt: S. Fischer.
5
Sonic Thought
Christoph Cox
Philosophical aesthetics suffers from a peculiar arrogance toward its object of inquiry, an arrogance that the “non-philosopher” François Laruelle calls “the principle of sufficient philosophy.”1 With this clumsy phrase, Laruelle names the pretension of philosophy to elevate itself above any object or discourse so as to offer a philosophy of it: a philosophy of science, of art, of music, etc. For millennia, philosophy has conceived itself as the “queen of the sciences,” claiming the ability to reveal what its object cannot reveal about itself: the essence, nature, or fundamental reality of that object. Philosophy thus dominates its object, subjecting it to philosophical rule. Convinced that its object is fundamentally ignorant about itself, philosophy is little concerned with what that object has to say on its own behalf.
How might one challenge this domination, allow the object to speak, put it on equal footing with philosophical thinking, permit it to generate concepts rather than solely to be subject to them? In the case of music and sound, what would it mean to think sonically rather than merely to think about sound? How can sound alter or inflect philosophy? What concepts and forms of thought can sound itself generate? These are the questions I want to address here. My aim is to track some of the ways that philosophy has or could be inflected by sound in order to produce not a philosophy of sound or music but a sonic philosophy.
Sonic ontology
Sonic philosophy begins not from music as a set of cultural objects but from the deeper experience of sound as flux, event, and effect. Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche are exemplary figures here, for both present not a metaphysics of music but a musical metaphysics. For Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, music directly figures the world as it is in itself, the primary forces and movements that drive all natural change, tension, creation, and destruction. In a passage celebrated by Nietzsche, Schopenhauer writes: “Music … expresses the metaphysical to everything physical in the world, the thing-in-itself to every phenomena.… [It] gives the innermost kernel preceding all form, or the heart of things” (Schopenhauer 1969: 262–3).2
For Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, music and sound are philosophically important because they present us with an ontology that unsettles our ordinary conception of things. In philosophy, ontology is the sub-discipline that investigates being, determining what there is or what sorts of things exist. We ordinarily operate with an ontology that begins and ends with what J. L. Austin wryly called “moderate-sized specimens of dry goods,” the objects of our everyday experience: apples, chairs, trees, cars, etc. (Austin 1962: 8). This ordinary ontology extends to include larger objects such as mountains or stars, and can accept scientific objects such as sub-atomic particles, provided that they are taken to be tiny versions of ordinary things—stable, solid, and durable, though very small. Indeed, when we speak of “matter,” we tend to think solely of solid matter. (Few, I think, would take liquids, gases, or plasmas—water, air, or fire, for example—as paradigms of matter.) This ordinary ontology privileges the senses of sight and touch; or rather, the senses of sight and touch determine this everyday ontology. The invisible, intangible, and ephemeral objects (so to speak) of smell, taste, and hearing seem to have only a shadowy existence relative to the standard of the ordinary solid object, whose presence is guaranteed by eyes and fingers, and enshrined in “common sense,” which names an entrenched hierarchy of the senses rather than some common agreement among them.
But surely sounds, odors, and tastes exist, and surely they are as material as sticks and stones. Sounds, to take the example that concerns me here, set eardrums aquiver, rattle walls, and shatter wine glasses. Indeed, sound is omnipresent and inescapable. Lacking earlids, we are forever and inescapably bathed in sound, immersed in it in a way that we are not immersed in a world of visible objects. An attention to sound, then, will provoke us to modify our everyday ontology and our common sense conception of matter. Sound lends credence to a very different sort of ontology and materialism, a conception of being and matter that can account for objecthood better than an ontology of objects can account for sounds.
Sonic flux
Music has always posed an ontological problem, for (unlike the score or the recording that attempt to capture it) it is intangible and evanescent but nonetheless powerfully physical. This ontological problem is compounded by sound art, which, from its very inception in the late 1960s, challenged the ontology of objects and, in particular, the modernist work of art. Though clearly an outgrowth of the Cagean tradition in experimental music, sound art emerged within the milieu of postminimalist practices in the visual arts fostered by Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Robert Barry, Michael Asher, and others whose emphasis on process, multi-sensory experience, and immersion defied the autonomy, medium-specificity, and purely visual or optical conception of art characteristic of high modernism.
Postminimalism’s challenge to these features of modernism opened two different paths for artistic practice. Art could pursue the “dematerialization of the art object” (Lippard 1973) by way of the concept, the idea, language, and discourse; or it could pursue an expanded conception of matter extending beyond the limited domain of ordinary, middle-sized, visual and tactile objects (paintings and sculptures, for example), a notion of matter understood as a profusion of energetic fluxes. While a few artists saw these two paths as parallel rather than divergent, conceptual art tended to follow the first path, sound art the second. In so doing, conceptualism was bolstered by a set of latently idealist theoretical programs insistent that our access to the real is fundamentally discursive, thus dismissing any notion of nondiscursive perception, materiality, or reality. During the 1970s and 1980s, this critical program came to dominate the visual and literary arts, offering powerful, sophisticated, and effective analyses of images and texts. By contrast, the provocation posed by sound art was not pursued philosophically or theoretically. As a result, sound art was left without a robust theoretical basis or mode of apprehension and was thus relegated to a minor status, at best an adjunct to music, at worst a naive or retrograde incursion into the visual arts. Thus, while conceptual art became a dominant concern for art historians and critics and a pervasive influence on the art of the past half-century, sound art remained (until recently) a minor and underground mode of art-making that attracted very little critical or art historical analysis. It is no coincidence, I think, that the emergence of powerful realist and materialist philosophies since the late 1990s has been paralleled by a renewed interest in sound.
Sound art’s greatest forefather, John Cage, invited us to think of sound and music not as bounded by musical works but as an anonymous flux that precedes and exceeds human contributions to it. This conception of sound courses through the history of sound art, from Max Neuhaus’s Times Square, La Monte Young’s Dream House, and Alvin Lucier’s Music on a Long Thin Wire to Christina Kubisch’s Electrical Walks, Francisco Lopez’s trilogy of the Americas, and the work of contemporary soundscape artists such as Chris Watson, Jana Winderen, and Toshiya Tsunoda.
If we accept this Cagean conception, sound constitutes one flux among many, joining the profusion of flows cataloged by Manuel DeLanda in his magnificent book A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, which conceives all of nature and culture as a collection of flows—flows of lava, genes, bodies, language, money, information, etc.—that are solidified and liquefied, captured and released by way of various processes that are isomorphic across these various domains (DeLanda 1997). Yet, as Schopenhauer a
nd Nietzsche pointed out, the sonic flux is not just one flow among many; it deserves special status insofar as it so elegantly and forcefully models and manifests the myriad fluxes that constitute the natural world.
Sonic events
Sound, then, affirms an ontology of flux in which objects are merely temporary concretions of fluid processes. This flux ontology replaces objects with events, an idea nicely demonstrated in a book that provides another exemplary instance of sonic philosophy: Casey O’Callaghan’s Sounds (O’Callaghan 2007). Sounds are intangible, ephemeral, and invisible; but O’Callaghan shows they are nonetheless real and mind-independent. Sounds persist in time and survive changes to their properties and qualities. Thus, they cannot be treated as secondary qualities (such as colors or tastes) that are relative to their observers; nor are they the properties of their sources, which cause or generate them but nonetheless remain distinct and separate. In short, sounds are not tied to objects or minds but are independently existing entities.
This is exactly what Pierre Schaeffer (the father of musique concrète and one of the progenitors of sound art) aimed to show in his analysis of the objet sonore: the sonorous object considered independently of its source, an entity to which audio recording draws attention but that ordinary experience also routinely encounters (Schaeffer 2004: 76–81). For Schaeffer, the sonorous object has a peculiar existence distinct from the instrument that produces it, the medium in or on which it exists, and the mind of the listener. Sounds are not qualities of objects or subjects; rather, they are ontological particulars and individuals. Yet Schaeffer’s language of the “sonorous object” misses the mark. For sounds are peculiarly temporal and durational, tied to the qualities they exhibit over time. If sounds are particulars or individuals, then they are so not as static objects but as temporal events (O’Callaghan 2007: 11, 26–7, 57–71).
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