New Music and the Crises of Materiality: Sounding Bodies and Objects in Late Modernity 9780367481858, 9780367489113, 9781003038535

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Previously published material
Acknowledgements
Introduction: New musical materialisms
(After) modernism and modernity
Chapter outlines
Notes
Part I: Musical bodies
Chapter 1: The (dis)possession of the musical body
Modernist musical bodies: medium and resistance
Crises of materiality
Problematic musical bodies
Outward bodily inwardness
Notes
Chapter 2: The composition of posthuman bodies
Music-making and body-making
Extended voices
Notes
Part II: Musical objects
Chapter 3: Orientations and the piano-object
Orientations, bodies, and objects
Different orientations
Furniture and fetish (in passive affirmation)
Presence and spectacle (in active affirmation)
Process and entropy (in passive negation)
Absenting and obliteration (in active negation)
The dialectics of musical objecthood
Notes
Chapter 4: Contemporary composition and/as plastic art
‘On some relationships …’
The sculptural through the painterly
Music’s re-examination of the painterly
Sonic sculpturality
Plasticity during liquid times
Notes
Part III: Musical materials
Chapter 5: On the ‘material’ of musical material
On the ‘critical’ of critical theory
On the ‘theory’ of materialist theory
Matter and activity
Dualisms and dialectics
Agency and musical material
Notes
Chapter 6: Natures and ecologies of composition
Soundings: oak, ginger, mushroom
Sounding (post)natural ecologies
Temporality, precarity, and the anticipatory
Notes
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

New Music and the Crises of Materiality

This book explores the transformation of ideas of the material in late t­wentiethand early twenty-first-century musical composition. New music of this era is argued to reflect a historical moment when the idea of materiality itself is in flux. Engaging with thinkers such as Theodor W. Adorno, Sara Ahmed, Zygmunt Bauman, Rosi Braidotti, and Timothy Morton, the author considers music’s relationship with changing material conditions, from the rise of neo-liberalisms and information technologies to new concepts of the natural world. Drawing on musicology, cultural theory, and philosophy, the author develops a critical understanding of musical bodies, objects, and the environments of their interaction. Music is grasped as something that both registers material changes in society whilst also enabling us to practice materiality differently. Samuel Wilson’s research  focuses on music and twentieth- and twenty-first-­ century modernity. He lectures in music aesthetics at Guildhall School of Music and Drama and interdisciplinary theory at London Contemporary Dance School.  He is the editor of Music—Psychoanalysis—Musicology (Routledge, 2018).

New Music and the Crises of Materiality Sounding Bodies and Objects in Late Modernity Samuel J. Wilson

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Samuel J. Wilson The right of Samuel J. Wilson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-48185-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-48911-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-03853-5 (ebk) Typeset in Times by SPi Global, India

Contents

Previously published material vi Acknowledgements vii Introduction: New musical materialisms

1

PART I

Musical bodies

13

1 The (dis)possession of the musical body

15

2 The composition of posthuman bodies

33

PART II

Musical objects

47

3 Orientations and the piano-object

49

4 Contemporary composition and/as plastic art

74

PART III

Musical materials

101

5 On the ‘material’ of musical material

103

6 Natures and ecologies of composition

124

Afterword

153

Bibliography 158 Index 168

Previously published material

Part I integrates and greatly expands on material from the following journal article: ‘The Composition of Posthuman Bodies’, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, special issue on ‘Bodily Extensions and Performance (Avatars, Prosthetics, Cyborgs, Posthumans)’, Vol. 13/2 (2017), pp. 137–152. Chapter 5 develops material from the following article: ‘Notes on Adorno’s “Musical Material” During the New Materialisms’, Music & Letters 99/2 (2018), pp. 260–275. A small amount of the material from the opening of this article is also integrated in the Introduction. Chapter 5 also includes a short passage, updated, from my unpublished PhD dissertation. See Samuel Wilson, ‘An Aesthetics of Past–Present Relations in the Experience of Late 20th- and Early 21st-Century Art Music’, PhD Dissertation (Royal Holloway, University of London, 2013).

Acknowledgements

There a number of people whom I must thank for their support and assistance with the finalisation of this book project. I am grateful to the composers and performers who have granted me permission to include third-party material, and for their interest in the project: Aaron Cassidy for granting me permission to reproduce an excerpt from his Second String Quartet and his photograph of Séverine Ballon’s performance of Liza Lim’s an ocean beyond earth; Lim for supplying this photograph and that of the bow from her Invisibility; Ballon for granting me permission to include the former photograph of her and the second photograph, taken by her. Thanks also to James Saunders for enabling me to include an excerpt from his materials vary greatly and are simply materials, and to Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri and Pe Lang for their photograph of a detail from Untitled IV. I am grateful to Breitkopf & Härtel for allowing me to include the excerpt from Helmut Lachenmann’s Pression. Some material that makes up this book took earlier form in journal articles. I  am indebted to Sita Popat, Sarah Whatley, and the peer reviewers for their insightful comments on an article which has been incorporated into Part I. I am similarly grateful to the anonymous peer reviewers who provided careful and constructive feedback on the Music & Letters article that constituted Chapter 5 in an earlier form. Additionally, Isabella van Elferen’s generous feedback on an early draft of Chapter 4 was hugely helpful. The positive feedback and encouragement provided by the anonymous reviewers of the book proposal and completed manuscript have also been enormously valuable, as has guidance from Genevieve Aoki, Music Editor at Routledge, in taking the book from proposal to publication. My hope is that this book might resonate particularly with a recently emerged and currently emerging generation of scholars for whom indeterminacy and multiplicity are not so much abstractions as conditions embodied in the precarity of their working life – one now typified by multiple and temporary and only ever partial institutional associations, short-term contracts, and a blurring of professional and personal time. In light of this, I am thankful to a wider community of supportive scholars – many in the early stages of their careers and working on the margins of the (relative) security afforded by higher education institutions – with whom I share conversations and alliances in these times. For those working in teaching-focused positions, such as myself, the truism that academic writing

viii  Acknowledgements happens slowly manifests in a very particular way. For me this meant a temporality of working and writing typified by long periods of reflection between sporadic bursts in times that were themselves characterised by betweenness: in evenings, lunchtimes, weekends, the very early morning before (paid) work, time booked as ‘holiday’, whilst commuting, sometimes even in waiting rooms. Again, to the numerous colleagues and friends who sustain both ongoing discussion and one another in this context, I must again say thanks. This includes many current and past members of the London Critical Collective – I am especially grateful for many energising conversations with Edwina Attlee, Sam Johnson-Schlee, Rebecca May Johnson, Matt Mahon, Chrys Papaioannou, Victoria Ridler, and Philippa Thomas. I am indebted to my colleagues at London Contemporary Dance School, where I am lucky enough to have if only a few days of research time per year, with whom I have ongoingly discussed many of the ideas that inform this project. Carolyn Deby, for her knowledge and openness in talking about some of the ecological ideas related to the last chapter, deserves particular mention. Connected with the sense of unpredictability mentioned above, this book, like many others, was finalised and revised during the UK coronavirus lockdowns of 2020. Given this writerly present, and the reading after this, one might read (on the part of the author perhaps) an overdetermination of the notions of precarious present and unpredictable futures. That said, it should not be read only in that context; these ideas of indeterminacy are explored most fully in the final chapter, which was nonetheless written before these events. The deepest thanks I have for my wife Harriet, for her untiring support, and for being a partner in thoughtful conversation as much as any other kind. Samuel J. Wilson

Introduction New musical materialisms

Matter seems to be the solid ground on which we stand. In the European art music tradition, it provides the sturdy enclosures of the concert hall and the opera house, and the objects and beings – instruments, musical technologies, and ­persons – that reside within them. An immaterial music floats above this ground – the musical work an object on display – and is sounded within these walls. But under some circumstances of listening one notices the space, and its objects and bodies, resonating responsively. Recording technologies and acoustic apparatuses help us quantify these physical relations of sound and its imagined enclosure, and this space becomes thought less as a void filled with music and more as a quantity of air vibrating harmoniously. As ‘I am sitting in a room’, the ethereal materialises. Further, on relistening, the bodies of listener and performer, and the latter’s relationship with their instruments and voice, begin to undermine our assumptions about music’s ephemerality. This is underpinned by a historical shift in understanding, in which the materiality of these same bodies and bodily relations transform: bodies are today thoroughly embedded in technological networks and, conversely, technologies are literally placed within bodies; today one is disposed to consider bodies in their situatedness within wider ecologies of the human and nonhuman, and indeed bodies themselves are understood increasingly as complex systems and not as unitary wholes. Echoing these shifts, in this book I seek to develop a better understanding of the problematic relationship between matter and sound. I focus on some indicative late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century contexts, which, I argue, themselves place great urgency on contested notions of materiality through compositional thought and practice. I suggest that music not only becomes an object understood as material, but itself becomes a practice of understanding, changing notions of matter during this time. What I am both diagnosing as condition and prescribing as theorisation is the emergence of new musical materialisms. This phrase can be read playfully, in two complementary ways. The first alludes to the concept of ‘new music’ – and more particularly to the notion that new music undertakes certain kinds of practices with respect to its material. This is to understand new music as material(ist) practice. Second, it makes reference to something distinctly new of and in materialist theories – and more acutely, the idea that contemporary materialism should take

2  Introduction a fuller account of music, historically considered perhaps as the most abstract of the arts. On the first reading: the concept of new music as called forth here is developed in the work of Theodor W. Adorno, for whom it is defined as a challenge to conventionally inherited ideas about what music is and what music does. This challenge need not be dramatised or stated openly. Adorno argued that this is because musical material embodies the contents of the world from which it emerges – indeed, it embodies the paradoxes of that society and history. This is enacted within the fabric of the work, at the level of its technical construction. As such, compositional technique cannot be isolated from this aspect and, by the same token, any technical issue in composition is always more than ‘merely technical’ in character. In his essay, ‘Criteria of New Music’ (1959), he writes: The truth of the work of art is […] that its meaning registers the ideological stage that has been reached, the contradictions of the situation right down to the depths of the technical contradictions that have to be mastered, and may even surpass them by articulating directly the truth of philosophical consciousness.1 The quality of this embodiment also has a historical dimension that is hidden, owing, in large part, to the apparent immediacy of the music before us and its non-representational nature (an idea explored in depth in Chapter 5): ‘Music possesses no contents borrowed directly from the external world. In exchange, contents have become embedded in the traditional forms,’ Adorno suggests elsewhere.2 Importantly, the concept of new music emphasises a (self) critical outlook with respect to the place and function of artistic works in society and the ‘ideological stage that has been reached’: the social and historical antagonisms they embody are a source of concealed excitation. This means that the development of music is not defined solely by ‘purely musical’ advances, but also by a relationship with what is outside it; indeed, as suggested already, to refer to compositional ‘technique’ or ‘musical material’ is to refer already to an outside that is paradoxically embedded within these musical features. Furthermore, while new music does often appear technically complex and ‘difficult’ for the listener, for Adorno this was not simply an effect of its intricate construction, but was owing to its radical difference when held against the consumables of mass culture. The ‘products’ of new music composition are very different from the products of mass culture, not only in their form but in that the latter encourages frictionless consumption. Given the dominance of mass culture in everyday life, this characteristic ease of consumption becomes a naturalised model of reception, against which reception in general is otherwise measured. And this radical difference – alongside the paradoxical notion that music is intimately connected with society through its embodiment of social antagonisms – was for Adorno part of its utopian function, in so far as this reminds us of the possibilities of a world different from one of a manufactured culture and administered society. New music should therefore not be thought

Introduction  3 of as a ‘style’ but as a characteristic criticality vis-à-vis historical and social conditions, a critical impulse enacted within musical material. A key claim made in this book is that an Adornian understanding of musical material can today be read productively in light of recent materialist theories and philosophies. I also suggest, looking in the other direction, that the dialectical and historically reflexive character of Adorno’s conception of musical material remedies potential pitfalls in these more recent philosophies. I develop these ideas in detail throughout; this is implicit in how numerous musical examples are discussed and theorised. This applied thinking lays the groundwork for the more direct, though perhaps abstract, examination of these ideas that come later; principally this happens in Chapter 5, in which I argue that the dialoguing of these perspectives provides critical resources for theorising materials’ activities in music, for thinking through the contemporary specificities of materials’ antagonistic character, and for reassessing how one conceives compositional agency when facing these materials. Furthermore, it is important to acknowledge here that, while points of continuity can be traced, it should go without saying that today’s world is different to that inhabited by Adorno. The socially and historically situated character of music also means that one would therefore not expect the new music of today to sound like the music that is discussed in his writing (Beethoven, Wagner, Mahler, Schoenberg, and others). To speak of new musical materialisms is thus also to suggest that new music’s relation to material has changed since this time. In this book I make the case that strands of new musical activity insist we attend to changing notions of materiality, including that of bodies, objects, and the wider environments in which these find themselves. I also argue that these developments should be considered in their relation to a still developing modernity – a term, discussed below, which I use to signify a long-standing historical era and set of socio-cultural practices, and to evoke the understanding of these through the critical theory of Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Fredric Jameson, Zygmunt Bauman, Rosi Braidotti, and others. And this, in fact, helps to clarify the central claim made in this book: that changing notions and contested practices of materiality are one central but as yet underemphasised concern manifested and explored in the critical music of the (particularly late) twentieth century and after. Furthermore, to discuss new musical materialisms is to say something crucial of the historical situation and aesthetic valences of the materiality in this period: music does not just reflect the material conditions of its production but actively enables critical play and reorientations vis-à-vis what we believe materiality to be in our contemporary historical moment. Music expounds the felt sense of this time’s changing material conditions. The second reading of this introductory phrasing is suggestive of a specifically musical dimension to what has been widely referred to as the ‘new materialisms’. This is a term used by a number of scholars and practitioners to mark out some contemporary, interrelated philosophical and interpretive directions. In the singular, this term is a necessarily problematic label. A recent volume of essays – New Materialisms – reflects this issue in its plural title. Nonetheless, this volume lays claim to a certain kind of thinking, calling for more material modes of socio-­ cultural analysis and interpretation.3 As in other recent titles, this is stated contra

4  Introduction some earlier methodological turns: for Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, the radicalism of the ‘cultural turn’ is now exhausted;4 for Braidotti, ‘neo-­materialism’ resists the dominance of the ‘linguistic paradigm’ as its mode of analysis.5 (New) materialism, as considered here, is thus not a distinct method, but a field of related concerns, questions, and theoretical inclinations. Despite engaging material thinking, music studies has not yet taken account of some emerging materialist trends encountered in interconnected fields such as philosophy, art theory, and cultural and gender studies. Furthermore, while new materialist perspectives have recently come to focus on artistic practices, these discourses predominately tend to refer toward the plastic and visual arts, over music.6 Just as musicology could find something productive in some forms of recent materialist theory, new materialist philosophies could likewise learn something from engaging music – an art that has often been considered to cut across the material and ephemeral, the physical and the abstract, problematising each term in dialectical relation to its other. ‘New materialism’, as Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin put it, ‘takes scholarship into absolute deterritorialization, and is not an epistemic class that has a clear referent. New materialism is something to be put to work.’7 I undertake some of this work here. Despite this context, I do not label my approach ‘new materialist’ in the sense used by these writers, though I do make reference to some thinkers sometimes labelled new materialist. I do this in the context of a longer history of materialist thinking, as I hope is made clear by my earlier references to Adorno and later references to Marx, Freud, and others. I would like to deny an easy ‘either-newor-old’ materialisms binary and narrative of succession; while such distinctions can sometimes be useful, my use of theory is a little more nonlinear. More fundamentally, I am resistant to an (understandably strategic) act of self-branding that enacts a kind intellectual franchising where I would place a ‘new materialist’ sign at my front of shop, to ensure the reader knows this is just one outlet of an agreed and familiar model, and that they will know the kind of thing that’s on offer even before they walk in.8 I take inspiration in part from what I see in strands of Sara Ahmed’s work: a sense of productive encounter with these new materialisms while also hesitating to dismiss the findings of past thinking (including the ‘cultural turn’) when seeking to develop contemporary materialist thought.9 My aim is to mobilise some conceptual practices that seek to understand changing notions of materialism and materiality as these manifest in and around musical composition, an activity which necessitates engagements with and conversations among a range of recent and ‘historic’ materialisms. This study also develops in the context of materialist thinking currently burgeoning within thinking about music specifically. Georgina Born has considered how identities are constructed musically and mediated materially.10 Emily Dolan has sought to establish, with reference to Haydn’s instrumental writing, ‘how music’s perceived immateriality and absoluteness depended upon concrete, material changes in orchestral practice’.11 Christoph Cox has proposed a ‘sonic materialism’ that seeks to give dignity and a theorisable basis to the materiality of ‘sound itself’.12 While my focus is on music from the late twentieth century and after, this is also a period that comes after that focused on in a host of writings,

Introduction  5 which outlined changes in cultures and technologies of listening in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These changes were themselves constituted in part by the emergence and systematisation of acoustics and sound as material phenomena.13 The plural ‘materialisms’ in this Introduction’s subtitle therefore refers to two things: multiple yet interconnected theoretical orientations to matter in the work of philosophers, musicologists, and cultural theorists; and multiple yet interconnected approaches to musical material in the work of twentieth- and ­twenty-first-century composers. I position my discussion at the points of intersection and antagonism both between and immanent in the two.

(After) modernism and modernity I situate this discussion within the context of some recent trends in modernity. The book’s title refers to its ‘late’ period. This term I use to evoke a number of specific features that I hope will become more familiar – their conventional usages might also be defamiliarised – through their repeated usage, although most fundamentally I am referring to some shifts in organisation of living, principally in Europe and North America, from around the 1970s onward, as encountered in a constellation of terms, including post-Fordism, the information society, and the precarious service economy.14 This ‘late’ condition is envisaged as simply the latest chapter in a perhaps 500year period from which, as Marshall Berman puts it, emerged a ‘maelstrom of modern life’. This was rooted in many spheres including: great discoveries in the physical sciences, changing our images of the universe and our place in it; the industrialization of production, which transforms scientific knowledge into technology […]; immense demographic upheavals […]; rapid and often cataclysmic urban growth; systems of mass communication […]; increasingly powerful national states […]; mass social movements of people; finally, bearing and driving all these people and institutions along, an ever-expanding, drastically fluctuating capitalist world market.15 Echoing this, as Julian Johnson writes: Benjamin, Jameson, Foucault, and Habermas (among many others) have used the term [modernity] as a specific historical category to refer to a period of Western history beginning somewhere around the end of the sixteenth century and which appears to approach a terminal phase in the latter part of the twentieth century.16 And while I talk about music after modernism, for reasons that I outline below, I generally avoid the term ‘postmodernism’; rather I take postmodernism (glossing Fredric Jameson) as a symptom of the cultural and material conditions (Jameson: ‘late capitalism’) which provide the framework for my discussion.17

6  Introduction What I do tend towards is an insistence that this discussion of music should be placed within a history of modernity, and of modernism. I do this head on in Chapter 3, which takes a wider historical view than the other chapters, in order to consider some critical issues that span early twentieth-century music and a more recent era of post-Cagean aesthetics. This echoes recent moves in musicology and music aesthetics to consider music’s part in the formation of modernity – one sees this in the work of John Butt, Karol Berger, Mark Evan Bonds, Daniel Chua, Julian Johnson, and others18 – and to consider modernism not just as a series of techniques (such as dodecaphonism and abstraction) but as a perplexing, paradoxical, and often critical engagement with the intellectual and material conditions of modernity: diversely enacting and disrupting logics of progress and rationality; often expressive of interests in the primitive Freudian self and the orientalised colonial other; and challenges to mass production, spectacle, and the commodity-form. The intimacy and quarrel between modernism and modernity here informs my discussion of our more recent period. Centrally, I ask what the once-­closely-held modernist commitment to one’s artistic materials – be this the flatness of one’s canvas in painting, or poetic experimentation not with expression conveyed through language but with the terms of language itself – means in a time when established notions of ‘the material’ are in flux. I seek to better account for what this commitment might mean, how it might change, in a music of a society in which not only ‘all that is solid melts into air’, but where notions of both society and self are increasingly understood as malleable and impermanent, as opposed to cast solidly. This is most recently embodied in the notion of the ‘flexibility’ of one’s labour and the celebration of personal resilience – bending without breaking – above rigidity.19 Cast in these terms, new musical materialisms’ critical explorations of materiality under late modernity is but the latest chapter in a longer history. Indeed, this is to suggest also that – ‘immaterial’ – music has an important function in establishing what we understand by materiality. A materiality specifically of and after modernism is characterised well by Douglas Mao, writing in the field of literary studies. He writes of ‘modernism’s extraordinarily generative fascination with the object understood neither as commodity (Goods) nor as symbol (Gods), but as “object,” where any or all of the resonances of this complexly polysemous word might apply’.20 In his Solid Objects he argues that this is a markedly modern state of affairs: This feeling of regard for the physical object as object – as not-self, as not-subject, as most helpless and will-less of entities, but also as fragment of Being, as solidity, as otherness in its most resilient opacity – seems a peculiarly twentieth-century malady or revelation, in any case; or rather, we might say, the open acknowledgement of such a feeling seems one of the minor trademarks of the writing of this period.21 I suggest that music has an important place in this story of materiality and modernity. I hope to contribute a discussion on what musical and sonic practices offer

Introduction  7 by way of performed investigations of a distinctly ‘problematic materiality’ (outlined in Chapter 1) – which emerges urgently as a characteristic of recent modernity. Bauman’s distinction between solid and liquid modernity – with all the material evocations both words offer – is useful in articulating the needs of critical theory under this late modernity. He differentiates these terms in order to mark a shift in the character and practice of modern life, consistent with the shifts towards late(r) modernity I mentioned above. Bauman uses ‘solid modernity’ to refer to a modernity of the Fordist factory, a rationalised and rationalising bureaucracy, and a time of totalitarianism and surveillance. ‘Liquid modernity’ refers to something different. Bauman outlines some shifts that one might observe in the later twentieth century: this earlier modernity ‘appears “heavy” (as against the contemporary “light” modernity); better still, “solid” (as distinct from “fluid”, “liquid”, or “liquefied”); condensed (as against diffuse or “capillary”); finally, systemic (as distinct from ­network-like)’.22 A hundred years ago ‘to be modern’ meant to chase ‘the final state of perfection’ – now it means an infinity of improvement, with no ‘final state’ in sight and none desired.23 Solid modernity, Bauman suggests, ‘was the target, but also the cognitive frame, of classical critical theory’; it provided an image of society and our emancipation within it which was for Adorno and Horkheimer a model akin ‘to a shared household with its institutionalized norms and habitualized rules, assignment of duties and supervised performance, in which, with good empirical reason, the idea of critique was inscribed’.24 Liquid modernity presents different framings and challenges for critical theory. As I hope should be clear from the chapters that follow, I do not suggest Frankfurt School critical theory be jettisoned from this discussion; instead, I propose that, at risk otherwise of performing an anachronism, this critical theory be challenged and reassessed through facing the new circumstances of the late modern (Bauman’s liquid modernity). This is to suggest one always historicise (glossing Jameson again) not only the substance theorised but theory itself. As implied through my reference to ‘New Music’, Adorno’s thought continues to provide valuable insight into the music and society of today – although in a manner different to his own time. This is an argument I make directly in Chapter 5, through bringing into conversation Adorno’s musical materialism and Jane Bennett’s ‘vital materialism’. And if one takes seriously the notion inherited from modernism – that art might embody criticality vis-à-vis the conditions of society – one should not be surprised to find that what music today addresses critically, and the manner of this address, will be different from the new music of an earlier modernity. A range of musical works and practices are discussed in the following pages. Many, though by no means all, are associated with composers’ names wellestablished in scholarly discussions of late-twentieth-century modernist – and more broadly ‘new’ – music, for example Brian Ferneyhough, Helmut Lachenmann, and Gérard Grisey. Regarding my selection and framing of the music discussed, it should be stated immediately that this book is as much focused on theory as it is on music, and consistently poses a relation between the two whereby the music shapes the theory just as the theory does the music. This means that this book is not, at least directly, centred on composers’ and practices ‘after’ (either chronologically or

8  Introduction figuratively) some event or date – modernism, World War II, 1968, or 1989 – nor is it a survey of a late-twentieth-century and contemporary compositional field.25 It rather explores contemporary material and cultural conditions as a problem diagnosed in and through the particularities of compositional practices vis-à-vis musical materials. This problematic is manifest immanently in these materials, and not only in how we conceptualise and talk about materiality. This is to say that how we live, and collective conditions of living, needn’t be propounded and contested exclusively through propositional, linguistic discourses, but are also actualised musically. My method of discussion is often one of juxtaposition, seeking to trace subcutaneous thematic and technical connections by rhetorically posing associations between figures who might in all outward appearances seem entirely dissimilar: for example Grisey and Annea Lockwood, Heinz Holliger and Jacob Kirkegaard, and John Cage and Liza Lim. These methodological choices, and my decision not to focus on a single ‘school’ of composition, also reflects the very nature of the contemporary as – and this should go without saying – an always-emerging field, which precludes a periodisation or a surefooted typology. That said, within this diverse terrain, the influence of composers such as Ferneyhough, Lachenmann, and Grisey is no doubt felt by the younger generation who navigate it, as a consequence of the former group’s impact on compositional thinking and aesthetics in general, as well as more directly on specific composers at the level of individual biography (for instance, Ferneyhough’s influence on Lim and Aaron Cassidy, who are both discussed below). Additionally, within these contexts I have also attempted – albeit in a limited way – to address some historical oversights or underemphases through cognisance towards the makeup of the composers discussed, for example in terms of gender balance (this also goes for the theoreticians and philosophers whose ideas I have mobilised).

Chapter outlines An intended argumentational trajectory runs throughout this book, from the context of recent material conditions to a focused exploration of bodies and objects, and then back towards the broadness of the environments in which these are ­embedded – and this is how I conceived of it as an author. But the reader might wish to approach it differently: one might, for instance, wish to start with Chapter 5 and explore the other chapters in the wake of the theoretical and philosophical issues foregrounded there. Starting with Chapter 3, instead, would emphasise the particularity of some musical case studies, through which these issues manifest. Nonetheless, each chapter aims to add something cumulatively to some common themes that emerge around bodies, objects, and materials. Hence I present the reader with a story in three interconnected parts, which take these notions as their impetuses. Part I focuses on the place of the body in music in relation to contemporary changes in society, associated with a ‘liquid’ neoliberal service-based economy and new technologies, which problematised the notion of the body as organic, unified, and fully our own. It is argued that this musical approach to bodies not only reacted to but enabled the practice of new ways of being bodies during this time of change.

Introduction  9 Chapter 1 explores the problematics of what constitutes materiality, especially the material body, within this context. This is a body that is composed of material and enacted materially, which might be made use of compositionally. The chapter title plays with a double notion, alluding first to the long-standing idea that virtuoso musical bodies are ‘possessed’ during performance, while, second, invoking an idea established in strands of materialist theory (Marx and after; more recently and differently in the context of posthumanist theory): that our bodies are also no longer our own when they are integrated into and directed through a technologically mediated society. Crucially, I propose that some contemporary compositional strategies constitute the exploration of crises of materiality that are enfolded within contingent historical, social, and technological particularities. They manifest repeated and plural attempts to navigate and determine materiality and material bodies, and their conditions of actualisation and imagining. Chapter 2 extends this thinking through the detailed focus on a case study. It draws on the figures of the cyborg and the posthuman to consider two pieces from Brian Ferneyhough’s Time and Motion Study series, which each explore the body’s relationship with technology. It is argued that Time and Motion Study II provides the listener with a ‘problematic’ human body – one intertwined with nonhuman technologies – in order to refigure what the body means within late ­twentieth-century modernity. Time and Motion Study III manifests vocalities envisioned posthumanistically via body as assemblage. Hence, in this chapter I offer a model for considering how the material crises identified in Chapter 1, which operate at the macro-level of socio-historical conditions, might be observed and interpreted at the micro-level of specific musical works. Following this, Part II foregrounds the objects which engage, face, or extend the body. It also seeks to trace some contemporary developments within a longer historical frame, looking to genealogies and contexts that precede the chronology of the liquid modern. These include ’60s experimentation connected with Happenings and Fluxus (Chapter 3), and some earlier twentieth-century modernisms, including Edgard Varèse’s music and, a bit later, György Ligeti’s (Chapter 4). Furthermore, Part II embeds a discussion of musical objecthood in multidisciplinary artistic contexts. Chapter 3 emphasises one object – the piano – as a repeatedly invoked site of questioning via its relation to the bodily. I consider performers’ orientations towards pianos as material objects – in particular, orientations constituting interstitial practices suspended between musical performance and performance art. Drawing on feminist phenomenology and Marxist theory, Sara Ahmed has argued that orientations and material relations conceal history, simultaneously foregrounding some aspects of perception at the cost of others.26 Taken in this way, pianistic orientations are understood to not only necessitate physical relations but also relations to history and to relations of perception (that are themselves historically and culturally mediated). The ‘universal’ status of the piano in dominant institutions of (‘classical’) music-making also positions it readily as a particular material for exploring these relations and the values they (are perceived to) embody. Additionally, my aim is that the chapter makes a methodological contribution: through discussing the particularities of the

10  Introduction piano-as-object, I develop some terms for theorising a multiplicity of relations to objects in musical performance more generally. These bring into play the dialectics of activity and passivity, and of affirmation and negation. Chapter 4 is outwardly about contemporary music’s connection to sculpture and painting. More fundamentally, however, it explores what approaches to musical materials tell us about compositional actualisations of spatiality and temporality in music. Its frame of reference regards music and painting after modernism, although it looks back to modernist principles genealogically; it begins philosophically and art-critically from a dialogue between two influential essays, the first by Adorno (on music and painting), the second by Clement Greenberg (on modernist painting). It then traces more recent tendencies over, and extrapolates from, these initial coordinates. I contrast painterly and sculptural attitudes manifested in different compositional practices and suggest that in these cohere attitudes towards artistic materials, for instance in approaches to surfaces and texture, and towards materials’ plasticity. I argue that from these has emerged a recent sculptural-­curatorial tendency that is specific to some contemporary works: this attitude poses and explores temporalised relations between spatially situated musical objects. I suggest that this allusion to the tangibility and permanence of the sculptural connotes a particular, critical relation to the historical-material conditions in which musical materials are encountered – conditions typified by temporariness, heterogeneity, and flux. Part III theorises materials and develops discussions of musical materiality in light of ‘older’ and ‘newer’ materialisms. Foremost in the discussion are the dialectics of musical material, their relationships and questions around agency. In Chapter 5, I do this through developing a dialogue between aspects of Adorno’s work and some new materialist thinking. I use the former’s concept of musical material as a prism diffracting the latter’s theory. Correspondences and tensions are explored within and between Adorno’s materialism and contemporary materialist perspectives (with particular reference to Jane Bennett’s ‘vital materialism’).27 Three main issues are discussed. First, musical materials are considered in terms of the dialectics of activity and passivity. Second, dualisms are considered with respect to compositional practices, discussions of musical material, and their ultimate problematisation. Third, compositional agency is explored. Through a dialoguing of Adornian and other materialisms, I suggest that agency may not be solely the ‘possession’ of the composer; it is also observed in a series of diverse material and historical relations. The last chapter considers how material objects and bodies are situated within specific spaces and environments. I refer to emerging notions of sonic ecology that place objects and bodies within spaces of sculpted sound. This I link to a long-standing connection in the European art music tradition: music’s affinity with nature, be this in evocations of the pastoral or in the seemingly natural ‘immediacy’ with which both nature and musical materials seem to speak. Chapter 6 hence discusses music and nature at a contemporary moment when notions of each – and the relation between the two – are changing. I suggest that while conceptions of an organicist and unmediated nature have been challenged by recent compositional work, nature – in some transformed sense – nonetheless

Introduction  11 plays an important role in some influential trends of contemporary compositional practice. I close the book with a short Afterword that collects together and extrapolates from some of the key claims made in each chapter.

Notes 1 Adorno, Theodor W. ‘Criteria of New Music’ in Sound Figures, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 145–196 at p. 165. 2 Adorno, Theodor W. ‘Form in the New Music’, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Music Analysis 27/2–3 (2008), 201. 3 Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, ‘Introducing the New Materialisms’, in Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (ed.), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–3. 4 Coole and Frost, ‘Introducing the New Materialisms’, 6. 5 Rosi Braidotti in interview in Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012), 21. 6 Symbolic of broader trends, music is conspicuously absent from the otherwise thoughtful collection which contributes to discussions on painting, photography, video, and post-internet art: Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt (eds), Carnal Knowledge: Towards a ‘New Materialism’ Through the Arts (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013). 7 Dolphijn and van der Tuin, New Materialism, 103. 8 A franchising instantiated in part through the development of new materialist pedagogies and training – for instance, a ‘New Materialism Training School’ on the arts and curation, and ‘Research Genealogies and Material Practices’ were held at the Tate Modern in London in May 2016. 9 Ahmed contributes to contemporary materialist debates yet resists labelling her approach “new” materialism, in that it engages with this thinking yet also draws on ‘earlier feminist engagements with phenomenology that were taken during the period of the “cultural turn”’; Sara Ahmed, ‘Orientations Matter’ in Coole and Frost, New Materialisms, p. 234. Elsewhere she has criticised the ‘founding gestures’ enacted by new materialists, which constitute an insistence that ‘old’ theoretical paradigms focus on cultural and representational practices at the loss of the body or matter ‘as such’; Sara Ahmed, ‘Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding Gestures of the “New Materialism”’, European Journal of Women’s Studies 15/1 (2008), pp. 23–39. For further critical discussion, see Nikki Sullivan, ‘The Somatechnics of Perception and the Matter of the Non/Human: A Critical Response to the New Materialism’, European Journal of Women’s Studies 19/3 (2012), 299–313. 10 Georgina Born, ‘Music and the Materialization of Identities’, Journal of Material Culture, 16/4 (2011), 376–388. 11 Emily Dolan, The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 7. 12 Christoph Cox, ‘Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism’, Journal of Visual Culture, 10/2 (2011), 141–161. 13 Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York: Zone Books, 2014); Alexandra Hui, The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840–1910 (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2012); Benjamin Steege, Helmholtz and the Modern Listener (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002). 14 Marie Thompson sums up the challenge (which I explore with specific attendance to the dimension of materiality and musical material): ‘if twenty-first-century music is to be better understood, then critical attention needs to be paid to the cultural changes that have occurred through, with, and alongside the emergence of neoliberalism since the 1970s’ (Marie Thompson in David Clarke et al., ‘Defining Twentieth- and TwentyFirst-Century Music’, Twentieth-Century Music 14/3 (2018), 411–462 at p. 457.

12  Introduction 15 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Verso, 2010), 16. 16 Julian Johnson, Out of Time: Music and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 3. Johnson discusses competing and complementary ideas of modernity in the introduction to this book. 17 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (New York and London: Verso, 1991). 18 Karol Berger, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origin of Musical Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Mark Evan Bonds, Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); John Butt, Bach’s Dialogue with Modernity: Perspectives on the Passions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Daniel Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Johnson, Out of Time. 19 Robin James, Resilience & Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism (New York and London: Zero Books, 2015). 20 Douglas Mao, Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 4. 21 Mao, Solid Objects, 4. 22 Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 26–27 and 25. 23 Bauman, ‘Foreword to the 2012 Edition: Liquid Modernity Revisited’ in Liquid Modernity, ix. 24 Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 24–25. 25 Paul Griffiths, Modern Music and After, 3rd Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) and Arnold Whittall, Musical Composition in the Twentieth-Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) are good examples of surveys. Tending away from surveys and towards music’s historical punctuation by an event or moment, more recently Alastair Williams has focused on a more specific context in his Music in Germany Since 1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). After 1989: Rutherford-Johnson explores ‘modern composition and culture since 1989’ (his book’s subtitle) in his Music After the Fall (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017); Seth Brodsky develops a Lacanian psychoanalytical theoretical framing in his From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017). 26 Ahmed, ‘Orientations Matter’; Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 27 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010).

Part I

Musical bodies

1 The (dis)possession of the musical body

The performer – particularly the virtuoso performer – seems possessed: a kind of medium through which gestures flow. Lawrence Kramer emphasises an important implication of this when he suggests that ‘the performer takes possession of the music by becoming possessed by it; no one can say which is in control’.1 The performer’s body belongs – if only for the time that the music lasts – to the work, just as the performer works to make the work their own. They play the music; the music also ‘plays’ them – instructing bodily actions and (at least in its romantic incarnation) spirited expression so as to direct particular modalities of being. A dialectic unfolds, one whose terms are those of ownership and control. Importantly, it should be remembered that ownership and control are by no means categories removed from politics and history. This is foregrounded in ongoing political discourses that encompass terms such as the private, the public, and the commons. But this also applies at the level of individuals: a normative politics of personal autonomy implies control over one’s own being. As N. Katherine Hayles summarises, a liberal humanist attitude is premised on the ownership of oneself: ‘visions of self-regulating economic and political systems produced a complementary notion of the liberal self as an autonomous, self-regulating subject’.2 Yet, as Hayles and many others have argued, our bodies are no longer straightforwardly our own – and one suspects that they in fact never fully were. The humanist envisaging of bodily autonomy (self-sufficient control, ownership) is challenged by a contemporary technological imagination that intimately intertwines bodies and technologies. That our bodies are not totally our own is an argument long made by Marxist materialist thinkers who have considered the historical and material conditions through which bodies are shaped and in which they are situated. The body’s normative ‘possession’ is challenged directly in Henri Lefebvre’s passing reference to the ‘dispossession of the body’.3 This he identified as part of the experience of everyday modern life – that our bodies are not fully our own when they are caught in a web of antagonistic rhythms that arrange them socially in time and motion (one could argue that this is only intensified in bodies now criss-crossed by technological networks). One can trace seeds of this thought in the nineteenth century, in Marx’s critique of the deskilling of workers by machines under capitalism. Here the machine is no longer a tool used by the worker; the worker instead organises their actions around that of the machine. As Marx famously puts it, the human

16  Musical bodies becomes ‘an appendage of flesh on a machine of iron’.4 This is in keeping with an even more fundamental dispossession, notes Timothy Morton: in Marx’s view, the worker is alienated from their own body in that the ‘worker’s body is imagined a system of movements without a subject’.5 The body is abstracted as economic resource, as potential to create value through labour. In capitalism inheres specific divisions of labour, and thus particular arrangements of bodies; I mean this not only insofar as some bodies appear somewhere and others elsewhere (Michel Foucault famously referred to the former as the ‘art of distributions’); bodies themselves are internally arranged through specific kinds of training and action appropriate to different fields of production and consumption (Foucault: ‘the composition of forces’).6 And as capitalism adapts and transforms, so do the terms of the (self) ownership and (self) control of bodies. The body of the worker in the factory of Marx’s time differs from that of the Fordist production line (as one sees darkly yet comedically reproduced in Chaplin’s Modern Times); the machinic actions of the worker here differ from the embodiment and affective labour the worker undertakes in a service-based post-Fordist economy.7 And, looking from production to consumption, one observes recent capitalism’s historic ‘shift of emphasis from ownership to access’8 – most recently instantiated in a renter’s market, streaming, and cloud computing. This chapter considers the body’s possession and dispossession in recent music, with particular emphasis on what this means for (virtuoso) performers and listeners. Nonetheless, this follows from a longer history of imagined possession in artistry (not just in music but across the arts). For Plato, the artist’s possession by the ‘divine power of the Muse’, as Richard Shusterman helpfully summarises, problematically brought with it an ‘irrational frenzy’, the ‘loss of a strong, autonomous, rationally moderate, temperate, self-controlled, and knowing self who exemplifies the ideals of excellent character and sound mind that are combined in the ancient Greek virtue of sophrosyne’. Aristotle by contrast saw less of a chain of influence of possession (the Muse of the artist, the artist’s affecting the audience), and emphasised instead the rational artist’s influence on ‘manipulated perceivers’.9 Different again, Nietzsche celebrated the frenzy of the artist: ‘If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy.’10 But as I have begun to allude to already, what becomes acute in recent contexts and discourses of possession are issues around ownership of one’s body and actions by oneself, as mediated by economic and technological forces that refigure the terms of assumed bodily autonomy. ‘Possession’, read most literally in terms of ownership, might mean something different too, beyond our own bodies, for denizens of an age characterised by renting not owning, access to services rather than the accumulation of concrete goods, and conditions of precarity and mobility. My aim is to establish how some questions around possession and dispossession relate to the ‘problem’ of contemporary materiality, with an ear to the discussions of specifically musical material, which come later. Furthermore, it should be noted that, if this dispossession seems overtly pessimistic, some see utopian possibilities in the movement beyond self-identities based in humanist

The (dis)possession of the musical body  17 bodily autonomy. Rosi Braidotti suggests that to become posthuman is to transform ‘one’s sensorial and perceptual co-ordinates, in order to acknowledge the collective nature and outward-bound direction of what we still call the self’. It is to emphasise an ‘assemblage within a common life-space that the subject never masters nor possesses but merely inhabits, crosses, always in a community, a pack, a group or a cluster’.11 Braidotti here suggests through potentially new and generative forms of commonality one might – we might – move beyond the terms of the dialectic of possession outlined above, those of ownership and control. This is a suggestion also picked up in the next chapter.

Modernist musical bodies: medium and resistance I argue that one must situate bodies historically and discursively. I have begun to do this above, if only briefly. I will now continue to press this line of argument through suggesting that in bodily practices in modernist music and after there inhere practices derived from a broader set of material conditions; furthermore, I suggest that music contributes to – and potentially enables critical reflection on – bodies unfolding under these same conditions. The contemporary, posthuman body that I explore below, and in more detail in Chapter 2, contrasts starkly with earlier modernist practices of bodies in music. Igor Stravinsky’s infamous view of the performer provides a ready example of the ideological content of bodies’ musical ‘doing’ under another regime of musical modernism; this might be taken also as a lesson more broadly that bodies come to act as extensions that constitute apparently abstract aesthetic goals as concrete acts. Stravinsky made the demand that the performer undertake an ‘execution’ of the text – as opposed to an ‘interpretation’: a ‘strict putting into effect of an explicit will that contains nothing beyond what it specifically commands’. The performer should act as a ‘transmitter’ of a ‘pure music’, he argued, in an ‘objective’ manner, and eschew especially interpretations that draw on ‘extramusical’ ideas beyond the domain of the musical work itself.12 This is in keeping with what Frank Cox has calls the ‘High Modernist Model’ of performance practice, which is, in Tanja Orning’s summary, ‘a linear, noise free and transparent chain between conception, notation and realization’ of a work.13 In this earlier body, the performer is commanded explicitly by this compositional will. The body is ‘docile’ in the sense used by Foucault. It is material sculpted through training, such that it might through this technical improvement better execute specific actions.14 This manifests a long-standing notion of the body ‘as a passive medium or instrument awaiting the enlivening capacity of a distinctly immaterial will’, as Judith Butler puts it; in addition to the musical instrument, the body itself is taken as an instrument and put to work by a commanding force.15 The musical text, under this regime, instructs the activation of a performing body that is otherwise withdrawn from activity and presence. Furthermore, the autonomy of the subject – a Cartesian will that animates an otherwise inanimate body – is reproduced in this conception of the musical text itself, an autonomy that is mirrored in a ‘purely’ musical object that one must resist contaminating with the ‘extramusical’. Indeed, this supposed autonomy has a long history that goes back at least as

18  Musical bodies far as the beginning of the nineteenth century.16 In sum, bodies’ and instrumental objects’ sounding play out on a stage whose dynamic backdrop includes ideologies of mind–body relations and the aesthetics of autonomy. This tableau might be, at times, naturalised as unchallenged conventions that remain part of the setting. Elsewhere, however, this scene is thrown into stark relief by what compositionally stands before it, such that the performance events come to foreground the very conditions that themselves made their staging possible. One way in which this is enacted is through the assertion of bodily presence. Against their passive docility, bodies are here asserted as resistant to total manipulation; sometimes a framing for their own activity is opened. Since the late 1960s many ‘composers and artists have variously conceived of the human body as a resonant space, one in which aural structures can develop’, as Gascia Ouzounian writes.17 ­Jennie Gottschalk has written of how numerous experimental composers since 1970 have created works that ‘make the physical actions of the performer a fundamental point of tension or interest in their encounters with the thresholds of audibility, capability, and raw physicality’.18 Orning has noted similarly how the body has been a place of emphasis in contemporary music. She argues that the performance practice of complex music in particular (she cites Brian Ferneyhough, Klaus Hübler, and Iannis Xenakis) in part constitutes ‘a new emphasis on the role of the body [which …] forefronts the instrumental practice, and thus the locus of performance, the body interacting with the instrument’.19 Martin Iddon recognises the ‘insistent physicality of the live player’, the body itself, as noise, as a disturbing presence, in Ferneyhough’s Time and Motion Study No. 2 (explored in detail in the next chapter).20 If the materiality of bodies and sound has been inhibited in some music and its discourses, there are also possibilities for a return of the repressed. Julian Johnson has suggested that: The eruption of sound over grammar, the insistence on the physicality of sound [that one encounters especially in some twentieth-century music], might well be understood in Freudian terms as the breaking out of a repressive force, not just because Freud’s theoretical model was contemporary with this aesthetic shift but because, like the linguistic order of the mind, musical order was challenged by the physicality of the world that holds it in check.21 The physicality of bodies and sounds – in accordance with pervasive Cartesian thinking – has in the past been dominantly conceived of as raw materials subsequently shaped by cultural forces. What Johnson draws attention to is that this physicality has more recently become recognised as resisting the complete command that this presumed passivity would seem to imply. I say this not to ascribe an emancipatory role or Dionysian essence to the physical body – to pose it as a ‘pre-cultural’ alternative to an ordered mind, from which it promises a path of liberation. Instead, I take it, as many composers have, as a productive site for problematising cultural and aesthetic concerns that are at first sight abstractly divorced from their bodily constitution – as a site for critical insights that encompass order and disorder, constraint and excess.22

The (dis)possession of the musical body  19

Crises of materiality Key to this book’s central argument is a notion chronicled widely in cultural and critical theory: that the idea of a stable, unitary body becomes awkward in twentieth- and now twenty-first-century modernity. As a point of departure in following up this suggestion, I would like to propose that music’s problematic relationship to the body can be understood most productively by framing it in two complementary ways: first, in its historically inherited relation to language and, second, in its more urgent relation to the material conditions of recent modernity. Andrew Bowie has argued that in the late eighteenth century the relationship between music and language changed. He sees this as an important component in the formation of (musical) modernity. He writes that ‘[t]he decisive factor is that it ceases to be clear what language is. At the same time the significance and nature of music itself changes, so that it is no longer clear what music is either’.23 I suggest that a correlative gesture occurs in the later period of modernity focused on here. This principally concerns not music’s relationship to a destabilised language, but music’s relationship to a now-problematic concept of materiality. The apparent ephemerality of music, measured against solid materiality, does not seem so distinctive when the solidity of materials themselves are brought into question and no longer stand for the certainty that they once did. At the same time, developing from nineteenth-century roots in the work of Hermann von Helmholtz and others, as modernity progresses sound itself becomes increasingly considered in terms of its own materiality.24 All this is to say that the changing material conditions of society also changed the terms by which one defined music, something conceived of conventionally as both material and immaterial. Looking nearer to our present, one notes that the context of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century music-making is one in which the late modern subject holds a problematic relationship with matter. This is not to say that this is entirely new, but that this problematic becomes intensified and more visible in this recent context: this subject relies on material commodities and systems of exchange so as to locate itself, yet it also senses the alienation that comes with commodity forms; mass-production intensifies the quantity and diversity of objects and materials on offer; a post-industrial, informational society promotes a reality constituted by services for consumption and, even more recently, an ephemerality of goods and digital ‘objects’ produced. This is a context in which the head of Ikea’s sustainability unit declared a moment of ‘peak stuff’, with homes bulging with consumer items and furnishings.25 With a generation of renters not owners, the material basis of the home itself lacks the solid permanence it once did. This is at odds with, say, the material optimism that immediately followed World War II, a society of aspirational consumption and accumulation, as depicted and satirised in Richard Hamilton’s Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956). Different strains and tendencies of these developments have been captured in a network of related though nonetheless non-identical terms, including post-­Fordism, information society, and cognitive capitalism, to emphasise some social and technological trends from around the 1970s onwards. Among other things, these relate

20  Musical bodies an ongoing transformation of the character of capitalism, a ‘shift from selling products to manipulating affect, an expansion of the service economy and the technological autonomization of its functioning’.26 (In the next chapter, I argue that related concerns, such as questions of production, efficiency, and the role of information, directly inform approaches to bodies in two works by Brian Ferneyhough.) More recently, a discourse has proliferated concerning the precarity of collective (labour, economical, ecological) conditions and, indeed, the precarity of any sense of certainty (material or otherwise) underpinning a no-longer-predictable future (something explored directly in Chapter 6). In this context, it is no surprise that the ‘sustainable’ rises as a celebrated buzzword in the management of everything, ranging from environments, to businesses, to the comportment of one’s self; one should add here that this rise itself attests to the unspoken unsustainability, depletion, and degradation that otherwise underpins collective attitudes to nature, people, and ourselves, as resources to exhaust through use (in all senses of this word). My point, to put it briefly, is that the ‘maelstrom of modern life’ that Marshall Berman wrote of with respect to modernity as such (as quoted in the Introduction) has been widely recognised, in recent decades, to have developed distinct new trajectories, intensifications, and characteristic paradoxes. For our purposes, I propose that these material changes – and the changes they imply regarding how one conceives of ‘materiality’ per se – affect how one imagines music in its historically inherited (im)materiality. One could reflect on how changing socio-­ economic conditions transformed music’s character during this time, not just in ‘how it sounds’ but in both what it is (ontologically) considered to ‘be’ and in how one conceives of its (performative) activity, its ‘doing’. And if the immaterial was once held to be a crucial element of music’s ontology, there is an important relational point to make here: as notions of materiality changed, so does that which was previously deemed to be its immaterial other. These material developments and uncertainties, one might propose, could be countered through appeal to our ‘natural’, material bodies. Surely the body is something one can always return to when faced with such uncertainties over materiality in society at large? I suggest not. In fact, many composers have shown this to be the case. Their compositional practice constitutes explorations in the problematic materiality of the body; a widespread strategy is to reconceive performers’ bodies with the material world in which they are situated – most immediately, in how these bodies relate to their instruments and/or the wider sounding environment. I suggest this ‘technical’ strategy can be viewed productively as a critical or dialectical response to a period of late modernity in which the notion of the bodily materiality, as with materiality more generally, became unclear. The body can no longer be – if indeed it ever was – the subject’s saving grace, a material touchstone onto which the subject can graft stable existence. Bodies are now conceived in multiple and contradictory terms (physiological, fashionable, medical, aesthetic, etc.). ‘The body’, writes Braidotti, emerges at the center of the theoretical and political debate at exactly the time in history when there is not more single-minded certainty or consensus about what the body actually is [...] Modernity is [...] the age of simultaneous

The (dis)possession of the musical body  21 inflationary overexposure and yet absence of consensus as to the embodied, material nature of the subject.27 The fleshiness of the worker’s body, that Marx could appropriately contrast with the ‘machine of iron’, today seems more troublesome to disentangle from the machine. The machinic is correspondingly more fleshy, lifelike, or animalistic. One sees this in everything from the ‘classic’ cyborg imaginary of the late twentieth-century – revolving around autonomous robotics, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering – to more recent bioengineering and biotechnological promises such as in vitro meat and DNA-based computer storage. In fact, iron and flesh, as materials, no longer stand so easily as metonyms of machine and body, as bodily and other materials are blurred and confused – or simply fused – in contexts ranging from the high scientific to the mundanely everyday. This lack of certainty is widespread. Some commentators express this as a historical limit: ‘If, today, there can be such an intense fascination with the fate of the body, might this not be because the body no longer exists?’28 Others emphasise the body’s multiple nature – that it does not exist as such but rather lies in a multiplicity of performative utterances: ‘There is no such thing as the body, if by that we mean something unmarked by gender, race, or physical ability.’29 Extending this idea performatively: ‘A body [...] does not exist – a body is not, it does.’ 30 Paradoxically, this seems to imply that we can only (re)discover the body through its ‘doing in the world’, its extension into the world, through which it retroactively comes to be recognised as ‘being’ a body in the first place.31 This drives me towards a proposal: if it is the case that, as noted above, contemporary music often stages the body urgently, perhaps this is because we are no longer sure what the body is. Furthermore, I suggest that this uncertainty is often expressed through potentially countering acts of externalisation that emphasise bodies’ place(s) ‘out there’ in the world. We sound bodies such that we might know them.32 The body is extended through performance ­practices – instruments and other technologies augment bodies. Sometimes (as in the next chapter) bodies are embedded within electronic and digital networks, in keeping with our posthuman age; elsewhere and sometimes simultaneously (as explored in later chapters) the body is placed in relation to objects – or as another object – and located among sounding matters within the context of a wider environment. These actions in part constitute attempts to (re)discover possibilities of what bodies are. To put this even more starkly: in a time when it is unclear what constitutes the body, one may paradoxically locate the body through gestures of dislocation, whereby one poses an extended body beyond oneself – ‘out there’ in the world – that one may find it again, and determine what a body now is. Music, viewed as a technology of extension, affords this dialectical activity. And new music (though surely not only this strain of musical practice) can problematise bodies, while also, in a dialectical sense, expound what the body is (or, in the plural formulation, what bodies are). Bodies and bodily matters are challenged, proposed, reformed, reclaimed, in these musical activities of sounding.

22  Musical bodies

Problematic musical bodies This section begins to follow up this suggestion, that some music draws attention to and immanently navigates historically derived problematics of bodies and (their) materiality. An excellent initial example of how this is enacted musically is provided by the work of Aaron Cassidy, who choreographically experiments with the bodily in music. To say that this ‘enacted musically’ is to propose that this music is not a mere illustration of a point others and myself have made in the sphere of theory – it is to suggest that music sounds actions, or actions sounds, that are constitutive of a striving to navigate crises of materiality, including bodily materiality. In much of Cassidy’s output, the performer’s body is not possessed or controlled merely as docile material in service of the music. As the composer put it of his The Crutch of Memory, for unspecified solo string instrument (2004): ‘I am interested in the ability of these corporeal actions to be present as musical material in their own right and not simply as means to an aural end.’33 This interest is elaborated in his Second String Quartet (2010). In this work, all four instruments receive a kind of tablature notation that simultaneously indicates multiple parameters. This is used to ‘represent [...] and communicate […] the role of physicality as material’.34 Bars 1–4 of the violin part are presented in Figure 1.1. The score supplies a great deal of complex information to the player. Most importantly one should first note that the physical space of the strings is presented vertically on the page (in line with Figure 1.2); the area of the score nearest the top of the staff is closest to the bridge of the instrument, the bottom nearest the nut. The at first parallel and then squiggly lines that begin near the centre, which then move towards the nut, indicate the left hand’s position. Boxes including numbers and dots (. . 4. / . 3 . . / 2 … / … 1) indicate finger positions and the spacing of the fingers. These are nestled within this hand’s overall movement, which is marked by continuous (often but not always parallel) diagonal lines. The stems at the very bottom notate this hand’s rhythm. The reader should note that the original score also includes colour as a notational element. The diagonal line of variable thickness (red in the

Figure 1.1  Aaron Cassidy, Second String Quartet (2010), bars 1–4, first violin. Reproduced with permission.

The (dis)possession of the musical body  23

Figure 1.2  Aaron Cassidy, instrument notation diagram. Reproduced with permission.35

o­ riginal), attached to the box reading (DG), indicates the right hand, i.e. the bow’s position. The thickness of this line indicates bow pressure. Stems at the top of the score (also originally red) show bow rhythm. These letters in boxes (DG) indicate which strings are to be bowed. Now look to the (originally green coloured) line near the top that connects boxed numbers 5, 2, 4, 2, 5, 2, and so on: this specifies bowing position, directions, and speed via movement between numbers 1–5, each of which corresponds with a section of the bow, which is split into five equal zones (1 is at the tip, 5 is at the frog). Cassidy’s scoring is in one sense very clear: he pays close attention to details of the violinist’s movement, and determines these scrupulously, providing notational instructions for numerous particularities that comprise the performance actions. At the same time, the complexity and multiplicity of this scoring means that the reader would be forgiven for not keeping in mind on first reading all details of the score I have just outlined above. I do not state this to disparage Cassidy’s music or notational practice. In fact, quite the opposite. I think that he, and other composers, might be pointing us towards something fundamental, to the problematic intersection between musical materials and bodily materials in the present historical moment. The confusion one might feel on reading this score echoes a deeper uncertainty about the body in society and in the symbolic discourses (music included) through which one identifies it, and comes to know it. The notation that Cassidy uses foregrounds bodies in motion. He has himself noted a concern in how to move from a very digital, stratified notational space – that is, one that ­predominately notates discrete points (through numbers, letters, symbols, noteheads, etc.) – to a smooth, continuous notational space that better represents the actual topography of the instrument and the fluidity of possible motion across that space.36 Even more recently he has extended this thinking through a turn to curves over lines and delineated coordinates in abstract space; these for Cassidy reflect forces

24  Musical bodies of resistance and trajectory, effects of forces and materials (he cites the curve of the telephone lines under gravity, the curves of the stream coursing over and through various materials).37 The bodily is over-abundantly present in this score, just as it is in the work of many others, and as it is variously present to the late modern subject in the contemporary everyday. But the body, as singular, unified certainty, is far harder to locate. Indeed, the proliferation of bodily presences in contemporary music seems to be symptom and proposed remedy for this apparent loss. In works like Cassidy’s, the work becomes the staging of encounter not only with the instrument, but with one’s own performing body. Established bodily disciplines – conventional uses of the instrument, of the sound producing actions prescribed by scores – are drawn on in both rehearsal and performance, yet their insufficiency is also foregrounded. This is particular to the work in question, and in fact many different works that each renew an interest in the bodies, although each doing so differently. In a time of problematised bodies, the body seems to be rewritten in each new work. But neither the body nor the score are blank canvases. The scoring of bodies implies a certain pre-existent history of writing bodies into music. Both body and score are palimpsests of action. The work moves beyond its high modernist function as a kind of manifesto, which stated: this is what it means to create a work of music today, and to move towards tomorrow. It refers not to the creation of an autonomous art object. It instead states and explores the possibilities of bodies under specific conditions of performance. And therefore it also refers not to bodies as objects that themselves possess autonomy. One notational technique of challenging bodies as autonomous unities is found in what is sometimes termed decoupling. Cassidy’s score provides one example. Here, the performer’s body and its gestures are taken apart, then put back together again in seemingly ‘unnatural’ arrangements. (As a side point: we then must ask why these seem so unnatural compared to conventional uses of instruments – new musical ‘natures’ are the topic of discussion in Chapter 6.) ‘The body’ no longer acts singularly in realising the work. Instead, the body comes to be thought of as a system of constituent parts; the ‘work’ of the body takes places across a number of intersecting registers. As Tim Rutherford-Johnson summarises, composers such as Cassidy have built on ideas already present in works by Xenakis, Lachenmann, and ­Ferneyhough, […] to conceive of the playing of an instrument not as a combination of actions towards a single end (i.e. sounding a particular note) but as a polyphony of different moving body parts – left hand, right hand, mouth, diaphragm, and so on – that might be ‘decoupled’ from one another and composed separately.38 This focus can be organised primarily around the physical instrument or the physical body. In an early example, Giacinto Scelsi’s String Quartet No. 4 (1964), separate strings of each of the instruments are notated separately. In Xenakis’s Synaphaï for Piano and Orchestra (1969), by contrast, the pianist’s body is at the forefront of the unconventional organisation of the musical materials. This piece sees ten staves for the soloist – one for each of his or her fingers.

© 1972 by Musikverlag Hans Gerig, Köln, 1980, assigned to Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden. Reproduced with permission.

The (dis)possession of the musical body  25

Figure 1.3  Helmut Lachenmann, Pression (1969, rev. 2010), opening.

26  Musical bodies Helmut Lachenmann’s Pression (1969, revised 2010) provides a classic example of decoupling in a chamber setting, and emphasises the inseparability of instrument and body in performance (Figure 1.3). The score presents the strings of the solo cello as a space (between the nut and the tailpiece) within which the player’s two hands operate. On the first page of the score one can see the right hand, normally holding the bow and starting above the bridge, notated separately from the up-and-down line that indicates the movement of the left hand’s fingers on the strings. Lachenmann later suggested that composing means ‘building an instrument’. This characterisation of composition as building is notable in that it emphasises the concrete act of making. Furthermore, this building consists of the invention of ‘a new system of categories in every work – naturally in dialogue with those already existing – and conveying every work as a “syntactical blueprint”’.39 His statement bears a modernist spirit – each new work is a statement of reinvention – while at the same time Lachenmann stresses that this is achieved through a relation to the past. And this dialogue is confirmed in performances in which the performer and their body are informed by an instrumental training – a familiar set of bodily relations to the instrument – that are subject to revision and defamilarisation. In the late 1960s and into the 1970s one finds a proliferation of problematic – or problematised – bodies in performance. As I suggested above, it is no coincidence that explorations of physicality occurred in a context of a transformation of the character of both capitalism and the technologies that instantiate it materially: the emergence of a post-Fordist, service based, informational society; a flexibility of the terms of both society and self in what Bauman has called liquid modernity. Rescoring of musical bodies through practices such as decoupling suggest a frank materiality to music as act: the body is indisputably present in the moment of performance and, as such, it is envisaged not simply as a passive medium for the materialisation of a music that is otherwise abstract, independent of its performance.

Outward bodily inwardness Extended instrumental practices, including decoupling, make visible that bodies are extended through their instruments. That is to say, their actions unfold in relation to and through objects besides themselves. Other composers have taken another approach: listening to traces of bodies (most literally: through listening to partial bodily sounds such as the heartbeat), as such locating bodies in or as a multiplicity of effects, as composed of a material system of parts. Yet this inward turn is, paradoxically, only made possible through the augmentation of these inner elements by technologies themselves external to the body (the stethoscope, the ECG), and by turning the inward towards a publicly observable, technologically mediated outside. Heinz Holliger’s Cardiophonie (1971) for oboe and electronics (originally, three tape machines), theatricalises this. The amplified heartbeat of the instrumentalist contributes to the tempo of the performance. As Brian Ferneyhough puts it, this is one example of a work that explores ‘the relationship established

The (dis)possession of the musical body  27 between the body’s somatic condition and the mediating metric lattice [i.e. the musical scoring of time, in bars and the notation of rhythms]’.40 Holliger scores a physically and technically demanding set of actions that includes not only conventional tone production but also intense breathing and vocalisations. The tapes capture and layer the sonic results. As the musical and physical intensity rises, so does the tempo – creating a feedback loop and crescendo of action that can only end abruptly after the player flees the stage. Ceasing playing, the player runs from the effects of the bodily actions, now displaced onto and reproduced only by the tapes, a gesture of escape from bodily traces over which they no longer possess ownership or control. The soloistic presentation of the body is, to borrow Lachenmann’s phrase, ‘in dialogue with those already existing’. The inward form being presented outwardly is a mainstay of romanticist aesthetics, in which the solo chamber work suggests individual expressivity and a private interiority that flows outwardly in public concert: spirit into matter. But it is the position of the body in this movement from inward to outward that distinguishes Holliger’s work. This is encapsulated in the paradoxical figurative function of the heartbeat, in addition to its literal role in shaping the tempo. Hearing it intermixed with the sound of the oboe and the breath of the player, one is presented with the strenuous fullness of a whole body in performance; this is not just a body purposed for realising a specific end, the effortless production of the work, a body whose presence is otherwise minimised. At the same time, the force and fact of this presence is enacted only through the staging of one part of a body, indeed a specifically physiological body conceived medically as an object of knowledge. Through the speakers one hears an organ without a body – a very partial yet very modern practice of knowing bodies which, nonetheless, contribute to a specific kind of theatricalised bodily plenitude. Through the extension of bodily sound, a synecdoche of the player’s own body is displaced into a technological sphere of reproduction. Viewed this way, the player’s final leaving of the stage is not just a practical breaking of the feedback loop, but an escape from the uncanny presentation of an emerging beyond-human body over which they no longer have ownership or control. We meet our own bodies in music with a mixture of fear and fascination – or perhaps the anxiety stemming from our loss of them is aestheticised as fascination. Here one observes the apparent otherness of bodies, in an inherent activeness which seemingly emerges from within them and in their relation to the outside. Indeed, the exploration of bodies’ relation to musical material – and as musical material – has also been used to explore the embodied position of listeners; a move which implicates these bodies’ contingency. The compositional use of otoacoustic emissions (OAEs) provide another excellent example of this. OAEs are sounds produced within the ear. They are not a merely perceptual phenomena, but actually arise physically. These sounds come about ‘in the ear canal when the tympanum receives vibrations transmitted backwards through the middle ear from the cochlea’.41 They are measurable and can be recorded through the use of small microphones in the ear canal. Furthermore, OAEs can be brought about through playing specific sounds into the ear,

28  Musical bodies which creates distortion products (DPOAE).42 This principle is used as one means of testing the hearing of very young children. The existence of DPOAE is, for some composers, suggestive of a lively body that can no longer be regarded as a mere passive receiver in listening. This liveliness is itself manifested actually in the materiality of the body. ‘I like to think of our ears acting as neurophonic instruments, sounding their own tones and melodic shapes,’ Maryanne Amacher said in reference to otoacoustic emissions.43 She is known for her electronic works, in particular those created for site-specific installations. Some of these initially made up her Sound Characters (Making of the Third Ear) (1999), ‘the first full-length recording of her musical works’.44 As Gascia Ouzounian summaries, the ‘third ear’ to which the title refers is that ‘which resonates inside the skull and is distinct from the music that emanates from loudspeakers’: otoacoustic responses and psychoacoustic effects such as difference tones.45 Amacher emphasises that the music be played at reasonably high volume and physically located in a space (headphones should not be used). As Gavin Borchert writes of Amacher’s installations, commentators are often struck by the embodied experience of the music; in one typical characterisation, the composer is said to create ‘landscapes of throbbing physicality from enormously amplified environmental and electronic sounds’.46 While the activeness of the body is put forward in Amacher’s work, through the challenging of its boundaries it is also problematised. The body is firmly situated as an embodied relation to one’s environment of listening: it is not an autonomous vessel for the soul but one that resonates in both sympathy and difference to the external world. Installations’ speakers here ‘only serve to set other speakers in motion: the resonances of the architecture, and the internal speakers emanating from the ears of each listener’.47 Similarly, Amacher herself suggests that audiences discover music streaming out from their head, popping out of their ears, growing inside of them and growing out of them, meeting and converging with the tones in the room […] Tones dance in the immediate space of their body, around them like a sonic wrap, cascade inside ears, and out to space in front of their eyes, mixing and converging with the sound in the room.48 The ocoacoustic also foregrounds a technologically mediated understanding of a responsive listening body. This technological mediation enables new bodily knowledges – by which I mean not just knowledge of the body but through the body. At the same time, changing technologies mark the instability of the grounds of embodiment; a problematic materiality of both the body and the technologies and situations in which it finds itself embedded. Compositional work makes sense of, enables the sensing of, these changes. Indeed, the notion of what ‘compositional work’ involves also changes in light of this. Amacher muses: ‘Perhaps one day, composers will make scores that will include bioenhancements for hearing, ornamenting our auditory system.’49 This challenge to bodily boundaries through use of otoacoustic emissions is also explored in Jacob Kirkegaard’s Labyrinthitis (installation 2007; CD release

The (dis)possession of the musical body  29 2008). The original installation consisted of a span of 16 speakers at various heights and arranged as an ascending spiral (echoing the shape of the inner ear), hung from the domed ceiling of the Medical Museion in Copenhagen. The sonic material of the work consists of DPOAEs recorded from within the composer’s own ear. These are arranged with the aim of creating distortion effects for the listeners. Douglas Kahn suggests that this, ‘in effect, creates a situation where the audience hears him hearing and hear themselves hearing. In this way alone, Kirkegaard has countered Duchamp’s dictum, “One can look at seeing, one can’t hear hearing.”’ He continues: ‘In Labyrinthitis, sounds interact both inside and outside the confines of individual experience.’50 In both the precompositional gathering of materials (recording of DPOAEs) and their final presentation, the separateness of bodies from one another and from their environment is challenged. Indeed, the presence of the composer’s body is seemingly traced directly, although nonetheless is technologically mediated, in the sound of the work – a presence more conventionally excluded in performance. In a sense, Kirkegaard’s sounding of the body is similar to Holliger’s: both trace the sonic effects that emerge from bodies in relation to stimuli; both also enact an externalisation of inner sounding outwards. But, whereas Holliger’s theatricalises the bodily exertion and its technological mediation on stage – as to be spectated and heard as an event separate from the listener-viewer – Kirkegaard emphasises the slippery boundaries between the composer’s body, the listening body, and the object of listening. The latter echoes Amacher’s interest in ‘the range of what our ears do in response to the music we create’.51 This not only turns us towards the listener, but does so in a distinct manner of being a body as much as having one: the practice of what bodies – their hearts, their ears – do when encountering bodies in the field of music. Surveying a wide range of musical practices, one is struck by the persistent, if differently enacted, exploration of the places and functions of the material body within them. This could be in the physicality of listening, as encountered in the work of Amacher, Kirkegaard, or indeed in Pauline Oliveros’s wellknown practices of deep listening. The performing body is elsewhere staged as in its undeniable presence, yet as something not fully known in advance, as in Lachenmann, Cassidy, and Holliger’s work. This is explored – in very different ways – in practices ranging from the music theatrics of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which brush on or overstep the boundary into performance art and multidisciplinary happenings, to Alvin Lucier’s vibration of percussion via the amplification of subsonic brainwaves (in Music for Solo Performer, for enormously amplified brain waves, and percussion of 1965), to concert works such as Galina Ustvolskaya’s Piano Sonata No. 6 (1988), which ‘enact[s] pain as a compositional parameter […], the very real physical pain of the pianist, who is required to contort his or her hands awkwardly and strike the keyboard with punishing, repetitive force’.52 The pluralities of bodies’ explorations on offer attest both to the multiply discursive and material practices through which the body is known and, related to this, the perseverant attempts to come to know what it in fact is. As suggested above, and explored more fully in the next chapter, this preoccupation with the material body – often though not always

30  Musical bodies staged in relation to technologies – has at its root the ontological and phenomenological slipperiness of materiality under late modernity. It has been suggested that music is well placed among the arts to trace the effects of changing material and technological conditions on the body. As Johnson puts it, music’s longstanding connection with sensibility means that ‘its responsiveness to bodily perception makes it particularly well-tuned to register the effects of technological change on the modern sensorium’.53 What should be added here is that music, as a cultural practice and place of subject formation, also contributes to what sensible bodies are, in addition to tracing its effects. This is similar to what Anders Flørisdal has called the ‘double writing’ of music and the body, in which one encounters the inscription of the one into the other without the two ever becoming one, as the body of the other – the performer – is invited, indeed presupposed, to enact the emergence of the work through the process of interpretation and corporeal realization: the work structuring the body and the body structuring the work.54 If music writes bodily discourses, and bodies are one matter of music as a discourse, this can also be compared productively with other kinds of writing. Hayles’s reading of the cyborg provides one such point of comparison: the figure of the cyborg in theory and science fiction registered the transforming intellectual and technological conditions of twentieth-century society, but one also came to know what it was through these fictions, through engaging with and thinking about them. Similarly, the musical body marks the conditions of (a now late) modernity, while also enabling us to imagine and enact the late modern body as such, to know what it now is. It evidences gestures of losing and finding the body/ bodies, of the body’s/bodies’ degradation and reclamation. Some musical and historical particularities of this practice are explored in more detail in the next chapter.

Notes 1 Lawrence Kramer, The Thought of Music (Oakland: University of California Press: 2016), 118. 2 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Become Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 86. 3 Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 75. 4 Karl Marx cited in Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2009), 91. 5 Morton, Ecology without Nature, 88. 6 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1991). 7 See Antonio Negri, ‘Metamorphoses: Art and Immaterial Labour’, in Art & Multitude: Nine Letters on Art, followed by Metamorphoses: Art and Immaterial Labour, trans. Ed Emery (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011). 8 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 39.

The (dis)possession of the musical body  31 9 Richard Shusterman, ‘Aesthetic Experience and the Powers of Possession,’ The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 53/4 (2019), 1–23, see pp. 5–7. 10 Nietzsche cited in Shusterman, ‘Aesthetic Experience and the Powers of Possession,’ 8. 11 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 193. 12 Igor Stravinsky cited in Richard Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 129. 13 Tanja Orning, ‘The Ethics of Performance Practice in Complex Music after 1945’, in Transformations of Musical Modernism, ed. Erling E. Guldbrandsen and Julian Johnson, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 307. See also Frank Cox, ‘Notes toward a Performance Practice for Complex Music,’ in Polyphony  & Complexity: New Music and Aesthetics in the 21st Century, ed. Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Frank Cox, and Wolfram Schurig, 70–132 (Hofheim: Wolke Verlag, 2002). 14 Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 15 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 12. 16 Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Mark Evan Bonds, Absolute Music: The History of an Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 17 Gascia Ouzounian, ‘Embodied Sound: Aural Architectures and the Body’, Contemporary Music Review 25/1–2 (2006), 69. 18 Jennie Gottschalk, Experimental Music Since 1970 (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 77. 19 Orning, ‘The Ethics of Performance Practice in Complex Music after 1945’, 314. 20 Martin Iddon, ‘Siren Songs: Channels, Bodies, and Noise’, in Noise, A Non-Ference, ed. Alec Hall (New York: Qubit, 2013), 73. 21 Julian Johnson, Out of Time: Music and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 279. 22 Samuel Wilson, ‘Building an Instrument, Building an Instrumentalist: Helmut Lachenmann’s Serynade’, Contemporary Music Review 32/5 (2013), 425–436. 23 Andrew Bowie, Music, Philosophy, and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 48. 24 See Benjamin Steege, Helmholtz and the Modern Listener (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 25 The Guardian, 18 January 2016. ‘We’ve hit peak home furnishings, says Ikea boss’, www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jan/18/weve-hit-peak-home-furnishings-saysikea-boss-consumerism (accessed 29 June 2019). 26 Patricia T. Clough, ‘The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia, and Bodies’, in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 220. 27 Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 192–193. 28 Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker cited in Hayle, How We Became Posthuman, 192–193. 29 Morton, Ecology without Nature, 107. 30 Erin Manning cited in Anna Hickey-Moody and Tara Page, Arts, Pedagogy and Cultural Resistance: New Materialisms (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), 3. 31 I should add that, if one has not guessed this already, that this points to the intertwining of the ontological and the performative. 32 For this reason, I am in agreement with Nikki Sullivan, that one should be sceptical of those discourses that propose exploring or theorising body or materiality ‘as such’. In line with this position, Sullivan helpfully summarises Gayatri Spivak’s view: ‘“the body as such” is the effect of a particular perceptual schema (one that presupposes its being and is thus shaped by that presupposition) rather than something a neutral, free-floating perception can recognize as such’. Nikki Sullivan, ‘The Somatechnics of Perception and the Matter of the Non/Human: A Critical Response to the New Materialism’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 19/3 (2012), 299–313 at p. 309.

32  Musical bodies 33 Aaron Cassidy, Composer’s Website. Retrieved from http://aaroncassidy.com/music/ crutchofmemory.htm (accessed 25 July 2019). 34 Aaron Cassidy, ‘The String Quartet as Laboratory and Playground for Experimentation and Tradition (or, Opening Out/Closing In)’, Contemporary Music Review 32/4 (2013), 312. 35 Reproduced from the prefatory notes for performance from the score of Second String Quartet. Cassidy also notes here: ‘The staff indicates the full length of the string from the nut to the bridge. All information on the staff is indicated proportionately (and differences in distances between instruments have been calculated proportionately, as well). Note that the left and right hands are freed from their normal topographical locations – the right hand frequently appears “behind” the fingered pitches of the left hand.’ For the composer’s own discussion of this tablature notation, see Cassidy, ‘Constraint Schemata, Multi-axis Movement Modelling, and Unified, Multiparametric Notation for Strings and Voices’, Search: Journal for New Music and Culture 10 (2013). Retrieved from www.searchnewmusic.org/cassidy.pdf (accessed 25 July 2019). 36 Cassidy, ‘Constraint Schemata, Multi-axis Movement Modelling, and Unified, Multiparametric Notation for Strings and Voices’. 37 Aaron Cassidy, ‘Imagining a Non-Geometrical Rhythm’ [inaugural lecture at the University of Huddersfield, 25 March 2015] available at: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Va62zpUMIoE (c. 24:00). 38 Tim Rutherford-Johnson, Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 103–104. 39 Helmut Lachenmann, ‘Philosophy of Composition – Is there such a Thing?’, in Identity and Difference: Essays on Music, Language, and Time, ed. Peter Dejans (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2004), 56–57. 40 Brian Ferneyhough, ‘The Tactility of Time (Darmstadt Lecture 1988)’, Perspectives of New Music 31: 1 (1993), 22. 41 Jonathan Kirk, ‘Otoacoustic Emissions as a Compositional Tool’, Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference (2010), 316. 42 Douglas Kahn, ‘Active Hearing: Jacob Kirkegaard’s Labyrinthitis’ (2008). Retrieved from https://fonik.dk/works/labyrinthitis.html (accessed 8 July 2019); Kirk, ‘Otoacoustic Emissions as a Compositional Tool’, 316. 43 Maryanne Amacher cited in Gordon Mumma et al., ‘Cage’s Influence: A Panel Discussion’, in Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art, ed. David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001), 187. 44 Kirk, ‘Otoacoustic Emissions as a Compositional Tool’, 317. 45 Ouzounian, ‘Embodied Sound’, 70. 46 Nicolas Collins cited in Gavin Borchert, ‘American Women in Electronic Music, 1984–94’, Contemporary Music Review 16/1–2 (1997), 93. 47 Gottschalk, Experimental Music Since 1970, 129. 48 Amacher cited in Ouzounian, ‘Embodied Sound’, 74 49 Amacher in Mumma et al., ‘Cage’s Influence’, 189. 50 Kahn, ‘Active Hearing’. 51 Amacher cited in Gottschalk, Experimental Music Since 1970, 129. 52 Rutherford-Johnson, Music after the Fall, 4. On Lucier’s work, see Seth Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 187. 53 Johnson, Out of Time, 142. 54 Anders Flørisdal, ‘Radically Idiomatic Instrumental Practice in Works by Brian Ferneyhough,’ in Transformations of Musical Modernism, 297.

2 The composition of posthuman bodies

This chapter picks up on a notion proposed in Chapter 1: that musical composition is one means of (re)discovering materiality and material bodies as problematised under late modernity. I consider Brian Ferneyhough’s seminal Time and Motion Study cycle (1971–77), focusing principally on the latter two of the three works, which use electronics. This cycle is indicative of a marked shift in a number of composers’ attitudes towards instrumental practice – along with some social and economic changes discussed in Chapter 1 – in the 1970s. These works are a forebear to more recent instrumental, electronic, and digital practices that seek to investigate and defamiliarialise the relation between the human and the nonhuman in musical composition and performance. Ferneyhough has been called a ‘postmodern modernist’, in that his compositional approach bears hallmarks of a critical modernist sensibility, within developing postmodern contexts.1 ‘Complexity’ – which manifests in often labyrinthine textures and intricate notation – is a word regularly associated with his music. His influential Time and Motion Study II, for singing cellist and live electronics (1973–76), is notable in that the player and instrument are taken as a human– machine hybrid. The cellist is integrated into a network of equipment: two tape systems capture sounds and reproduce them in delayed form from the speakers; these systems are controlled by the performer’s two foot pedals and with the help of (at least two, preferably three) assistants responsible for the work’s electroacoustic elements; two contact microphones are attached to the cello and another to the throat of the cellist; a directional microphone is also placed in front of the instrumentalist; and the sounds captured are filtered not only through the tape loop but through a ring modulator. Martin Iddon’s suggestion that this work be understood productively in terms of a cyborg identity is explored further below.2 I also extend this idea, in reference to the third Time and Motion Study (1974), for 16 solo voices with percussion and electronics, to consider what a posthuman reading might mean for bodily extensions in vocal music. The present investigation is propelled by two distinct comments on bodies and their prostheses, read contrapuntally: the first that the musical instrument is a prosthetic augmentation of the human body, enabling the body to exceed itself (to sound faster, higher, louder than any voice, and to enable the individual to do so often in multiple parts simultaneously)3

34  Musical bodies and, second, that the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born.4 Accordingly, one might add that music and musical practices both extend bodies and permeate them. This is most readily apparent in the boundaries between musical instruments and instrumentalists that are complicated through acts of performance: the instrumentalists’ gestures become, through the instrument, expressive output; in a feedback relation the instrumentalist also responds to the sound produced – and to the sum sonic total fashioned by all the instrumentalists in their ensemble – such as to modify their bodily gestures and hence the sonic outcome once again. The role of sound production here points to a second bodily extension: the sound of music itself is something that extends and permeates bodies through both enveloping them and blurring boundaries such as to deny their autonomy. So here one encounters a field of interconnected bodily extensions: instrument-as-prosthesis and sound-as-prosthesis. Prostheses and bodily extensions are now everyday occurrences (at least within the Global North): nonhuman elements are routinely incorporated into human bodies in medicine; bodily presence is complicated daily by presence online; near ubiquitous access to digital and communication networks is afforded by portable technologies such as smartphones. In this chapter I explore extensions across the body-instrument-sound field. However, I turn from the contemporary moment to argue that it is productive to consider a longer history of bodily extensions; this enables us to better appreciate the emergence of more recent posthuman trends and, further, allows us to consider how these extensions engage longstanding politics and antagonistic conceptions of the body. Accordingly, I situate this discussion in relation to musical modernism, which has itself sometimes had a problematic relation to the body. I begin by considering what musical treatments of extended bodies tell us of our anxieties about and desires over bodies and their constitutive matters. I suggest that compositional practice enables an elaboration of bodies and materialities that are in a historical condition of crisis. I go on to argue that critical musical attention to prosthetic bodily extensions refer us back to what Hayles suggests is the ‘original prosthesis’, the body; one comes to know, to feel, what a body is insofar as it is prosthetic – through exploring instrumental and sonic extensions that are exterior to, though intersect with, it. Drawing on posthuman and psychoanalytic theory, I claim that, through losing one’s body in its extensions, one paradoxically discovers what bodies are, and what they might do. A contemporary posthuman condition, in which extensions raise questions about the body’s unity and autonomy, are – and have been for some time – the means by which potential answers to these questions are also explored. In this chapter my argument will show how Ferneyhough’s work might be interpreted in posthuman terms, serving to develop conclusions about the changing significance of bodies and their extensions in late twentieth-century music and culture

The composition of posthuman bodies  35 more broadly. As Johnson puts it, ‘instrumental music, by definition, embodies modernity’s contradictory relation to technology and blurs the boundary between organic human agent and its own mechanical invention’.5 If one takes music ­critically – in the Adornian sense that it embodies society’s contradictions – one might suggest that music emboldens us to see and hear the human and posthuman conditions in which its composition and performance take place. The human–­ nonhuman entanglement that takes place in the body-­instrument-sound field is pronounced in works such as Ferneyhough’s that critically stage the (‘natural’, organic, biological) body as intersecting with technologies that bear the mark of an electronically (now digitally) enmeshed society. Hayles’s suggestion that the body is the ‘original’ prosthesis is important in that it emphases a temporal, historically originary aspect of any spatial body-­instrument-sound field; the former term in this field is a learnt – yet ­naturalised  – model of what constitutes extensions and their capacities for manipulation. Hayles’s words also mark that, as with bodies, prostheses constitute sites shaped by ideological and historical conditions. As such, when one reads that one learns to ‘manipulate’ one’s body, this may lead one to ask: to what end? This initial question invites others about politics and powers of (self) control and (self) domination – questions asked in reference not only to one’s body as prosthetic but also, in the case of music, to instruments and sounds as bodily extensions. There is much at stake in bodies’ making of music – and through music, I argue, bodies are made also. I will focus on the second two of Ferneyhough’s three studies; these foreground problematics of historically, materially, and technologically changing bodies. That said, a detail from Ferneyhough’s programme note to his Study I (1971–77), for solo bass clarinet, is pertinent to these issues across the entire Time and Motion Study series: The title is intended to suggest both a desire to integrate the concept of efficiency as applied to the relationship between the performer, notation and realisation more explicitly into the fabric of the material and its organisation than is perhaps customary, and the conviction that time is most usefully conceived of, not merely in a linear but also in a vertical fashion (i.e. as a function of the mutual interaction of several distinct and layered process-types).6 Echoing Hayles, above I argued that bodies – as the original prosthesis – and their later extensions are not ideologically neutral but trace and enact the socio-­cultural priorities of the conditions that make them. The concept of efficiency is clearly of interest to Ferneyhough; so too, I suggest, is the concept’s relation to the extended body. ‘What might the term [efficiency] mean when applied to aesthetic production, reproduction and reception?’, he asked.7 Clearly the series title evokes Taylorism and its practices of scientifically managing bodies in time and motion in pursuit of maximising productivity; one might also consider the modern management of bodies in both industrial and musical contexts. A precursor is found in the organisation of the orchestra, which has been said to echo the organisational dynamics of industrial society: ‘The increasing specialization of the orchestra

36  Musical bodies (complete with its hierarchy of principal and rank-and-file players) [...] reflected a division of labour occasioned by the mechanized process of the industrial revolution.’8 Indeed, as has long been recognised, a division of labour propagates a division of the self – and the disjunction between mental and physical labour identified by Marx is intensified under logics of rationalisation. This ‘industrial’ organisation and a culture of specialisation is resisted musically in fantasies of synthesis and reversion to myth – Wagner’s concept of the G ­ esamtkunstwerk in the nineteenth century provides a notable point of reference. Below I suggest that Ferneyhough’s works elaborate on these interconnected issues in a later, post-­ industrial context of the 1970s that marks and makes its material bodies differently from this earlier time. The performer’s body not only sits in a prosthetic relation to their instrument and its sounding; I argue below that the concept of the extended body became something new in a late twentieth-century context characterised by the requirements of efficiency, a rethinking of bodies’ relations to technologies and one another, and presumptions about autonomy and ‘disembodied’ information. Crucially, I want to sketch some specific aspects of posthuman musical bodily extensions within broader cultural and historical contexts. Without this contextualisation, when exploring the posthuman one is in danger of otherwise repeating a problem Fredric Jameson identified in numerous discussions of the postmodern: a tendency to reduce postmodernity to a list of aesthetic and cultural symptoms – intertextuality, pastiche, and so on, its ‘stylistic’ features – without positioning these within the historically dominant material and cultural conditions which these ‘stylistic’ features manifest.9 To borrow a phrase from Patricia Clough, here I take the body – and its extensions – as ‘a historically specific mode of organization of material forces’.10 I argue that the ‘composition’ of the body – how it is written into music and the possibilities of what it might be at a historical moment when its constitution is in question – is negotiated where bodily concerns and extensions are expressed musically, something encountered prominently in some twentieth-century art music, such as in Ferneyhough’s Time and Motion Study cycle. Music can draw attention to the paradoxes of bodies extended through it, encompassed ‘within’ it. This goes for both bodies’ unfolding gestures and interactions, and in their historical dimension – that we have come to learn habitually that bodies in music mean and do certain things. (They also do not do certain things: in the concert music of the Western art music tradition the visibility of individual performers’ bodies is normally minimised through clothing them in uniform dress, generally all black; the audience’s bodies also recede from presence where concert hall lights are dimmed.) Twentieth-century music, especially modernist music, has a difficult relationship with the body (for instance, Stravinsky – see Chapter 1), though there is no monolithic ‘modernism’ just as there is no unitary ‘body’ in the singular. Some twentieth-century art music – and some modernist music – does, however, enable us to hear aspects of our recent historical and cultural conditions, and the body’s constitution through and extension across them. This is to suggest that posthuman composition is not a style but a condition; and one sees many reactions to some common sources of material and bodily uncertainty.

The composition of posthuman bodies  37

Music-making and body-making In their theatricality, the Time and Motion Study pieces make very clear their indebtedness to staged sounding bodies. Note however that, in the preface to the score of Study II, Ferneyhough states explicitly that this work must not be presented as music theatre, as this would strip it of ‘alternative layers of import’. ‘At the very most it might perhaps be termed an “allegorical action”.’11 Ferneyhough’s resistance to a theatrical – and, by extension, representational – i­nterpretation owes perhaps to this framework’s potential foreclosure of aesthetic autonomy (discussed below), a concept traditionally aligned with ‘pure’ instrumental music and precluded by theatre’s multimedia character. Elsewhere he writes that ‘the work can in no sense be said to be improvisational’, yet its inherent indeterminacy in execution, distributed across the cellist and assistants, means that, in Ferneyhough’s view, ‘the piece resists regulation to the status of a predictable and informationally static product’.12 It is notable that Ferneyhough cites the ‘informational’ here – and that he poses a materialising and somewhat indeterminate performance event as in some ways at odds with this ‘static product’. Drawing on Hayles’s writing, one might point out that this statement appears within a late twentieth-century context in which information became dominantly ‘viewed as pattern and not tied to a particular instantiation’, as something that ‘lost its body’.13 Autonomy from constitutive contexts – especially material, bodily contexts – is not only an apparent characteristic of information: classic claims about the autonomy of modernist artworks are also well-established. This is pronounced where the body merely becomes the means through which the ‘information’ of the work is presented (Stravinsky’s performers). As Hayles notes of information, this imagining forgets that ‘for information to exist, it must always be instantiated in a medium’.14 One might interpret Ferneyhough’s interest in the work’s existence in the indeterminate act of performance, over the work as static information, as an attentiveness to the constitutive acts through which musical ‘information’ is instantiated materially. This can be taken not only as a repudiation of the static, eternal, and ‘informational’ character of the musical work, but also of the classic image of this (modernist) musical work’s autonomy. Ferneyhough’s scores are notoriously complex.15 A number of commentators have suggested that this complexity not only presents a challenge to the performer but that this challenge defamiliarises the performer’s conventional actions. The scholar-performer Ian Pace attests from experience that the difficulty of executing Ferneyhough’s scores ‘negates more habituated patterns [of performance], and as such encourages more creative approaches on the part of the performer’.16 Iddon similarly suggests that this complexity plays a more direct role for the performer than for the audience-receiver.17 The musical instrument, as a bodily extension, a prosthetic mastered through training and self-discipline, is also rewired through extended techniques that see the instrumentalist produce sounds through a choreographed deviation from habitualised norms. These techniques are ‘extended’ in that they seemingly push at the boundaries of conventional instrumental techniques. But in doing so they arguably also defamiliarise the normative bodily

38  Musical bodies extension that is the musical instrument itself: they remind us that the instrument was a once foreign (nonhuman) object that was only later naturalised as a medium of expressivity (and thus in a sense ‘humanised’). Furthermore, the composer seems to introduce layers of friction encountered by performers in their ‘production’ of sound. Rather than working together, multiple actions occur simultaneously such as to complicate one another – as for example at the opening of Study II when the cellist realises four separate staves of notation: one for each hand, which stop and pluck the strings, and one for each foot, which utilise pedals that control the tape delays and microphones. These problematise the synthesis of the musical work that is being realised (‘work’ in a dual sense: as ‘artwork’ and as practice of production). These techniques engage a longstanding tradition of the virtuoso performer. Indeed, it has been suggested that Study II is ‘a parody of nineteenth century virtuosity’.18 The virtuoso, a figure crystallised during the nineteenth century, reproduces a certain modality of the extended body that espoused a fluent and dextrous use not only of an instrument but also of the synthesis of bodily actions that engaged it. One might here note that the ‘Study’ of the title also invokes the étude as a musical form associated closely with developing mastery over one’s instrument. The virtuoso culminates two nineteenth-century preoccupations, the hero and the individual’s relation to a transforming society during the Industrial Revolution. They are each a figure who ‘extends the boundaries of human endeavour like some aesthetic explorer’ yet that evokes ‘machine-like precision and speed’.19 In a studied mastering of time and motion, highly developed feats of technically skilled ability are ideally staged with natural fluidity. The nineteenth-century virtuosic body – ‘a body-as-organism that, by the late nineteenth century, had become the model of what a body is’20 – was here placed in a paradoxical position: the ‘organic’ body became machinic in an effort to make the mechanical appear natural. The performer is heroic in that they overcome, through struggle, their own body and its objects in order to produce and display a self-mastery that is consumed socially as musical performance. One could even suggest that a kind of master–slave dialectic plays out, where the once subservient body, thought to be working under the direction of the mind, becomes recognised as constitutive of the musical labour taking place. The posthuman virtuoso inherits these two modalities of the performing body – as human–machine hybrid and hero-performer. What is different about the posthuman virtuoso, compared with its earlier incarnation, is the composition’s staging of a subject’s intimate entanglement with its objects – that this becomes part of the compositional problematic. Indeed, Ferneyhough said, in reference to Study II, that he wished to envision the performer as ‘one of the objects which the environment is conditioning’.21 This arrangement of materials extends the sonic capacities of these intertwined materials and our presumptions about the body’s naturalness, passivity, and pliability. Ferneyhough’s original subtitle for this piece, ‘Electric Chair Music’, resonates figuratively with the Foucauldian ‘disciplining’ of the performer’s virtuoso command of the body. But here the modern’s docile body is extended. Rather than the metaphor of the electric chair, Iddon argues that a more productive interpretative point of departure

The composition of posthuman bodies  39 be found in the figure of the cyborg; he suggests that Study II puts the cyborg identity of the performer in stark relief.22 Iddon’s interpretation provides insight into how this performance of cyborg identity manifests in a specific organisation of the human-machine. This is founded in an interreliance between these elements. As Iddon writes, ‘the respective demises of both cellist and electronic other are intimately interwoven’: material produced by the cellist forms the basis of the tape loops; at the same time, this recorded material does more than simply provide traces after the fact and is central to the work the cellist performs.23 I want to extend Iddon’s cyborg reading with reference to broader posthuman theoretical and historical contexts. Or to put this another way, I now want to consider what is at stake in the exploration of this hybrid identity. In addition to the arrangement of human and nonhuman materials that Iddon observes, one could note here that this specific organisation is contingent on particular historical circumstances – that ‘the cyborg was created as a technological artifact and cultural icon in the years following World War II’24 – and that this has consequences for music’s autonomy. The musical work’s autonomy, embraced emphatically by a number of modernists after the War, came to be increasingly hard to maintain towards the end of the century. Both the autonomy of the musical work and the autonomy of the self – and as many scholars point out, the former enables the performance of the latter25 – are challenged in the composition of extended posthuman bodies. The autonomous liberal subject is problematised in cyborg identities that demand we rethink our claims that our bodies, our original prostheses, are totally our own. As Hayles notes, ‘if owning oneself was a constitutive premise for liberal humanism, the cyborg complicated that premise by its figuring of a rational subject who is always already constituted by the forces of capitalist markets’.26 Both industrial and post-industrial capitalism provides us, as producers and consumers, with specific modalities of organising our relations to and in technology. If the highly specialised arrangement of the symphony orchestra echoed the organisational dynamics of industrial society, then, in Study II, in a manner echoing the dynamics of post-industrial society, the cellist – the posthuman virtuoso who sits centre stage – is flanked by technicians (‘assistants’ in the score) who maintain and alter the technological relations that enable the cellist to be productive as a human–machine entanglement. The cyborg identity thus extends not only across the cellist and electronics, but also across these technicians; all contribute to the distributed task of arising sonic output in a study of time and motion. Through foregrounding the heterogeneity of sonic production and musical product, the autonomy of the work (again in the dual sense of the ‘musical work’ and of practices of production) and of the ‘individuals’ that produce it is again questioned. All performers know and rely on the fact that the body is a place of memory – hence one’s practice to make scales and arpeggios automatically reproducible. The problematics of embodied memory for an extended, posthuman body are explored in Study II. This is in part undertaken through, as suggested above, a defamiliarisation of habitual patterns of performance. Indeed, this defamiliarisation is doubled: first, the expressive capacities of the instrument, as prosthetic object, are reappraised; second, the performer’s body – the original prosthetic – comes to be

40  Musical bodies regarded as ‘one of the objects which the environment is conditioning’ (to quote Ferneyhough once again). Both instrument and body, as prosthetic and relationally constituted, are denied their autonomy. Autonomy is further blurred where tape loops capture sonic outcomes of bodily gestures (as a kind of memory or ‘congealing’ of the musical labour) and reproduce and intermix these with events in the present. As Sylviane Agacinski writes, ‘the material trace serves to support the subjective recollection of old experiences, but the memory is also freed from its responsibilities by externalising itself in the support materials (writing, pictures, computer data)’.27 Ferneyhough’s tape materials could easily appear on this parenthetical list. The danger here is that, in the externalisation of memory into these materials, bodily memory and the body itself are hidden; much like Hayles’s information, in these materials they lose their characteristic embodiment. At the same time, Iddon argues that the tape loops act as an ‘entropy circuit’, not so much marking memory as constituting a process through which gestural energy is both preserved and destroyed.28 I suggest that these two potential interpretations of the place of technology – as externalising memories and gestural energies – are not necessarily mutually exclusive: just as energetic gestures are contoured by habits and memories, so too can memory manifest itself gesturally. A number of examples of the latter process are found in psychoanalytic literature. The most famous is Freud’s description of the infant’s fort-da game in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Here the young child sublimates fears about the mother’s absence through hiding and finding an object, thus actively undertaking through play the gesture of her return in a symbolic form.29 Indeed, through extending the body in the artwork – in the theatricality of a mechanistic virtuoso performance and through the work’s more literal technological aspects – here the fort-da game is imitated writ large: our late modern anxiety over the dispossession of the body plays out through our losing of it into the artwork (one proclaims: ‘no one knows what the body is anymore’, fort/‘gone’), before we locate it once again (‘the bodies are enmeshed technologically’, da/‘there’). Furthermore, once we ‘discover’ this body, we realise, echoing Hayles, it was never what we thought it was (‘We have always, it turns out, been posthuman’). This, one might reasonably speculate, is a condition more broadly encountered in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music that critically explores expressions and capacities of the body; these works do not merely mark that the body and its matters are in crisis but, through aesthetic play, they enable a practiced experimentation with what bodies now are or could be, in the contexts of their technological enmeshing and social constitution. By aesthetically stating that one knows not what bodies are – a gesture of apparent denial – one begins to guard against this anxiety while simultaneously something is actively crafted. Through losing the body into a larger field of instruments, sounds, and nonhumans, it rematerialises anew.

Extended voices The voice, resonating both within and extending beyond bodies, may also act as this ‘instrument’ that sounds bodies. Some psychoanalysts have suggested that, in

The composition of posthuman bodies  41 early childhood experiences, the voice enables a bridging of primal separateness, the divide of our body and that of our mother’s, which were once one; the mother’s voice can hold and comfort the child even without direct physical contact taking place, and the child’s and the mother’s voices can envelop one another, facilitating their imagined unity.30 Later, in adult life, the sound of music, like the sound of the voice, derives from the exertions of the body, and extends itself to envelop the bodies of performer and audience alike. Furthermore, in everyday life, one now encounters recordings and telephone calls that engender new meanings and possibilities in vocal extensions of the body and bodily touch. The voice is also a ‘classical’ extension of the body that might be read retrospectively in posthuman terms where this is focused through its technological mediation. The ubiquity of electronic and (now digital) media in recent modernity is also brought into focus in Time and Motion Study III (1974), for 16 solo voices with percussion and electronics. Here the basic organisation and distribution of the musical and technological material are simple by the standards of Study II, although complexity results. As Ferneyhough explains: The singers are divided into four independent formations of unequal size, which are placed at the four corners of the performance space. Behind each group is located a loudspeaker reproducing the sounds produced by the choir placed diametrically opposite, with the result that complex patterns of mutual interference and spatial distribution are evoked.31 As Iddon has noted, Ferneyhough often poses the human and machine oppositionally in his written discourse.32 He wrote the following on Time and Motion Study III: In the electroacoustic transmission of human sound, I always saw much more – in certain regards also a bit less – than a simple extension of the limits assigned to the voice. The voices and their reproduction by mechanical channels constitute in my eyes two very different domains of expression: this work proposes to highlight aspects of their opposition.33 Rather than trying to synthesise the paradox of the oppositional (human vs machine) in his writing and the cyborgic (human–machine) in his music, it is more productive to embrace this apparent disjunction as antagonistic. One could consider Ferneyhough’s paratextual pronouncements to be the flipside of his compositional practice: both point to an underlying anxiety about the interpenetration of the human and nonhuman. To vehemently deny the opposition of biological and mechanical in language, while intersecting them in compositional practice, is comparable to the psychoanalytic subject whose voice affirms one thing and whose actions assert quite another: ‘it can’t be that, it is anything but that; the man in my dream was anyone but my father’. Freud’s essay on negation might suggest that a pronounced denial – that the human is definitively not the machine – is only another affirmed expression of some underlying neurotic cause of both one’s words and actions.34 Ferneyhough’s contradictory words and compositional

42  Musical bodies actions manifest but one expression of collective anxieties over a historical-technological situation in which the ontological status of bodies and ‘matters’ are in question more broadly. (Hence this is not to diagnose Ferneyhough as neurotic; the work publicly manifests a collective socio-historical anxiety.) Language also plays a role within both Study II and III – of specific focus is the materiality of language’s sounding and its bodily production. Consistent with his interest in reorganising ‘the molecules of meaning, which for us constitute reality’, Ferneyhough breaks down language into its constituent sounding elements through using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to organise his texts.35 In both works, though differently, one encounters an intense focus on practices of vocal production – and reproduction. This reproduction of language is first epistemological, in its rationalisation through the IPA – its asignifying sounding becomes quantified as objects of knowledge with systematisable relations. Secondly, as indicated already, the reproduction of voices technologically becomes a problematic for compositional elaboration. In Study II the cellist vocalises, but  his or her ‘voice is only ever heard in its ring-modulated form, combined with the sound from the air microphone in front of the instrument’.36 The voice is engaged as an extension of the body, both as sound and as technologically mediated expression. Joseph Auner has written of how in some popular music, ‘elaborate production featuring electronic noises, unexpected and densely layered effects, and other distancing techniques [...] provide what might be thought of as technological quotation marks around the more familiar materials’.37 Similarly, in Ferneyhough’s setting, the voice extends the body not only through sound, but through the instrument and other apparatus; the mediation of this sonic extension by ring modulation and microphone technology is marked such as to render the voice neither familiarly human nor simply that of the nonhuman. The vocal sound becomes an extension across different bodies, and also a way to explore and blur the boundaries between bodies and machines. This is developed in particular in Study III, in which Ferneyhough advanced his interest in the ‘computer-like precision’ of particular vocal techniques.38 The composer here drew on textual fragments from numerous contrasting sources on themes such as categorisation and knowledge, the myth of efficiency, and industry.39 In the final part of the piece, to quote Ferneyhough, ‘all voices participate in a confused and variegated “sound carpet”, in which individual, manically executed vocal details are drowned out by the continuous tutti roar’.40 This ‘sound carpet’ perhaps recalls the ‘oceanic’, prelinguistic state experienced by the young infant, as theorised by Freud and then Lacan, a state in which the boundaries of the self are exceeded: the world seemingly extends into the self and the self into the world. This oceanic quality could be identified in a great variety of musical works (and has been said by some psychoanalysts to be a characteristic of music in general). What is distinctly posthuman about this compositional strategy is that it engenders not only new relations of exteriority – between bodies and nonhuman objects – but also traces changing relations interior to bodies themselves. On Study III, Ferneyhough himself has referred to his ‘notating the tension of the throat muscles, position of the tongue and the shaping of the lips, etc. as ­separately-rhythmicized parametric strands’.41 Nicholas Cook suggests provocatively that it ‘is as if the

The composition of posthuman bodies  43 composer is bypassing the singer as a person and scoring directly for his or her vocal organs’.42 To put this in explicitly posthuman terms, it seems that the singers become taken as heterogeneous bundles of fleshy part-objects rather than as unified subjects. Not only is the body extended as a part within a system of technology, but the body itself comes to be thought of as a system of constituent parts. Much like the cyborg self that Donna Haraway articulated so exquisitely, one encounters the performer as an arrangement of parts that might become recomposed and repurposed. Under this logic, ‘[a]ny objects or persons can be reasonably thought of in terms of disassembly and reassembly; no “natural” architectures constrain system design’.43 This accords with what Hayles has suggested elsewhere: the ‘posthuman subject is an amalgam’.44 Indeed, here an antagonism is again explored between the (modernist) body in composition and performance: the body is scripted into a musical score – as separable parts – in composition; in performance, however, this alliance between reorganised elements is one that gives rise to unpredictable interactions and interferences of one component by its others. Rather than forging autonomous subjects and objects, one encounters an unfolding interaction of bodily and technological elements. Hayles points out that ‘we have always been posthuman’ – that is, even though cyborgs and posthumans are figurative of twentieth-century facts and fictions, subjectivity has always been enmeshed within, distributed throughout, and emerged in relation to the technological conditions of modernity.45 If music and its instruments have always been posthuman bodily extensions, these prostheses have more recently been instrumental in enabling us to posit and interrogate the body in a historical moment in which its matter is itself in question. Music’s genealogy as an art form that intersects the material and immaterial primes it as a productive site in which problematics of materiality might become subject to transformation and critique. Ferneyhough’s Time and Motion Study cycle provides but one influential response to the conditions of late twentieth-century modernity, but it is by no means the only one. Bodily presences that cannot be presumed in advance, that cannot be reduced to a stable object of reference (‘the body’), proliferate throughout an array of practices tied to an array of terms including contemporary, critical, and new music: this can be observed for instance in the examples from Maryanne Amacher, Aaron Cassidy, Heinz Holliger, Jacob Kirkegaard, or Helmut Lachenmann discussed in the previous chapter; or in work by many others, including the extended vocalities developed by Jennifer Walshe, Simon Steen-Andersen’s dramatisation of musical bodies (often invoking their mediation by audio and video technologies), or in Wolfgang Rihm’s haptic treatment of sound (explored in Chapter 4). In Ferneyhough’s case, the problematics of extended bodies have here been recast in changed body-instrument-sound fields. Writing of the cyborg, owing to machines’ entanglement with a no-longer-separable ‘human’, Haraway suggested that ‘we are they’.46 Something similar can be said of musical sounds and practices in which boundaries between bodies and their extensions have been blurred; one could state that we have come to practise ourselves, materialise ourselves, in technological-aesthetic practices such as the making of music.

44  Musical bodies As a closing gesture, it is worth taking stock of the proposals made in this chapter and the previous one, as these operate in conjunction with one another and set the stage for Parts II and III. Key to Part I is a culturally and historically emergent problematic of materiality. Embodied experience – and the experience of our own bodies as objects – provides perhaps the most intimate and immediate familiar, becoming-unfamiliar, locale of this condition. This is emphasised by recent transformations in social conditions (closely associated with post-­industrial capitalism, information society, and so on) that connote the body’s dispossession. Music – as a theatre of possession and disciplined bodily (self) control – plays out under, or simply plays out, these conditions. This is clearest in work that effectively dramatises bodies’ heteronymous constitution by and dispersion throughout techniques and technologies that cannot be reduced to the once-held myth of body-as-organic-unity. This problematisation of the body echoes a condition of materiality’s becoming problematic in general, crises that liquify the presumed solidity of ‘the material’. In a sense, music marks the loss of the body, its matters, and the concreteness of materiality as such. Yet, music can also sound an address or an (if only imagined) corrective to this loss, this dispossession. Manifesting technological and sonic extensions of the body, music places bodies out in the world such that they can be found again. The body’s loss, its heteronomy and distribution through a range of social and technological matters, means that now, conversely, we may find it again in these same materials. Our self is found in these others. Indeed, one might, in this sense, conceive of sounding itself (and, hence, sounding oneself) as a technology of self-knowing. Music tells us what the body – a problematic body – is. It not only marks materials and bodies in a state of flux, but responsively practices a contouring and experimentation with what bodies are or might soon come to be.

Notes 1 See for discussion Ross Feller, ‘Resistant Strains of Postmodernism: The Music of Helmut Lachenmann and Brian Ferneyhough,’ in Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, ed. Judy Lochhead and Joseph Auner (New York: Routledge, 2002); Lois Fitch, ‘Brian Ferneyhough, “Postmodern Modernist”’, in The Modernist Legacy: Essays on New Music, ed. Björn Heile, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009). 2 Martin Iddon, ‘On the Entropy Circuit: Brian Ferneyhough’s Time and Motion Study II’, Contemporary Music Review 25/1–2 (2006), 93–105. 3 Julian Johnson, Out of Time: Music and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 142. 4 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Become Posthuman: Virtual bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 3. 5 Johnson, Out of Time, 142. 6 Brian Ferneyhough, Programme note to Time and Motion Study I (1979), available online at www.vcisinc.com/c0810notes.pdf (accessed 2 December 2016). 7 Brian Ferneyhough cited in Iddon, ‘On the Entropy Circuit’, 95. 8 Johnson, Out of Time, 147–148. 9 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (New York and London: Verso, 1991). 10 Patricia T. Clough, ‘The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia, and Bodies’, in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 207.

The composition of posthuman bodies  45 11 A phrase he also used to describe Study III. See Brian Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, ed. James Boros and Richard Toop (Routledge: Abingdon, 1995), 93. 12 Ferneyhough Collected Writings, 108. 13 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 13 and 291. 14 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 13. 15 In a lengthy review article, Ian Pace identifies a number of trends in scholarly discourse about Ferneyhough and his music, including contrasting characterisations of this ‘complexity’. See Ian Pace, ‘Positions, Methodologies and Aesthetics in the Published Discourse about Brian Ferneyhough: A Critical Study’, Search: Journal for New Music and Culture 11 (2011). Available at www.searchnewmusic.org/pace.pdf. 16 Pace, ‘Positions, Methodologies and Aesthetics’, 42. 17 Iddon, ‘On the Entropy Circuit’, 96. 18 Pace, ‘Positions, Methodologies and Aesthetics’, 9. Here Pace draws on Peter J. Reynolds, The Music of Brian Ferneyhough (MA dissertation, University of Wales, 1983). 19 Johnson, Out of Time, 144. 20 Clough, ‘The Affective Turn’, 207. 21 Ferneyhough speaking in David Van Noortwijk, dir. 1997. Time and Motion Study II. Bliss Studios. Available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghyN-kJpcbI, at 3:02. 22 Iddon, ‘On the Entropy Circuit’, 94. 23 Iddon, ‘On the Entropy Circuit’, 100. 24 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 2. 25 Notably Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 26 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 86–87. 27 Sylviane Agacinski, Time Passing: Modernity and Nostalgia, trans. by Jody Gladding (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 89. 28 Iddon, ‘On the Enthropy Circuit’, 94. 29 Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in The Penguin Freud Reader, ed. Adam Philips. (London: Penguin Classics, 2006). 30 Alexander Stein, ‘The Sound of Memory: Music and Acoustic Origins’, American Imago 64/1 (2007): 59–85; David Bard-Schwarz, ‘Speaking of the Voice in Psychoanalysis and Music’, in Music – Psychoanalysis – Musicology, ed. Samuel Wilson (London: Routledge, 2018). For a discussion of a compositional treatment of this psychodrama, see Ellen Handler Spitz, ‘Separation-Individuation in a Cycle of Songs: George Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children’, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 42 (1987): 531–543. 31 Brian Ferneyhough, English language programme note to Time and Motion Study III (1974). Available online at www.editionpeters.com/resources/0001/stock/pdf/time_ and_motion_study_iii.pdf (accessed 7 December 2016). 32 Iddon ‘On the Entropy Circuit’, 97. 33 Brian Ferneyhough, French language programme note to Time and Motion Study III (1974). Available online at http://brahms.ircam.fr/works/work/8654/ (accessed 16 July 2016), my translation. 34 Sigmund Freud, ‘Negation’, in The Penguin Freud Reader, 96–100. 35 Ferneyhough speaking in Van Noortwijk, Time and Motion Study II, at 0:34. 36 Iddon, ‘On the Entropy Circuit’, 96–97. In Study II, Ferneyhough draws on a source text from Artaud. For a more detailed discussion of Ferneyhough’s treatment of this text, see Iddon ‘On the Entropy Circuit’, 97–103. Iddon also reflects briefly on the gendering of the voice (endnote 3). 37 Joseph Auner, ‘“Sing It to Me”: Posthuman Ventriloquism in Recent Popular Music’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 128/1 (2003), 115. 38 Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, 93. 39 Ferneyhough mentions as specific sources Duchamp, Christopher Marlowe, as well as classical philosophy (Collected Writings, 94 and 97). 40 Ferneyhough, English language programme note.

46  Musical bodies 41 Ferneyhough cited in Nicholas Cook, Beyond the Score: Music as Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 282. 42 Cook, Beyond the Score, 282. 43 Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 162. 44 Hayles, How We Become Posthuman, 3. 45 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, see 279 and 291. 46 Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 180.

Part II

Musical objects

3 Orientations and the piano-object

The piano is a site of repeated visitation in new music. This is not just to say that music has and continues to be composed for pianos in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – that much is obvious. It is rather to emphasise that the piano has recently often come to be positioned compositionally as a materially and culturally embedded object, or else an object inherited historically – a thing assertively situated. In this chapter I explore how these positionings enable diverse negotiations of relationships bound up in the piano’s concomitant histories, cultures, and issues of subjectivity. As material sedimenting culture, the piano is an object provoking an array of reactions. In some cases the piano is marked out as distinctly ‘historical’: as the remnant of an old world, an object temporally disjunct from but still persisting – at least materially – in the worldly present. In others, the piano is taken to embody supposedly universal values, values which are sometimes undercut ironically through its particular positioning. Others like Nam June Paik – who proclaimed that ‘the piano is a taboo. It needs to be destroyed’1 – push us towards negation, posing the piano and its cultures as something to be overcome, or a catalyst for change. Despite their differences, what is clear in these reactions is that through adopting relations with pianos one might also posit relations to a history not only of music but of music as a concretisation of a broader society. This chapter therefore explores how composers and artists orient performers and listeners towards pianos – and what is at stake in these orientations. The latter aspect is important: to conceive of relationships with musical objects (including the piano as an object) as a ‘purely physical’, as somehow abstracted away from culture and history, is to miss something crucial. This is why I use the term orientation. I borrow this from Sara Ahmed. Her discussion of orientations provides a useful starting point for these critical reflections, because she argues that in our approaches to objects some aspects of perception and history are foregrounded, whilst others are obscured. She also demonstrates how this relation is embodied phenomenologically, enabling us to continue a line of materialist thinking about the body developed in Chapters 1 and 2. For our purposes, of discussing the piano as material and cultural object (one aspect cannot be isolated from the other), Ahmed also helpfully positions her writings on orientations theoretically: while in many ways receptive to recent developments in materialist theory she resists labelling her approach ‘new’ materialism, in that it draws on ‘earlier

50  Musical objects feminist engagements with phenomenology that were taken during the period of the “cultural turn”’.2 She also demonstrates a Marxian sensitivity to the concealed history of objects, and their contexts in circuits of production, circulation, and consumption. Once this notion of orientation is established, I then move on to discuss what this means for performers with respect to the piano specifically, exploring a number of examples that straddle the lines between music, performance art, and sculpture. I focus on these interstitial spaces, in which relations between pianos and performers have been reoriented in ways that enable critical reflection on the historically and culturally conventional. These are spaces of practice connected with a music- or art-historical time frame slightly extended beyond that of the other chapters. As noted below, it was from the 1960s onwards that some widespread tendencies in performance art(s) transversed previously assumed boundaries between artistic disciplines. For this reason, in addition to late t­wentieth-century and contemporary works, I will discuss some 1960s Fluxus experimentation – in particular, some event-scores, prospective performances which are ‘notated’ as written instructions. From the standpoint of exploring orientations, event-scores are a helpful compositional form to consider because, where objects – such as pianos – are mentioned, they for the most part directly instruct a relationship between the performer and the object (generally in a form of action). Alternatively, where they do not instruct this relationship straightforwardly, they take the relationship between subject and their object or their action as something to be determined by the performer (event-scores’ often scant detail is famously open to different interpretations in performance); as a consequence of the open and indeterminate character of such works, it is the relation between subject and object – the subject’s action and the object’s inaction, or vice versa – that is the thing that itself captures attention.3 It can also be said that one finds that the eventscores established in the 1960s continue to shape later practices towards objects (some mentioned below), including pianos as objects. Hence, the implications of findings regarding these experimentalist works needn’t be limited only to the concerns of that decade. To develop this discussion of pianos as objects, I first turn to Ahmed’s thoughts about orientations. I establish some questions bound up with orientations, before considering how this plays out with pianos specifically. Key to these orientations is their multiple character, something implying a multiplicity of a subjecthood bound up with its object(s). I reflect on the socio-historical context in which ­performer-pianistic subjecthood is embedded. Through considering a range of musical examples in the second half of the chapter, I sketch some implications of these subject–object dialectics, centring on issues of activity and passivity, and affirmation and negation. In so doing, I offer a heuristic for navigating the dialectics of musical orientations and objecthood more generally.

Orientations, bodies, and objects On writing philosophy – and writing about philosophy – Ahmed focuses on a commonplace object of philosophy, a piece of furniture: the table. It is close to

Orientations and the piano-object  51 hand to the philosopher, laying hands, paper, and ink (now laptops) upon it in their working. Seeing it before them as they write, it is then little surprise that it is an example of reference in numerous philosophers’ reflections on perception – as a particular object that may be acknowledged in more general lessons about what it is to perceive objects. Yet, at the same time, the table often constitutes something assumed and unacknowledged – it is that on which the philosopher writes, that which enables the easy possibility of writing. As an object enabling the philosopher’s efforts – as well as mundane non-philosophical activities – it materialises unseen, normative assumptions. Ahmed points out that tables and their uses suggest assumptions about, for example, the gendering of space – compare the (historically gendered masculine) philosopher’s writing desk and the domestic kitchen table (historically gendered feminine); these also relate to differentiated forms of labour – the philosopher’s philosophising at the table, versus the maintenance of the space in housework.4 A crucial piece of furniture in musical thought and practice, the piano shares much with the philosopher’s table. For many composers it was – for many it still is – an assumed background on which one writes. One acknowledges it while one is, at the same time, indifferent to its ubiquity within institutional iterations of the Western art music tradition: formally in concert halls and conservatoires, informally in the living rooms of bourgeois homes. As with the table, the piano materialises orientations towards the world. This it does in the sense of bodily orientations towards an object: there are certain ways in which one, conventionally, does or does not interact physically with the piano when working as a performer or composer. Yet the piano also orients us, with our bodies – with us as bodies – within situations unfolding under specific social and institutional conditions. This is all to say that the orientations that pianos provide us are not purely physical but provide modes of physicality that manifest ‘abstract’ cultures and sedimented histories. At the same time, of course, the piano is not determinate of our orientation. A dialectic is at work whereby pianos are ready to the hands of composers and performers given a dominant aesthetic regime orientated around certain ideas of music and music-making, which requires pianos to be ready to hand. Or as Ahmed puts it, ‘orientations affect what is near or proximate to the body, those objects that we do things with’.5 Indeed, just as the table might afford the philosopher’s writing, pianos enable certain kinds of musical working and making – and this is built into its construction and uses one learns of it. As Ahmed puts it, ‘objects not only are shaped by work, but they also take the shape of the work they do’.6 Despite contributing, as background, to musical orientations, some have nonetheless foregrounded bodies’ relations to pianos, their writing at pianos – as Ahmed does with the bodily act of writing upon the table – and, related to this, their physicality in performance. As Julian Johnson puts it, ‘listening to [music such as Ravel’s], let alone playing it, one has to wonder at what these composers do to the piano, what they get the piano (and thus the pianist’s body) to do’.7 This reflection on what is done at or with the piano is rendered more clearly where the piano phenomenologically comes into focus in the foreground of experience – where it is no longer just that background upon which musical experience comes

52  Musical objects (in)to form. This follows a broadly Husserlian gesture; Ahmed suggests that for Husserl, phenomenology ‘means apprehending the object as if it were unfamiliar’.8 Where the piano-object is cast unfamiliarly, one might critically reflect on experiences of it not only limited to these occasions, but also on its more ‘­conventional’ usages. Orientations foreground aspects of worlds and bodies through the backgrounding of others. Ahmed reads this through interlacing Marxist theory and phenomenology. The commodity-form is paradigmatic of the relevance of the former influence: in this form is concealed a history of production that is forgotten at the moment of consumption; the object’s form presents it as independent of the historically contingent material relations that determine it. Drawing on Husserl and others, Ahmed complements this idea with phenomenological insights into the familiarity (and unfamiliarity) of specific aspects of one’s world and the presumptions one has about it: these are already formed in some ways and not others. This world ‘has already taken certain shapes, which are the very form of what is “more and less” familiar’.9 Ahmed suggests that Marxist theory provides an account of the historical dimension of the object, just as phenomenology ‘attend[s] to the background’ of the object temporally, our perception of and orientation towards the object in time.10 Furthermore, Ahmed develops a feminist reading of these ideas, suggesting a gendered dimension to the recognition of and relation towards objects and bodies. Not only is the labour behind the object often obscured (as in the commodity-form) but specific kinds of labour are conventionally recognised (or not) to be labour in the first place: housework, childrearing, and so on is often bracketed out of the category ‘labour’ such as to provide spaces and times for (masculinely defined) work to happen. The acknowledged work of the (historically male) philosopher at their writing desk not only placed the domestic home in the background, but depended in part on the (feminine-gendered) housework that kept this desk clear.11 Ahmed’s argument about the table in philosophy has a critical edge. She uses the term ‘“paperless” philosophy’ to denote how a widespread effacement of embodiment and materiality in philosophy echoes a devaluing of a conventionally ‘feminised’ yet particularised body, under the transcendence of a universalized ‘masculine’ rationality. Furthermore, the history of philosophical thought – ­conceived as a legacy of ‘abstract’ ideas – obscures the often-feminised labour which maintained the material conditions in which this thinking could take place. As she puts it: Feminist philosophers have shown us how the masculinity of philosophy is evidenced in the disappearance of the subject under the sign of the universal. This masculinity might also be evident in the disappearance of the materiality of objects, the bracketing of the materials out of which, as well as upon which, philosophy writes itself, as a way of apprehending the world […] We could call this the fantasy of a ‘paperless’ philosophy.12 De-embodiment is understood here as a masculinising gesture. It is also one that, in turning from materials, uncritically does away with their immanent historicity;

Orientations and the piano-object  53 this gesture involves ‘the disappearance of political economy, the “materials” of philosophy’ and the labour that engages these materials.13 ‘Paperless’ composition, like a paperless philosophy, similarly de-emphasises the labour and materiality of compositional practice. Music, in that view, effaces its own material conditions of production – an idea that reinforces historically influential notions of music as transcendent of the brute, material world. By contrast, to foreground the materiality of music – both through particular compositional and interpretative practices, as oriented around the piano-object – is to highlight opportunities in which one might place music within contexts of sedimented history, congealed labour, and political economies (potentialities I might only begin to realise in this chapter). In this view, histories and (gendered) embodied relations are sedimented in objects and our orientations toward them. One sees this clearly in the case of the piano – and below I will suggest that in various avenues of compositional and artistic practice the piano has repeatedly served as a site for the exploration of entangled worlds of musical histories and embodiments. This is to say that my discussion of the piano as a material object cannot be understood without reference to the politics and practices that are historically inscribed into this object. Consistent with this, Kevin Dawe has written of musical instruments more generally as embodiments of culturally based belief and value systems, an artistic and scientific legacy, a part of the political economy attuned by, or the outcome of, a range of associated ideas, concepts and practical skills: they are one way in which cultural and social identity (a sense of self in relation to others, making sense of one’s place in the order of things) is constructed and maintained.14 With this in mind, one should note that the history of the piano is both private and public, pertaining to particular modalities of domestic and public life. Richard Leppert has demonstrated how, in the nineteenth century, ‘the piano became the ubiquitous and unrivalled instrument of the bourgeois home’.15 Leppert makes clear the gendered dimension of this: ‘the piano served as an object to be looked at beyond being heard or played upon’, acting as ‘the simulacrum of family, wife, and mother’. The piano provided (musical and social) harmony, family cohesion. It was furthermore an object that fulfilled females’ educative and domestic functions within the bourgeois household.16 In its public life, the piano had a central place in concert music: from both chamber music and lieder accompaniments to the virtuosic grandeur of the concerto with orchestra.17 This double life of the piano’s socialities, as domestically enclosed and openly shared, helped it to mediate the public–private gap; before the advent of recording, the popularity and wide availability of piano reductions enabled orchestral works and opera overtures to be brought into one’s own home. It was and remains to be a common – and defining – fixture of a concert hall. One should consider a banal but important point connected to this: unlike almost all other instruments, the performer does not carry it onstage before playing it.

54  Musical objects Instead, it is approached from the back or the side of the venue. In this sense, the object precedes and outlasts the physical presence of the performer. It is the familiar furniture of the stage onto which they walk (even when tucked away, sleeping under its cover, to the side of the stage). This is all to say that in many ways the piano is assumed as both materially and symbolically present in spaces and traditions of classical and romantic music-making, both in bourgeois homes (of the 1960s, at least) and in concert life (still today). It should go without saying that these assumptions – because they are assumptions – normally go unnoticed; it is only through a reorientation that one comes to recognise their normative presence. The domestic piano, a gendered object acting as simulacrum, becomes only more passive when being seen but not heard: yet this simultaneously reconfirms its familiar objecthood. In the nineteenth century, ‘in the homes of the rich, the grand piano commonly functioned as high-caste furniture […] Indeed, such pianos didn’t need to be played in order to justify the expense of their purchase’.18 (Later, recordings confirmed the unheard piano’s status as furniture; Roland Barthes noted in 1977 that ‘the gramophone record takes the place of the piano’ in the modern home.19) The silent piano can be suggestive nonetheless of a tradition of music-making. Luciano Berio comments that in this manner the instrument becomes a fetish, a sort of ‘still life,’ a motionless object, a nostalgic reminder of a hypothetical paradise lost. Even if locked away, unplayed, in a room, the image of a musical instrument – a powerful Steinway or a priceless Stradivarius – can take a symbolic absolute value, substituting for music itself.20 This silencing is subject to critique in diverse contexts; ‘[t]his fetish became, among other things, the target of John Cage’s irony and provocative suggestions’, noted Berio.21 In David Tudor’s initial rendering of 4’33” the silent piano is brought forward from the phenomenological background. This is to read Cage’s work not simply as occasioning awareness of a wider sonic environment (as is usually the case); it is also to take it as a critical orientation – one possible r­eorientation – to an object that is historically, symbolically presumed, an object that is conventionally ‘part of the furniture’. Here I am suggesting that it is an important fact that it is the piano that is the specific instrumental object that Cage makes use of in facilitating our hearing of the sonic environment beyond the instrument; this object carries with it a particular set of historical and social inscriptions, that in this case resonate silently. Indeed, through actively staging the piano’s being seen but not heard, he in some sense queers and reclaims its normatively feminised passivity. Below, I further develop these themes of passivity and activity vis-à-vis the dialectics of the piano-object. To consider orientations is to think not only about objects, but also bodies’ relations to them. Ahmed writes that, ‘orientations are how the world acquires a certain shape through contact between bodies that are not in a relation of exteriority’.22 The body takes shape in its orientation to a world of objects; this world is, conversely, experienced through this embodied relation. This is to also suggest

Orientations and the piano-object  55 that there is feedback between the body and its world. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s description of his orientation towards his writing desk clarifies the phenomenological aspect of this embodied relation: my [dynamically conceived] body appears to me as an attitude directed towards a certain existing or possible task. And indeed its spatiality is not, like that of external objects or like that of ‘spatial sensations’, a spatiality of position, but a spatiality of situation. If I stand in front of my desk and lean on it with both hands, only hands are stressed and the whole of my body trails behind them like the tail of a comet. It is not that I am unaware of the whereabouts of my shoulders or back, but these are simply swallowed up in the position of my hands, and my whole posture can be read so to speak in the pressure they exert on the table.23 Merleau-Ponty observes that, by turning – both figuratively and literally – towards his desk it becomes regarded not as an object that is wholly external to the body but as one through which the body is itself constituted phenomenologically. A  ‘spatiality of situation’ coheres in a specific bodily engagement with an object on particular terms. In this moment, this perceiving body is itself not identical with the organic body; nonetheless, the foregroundedness of the hands as the threshold of this relation are grounded in physicality. The piano, similarly, provides a spatiality of situation. The harmonic space of the keyboard is perhaps the most conventionally appreciated: this provides a field for potential actions that the trained pianist orients their body through. As Ahmed notes, both ‘Husserl and Merleau-Ponty […] describe bodily horizons as “sedimented histories”’, concluding that what appears natural and spontaneous about the body’s orientations takes time.24 (One should note the uncanny link with Theodor W. Adorno’s suggestion that musical material embodies history as sediment, and that this material includes both the piano and pianism. This is explored in Chapter 5.) Furthermore, bodies ‘acquire certain tendencies through proximity to objects whose nearness we have already inherited’, meaning that ‘the materialization of subjects is hence inseparable from objects, which circulate as things to do things with’.25 The ubiquity of the piano in conservatoire settings and music education institutions attests to its centrality not only to pianists but as emblematic of a view to art music’s foundational construction and interpretation. The keyboard provides historically contingent – if different – spatialities of situation for composers and theorists as well as performers. Importantly, as argued in Chapter 1, the notion of a singular body has become increasingly hard to maintain. Even if one focuses on the ‘the performer’ as a figure, and their bodily relation to the instrument, one quickly recognises that multiple kinds of bodily orientations take place in relation to the piano-object where these bodies are subject to different kinds of training and discipline. ­Musicologists have been at pains to problematise the singularity of ‘the listener’, pointing out that this is a figure that is conventionally an ideal positioned hypothetically rather than actually – one who has been conceived in different ways historically in various specifiable contexts. Postmodernists in particular sought

56  Musical objects also to pluralise this figure: there is not one modality of hearing, and musical meaning instead emerges in various readings, in the reading acts of many readers. Yet, as Mine Doğantan-Dack argues, a similar gesture of problematising the singular is sometimes lacking in discussions of ‘the performer’ of performance studies. As she puts it: The general tendency, in performance studies, to speak of ‘the performer’ in the abstract obscures the fact that in reality different kinds of musical instruments involve different expressive means, engender different phenomenologies of performance making and generate different kinds of performer identities.26 The piano suggests a particular set of phenomenological relations codified in the layout of its keyboard, the use of its pedals – even expressed in the descent of the pianist’s hand before striking the key – and the ‘weight’ encountered upon depressing it. Again, these are not determined by affordances of the piano-object alone: also key to understanding the piano are differentiated orientations towards this apparently singular and inert object. In a moment I consider multiple orientations in terms of the division of artistic labour: whereas some performance work that uses pianos – as normatively – requires a pianist, others require ‘performers’, trained in music or not, that are not specifically identified as (or who self-identify as) ‘musicians’. In the latter case, our orientation towards the piano is often as an object faced among other objects – its objecthood is foregrounded and underlined – rather than it being an object through which the pianist expresses something connected with although nonetheless other to the piano-object (i.e. an ‘abstract’ musical idea). Ahmed suggests that there is a ‘political economy of attention’, of what is seen, and of the presumed background on which the seen is foregrounded. This has a bodily dimension: ‘The world takes shape by presuming certain bodies as given.’27 The piano and pianism – and corresponding attentions of what is seen and what is heard – become where our presumptions about the givenness of pianos-objects and bodies-subjects become phenomenologically problematised. I suggest below that this can be brought into focus though considering various performance practices manifesting different orientations towards the piano as well as the things this object sediments: bodily, historically, and culturally. By considering orientations towards pianos in interstitial spaces between musical performance and ‘performance art’ one might better render the phenomenological background visible. This recalls the Husserlian phenomenological gesture of regarding the familiar as if unfamiliar, with the additional caveat that perception is to be understood as historically and materially situated.

Different orientations The piano – as an object – cannot be conceived of separately to the history of its operation. In this view, piano pedagogy represents, as I have argued elsewhere,

Orientations and the piano-object  57 an ‘institutionalisation of the skills and capacities of operating the instrument’.28 Using Ahmed’s language, one could say that the ‘correct’ manner of playing concretises a normative orientation towards the object: a specific kind of bodily engagement with and phenomenological attention towards it. One might assume ‘the performer’ (singular) to adopt a normative orientation rooted in their pianistic training. But as Doğantan-Dack reminds us, a pluralised notion of performers might enable us to take a fuller account of orientations towards the piano-­object; this is a crucial recognition if one is to account in particular for interstitial and cross-disciplinary artistic encounters with pianos which emphatically do not assume pianistic training on the part of the performer, but which, at the same time, generate meaning through the specific choice of the piano as the object encountered in performance. For instance, one might ask what orientations towards and reorientations around piano-objects occur in a range of performance practices in the 1960s and 1970s, practices which blur boundaries of artistic disciplines and specialised forms of performance training. In advance of these cross-disciplinary performance practices, Allan Kaprow famously stated: Young artists of today need no longer say, ‘I am a painter’, or ‘a poet’ or ‘a dancer.’ They are simply ‘artists.’ All of life will be open to them. They will discover out of ordinary things the meaning of ordinariness. They will not try to make them extraordinary but will only state their real meaning. But out of nothing they will devise the extraordinary and then maybe nothingness as well. People will be delighted or horrified, critics will be confused or amused, but these, I am certain, will be the alchemies of the 1960s.29 Reflecting on these developments, Julia Robinson notes how in a widespread artistic turn during the beginning of the 1960s, ‘[t]he conventional language of modern art – even basic terms such as “painting,” “sculpture,” and “­composition” – was rendered obsolete by the range of new approaches’.30 This can be seen for instance in the event-scores (written instructions interpreted in performance actions) associated with the Fluxus movement. ‘Made by artists active in New  York’s interdisciplinary neo-avant-garde, these pieces came out of an expanded sense of “music” and an expanded sense of medium.’31 Writing of text scores in general, Seth Kim-Cohen notes that ‘unlike the codified, institutional context of traditional composed music, [these scores] do not (or at least in the early 1960s did not) come loaded with habituation and ramification’. These scores do (did) not assume a specific training, with instructions to be performed ‘according to a predetermined skill set’.32 For Kaprow and his contemporaries, this new sensibility of artistic selfhood and media, subject and object, channeled an emancipatory spirit. What is seldom commented upon, however, is that one could, alternatively, read this moment contrarily, in light of more recent developments. To do so is effectively to remark upon the then contemporary transition between solid and liquid modern subjectivities (as discussed in the Introduction). Key to this reading is a recognition that the liquid modern self is plural and itinerant. With that in sight, one begins

58  Musical objects to recognise that the transversive mobility once celebrated in the image of 1960s experimentalism is now, in many ways, an inescapable reality for artists and citizens alike, derived from liquid modernity’s characteristic fluidity and precarity. But whereas mobility once promised emancipation from the constraining concreteness of social institutions and art-historical conventions connoting solidity, the dominant logic of these institutions and conventions is now itself one of fluidity. Today, to be mobile and adaptive in the aesthetic sphere is not necessarily to subvert or escape the dominant social logic – more often than not, it is precisely to follow it. Connected with this, the new historical situation in which all are simply ‘artists’ is not only limited to cultural production. It also plays out in the domain of consumption. Within the musical world, the flattening of the ‘artist’ figure is ironically mobilised most often not in art music, but in the commercial sphere, where instrumentalists, singers, composers, producers, and so on are all referred to as ‘artists’ (think of music steaming services listings), without distinguishing forms of technical practice. But in today’s world that is clearly not a fact derived from a critical impulse to upset the constraints of established disciplines. Nonetheless, with the blurring of the figures of dancer, musician, actor, and others there also comes a disinheritance of historically long-standing orientations between performer-subjects and their objects, enabling for a recognition of and in the object of those features commonly bracketed out of phenomenological attention: bodies’ relations to it, its associated social content, and so on. And these reorientations might not only draw attention to objects such as pianos as material objects; if subjects concretise through orientations towards their objects then, similarly, this enables renegotiations of subjecthood vis-à-vis their objects.33 To simplify the implications of this in binary form: the trained pianist, through a familiar set of bodily relations, works through the instrument such that this action blurs the phenomenological boundaries between pianist and piano. ­Merleau-Ponty would say it is incorporated into their ‘body-schema’, just as the blind man’s stick has ‘ceased to be an object for him’, becoming an object through which he experiences his world.34 This is an example of an orientation involving a relationship of ‘non-externality’. With the non-pianistic performer who faces the piano, however, there is a sense of the object’s externality. As Michael Nyman puts it in his classic Experimental Music, ‘the piano can be treated as an object [my emphasis] with surfaces to be hit or painted, have things thrown at, left on, hidden in, moved about or fed with hay’.35 When treated ‘as an (external) object’ by the performer-subject, it is markedly separate from them. Through breaking the smoothness of a conventional orientation – pianism – it becomes noticed, phenomenologically observable. However, it should be remembered that this binarisation of either total (conventional) mastery of the non-externalised instrument in pianism or its positioning as an ‘external’ worldly object is a simplification that does not acknowledge possibilities of movements between these two positions. Indeed, in some performances there is an oscillation between the two poles of this dialectic – between the playing of the piano and the playing with it, as a piano-object – with the performer-subject shifting back and forth between them. This is also to say that orientations can be renegotiated within the span of a single performance.

Orientations and the piano-object  59 To develop the implications of these ideas, below I consider a number of musical and artistic examples in those fuzzy spaces where traces or memories of historically conventional pianistic orientations blur with the staging of the piano in its objecthood. In order to navigate these spaces, I tentatively adopt a heuristic spun between two axes of dialectic. I use these axes to describe possibilities of encounter – and the play of externality and non-externality – between the interconnected performances of bodies and objects. These dialectical considerations develop out of terms used already: those of performer and piano, of subject and object. These terms, and their pairing, suggest that each of the first terms are entangled with each of the latter – indeed, this is a characteristic emphasised by the notion of orientation. In that way, one’s emergence (the subject’s) must be understood in its interrelation to the other (the object’s – and vice versa). Yet despite this interconnectedness, this language of subject and object also enables a critical moment of pause, in which one might consider this duality of terms in parallel (the status of the subject, the status of the object): these orientations can be staged in either an active or passive relation, whereby the subject either steps forward and asserts something of the object, or else they step back so as to reflect on the object as object; turning to the object, one notes its status either as stated presence or, alternatively, that its presence is denied or resisted. These are the two dialectical axes I mentioned above: one axis foregrounds the activity or passivity on the part of the subject; the other foregrounds the presence or negation of the object. Hence, after (an if only imagined) separation, the recombination of these alternatives (passive/active, affirmation/negation) is suggestive of something approaching a schema of four combinatorial possibilities, one that might be helpful when navigating a diverse array of orientations towards pianos. The first possibility brings focus to the passive through the continued presence of the piano-object, often doing so through an ironic noticing of the piano’s going unnoticed under normative conditions. This passively stages the affirmed presence of the piano-object (we can cautiously refer to this as ‘passive affirmation’). The second reveres or celebrates the piano in its material and historical objecthood, often in spectacle. It actively affirms the presence of the piano-object (‘active affirmation’). The third possibility involves a stepping back, an acknowledging of the piano-object’s subjection to forces besides the performing subject – the materiality of decay and entropy (‘passive negation’). Logically following this combination of possibilities, the fourth and final tendency is associated with destructive actions geared towards the non-presence of the piano-object: acts of negation that seek to embody the disruption of that which the piano is understood to stand for synecdochally – the sensibilities of Western art music and bourgeois domesticity being prime candidates (let us refer to this as ‘active negation’). Some crucial caveats about this (yes, overdetermined) typology must be acknowledged right away. Foremost: operating within the sphere of aesthetic practices, these orientations are always staged in some form. The passive is thus never truly passive – it is always an active presentation that brings into focus the passive orientation that one might take towards the piano-object more generally. It is a remembering of the fact of our everyday forgetting of the object, of its

60  Musical objects presence and of the social and symbolic significance of this presence. Furthermore, as Ahmed’s work on orientations reminds us, the flipside of this is that activity with an object also involves a forgetting (the desk is usable only through its previous tidying, which is out of mind during our time of its use; it exists only through having been brought into being through labour that is forgotten in the present moment); as such, just as a supposedly passive orientation still constitutes a performance activity, the active use of the object also implies passivity towards aspects of it and its history. This is again to insist on the dialectical character of orientations, rather than suggesting that activity and passivity, and affirmation and negation, comprise wholly independent possibilities. Last – and this point relates to the potential generalisability of the schema outlined above – I caution that while I suggest that the dialectics of activity and passivity, and affirmation and negation, might be useful in discussing musical objects beyond only pianos, it is also important to stress that I have formulated these terms (active/passive, affirmation/negation) in relation to the piano specifically. This is not a universally applicable framework that can be applied unthinkingly to some other, supposedly autonomous, object of study. The framework itself, in both its specificity and any relative generalisability, constitutes a dialectical response that emerges in relation to the object of study – here the piano.36 These subtleties can be better appreciated through considering some examples.

Furniture and fetish (in passive affirmation) Some orientations foreground the normative affirmation of the piano-object. That is, they emphasise the piano’s symbolic and material centrality to the institutions of Western art music, and the values cohered within it. This affirmation might be rendered passively or actively: the relation between subject and object is either posed as, paradoxically, one of non-contact and indifference, or the object is thrust forward such as to manifest a visible and audible spectacle of its normative indistinctness. And as just noted with respect to the dialectical character of these orientations, this difference between passivity and activity needn’t be seen as one of mutually exclusive alternatives; below we see passive and active aspects mingling within the same work. Further, it should be remembered that dialectics of orientation can turn us quickly from one possibility to its other, where for instance ironic passivity reminds us of activity. One can find many examples of the passively affirmative attitude in the eventscores of the Fluxus artists, as for example in George Brecht’s Piano Piece and Tomas Schmit’s Piano Piece No. 1, both from 1962. In Brecht and Schmit’s pieces one sees/hears the ironic presentation of the silent piano as passive, fetish object. Brecht’s Piano Piece states simply: ‘a vase on (to) a piano’. The passivity of the instrument is underlined by the possibility that a performer need not even place the vase onto a piano – as in so many homes, a vase might be on the piano already. This normativity is echoed on stage visibly. In light of George Maciunas’s correspondence with Brecht, Liz Kotz notes that Maciunas suggested that ‘events like Piano Piece [occur] virtually unnoticed, unperceived as a separate “work”’. The ‘everyday’ nature of this activity provides an example of a ready-made – recalling

Orientations and the piano-object  61 Duchamp – but one of a ready-made event rather than ready-made object (such as his Fountain).37 Maciunas wrote to Brecht in 1962 that: your events are non-art since you did not create the events – they exist all the time. You call attention to them […] Very few ever thought the vase of flowers over piano was meant to be a piece & they all wanted a ‘piece’ to follow.38 This notion that Brecht did not in fact create the piece, but merely reaffirmed through framing actions a situation already in existence, confirms the piece’s passive character. The pedestrian passivity of Brecht’s piece is echoed in Tomas Schmit’s, although Schmit moves partially towards activity: Tomas Schmit – Piano Piece for George Maciunas no. 1, dec 62 the performer puts onto the great lid of a closed piano as many different objects as possible (for example: a bottle, a typewriter, a hammer, a book, a hat, a broom, a radio, a suit-case, a young girl, a package of cigarettes, a machine gun, a coffee-pot, a shoe, a photo of Fidel Castro, etc. etc … …), until it is impossible to put anything more on it. – then he lifts the great lid.39 In an alternative version of the piece, the composer also emphasises the activity of the performer, by theatricalising in a slightly different way. He both suggests the manner in which they place their chosen objects (they ‘may arrange these objects very carefully and with deliberation’, or might ‘construct a building’ from them) and specifies the characteristics of the final movement: ‘When he has completed his arrangement, he lifts the great lid suddenly. The piano must be placed so that when the lid opens, the objects slide towards the audience.’40 The silence of the piano, its having-become-fetish, is affirmed passively in both pieces. The piano is furniture, seen but not heard. The mundane passivity of the performer’s actions is also echoed in a piano which is itself affirmed in its own passivity. Writing to Schmit, in 1964, Maciunas reflected on this ready-made quality, on this art as life re-presentation. He inverts the interpretation that stage performances reproduce the pedestrian: it is rather the everyday, in a sense, that echoes performances, and in so doing, at its extreme, this negates the very possibility of performance in the first place: The best Fluxus ‘composition’ is a most non-personal, ‘ready-made’ […] – it does not require any of us to perform it since it happens daily without any ‘special’ performance of it. Thus our festivals will eliminate themselves (and our need to participate) when they become total readymades.41 A passive orientation finds its limit when one does ‘not need to participate’ at all in composition and performance. This is a limit in that this level of passivity diffuses the sense that the performance is happening and that it is constituted by some kind of orientation. Falling back from art into life – folding one completely into the other – one’s orientation becomes unobserved and unobserving

62  Musical objects once again. And in reflecting on this extreme, one notices that maximal passivity in fact equates with affirmation, effectively the proclaim that: all there is life in its presence, unfolding before us. Performance, as orienting possibilities of reframing and critical reflection, is here totally receded. While piano-furniture appears in domestic spheres, it of course also does so in public ones. In the case of its concert hall existence, in addition to its history, the piano’s presence as an object also derives from a practical material concern. As already noted above, unlike many other instruments, it is not carried intimately by the performer; the piano sits ready onstage, the mise en scène in which the pianist then appears. Once the performance is finished, it remains on the stage – if art fulfils the function that religion once did: on the altar – of the concert hall. This altar has been a place of worship, and even one of sacrifice. An offering, a gesture of care, is presented in La Monte Young’s Piano Piece for David Tudor #1 (1960). Here the performer places a bale of hay and bucket of water before the piano. ‘The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself.’ If the former option is pursued, the piece ends when the piano has been fed. Otherwise, the piece ends ‘after the piano eats or decides not to’.42 The piano’s position on stage is affirmed. The performer takes a passive role; the piano decides the duration of the performance. Although of course the piano does not actually do so – and as such its inertness is reconfirmed through this ironic action, through positing its potential aliveness. If Brecht and Schmit presented to us the piano as furniture of the home – akin to Ahmed’s table, sitting in the study, topped with vase and other practical and ornamental objects – Young playfully approaches the piano as public animal, one that is ultimately non-agential, as if taxidermied.

Presence and spectacle (in active affirmation) Whereas Nam June Paik regarded the piano as taboo, others explore its totemic qualities – actively affirming its objecthood and concomitant associations. In such cases, this character is underlined in the strength of its presence: ‘see and hear the piano’ is proclaimed emphatically in a manner that goes beyond the instrument’s usual – assumed – use, as one finds in normative concert hall settings. The sheer force of pianos’ presence is felt, to mention one example, in Horațiu Rădulescu’s Clepsydra (1982), in which the audience is surrounded by 16 ‘sound icons’ – grand pianos set on their sides, with their strings exposed, and bowed by performers. Interdisciplinary collaborators Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano (2008) explores the cultural and institutional-discursive resonances of such presencing. In the simplest terms, this work presents a Bechstein grand which, after having had the central two octaves of its strings removed, has had a circular hole cut through its centre. A pianist stands in this space, and from within, reaches over to the keys to play (from a reverse position) an arrangement of the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony every hour.43 The piano is on castors, and, after a while, they start to wander through the gallery space, carrying a gliding piano with them as they play. The work has been staged multiple times after its commissioning for the Haus der Kunst in Munich (2008), for example in New York

Orientations and the piano-object  63 at the Museum of Modern Art and the Gladstone Gallery (both 2009), the Argos Center for Art and Media (Brussels, 2011), the Palazzo Cusani (Milan, 2013), and the Fundació Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona, 2018). More complexly, the work plays on an array of associations that Calzadilla has called ‘a rich constellation of references’, which trace points spanning international politics and cultural history.44 The Ode to Joy itself has a performance history ripe with multilayered connotations of universality, profundity, and brotherhood: it was conducted by Richard Wagner to mark the foundation of the ­Bayreuth Festspielhaus; it is adapted as the Anthem of Europe as the musical anthem of the European Union and the Council of Europe; it was famously conducted by Leonard Bernstein after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 (replacing the word ‘joy’ with ‘freedom’). Further associations and meanings become clearer when one rehearses the development of Stop, Repair, Prepare. The kernel of the work was originally conceived for the 2007 Istanbul Biennial, although its realisation on that occasion was not possible for practical reasons. Despite this, the collaborators took Turkey as a meeting place of East and West – a resonance with particular potency at a time of ongoing conflict following the invasion of neighbouring Iraq by Western forces in 2003. The cultural resonance of the famous ‘Turkish march’ in Beethoven’s movement changes in this context.45 The commissioning of Allora and Calzadilla’s work by Munich’s Haus der Kunst reminds us of another aspect of the Ode’s history. Allora notes that this building was ‘the Third Reich’s first monumental propaganda building’ and that the Ode to Joy was played to inaugurate it.46 Indeed – contrary to the Ninth’s spirit as the music of international brotherhood – the work initially emerged from the duo’s interest in the interconnected history of music and warfare which, in this case, the piano enables them to navigate symbolically.47 That the piano is the instrument on which the movement is realised in Allora and Calzadilla’s work is not incidental. Not only is it Beethoven’s own instrument, it dons a characteristic universality stemming from its symbolic proximity to and ubiquitous presence within the world of European art music. The ‘hole’ that gestures towards musical absences also has further implications for the gestures of the pianist. With these strings removed, they play the central keys of the piano without creating sound, beyond the keys striking the keybed (in general, the arrangements of the Ninth are played towards the low bass and high treble ends of the keyboard). With the dialectical character of the axes referred to above firmly in mind, one should also note that the affirmed presencing of the piano in Stop, Repair, Prepare is foregrounded in part through this aspect of negation: the lack at the centre of the instrument. The orientations invoked by the piano-object are crucial to the meaning of the work. The pianist, as mentioned already, plays with their hands approaching the keys from the ‘wrong’ side, from within the instrument. A situation arises in which, despite being internal to the piano, it is paradoxically ‘external’ to them in their function as a pianist – it is a strange or estranged object they must come to terms with. Being within the object, a position emblematic of intimacy with supposed musical values of universality, they are somehow also at odds with this object and these values. This is an uncomfortable embodiment, both for the

64  Musical objects pianist, who strains to the reach the keys, and for the piano, at a symbolic level. Here, internality does not correspond to non-externality. Something similar goes for the relation of this misaligned performer-object, body-piano, and the relationship between this (these? – for there is not a synthetic wholeness to their togetherness) and the gallery space. After starting to play, they wander around the space. The piano and its associations become many things: for the pianist, a mobile space of disconcerted play; for gallery-goers, a spectacle; at a symbolic level, the piano also becomes a ball and chain, a weighty object and immanent history hauled along by – or with – the performer.

Process and entropy (in passive negation) Some strategies negate rather than affirm (often ironically) the presence of the piano-object, as above. This is passively undertaken where the piano-object is positioned in situations of decay that acknowledge forces beyond those elicited by the performer as subject. (This idea of positioning musical objects environmentally is explored in more detail in Chapter 6.) This is active where destructive steps are taken on the part of the performer(s). Annea Lockwood’s series of Piano Transplants develops the former orientation of passive negation. Pianos are sacrificed to processes including the elements. (Lockwood specifies that the instruments must already be beyond repair.) In Piano Garden (1969–70), an upright is slipped diagonally into a trench outdoors, a small grand is nestled in some bushes, and ‘fast growing trees and creepers’ are encouraged to spring up around them.48 Cultural associations garnered by the object are simultaneously obscured and mythically elevated through the return of this cultural artefact to nature. Southern Exposure (composed 1982, realised 2005) instructs that a ship’s anchor be attached to a grand, with the instrument left at the high tide mark with its lid open – ‘Leave it there until it vanishes’. Her Piano Burning (1968) subjects the piano to indeterminate forces.49 This is initiated by what is arguably an active (and destructive) if brief step, before the performer is placed in a reactive rather than proactive position. The performer is told to first ‘spill a little lighter fluid on a twist of paper and place inside, near the pedals’, before setting light to the piano. They then play whatever they please for as long as possible. In an early iteration, Lockwood placed old microphones in the piano, with their leads wrapped in asbestos, so as to closely capture and amplify the sound of the burning. In this performance Lockwood applied ‘just a little bit of lighter fluid on one corner of the piano’. As she recalls, I lit it and began to play. I could play for about forty minutes before it was too hot to continue. All this was of course amplified with many strange sounds taking place as the fire worked its way, strings breaking and microphones melting.50 Where a Piano Burning is normally completed in around an hour and a half, in Ross Bolleter’s piano collecting one sees and hears the impacts of extended time on the piano-objects as material. He specifically collects instruments which

Orientations and the piano-object  65 have been neglected and uncared for, doing so since at least the creation of his World Association for Ruined Piano Studies (with Stephen Scott) in 1991.51 More recently he has left pianos to be subject to the forces of the heat and weather of rural Western Australia. He is known for then responding to the particularities of these ruined instruments in improvisations, which are recorded, sometimes being multitracked and montaged. For instance, in ‘Piano Dreaming’, the final track from the album Crow Country (2000), one hears the creaking internal mechanisms of a degrading pianola, the plucking of its strings, alongside and then superseding reverberant hauntological salon music. Bolleter (with tape work by Rob Muir) entices a multilayered sonic environment of plucks, scraps, deep rumbles, squeals, machinic repetitions, and gamelan-like sounds akin to gongs. The piece ends, as the albums begins, with environmental sounds of birds and a dog barking distantly – with Bolleter explicitly situating the degrading pianola in a distinctly non-concert hall ‘environment’. His Piano Convergence (2005) develops this principle of decay and collection in installation form. Here the artist brought together donated pianos ruined by acute unforeseen events such as a flood or housefire, or instruments which had simply decayed over years of chronic neglect. Just as Ahmed reminds us that the table is an object that is subject to ‘a history of changing hands’ – a history of production, distribution, and consumption – the pianos’ convergence gathers piano-objects as materials that have themselves gathered stories.52 The instruments were arranged in a curving line in the central space of the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. Members of the public were encouraged to play them as unfamiliar objects (with Doğantan-Dack’s pluralised performer in mind, one notes that these were more unfamiliar for some than others); the lids and front panels were removed so that the strings and interior could be plucked, tapped, and otherwise explored playfully for their sonic potential. Where Piano Convergences was a temporary installation, Ruined Piano Sanctuary follows as an ongoing project.53 Based at Wambyn Olive Farm in the countryside to the east of Perth, this is a permanent home for abandoned pianos. These are situated in the landscape of natural forces inciting decay. They are as such in a process of becoming pianos ‘prepared’ by their environments. This preparing constitutes not conscious activity in advance of performance (pace Cage), but a disorganisation and degradation of the piano’s own parts; objects needn’t be affixed to the strings and interior where the piano itself is heard as a disarranged assemblage, a heterogeneity of disfunction. Indeed, this gestures towards the negation of the piano-objects as pianos, as their materiality as wood, metal, and ivory becomes increasingly apparent through the disorganisation of the whole. Their status as pianos – and as cohesive objects – eventually exists only in memory, in the disjunction between the objects as musico-cultural icons and the materiality that composes them at present. In one’s imagination, this is something one might project into their future becoming-debris. Passive negation comes through in a preparation that results from human inaction – or more acutely, through the (initially active) action of setting in motion a situation from which action is then withdrawn (approaching the aesthetics of the anticipatory discussed in ­Chapter 6). In addition to the sanctuary’s existence in its own right, the pianos

66  Musical objects that comprise it also form the basis of new improvisations by Bolleter and other visitors, who can enjoy the particularities brought out through the weathering of the piano-­objects. Yet even these moments of active human intervention emphasise the ongoing process of material decay beyond human activity. They constitute momentary interjections into extended temporalities of meteorological events and seasonal cycles.

Absenting and obliteration (in active negation) One strand of orientations not only allow for the piano-object’s decay, but actively manifests a persistent impulse to obliterate it. Other instruments have incurred foul treatment – think of Paik’s One for Violin, in which a violin is raised above the performer’s head, before being slammed downwards and smashed in front of them – but the wide array of destructive actions inflicted on pianos is notable. Looking beyond Lockwood’s Piano Burning, one sees an instrument that is widely subject to assaults through a variety of actions including scratching, hammering, and sawing.54 A number of Fluxus works take this route. Maciunas asks the performer to nail down each piano key one by one (Piano Piece No. 13 for Nam June Paik [Carpenter’s Piano Piece]), to the effect of ‘this is the last piece ever to be played on this instrument’. Robert Bozzi’s Choice series has a number of piano focused works (all 1966): Choice 5 has two pianists clash two pianos together several times (pedals depressed); Choice 16 has a piano repeatedly lifted and dropped from a height of at least two metres, ‘until the piano or floor is destroyed’; in a gesture of ‘head on’ confrontation, his Choice 3 presents a helmet-wearing performer onstage, who, having positioned him/herself as far from the piano as possible, proceeds to lower his/her head and charge at the piano at top speed.55 Philip Corner’s Piano Activities (1962) is perhaps the most infamous of the Fluxus-associated works that violently orient players towards a piano as an object.56 Corner provides a series of roles and a manner of ordering them into a specific performance – these latter instructions comprise ‘orders’ enumerated in the text score. The roles relate to parts of the piano and relationships with them: the keyboard, pedals, acting ‘on strings, with external objects such as hammers, drum sticks, wires or ropes’, acting ‘in any way on underside of piano [sic]’, scratching and rubbing the piano, bringing into contact with it ‘objects producing their own noise’, and so on. The six orders tell the players, for example, to adopt ‘one role only’ and to ‘thoroughly’ explore ‘sounds possibilities’ of ‘timbre, dynamics, articulation, juxtaposition and evolution silences [sic]’ (order I), or to develop solos and duets with their fellow performers (order V). The openness of the score permits destructive gestures, though these are not prescribed exactly. For instance, hammers, just mentioned, are one of the suggested ‘external objects’ with which performers should ‘act on [the piano’s] strings’. Performers are elsewhere instructed to ‘strike or drag over parts of the piano other than the strings, with [a] metal or wood rod, or other objects’. But this in the context of a wide variety of explorative actions. Nonetheless, the piece has become synonymous with piano destruction, and this approach has in a sense

Orientations and the piano-object  67 become part of the ‘performance tradition’ of the piece.57 This can surely be traced to its infamous and influential 1962 performances at the Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik in Wiesbaden, in which a piano found itself smashed to pieces over a series of performances. As Gunnar Schmidt puts it, ‘those taking part – George Maciunas, Emmett Williams, Wolf Vostell, Nam June Paik, Dick Higgins, Benjamin Patterson, and Alison Knowles – circled around the piano like a mob, in order to work it over rather than to play on it’, doing so in a detached, unenraged manner.58 In fact, the measured violence that met the piano was also detached from the performance instructions. In a letter to La Monte Young, Maciunas wrote the following: we did Corner’s Piano Activities not according to his instructions since we systematically destroyed a piano which I bought for $5 and had to have it all cut up to throw away, otherwise we would have had to pay movers, a very practical composition, but German sentiments about this ‘instrument of ­Chopin’ were hurt and they made a row about it.59 Schmidt confirms that Corner’s score was not followed; the score was given to Higgins, but neither Higgins nor Maciunas brought this to Germany for the performance and ‘they forgot what was exactly written down’. As Schmidt summarises, ‘it seemed that the performers did not know the score but acted only according to the directions from chairman Maciunas’.60 Even if the score might permit violence, it does not prescribe it directly. Yet, Piano Activities has, owing to this performance history, nonetheless become a set of actions ready to clothe and validate (within the realm of the artistic) the impulse to obliterate pianos – along with what they stand for. Even if one were to take at face value Maciunas’s comment about the ‘practical’ need to avoid paying the movers, it is notable that, contrary to its normative permanence in the concert hall, in this case the piano is taken as a disposable object, something to become-waste in its exhaustion through performance.61 Caleb Kelly writes that Corner was initially against this destructive performance, but ‘when informed that the parts had been turned into sculptures he understood that the piano had been positively transformed by its breakdown’; following this, he wrote Quiet Work of Destruction, which instructed the performer to ‘carry out all destructive actions softly and slowly’.62 Indeed, the performers’ active negation of the piano-object need not obscure the gestures of negation also present in the score, even if this score were not realised precisely. Order IV instructs a player to react to the other activities taking place, to their ‘intensities, timbre, pitches’, yet also that ‘the willful [sic] inclusion of borrowed material, or formal and traditional mannerisms, is never appropriate’ [my emphasis]. Hence this player’s activity of negation extends to musical material played on the piano, in addition to one’s orientation towards the piano in a naïve sense of the object as material. Extending this idea of negating musical material in light of the 1962 Wiesbaden performances, one can note Dick Higgins’s later disparaging of the ‘very conventional’ compositions by Karl-Erik Welin, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Morton Feldman performed as

68  Musical objects part of the festival. Corner’s work – at least realised as it was in its Wiesbaden ­performances – can therefore be seen as offering, symbolically, the negation of these more recent manifestations of a ‘conventional’ concert tradition. Frankenstein pianos reconfirm this damaging in Paik’s Exposition of Music – Electronic Television (1963). This was the artist’s first major solo exhibition (with assistance from Tomas Schmit), in which viewers were presented with both pianos and televisions. Both were subject to violent transformations. As Ina Blom summarises, prepared pianos were ‘laden with all sorts of objects and debris’. This ‘mirrored the violence of the electronic transformations and transmutations on the screens’ which were degraded and modified in various ways.63 Joseph Beuys, one of the attendees, famously took an axe to one of Paik’s pianos, annihilating it. Paik left the debris on display as part of the exhibition. Paik’s Klavier Integral consisted of ‘a piano with part of its casing removed and adorned with paint, barbed wire and miscellaneous objects’. Visitors were invited to ‘“play” keys that activated objects suspended from the piano case, electric switches, a transistor radio, a fan heater, film projectors, and the lights of the exhibition room’.64 Here quite forwardly returns the theme of the externality and non-externality of orientations. The effects of the action on the keys is here quite literally externalised into the surrounding environment such that oneness with the instrument in ‘performance’ is impossible. The piano becomes a theatricalising device, a centre of operations through which to modify details of one’s environment. Standing at the centre of the living room or concert hall, this was in a sense always its function – as a station directing affects. But here, this externalisation is pushed to the point of distribution beyond the body and its affective qualities. One turns from coordinated affects towards effects that are unforeseen and explorative on the part of the ‘player’. As with the decaying pianos discussed above, the exploration of the damaged piano-object explodes the piano into a disorganisation of constituent materials. This denies us, firstly, the unity of the object as a piano. Second, and connected with this, the piano’s existence as merely a conglomerate of materials, among a collection of other materials in a wider environment, denies the performer’s unity (non-externality) with it when playing. Looking beyond Fluxus and to the gallery arts more generally, one notes other active and destructive gestures of negation. One encounters Rebecca Horn’s Concert for Anarchy (1990), which compulsively repeats a piano’s hanging. An upside-down grand is suspended from the ceiling. This periodically drops towards the floor, but is caught suddenly before impact, such that the keys jolt downwards, out of place, with all the strings resonating violently. It then rises up, the keys withdraw, back towards the keybed, before the cycle of the hanging action occurs again. Elsewhere, the debris from a smashed piano are affixed to a red background and presented in Chopin’s Waterloo (1962), by the Frenchborn artist Arman (born Armand Fernandez, 1928–2005). A similarly assaulting gesture is cast in bronze in his Accord Final [Last Chord: They Wouldn’t Let Me Play ­Carnegie Hall] (1981), in which one sees an imploded baby grand, perhaps crushed under the weight of an impossibly harsh performance. Arman’s sculptures trace assaults on the piano. Because of its casting in metal, with Accord Final in particular, one is left with the paradoxical sense of the freshness of this

Orientations and the piano-object  69 particular attack, frozen before us, and, owing to the sculpture’s permanence, a statement of artistic intent that sits outside of time. Here, in a silent sculpture, sound – the lack of sound – is significant, in so far as a tradition of sounding is evoked through its negation. ‘[W]hat is perhaps odd, and distinctly affecting […]’, writes ­Richard Leppert, ‘is that it [Accord Final] seems powerfully to invoke music despite music’s profound, indeed absolute absence; that is, the broken piano, speaks the sounds of which it is no longer capable by marking loss.’65

The dialectics of musical objecthood Drawing the chapter to a close, some general observations – applicable beyond but leading from our consideration of pianos – can be suggested. One should firstly note that, as an object with specific symbolic resonances and historical embeddedness, the instrument-as-object’s nurture, care, or destruction – and our staged indifference towards it – constitutes particular modalities of orientation. In the cases discussed, these diversely strive towards the acknowledgement or overcoming of the piano’s immanent sedimented legacies, variously doing so through reoriented focus, the instigation of processes, or, sometimes, revolutionary violence and ferocious gestures of negation. In saying this, I am insisting that the choice of the object is important, be this the piano or some other object. This choice affords particular modalities of action and inaction, of attention and forgetting (on both experiential and historical registers). Consider George Brecht’s Incidental Music (1961), in which the pianist is instructed to perform some simple actions at/on the piano, such as resting the stool against the body of the instrument, and placing a stack of wooden blocks on the strings. Seth Kim-­Cohen raises a very good question: ‘why the piano? Brecht could have chosen any object.’66 Consistent with my Ahmed-inspired suggestions above that in objects and our orientations cohere histories, Kim-Cohen suggests that this choice of object is owing to the piano’s discursive and symbolic positioning with the art music tradition. This piece is a ‘reconception of the piano; a questioning of the concepts embedded within this object, this machine, this token’.67 This is again to insist that the very ‘material’ quality of composition and performance practices cannot be abstracted from these materials’ cultural and historical embeddedness. The concept of orientations emphasises the dialectics of musical objecthood, recognising a complex plurality of subjects and objects unfolding materially in relation to one another. (This idea is expanded in Chapter 5, vis-à-vis the dialectics of passivity and activity in compositional treatments of musical material – I also do this elsewhere.68) The spectacle of Allora and Calzadilla’s Stop, Repair, Prepare asserts the presence of the piano, but does so through a lack, alluding to something missing. Violent negation in destructive actions is reactive to ­presence – the conventional ubiquity of what the piano is as a material and cultural artefact. The passivity of Bolleter’s decaying pianos is focused through actions including their initial gathering and, later, their occasional enlivening by visiting players; in fact, it is this which renders them objects of aesthetic intrigue, differentiating these sanctuary-objects from those in scrapyards the world over.

70  Musical objects This dialectic also reminds us of the late twentieth-century emergence of materiality as a ‘problem’ – and that musical practices enable the exploration of this condition. As taboo, totem, or token, the piano’s very familiarity connotes a degree of safety – some presumed level of knowingness – while, at the same time, enabling possibilities for negotiating crises of materiality that have broader implications. It is a site of return in a difficult world of changing materiality, although this is not to imply that it is simply a site of refuge. I am suggesting that far-reaching dialectics of materiality are encountered through presumptions afforded via the particularity of this site: to pose materials’ own activity is to meets its passivity; to insist on materials’ passivity is to discover activity in processes of entropic transformation; and, to seek presence is to encounter lack.

Notes 1 Nam June Paik cited in Dorothée Brill, Shock and the Senseless in Dada and Fluxus (Lebanon: Dartmouth College Press, 2010). 2 Sara Ahmed, ‘Orientations Matter’, in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 234. Ahmed expands on some other aspects of her concept of orientations in her Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 3 As George Maciunas saw it, event-scores focus a singularity of action (as opposed to a polymorphic nature of happenings). Liz Kotz, ‘Post-Cagean Aesthetics and the “Event” Score’, October 95 (2001), 82. 4 Ahmed, ‘Orientations Matter’, 249. 5 Ahmed, ‘Orientations Matter’, 235. 6 Ahmed, ‘Orientations Matter’, 244. 7 Julian Johnson, Out of Time: Music and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 294. 8 Ahmed, ‘Orientations Matter’, 239. I explore this defamiliarisation using Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology in my ‘Building an Instrument, Building an Instrumentalist: Helmut Lachenmann’s Serynade’, Contemporary Music Review 32/5 (2013), 425–436. 9 Ahmed, ‘Orientations Matter’, 236. 10 Ahmed, ‘Orientations Matter’, 240. 11 Ahmed, ‘Orientations Matter’, 249. 12 Ahmed, ‘Orientations Matter’, 249. 13 Ahmed, ‘Orientations Matter’, 249. 14 Kevin Dawe cited in Settimio Fiorenzo Palermo, ‘Instrumental Trouble: A Queer Organology of Hugh Davies’s Found Instruments’, Interalia: A Journal of Queer Studies. Available at https://interalia.queerstudies.pl/en/recently-added/instrumentaltrouble/ (accessed 17 December 2020). 15 Richard Leppert, ‘Sexual Identity, Death, and the Family Piano’, 19th-Century Music 16/2 (1992), 111. 16 Leppert, ‘Sexual Identity, Death, and the Family Piano’, 105. 17 See Stephen Zank and Richard Leppert, ‘The Concert and the Virtuoso’, in Piano Roles: A New History of the Piano, ed. James Parakilas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 18 Zank and Leppert, ‘The Concert and the Virtuoso’, 101–102. 19 Roland Barthes, Music – Image – Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Hill and Wang, 1977), 163.

Orientations and the piano-object  71 20 Luciano Berio, Remembering the Future (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 26. 21 Berio, Remembering the Future, 26. 22 Ahmed, ‘Orientations Matter’, 234. 23 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 114–115. 24 Ahmed, ‘Orientations Matter’, 246. Ahmed points also to the link with Judith Butler’s feminism: for Butler, ‘it is precisely how phenomenology exposes the “sedimentation” of history in the repetition of bodily action that makes it a useful resource for feminism’. 25 Ahmed, ‘Orientations Matter’, 248–249. 26 Mine Doğantan-Dack, ‘The Role of the Musical Instrument in Performance and Research: The Piano as a Research Tool’, in Artistic Practice as Research in Music: Theory, Criticism, Practice, ed. Mine Doğantan-Dack (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 172–73. 27 Ahmed, ‘Orientations Matter’, 250. 28 Wilson, ‘Building an Instrument, Building an Instrumentalist’, 426. 29 Allan Kaprow, ‘The Legacy of Jackson Pollock’ [1958], in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life: Expanded Edition, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2003), 9. 30 Julia Robinson, ‘From Abstraction to Model: George Brecht’s Events and the Conceptual turn in Art of the 1960s’, October 127 (2009), 91. 31 Kotz, ‘Post-Cagean Aesthetics and the “Event” Score’, 56. 32 Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear, 53. 33 The notion of ‘the performer’ free from the constraints of a singular artistic discipline was emancipatory during its formation in the late 1950s and early 1960s. However, in retrospect, a risk arises: without the differentiation of painters, dancers, and poets there is a danger of flattening the figure of the performer into something singular and undifferentiated. This, ironically, reproduces the same logic of the singular ‘performerfigure’ that Doğantan-Dack was correct to critique in a very different context. 34 Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, 165. For discussion, see Wilson, ‘Building an Instrument, Building an Instrumentalist’, 429–430. 35 Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 20–21. 36 Qualifying this anachronistically, one could say that this exhibits the influence of the post-structuralist thinkers I’ve drawn on elsewhere, and resists my proposed – provisional – schema’s use in accordance with the principles of structuralism. 37 Kotz, ‘Post-Cagean Aesthetics and the “Event” Score’, 83. 38 Maciunas cited in Kotz ‘Post-Cagean Aesthetics and the “Event” Score’, 83 (my emphasis). 39 Tomas Schmit, ‘Piano Piece for George Maciunas no. 1, dec 62’, one of the many text scores included in George Macuinas’s Fluxus Preview Review (Fluxroll), 1963. 40 Tomas Schmit, ‘Piano Piece No. 1’ as reproduced in The Fluxus Performance Workbook, ed. Ken Friedman, Owen Smith, and Lauren Sawchyn (Performance Research E-Publication, 2002), 91. Schmit suggests different objects too: ‘toys, chess pieces, concrete blocks, wood blocks, bricks, glass vases, rubber balls, etc.’ 41 Maciunas cited in Kotz ‘Post-Cagean Aesthetics and the “Event” Score’, 83. Maciunas gives Brecht’s Exit as an example. 42 La Monte Young (ed.), An Anthology of Chance Operations, unpaginated (self-published by La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low, 1963). 43 The performance at the Gladstone Gallery used six pianists. The MoMA performance used five, each with a different arrangement of the Ode to Joy. See Anne Wagner’s contribution to Morris, Mark, Toni Martin, Anne Wagner, Sarah Rothenberg, Erik Tarloff, Rachel Cohen, and Ethan Iverson, ‘A Symposium on the Piano’, The Threepenny

72  Musical objects Review 119 (2009), 20–22 and Guillermo Calzadilla’s brief interview in The Museum of Modern Art, ‘Performance 9: Allora & Calzadilla at MoMA’, available at www. youtube.com/watch?v=iuJdI8S01-k (accessed 4 January 2020). 44 Calzadilla in Carlos Motta, Jennifer Allora, and Guillermo Calzadilla, ‘Allora & Calzadilla’, Bomb 109 (2009), 71. 45 In an interview, Allora specifically cites the alla turca found in the music of Beethoven and the Viennese classicists. Allora in Motta, Allora, and Calzadilla, ‘Allora & Calzadilla’, 66. 46 Allora in Motta, Allora, and Calzadilla, ‘Allora & Calzadilla’, 70–71. 47 Allora in Motta, Allora, and Calzadilla, ‘Allora & Calzadilla’, 70. 48 See Annea Lockwood’s website, www.annealockwood.com/compositions/pianotransplants/ (accessed 2 January 2020). 49 Lockwood’s official catalogue lists the work as from 1968. However, in a 1989 interview she refers to a performance on London’s Chelsea Embankment taking place in 1965 or 1966. Annea Lockwood and Stephen Montague, ‘[Interview with] Annea Lockwood’, Contemporary Music Review 6/1 (1991), 148. 50 Lockwood and Montague, ‘[Interview with] Annea Lockwood’, 148. 51 See Ross Bolleter’s website, https://bolleter.wixsite.com/warpsmusic (accessed 2 January 2020). See also Tim Rutherford-Johnson, Music After the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 214 for additional discussion of Bolleter’s World Association project. 52 Ahmed, ‘Orientations Matter’, 243. 53 Antoinette Carrier has documented Bolleter’s work in photography and film. Her short film Frontier Piano: The Creation, explores Bolleter’s sanctuary. Available at www. antoinettecarrier.com/links.html (accessed 2 January 2020). 54 There are of course historical precedents for destruction as a clearing of ground for future compositional action. The Futurists provide a notable reference point, with Luigi Russolo in his The Art of Noises proclaiming that ‘we [like-minded Futurists] cannot for long restrain ourselves from the desire to create finally a new musical reality by generously handing out some resounding slaps and stamping with both feet on violins, pianos, contrabass, and organs’. Luigi Russolo, ‘The Art of Noises: Futurist Manifesto’, in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, (New York and London: Continuum, 2004), 10–14, at 12. Yet the Fluxus artists, unlike the Futurists, generally incorporated a humorous playfulness that lightened the dark extremes of the destructive impulse – which for the latter also manifested in xenophobia and hawkish jingoism. 55 Bozzi’s scores appeared in an issue of the magazine Film Culture, 43/Winter (1966), 6, designed by Maciunas. These are also reproduced in Friedman, Smith, and Sawchyn’s (eds), The Fluxus Performance Workbook, 18. 56 For a fuller discussion of Corner’s work and the context around it, see Gunnar Schmidt, ‘Piano Activities’ (translated by Philip Corner), reproduced from Klavierzerstörungen in Kunst und Popkultur (Berlin: Reimer 2012). Retrieved from http://piano-activities. de/englindex.html (accessed 30 December 2019). 57 Multiple realisations can be viewed online, and these are generally destructive in character. 58 Schmidt, ‘Piano Activities’. 59 Macuinas in Emmett Williams and Ann Noël (eds), A Collective Portrait of George Macuinas 1931–1978 (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997), p. 53. Also see Schmidt, ‘Piano Activities’. 60 Schmidt, ‘Piano Activities’. Also see endnote 24. 61 A short newsreel documents edited snippets of a festival performance of Piano Activities, a concert also including Paik’s famous Zen for Head. ‘TV Documentation of the Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik, Wisebaden’ (Museum Wiesbaden, 1962). This newsreel was included at the London Tate Modern’s 2019–20 Nam June Paik Exhibition. It can also be viewed on YouTube.

Orientations and the piano-object  73 62 Caleb Kelly, Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 130–131. 63 Ina Blom, ‘Boredom and Oblivion’, in The Fluxus Reader, ed. Ken Friedman (Chichester: Academy Editions, 1998), 77. Blom also notes that for Paik the interdeterminacy of artistic materials stemmed from an ‘indeterminacy in culture-at-large’. This theme returns in the final chapter, an aspect of which explores the connection between musical indeterminacy and cultural conditions of precarity. 64 Nick Kaye, ‘Hardware in Real Time: Performance and the Place of Video’, Contemporary Theatre Review 15/2 (2005), 208. 65 Richard Leppert, ‘Material Culture and Decentred Selfhood (Socio-Visual Typologies of Musical Excess)’, in Critical Musicological Reflections: Essays in Honour of Derek B. Scott, ed. Stan Hawkins (New York: Routledge, 2016), 107. 66 Seth Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 171. 67 Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear, 174. 68 Samuel Wilson, ‘Strategies of Conquest and Defence: Musical Encounters with the Object in Twentieth Century Music’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 145/2 (2020), 457–484.

4 Contemporary composition and/as plastic art

In this chapter I work through some thoughts about contemporary compositional practices and how these relate to practices of painting and sculpture. I do this less to identify composers who have drawn on painting and sculpture – although this is not contrary to my aims – and more as a way of thinking about the spatial and temporal commitments that cohere in compositional approaches to materials.1 Like the previous chapter, which focused on interstitial performance practices, here my field of view considers materiality in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century music through a sideways look beyond a narrowly and autonomously circumscribed field of ‘the musical’. Music is shaped by and feeds into socio-historically mediated ideas about what space and time are and how materials relate to them. One could say it contributes to a contemporary ‘culture of time and space’, to borrow from the title of ­Stephen Kern’s historical study of changing ideas of time and space in Europe and ­America around the beginning of the twentieth century.2 For this reason, when using words such as ‘space’ and ‘spatiality’, ‘time’ and ‘temporality’, I am referring to a shifting constellation of overlapping ideas and domains. Rather than beginning from a founding definition of words such as these – and then proceeding to identify them in some musical examples – I start from a proposition: that music encompasses thinking and practices that enact certain kinds of spatiality and temporality, and that these manifest themselves multiply on interrelated registers, often simultaneously. Furthermore, these thoughts and practices are rooted in, yet also contribute to, culturally mediated ideas about space and time. Hence, the spaces to which I refer include the spaces in which music happens (performance spaces, installations, the fluid space of proximity between performer and their instrument), the graphical notational space of scores, as well as the abstract sense of intramusical space developed within music, through time; it thus encompasses both the literal and figurative spaces that play out in music.3 These, I propose, can tell us about culturally predominant, latent, and contested ideas of the dialectics of space, time, and musical materiality.

‘On some relationships …’ Theodor W. Adorno’s curious mention of medium in his 1965 essay, ‘On Some Relationships between Music and Painting’, provides an initial entry point into

Contemporary composition  75 discussing the dialectics of time and space vis-à-vis musical materials. Key is the following passage, to which we will return repeatedly from different angles of approach: If time is the medium that, as flowing, seems to resist every reification, nevertheless music's temporality is the very aspect through which it actually congeals into something that survives independently – an object, a thing, so to speak.4 A dialectical relationship is enacted, where time is marked by music; yet it is also that through which music emerges in order to achieve this marking. And by noting the congealed ‘thing’ that appears through music, Adorno also implicates time’s relationship with space: the cast permanence of the object, the thing that now stands before us. The antagonistic aspect of this dialectic is located initially in the tension between time’s ‘flowing’ – its resistance to reification – and its ossification as an independent object. Adorno insists that this tension always remains in the spatialisation of time. It is for this reason that he attacks some strains of composition, as attempts to assert the absolute transformation of time into space.5 Rooted in neo-Marxian dialectics, temporal process is in his view always in irreconcilable tension with the product cast in space. To assert a shared identity common to the two would be mistaken. One might add, within this Marxian framework, that this process/product conflation would constitute a kind of fetishism. One cannot mention the words medium and painting together without alluding to Clement Greenberg’s hugely influential essay, ‘Modernist Painting’. Much of the discussion of painting later in this chapter is drawn from work done after Greenberg’s central thesis (and after Rosalind Krauss, herself working post-Greenberg). Greenberg proposed that, in line with a historical trajectory of differentiation between art forms, modernist painting constitutes an engagement with ‘all that was unique to the nature of its medium’. Crucially, for modernist painting this means an embrace of flatness; ‘two dimensionality, was the only condition painting shared with no other art’. He emphasised that ‘flatness alone was unique and exclusive to that art’.6 For Greenberg, this manifests itself also in what can be characterised as a dialectic of limits. That is, he suggests that modernist painting embraces the features that could be said to limit painting as a medium. It takes limitations, such as the flatness of the canvas, ‘as positive factors that are to be acknowledged openly’.7 It acknowledges these by pushing at them – and the further these are pushed, the further they must be observed. Or in his own words: The essential norms or conventions of painting are also the limiting conditions with which a marked-up surface must comply in order to be experienced as a picture. Modernism has found that these limiting conditions can be pushed back indefinitely before a picture stops being a picture and turns into an arbitrary object; but it has also found that the further back these limits are pushed the more explicitly they have to be observed.8

76  Musical objects No doubt Greenberg sought to argue something different from Adorno, and indeed about a different art form. However, this chapter begins with an experimental proposition: that a productive discussion on music and its sister arts might follow from bringing together these two landmark essays on two arts and the dialectics of medium. Furthermore, in this chapter I also seek to emphasise the historically mediated character of time, space, and medium.9 This approach contrasts with – although is by no means necessarily at odds with – empirical methodologies that predominately treat space and time as cognitive categories within which musical perception takes place.10 That is to say that I am interested in (1) the concept of medium and its relationship to material conditions, (2) time as a medium, and (3) the medium’s spatial existence during a liquid modern era, a period promoting (i) liquid flows above solid forms, (ii) the temporary over the permanent, and (iii) heterogeneous mobility beyond autonomous isolation. Hence this is not only to bring the two essays together, but to do so while underlining the specific context of a more recent modernity than that evoked by Adorno or Greenberg. My approach constitutes a critical play with anachronism. In his essay Adorno argued that some twentieth-century music suggested convergences with painting. Outlining these conditions of convergence more thoroughly will allow us then to consider and contrast later developments. He proposed that, crucially, these convergences should not be considered purely at the outer level of appearance. One should appraise these more genuinely through recognising the expression of mutual, inner characteristics, such as shared treatments of time–space relations that are, paradoxically, embodied differently within the different mediums. False – illusory – convergences between music and painting are in Adorno’s view posed by music that problematically imitates the painterly, and in so doing fails the specificity of its medium (that is, time). Where music goes so far as to emulate the spatiality of painting in this way it risks disregarding temporality completely, and in so doing ‘lets go of the synthesizing principle through which, alone, it [genuinely] assumes a form approaching space’. This is because music can only become ‘an object, a thing, so to speak’ through emerging temporally. A ‘fictitious’ spatialization would assert the treatment of time ‘without consideration, as if it were space’. Inversely, the same goes for painting that, on first appearance, has a ‘musical’ character: ‘painting that behaves dynamically, as if it were capturing temporal events, as the futurists desired and many abstract painters attempt to do with circling figures, exhausts itself, at best, in the illusion of time’ (p. 67; from here on I will give page references to Adorno’s essay in the text). Where the space of painting asserts temporality it suggests only a false convergence with music. Adorno seems to suggest two primary inroads to a genuine convergence between music and painting. These are closely related. This lies first in the specificity of each medium’s construction – their writing, to use Adorno’s term – and, connected with this, the autonomy of this writing. This turn to specificity Adorno shared with Greenberg. However, in contrast with Greenberg, Adorno’s dialectic emphasises how through particularity something universal is paradoxically posed: ‘The arts converge only where each pursues its immanent principle in a pure way’, is how he puts it (p. 67). The shared condition of both is that each

Contemporary composition  77 speaks ‘by virtue of the way they are constructed, not by the act of representing themselves; they speak all the more clearly, the more profoundly and thoroughly they are composed in themselves, and the figures of this essential form are their writing’ (p. 71). One should also recall here that for Adorno autonomous artworks and their constituent materials embody social antagonisms. Hence this is also to understand the specificities of each medium as immanently manifesting something of social conditions ‘exterior’ to both music and painting, even when these arts are conceived as autonomous. In accordance with this sense of relatively autonomous art, Adorno is principally concerned with the process of writing as comes through in the composition of musical artworks11 – and it is in this process that convergences between artforms might arise. Adorno argues that convergence is not a natural result of the materials but is a function of ‘powerful, form-giving processes’ that are undertaken across the materials of music and painting (p. 76). These arts ‘make sport of those artists who expect convergence to come from them, rather than from the articulation process’ (p. 74). Where convergence does appear to be natural, this is due to a historical naturalisation of convergences; this is a function of a second nature rooted in the preformed quality of materials (more on this in the next chapter). As Adorno puts it, ‘the concept of construction […] aims to introduce rational order into the material, but with the covert assumption that the conditions of such a possibility, if not the actual principles of construction themselves, are also preformed in the material’ (p. 77). In other words, ‘construction’ suggests an ordering of the material, but this material also implies the possibility of ordering, something ‘inherent’ in the material already, due to a process of naturalisation. External order is not simply imposed onto material, as this material itself ‘naturally’ suggests order and possibilities of convergence. Alongside ‘writing’, the second aspect of convergence encompasses questions of dialectics and non-identity. Painting and music gesture to expressivity in the impossibility of synthesising form and content and, fundamentally, object and subject. One is tempted to add here that this applies to critical modernist painting and music specifically over a more general comparison between the two art forms as such. Indeed, Adorno notes that it is with ‘nonobjective painting’ and (presumably, freely) atonal music that one sees a shared move away from an artist as dominant over their material – as ‘the old synthesizing I, behaving as if it were in unbroken command of the material and of itself in the Gestalt’ (p. 72). Here Adorno alludes to a foray into artistic content that has become remote from its ordering into form. (This perhaps reminds us of his characterisation in Philosophy of New Music of Schoenberg’s early atonal experimentation, before this material’s ordering and domination through the development of a serial method.12) Looking from content to form, one also sees a convergence where the object of painting and music can never fully capture the expressive demands put upon it by the subject. It is in fact in this failure of expression that expressivity is paradoxically located; this gap demonstrates that which ‘cannot be hidden by symbolic unity’. Indeed, this characteristic Adorno links to the specificity of writing, hence the return to ­medium-specific questions of form and the ordering of material. Through an emphasis on writing, which constitutes a total investment in the particularity of

78  Musical objects one’s medium, one comes to reveal the impossibility of each art form’s functioning as total. ‘This crackling with electricity is perhaps the most tolerable approximation to what should be understood by the work’s character as writing and by the convergence of painting and music’ (p. 72). Here music and painting converge not because of something shared, but precisely because each is only partial, and hence in an expression of difference. For Adorno, it is through these differences that the arts might approach each other. It is hence not that they share some essential aesthetic identity that manifests in both. This manner of approach is located in a dialectic of space and time, in which, through musical time, one approaches the spatial and, through painterly space, one implicates the temporal. The idea of musical ‘form’ suggests the ‘ideal’ spatialization of musical time (p. 66). Furthermore, the ‘spatial, that is graphical […]’, character of notation also affords the fixing of music’s time in the score (p. 74). Indeed, music makes use of the spatial, via the notational – a feature that ‘points clearly to space as a condition of its objectification’ (p. 70). Conversely, the reworking of space in painting, its ‘dynamization and negation’, posits a movement towards time (p. 67). The recognition of a painting’s elements in the act of viewing – their relationships with one another, and in mutual production of differences, tensions, and ambiguities between elements – also evokes time. Tension ‘can in no way be conceived without the element of the temporal’, suggests Adorno (p. 69). Having outlined Adorno’s account of music and painting, I would like to supplement this by considering how the painterly in music points beyond painting alone and towards sculpture. In this way I am implicitly writing against Greenberg’s view that modernist painting exhibits a ‘resistance to the sculptural’, and further pulling at threads of convergence between these art forms through an intermediary, music.13 In order to do so, I first reference early and mid-twentieth-century modernist music. This will enable us to then consider later developments informed by or differentiated from these practices. Here I turn specifically to contemporary painterly practices that inform more recent musical writing, as well as contemporary sculptural attitudes in musical composition.

The sculptural through the painterly Some spheres of musical modernism developed the music–painting connection beyond the characteristic flatness of the canvas. A dialectic emerges in which flatness was negated through its implementation as diagrammatic of the sculptural. This was a flatness paradoxically urging depth; through the flatness of a score – as a kind of canvas – musical materials were distributed spatially so that in performance they became heard to exceed this score-as-canvas. These early sculptural tendencies constitute the sculptural through the painterly. Edgard Varèse provides an important early landmark in this tendency, and György Ligeti one somewhat later. But the emergent tangible sculpturality of sound, reached through visual sensibilities in compositional processes, is of course not limited to the output of two composers. Alongside the latter, one might also think readily of other examples from the 1960s: the morphing forms one hears in Friedrich Cerha’s Spiegel series (1960–61), arising from scores that sweep instrumental entries

Contemporary composition  79 across the page;14 the shifting masses of Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960); and arguably even the swirling textures of Witold Lutosławski’s Symphony No. 2 (1965–67), with groups of instrumental staves unshackled from a global notational grid and scattered throughout the score. I reference these modernist experiments – and hark back to Varèse, Adorno, and Greenberg – with the acknowledgement that these points of musical and discursive reference might appear somewhat conservative in a book concerned primarily with contemporary music and recent material conditions. I do this in order to give a sense of historical precedents and continuity across longstanding features of twentieth- and twenty-first-century modernity, and – more importantly – to outline how painterly and sculptural practices of contemporary composers differ from these predecessors. In fact, this is particularly important because, as I demonstrate below, while these earlier modernists are often overtly painterly or sculptural, those that come later tend towards undertaking this implicitly, with plasticity becoming immanent to their compositional work – and, furthermore, this gesture towards concreteness is itself of note, manifesting under liquid modern conditions paradoxically characterised by the predominance of the impermanent. Framed as such, one can note in Varèse’s work features that are precursors to some later tendencies. As Malcolm MacDonald notes, the visual and spatial took a practical role in the composer’s writing process (something he shared with Ligeti, as discussed below): ‘Varèse introduced a visual aspect into his compositional routine’ through producing compositional sketches on scraps of paper, using coloured inks, and in the development of tiny ‘atomic processes, extremely precise rhythmic figures for percussion, interlocking and related to one another by their spatial layout on the page, sometimes free-floating without any staves or pitch-reference: violently scribbled instructions, arrows and parabolas lead off in different directions’.15 In his music, the visual is a field of depth for Varèse; light is less an effect on a surface and more a projection into space. Varèse’s project developed ‘sound projection’, the feeling given us [sic] by certain blocks of sound. Probably I should call them beams of sound, since the feeling is akin to that aroused by beams of light sent forth by a powerful searchlight. For the ear – just as the eye – it gives a sense of prolongation, a journey into space.16 A sense of optical depth emerges throughout Varèse’s thinking: the title of his work Hyperprism connotes a polygon ‘extended into any number of dimensions’, thus serving ‘as a metaphor for Varèse’s ideas of musical projection’ more generally;17 and in Amériques the composer, in his own words, employs instruments with a definite, fixed pitch to serve as a contrast in pure sound. It is surprising how pure sound, without overtones, reinterprets the quality of musical notes with which it is surrounded. Actually, the use of pure sound in music does to the harmonics what a crystal prism does to pure light. It scatters it into a thousand varied and unexpected vibrations.18

80  Musical objects Colour, like texture, here alludes to the possibility of depth, something beyond surface flatness. And this is reconfirmed by Varèse’s use of colour, specifically timbre, as a mechanism for articulating differences within the spatial field. Using what he called a technique of ‘non-blending’ – the articulation of discrete elements – Varèse retained differences between elemental musical materials both in terms of timbre and pitch: ‘I strive to make the listener aware of the utmost differentiation of colors and densities’, he stated.19 Key to Varèse’s spatial conception of musical material is the idea of the soundmass. Hermann von Helmholtz’s On the Sensations of Tone was crucial in its influence on Varèse, with the latter discovering the French edition of this text in 1905.20 This bolstered Varèse’s view that music could be conceived ‘as bodies of intelligent sounds moving freely in space’, a concept Varèse credits originally to the influence of philosopher and mathematician Józef Maria Hoëne-Wronsky.21 As Philippe Lalitte notes, Helmholtz used the term ‘sound mass’ (‘masse sonore’) to refer to ‘a sound composed of elementary sounds (harmonics)’, and proposed that this could be the origin of the idea of the sound mass dear to Varèse [which are] for example aggregates composed of structures of intervals and in groups of differentiated timbres, set in motion by the play of loudness envelopes and rhythmic profiles.22 Even if one only tentatively proposes this connection between Varèse and ­Helmholtz’s concepts of sound-mass (as does Lalitte), at the very least one should take note of Varèse’s statement that ‘Helmholtz was the first person to make me perceive music as being a mass of sounds evolving in space, rather than as an ordered series of notes (as I had been taught)’.23 This conception of sound-mass crystallizes what seems – at first – to suggest a space akin to the sculptural, that is one that leaves behind the painterly. Soundmasses can be said to interplay within space, suggesting, in Varèse’s own words ‘penetration or repulsion’, and ‘transmutations taking place on certain planes [which] seem to be projected onto other planes, moving at different speeds and at different angles’.24 But this early sculptural attitude is also one paradoxically invested in a modernist sense of surface, or in fact surfaces in the multiple. What Varèse called ‘sound-masses’ or ‘planes’ – ‘areas defined by pitch, register, and instrumentation’,25 suggest multiple faces that are each themselves without depth: sheer surfaces coming into contact with others through the encounter of each other’s mutual exteriority. Looking historically backwards, this is something different from a nineteenth-century organism in which materials express depth through emergence and transformation;26 looking ahead, as we do later in this chapter, this also differs from the liquid flow of materials of a later time. Varèse’s solid modernity casts solid plane impacting on solid plane, or the shifting and partial views of outer edges of a shape that is unobservable directly – a multiple nature comparable to then contemporary experiments in Cubist visual art.27 Varèse’s treatment of colour reconfirms this mutual play of painterly flatness and sculptural depth. Where colour becomes a marker of ‘zones of intensities’28

Contemporary composition  81 through the principle of non-binding it acts as ‘an agent of delineation like the different colours on a map separating different areas, and an integral part of form’.29 The map is a suitable point of comparison for Varèse because, like the painting that points beyond painting, it embodies the concept of a flat surface alluding to extended space beyond its own flatness. Indeed, the concept of the sound-mass itself echoes Greenberg’s observation that a medium might push dialectically at its limiting conditions, making something of these productively. As noted above, in his view, modernist painting pushes at the limitations of the flat canvas, actively making this to be that which marks modernist painting as such. The concept of the sound-mass parallels this: the weight and density of masses is asserted, but this is only afforded through the possibilities of weightless sounds that are not bound to gravitational forces, and that as such might float, move, and impact on one another freely in a limitless ‘spatial’ field. The more that sound emphasises apparent mass, the more it observes the principle of its medium: that it is without mass. Just as the visual played a role in Varèse’s compositional routine, this is also of importance to Ligeti’s creative strategy. Jonathan W. Bernard has demonstrated how this can be seen clearly in works such as Atmosphères (1960) and San Francisco Polyphony (1973–74), through exploring compositional sketches that include the use of quasi-graphic notation tracing orchestral lines and shaped blocks of instrumental textures, diverging and interweaving across the page.30 (As Jennifer Iverson has noted, the use of tape and synthesis technologies in studio-based practices also bear their mark, particularly with regard to Atmosphères.31 The broader impact of electronic and digital processes on the sculptural is explored in more detail below.) Texture is a key term here: it knots together the painterly and the sculptural. True flatness can only be a modernist fantasy and scientific abstraction – one might think of the highly refined materials that constitute the polished exterior of the supersonic aircraft or space shuttle – true flatness is never truly present in a textured world. This also goes for the flatness of modernist painting. Greenberg himself noted this: ‘The flatness towards which Modernist painting orients itself can never be an utter flatness.’32 This for him was again a reminder of painting as a medium that in its modernist incarnation observed its own limit, but made something of this. Kazimir Malevich’s black, Yves Klein’s blues, Mark Rothko’s oranges and reds – all characterise canvases that, whilst they may by no means be called sculptural, suggest with hindsight a relation to this expanded field; up close, they evoke the impossibility of flatness – the quiet eruption of the textured – that always disturbs the flat surface conceived abstractedly from afar.33 What Greenberg called modernist painting’s resistance to the sculptural again evokes a dialectic of limits; in their commitment to medium-specificity, concomitant flatness suggests worlds beyond flatness. Musical texture perhaps even more forthrightly than painting or sculpture themselves evokes slippages between the painterly and the sculptural. Think again of Ligeti’s Atmosphères. As Paul Griffiths summarises, Ligeti’s use of micropolyphony (the crossweaving and blurred overlay of multiple polyphonic lines) eliminates rhythmic movement, and there is an

82  Musical objects emphasizing [of] sustained sounds (the work, unusually for this period, is for an orchestra without percussion), and [the avoidance of] all sense of pulse; harmony is held in suspension by the use of clusters. All these effects of continuity provoke an experience of sound as texture.34 The use of the score-canvas in compositional sketching, and the illusion of space on hearing time suspended, confirms the experience of a texturedness held between the painterly and the sculptural.

Music’s re-examination of the painterly In the wake of what Rosalind Krauss famously called ‘the post-medium condition’, contemporary painting has been characterised as mobile and embracing of media beyond itself.35 The discipline of painting, with all its specificities, is paradoxically continued today in so far as it embraces artistic forms and situates itself within a world of images that exceed painting alone. David Joselit has argued influentially that contemporary painting is ‘beside itself’, suggesting that an expanded painting visualises not only images but their distribution in an economy of images.36 André Rottmann states something similar, though emphasises a view looking outward from painting: ‘paradigms that once provided the very basis of painterly abstractions have not been annihilated, but are disseminated across an expanded array of practices, materials, media, and sites.’37 Echoing this, Peter Geimer has shown how painting has utilised the connotations of an autonomous art form while nonetheless incorporating images from contemporary news media, in order to assert political significance and historical gravitas.38 In summary, within an expanded ecology of imagery, the painterly has become mobile, yet still insists on something specific to painting. In this expanded field one also sees that new convergences suggest themselves between painting and music. One can also comment on how aspects of composition echo distinctly contemporary painterly sensibilities – for example, towards line, surface, and surfaces in the multiple. These contrast with but develop from some of the convergences identified by Adorno in his essay. Writing in the mid-­ twentieth century of that century’s earlier and current developments, Adorno observed one thread of composition which used what he called a ‘painterly procedure on a small scale’. Here, the composer’s control of their material was characterised by time’s being ‘planned, disposed of, organized from the top down as a whole, as only visual surfaces once were’. Tones are painted with in ‘the way painters operate with individual color values’; rather than line, one finds a music of ‘blocks’, atomized materials distributed by the composer (p. 68).39 In this music, ‘sounds, in their simultaneity, have become extraordinarily nuanced and differentiated in themselves, exploiting discoveries made by the early Stravinsky, among others’. Adorno contrasts this compositional practice with the genuine dialectic of form and content as found in ‘traditional music, including S ­ choenberg, Berg, and Webern’, music which explores line (p. 68). Line of course manifests a spatialisation of temporality. Adorno connects the musical line with the line(s) laid down in notation, although he does not see the former as only seen in or

Contemporary composition  83 reducible to the latter. Line is, as he puts it, a concept centred on a ‘compelling paradox that precisely its temporal dimension can be fixed only as spatial, that is graphically’ (p. 74). Considering three brief examples (from Aaron Cassidy, Matthew ­Sergeant, and Wolfgang Rihm) will show how visual, painterly thinking manifests in contemporary compositional practices, although in manners different from their modernist presentations. Taking the issue of line first: this is a technical feature in a number of contemporary compositional practices, and is iterated in both product and process. It is both a notational – graphically produced – feature and one that also inheres as a (metaphorical?) guiding image during the compositional process. Aaron Cassidy has spoken directly about his interest in the line in composition, and provides an excellent example of this tendency. Crucially, this is a line conceived in a way akin to a contemporary form of the painterly – that is, one expressive of the physicality of action and emblematic of material forces. This is to say that rather than pursuing line as ‘linear’ – the latter word implies everything from geometric exactness, to autonomous becoming, to modernist progress – ­Cassidy turns to the curve. Curves, in his view, reflect forces of resistance and trajectory under heterogeneous conditions, effects of combined forces on and through materials: think of the curve of telephone lines under gravity, that of the stream shaped by and shaping the underlying topography of the landscape.40 In his conceptualisation, curves express movement and resistance, speed and duration. This foregrounds something different to linearities connecting space as discrete coordinates, as mapped out on the flatness of the score-canvas and diagrammatic approaches that render shapes of sound in a presumably neutral, universal space (from Bussotti’s graphics, to Feldman’s graph notation, to Xenakis’s mathematical renderings). The seemingly paradoxically non-linear line traces forces, and charts interactions of materials, bodies, and objects under particular conditions. Turning to surface: the surface on which lines find themselves have been scrutinised for instance by composer-theorist Matthew Sergeant, in his concept of ‘scoring’. This idea crystallises some aspects of contemporary thought about surfaces more generally, that of the score and those encountered in the actions of (its) sounding. In contrast with the conventional notion of scoring as orchestration (for example), Sergeant argues ‘(1) that scoring is an action, a verb; and (2) that scoring leaves a mark on the material world (a scratch, an etch, etc.)’.41 Here the surface is an interface between maker and the made. Crucially, Sergeant emphasises that while scoring happens as an action, it also leaves something as its trace. In this sense he posits that in our consideration of the surface, which in the first instance appears to concern the spatial, one should also not forget its temporal dimension. Last, it is the ongoingness of this action that pushes it towards an open-ended future, and which also demands that one heeds the self-reflexive within scoring actions. As he puts it: When I talk about scoring, I am […] talking about a maker’s relationship between their own sense of self and that which is materially emerging before them as they make in the present tense. As a maker scores, the

84  Musical objects actions of their self instigates changes in [the] material world around them (through the movement of a pencil, as a perhaps all too easy example), the self observing these changes as being externalised from it. In this way, the maker ever-operates simultaneously as a reader as well as a writer.42 The surface is not an abstract flatness but both spatially and temporally textured. It is changeable and dynamic, a field that implicates the bodily movements of the actions of making: (reflexive) actions both effecting and affecting a textured surface.43 Wolfgang Rihm’s compositions take a very different, though nonetheless critical, approach to the surface, one that moves toward the physicality of one’s material – and he cements this thinking’s relationship with painting directly. Alastair Williams gives a helpful summary, writing of the frequent references to painting in Rihm’s writings, whether or not allusive music is being discussed, which impart a tactile dimension to this musical understanding. The idea of a hidden contour, or of music stratified in such a way as to let levels rise and sink, already has a painterly quality to it because it suggests a canvas in which an underlying shape is partly visible and partly concealed. It is no surprise, then, that in the 1990s these tendencies fed into the more overt use of what Rihm, alluding to the Austrian painter Arnulf Rainer, calls ‘Übermalung’ (overpainting) to describe the process of adding layers to existing music.44 Yves Knockaert notes that ‘overpainting’ was a term first used by Rihm in relation to his Tutuguri (1980–82), though the composer himself considers the technique to have appeared in practice in earlier work, during study with Klaus Huber.45 (Rihm wrote of Tutuguri: ‘I proceeded often as on image surfaces: density clusters, overpainted, signal, colour fight, attacking the material, sound strokes, free setting, line coercion, grids, plastic, haptic.’46) In Rainer’s work, overpainting consists of a process of working over – quite literally painting over – pre-existing images. Sometimes he allows an underlying image to show through, whereas at other times the original is obscured entirely (as in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1981). Rihm borrows from and adapts this process. His ‘overpainting’ techniques involve ‘reusing, resuming, and rewriting’ musical material from one composition for another. He adds layers extracted from one work above material from another, or inserts pre-existing material into new works.47 ‘Vers une symphonie fleuve I (1992/1995), for example, adds a string layer to a previously composed piece for wind and percussion, et nunc (1992)’, notes Williams. ‘Such procedures are continued in the five versions to date of fleuve, and in the way that Jagden und Formen (2001) absorbs three earlier scores.’48 ­Knockaert is correct to point out that, whereas Rainer’s overpainting results in a single work, such as a photograph altered with layers of paint, Rihm’s resembles a postmodern interest in intertextual processes.49 In both contexts, however, image and musical materials are placed in wider networks that exceed the art forms’ long-held commitments to autonomy. Both Rainer and Rihm’s ‘overpaintings’ suggest practices of reworking:

Contemporary composition  85 the final works are marked as traces of processes whereby materials of different kinds are posed in relief to one another. But what is perhaps more significant is how this technical aspect of Rihm’s practice, borrowed from painting, points towards a plastic and tactile conception of sound. Rihm himself has stated that he sees himself as ‘a sculptor who takes material in his hand and must bring it to life’.50 In part, this bears the influence of Varèse (Williams notes that Rihm has written ‘enthusiastically of Varèse’s sculpturally direct discovery of sound and sound objects’ in his essay ‘Musikalische ­Freiheit’).51 Rihm’s approach to overpainting links directly with this sculptural attitude. The notion of layer evokes the flatness of painting, yet also points beyond it: that even the flat surface is a multistaged field of depth. It recalls the notion of texture introduced above. It also opens up the possibility of relationships between the layered: formally, the mutual reinforcing and elsewhere the obscuring of one layer’s elements by another; and, symbolically, of the meaning that emerges from this interaction. Knockaert writes that for Rihm, ‘“layer” is not a neutral term’. Instead, a multilayering means the stacking of layers of which each is defined by certain characteristics.52 Hence overpainting enables the opening up of new relationships between material: a placing of layers before and after one another (both spatially and temporally), of sonic objects besides one another through the use of insertions. This is achieved in part through a treatment of musical material via painterly and sculptural approaches that are not at odds with one another, but intertwined. What one sees, then, in the three brief examples from Cassidy, Sergeant, and Rihm, is the applicability to musical composition of painterly terminology inherited from modernism, though used in senses quite different to the contexts of painterly (musical) modernism. The line (Cassidy) moves away from instilling the organic or geometric essence of the material rendered, away from an expression of abstracted ideals, and rather marks or traces material actions and forces undertaken within an ecology of activities and agencies. Furthermore, evoking the spatial’s implication of the temporal, one can note that the line’s nonlinearity contravenes the line’s associated teleology. Similarly, the surface is taken not as an assumed ground or canvas: rather than that upon which interact elements that are secondary to it, it is itself imagined to be a dynamic space of interaction (Sergeant); elsewhere (Rihm) it becomes multiple and changeable, shattered fragments that reframe and colour what are (both spatially and temporally) before and after them. All this points to palimpsests of visual thinking in recent compositional practices, showing through in actions that apparently move us from the visual towards plasticity. Or, putting it more carefully, this invites an exploration of the physicality of features – such as lines and surfaces – that once constituted modernist visual preoccupations. This is also to say that while materials’ physicality is emphasised, this accentuation does not represent a historical situation in which visuality has no place in compositional actions, in which this has been fully displaced by a turn to the physical. Instead, one observes the emergence of scopic compositional imaginings that themselves constitute engagements with music’s materiality. Again, the painterly and the sculptural are entwined.53

86  Musical objects

Sonic sculpturality This tangibility, this notion of music as a plastic art bleeds into a foreground of some contemporary music’s sculptural condition.54 This condition is crystallised where sound itself is conceived of as material taking shape and to be shaped – composition is a process of rendering it into some form that constitutes the work – and, also, where this work is proactively constituted as relationships between objects, relationships acknowledged sonically. As discussed above, some works by Varèse, Ligeti, and others pre-empted the former aspect of the sculptural. An exploratory approach to instruments and objects, as heard prominently in openended Cagean practices, contributed to the latter. In For the Birds, Cage ‘proposes listening microphonically to the atomic vibrations of objects’; we are presented with a situation where, in Cage’s view, ‘Object would become process; we would discover, thanks to the procedure borrowed from science, the meaning of nature through the music of objects’.55 This approaching the sculptural can also be appreciated as an aspect of a number of strategies reviewed in the previous chapter, which sounded relationships between objects and objects, and objects and bodies. Yet while I characterise two aspects of the sculptural here, it should be said that these are dialectically intertwined, in so far as both – what is heard as an object, and objects’ as being heard – focus attention on the materiality of sounding.56 Electronic music and its influence on acoustic composition impacts one strand of the sculptural. Here, ironically it is in sound’s apparent dematerialisation, through technologies of recording and scientific abstraction, that it most readily becomes material for sculpting. As recorded and reproduced in the studio on analogue tape, sound – codified magnetically – becomes something to be cut up, filtered, spliced, and reversed. This tendency is even more pronounced with digital technologies that apparently freeze sound as information, allowing it to be visualised and modified on screen: in becoming information the sound loses – or at least seems to lose – its grounding in the material world, opening up radical possibilities of transformation not tethered to the specificity of its (original) medium.57 Yet at the same time this apparent transcendence of materiality suggests something of its opposite. As something crafted, subtracted from, and added to, sound approaches sculptural treatment. The visualisation of the sound enables its shaping. Sonograms image sounds in three dimensions – time, frequency, and amplitude – and make visible sounds as harmonic spectra. Furthermore, programs such as Audiosculpt enable us not only to ‘observe a sound’s spectra in tangible form’, but to modify them.58 This software was the product of work at IRCAM on the digital handling of sound, transformations which ‘include time-varying filtering, transposition, time-stretching, and hybridization between two sounds’, and has been described as ‘a powerful time-­ frequency graphical editor based on the SuperVP phase vocoder’.59 This enables users to load samples, plot changes on a screen (as a digital canvas), affecting everything from pitch shifting to drawing onto the sonogram such as to blot out or emphasise specific frequencies or harmonic spectra; it even allows morphing, for example through the imprinting of an aspect of one sound (such as amplitude over time) onto another sound. The central paradox here is that it is only in the

Contemporary composition  87 forgetting of sound’s materiality, its abstracting into the sphere of the technical, that it becomes imagined to be an object to be handled and shaped ‘directly’ as (if it were) material.60 A specific modality of touch also has a role in the sculptural condition of sound, one that comes through (but is not limited to) relationships with recorded sound. In contrast with the conventional functioning of, say, the violin or the piano, sound becomes sculptural where it seems to exist in its own right. It normally goes without saying that with these former instruments one must maintain one’s touch – the pressure on the bow or one’s finger on the key – or else the sound dies away. In contrast, sculptural sounding implies the autonomy of the sound itself: one carves amplitude by moving the fader on the mixing desk, and attenuates unwanted frequencies by sweeping a filter cutoff; one acts on sonic material that nonetheless has existence, even if existing as silenced, waiting presently behind the fader to re-emerge at any moment. Even where triggered by gestures – as simple as initiating playback of the tape or digital sample – the sound material suggests potential self-sufficiency, as something ready to be called onto stage. Thus, more specifically, it is the withdrawal of normative touch that marks this aspect of sound materials’ sculptural treatment: that they needn’t be maintained through the maintenance of the performer’s touch. And where human touch is absented completely, sounds’ autonomy finds expression through technologies of automation. Indeed, in contrast with the violin or piano, the terms of the human–computer interface might even be reconfigured so that unexpected sounds result from the performer’s gestures. Rather than increased downward pressure – of the bow on the string or the finger’s initial strike on the key – which ‘naturally’ produces a louder dynamic, this pressure, when conceived of as information (often midi information), can be mapped onto any number of parameters. Again, this breaks the presumed relationship between the body and sound, reconfirming a sense that the sound has its own presence, that may be affected but is not caused by the ­(natural/ised) gestures of the performer’s body. Here body and sound are elements in an environment of relations but need not be allied causally. Indeed, looking back from the sound to the body, here the body’s own coherent synthesis becomes disregarded. It becomes instead conceived of as expressive of information to be utilised in effecting/affecting sound. This echoes one crucial aspect of the body in information society, in which bodies’ physical presence becomes imagined to be secondary to what it is seen to be expressive of, such as genetic and, later, behavioral information.61 As N. Katherine Hayles has argued (as explored in Chapter 2), this is a technological and thus historical mediation of how we think about embodiment and disembodiment.62 As Donna Haraway writes elsewhere, emblematic of this kind of envisioning of materiality’s relation to information, ‘biology here is a kind of cryptology’ – i.e. bodily matter becomes imagined to be the instantiation of a (genetic, informational) code, and matter can be understood through techniques of decoding.63 The organic, unified body becomes envisaged differently when informated (a term borrowed from S ­ hoshana Zuboff to label behaviour codified into information): an uncanny quantification that is both strange yet bears some kind of resemblance to us.64

88  Musical objects Acoustic composition also changes in light of the electroacoustic. Looking back to the experiments of the 1950s and 1960s, one can note some direct points of influence. As mentioned already, Iverson has shown how ‘Ligeti’s exposure to elektronische Musik and its discourses at the WDR studio spurred the development of his sound-mass style, introduced famously in Atmosphères’.65 Stockhausen’s Gruppen (1955–57) employs in acoustic form the spatialisation processes that are a mainstay of the electroacoustic realm (and realised in this sphere most directly in his later Oktophonie, 1990–91).66 As is well known, Helmut Lachenmann’s musique concrète instrumentale names a compositional approach which derives unexpected sound production from conventional instrumental objects (albeit approached in unconventional ways). Interestingly, Lachenmann is keen to emphasise that this idea is ‘not at all just about noises, it’s about the physical energy of sound’.67 And later it is perhaps specturalism that enacts most systematically the material of the acoustic realm as a relation to sounds’ technological mediation. Indeed, in all these post-electronic soundings one is struck by the irony that the sculptural in music – that is to say, the spatial and physical objecthood of sound as material – is spurred on through its mediation via a prior ‘dematerialisation’ as recorded or synthesised artefact. In Alvin Lucier’s output there persists an interest in sculptural sounding, and the intersection of the acoustic and the electronic. At the opening of the Introduction, we alluded already to his I Am Sitting in a Room (1969), which emphasises how the physical space of the room responds to and shapes the sonic result.68 Indeed, Lucier himself conceived his artistic practice as a sculptural orientation towards sound: Throughout my career I have tried to discover ways of moving sounds in space and revealing their sculptural characteristics. In Vespers (1968) and Reflections of Sounds from the Wall (1982) sounds bounce off reflective surfaces to various points in a room. In Directions of Sounds from the Bridge (1978) and The Shapes of the Sounds from the Board (1980) they flow out of musical instruments in different directions. In In Memoriam Jon Higgins (1985), a clarinetist [sic] causes ripples of sound to spin around the performance space. In none of these works is the movement produced by electronic switching or panning devices; instead, certain natural characteristics of sound are isolated and made audible. The results are subtle, often too much so for the average listener to discern. I accept this obstacle to the comprehension of my works but retain the intention as an impetus for compositional ideas.69 Similarly, Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas is in ­Lucier’s words a work that is ‘concerned with using sound to sculpt new shapes within a space’.70 This four-part work, begun in 1972, is constituted by a sound installation of tuned pure waves spinning around the room, a set of solo works, and a duet for voice or instrument accompanied by oscillators, an ‘ensemble’ of speakers and snare drums, and a piece involving dancers. These pieces for voice or instruments and oscillators explore the physicality and spatiality of sounding through posing interactions between player’s sounds and pure tones so as

Contemporary composition  89 to create relationships such as interference and beating.71 In the piece for voice one hears the singer ‘beat the lower [tone] in one direction and the higher one in another direction, and if you’re sitting in the audience you receive those changes of pressure at different places in different parts of the audience’.72 In part III, ‘snare drums are sympathetically resonated by the passing waves’.73 Importantly, here one can note a slippage between two aspects of sculptural sounding. Whereas in the work for voice it is the sound that becomes an object sculpted, in this latter part objects are placed sculpturally, that is, situated spatially, in service of emphasising the materiality of sound. This neatly knots together the notion that sound is an object to be sculpted and that sounding objects can be conceived sculpturally: as materials organised through spatial relations to other objects and to the myriad bodies of performers and listeners. This particular conception of the spatial in music pushes us towards what I will refer to as the curatorial aspect of approaching materials. A sculptural-curatorial approach is developed by a number of composers that explore objects and their sonic affordances. Cage, Lucier, and David Tudor, along with some Fluxus artists and those pursuing interstitial performance works – as explored in the previous chapter – provide initial forays in this direction. This is developed further in the work of numerous contemporary composers (some of which are focused on in detail in the next chapter).74 In the most general terms however, this is a situation captured in the image of the stage prior to many contemporary performances: before the audience, before the music starts, one sees a silent scene of objects laid out, often on a table or other surface, sitting on, in, or across instruments, and perhaps protruding from under the lid of the piano – all promise some kind of sonic potential that excitingly draws closer to realisation as the performers walk on stage… Some of James Saunders’s work provides us with an excellent recent example of this. In his materials vary greatly and are simply materials (2010) the audience is presented with a harp prepared with ten different materials placed between the strings in advance of the performance (Figure 4.1). These are played with two bows. Materials are chosen for their sonic qualities. This piece was written as one of a number in which the composer explored fragile sounds. But these materials, when taken together, take on specific connotations (pushing against the title’s pronouncement, that materials are ‘simply materials’), because each material relates

Figure 4.1  James Saunders, a page from materials vary greatly and are simply materials (2010). Reproduced with permission.

90  Musical objects to one of the traditional gifts given for the first ten wedding anniversaries: cotton, paper, leather, fruit, wood, sugar, wool, salt, copper, and tin.75 (The piece is dedicated to Tim Parkinson and Angharad Davies, and was first performed at their wedding.) The player is given six pages that may be played in any order. I call this curatorial initially because Saunders’s piece expresses conscious interest in the placement of objects and the player in relation to one another. A body and a set of specific objects are placed before the audience. Indeed, the composer leaves the performer to determine the exact nature of these relationships (the specific objects that fulfil each category of each material type, their placing on the instrument), thereby also extending to them some curatorial agency ahead of the performance. The approach is sculptural in as much as performance actions are concerned, in so far as through this prepared situation emerges an (if only imagined) self-sufficiency to the objects in their sounding – in their interrelationships, between objects, harp strings, and bows. All bowing actions are marked ppp (), and the score’s preface adds that the sounding should be ‘very quiet, with naturally occurring, unforced variations’.76 The former instruction of the performance dynamics demands an intense focus on the part of the listener, a grasping for the sound of the materials at a threshold of observation. Connected with this, the latter (‘naturally occurring, unforced variations’) necessitates that the player minimises their control over the sonic material and their exertion over specific audible results, which, again, are aimed to derive from the mutual interplay between objects themselves, rather than their use by a player for specific ends. This sculptural-curatorial tendency comes through in other works by Saunders from around this time, including with the same material or still, to vary the material (2011), in which at least two players bow nine different surfaces ‘on the edge of silence’, causing sound to ‘stop and start uncontrollably’.77 In surfaces (2010–11) players are offered 300 cards that each state an action involving the interplay between the performer and surface or the surface and another object or material. Examples include: ‘the side of an [object] is pushed across a [surface] with minimum pressure’, ‘the edge of a [surface] is whittled’, ‘as many holes as possible are punched out of a [surface]’, and ‘[liquid] is poured onto a [surface] from a great height.’ The duration of the piece is freely chosen, and actions can be completed ‘in any sequence or combination’.78 (This adopts for new purposes the form of the text-score, explored in the previous chapter with reference to Fluxus.) Saunders’s ‘surfaces’ are distinctly material, sculptural, as textured and changing – a field of interaction – and are far removed from an abstracted surface that one meets under Greenbergian modernist flatness. Yet, echoing Greenberg’s dialectic of limits, the fact that materials and surfaces are not specified by the composer paradoxically means that the specific qualities of these media are more closely observed and listened to in a performance, where the exact sonic results of them are unknown in advance (indicative of what in a later chapter I will label the aesthetics of the anticipatory). Likewise, in so many territories (2014), pitches play the role of a set of objects handled by the composer and set in indeterminate relation. Clarinettist, accordionist, pianist, and cellist each independently but simultaneously work their way through their own page of score, which is comprised of an eight-by-eight grid of sixty-four pitches, navigating from the top-left

Contemporary composition  91 to the bottom-right pitch in a path of their own choosing. Dynamics ranged from triple-p to the threshold of silence. ‘Stable states may sometimes develop where repetitions of cells in a fixed relationship occur. If this happens, players may either choose to submit and move on, co-exist for a time, or refuse to move on and wait for the other player(s) to submit.’ Again, Saunders leaves the emergence of the sonic result up to the indeterminate combination of the pitches themselves (with an understanding that pitch combinations become more predictable towards the beginning and ending corners of each page) and in the hands of players that respond to the unfolding combinations of the pitch materials. And this is why it is important to emphasise the intersection between the sculptural and curatorial in contemporary music. To refer to the sculptural alone risks misunderstanding, the mistaken suggestion that to say that music becomes sculptural is to say that it actually stands as a self-sufficient ‘object, a thing, so to speak’ (Adorno). It might also be taken to mean that once the sculpture is cast, it retains solidity, forever remaining on display. What the curatorial dimension insists upon is the temporality and heterogeneity of the sculptural: objects are exhibited in their relationships with one another, in dynamic relationships often bound to the duration of a performance that is necessarily temporary. Akin to an interest not in stasis but in the mobility not just of objects but of subjective focus, it states this object’s material and symbolic relation with this one’s; then with that, and also with these.

Plasticity during liquid times The necessary impermanent sculpturality of this strand of contemporary music-making echoes the flexibility and transience that characterises our liquid modern times. In this context, from the side of sculpture, sounding becomes attractive given prevailing notions of sound’s diffuseness and passingness; it also, as I will suggest in a moment (via painting), enables an energising of the plastic under socio-­economic conditions that demand constant dynamic and energetic renewal  – relentless sources of reinvigoration. This also problematises the presumed solidity of sculpture. As Zygmunt Bauman reminds us, ‘solids are cast once and for all. Keeping fluids in shape [in contrast] requires a lot of attention, constant vigilance and perpetual effort – and even then the success of the effort is anything but a foregone conclusion’.79 From the side of music, the sculptural is suggestive of some kind of permanence, however fleeting; any final reification as a sculptural object per se is disturbed by its curatorial dimension, which insists upon a relational mode of sounding bodies and objects in what they afford or signify in each other, across the span of the performance. Peter Geimer suggested something important of painting that reworks or incorporates non-painterly imagery (such as a painting of a photograph from a newspaper or TV report): rather than viewing this transformation as the transcending of the original image into something more profound, one should read this as a situation in which painting today ‘obtain[s] its sensory effects’ through turning to film, photography, and music, which are ‘continuously called up and kept alive as energetic models’.80 Inverse to this situation, in music it seems that the painterly

92  Musical objects or the sculptural are evoked (even where this evocation is not named consciously) in order that music is not constituted only by sensorial passingness. Articulating composition, performance, and listening through painterly, sculptural, and curatorial practices enables one to insist on music’s tangibility. If painting finds its energetic sensoriality through incorporating other images and art forms, music articulates solidity through turning to painting and sculpture. But isn’t this just what Adorno was getting at: that music only becomes an object, a thing, so to speak, in its emergence through time? Yes, and no. Convergences between music and other art forms such as painting and sculpture still play out dialectical relations of time and space. But what is different, as just mentioned above, is that the urgency of music’s material thingness today arises from liquid modern conditions defined by passingness and malleability. Time, space, and the place of the material within (or throughout?) these is changed. This contemporary necessity might be placed within a historical context: today one cannot adopt the function of sounding in the guise of a nineteenth-century romanticism – as transcending solidity – as this solidity can no longer be assumed as the framing context that transcendence would take us beyond; for a similar reason, one can neither continue modernist imaginings of sound’s sculptural possibilities (Varèse, Ligeti, et al.), as celebrated against the solidity of the social and institutional conditions that frame it. Rather, the contemporary composer is caught in a paradoxical position: rooting music in the plastic, or in the curatorial emplacing of objects, offers it (relative) permanence during an era of passingness – some kind of differentiation from a liquid background that is always in motion. Yet, at the same time, music uncovers this physicality just at a time when the tangible cannot be taken for granted; in this sense the tangible in music embodies characteristic flows derived from these same conditions. Related to this, the contemporary plastic arts that music roots itself in – here painting and sculpture – are themselves necessarily and immanently infused with the characteristics of the liquid modern. Contemporary music’s sculpturality thus constitutes a grasping for the plastic, not a tangibility that can be said to independently exist (if only we could reach it) but one that is problematic from the very beginning. In short, the sculptural and curatorial modalities outlined speak to anxieties over individual and collective investments in materiality. Put another way, the more one insists on music’s materiality, the more one senses that this materiality is subject to questioning or a process of unfinished forming. A lesson from painting is helpful in enabling us to further consider how artistic activities sit in relation to changing socio-historical, economic, and technological conditions. The story goes that painter Paul Delaroche pronounced painting dead on seeing the first daguerreotype in 1839, and that this pronouncement has been uttered periodically since, in the face of waves of technological development that involve images and their reproduction.81 Despite its ‘death’, some have suggested that the resurgence of painting in the late-twentieth century can be explained in part due to its relationship with late capitalism. Isabelle Graw in particular argues that this art form is able to produce the sensation that it has captured living labor, [and] this could explain its current popularity in our new economy, which has been

Contemporary composition  93 alternatively described by social scientists as a ‘post-Fordist condition’ (Paolo Virno), as ‘cognitive capitalism’ (Yann Moulier-Boutang), or as ‘network-capitalism’ (Luc Boltanski/Ève Chiapello). Through its close association with the artist’s life and as a clear trace of their living labour, it is an art form ‘particularly well-positioned in such an economy’.82 Music of course has a very different manner of production and circulation than painting. Despite this, one can ask how repeated assertions of the bodily in contemporary music might also derive from and reflect on the technological and economic conditions just mentioned. At the very least, one might comment that, on reflection, it is unsurprising that in an economy that demands the production, capture, and circulation of sensation, one strata of compositional practice emphasises the physicality and the bodily, producing work and then reproducing under performance conditions situations in which bodies and their performance-labour are themselves features of aesthetic intrigue: those things that we listen to and watch acutely. (Alastair Williams notes that composer Brian Ferneyhough draws on Gilles Deleuze’s take on painter Francis Bacon, ‘that painting is not about reproducing or inventing forms but about capturing forces’ – a comment which accords precisely with this formulation.83) One is again faced with the paradox that even in music that is critical of underlying cultural-economic conditions – for instance music which explodes fetishised objecthood derived from consumer culture – this same music converges with the dynamics of these conditions in other respects. Perhaps, echoing Adorno, we might term this a strategy of survival: it is only in the mimesis of these dynamics that critical art forms maintain their social relevance. One could note that a number of the approaches to the piano-object discussed in the previous chapter could be considered sculptural-curatorial. In so doing it would be helpful to reintroduce the term orientation, and thereby remind oneself that just as this approach brings specific qualities and affordances of sound(ing) material into focus this is simultaneously – and constitutively – effected through the forgetting of other relations. For instance, insistence on materials’ mutual interactivity in the present demands a temporary forgetting of the historically mediated character of the material and of our relation to it. As argued in that chapter, the choice of one’s object(s) or material(s), whether the piano or something other, is an important factor that must be understood in conjunction with orientations that might be active or passive (or fleeting dialectically between the two) and which seek to affirm or negate the object’s presence. In summary, Part II has emphasised that one always needs to recognise our relation to and through materials, rather than assert discourses of materiality ‘as such’. This should be stated also of pronouncements about objecthood: what we say of objects, what we do with them, what they do for us – and in fact also the joy we take in withdrawing touch, the joy of objects’ ‘own’ ­activity – does tell us something of objects, but also of ourselves. And the word ‘orientation’ is useful here, as its multifaceted usage enables us to consider our ‘approaches’ to both objects and bodies posed in relation to them. It is because the piano seems such an uncontroversial ‘choice’ of object to make

94  Musical objects use of musically and in performance practices that I take it as a case study of these orientations in Chapter 3. But I insist that the very fact of this choice is important, and our forgetting of this echoes a condition under which forms of presence are contingent on other practices of absenting. This is a historical point as much as a philosophical one (Derrida’s famous metaphysics of presence); what one sees in the piano-object is a leveraging of the instrument’s naturalisation, as part of the furniture of (‘classical’, institutional, bourgeois) music-making. This objecthood has also been explored in the present chapter under what I label some recent music’s ‘sculptural-curatorial’ condition. This describes a recent strand of compositional practice that increasingly poses a relation to materials conceptualised as in some sense plastic. This sculptural attitude has its forerunners in some strains of mid-twentieth-century modernist practice; but differences arise in how these objects are cast in space, and in how one is led to perceive surfaces and depth. Key also to contemporary sonic sculpturality is a relational dimension that I have characterised as curatorial. This emphasises the sonic-sculptural’s dynamic quality – a changingness and material heterogeneity in keeping with the liquid modern conditions in which practices regarding sculptural objects are embedded. Looking toward the final two chapters: in Part III we consider how the relationality of objects and materials in composition constitute an ecological approach  – that is, the setting up of or recognition of a space–time comprising a field of interactions. This is a close cousin of the curatorial, as discussed here: what the curatorial and the ecological both provide is a language for a conception of the compositional as relationships. They differ in that the former derives from a discourse of administration, the latter from environmental thinking. But their shared characteristic of relationality means that while one appeals to a modern culture of cataloguing and rationality, and the other to a self-evident nature, each is not limited to these spheres of culture and nature. Nonetheless, despite pushing against the differentiation of these concepts, the overtones of this duality are still heard in this distinction. More fundamentally, these echoes of the old culture–nature division come down to the implicit conditions of agency that play out in the subject–object dialectic of artistic practices. The curatorial implies agency on the part of the (human) creator, who chooses how objects, their sounding, and sounds as objects sit beside and thread across one another. The ecological, by contrast, connotes the self-sufficient activity of a nonhuman environmental system. As such, with the former, agency – the change-making of the relationships between materials displayed and sounded – lies ultimately with the (human) curator, even where the curator-figure follows and responds to the implications of the materials themselves. The latter is suggestive of dynamic self-making and self-changing. Opening Part III, this question of agency and material is central to the next chapter. The apparent binary of agential possibilities is also scrutinised further. Following this, the final chapter explores contested contemporary and historically long-standing conceptualisations of nature that effect and are performatively constituted through recent compositional practices.

Contemporary composition  95

Notes 1 As Zygmunt Bauman writes, ‘modernity means many things, and its arrival and progress can be traced using many and different markers. One feature of modern life and its modern setting stands out, however, [and this] is the changing relationship between space and time’. Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 8. 2 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918: With a New Preface (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2003). 3 Jonathan W. Bernard has a nice phrase regarding intramusical space: Of Varèse’s music, he writes of ‘the internal space – the space that the work itself embodies’. See his ‘Varèse’s Space, Varèse’s Time’, in Edgard Varèse: Composer, Sound Sculptor, Visionary (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), 150. Emphasis in the original. 4 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On Some Relationships between Music and Painting,’ trans. Susan Gillespie, The Musical Quarterly 79/1 (1995), 66–79 at 66. 5 ‘As time itself, as a medium, is transformed purely into a material, and as the things that occur in it are reduced to tonal materials, the way is paved for spatialization: space as identical with absolute material.’ Adorno, ‘On Some Relationships,’ 69. 6 Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, in Art in Theory 1900–2000, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, 773–779 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 775. 7 Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, 775. 8 Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, 777. 9 This was, in different ways, an implicit dimension of both ‘On Some Relationships Between Music and Painting’ and ‘Modernist Painting’. The former considered how space–time relations within music connected with a world beyond it (for example, linking Debussy and ‘French painting of his era’; p. 67). Greenberg tended more towards the construction of a metanarrative: modernist painting as a culmination of historically emerging painterly practices. From what follows, the reader will appreciate my approach is more in keeping with the former than the latter approach. 10 For example, drawing on cognitive linguistics and James Gibson’s ecological thought, Eric Clarke presents a well-developed psychological account of the perception of space in music. That said, discussing psychology and cultural-historical factors are not mutually exclusive options. Indeed, Clarke in part addresses the technological – that is to say a necessarily historical – mediation of perception through discussing how recording and studio techniques create a sense of space in some music. See Eric Clarke, ‘Music, Space and Subjectivity’, in Music Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience, ed. Georgina Born (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 90–110. 11 Although one needn’t imagine this writing to happen only within compositional actions, where one conventionally sees the literal writing of notes on a page; one might argue for instance that performers contribute to inscriptions of musical meaning, responding to score and sound, and enacting critical écriture. 12 ‘Twelve-tone technique is truly its [music’s historical dialectic] fate. It subjugates music by setting it free. The subject rules over the music by means of a rational system in order to succumb to this rational system itself.’ Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 54. 13 Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, 776. 14 ‘The optical aspect played an essential part in all phases of creating the Spiegel. When writing down the scenic draft (1961) it was always clear to me that there cannot be a single, compulsory bracing of the optical and acoustical level; instead, the combination of both creates a field of overlapping in which various individual solutions are possible.’ Friedrich Cerha, Programme note to Spiegel (I–VII). Available at www.­universaledition. com/friedrich-cerha-130/works/spiegel-i-vii-4911 (accessed 15 April 2020). 15 Malcolm MacDonald, Varèse: Astronomer in Sound (London: Kahn & Averill, 2003), 335–336.

96  Musical objects 16 MacDonald, Varèse, 139. 17 MacDonald, Varèse, 154. 18 Varèse cited MacDonald, Varèse, 110–111. 19 Varèse cited in MacDonald, Varèse, 144. 20 Philippe Lalitte, ‘The Theories of Helmholtz in the Work of Varèse’, Contemporary Music Review 30/5 (2011), 329–344 at 329–330. 21 Varèse cited in MacDonald, Varèse, 51. 22 Lalitte, ‘The Theories of Helmholtz in the Work of Varèse’, 334. 23 Varèse (speaking in 1963), cited in Lalitte, ‘The Theories of Helmholtz in the Work of Varèse’, 330. 24 Varèse cited MacDonald, Varèse, 141. 25 MacDonald, Varèse, 140. 26 MacDonald suggests that Varèse’s use of mosaic and collage also subverted the organic ideals of the nineteenth century; this was more appropriate to the urbanised and mechanised world of the twentieth. See MacDonald, Varèse, 146. 27 As Jonathan W. Bernard writes, the ‘reciprocity [of space and time] stems, not only from the generally strong visual attributes of Varèse’s music, but even more crucially from the affinities it bears to the visual art of early modernism, particular (in this case) cubist painting and sculpture, in which multiple viewpoints of “the same” object, represented in sequence or in superimposition, were often featured’. See Bernard, ‘Varèse’s Space, Varèse’s Time’, 151. 28 Varèse cited in Bernard, ‘Varèse’s Space, Varèse’s Time’, 150. 29 Varèse cited MacDonald, Varèse, 141. 30 Bernard refers to this visual technique as ‘drawing’, one technique among five basic types of sketch. See Bernard ‘Rules and Regulation: Lessons from Ligeti’s Compositional Sketches’, in György Ligeti: Of Foreign Lands and Strange Sounds, ed. Louise Duchesneau and Wolfgang Marx, 149–168 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2011). Plates reproduce some of these sketches. 31 Jennifer Iverson, ‘The Emergence of Timbre: Ligeti’s Synthesis of Electronic and Acoustic Music in Atmosphères’, Twentieth-Century Music 7/1 (2011), 61–89. 32 Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, 777. 33 The dialectical limit of this is arguably found in Anish Kapoor’s use of (and exclusive rights over) Vantablac, a paint so dark it absorbs 99.96% of light, and which thus negates any sense of texture. This paint was originally developed for military applications, such as painting stealth aircraft. As an extreme black colour, it embraces invisibility, or the negation of colour. Uniform flatness, a boundary, opens into an abyss. 34 Paul Griffiths, Modern Music and After, 3rd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 136. 35 Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999). 36 David Joselit, ‘Painting Beside Itself’, October 130 (2009), 125–134. Joselit expands on this in a later essay, writing that a key concern in contemporary painting is with paintings’ ‘entry into the world as an image in circulation’. See ‘Marking, Scoring, Storing, and Speculating (on Time)’, in Painting Beyond Itself: The Medium in the Post-Medium Condition, ed. Isabelle Graw and Ewa Lajer-Bucharth, 11–20 (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), 19. André Rottmann similarly writes the following: ‘No longer synonymous only with a flat picture plane hung on the wall, today, painting tends to emphasize the apparatus of its appearance and the conduits of its circulation.’ André Rottmann, ‘Introduction: Remarks on Contemporary Painting’s Perseverance’, in Thinking Through Painting: Reflexivity and Agency Beyond the Canvas, ed. Daniel Birnbaum, Isabelle Graw, and Nikolaus Hirsch, 9–13 (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 10. 37 André Rottmann, ‘Introduction: Remarks on Contemporary Painting’s Perseverance’, 10–11.

Contemporary composition  97 38 See Peter Geimer, ‘Painting and Atrocity: The Tuymans Strategy’, in Thinking Through Painting: Reflexivity and Agency Beyond the Canvas. 39 As Adorno adds, ‘the integration of total planning and the atomization into tones correspond’ (p. 68). 40 Aaron Cassidy ‘Imagining a Non-Geometrical Rhythm’, inaugural lecture at the University of Huddersfield, 25 March 2015, available at www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Va62zpUMIoE, 24:00 in video. 41 Sergeant, ‘Scoring: Towards a Material Notion of Making in Compositional Practice’, Paper delivered to the Royal Musicological Association Annual Conference, University of Bristol (September 2018). Available at https://static1.squarespace.com/ static/56238aa4e4b059c47b4ad818/t/5b9f8795aa4a990d71443cfd/1537181590202/ sergeant_scoring2018_writtenversion.pdf (accessed 7 April 2020). 42 Sergeant, ‘Scoring: Towards a Material Notion of Making in Compositional Practice.’ 43 As interface, this conception of thinking/making the surface echoes Tim Ingold’s notion of ‘binding’ (to be discussed in Chapter 6). 44 Alastair Williams, ‘Swaying with Schumann: Subjectivity and Tradition in Wolfgang Rihm's “Fremde Szenen” I-III and Related Scores’, Music & Letters 87/3 (2006), 379–397 at 383. 45 Yves Knockaert, Wolfgang Rihm, a Chiffre: The 1980s and Beyond (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2017), 107. 46 Rihm cited in Knockaert, Wolfgang Rihm, a Chiffre, 105. 47 Knockaert, Wolfgang Rihm, a Chiffre, 105. 48 Williams, ‘Swaying with Schumann’, 383. 49 Knockaert, Wolfgang Rihm, a Chiffre, 105. 50 Rihm cited in Richard E. McGregor, ‘Wolfgang Rihm: Aspects of Unity and Diversity in His Compositional Processes’, Contemporary Music Review 36/4 (2017), 203–206 at 205, endnote 1. 51 Alastair Williams, Music in Germany since 1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 150. 52 Knockaert, Wolfgang Rihm, a Chiffre, 106. 53 I am grateful to Isabella van Elferen for suggesting the image of the palimpsest when more clearly tying together this section. 54 This could be referred to as part of the ‘expanded field’ of sculpture, part of a diffuse collection of terms that take meaning through their discursive relation. See Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October 8 (1979), 30–44. Using Krauss’s ‘expanded field’ as a model, Seth Kim-Cohen develops a schema encompassing sound in his In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2009), arguing it must be understood as part of a ‘universe of terms’ (p. 157). As I hope is evident from my interest in the conditions surrounding a changing materiality, rather than purporting sound’s immediacy, I am very much in agreement with him that sound (and its materiality) must be understood in its discursive mediation. Kim-Cohen’s reworking of Krauss’s schema enables him to develop the idea of ‘non-cochlear sonic art’ – the ‘combination of the positive categories of “noise” and “speech”’ (p. 156). 55 Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear, 113–114 and Cage cited pp. 113–114. Also see John Cage and Daniel Charles, For the Birds: John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles (Salem: Marion Boyars, 1981), 221. 56 I explore this dialectic in greater detail in Samuel Wilson, ‘Strategies of Conquest and Defence: Encounters with the Object in Twentieth-Century Music,’ Journal of the Royal Musical Association 145/2 (2020), 457–484. 57 I am inclined to quote Hayles again (as in Chapter 2): ‘for information to exist, it must always be instantiated in a medium.’ Hayles, We Became Posthuman: Virtual bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 13. The need for this reminder from Hayles follows her argument that

98  Musical objects we late moderns tend (mistakenly) to think of information and code as the essence that escapes or sits outside of any particular material instantiation or iteration of it. 58 Ian Fleming, ‘I Have No Mouth (pts.1–6): Introducing Postdigital Specturalism’, Leonardo Music Journal 24 (2014), 45–48. 59 Hugues Vinet, ‘Science and Technology of Music and Sound: The IRCAM Roadmap’, Journal of New Music Research 36/3 (2007), 207–226. 60 Isabella van Elferen focuses in on the paradoxical status of timbre in this regard, arguing that it is suggestive of both materiality and immateriality and hence entices an array of critical, discursive, and compositional responses. See van Elferen, Timbre: Paradox, Materialism, Vibrational Aesthetics (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2020). Timbre, she summarises, ‘points indexically to the materiality of sound and defies it, it is an indispensable but highly unstable part of music’s internal and external vectors, it can be hinted at by the most colorful of verbal icons but eludes even the most ephemeral of them, and it presents the object-cause of desire in the listening experience’ (p. 96). 61 On behavioural information and the rise of surveillance capitalism, see Shoshana Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (London: Profile Books, 2019). 62 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman. 63 Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 164. 64 Shoshana Zuboff writes of the informating of working practices thus: ‘As a result of the informating process, computer-mediated work extends organizational codification resulting in a comprehensive “textualization” of the work environment.’ Zuboff, ‘Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization’, Journal of Information Technology 30 (2015), 75–89, at 76. It is no stretch to suggest that, in the musical sphere, the body’s becoming informationally textural, becoming scored in this way, offers composers new opportunities of musical writing. 65 Iverson, ‘The Emergence of Timbre’, 62. 66 Gascia Ouzounian has noted how the development of sound spatialization technologies reinforced, for some modernist composers, a post-War Cartesian and Euclidean conception of space–time, as a ‘container’ to be filled, in which transformations occur. See Ouzounian, ‘Sound Installation Art’ in Music Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience, ed. Georgina Born, 73–89 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 76. 67 Lachenmann cited in Williams, Music in Germany Since 1968, 121. Williams also relates to this Barthes’s ‘grain of the voice’, as this attempts to foreground physicality and particularity over beautiful tone production (p. 122). 68 Regarding I am Sitting …, I am in agreement with Kim-Cohen, who has argued that interpretation of this work should not be reduced merely to an obsession with physical phenomena: one should reflect on the piece’s discursive relation to other works and practices (Kim-Cohen, Blink of an Ear, 192–193). As I hope is evident throughout this book, I aim to contribute to an understanding of these relations through attending, among other things, to the conditions under which these discursive relations – and indeed the notion of ‘the physical’, as such – are mediated. 69 Alvin Lucier, Album note to Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas. Retrieved from www.lovely.com/albumnotes/notes1015.html (accessed 30 June 2020). 70 Lucier cited in Jennie Gottschalk, Experimental Music Since 1970 (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 119. 71 A strategy used by Lucier in many other works, for instance Music for Baritone and Slow Sweep Pure Wave Oscillators (1993). 72 Lucier cited in Gottschalk, Experimental Music Since 1970, 119. 73 Lucier, Album note to Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas. 74 Jennie Gottschalk discusses some composers who utilise objects in her Experimental Music Since 1970, especially pp. 89–96.

Contemporary composition  99 75 The title of Saunders’s piece borrows from Donald Judd’s influential 1964 essay, ‘Specific Objects’, specially from a passage discussing artists’ uses of new materials developed in industrial contexts: ‘Materials vary greatly and are simply materials – formica, aluminum, cold-rolled steel, plexiglass, red and common brass, and so forth. They are specific. If they are used directly, they are more specific.’ Owing that these new materials have not yet been sublimated into artistic contexts, the specificity of the material is underlined. Judd continues: ‘Most of the new materials are not as accessible as oil on canvas and are hard to relate to one another. They aren’t obviously art. The form of a work and its materials are closely related.’ Judd, ‘Specific Objects’, unpaginated, Judd Foundation, retrieved from: https://juddfoundation.org/artist/writing/ (accessed 1 July 2020). 76 Saunders, materials vary greatly and are simply materials (2010). Retrieved from http://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/4649/1/materials%20vary%20greatly%20and%20 are%20simply%20materials.pdf (accessed 7 April 2020). 77 Performance instructions for Saunders’s with the same material or still, to vary the material. Retrieved from http://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/4641/1/with%20the%20 same%20material%20or%20still%2C%20to%20vary%20the%20material.pdf (accessed 7 April 2020). 78 Saunders, surfaces (2010–11) score. Retrieved from http://researchspace.bathspa. ac.uk/4646/2/surfaces%20A8%20cards.pdf (accessed 7 April 2020). 79 Bauman, Liquid Modernity, p. 8. 80 Geimer, ‘Painting and Atrocity,’ 31. 81 For discussion, see Terry R. Myers, ‘Introduction: What Has Already Been Said about Painting Is Still Not Enough’, in Painting, ed. Terry R. Myers, 12–19 (London and Cambridge: Whitechapel Gallery, 2011). 82 Isabelle Graw, ‘The Value of Liveliness: Painting as an Index of Agency in the New Economy’, in Painting Beyond Itself: The Medium in the Post-Medium Condition, ed. Isabelle Graw and Ewa Lajer-Bucharth, 79–101 (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), 82–83. 83 Williams, Music in Germany Since 1968, p. 201. My emphasis.

Part III

Musical materials

5 On the ‘material’ of musical material

Following the previous chapter’s discussion of music, painting, and sculpture, this chapter unpacks some ideas around materiality and musical material. It takes up the issue of these materials’ strange objecthood, their thingness, after that compulsively repeated phrase of the previous chapter: music’s temporal congealing into ‘an object, a thing, so to speak’. I do this by exploring how one might variously modulate Theodor W. ­Adorno’s concept of musical material during a time of new materialisms, such that it might resonate new meanings. This should not be seen linearly and straightforwardly as an ‘updating’ of Adorno’s thought – ‘Adorno 2.0’ – for a time in which an increasingly digitised, informational, ‘liquid’ culture challenges assumptions about solid, unshakable materiality. Instead, this discussion navigates points of dialogue: suggestions are taken from contemporary materialisms in order that one might begin to better examine music’s place in and aesthetic reactions to material cultures; concerns are also voiced regarding the potential subsumption of peculiarly musical materialities into a more generalised concept. And in this chapter I explore how musical materials, called to our attention by contemporary materialist thinking, can be conceived of as sites of aesthetic and critical intrigue. In this sense, I do not seek to synthesise Adorno’s materialism and that of others. Indeed, in an Adornian paradox, musical materials are instead shown to problematise preconceptions about and reified notions of what materiality is. This musically immanent questioning of materiality I reflect on in part in critical response to some (new) materialist work that purports to unproblematically explore matter ‘as such’.1

On the ‘critical’ of critical theory If it is to retain its criticality, a necessary problematisation of critical theory must accompany this musically immanent dimension. As argued directly in the Introduction and more implicitly throughout the rest of this book, the appeal and contemporary efficacy of music’s theorisation – here rooted genealogically in the work of Adorno and others – is most promising where this critical theory challenges inherited presumptions about its context and its domain of its applicability. This challenge or response to methodological rigidity is an appeal to the spirit of the law over the letter of the law. I make an analogous appeal to Adornian

104  Musical materials thinking and discussion of the musically new. Rather than taking new music and its theorisation as a set of signifiers or demonstrable conditions, met and checked off – as laws to be recognisably worked within – I here take inspiration from them as points of beginning. It is taken as something embracing a self-reflexive spirit that pushes against the boundaries of reification and of codification (the ‘letter of the law’). This is not to say, however, that this pushing forward means forgetting that the critical in music and theory has its hallmarks and characteristic qualities; just as the spirit of the law cannot forget the law itself. If one is to understand Adorno’s contributions to thinking and his thought’s contemporary relevance, care must be taken not to ossify Adorno-influenced dialectics into an undialectical method – an Adornian system of dialectics. This is because Adorno’s writings attempt constantly to undercut their own fixity and the reification of thought. As Fredric Jameson notes there is something inherently problematic about seeing dialectics as a mode of thinking.2 For him, the strength of dialectical thinking is not that it becomes a system; instead it highlights that systematisation regards a finite set of possibilities and is always unable to fully grasp the objects of thought and the thoughts themselves. Reflecting on this, we could say that there is an inherent tension in the idea of an established Adorno scholarship: that between (1) the letter-of-the-law needed to understand, set out, and explicate Adorno’s ideas and their interrelationships, and (2) following the spirit of critical thought through problematising the systematisation and reification of thought.3 As Jameson points out, however, the constant undercutting and dereification of language is ‘easier said than done’ – this ‘poses extraordinarily difficult writing problems, which are probably best solved by the multiplication of terms rather than their suppression’.4 The spirit of Adorno’s work seems to suggest a constant need to liquify the solidity of its own knowledge, to find renewal and life only in its encountering of something other to it, rather than yet again be posited as an (admittedly enigmatic) key for the interpretation of a few composers’ works, predominantly located in the first half of the last century. While new things are surely yet to be said about Adorno and Schoenberg, and even Adorno and Late Beethoven, to repeatedly render an ‘Adornian’ reception of this music problematically implies a freezing of undialectical – that is, static, non-dynamic – essence. This merely produces and reproduces symbiotic musical and philosophical canons. One might contest that this concretisation does helpfully and productively grant knowledge formation about both theory and music; furthermore, the dynamic movement of the dialectic is most visible when moving across the stable backdrop provided by reification (or else where the relation is between ideas pushing and pulling in converse directions). This is true in one sense. Yet the overemphasis of this lawlike codification alone dulls this theory’s genuinely critical edge. This finds its institutional expression in a Critical Theory compartmentalised safely among other specialised knowledges within a schematised intellectual division of labour.5 Discourse of this nature is an expression of what Julia Kristeva has more generally characterised as ‘academic discourse’, established institutionalised thinking which ‘possesses an extraordinary ability to absorb, digest, and neutralize all of the key, radical, or dramatic moments of thought’.6 Let it also be understood,

On the ‘material’ of musical material  105 however, that my suggestion that one deterritorialise Adorno’s aesthetics is not to proclaim its universal and ahistorical applicability (this would be, again, to cement the structure of thought as an unchanging framework); indeed, Adorno’s theoretical contributions – like critical compositional activities themselves – exist in and emphasise their relation to particular historical and material conditions, and this in part constitutes their criticality whilst simultaneously guarding against ahistorical universalism.7 Hence, I suggest that one should resist this theory’s nullification, by embracing a spirit of critical reflexivity – of the inherent problematic of reducing all to the conceptualisable, of the impossibility of finding everything and everythought a place in which to sit beside one another with neither tension nor contradiction – without subscribing only to the accepted law of method. In sum, this is to insist that the ‘spirit’ and critical potential of Adorno’s thought is neutralised if it is followed too closely, ‘to the letter’. In this view, one should problematise new fields of musical and philosophical inquiry in relation to this thinking, and resist the reification of Adorno’s dialectics as a ‘philosophical approach’. His thinking demands a creative and deterritorialised misreading, in a gesture which does not provide a reified meaning in the singular. The theoretical text is productively conceived as a ‘model of interconnection, a navigational tool’ (to borrow a phrase from Rosi Braidotti), one that facilitates movement within a constellation of ideas, in which an object of discussion (Adorno’s ‘musical material’) comes to be differently refracted given one’s own changing position in relation to it.8 This chapter aims to achieve this via the introduction of related ideas about matter, dialectics, and agency, constituting an exploration of the interconnectedness of aspects of musical material and materiality. In these materialist terms, I suggest a language for critically discussing music from Adorno’s time and after.

On the ‘theory’ of materialist theory The emergence of so-called new materialist theory provides an urgent context  – as well as fertile resources – for (re)conceptualising musical material after Adorno. Indeed, this recent body of theory can itself be more fully developed on accounting for music and its materials. Here I propose some initial steps to do so. In these terms – and rather than providing firm, final answers about music’s materiality – I hope to open the field to a modality of questioning and a set of theoretical orientations vis-à-vis music’s materials. Promisingly, in line with this, new materialist theory has been characterised as concerning less the specific object of thought and more the terms by which an object or objects might be considered or encountered interpretatively. As already quoted in the Introduction, new materialism has been said to have no ‘clear referent’ and is rather ‘something to be put to work’.9 This it already shares with Adorno’s somewhat anti-methodological thinking. Briefly outlining Adorno’s concept of musical material will enable us to identify points of connection, difference, and development with relation to current materialist perspectives. Doing so will enable us to navigate three principal points of dialogue: the first involves reflecting on musical materials and materialities as

106  Musical materials potentially active components in composition, performance, and listening; the second concerns the dualisms and dialectics through which concepts of materiality are articulated; third, the issue of agency is considered. Adorno’s idea of musical material appears in various forms throughout his output, and crystallises aspects found in his thought more generally: the dialectics of history and nature, the antagonistic relations of constraint and freedom under modernity. Musical material for Adorno is all that faces the composer in the present as inherited from the past: formal schemes, instrumental forces, harmonic and melodic formulae and expectations, and so on.10 These have all been shaped already by a history of compositional practice. Carl Dahlhaus summarised this idea: ‘The concept of material as propounded by Adorno means preformed material’.11 Enigmatically inscribed in musical material is a history of past compositional decisions. Material must therefore be understood as historically situated. At the same time, this material ‘finds itself’ in new and unpredictable circumstances in the historical present. In a 1930 radio debate with Ernst Krenek, Adorno stated that ‘the possibilities for composing already contain the sediment of history within them’.12 The basis of any possible compositional response to material’s new musical and social circumstances is mediated by a history sedimented within it. Indeed, past ‘subjective’ compositional choices, through their repetition, rationalization, and ossification, came to appear as a form of objectivity – the way things are. This dialectical reversal is writ large in the ­Enlightenment: ‘The totalizing and objectifying dynamic of modern reason necessarily regresses in its pursuit of progress, for the free subject, in dominating the world and mastering itself becomes the object of its own oppression.’13 The subject, in seeking freedom through progress (and instrumental reason), becomes only further constrained. Being a place in which the dialectics of subjectivity and objectivity, of freedom and domination, are worked through, the musical work is an inexplicable embodiment of philosophical and social antagonisms. As Adorno puts it, ‘musical material itself is not natural material, nothing physical that remains constantly itself, but something historical’.14 Yet, at the same time, particular ways of ‘doing’ music, and aspects of music itself, come to appear as natural. They become ‘second nature’. Crucially, this complicates our sense of what nature is, as one cannot simply disentangle the ‘first’ nature from the second. Furthermore, Adorno observes in music, more generally, a characteristically apparent ‘naturalness’. Music shares a quality of immediacy with nature, in seemingly referring to nothing outside itself: ‘In the case of music, as with nature, what is most striking is its immediacy’.15 Adorno’s concept of musical material reminds us that, in fact, experiences of music and nature are mediated by history. Notably, taken uncritically, materiality also seems to suggest immediacy: it appears to be the stuff which is ‘simply there’ or, like nature, the inert state of the world as apart from an active and autonomous human subject. It also appears as meaningless and without purpose. As Jane Bennett observes, the label ‘material’ is often appealed to as a trope of fixity, something denoting ‘some stable or rock-bottom reality’ (e.g. the evocation of ‘material interests’) or some ‘founding pre-discursive space’.16 Material for Bennett is never a simple fixity or brute physicality; she instead develops a notion of ‘the material’ from which energy or

On the ‘material’ of musical material  107 force itself emerges. Even with respect to aspects of the world that appear incorporeal, ‘mobile activity remains immanent to the material world’, she suggests.17 She has in her sights the development of a materialism that is not contingent on an extraneous vitalising force.18 Bennett’s suspicion of a vitalised ­materialism – in which passive material is activated by something other to it – leads to her development of a vital materialism. In this she expresses incredulity towards the dualism of materiality as passive and immateriality as correspondingly active (activating) force. Here we find some initial points of contact with aspects of Adorno’s thinking, in particular his notions of non-identity and nature.19 Under the logic of instrumental reason – under modernity’s dominant form of rationality and the processes of standardisation – both are distant, unapproachable. Yet, at the same time, non-identity and nature continually threaten to impinge into – or to disturbingly flair up from within – their dialectical counterparts: identity and history. I suggest that this capacity of flux also, in fact, resembles a vital understanding of materiality. Materiality, like non-identity, like nature, is always ‘problematic’; like these two other terms, it can neither be subsumed conceptually nor rendered inert. It cannot be isolated from the conceptual – or ‘immaterial’ (an equally problematic label) – categories which it ultimately disturbs.

Matter and activity The object is, for Adorno, characterised by a heterogeneity that disturbs stable ontological categories, which were for him exemplified in modern scientific epistemologies: To yield to the object means to do justice to the object’s qualitative moments. Scientific objectification, in line with the quantifying tendency of all science since Descartes, tends to eliminate qualities and to transform them into measurable definitions.20 A critical aesthetics of materiality should, accordingly, recognise objects’ capacities for arousing a problematization of quantifiable knowledge – it would acknowledge what Adorno calls their ‘qualitative moments’. Many contemporary materialisms emphasise the capacity of matter as active: as a source of disturbance, force, or even agency (the last term is explored below more fully). In her Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett identifies in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics points of correspondence between his idea of non-identity – as apparent in objects’ ‘qualitative moments’ – and what Bennett calls the vital thing-power of objects.21 As Bennett describes it, the concept of thing-power ‘gestures toward the strange ability of ordinary, man-made items to exceed their status as objects and to manifest traces of independence or aliveness, constituting the outside of our own experience’.22 Thing-power shares with non-identity the character of a heterogeneity excluded from conceptual knowledge rooted in Enlightenment humanism and anthropocentrism. It is a force of excess that emerges from within material. Regarding non-identity, one also recognises that

108  Musical materials [t]his elusive force is not, however, wholly outside human experience, for Adorno describes non-identity as a presence that acts upon us: we knowers are haunted, he says, by a painful, nagging feeling that something’s being forgotten or left out.23 This normative exclusion of non-identity, one could note, echoes the position of nature under modernity: it is something that, through its domination via Enlightenment rationality, appears, contradictorily, as both immediately present yet also unknowable and alienated from us. Adorno argues for sensitivity towards the object and its heterogeneity, asserting in Negative Dialectics that it is only ‘by passing to the object’s preponderance that dialectics is rendered as materialistic’.24 Music, being a temporal art, both denies a solid materiality whilst also proffering the possibility of being ‘an object, a thing, so to speak’ (to again cite the phrase from Adorno, mulled over in the previous chapter). Ambiguous in its materiality, it is an aesthetic practice that is well positioned to call attention to the problematics of its own material and conceptualisation. Indeed, in doing so, music might raise questions about our experience and comprehension of materiality more generally. As ‘a thing’, it also draws attention to forces that seem to emerge from within, yet that simultaneously point to something out-side.25 In this respect it resonates with what Bennett calls thing-power. ‘Adorno [...] acknowledges that human experience [...] includes encounter with an out-side that is active, forceful, and (quasi)independent.’ The body is one site in which these forces’ operations can be recognised. They operate ‘at a distance from our bodies or [...] as a foreign power internal to them’.26 It is important to note the Bennett does not – problematically – reduce the body to pure materiality or physicality. The body is imbricated in material processes that cut across its limits: she talks of ‘the materiality of which we are composed’ and suggests that ‘[w]e are vital materiality and we are surrounded by it, though we do not always see it that way’.27 This is already recognisable in musical contexts where bodies and embodiment are implicated in performance and listening situations. In musical performance, for instance, bodies enter into productive relationships with material phenomena: most uncontrovertibly, objects such as musical instruments; more abstractly, elements of the musical material, such as pitch, rhythm, and sound in its material presence. In a number of broadly modernist and contemporary works, performers and listeners are encouraged to navigate series of relations to objects and explore them as occasioning fields of expressive, often historically evocative, dynamic possibilities. John Cage, Luciano Berio, Helmut Lachenmann, Brian Ferneyhough, Aaron Cassidy, and many others – in many of their works they all diversely provide possibilities for exploring instrumental objects and our relationships with them. As such, performers’ bodies are not taken as isolated from the instruments that they engage with materially.28 Pertinent here is Julian Johnson’s recent suggestion that modernism might be understood, in one dimension at least, as a compositional attitude towards the particularity of musical materials – that these materials are negotiated in terms of their specific cultural and corporeal associations. Johnson draws attention, for instance, to how in his Sonata for Solo Viola (1994) György

On the ‘material’ of musical material  109 Ligeti explored ‘a preoccupation with the particularity of sound – the tone of the viola’s C-string, Tabea Zimmerman’s playing, and an intonation that resists the abstract ratios of equal temperament’; this also implied ‘a particularity of musical voice in terms of the resonances of time and place’.29 In this transformed understanding of modernism, Johnson suggests, one might recognise that the ‘constitutive tension between the material particularity of music and the abstract schemes of its organization does not disappear, but [that] it has metamorphosed significantly over the last century’.30 As Johnson implies, materiality and particularity seem to align closely. Proffered specific material in a work forcefully and immediately impresses on the listener the material situation before them: most obviously that the player is engaging an instrumental object with their body, and doing so on particular terms. So-called ‘extended’ instrumental techniques often foreground this process. Sonically productive encounters between bodies and instruments are staged in these terms in both, for example, Lachenmann’s Pression (1969, rev. 2010), for a cellist who navigates surprising configurations of bow, cello body, hands, strings, fingers, and fingerboard, and his Guero (1970, rev. 1988), which sees the performer percussively run their fingers over the outside front keys of the piano, without producing pitch. Adorno’s work would remind us here that instruments and instrumental traditions are also inherited forms of musical material, and that they, as such, are mediated historically; immediacy is a historical issue. Conventionally, performers’ embodied relations with instruments appear as immediate but are, of course, also subject to this process of mediation. At their most radical or foregrounded, these are visibly divergent from a historically mediated and relationally constituted ‘norm’. And thus material particularities become the means through which to address not only the dialectically related ‘abstract schemes of [music’s] organisation’, as Johnson puts it: in addition, supposed universals, such as the normative conditions of music-making, become regarded as instituted dialectically, through their particular material iterations. In seemingly foregrounding the ‘materiality of the musical material’, in its apparent immediacy, this strategy seems to assert the particular as prior to the universal – a present though unknowable out-side that constitutes a moment of challenge to what is presumed. Writing in the field of critical pedagogy, Anna Hickey-Moody and Tara Page suggest that ‘matter can often teach us through showing us otherwise’.31 One might make productive links to the idea that matter provokes new possibilities for thought and practice, and note, additionally, that these possibilities might take aesthetic form. In the Adornian sense that art constitutes a material embodiment of social and philosophical antagonisms, music might therefore bring critical attention to and stimulate alternative imaginings of both itself and the material conditions constitutive of it. Bennett’s active, forceful out-side is encountered in musical materials – broadly conceived – which include those technologies that mediate the practice of composition and music-making more generally. In a musically ‘literate’ tradition of Western art music this includes forms of notation, and even things as simple as the pens and paper one might use to produce notation. Something might be said here of composition conceived as a critical approach to material production.

110  Musical materials It has been recognised widely that notation – and the practice of writing notation, as distinct from recording music through notation – has been of great interest to many composers and experimentalists. Pen and paper are compositional ‘musical materials’ in works such as Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra, in which lines intersect the staves and scribblings ‘connect the dots’ of the pitch material. Morton Feldman, in a similar compositional gesture, ‘used the word “material” to refer to musical nonhumans: instruments, pages, sounds’.32 In discovering pens, paper, and other materials as musical materials, Cage, Feldman, and others opened up possibilities for new and unpredictable forms of compositional and aesthetic practice. These materials were active components encountered within the compositional process. Experiences of listening – in which one hears/feels music with/through one’s body – may also foreground the body’s capacity as a node of relations that exceeds its own limits. Listeners, through the musical material, encounter an external object – this externality is emphasised in the reified concept of the ‘musical work’, something that seems to exist independently of them. At the same time, however, listeners are immersed within a sonic envelope that resonates within them. Musical materialities – in the events of production (performance) and reception (listening) – thereby intersect the body as a site of heterogeneity and prospective non-identity. It is notable that Adorno’s philosophical pronouncement – that ‘[t]o yield to the object means to do justice to the object’s qualitative moments’ – is echoed in a number of compositional and performance practices that seek to explore the qualities and aesthetic opportunities offered by various ‘objects’. In these cases the objects and the thing-power they possess are faced in moments and processes of encounter, and engaged. These processes enact something akin to a gesture of questioning that ‘yield[s] to the object’. These ‘objects’, taken first in the naïve sense, include immediately physical entities such as musical instruments and the pens and paper of compositional practice, and an exploration of their prospects and probabilities (the latter often explored through chance procedures); a long list of examples could be cited, which might include Berio’s exploration of the possibilities of various instruments in his Sequenza series (1958–2002) and Cage’s playful use of cacti in his Child of Tree (1975).33 But these material ‘objects’ also include apparently immanent musical materials, such as the instrument-object’s expected role within the ensemble, particular gestures or elements of borrowed material (objet trouvé) that are then responded to, the qualities of which become subject to expansion and investigation throughout the course of the work. In an emergent elaboration through performance, the musical engagement with the ‘object’s qualitative moments’ seems to ask: what can the object do – what are its capacities for poïesis?34 Further, what can it not do – what are the limits at which it seems to push back assertively, challenging the frameworks through which we presume to know it?35

Dualisms and dialectics Adorno and many contemporary materialists attempt to problematise dualist thinking – a gesture emphasised in the irreconcilable (non-)concept of non-identity. Here,

On the ‘material’ of musical material  111 a key dualism for scrutiny, of course, is that of materiality and ‘non-­materiality’ itself (be this second term ‘abstractness’ or ‘immateriality’, for example). New materialist approaches tend to eschew dualist modes of thinking that stem from earlier conceptions of materiality. As Diana Coole and Samantha Frost note: Many of our ideas about materiality in fact remain indebted to Descartes, who defined matter in the seventeenth century as corporeal substance constituted of length, breadth, and thickness; as extended, uniform, and inert [...] According to this model, material objects are identifiably discrete.36 In this dualist conception, things are matter or spirit, real or abstract, object or subject. As we have seen already, assumptions about dualisms such as the life–matter binary are challenged when capacities like ‘activeness’ are argued not to be in the sole possession of one term (life) but as emerging through the interpenetration of both. As Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin state, in contrast with a Cartesian idea of materiality, ‘the immanent gesture of new materialism is transversal rather than dualist as it intersects academic (neo-)disciplines [...], paradigms [...], and the linear spatiotemporalities conventionally assigned to epistemic trends’. They propose that ‘new materialism is itself a distinctive trend, both in feminist theory and cultural theory more broadly, and a device or tool for opening up theory formation’.37 It is in this spirit, as a manner of ‘opening’, not method, that I here draw on materialist thinking. Dolphijn and van der Tuin have suggested that ‘reworking and eventually breaking through dualisms appears to be the key to new materialism’.38 This ambition draws energy and terminology from past projects that challenged dualistic thinking, as encountered in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and that of the post-structuralists; some new materialists also call on those phenomenological traditions that blurred the binary of body and mind. Elizabeth Grosz, whose Volatile Bodies is a common touchstone for many new materialist thinkers, notes that ‘[i]n dissolving oppositional categories we cannot simply ignore them, vowing never to speak in their terms again. This is neither historically possible nor even desirable insofar as these categories must be engaged with in order to be superseded’.39 Adorno claims something similar: past thinking and practices exert historical pressures upon the present. (Indeed, this is central in his account of musical material; in the present, one faces past, now sedimented, musical practices.) This goes for dualisms also. For Adorno, as for Grosz, they cannot simply be ignored or dismissed, at risk of their unacknowledged continuance. They must instead be engaged with and, as I would put it, worked through. With respect to music, sound, and materiality, Christoph Cox seeks to dispel dualisms entirely, in a proposed challenge to representational and anthropocentric thinking: The materialist theory I propose here maintains that contemporary cultural theory’s critiques of representation and humanism are not thorough enough. A rigorous critique of representation would altogether eliminate the dual planes of culture/nature, human/non-human, sign/world, text/matter.40

112  Musical materials His suggestion is a powerful one, as is his reappraisal of the materiality of sound itself. However, his materialism’s limitation, I suggest, lies in this very dissolution of dualisms; I propose that, instead, they should be worked through (in line with Grosz’s suggestion). Cox focuses us upon sound’s materiality. But in doing so, pertinent – of course, problematic – dualisms are effaced completely: principally those of music and noise, and of music and sound. (This perhaps is not a problem for Cox’s theory, taken on its own terms; proposing a realist ontology of sound, subjects such as composers and listeners – who shape and perceive such distinctions – are of less importance to Cox’s philosophical priorities than they are to Adorno’s.41) Cox begins by focusing on sound artists who in the 1960s explored sound, before a conceptual slippage occurs towards a discussion of music. In citing this issue, I do not wish to imply that music and noise or music and sound are separate entities. This would be to reinscribe the dualisms to which Cox quite rightly brings critical attention. Instead, I hope to suggest that such dualisms are necessarily problematic; music and noise, for instance, subtend one another; as Henry Cowell put it, ‘the noise-element has been to music as sex to humanity, essential to its existence, but impolite to mention, something to be cloaked by ignorance and silence’.42 What emerges through Adorno’s concept of musical material is a sense that musical materialities are contoured by, yet exceed and ultimately destabilise, distinctions such as music and sound. Against those new materialist positions that dissolve dialectical particularities into a monist ontology, I want to suggest that music be conceived through dualisms that when engaged cannot be totally effaced.43 (It is here that the dialogue between Adorno’s materialism and some aspects of new materialist philosophies becomes somewhat tense.) Indeed, musical materialities have enabled new and immanent forms of challenge to these problematic dualisms. The music–language dualism provides another example. Here the two terms have been conceived relationally. Andrew Bowie has charted, for instance, how anxieties over the nature of language manifested in music’s changing ontology during the late-eighteenth century.44 Yet the music–language dualism has been subject to critique too: from the side of music, one could hear Adorno’s own protestations about these concepts’ absolute division in his recognition of music’s ‘language character’;45 from the side of language, one could read those post-structuralists who considered musical, phonic, sounding qualities to be inherent within language.46 Problems arise where the materiality of sound is celebrated at the cost of effacing completely its dialectical ‘others’: its social, philosophical, and historical situations. It would perhaps be more productive to talk about music and sounds’ material situatedness. Historical changes in attitudes towards musical materials – and to sonic materialities – would also be forgotten if dualisms were simply superseded or elided. It is in part for this reason that I foreground dialectical thinking over the monist ontologies expressed by many new materialists. Assertions of musical materiality must themselves also be considered relationally; a claim to materiality is the assumption of a position that is not something else – first and foremost it is a claim against ‘immateriality’ (whatever this means). Indeed, music has, historically, been considered as emblematic of an abstract yet affective immaterial

On the ‘material’ of musical material  113 presence. To forget this would be to ignore its history, and the embeddedness of this immateriality in the very concrete practices of composition, performance, and listening. Bennett’s vital materialism is instructive on this relational matter: she does not deny the ‘existence’ of immateriality – she instead cautions that one should not turn to it as a sole source of meaning, as something invested into a material world that otherwise lacks meaning. In musical contexts, this is to say that practices that have produced music – that have produced musical ­immaterialities – are themselves material. These immaterialities – never separable from the materialities that produced them – are features of fields of relations that constitute ever-new forms of musical practice. It is in musical material as congealed history that an Adorno-inflected new musical materialism diverges or opens dialogue with other accounts of musical materiality. Cox’s ‘sonic realism’, for instance, aims to focus on sound itself. He refers to Cage’s 4’33” by way of example. The ‘silence’ of Cage’s work begs questions surrounding sound’s own materiality, and opens our ears to sounds that cut across the human and nonhuman, intended and accidental, and meaningful and meaningless. As Cox writes, ‘John Cage [...] celebrated worldly sound in 4’33”, the so-called “silent” composition that invites audiences to perceive environmental noise as an aesthetic field’.47 This is all true. Yet, once more, Cox’s thorough dissolution of the music–sound dualism is problematic. The very fact that any performance is regarded as a musical event is significant to the work alongside its sonic aspects: appearing in programmes and staged in concert venues – perhaps ‘arranged’ for an orchestra that sits motionless onstage – this event is also significant in its evocation and play on a tradition of musical performance practices. To forget this crucial fact, which Adorno reminds us of in his focus on historicity, would deny a meaningful capacity of what Cage takes as his ‘musical material’: the performance and listening event itself. Indeed, this mention of Cage is important, as Cox’s sonic realism has been criticised for its mobilisation of post-Cagean listening practices as revealing universal lessons about sound’s nature. Marie Thompson in particular has noted how Cox’s materialist theory is ‘caught between the development of a specific ontological approach appropriate for […] what he considers to be the aesthetic priorities of post-Cagean sound art’ and ‘the much grander accreditation of sound art as revealing “the nature” of sound-itself as it exists “beyond” the realm of representation, signification and culture’.48 Developing a critical line well established in feminist and post-colonial theory, Thompson rightly notes how a particular – though unmarked as such – has been elevated to the universal in Cox’s framework, and that it might for this reason carry with it unacknowledged ­politico-philosophical baggage in need of critical unpacking. As she puts it, the ‘pursuit of the “nature of sound” risks uncritically naturalizing what is ultimately a specific onto-­epistemology of sound’.49 Very much connected with this, the ontological in Cox’s argument is the target of Brian Kane’s astute philosophical critique. Kane summarises a key tenet of Cox’s theory (and of theories that make similar pronouncements about sonic ontology). This is ‘the principle that a work of art can disclose its ontology’. Kane labels this ‘onto-aesthetics’. For him, onto-aesthetics most fundamentally presents an issue in its reliance

114  Musical materials ‘on  a category mistake. It confuses embodiment with exemplification’.50 Kane argues that a work like 4’33” cannot exemplify the nature of sound, as Cox claims it does, because ontology is embodied rather than something ‘capable of being exemplified’. No object ‘better exemplifies being an object than any other object’, Kane points out.51 While approaching his critique from a direction different from Thompson, Kane suggests a similar implication: that where one pronounces on sound’s nature – sonic matter – ‘itself’, the contingencies of the cultures in which sound is embedded become concealed. In Kane’s summary, the arguments constituting the ‘“ontological turn” in sound studies neglect the role played by auditory cultures in shaping affective responses to sound and in “­ontological” claims about sound’.52 Stepping back from the details of this debate, one could add that critiques of pronouncements about ‘sound itself’ often echo many of those of ‘matter as such’. These critics, in their different domains, all point out (correctly, in my view) that what the thing (sound, matter) is thought to be – even thought to be ‘in itself’ – can never be untangled from its mediation by culture and perception, and hence also issues of history, sociality, and power.

Agency and musical material As discussed above, Adorno’s notion of musical material emphasises its immanent sedimentation of auditory cultures and histories. This is in part why I find it so fruitful to bring this into conversation with recent materialist philosophies, particularly while circling around a ‘problematic’ notion of materiality. Indeed, in a seemingly paradoxical move, I suggest that a materialist reading of music can be most critically productive when focusing itself on features of music that, on first hearing, seemingly gesture towards the immaterial, the transcendent, and the ontological; connected with this, this criticality emerges through engaging apparently abstract tensions and generative differences between ideas such as music and sound, the abstract and the physical. An element of this endeavour would be the consideration of the strategies undertaken in the ascription of these differences. Rhetoric of (re)turning to ‘the material’ in twentieth- and twenty-first-century discourses would not be understood as historically and aesthetically significant if one omitted to mention that this was a rhetoric spoken in response to often unstated assumptions about the immaterial character of music. Indeed, examples of such attitudes are expressed in composers’ own writings and paratexts: Harry Partch, for instance, argued for a ‘Corporeal Music’, in contrast with what he saw as other ‘Abstract’ musics;53 Edgard Varèse referred to music as ‘the most abstract of the arts and also the most physical’.54 Hence an appropriately critical materialism should take music as a site for working through the dialectics of the material and immaterial. This is one reason why I have insisted that one might approach apparently abstract ‘immanent’ musical material in materialist terms, rather than limiting oneself to observations about the obviously material: instruments, performers’ bodies, musical technologies, and similar (although these features clearly should be part of the remit of materialism, hence their discussion in my other chapters). As Fredric Jameson puts it, dialectics involve the ‘dynamic and productive act of setting the antinomy [i.e. the dualism, the contradiction] itself in motion’.55 It

On the ‘material’ of musical material  115 is not, as Adorno writes, ‘a particular philosophical standpoint, but the sustained attempt to follow the movement of the object under discussion and to help it find expression’.56 It is notable that this image of the dialectic resembles Adorno’s view of compositional practice: the composer, faced with musical material, helps it find expression despite, and through, its own contradictory nature. Tia DeNora identifies two aspects to the dialectical position of the composer as a subject, both of which are active and passive in their relation to musical material. The composer is passive in so far as they must contour inherited musical materials that suggest their own implicit ‘“laws” of development’.57 Yet, these ‘laws’ – laws that have become second nature – are themselves the products of previous generations’ compositional choices. ‘“[M]aterial” is itself a crystallisation of the creative impulse, an element socially predetermined through the consciousness of man’, as Adorno puts it.58 The subject is thus also an active agent in responding to the ‘needs’ of the material and its relation to the social and aesthetic circumstances of the present. Furthermore, musical material not only demands solutions to technical problems on the part of the composer, ‘it also involves a mediated relation to society’.59 The composer is thus responsible to the material as both ‘congealed history’ and as it is situated in the social and historical present. It is on this basis that DeNora argues that Adorno subscribes to a view of the ‘composer as hero’.60 It could be noted here that contemporary materialists have variously problematised the autonomy of the heroic subject (in distinction to Adorno’s position) and, associated with this, the subject’s capacity for autonomous agency. In this respect one could also emphasise the composer’s relation to musical material as not merely extrinsic. They do not only ‘face’ the sum total of everything that has come before them, in the heroic sense of the word. They are also embedded within musical and, more broadly, social practices. With regard to the historicity of the musical material, there is no moment of choice in the compositional process as such (I should be clear that Adorno does not state emphatically that there is); instead, a rather more complex comingling of subject and object, composer and musical material, occurs. Indeed, the composer crafts themself as a subject-as-composer through this unfolding practice. It would be a mischaracterization to suggest that Adorno thought that the composer maintained absolute autonomy from their material. One would do better to characterise the composer–material relationship as antagonistic: the composer is caught between the present and the needs of musical materials inherited from the past. This paradox is explored at length in Adorno’s 1961 essay ‘Vers une musique informelle’, in which he considers the possibilities for the composition of music that emerges from the demands of the material.61 If, as DeNora diagnoses in Adorno’s position, the composer is dialectically both active and passive in their shaping of material, this raises a question: what is active as complement to the composer’s passive aspects? Adorno’s answer is the musical material – its needs and tendencies, which find expression through their mediation by the subject. In regarding musical material as in this sense ‘active’, however, one recognises two things: firstly, that neither the subject nor their compositional ‘choices’ are autonomous; and, secondly, more radically, that the subject themself is imbricated in material processes that complicate their ‘possession’ of agency and choice-making as such.

116  Musical materials Adorno’s discussion of musical material is embedded in a language of what this material ‘needs’ and its immanent ‘laws’. With this apparent autonomy, it might appear that Adorno implies that musical material possesses some kind of agency – it needs or even desires one thing or another. Such an implication may even appear naïve, founded on a misunderstanding; this is a confusion, one might say, between, firstly, features interior to the musical material, and secondly, the listener’s projection of needs and laws onto the material, from a position exterior to it.62 But I would like to claim that there are benefits to entertaining, without entrenching, the ‘naïve’ view here, especially if the material and listener’s mutual entanglement are understood to complicate a clear division between interiority and exteriority. Crucially, for reasons already outlined above, this is on the condition that one does not subscribe wholly to such naïvety, becoming consumed by objects ‘as such’, or by the agency of materials ‘per se’, as abstracted away from the contingency of our orientations towards them. Adorno’s language of musical agency, perhaps surprisingly, resonates with recent attempts to challenge agency as a solely human category – or one as reliant on life as such. In a comparative move, Bennett defends the apparently ‘naïve ambition of vital materialism’: she understands an ‘agency of assemblages’ at work in the world, in which agency is taken as ‘a confederation of human and nonhuman’.63 With this in mind, could agency be conceived productively through a notion of musical material that draws together numerous registers, including those of the human and nonhuman, and of history and nature? In Bennett’s terms, elements of musical material may be conceived of as actants. An actant is ‘a source of action that can be either human or nonhuman; it is that which has efficacy, can do things, has sufficient coherence to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events’.64 Its power and capacities are recognised only in its unfolding relationships with other elements: ‘An actant never really acts alone. Its efficacy or agency always depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces.’65 In this respect, did Adorno not go far enough? Could that which was for him implicit be made, cautiously, explicit? Adorno perhaps sensed the agential capacities of nonhuman forces; but without making this feeling explicit, agency arguably remained for him something possessed solely by the (human) subject. However, to develop this notion of a ‘distributive’ agency, one located neither exclusively in the compositional subject nor in the musical object, is not to assert a model of compositional making that simply supersedes or replaces Adorno’s concept of musical material: it rather dialogues with it. What Adorno’s concept of musical material brings to any discussion of an agency distributed across the human and nonhuman is a critical historical dimension: if one were to characterise the encountering of the material by the composer as a moment of immediacy one would forget something crucial – that this musical material contains within it traces of past subjectivities as sediment. With this Adornian qualification, agency is, in fact, not only distributed ‘sideways’, across the composer and the material, but ‘backwards’ too, through a genealogy of compositional practices that encompass the history of past ‘subjective’ compositional choices.

On the ‘material’ of musical material  117 At this moment of theoretical attentiveness to the nonhuman, one could remark on the relation between this concept in new materialist philosophies and the theme of dehumanization, one trope of modern life and art of which Adorno was highly critical. Adorno’s concerns with musical dehumanization were expressed forcefully in his infamous critique, in Philosophy of New Music, of Stravinsky, whose music, for Adorno, articulated lifeless and depersonalised musical forms.66 In light of this I should add that to take account of the nonhuman, and its entanglement with the human, is not to promote a ‘dehumanised’ materialism – at least not necessarily. To speak of the nonhuman is not to dehumanise, when one considers the nonhuman as entangled with the human, and the human with the nonhuman, in practices such as composition and music-making. Indeed, efforts to look beyond the human explicitly reject dehumanisation when these same efforts aim to understand better what it means to be human in contexts that are historical, ecological, and planetary in context (some such practices are explored in the next chapter). One could also note here that Adorno’s ‘dehumanising’ and new materialists’ ‘nonhuman’ both relate to overlapping – although, crucially different – conceptions of ‘the human’ (as a shared other to these two terms). Adorno’s post-Enlightenment subject evinced a humanity at odds with the dominating forces of administered society and instrumental reason; by contrast, the human of new materialist contexts is one inextricably bound up with nonhuman forces that blur the boundaries between the terms of the human–nonhuman dyad – a feature most critically developed in posthumanist discourses that take ‘the human’ as a contested category, one crisscrossing numerous political and technological trajectories.67 Indeed, this question of the human in its relation to the nonhuman, and indeed critical debates about the concept of ‘(post)humanity/(post)humanism’ draws us back to a larger frame of reference. This takes in view (our own and others’) bodies and objects, and within the sphere of the musical, what is at stake in how bodies and objects are sounded/sound themselves. In arguing for a dialectical theorisation of musical material, I hope to have offered preliminary inroads towards thinking about materials’ paradoxical characteristics, and to have posed new music as a site in which materials – including bodies and objects – are contested, responded to, and explored critically. This is again to say a problematic materiality is navigated where, for instance, contemporary composers have sought to examine instrumental objects as sounding technologies with which musicians have embodied relationships. Crucially, however, I have also suggested that it is not only in these emphatically physical relationships that materiality is present: music’s apparently incorporeal aspects are bound up with its corporeality, and vice versa; embodied relationships are mediated historically, as Adorno reminds us, and do not constitute a physical rawness or materiality as such. Indeed, history is also present in musical materials in the more abstract sense – that is, in terms of the forms and structures of musical works.68 These seemingly ‘immaterial’ musical materials have been subject to reappraisal through their distinctly material aspects. The music of Wolfgang Rihm provides a clear example. Alastair Williams suggests that the recontextualisation of sound, ‘through an unlikely combination of cultural and tactile associations, is a continual theme in his work’.69 In his Klavierstück

118  Musical materials No.  7, for example, objets trouvés that conjure the spectre of tonality, compulsively reiterated E flat major chords, transform from signifiers of a tonal history to forceful gestures that insist on their material presentness. Indeed, as Rihm himself has said: ‘The task of art in repressive times is to be not just a refuge, but a repository of energy.’70 Here, in a passage that ‘yield[s] to the object’, that navigates its qualities and possibilities, historically inscribed musical materials do not simply glance backwards: their energies fuel the motions and directions of the present.71 The material in the ‘immaterial’, the immaterial in the ‘material’. It is perhaps unsurprising that, of the composers mentioned above, John Cage’s name has been cited repeatedly. Post-Cagean strategies (pre-echo) some features of materiality that are explored elsewhere in theory. For example, Cage’s compositional practice moderates the subject’s presumed dominance over musical material – a characteristic pursued more recently not only in many contemporary concert works, but also in numerous installations and sonic art works. 4’33” is of course paradigmatic of this tendency. It is a work that could in many respects be regarded as non-subject-oriented: the composer withdraws from the act of composition as such; the listener attends to a sonic field that includes both human and nonhuman activities and agents. The indeterminacy inherent in this attitude suggests a recognition that materials are not merely passive – neither deterministic nor mechanistic – but active and unpredictable; this event draws our attention to the musical and sonic Brownian motion that surrounds us always. Many of the assumptions that are problematised in this piece (the role of the composer, what counts as musical material in the first place) revolve around an anthropocentrism concerning the subject’s role as active and dominant over material that had previously and more conventionally been imagined to be passive and inert. One should note, however, that this is not the end of the story: in the next chapter I expand on and challenge some of the presumptions manifested in non-subject-oriented compositional and listening strategies. Adorno’s materialism foregrounds the historicity of musical material, its aesthetic circumstances, and critical possibilities in the context of what has now come to be known as late capitalism. His idea of ‘musical material’ encompasses not only the, naïvely taken, physical dimensions of music – instruments, performance practices, and so on – but the allegedly abstract, immaterial categories that these material practices reinscribe yet exceed (tonality, theories of form, etc.). Just as Adorno’s concept invites urgent reflection on the historical mediation of musical materialities, new materialist thinking brings to Adorno’s materialism a rich vocabulary for discussing materials’ capacities and agencies. It opens avenues for recognising and articulating in music the comminglings of the human and nonhuman, and of history and nature. Through a dialogue between Adorno’s and others’ materialisms, one might begin to chart the changing significance of musical material and materiality in music. In this chapter, I hope to have offered some initial lines on which material issues may be traced, through both music and associated philosophical thought. Musical materials, in their immanent embodying of materiality’s problematisation, enable us to practise a working through of diverse critical problematics concerning our own, and music’s, material situatedness in the present – to explore its, as well as our own, material constitution.

On the ‘material’ of musical material  119 Developing this line of thinking, questions expanding on the environments and situations in which both we find ourselves and materials find themselves are elaborated in the next chapter. This step towards the next chapter also traces an underlying connection between conventional notions of ‘material’ and ‘nature’ – a connection worth considering critically in terms of its ideological import. This connection has already been pointed towards via Adorno’s critique of second nature, as discussed above: like material, nature is normatively regarded as the stuff that is self-evidently there, a world (of nonhuman things) ready for human use. Following this gesture, conventional musical use includes musical materials transformed into new works through compositional practices; this echoes a broader conceptualisation of practices of production that take an unused ‘nature’ (‘natural resources’) that are transformed through human labour into something now ‘cultural’. The next chapter opens this up further, through charting how contested concepts of nature manifest in and contour reformulations of compositional practice. Furthermore, I also suggest that these new practices can reflexively act so as to alter our understanding of what it means to think ecologically.

Notes 1 Nikki Sullivan has diagnosed this tendency in some new materialist work. She convincingly argues that matter is bound up with our perception of it. As she puts it, ‘my argument, then, is that “matter” is inextricable from the I/eye [and for us: the ear!] that perceives it: perception makes “matter” matter, it makes “some-thing” (that is no-thing) (un)become as such, it makes “it” intelligible’. See Sullivan, ‘The Somatechnics of Perception and the Matter of the Non/Human: A Critical Response to New Materialism’, European Journal of Women’s Studies 19/3 (2012), 300. 2 Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2010), 13. 3 As Berthold Hoeckner writes of the essays that constitute an edited collection on Adorno and music, these are ‘torn between defusing Adorno’s explosive potential and rekindling it’. See Berthold Hoeckner, ‘Preface: On Apparition’, in Apparitions: New Perspectives on Adorno and Twentieth-Century Music, ed. Berthold Hoeckner (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), xii. Rainer Nonnenmann provides a historicisation and discussion of the contemporary relevance of critical music and critical theory in his chapter, ‘The Dead End as the Way Out: Critical Composition: A Historical Phenomenon?’, in Critical Composition Today, ed. Claus Steffen Mahnkopf, 88–109 (Hoheim, 2006). 4 Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, p. 37 (footnote). 5 And this specialism is something often listed as a commodity on universities’/departments’ websites. I fully acknowledge my own complicity in contemporary higher education’s pedagogic-economic superstructure. In the actual practice of living, spaces of criticality are shot through with dimensions of complicity; the ‘purity’ of criticality, like other discourses of purity, is a dangerous idealization. I am in agreement with Matt Mahon that one should avoid a ‘dead-end in a narrow definition of critique’, one that positions complicity in stark dichotomy to it. See Matt Mahon, ‘Criticality, Experimentation and Complicity in the LA Review of Books’ Digital Humanities Controversy’, London Journal of Critical Thought 2/1 (2018), 7. 6 Julia Kristeva, ‘Psychoanalysis and the Polis’, trans. Margaret Waller, Critical Inquiry 9/1 (1982), 77. 7 I borrow and adapt this point about compositional activities from Nonnenmann, who notes of critical composition that ‘precisely the fact that it always exists in relation to a specific historical situation of musical material and listening

120  Musical materials underlines its trans-historical validity and legitimation’. See his ‘The Dead End as the Way Out’, p. 106. 8 Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, rev. 2nd edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 18. 9 Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012), 103. 10 I should only give a brief overview of Adorno’s concept of musical material here, and its connection with his musical thinking more generally. This has been outlined many times, perhaps most clearly in Chapters 4 and 5 of Max Paddison’s Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 11 Carl Dahlhaus, ‘Form’, trans. Stephen Hint, in Schoenberg and the New Music: Essays by Carl Dahlhaus, 248–264 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 248–249. 12 Adorno cited in Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 93. 13 Daniel K. L. Chua, ‘Drifting: The Dialectics of Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music’, in Apparitions: Essays on Adorno and Twentieth-Century Music, ed. Berthold Hoeckner, 1–18 (New York: Routledge, 2006), 6. 14 Theodor W. Adorno, Sound Figures (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 160. It is notable that Adorno corresponds ‘natural material’ here with unchanging physical material. This contrasts with the nuance of the language used in his discussions of nature elsewhere. 15 Max Paddison, ‘Music and Social Relations: Towards a Theory of Mediation’, in Contemporary Music: Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Max Paddision and Irène Deliège (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 274. As Adorno himself puts it, ‘every art contains elements which appear natural and self-evident at the moment it is brought into being. Only the course of further developments makes clear that they have come into being and are therefore transitory, so that their naturalness stands revealed as a “second nature”’. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Vers une musique informelle’, in Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingston (London and New York: Verso, 1992), 275–276. 16 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 58. 17 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 57, emphasis in the original. 18 Bennett claims that Henri Bergson and Hans Driesch come close to articulating this idea in the early twentieth century; their vitalism faulted in their reliance on ‘a notquite-material life force’. Vibrant Matter, 63. 19 Indeed, Bennett draws on Adorno’s thought in the development of her vital materialism. See in particular Chapter 1 of Vibrant Matter. Furthermore, Fredric Jameson alludes to some form of correspondence between nature and non-identity. See his Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (Verso: London and New York, 1990), 9–10. 20 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 43. 21 See Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 13–17. 22 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, xvi. 23 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 14. 24 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 192. Bennett cites this passage in Vibrant Matter, 16. Bennett suggests that what limits Adorno’s materialism is the fact that he ‘struggles to describe the force that is material in its resistance to human concepts’; he instead turns towards the messianic, of which Bennett is suspicious. 25 Bennett hyphenates ‘out-side’ to mark out an attempt at the impossible task of conceiving of the exteriority of things beyond the human: ‘to name the independence (from subjectivity) possessed by things’. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 3. 26 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 17. 27 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 12 and 14, emphases in the original.

On the ‘material’ of musical material  121 28 I have previously explored embodied performer–instrument relations in Lachenmann’s music: see my ‘Building an Instrument, Building an Instrumentalist: Helmut Lachenmann’s Serynade’, Contemporary Music Review 32/5 (2013), 425–436. 29 Julian Johnson, ‘Return of the Repressed: Particularity in Early and Late Modernism’, in Transformations of Musical Modernism, ed. Erling E. Guldbrandsen and Julian Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 37. 30 Johnson, ‘Return of the Repressed’, 52. 31 Anna Hickey-Moody and Tara Page, ‘Introduction: Making, Matter, and Pedagogy’, in Arts, Pedagogy, and Cultural Resistance: New Materialisms, ed. Anna Hickey-Moody and Tara Page (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 16, emphasis in the original. 32 Mandy-Suzanne Wong, ‘Introductory Editorial: Towards a Vital Materialist Aesthetics’, Evental Aesthetics, 3/3 (2015), 5. 33 On the latter, and the exploration of non-musical objects in terms of their sonic properties, see Andy Keep, ‘Instrumentalizing: Approaches to Improvising with Sounding Objects in Experimental Music’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music, ed. James Saunders (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 113–131. 34 This question echoes a Spinozist–Deleuzian idée fixe: an interest in ‘what can a body do, i.e. how and to what extent can it affect and be affected by other bodies?’. Marie Thompson, ‘Experimental Music and the Question of What a Body Can Do’, in Musical Encounters with Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Pirkko Moisala, Taru Leppänen, Milla Tiainen, and Hanna Väätäinen (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 156. 35 Regarding this last question, Hickey-Moody and Page have labelled matter ‘pedagogical in its resistance’, in its challenging of the presumed limits of knowledge and its associated epistemologies. It ‘teaches us through resisting dominant discourses, showing us new ways of being’. See their ‘Introduction: Making, Matter, and Pedagogy’, 5. 36 Coole and Frost, ‘Introducing the New Materialisms’, 7. 37 Dolphijn and van der Tuin, New Materialism, 100. It should be noted here that the terms ‘transverse’ and ‘transversal’ are used by a number of new materialist thinkers to signify an act of cutting across the boundaries between different disciplines, ideas, or conceptual domains. I draw on this usage here, although it should also become clear that I maintain a place for dialectics when thinking ‘transversally’. 38 Dolphijn and van der Tuin, New Materialism, 97. 39 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 24. 40 Christoph Cox, ‘Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism’, Journal of Visual Culture, 10/2 (2011), 148. 41 That said, Brian Kane takes up this issue and offers a persuasive critique of Cox’s (and others’) Deleuzian ontology of sound in his ‘Sound Studies without Auditory Culture: A Critique of the Ontological Turn’, Sound Studies 1/1 (2015), 2–21. This is discussed below. 42 Henry Cowell, ‘The Joys of Noise’, in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 23. 43 Annie Goh has correctly identified in Cox’s argument a problematic treatment of dualisms, in which the ‘overcoming’ of binaries ‘presumes the very separation’ of them. See her ‘Sounding Situated Knowledges: Echo in Archaeoacoustics’, Parallax 23/3 (2017), 283–304. 44 Andrew Bowie, Music, Philosophy, and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 45 See Max Paddison, ‘The Language-Character of Music: Some Motifs in Adorno’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 116/2 (1991), 267–279. 46 Julia Kristeva, for instance, explored the sounding, musical, and material aspects of language. These are foregrounded in poetic language’s complication of the ‘symbolic’ and ‘semiotic’ aspects of language in general. See her Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). 47 Cox, ‘Beyond Representation and Signification’, 155.

122  Musical materials 48 Marie Thompson, ‘Whiteness and the Ontological Turn in Sound Studies’, Parallax 23/3 (2017), 271. 49 Thompson, ‘Whiteness and the Ontological Turn in Sound Studies’, 270. Cox himself responded to Thompson’s critique of the unacknowledged ‘whiteness’ of his universalising, writing that the ‘problem is that Thompson’s charge of racial bias has little to do with my position in particular, instead resting on the claims that all universalizing knowledge is white, European, and imperialist and that only situated, local, and relative knowledge claims are valid. In classic relativist fashion, Thompson thus undermines her own position, making a universalizing claim that rejects universalizing claims’. Cox, ‘Sonic Realism and Auditory Culture: A Reply to Marie Thompson and Annie Goh’, Parallax 24/2 (2018), 238–239. I feel this reaction is slightly misplaced, as Thompson doesn’t state that universals are impossible. Rather, she stresses the importance of critical reflection on the politics of a particular that is posited to stand universally. 50 Kane, ‘Sound Studies without Auditory Culture’, 11. 51 Kane, ‘Sound Studies without Auditory Culture’, 12. 52 Kane, ‘Sound Studies without Auditory Culture’, 16. Elsewhere, and preceding Cox’s article, Seth Kim-Cohen has argued for the need to replace ideas about ‘sound-initself’ with a view that recognises ‘the discursiveness of a conceptual sonic practice’ (In the Blink of an Ear, 217). 53 Harry Partch, Genesis of a Music: An Account of a Creative Work, Its Roots, and Its Fulfilments, 2nd edn (New York: Da Capo Press, 1974). 54 Cited in Olivia Mattis, ‘The Physical and the Abstract: Varèse and the New York School’, in The New York Schools of Music and the Visual Arts: John Cage, Morton Feldman, Edgard Varèse, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, ed. Steven Johnson (New York: Routledge, 2002), 59. 55 Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London and New York, 2010), 43. 56 Adorno, Sound Figures, 145. 57 Tia DeNora, After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 14. 58 Adorno, cited in DeNora, After Adorno, 14. 59 Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 188. 60 DeNora, After Adorno, 14. 61 Adorno suggests that paradoxes arise in the ‘situation which calls for a truly informal music’: for instance, between abstract construction in composition and composers’ spontaneity, and between the insistence on the necessity of ‘structural arrangements’ and the acquisition of ‘contingent matter, external to the composing subject’. Adorno, ‘Vers une musique informelle’, 277. 62 It has been said that identification and projection are the psychoanalytic categories that Adorno’s critique calls on. Sergio Paulo Rouanet, ‘Adorno, Theodor and Freud’, in International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, ed. Alain de Mijolla (New York: Macmillan, 2005), 31. 63 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 17 and 21. 64 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, viii. Bennett develops the concept of the actant from Bruno Latour. She quotes Latour: with the actant, ‘“competence is deduced from [its] performance” rather than posited in advance of the action’. 65 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 21. 66 Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer of an earlier version of this chapter for suggesting that I consider the relationship between Adorno’s dehumanisation and the new materialists’ ‘nonhuman’ in greater detail. 67 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013); Rosi Braidotti, ‘Are “We” in this Together?’, keynote lecture delivered at the Planetary Poetics Workshop at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London, 21 September 2017. 68 See Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 174–183. 69 Alastair Williams, ‘Wolfgang Rihm and the Adorno Legacy’, 85–102 at 90.

On the ‘material’ of musical material  123 70 Rihm, cited Williams, ‘Wolfgang Rihm and the Adorno Legacy’, 93. I have previously made links between Rihm’s ‘materialised’ use of history in this work and similar gestures in Schnittke’s music, which explores the process through which ‘the rhetorical content of what was historically evocative material is taken to an extreme, being pushed towards gestural violence’. See Samuel Wilson, ‘After Beethoven, after Hegel: Legacies of Selfhood in Schnittke’s String Quartet No. 4’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 45 (2014), 311–334. 71 Here I again quote from Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 43.

6 Natures and ecologies of composition

It is a truism that culture is now very different to that of the late romanticism of Wagner, Mahler, and Bruckner. But we are also of a very different nature; in a time of ecological awareness – although when one looks at global emissions, food waste, and the potential threat of anti-microbial resistance, one notes this is an awareness in theory not fully implemented in practice – nature means something very different than it once did. Accordingly, the nature of nature’s appearance in musical and sonic practices today is different from its prominent presence as heard and dramatised in the music of Wagner, Mahler, and Bruckner. But nature is still musically with us, present, and indeed not hidden under the surface – not a root being concealed beneath a grafted scion of musical culture, blooming and bearing fruit. The nature of music is now a theory and practice of a nature that is itself ecological, not (merely and sometimes) in the sense that it consciously evokes thoughts of the sublime ­terror of dark forests’ consuming shadows or the pleasant sensibilities of meadows renewed by the lightest of springtime showers; rather, the ecological here is an at once abstract yet also practised system of material relations and environments that are both internally dynamic yet also bounded only permeably. Both bloom and fruit are in a process of becoming through an environment constituted by multiple elements; they are not end points, and instead feedback into this environment, enabling specific formations of insect, animal, and microbial life. This conceptualisation of environment is illustrated in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s image of certain orchids [which] display the physical and sensory characteristics of female wasps in order to attract male wasps into a trans-species courtship dance […] As these wasps move from flower to flower, desperately trying to copulate with them, so too does the pollen which has been transferred to their bodies. Consequently, ‘the body of the wasp’ is incorporated into the orchid’s reproduction process.1 Both wasp and orchard are becoming in relation to one another, rather than acting as autonomous beings. I begin by underlining this shift in order to draw attention, in brief, to some key thematics at stake in shifting conceptualisations of nature. In a moment I will summarise some of these in a little more detail, and in particular reflect on how these affect and are affected by compositional thinking. By first explicating some

Natures and ecologies of composition  125 long-standing as well as newer conceptions of nature, one can better appreciate later deviations from and paradoxes of these, as well as points of historical continuity (the latter sometimes concealed in the conceptual undergrowth). This will move us to consider how recent discursive (re)formulations of ‘nature’, for example Anna Tsing’s and Tim Ingold’s different mobilisations of the fungal, both enable us to rethink the nature–music coformulation and, at the same time, raise critical questions about what happens when (e.g.) the fungal becomes a preferred heuristic of compositional production and reception. A stereoscopic reading of one composer’s comment will help focus some initial critical issues with the music–nature connection that is the concern of this chapter. Paul Hindemith stated that ‘tonality is a natural force, like gravity […] The carpenter would not think of disregarding the natural properties of his wood and putting it together any old way without regard to its grain’.2 Lloyd Whitesell reads this comment in keeping with the widespread notion of nature as ‘immutable laws’:3 musical composition should take the form of some actions and treatments of musical materials and not others. This interpretation recapitulates what Raymond Williams suggested is one of the key meanings of the word ‘nature’, as the essential qualities of a thing.4 But a second interpretation is also possible, one that regards nature not as an essential and regimentally unchanging realm, but one that instead looks towards what Hindemith labels ‘natural properties’ such as to emphasise their possibilities and affordances in the hands of the craftsperson (be this carpenter or composer). In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari make reference to the grain of the wood, with which the carpenter works – although with implications different to the first, essentialist reading offered above. Tim Ingold writes of their discussion: When you take an axe (or a wedge if you are using green-wood techniques) to split a log, you are not imposing a form on the log. What you are doing is finding the grain; and then the axe or the wedge will follow it.5 This is an anti-hylomorphic reading, which is to say that it goes against the idea that form can be rendered into or on a homogeneous and passive substance. ‘Deleuze and Guattari argue […] that the artisan, the maker, the craftsperson is a person who has to follow the material, to follow the way it goes.’6 In keeping with aspects of contemporary materialist theory (for instance, new materialists’ interest in the activity of matter as explored in Chapter 5), the implication is that ‘natural properties’ are less prescribed rules and rather more those things encountered in processes of creative action, the affordances of the material with which the craftsperson works. This second reading places less emphasis on inescapability (Hindemith’s tonality, as undeniable as gravity) and more on the conditions of possibility within the local contexts of the materials to hand. Adorno wrote extensively about both music and nature. His dialectical thinking about both – apart and taken together – enables one to consider the paradoxes implied with our twin readings of Hindemith’s comments in sight. Adorno argued that despite its apparent immediacy, nature cannot be accessed directly. As ­Deborah Cook summarises, ‘Nature is accessible to human beings only in

126  Musical materials mediated forms […] Adorno emphatically rejects the identification of nature with the concepts and practices that we use to apprehend it.’7 This is an idea that impacts directly on musical aesthetics; music, like nature, is suggestive of immediacy, whereas it is in fact mediated by, shaped by, and contributes to discourses of what this ‘naturalness’ consists of in the first place. For Adorno, art that purports to represent nature directly only does so falsely and, in fact, fails as art: Art is the dialectic between the form-creating principle of rationality and the mimetic impulse. Art assists the latter to fulfil itself by means of techniques and rational procedures. It represents suppressed nature solely by virtue of everything it has developed in the course of the domination of nature. If, instead of carrying through the logic of dialectic, art opts programmatically for one side or the other, it becomes null and void.8 Music’s relation to nature is an urgent question for Adorno, as music has historically suggested proximity to nature through sharing with it an apparent qualitative directness. Indeed, music provides exemplary instances of what Adorno calls second nature, which is, ‘quite simply, a socially constructed image of reality passed off as if it were natural and timeless rather than cultural and thoroughly historical’, as Julian Johnson puts it. Johnson continues: Music presents a powerful example of this process because in most cases it is not the object of critical thought. The degree to which the language of tonal music is internalised as ‘natural’ is swiftly demonstrated by considering the popular response to atonal music: common epithets are ‘chaotic’, ‘irrational’, and ‘unnatural’ or ‘inhuman’.9 This concept of second nature is important as it problematises the double reading of Hindemith’s comments above; it demands that we cross our eyes, blurring the absolute separation between the two alternative readings such as to reflect on the paradoxes of the ‘natural material’ in each. In particular, an anti-hylomorphic language of affordances promises to allow material to speak in conversation with the craftsperson, rather than only convey – materially – the craftsperson’s ephemeral message. However, Adorno reminds us that this material, its message, might very well be constituted already by a second nature. Integral to second nature is a presumption of that’s just the way things are. Indeed, even if, under the anti-hylomorphic conceptualisation, the grain becomes seen not as an essence that founds the prescribed rules of one’s craft, the things encountered are still presumed in some way: this is the way they go, these are their tendencies and affordances. To repeat Ingold’s words: ‘artisan, the maker, the craftsperson is a person who has to follow the material.’ I ask, what does this following consist of? And what does it mean, aesthetically and even ethically, to go against one’s chosen material, against the ‘way it goes’? To ask these questions is not to imply that the correct path is to lead rather than follow one’s material. This would return us fully to the critiqued model (hylomorphism)

Natures and ecologies of composition  127 in which the craftsperson imposes abstract form on their material. To switch to leading from following also functions with the same circuit of thinking, as binary opposite: following’s 0, to leading’s 1. Rather than the either/or of leading/following, can one refigure this image and undertake a dance where one neither exclusively follows nor leads one’s material, but instead oscillates dialectically between these possibilities?10 This would perhaps involve a complex and sometimes tense relationship with one’s material, in which paradoxes in one’s material – in its ‘nature’ – are explored critically. This criticality is present in Adorno’s notion of second nature: one cannot assume the pregivenness of nature; when one ‘follows’ nature, one recognises that this presumption about its direction of travel might arise in part from a domination that has led it in this direction in the first place. Leading and following are dialectically intertwined. This is not to utterly dismiss the language of encounter and afforded possibilities that Ingold and other ecological thinkers have developed. But it is to say that one should always critically consider the possibility that both the processes of following and the materials followed are themselves bound up with a history of conceptual and practical domination (connected with terms such as rationality and technique).11 Furthermore, all the while one must remember that the grain of the wood, which one finds in the log, is very different to what one finds in musical material. This is not just to say that a particularity of material demands a particularity of response: that the grain of the wood and the ‘grain of the voice’ are different. It is also to evoke all that is lost and gained when one translates seemingly natural imagery – I can almost hear the thump of the axe as gravity pulls it onto the waiting timber – into the sphere of musical and artistic production. It is to ask why one might want to appeal to the particularity of grain, in an essentialising manner (our first reading) or as a determinative of the affordances with which the craftsperson works (our second). Why choose wood as the object of rhetoric, as metaphor of artistic material engagements, or literally as artistic material? (The artisan might initially answer ‘for its particular affordances’, but this answer simply reframes the object as a bundle of affordances. So one asks again: what do these affordances offer your artistic practice, expressively or otherwise?) Chopping wood suggests something of both a homeliness and an intimacy with natural materials; at the same time, it presents an image distant from majority experiences of the everyday of late modernity.12 Echoing this questioning, Timothy Morton, in his critique of some forms of environmental writing, suggests it is notable that Heidegger chooses peasant’s shoes as an illustrative example of objects that display relationships with their environment; the peasant shoes are an ‘ideological fantasy object’, an object close to the natural but in no way neutral, an image in this case mobilised in line with a problematic nationalism, suggests Morton.13 Generally, one can ask why and on what terms imagery proximate with nature – even if the specific content of this imagery changes historically – has and continues to be so influential in compositional and artistic approaches to materials. This is to begin to ask why specific modalities of ‘working with materials’ have rhetorical, conceptual, and practical purchase for many during our contemporary historical moment. To look to an environment and its elements – and to environment as dynamic, elemental possibilities – says much about our desires to understand our own place within this.

128  Musical materials

Soundings: oak, ginger, mushroom The intricacies of these questions can be more fully theorised if one considers how ideas of nature have changed historically, and how they are intertwined with musical practices. Modernity separated – conceptually – nature from culture. In an influential lecture, Raymond Williams suggested that ‘ideas of nature’ are often contrasted with culture, humans, or society, ‘with the world of humans and their relationships’.14 Crucially, despite this dualistic separation, nature is envisaged in a manner that manifests social ideas: one might argue that the ‘struggle’ one observes in nature justifies a competitive capitalism, similarly premised on struggle; ‘natural’ hierarchies and biological differences might manifest themselves in everything from differentiation of gender roles to scientific racism. ‘What is often being argued, […] in the idea of nature is the idea of man […] of man in society, indeed the ideas of kinds of societies’, as Williams put it.15 The question I pursue in the wake of this is how the ‘changed nature’, what is popularly referred to as the Anthropocene – a concept accompanied with claims of the breakdown of the nature–culture dualism  – manifests in criss-crossing practices of music and sonic art. The Anthropocene is the epoch under which the natural environment cannot be disentangled from the human, owing to recent features of life including changes in atmospheric composition, and pollution and waste materially changing both oceans and land for the future of both human and nonhuman life. Its usage has exploded in recent artistic and academic discourses. However, it should be noted that it is also a concept sometimes criticised as – ironically – naturalising radical environmental change as part of the unalterable progression of earth history. For this reason, some suggest alternatives that foreground the specific historical and economic formations under which environmental changes are taking place, preferring to speak for example of the Plantationocene (the time of plantations and the modern rationalisation of food production) or the Capitalocene (the time of capitalism).16 Despite recent developments in nature discourses, the ‘nature’ so prominent in nineteenth-century romanticism remains formative in the development of key aspects of now-contemporary ideas of nature. Some characteristics of it persist in some contemporary practices (nature as distant, as immersive, as wilderness). Elsewhere, it is emphasised as providing crucial points of contrast, whereby contemporary interlocutors craft their ‘natures’ in contradistinction to it. In this sense, it is root as both cause and reactant of aspects of nature-thinking today. The following discussion therefore will be contextualised by first briefly charting a history of ideas of nature proximate with compositional sonic practices. This can be described as a move between paradigmatic images of a changing nature – although it must be emphasised that each does not smoothly succeed its predecessor in sequence. Rather, some aspects of each image persist and form the basis of a counter-reaction by another; different images also share characteristics, while resisting others. Notably, these images of nature are quite literally images borrowed from nature as synecdoches of natural processes as such: the organicism of plants and animals shaped long-standing nineteenth-century musical and philosophical ideas of nature; in the later twentieth century, the image of the rhizome was deployed

Natures and ecologies of composition  129 to contest this (most notably by Deleuze and Guattari); even more recently, the mycelial has become the go-to trope in nature-writing that is being employed theoretically and practically by a number of contemporary theorists and composers (and indeed musicologists too). As strange as it might sound, with tongue in cheek one might call this nature story one of oak, ginger, and mushroom. This last image of the fungal instantiates aspects of a broader ecological approach to compositional thinking that seeks to develop nonlinear and relational thinking between aspects of musical material. Importantly, in contrast with widespread uses of the word ‘ecology’, I go on to stress that ecological approaches in music do not necessarily delineate a direct relation to nature – sometimes one observes a decoupling of the relational in musical thinking from an abstracted nature such that the ‘environment’, in which musical elements unfold, is not conceived of as a specifically natural environment. This latter possibility, in which ‘ecology’ becomes detached from ‘the environmental’ – the realm in which ecological thinking itself emerged – is more akin to what Morton calls dark ecology, or an ‘ecology without nature’.17 With that in mind, I now briefly outline some historical transformations in discourses of nature, and of music–nature connections, as precursors informing more recent interests in the ecologies of music-making. Holly Watkins, parsing the work of Lotte Thaler, Lothar Schmidt, and others, helpfully summarises with the following: critics and analysts such as Adolf Bernhard Marx, Eduard Hanslick and Heinrich Schenker advanced authoritative but unstable claims regarding what makes music organic, in hopes of establishing the superiority of formal principles exemplified by late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Austro-German music, most of it (pace Wagner) instrumental. Statements regarding the development of musical material out of a single seed and the reciprocity of parts and whole accrued rhetorical force despite the lack of consensus regarding their analytical demonstration.18 Furthermore, Watkin notes the influence of both Kant and Hegel in the development of this nature-rhetoric.19 Kant’s paradigm of organicism was the tree. He saw this as having ‘a “natural purpose”, by which he meant a self-maintaining entity whose existence cannot be traced to some external intention or end’.20 All parts of the organism, in this model, work in relation to and in support of the others: they exist ‘by means of the other parts’ and ‘for the sake of the others and the whole’ – the organism is ‘organized and self-organizing’.21 By contrast, Hegel rejected Kant’s tree as embodiment of the developed organism; parts are under-­differentiated in plants, when compared with those of animals. The latter thus expresses a ‘higher’ totality.22 Of difference, Goethe suggested alternatively that this enabled organic unity in plants, writing that ‘the root is in fact no different from the stalk, the stalk no different from the leaf, and the leaf no different from the flower: variations of the same idea’.23 All in all, early nineteenth-century aesthetic organicism that was ‘less a coherent philosophy than a set of loosely related images, most of them botanical’ – the ‘seed’ supposedly at the centre of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (famously said E. T. A. Hoffman) is an excellent example of this.24 As Johnson

130  Musical materials reminds us, echoing Williams’s point about an idea of nature as an ‘idea of man’, organicist discourse helped to underpin the notion of a self-generative, ‘confident, assertive subjectivity, at one with nature not in some amorphous, primeval way but as the result of its own autonomous, creative activity’.25 Famously opposed to this image of the tree – as exemplar of organic totality – is Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome. This notion informs but is to be distinguished from the idea of the mycelial, discussed momentarily. A rhizome, in Deleuze and Guattari’s words, is a subterranean stem [which] is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots or radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects altogether: the question is whether plant life in its specificity is not entirely rhizomatic. Even some animals are, in their pack form. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all of their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers.26 The rhizome is, in their view, organised but non-hierarchical and without fixed positions. Different from a tree or root, ‘any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be’.27 While the rhizome is heterogeneous in nature, it is nevertheless segmented ‘according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed’, though this segmentation is not one of opposition and hierarchisation as one would find with a branching root.28 The rhizome is in this sense close to the image of a distributive network with multiple diverging and intertwining connections. Ingold’s work develops in part – but ultimately distinguishes itself – from the concept of the rhizome. It has also directly inspired and indirectly influenced compositional practices. Rhizomatic models, Ingold argues, align closely with ­network-based thinking. This aspect has been critiqued not only by Ingold, but by others such as Morton, who argue that despite Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestion that the rhizome is heterogeneous and segmented, the concept uniformly flattens difference.29 Ingold promotes the meshwork over the network, as an image appropriate to discussions of dynamical living systems. The distinction between the two is ‘critical’, he suggests. In the network model, ‘relations, it is supposed, are mutually constitutive’. However, this relational network model implies ‘the prior separation’ of elements. Speaking of ‘relations between’ elements of a network ‘necessarily presupposes[s] an operation of inversion whereby every person or thing is turned in upon itself prior to the establishment of a connecting link’.30 For Ingold, the meshwork is a more appropriate model of relationality than the network as it does not imply prior separation.31 Ingold reconfirms this by shifting rhetorically from the image of the rhizome to that of the mycelial – and states emphatically that this be considered a model for understanding ‘the living organism’ more generally: The lines of the spider’s web [are secreted] from the body of the spider as it moves, they are the lines along which it acts and perceives.

Natures and ecologies of composition  131 […] The thread-lines of the web lay down the conditions of possibility for the spider to interact with the fly. But they are not themselves lines of interaction. […] No longer a self-contained object like a ball that can propel itself from place to place, the organism [similarly] now appears as an ever ramifying web of lines of growth. This is the Deleuzeian haecceity, famously compared to a rhizome […]. I personally prefer the image of the fungal mycelium […]. Indeed as the mycologist Alan Rayner […] has suggested, the whole of biology would be different had it taken the mycelium as the prototypical exemplar of the living organism. For it could not, then, have been built upon the presumption that life is contained within the absolute bounds of fixed forms. We would rather have a biology that starts from the fluid character of the life process, wherein boundaries are sustained only thanks to the continual flow of materials across them.32 Further developing his concept of the meshwork, Ingold reframes the notion of organicism. He takes issue with the view that creatures live upon the world,33 a view he labels Kantian, following Kant’s comment that ‘the world is the substratum and the stage on which the play of our skills proceeds’.34 This view reflects a widespread gesture of inversion, which ‘turns the pathways along which life is lived into boundaries within which life is contained. Life, according to this logic, is reduced to an internal property of things that occupy the world but do not properly inhabit it’. Ingold argues that one must resist this inversion, and the notion of a pre-existent world of things, and attend instead to the ‘continual coming-into-being’ implied by a process of inhabiting. Surfaces, under this new model, are seen less as assured boundaries than as sites of interaction, places of different elements’ binding: ‘the land itself no longer appears as an interface separating [earth and sky], but as a vaguely defined zone of admixture and intermingling’. The same is true of organisms. As Ingold puts it, ‘what we have already found about the surface of the earth applies with equal force to the surface of the organism’.35 Anna Tsing, in her anthropological account of mushrooms in environments and trade, claims something similar: ‘Humans and fungi share [indeterminate] here-and-now transformations through encounter’, meaning that both are open to change through a shared vulnerability and openness of boundaries.36 Furthermore, while it was noted above that the older organicist model of nature had its corollary in an assertive self-generative subjectivity, the mycelial threads in the topsoil similarly offer an image of a contemporary subjectivity, one that is distributive and enmeshed. And for Ingold and Tsing this is not only true of organisms, but of the ecology of the environment as such. Referring again to his idea of the meshwork, Ingold argues elsewhere that the ‘meshwork view corresponds very closely to the ecologists’ idea of the web of life’.37 The fungal view is echoed here: the mycelial meshwork typifies pathways’ possibilities of transformation of matters (vegetal and otherwise), perhaps most literally in its sprawling position in a topsoil of a forest floor held as – binding not bounded – ‘surface’ between earth and sky. Last, for Tsing – who gestures again to the contemporary subject – mushrooms remind us of the survival of the self as bound up with an environment of others, taking us beyond a discourse of purity

132  Musical materials and self-contained personhood: ‘Precarity is a state of acknowledgement of our vulnerability to others.’38 A discussion of two comparative examples of compositional mushroom-­ thinking will help to clarify how these principles initially pertain to music – and differently. In his ‘Music Lovers’ Field Companion’, John Cage jokingly wrote the following: ‘I have come to the conclusion that much can be learned about music by devoting oneself to the mushroom.’39 Despite the light and playful tone of this piece of writing, it should not be forgotten that Cage was in fact a knowledgeable mycologist. In 1959, he won an Italian quiz show with mushrooms as his chosen specialist area, his final task being to correctly name ‘all the genera of white-spored mushrooms’. He won a lira prize equivalent to $6,000.40 But Cage’s interest in mushrooms was not only scientific. Cage admired the ­philosophy of Henry David Thoreau, who famously chose to live simply for more than two years in a cabin in 1845–46 in woodland near Concord, ­Massachusetts, immersing himself in the natural environment.41 For Cage, the mushroom is also a figure of immersion, of noticing the unnoticed underfoot; a perceptual awareness of unobserved sounds echoes the practice of the search, observation, and surprise of the foraging expedition. Geared towards perceptual action, this is mushroom-as-phenomenology. However, one should note additionally that the Thoreauvian quasi-spiritual aspect to Cage’s observance of the mushroom and environment should not obscure its brute origins: note that Cage first started collecting mushrooms out of the need to supplement his paltry diet during the Great Depression.42 While Cage’s interest in the fungal, and its connotations around the immersive environment and our perceptual awareness of this, might seem to suggest a very different view of nature from a nineteenth-century one, I follow here Benjamin Piekut’s suggestion that Cage’s politics of nature accord with what Bruno Latour refers to as the ‘Modern Constitution’. This names the historical development of an epistemological bifurcation of humans and nonhumans, an authoritative nature and a human world of social contingencies.43 Reviewing Cage’s compositional processes, Piekut argues that Cage works hard to enable nature to speak sonically – ‘letting sounds be themselves’ is an intensive process that asserts a particular relation of human to nonhuman other – and in the Cagean conception it is ultimately ‘nature’ in the singular that speaks through multiple instances.44 Liza Lim’s interest in the mycelial provides a contemporary point of comparison. In her Invisibility for solo cello (2009), the performer uses a ‘prepared’ bow (Figure 6.1). The hair of the bow is wrapped around the stick, creating an uneven surface. This creates a quiet yet rough sound as it is drawn across the cello strings. The composer has spoken of the ‘inherently complex mechanics of sudden accelerations, glitches and slippages as the undulating surface of alternating hair and wood passes over a string’.45 The ‘surfaces’ she mentions, the interface of bow and string, are accordingly ones embraced in their indeterminacy and uncertainty; in being brought into relation these surfaces are, in Ingold’s terms, binding not bounded entities. Indeed, in a discussion of the piece, Lim directly acknowledges Ingold’s conceptual framework.46

Natures and ecologies of composition  133

Figure 6.1  ‘Prepared’ bow for Liza Lim’s Invisibility (2009). Source: Lim, ‘A Mycelial Model for Understanding Distributed Creativity.’ Photograph by Séverine Ballon. Reproduced with permission.

Even though the materials the modified bow is composed of – the hair and wood – are identical to the conventional bow, these sit in a different relation to each other. As such, in the binding space where modified bow meets the strings, attention is brought to the specific material constituents (wood, hair, rosin), which one should normally forget when one sees the bow as bow, i.e. as a unity that transcends its own brute material constituents. A kind of return of the material repressed occurs. Yet, just as the repressed never returns in a ‘raw’ state, this materiality is never entirely raw either; it is mediated by secondary processes – to see wood, hair, or rosin is already to see matter shaped tangibly and conceptually, as natural resources already subject to rationalisation. What is perhaps even more noteworthy is a gesture which is, on the face of it, banal: there is a switch to a conventional bow halfway in Lim’s piece. But rather than a return to a normal state of affairs, following the use of the modified bow previously the listener-­observer becomes aware of the specific materials of the conventional – the concrete specifics of the instrumentally normative – as an echo of the unfamiliarity of what came earlier. That prior defamiliarisation now tinges the conventional with a new attentiveness to its distinctly material qualities. The modified bow disturbs but does not fully cast aside an otherwise conventional set of relationships between the cellist’s body, their instrument, and the bow itself. In the final section (the last minute and a half or so), the cellist plays with both bows, one taken in each hand. Sometimes this involves bowing across the strings from both directions. At other times, the left hand, holding the altered bow, uses it to sometimes stop notes on the neck, while the normal bow activates the string. A single bow and cello are not brought together in the unity of the cellist’s bodily action; rather the body is used to place these objects in shifting forms of contact with each other within an environment composed of wood, rosin, hair, and the metal of the strings. This accords with Lim’s ‘ontological focus on matter

134  Musical materials as flux and as inseparable from generative currents’, as in ‘Ingold’s use of the fungal mycelium’.47 While Invisibility has a precedent in Helmut Lachenmann’s Pression (see Chapter 1), which predates it by four decades, it differs in its tactics of elaborating the materiality of its constituent objects. Despite the unfamiliar use of sound generation and the scordatura tunings of the strings, the use of the sustained open strings at the very end helps to return us to a (relatively) stable pitch environment, a familiar closing gesture. Clement Greenberg famously suggested that the kitsch in the twentieth century was only possible after a ‘fully matured cultural tradition’, and that it mobilised the rhetoric of this tradition formulaically.48 The mycelial offers an appropriate model for music-making after which history has not only matured, but supposedly ended: a form for a time of detritus after a postmodern superabundance of materials; decomposition and composting as compositional strategy. Indeed, the biological narrative implicit in Greenberg’s diagnosis of kitsch (a period of maturation, implying tradition-as-organism) is itself undercut by an image of mycelial life that de-emphasises the teleological. Culture-as-an-organism is now seen as one of many parts, in which the organism is itself a dynamic system rather than unitary (culture culturing in the petri dish). The image of culture as mushroom can serve different functions. For Cage, the mycelial enacts renewal: Mushrooms grow most vigorously in the fall, the period of destruction, and the function of many of them is to bring about the final decay of rotting material. In fact, as I read somewhere, the world would be an impassable heap of old rubbish were it not for mushrooms and their capacity to get rid of it.49 More recently Lim reiterated this, drawing attention to mycelial systems’ role in both the decay and renewal of the environment. But she also supplements this account with an interest in seemingly reclaiming natural beauty from it. She quotes John Ruskin approvingly, retroactively inflecting his words with reference to the mushroom’s capacity to rework decay: ‘Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent [...] And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies, which are not only signs of life but sources of beauty.’50 To paraphrase Anna Tsing, who expresses a similar sentiment, mushrooms promise the possibility of life after decay and ruin.51 As noted Cage’s mushroom forage echoes a composition practice of observing the unobserved. Lim, in her mycelial approach, is similarly interested in changing perception. There is an important difference however: hers is a perceptiveness not of overlooked materials, but of the overlooked in materials. She is interested in working ‘with the grain of materials in a close listening to the “inner world” of sounds and to compose in a way that emphasises the tactile and haptic’. The specific materiality of her musical materials are drawn out through a relationality of components unfolding dynamically. Indeed, materials are taken not only as perceived but as a modality for perceiving: an attendance to materials’ interactivities means, for Lim, materials ‘become the tool of perception’.52 Lim’s mycelial strategy, in contrast with Cage’s early mushroom phenomenology, can be called ‘ecological’.

Natures and ecologies of composition  135 Both rhizomatic and mycelial thinking accords with many principles of an ecological approach and often figures in ecological discourses. It should be noted right away that this term has a number of overlapping definitions. Aaron S. Allen and Kevin Dawe summarise a conventional one as follows: ‘Ecology is an academic, scientific discipline that conducts objective research into realworld nature […]; but ecology is also used popularly to refer to sustainability issues or, just simply, nature.’53 Ecology is very much concerned, ethically as much as methodologically, with nature in normative definitions. But ‘nature’, as already indicated, can mean different things. Allen and Dawe argue that ecological, environmental perspectives see nature as dynamic rather than static or essential(­ising). For this reason, they argue that ecomusicology, which takes an ecological approach to music and sound studies, must resist the reification of its key terms. While associated with nature, ‘environment’, they argue, must not be seen as totally separate from the human – as ‘out there’.54 This critical problematisation of the ‘nature’ of ecology is productively theorised by Morton in his Ecology Without Nature. He argues that ecology need resist conceptualising nature as beyond the human, something both distant yet immersive – paradoxically qualities evoked for example in the image of the wilderness.55 He suggests that one should instead embrace the dialectical paradoxes of the ecological, recognising that, for instance, what is considered natural is often produced through (very human) practices, for example of labour (the worker on the field, the gardener’s lawn) and, closely connected with this, the economy (agriculture under capitalism).56 As he puts it, ‘ecology, if it means anything at all, means being without nature. When we drag it front and center, against our ideological interests, it stops being a world in which we can immerse ourselves’.57 Some musical consequences of what Morton calls dark ecology will be followed up below – raising the possibility of an ‘ecomusicology without nature’. While composers such as Lim do concern themselves with an ecology often explicitly referring to nature, I would like to suggest that the ecological informs a number of intertwined compositional approaches that are not so outwardly attached to ‘nature’, yet still retain a concealed connection to transforming discourses of nature. Concepts such as Morton’s dark ecology (ecology without nature) and Adorno’s notion of second nature (unnatural natures) will be useful as the discussion develops. In the next section, I open up these paradoxes of the natural with regard to some specific contemporary issues and compositional practices.

Sounding (post)natural ecologies An ecological approach might not only be suggestive of natural systems; the ‘environment’ that one attends to is constituted by relationships that span what might have previously been labelled natural and human spheres. Some thinkers foreground the political implications of this, by placing ecology – along with traditional ideas of nature – within the historical and ideological contexts of capitalism and colonialism. As Allen and Dawe remind us, the words ‘ecology’ and ‘economics’ both derive from the same Greek root, ‘eco-’, originally from oikos, meaning household.58 With that in mind, one should note that

136  Musical materials post-anthropocentrism needn’t necessarily constitute a positive and radical emancipation of the nonhuman. Rather, the (nonhuman) ecological system might be recast in the terms of a (very human) economical system. Where the human’s household becomes not seen as a private dwelling divided from the world, but the world at large, this same world becomes imagined, managed, and organised in a manner that reproduces the problems inherent within what was previously imagined as a purely ‘cultural’ household. As Rosi Braidotti points about, the global economy is itself post-anthropocentric: it ‘ultimately unifies all species under the imperative of the market’.59 Similarly, the blurring of the line between nature/culture, writes Donna Haraway, has sometimes been enacted in practice ‘at the cost of turning everything into circuits of monetarization and accounting’.60 This is the rationalising aspect of what some call the Capitalocene. While not identical, as distant cousins, economics and ecology share something here. This ‘bad’ nature–cultural transversal – often contrasted implicitly with the ‘good’ ecological awareness of nature–culture entanglements – is at times the focus of sonic and musical ecologies. This often manifests through two related concerns: firstly, the sites of these entanglements and, secondly, the autonomy (binding) – or, again, entanglement (bounding) – of these sites with respect to the wider world. The choice of site is symbolic as much as material; I use the word ‘symbolic’ here not to designate a specific signified referent, but rather to evoke the notion that the choice of site is suggestive of a number of (often ideological and/or aesthetic) meanings and associations besides any site’s brute physical characteristics. To give an example: when, at the turn of the twentieth century, Mahler, Webern, and others periodically retreated from the ‘unnatural’ hustle and bustle of the city so as to refresh and recuperate in the naturalism of the countryside (often spa towns), the rural–urban division expressed in their movement echoed the nature–culture duality of their thought.61 This movement enacted a symbolic differentiation of locations as much as a naïvely material one. The clear mountain air that spurs inspiration is, it should go without saying, an aesthetic image, in contrast with the quantifiability of this same air’s lack of polluting particulants, as demonstrable through scientific practices.62 But ecological thinking might itself help to register the ideological and aesthetic implications of the dialectics of nature and culture where the object of ecological thought is not taken to be a nature isolated from culture. One might, for instance, perceive urban environments ecologically – something undertaken in an expanded definition of nature writing, and in music and sonic art. Of the former, Morton casts Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Projects as this kind of ecological formation; this project constitutes ‘a form of environmental criticism’ – not of nature – but of ‘spaces produced by modern capital’.63 As Morton observes elsewhere, this is something present in David Harvey’s proposal that ‘ecology must engage with urbanization to have critical relevance in the twenty-first century’.64 This is nature writing expanded to encompasses an environment that complicates commonplace assumptions about ‘nature’ as environment, and which understands both environment and nature not as discrete spaces hidden away from the dynamics of contemporary capitalism.

Natures and ecologies of composition  137 Of the latter, music and sonic art, one can readily think of numerous sound artists who have sought to explore the interpenetration of sonic environments by intersecting natural and cultural forces. Sound artist David Dunn has been critical of recordists who have attempted to ‘purify’ their field recordings of human traces such as aeroplane and traffic noise. He argues that this ‘lures people into the belief that these places still fulfill their romantic expectations’.65 This is to suggest we no longer live in an untouched nature, if we in fact ever did. Sound artist Francisco López puts things slightly differently. While López does share with Dunn a concern about what the latter calls ‘the armchair environmental movement’, he rejects Dunn’s suggestion that recordings need to faithfully reproduce the environment, as the use of microphones and sound reproduction technologies itself constitutes an intrusion that shapes the perception of the listener, and because even when this technology is not present, listening is focused on some aspects of the environment while excluding others. López’s ‘La Selva’ is a 70-minute track originally recorded in the Costa Rican rainforest during the rain seasons of 1995 and 1996, and released on CD as part of Through the Looking Glass (2009). Sound material is compositionally structured following the course of ‘a prototypical day cycle of the rainy season’ (a strategy also used effectively by Chris Watson in ‘Ol-Olool-O’ on his album Weather Report (2003), which composites field recordings to suggest a single condensed day on the Kenyan Savanna). In López’s modification of Dunn’s position, he does not suggest we regress towards a romantic representation of natural environments; he insists upon an ecological understanding of them. Indeed, while López in general attempted to avoid recording ‘human-made sound intrusions’, ‘La Selva’ does include some, which are taken as part of this environment and not concealed during the editing process. In this understanding of ecology, López attempts a departure from conventional bioacoustics, which he characterises as tending ‘to isolate the calls, songs or whatever other sounds of a certain species from the “background” sound of its environment’ in order to identify them scientifically. The composer instead hopes to give the listener a sense of the environment as constituted by multiple life forms: animal – and indeed plant – weather systems, and the relation of each of these with the physical environment. Recalling for us Ingold’s discussion of the forest floor as a space of binding, López writes that a sound environment is not only the consequence of all its sound-producing components, but also of all its sound-transmitting and sound-modifying elements. The birdsong we hear in the forest is as much a consequence of the bird as of the trees or the forest floor. If we are really listening, the topography, the degree of humidity of the air or the type of materials in the topsoil are as essential and definitory as the sound-producing animals that inhabit a certain space.66 This is, again echoing Ingold, to turn from perceptual awareness of individual entities living life upon a pregiven surface, and towards the acknowledgement of intertwining environmental – including sonic – phenomena. Or, as López himself puts it, this is to develop ‘a more systemic perspective, considering assemblages

138  Musical materials of sound-producing animal species at an ecosystem level’.67 While Dunn and López differ in their views of the representational purity of field recordings of nature, they share an interest in the relations within and between nature and its others: nature is not taken as isolated or, indeed, itself to be composed of isolatable components.68 How one hears nature, and what this nature consists of, is a pressing issue for some sonic practitioners. If, in keeping with Adorno’s ‘second nature’, tonality was once the natural material of music making – the system in which parts found sensible and comprehensible relation – today we are in a very different position: we are faced with a plethora of natural compositional substances and relations between them; we have also come to understand that the meaning and implications of this ‘naturalness’ has fundamentally shifted. One often presented idea of nature is as a system that is at risk of loss: nature as the sometimes obscured and often soon-to-be destroyed by human activity. Examples abound where composition meets field recording. The temporal frame of loss can stretch from daily cycle to the generational: of the former, in Jana ­Winderen’s The Noisiest Guys on the Planet (2009), the composer uses hydrophones to conduct an ‘investigation into the use and production of sound by decapods [ten legged crustaceans]’ – she suggests that ‘this sound is what you are very likely to hear as soon as the ferries and motorboats have parked for the night’;69 of the latter, in Chris Watson’s ‘Vatnajökull’ (on the album Weather Report) the listener is presented with an 18-minute sound collage that contrasts the sounds of glacial ice flowing into the Norwegian Sea – a process normally taking 10,000 years. Additionally, the natural world (scare quotes on ‘natural’ always implied from here on), which provides music and sound art’s materials, has been extended through scientific methodologies and collective histories of experience, so as to encompass new forms of the ‘post-natural sublime’ – this I use not to designate a break with the natural world but rather to allude to a marked extension or repositioning of it. We are suspended in both terror and awe at a post-nuclear world which implies a nature already contaminated or always vulnerable to disaster (Hiroshima, Chernobyl, Fukushima). This world is on scales whose extremity tests the boundaries of our imagining: the nuclear occupies a multi-generational temporality; it unfolds across spaces of both cellular mutation, at the level of the microscopic, and fallout, at that of the transregional. This is rhapsodised in Jacob Kirkegaard’s 4 Rooms (2006), in which the composer presents recordings from rooms in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. These were created through initially recording ten minutes of ambience in each room, before playing this recording back into the room and recording the result. This process was repeated a number of times, and as a consequence an individual drone of resonant overtones emerged from within each space.70 This room-specific resonance eludes to Alvin Lucier’s I am Sitting in a Room. Unlike Lucier, however, the context of Kirkegaard’s rooms makes clear that no one is routinely sitting in them. This sense of human absence is heightened by a choice of four rooms that in their past lives were collective public spaces: a church, auditorium, swimming pool, and gymnasium. As Seth Kim-Cohen points out, in this work listeners do not hear the nuclear itself: ‘the inflection we hear is not precisely that of radioactive

Natures and ecologies of composition  139 particles and electromagnetic waves, but of the story, the history, of them […] We hear the hum of Kirkegaard’s piece through the filter of what we know about Chernobyl’;71 hearing is ‘profoundly overdetermined by the nuclear disaster’, as Christoph Cox puts it elsewhere.72 This point about historical context is important in shaping the mediated hearing of this site. But the historical dimension is also notable in that the development of a nuclear culture post-World War II marks also an awareness of a form of materiality that itself feels unsure: the nuclear typifies a problematic materiality.73 Even though these are places marked by human absence, the emphasis on their radioactive contamination does again recall the fact of bodies’ openness. As Morton puts it, ‘asbestos, radioactivity, and dioxins’ (what Bruno Latour calls ‘quasi-objects’) have ‘truly opened the body to its environment, albeit in the negative’.74 In the popular imagination, the radioactive is a substance or quality imagined to exist but observed principally in its destructive traces, in which the invisible is registered only in the effects of the monstrously visible. It is both there yet seemingly isn’t, blurring and modifying environments and bodies, something imagined (accurately or not) always to risk catastrophising established geographical and biological borders. Exploring such scales of (post)natural material, one notes those composers who have drawn on the planetary and the extra-planetary as an expanded artistic palette. In Annea Lockwood’s 2014 collaborative installation with Bob Bielecki, Wild Energy, the listener hears infra- and ultrasonic sounds normally beyond the range of human hearing. Among the sounds included are solar oscillations (‘pressure waves which travel through the body of the sun, causing ripples on the surface’) recorded by spacecraft, and made audible by being speeded up 42,000 times, volcanic vibrations (sped up 100 or 200 times), electromagnetic waves caused by lightning, emissions ‘generated by high-energy particles shooting through Earth’s magnetic field’, and the sounds of animals and plants: sei whales, bats, and the ultrasounds produced within trees by the uptake of water.75 Gérard Grisey’s music is outwardly very different from Lockwood’s. But here too one finds a refigured nature in its material: specifically, the recordings of pulsars in his Le Noir de l'Étoile (1989–90) for percussion sextet and tape. These stars’ repetitive pulsations are augmented and punctuated by the sound of the percussionists who seem to expand them outwards. The percussionists are arranged to encircle the audience. Grisey’s work brings into dialogue sounds both human and extra-terrestrial in origin in a fashion that recalls an imagined premodern ritual. Paradoxically, though, this rite is dependent on the findings of recent astronomical science. An attentiveness to the material ‘universe’ of sounds, for Grisey, foregrounded sounds’ own temporality, as opposed to their abstract temporal ordering. As he put it, ‘strengthened by an ecology of sounds, spectral music no longer integrates time as an external element imposed upon a sonic material considered as being “outside time”, but instead treats it as a constituent element of sound itself’.76 Temporality in this view emerges from the particularities of the material. In both Grisey and Lockwood’s works, nature and its materials here encompass energies and motions beyond direct perception. Yet, nature – very much changed since romanticism – still persists as a ground of both aesthetic appeal and legitimation.77

140  Musical materials

Figure 6.2  Séverine Ballon performing Liza Lim's an ocean beyond earth. Photograph by Aaron Cassidy. Reproduced with permission.

Other possibilities of a post-natural ecology are seen in those works that place objects and bodies in dynamic and emergent relations with one another. This practice explores affordances and potentialities of materials in terms of these relations. This has already been observed in the case of the cello strings and prepared bow (later, the conventional bow) in Lim’s Invisibility. In another of her works for solo cello, an ocean beyond earth (2016), the focus on interrelated objects in performance is heightened to the point of observant study (Figure 6.2). The title’s inspiration is extra-planetary in origin, referring to Enceladus, one of the moons of Saturn, which has been recently discovered by NASA’s Cassini mission to have a tidal ocean beneath its crust, from which breach geysers that release water which ultimately contribute to the parent planet’s icy rings. The piece is, in one sense, sculptural in design, in so far as it requires a specific distributed relationship between objects in the performance space. The performer not only bows the cello but also uses lengths of thread passed around the strings to activate them. A violin is positioned some distance away, as a smaller satellite that echoes the larger form of the cello’s body as an object. Connective threads run from this and across the cello strings, so that both can be sounded through a single action. Both instruments are positioned as material objects to be explored connectedly, one closely (the cello, embraced by the performer’s body) and the other more remotely (the violin, reached only by the intermediary of the strand). The inherent quietness and relative indeterminacy of their sounding by thread only adds to the tone of focused discovery. Similar principles and techniques are also employed by Marianthi PapalexandriAlexandri, although unlike Lim these are partially or fully automated mechanically.

Natures and ecologies of composition  141

Figure 6.3  Detail from Untitled IV. Photograph by Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri and Pe Lang. Reproduced with permission.

Papalexandri-Alexandri has an interest in instruments’ objectual possibilities. Her Untitled IV (2011–12) on first sight appears to present a space of experimentation that is as much scientific as musical: one sees four d­ isassembled – or dissected? – recorders distributed on a surface, each piece of which has one end covered with an elastic silicone membrane (Figure 6.3). As the composer explains of these sound devices (developed in collaboration with Pe Lang): ‘A nylon line is fastened through a hole at the centre of the membrane; the end of the nylon line is loosely secured to a wooden resined motor driven rod to produce friction. The sound is produced by the nylon line causing the membrane to vibrate by friction.’ In this and other works using similar strategies by the composer, the sound can be modified by means including changing tension of the line, the speed of the motor, or by ‘depressing the membrane with the fingers while it is vibrating to vary the pitch or by playing on the keys’.78 In Connector (2011), membranes are attached to instrument-objects including a trombone bell, violins, and a drum head. In this installation work, the human performer is removed entirely, so as to underline the material properties of the objects in an exploratory manner, nonetheless reminiscent of quasi-objective scientific demonstration. Yet, like psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott’s famous case of the boy obsessed with stringing objects together, perhaps this enactment is similarly a symbolic resistance to the anxiety of separation; in a world increasingly aware of the dangers of thinking nature as a separate realm, these repeated threading actions suggest an urgent reassertion of our interconnectedness with the world of things. ‘String can be looked upon as an extension of all other techniques of communication’, writes Winnicott. ‘String joins, just as it also helps in the wrapping up of objects and in the holding of unintegrated material.’79 In works by Lim and Papalexandri-Alexandri and many others, in which (human) performers are present to greater or lesser degrees, instruments and/as objects are presented as a field of potential actions – actions often exhibiting both human and nonhuman agency. This is seen in a network of practices that encompass works by, for instance, Hanna Hartman (Borderlines, for violin, amplified

142  Musical materials objects and tape (2011)), James Saunders (his various works ‘on the sonic properties of materials’),80 Michael Pisaro (Ricefall (2) (2007)), and Sivan Cohen Elias (Hack, for interconnected electric and classical guitar (2016), which incidentally, like Lim and Papalexandri-Alexandri’s works cited above, includes the threading of both instruments with fishing line, so that they may be sounded together). Following on from the discussion of the sculptural developed in Chapter 4, these works approach the curatorial, in an ecological mode. They gather objects in relation not only due to their independent qualities but with an ear to their interactivity through the means of specifically chosen arrangements and modes of engagement. Extending this logic, one could add that this ecology of objects needn’t be constrained only to instruments and objects in the everyday sense of the word; one might undertake this curatorship in relation to sonic objects where sound itself has become conceived sculpturally, as an array of physical materials to be handled and presented exploratorily.

Temporality, precarity, and the anticipatory Different temporalities are implicit in different ideas of nature, from which follow different compositional conceptions of music and time. Conventionally, nature is eternal and unchanging: this is manifested most literally in pedal points, whose association ‘with the idea of nature is rooted deeply in the history of tonal music’.81 But nature is also the background from which the human emerged, towards a higher culture. Nature is paradoxically, in this view, both timeless and the pre-cultural past that we carry with us. MacCormack and Strathern summarise this view: ‘The ‘natural’ is that which is innate in our primate heritage and the ‘cultural’ is that which is arbitrary and artificial.’82 However, as Holly Watkins points out in a different context, an unchanging nature presents a paradox when appealed to in relation to musical aesthetics: ‘concepts such as totality, unity and wholeness’, concomitant with organicist discourses, ‘are much easier to conceive as static achievements than as ongoing processes’.83 The question of temporality should not be lost when one considers why the ecological, by contrast with previous organicisms, is attractive to a number of contemporary composers and practitioners: the ecological implicates the temporality of any natural – or musical – system.84 (This echoes Grisey’s suggestion, made in light of an ecology of sounds: that sonic materials impress on us their own temporalities.) Any element in the system changes in relation to a change introduced elsewhere in that ‘environment’: a new animal, sound, object in the habitat is implicated in its relationship with pre-existing elements, and vice versa. What is suggested is emergence over stasis, relation not isolation, experiential dynamism rather than analytic dissection. Ecological thinking – regarding nature and musical composition – is in keeping with a language of process; the latter term itself accords with some other aesthetic needs and priorities of our present. Ecology provides a compositional modality of thinking that enacts particular notions of temporality. Ingold articulates this ecological conception of process: ‘the open world that people inhabit is not prepared for them in advance. It is continually coming into

Natures and ecologies of composition  143 being around them. It is a world, that is, of formative and transformative processes’.85 Ingold argues this with an eye to critiquing the Kantian view mentioned above – under which the earth is the closed boundary ‘upon’ which organisms live (humans included), rather than a space of interactive binding open to the dynamism of ‘inhabitation’. Ingold is correct to question this a priori stage of existence. At the same time however, I want to foreground a dialectical caveat: when one reflects on Adorno’s concept of second nature one recognises that the world is in some regards prepared ‘in advance’; materials (for the composer: ‘musical materials’) are subject to mediation, in ways that are integral to the dynamic and emergent interaction of elements that Ingold, quite rightly, suggests have been sometimes undervalued theoretically. Ingold writes that he and a number of other thinkers are ‘not so interested in what a material is. They wanted to know what it does’.86 Even if Ingold is not speaking directly of music here, one can read his comments to include ­composers  – as thinking practitioners, as practising thinkers – concerned with the doing of their (musical) materials. Again, one can by way of example point to the compositional thinking of Lim, who has spoken of an interest in her musical materials taken ‘as “a gathering of currents”’ (Lim borrows a phrase from Ingold here). For Lim this means coming to understand musical materials not as a set of distinct objects assembled or schematised so as to convey a pregiven meaning. Rather than ‘building blocks’, music engages with ‘a different order of architectural thinking […] characterised by metamorphosis and flux’.87 This aligns closely with Ingold’s comment elsewhere that ‘every material, in a way, is a becoming – it’s not an object in itself but a potential to become something’.88 A process of emergence, of the unforeseen but yet to come, is celebrated when one works without a preconceived ‘architectural plan or a systematized method’.89 Needless to say, this practice of working leads to musical results and priorities very different from the organically unified totality one observes in a great deal of music historically spanning much nineteenth-century romanticism and ­twentieth-century modernism. And the ecological also suggests a different relation to the temporal. Most literally, an emphasis on emergence over a pre-formed compositional plan can mean that the tempo of compositional working can be slow: one must (ideally) allow materials to suggest their ‘own’ directions, which feedback into an iterative loop under which the conditions of emergence are then modified, and/or the qualities emerged are enabled to more fully speak. Lim has noted the ‘labour-intensive’ manner of this practice, one which involves interaction not between material and composer, but between composer and performer, and performer and instrument.90 Not only is the product aesthetic in suggesting no specific purpose (to invoke the Kantian slogan); the production process is also resistant to contemporary modernity’s purposive, ready, and efficient working practices. She also points to another feature of ecological temporality: speaking of her Invisibility, she suggests the musical work becomes regarded as ‘both fruit and archive of the traces of those reciprocations and iterations [of composer–performer creative collaboration]’.91 With this I would like to underline that music reminds us of the temporalities of processes, in both its final artistic products and modes of production. In stating this

144  Musical materials I am by implication suggesting that the complexity of temporality is sometimes lacking in theorisations of process. In suggesting above that Ingold take account of mediation and second nature, I have mentioned this already with reference to historical time. Yet this also goes for the temporality of musical works as they unfold in the present: many embrace process, but this process is temporally multifaceted, often paradoxical, and takes specific forms that are subject to mediation by features of the world beyond the work. Here I am in agreement with Georgina Born’s critique of what she calls the ‘monotemporality of becoming’, which she suggests one observes in a number of process-focused theories and methodologies. Born develops this critique in a context very different to that explored here (her investigation focuses on genre), but her conclusion resonates with this context: a (mis)understanding of becoming as monotemporal ‘can flatten out and pre-empt investigation of the multiplicity of time’. ‘Process and becoming’, she summarises, ‘do not so much resolve as position us at the threshold of a wide vista of questions of temporality’.92 Looking back to ecology, one could say that music and sonic art remind us of the temporal dimension of (musical or everyday) environments; music insists an environment not be conceived as a synchronous set of mappable relationships between parts. In light of the mediation of processes and their temporalities, I would like to suggest that the attractiveness of ecological and indeterminate approaches to many contemporary composers at the present historical moment is suggestive of a shared material condition, or methodological problematic. In the widespread post-Cagean embrace of indeterminacy I read a subterranean connection with the precarity of everyday life under late modernity. Here I pick up on Anna Tsing’s associating of indeterminacy with precarity.93 In keeping with the historical crisis of materiality outlined in Chapter 1, Tsing also points out that, in comparison with 1950s and 1960s ideas about a stable natural equilibrium: In the 1970s […] attention turned to disruption and change, which generate the heterogeneity of the landscape. In the 1970s too, humanists and social scientists began worrying about the transformative encounters of history, inequality, and conflict. Looking back, such coordinated changes in scholarly fashion might have been early warning of our common slide in precarity.94 This is a situation echoed in some prevalent compositional strategies, in which composition becomes less the fixing of material organised into a work and more the work of opening a space alluding to the openness of possibility. In these cases, compositions accordingly tend away from solidity and towards a practice of precarity. Here I use the word ‘practice’ in a sense of repetition for the purposes of learning and coping with material (i.e. much of what the student does in the conservatoire practice room). Given the widespread precarity of our times, the ability to invoke, to undertake, to practise indeterminacy in the aesthetic sphere helps composers, performers, and listeners prepare themselves for unplanned and uncertain futures. Indeed, this is something Lim herself has commented on, writing of her Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus (2017). As she puts it, through the uncertain in music, ‘we might find some clues for living in uncertain times – not in stories of resolution but perhaps in rehearsals for precarity’.95

Natures and ecologies of composition  145 In listening to the indeterminate one anticipates not the image of a specific future but a future without specific content. Echoing the gesture traced in ­Chapter 2, here I again read a motion through which a potential source of anxiety becomes transfigured as aesthetic fascination. Indeed, it is no coincidence that these same contemporary compositional strategies of indeterminacy often manifest in particular in relation to the material and the environmental specifically. Points of fixation are focused upon, not because these things are themselves fixed and fully accounted for, but rather – like any object of desire – because one is enticed by a lack of the object or lack within the object. Environment and material are, today, attractors that hold attention as unknowns. The crises of materiality discussed in Chapter 1 are echoed in a crisis of environment – an environment which today is an object of loss (environmental degradation) and unknowing (unspecifiable as both natural and human; paradoxically both microscopic and astronomical in scale). The mycelial – associated with ecological relationality – is for many taken as a figurative natural image of this transformed (post)nature, in uncertain times. Indeed, owing to the integrative openendness with its dynamic environment, Tsing makes the case that the mushroom be understood as emblematic of ‘indeterminacy and the conditions of precarity’.96 With all that in mind, indeterminate practices and environmental soundings after Cage seem not only suggestive of technical issues regarding musical material and compositional approach; these same strategies embody an enigmatic social relevance that speaks to contemporary temporalities and collective existential uncertainties. This interest in the ecological and, intertwined with this, indeterminacy inheres in what could be termed an aesthetics of the anticipatory. The anticipatory employs a rhetorical ‘going to have happened’ at some later stage; one knows that something will have happened within a specific framing, but the content of the event is not prescribed exactly. Tsing asks the following: ‘What if […] precarity is the condition of our time – or, to put it another way, what if our time is ripe for sensing precarity?’97 This historical condition, this sensing of precarity, is quite literally taking place in compositional enactments of indeterminacy: one opens oneself to sensing something one knows one cannot know in advance. To push this thesis a little further: this anticipatory aspect echoes – formally – the structure of utopianism. This is to say that it does not present the image of a future, but rather marks the possibility of different and differently organised futures. It is emancipatory precisely because it is without precise prescription. It therefore should come as no surprise that ecological compositional approaches often are conceived as having an inherently ethical dimension: not only do they sometimes present content derived from a problematic past or present (the sound of Chernobyl, traces of habitat destruction), but they present this content in a form foregrounding emergence and dynamism – in the terms of difference, the unknown, the unfixed. ‘A precarious world is a world without teleology’, writes Tsing.98 The anticipatory provides moments of perceptual readiness for a collective taking of breath. This distinction between ecological form and content is helpful as it clarifies the critical possibilities of some compositional practices. It should not be forgotten that the terms of anticipation – and consequently of the aesthetics of the

146  Musical materials anticipatory – are mediated by factors external to them. With the inclusion of ecological content, there is sometimes (though by no means necessarily) a risk of failing to also register the conditions through which anticipation is mediated – where for instance a work revels in an apparently self-sufficient materiality, wherein it falls into the revelatory brilliance of this material environment – where it concerns itself with the immediacy of the present (for instance of an immersive environment), while failing to place this present in a history in emergence. Put slightly differently, problems arise where the form of anticipation is unacknowledged, where all one is presented with is the sheer immediacy of content. This can be put in explicitly temporal terms. That claim of immediacy announces: all that exists is the presentness of what is before the listener. As opposed to the ‘negative project’ of Adorno and Horkheimer, the ecological in composition can become problematic where it purports to reveal only ‘positive’ content – the wholesale fullness of the world – as a plenitude that sublimely bamboozles us and forecloses any possibility of our critical reflection on the terms through which this content makes this presentation. Here arises what Morton calls ambient poetics: ‘Ambient poetics is about making the imperceptible perceptible, while retaining the form of its imperceptibility – to make the invisible visible, the inaudible audible.’99 Morton is critical of ambient poetics as this seemingly brings the background into the foreground – one hears a previously unheard environment – while, at the same time, one revels in this environment being beyond our reach. The ambient here promises contact with that beyond everyday perception while simultaneously underlining that this contact will always escape us. In ambient poetics there ‘establishes a sense of processes continuing without a subject or an author’.100 This potentially presents an issue for those post-Cagean practices which, similarly, open the listener to the immediacy of environmental sound while simultaneously underlining this sound’s imperceptibility. Ambient poetics is for Morton an issue because distance is both obscured and enacted. This is where lies the critical potential of an expanded notion of compositional ecology, one which is neither aligned with a fixation on a nature separate from the human, nor which promises unmediated contact with the perceived. The ecological, in some forms, can promise contact, touch, proximity, while also underlining the paradox that distance figures into making this possible. While an ambient poetics might be implied, it needn’t necessarily be enacted. Kirkegaard’s 4 Rooms, for instance, presents us with the unheard material voices of the chosen spaces. But with this comes an awareness of the contact’s dependency on compositional interventions into these spaces; Kirkegaard makes clear the distance that is inherent in our contact. Morton adds: Ever since the Romantic period, ambience, a complex product of automation, private property, collectivity, and new media, has generated ever more virulent forms of aestheticization. […] Technology and ideology strive hand in hand to produce forms that unmercifully de-distance the object, only to reify that very de-distancing (reality TV, ambient music in corporate space).101

Natures and ecologies of composition  147 In contrast with this technological presentation of apparent immediacy, the form of Kirkegaard’s technique does not purport a reified and transcendental naturalness – even though the content of our listening is one of a transfigured nature. This is in keeping with what Morton calls ‘ecocritique’, that is a self-reflexive attitude to nature, which ‘thoroughly examines how nature is set up as a transcendental, unified, independent category. Ecocritique does not think that it is paradoxical to say, in the name of ecology itself: “down with nature!”’102 Similarly, looking back to Lim’s Invisibility: while perception of the imperceptible does indeed characterise Lim’s interest in the grain of materials – recalling a constitutive element of Morton’s problematic ambient poetics – her mycelial model retains the human as part of her compositional ecology. Rather than turning from human to an ecology of materials ‘in themselves’, the composer deploys mycelial thinking as a manner for, as she puts it, rethinking ‘the dynamics or modality of composer–performer collaboration’ – that is, working with the performer’s embodied knowledge in addition to other musical materials, and in this collaboration drawing together many ‘nutrients of insights and ideas, available to each other in new ways’. Again, active materiality is not brought into the foreground as an ever-present condition of existence, but rather as emerging in relation to specifically situated formations of compositional authorship and performance; the material is embraced in ‘creative partnership’.103 Nature persists historically as a concept operative in compositional engagements with musical materials. Ecological approaches foreground the materialist implications of compositional practice through attending to a world of objects; our interest derives in part from the interactive and interdependent qualities of these materials. It has been shown that ecological practices often – but not always – signify this nature after nature, and have been expanded to refer to the materiality of objects that cut across a clear nature–culture divide. The mycelial provides a related image for a transformed contemporary nature. Suggestive of a nature – and selfhood – characterised by contamination not purity, systemic interconnectivity over competitive individualism, its critical mobilisation by theorists and composers alike also promoting ‘one kind of collaborative survival’ in this problematic material world.104 Furthermore, music and sound art demonstrate the temporal complexities of ecological artistic practices, gifting opportunities to reflect on the multifaceted temporalities of emergent material processes. The urgency of this challenge is not merely conceptual but, in fact, embodied in indeterminate practices and compositional techniques that take on a changed function – post-Cage – and precious relevance to the precarious conditions of our ‘liquid’ times. In this chapter I have suggested that the environments in which one locates, observes, and listens to materials are changing – and with this rises the connected notion that materials might themselves be construed in their environmental embeddedness. This I have linked with some contemporary compositional approaches that enact ecological approaches expressing materials’ relationality over their autonomy. These approaches – and the mycelial intermeshing of materials that is sometimes associated with them – distinguish themselves from

148  Musical materials a longer history of music’s association with nature. Indeed, the compositional can take the form of the ecological without proposing the specific content of the ­natural world, promoting a condition of postnatural ecology. This echoes a post-anthropocentric language of nature–culture intersection and blurring. This sounded exploration of the open-ended environment offers as critical function an opportunity to practise the uncertainty and precarity that characterises our present, and a near future that is simultaneously closing quickly, yet also unpredictably open. It echoes – that is, sounds beyond itself – a liquid modern condition under which, to borrow Z ­ ygmunt Bauman’s words, ‘everything could happen yet nothing can be done with confidence and certainty’.105 The aesthetics of the anticipatory are a technique of readiness, the aestheticisation of precarities around present materials and the unpredictability of an unfolding near future.

Notes 1 Jon Roffe and Hannah Stark, ‘Introduction: Deleuze and the Non/Human’, in Deleuze and the Non/Human, ed. Jon Roffe and Hannah Stark, 1–16 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 1. 2 Paul Hindemith cited in Lloyd Whitesell, ‘Twentieth-Century Tonality, or, Breaking Up is Hard to Do’ in The Pleasure of Modernist Music, ed. Arved Ashby, 103–120 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2004), 108. 3 Whitesell, ‘Twentieth-Century Tonality’, 107. 4 Raymond Williams, ‘Ideas of Nature’, in The Cultural Studies Reader, 3rd edition, ed. Simon During, 283–297 (New York: Routledge, 2007). 5 Tim Ingold, ‘An Ecology of Materials’, in Power of Material/Politics of Materiality, ed. Susanne Witzgail and Kerstin Stakemeier, 59–65 (Online publication: Diaphanes, N.d.), 62. 6 Ingold, ‘An Ecology of Materials’, 62. 7 Deborah Cook, ‘Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw’, Continental Philosophy Review 40 (2007), 49–72 at 50. 8 Theodor W. Adorno and Rodney Livingstone, ‘Form in the New Music’, Music Analysis 27/2–3 (2008), 201–216 at 209. 9 Julian Johnson, Webern and the Transformation of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 229. 10 Timothy Morton suggests ‘dark ecology dances with the subject–object duality’. Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 185. We will introduce the notion of dark ecology below. 11 The historicity of materials’ ‘own’ and ‘active’ tendencies and inclinations was explored in the previous chapter. 12 Nikki Sullivan asks a similar question of some new materialist appeals to the biology of the ‘natural world’, when it is subsequently taken as a new model of subjectivity and selfhood. She asks: ‘What is it about “animal agency” that makes such a revisioning possible? Why animal agency?’ Nikki Sullivan, ‘The Somatechnics of Perception and the Matter of the Non/Human: A Critical Response to the New Materialism’, European Journal of Women’s Studies 19/3 (2012), 308. Emphasis in the original. Similarly, we asked in Chapter 3, what it is specifically that the piano affords as a choice of object. 13 Morton, Ecology without Nature, 173. 14 Williams, ‘Ideas of Nature’, 284. 15 Williams, ‘Ideas of Nature’, 286. 16 See Donna Haraway, Noboru Ishikawa, Scott F. Gilbert, Kenneth Olwig, Anna L. Tsing and Nils Bubandt, ‘Anthropologists Are Talking – About the Anthropocene’, Ethnos:

Natures and ecologies of composition  149 Journal of Anthropology 81/3 (2016), 535–564 and Donna Haraway, ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin’, Environmental Humanities 6 (2015), 159–165. Also see Anna L. Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 37–44 regarding nature and the plantation. 17 Morton, Ecology Without Nature. 18 Holly Watkins, ‘Toward a Post-Humanist Organicism’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review 14 (2017), 93–114 at 96–97. In her article Watkins explores the possibility of a systems-based understanding of musical organicism. 19 Morton reads much contemporary ecological writing as Kantian in character, although with respect to the latter’s philosophy of art: ‘Respect for the environment entails a certain aesthetic rather than purely ethical reaction, which involves the distance that Kant says is essential for maintaining the sublime object.’ (Morton, Ecology without Nature, 113). This he calls consumerist: ‘Like an object of value in a shop window as seen by a window shopper, we consume the wilderness in a purposively nonpurposive way.’ (p. 139). 20 Watkins, ‘Toward a Post-Humanist Organicism’, 100. 21 Kant quoted in Watkins, ‘Toward a Post-Humanist Organicism’, 100. Emphases in the original. 22 Watkins, ‘Toward a Post-Humanist Organicism’, 101. 23 Goethe quoted in Johnson, Webern and the Transformation of Nature, 217. 24 Watkins, ‘Toward a Post-Humanist Organicism’, 101–102. 25 Johnson, Webern and Transformation of Nature, 231–232. Johnson is here referring to Heinrich Schenker’s idea of ‘the tonal ground and the ground of nature’. 26 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 6–7. 27 Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 7. 28 Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 9 and 16. 29 Morton, Ecology without Nature, 52. 30 Tim Ingold, ‘Bindings against Boundaries: Entanglements of Life in an Open World’, Environment and Planning A, 40/8 (2008), 1–15 at 10. Emphasis in the original. 31 This interest in arguing against the concept of prior separation – and in seeing separation as an effect of phenomena rather than the cause – is echoed in the ontological sphere in the work of Karen Barad, specifically in her notion of ‘intra-action’. See her ‘Posthuman Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28/3 (2003), 801–831. 32 Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge, and Description (New York: Routledge, 2011), 85–86. Emphasis in the original. This passage contains material developed from Ingold, ‘Bindings against Boundaries’. 33 Ingold, ‘Bindings against Boundaries’, 3. 34 Kant quoted in Ingold, ‘Bindings against Boundaries’, 3. 35 Ingold, ‘Bindings against Boundaries’, 1–2, 8 and 11. 36 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 47. 37 Ingold, ‘An Ecology of Materials’, 64. 38 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 29. 39 John Cage, ‘Music Lovers’ Field Companion’, in Silence, 50th anniversary edition (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 274. Cage’s article is clearly tongue in cheek. In Silence, a note precedes it: ‘In 1954 an issue of the United States Lines Paris Review devoted to humor was being prepared. I was invited to write on the subject of music. I contributed the following article’ (p. 274). 40 Sabrina Small, ‘Harmony of the Spores: John Cage and Mycology’, Gastronomica 11/2 (2011), 19–23 at 21. 41 See the chapter ‘Nondualism and Coexistence: Henry David Thoreau and John Cage’, in Christopher Shultis, Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the American

150  Musical materials Experimental Tradition, new edition (Hanover and London: University of New England, 2013), 29–58. 42 Small, ‘Harmony of the Spores’, 20. 43 See Benjamin Piekut, ‘Chance and Certainty: John Cage’s Politics of Nature’, Cultural Critique 84 (2013), 134–163; for Piekut’s outline of Latour’s concept, see pp. 138–139. 44 Piekut, ‘Chance and Certainty’, 151 and 135. Piekut has elsewhere argued that Cage’s politics of nature enable a reproduction of normative power relations through concealing the positionality of the composer and listeners. See his ‘Sound’s Modest Witness: Notes on Cage and Modernism’, Contemporary Music Review 31/1 (2012), 3–18; and for discussion and development of this suggestion see Samuel Wilson, ‘Strategies of Conquest and Defence: Encounters with the Object in Twentieth-Century Music’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 145/2 (2020), 457–484, at pp. 476–479. 45 Liza Lim, ‘A Mycelial Model for Understanding Distributed Creativity: Collaborative Partnership in the Making of “Axis Mundi” (2013) for Solo Bassoon’, paper given at the Performance Network Second International Conference, 4–7 April 2013, Cambridge, UK, p. 6. Retrieved from http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/17973/. 46 Lim, ‘A Mycelial Model for Understanding Distributed Creativity’, 2–3. 47 Lim, ‘A Mycelial Model for Understanding Distributed Creativity’, 3. This mycelial view she contrasts explicitly with Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the rhizome. 48 Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 10. 49 Cage, ‘Edgard Varèse’, in Silence, 85. 50 John Ruskin cited in Lim, ‘A Mycelial Model for Understanding Distributed Creativity’, 12. 51 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 18. 52 Lim, ‘A Mycelial Model for Understanding Distributed Creativity’, 5 and 7. 53 Aaron S. Allen and Kevin Dawe, ‘Ecomusicologies’, in Current Directions in Ecomusicology, ed. Aaron S. Allen and Kevin Dawe, 1–15 (New York and London: Routledge, 2016), 9. 54 Allen and Dawe, ‘Ecomusicologies’, 12, 8, and 9–10. 55 Ingold says something similar of the notion of materiality, that this should not be regarded as a purely external physicality, as ‘a world “out there”’. See Ingold, ‘An Ecology of Materials’, 60. It is not a coincidence that nature and ‘the material world’ are often conventionally aligned closely (often in binary opposition to culture, mind, or spirit). 56 Morton, Ecology Without Nature, 89. 57 Morton, Ecology Without Nature, 204. 58 Allen and Dawe, ‘Ecomusicologies’, 2. 59 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 63. 60 Haraway in Haraway, Ishikawa, Gilbert, Olwig, Tsing and Bubandt, ‘Anthropologists Are Talking’, 538. 61 See Johnson, Webern and the Transformation of Nature, 26 on these retreats. 62 Although it should be added that this latter form of knowledge-making – which shows how things ‘really are’ – is not a neutral practice and not without its own frame of symbolic reference. 63 Morton, Ecology without Nature, 150. 64 Morton, Ecology without Nature, 169. 65 David Dunn cited in Tim Rutherford-Johnson, Music After the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 225. 66 Franscisco López, Composer’s website: www.franciscolopez.net/env.html (accessed 26 July 2019). 67 Franscisco López, Composer’s website.

Natures and ecologies of composition  151 68 In López’s work this is often achieved, paradoxically, through the isolation of sound from other registers of experience. Seth Kim-Cohen undertakes a reading of a 2008 performance of López’s Buildings [New York] in which the composer asks the audience to wear blindfolds so as to focus on the sounds themselves. Of his recorded works, Kim-Cohen writes that, similarly, ‘López manipulates the recordings to arrive at sound works intended to be devoid of semiotic attachments to identifiable elements’. See Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 123–125. 69 Jana Winderen, Composer’s website: www.janawinderen.com/news/the_noisiest_ guys_on_the_plane.html#.XT2-JOhKiUk (accessed 28 July 2019). 70 Jacob Kirkegaard, Composer’s website: https://fonik.dk/works/4rooms.html (accessed 28 July 2019). 71 Seth Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear, 132. 72 Christoph Cox cited in Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear, 132. 73 In a similar vein, dark matter, as present but not visible, has come to function recently as symbol of a problematic materiality. 74 Morton, Ecology without Nature, 108. As I revise this book towards the end of 2020, one might now add viral pandemics to Morton’s list. 75 Caramoor website: www.caramoor.org/music/sonic-innovations/wild-energy/ (accessed 29 July 2019). Annea Lockwood, Composer’s website: www.annealockwood.com/compositions/wild-energy/ (accessed 29 July 2019). Also see Gottschalk, Experimental Music Since 1970 (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 70. 76 Gérard Grisey cited in Dimitris Exarchos, ‘The Skin of Spectral Time in Grisey’s Le Noir de l'Étoile’, Contemporary Music Review 15/1 (2018) 31–55 at 34. 77 Listening to a post-natural environment can be heard in Christina Kubisch’s Electrical Walks (2001 onwards), in which the artist provides participants with headphones and a device capable of picking up the electromagnetic fields in their local urban environments. For discussion, see Seth Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear, 109–119. 78 Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri, Composer’s website: http://marianthi.net/works. html. 79 Donald W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 25. It should be added that with his psychoanalytic context Winnicott’s use of the word ‘material’ refers not simply to physical material, but to psychical content (which itself unfolds through embodiment and one’s relation to a physical world). 80 James Saunders cited in Gottschalk, Experimental Music Since 1970, 90. See the section ‘Instruments as Objects’, 89–96. 81 Johnson, Webern and the Transformation of Nature, 43. 82 Carol MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern, Nature, Culture and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 6. 83 Watkins, ‘Toward a Post-Humanist Organicism’, 103. 84 This is pre-echoed in the Darwinian concept of evolution, which was suggestive of the historical temporality of nature: ‘natural forms had not only a constitution by a history’. Williams, ‘Ideas of Nature’, 289. 85 Ingold, ‘Bindings against boundaries’, 6. Emphasis in the original. 86 Ingold, ‘An Ecology of Materials’, 63. 87 Lim, ‘A Mycelial Model for Understanding Distributed Creativity’, 7. 88 Ingold, ‘An ecology of materials’, 63. 89 Lim, ‘A Mycelial Model for Understanding Distributed Creativity’, 11. 90 Lim, ‘A Mycelial Model for Understanding Distributed Creativity’, 11. 91 Lim, ‘A Mycelial Model for Understanding Distributed Creativity’, 4. 92 Georgina Born, ‘On Tardean Relations: Temporality and Ethnography’, in The Social After Gabriel Tarde: Debates and Assessments, ed. Matei Candea, 230–247 (London: Routledge, 2010), 243. 93 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 20.

152  Musical materials 94 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 160–161. 95 Liza Lim, ‘An Ecology of Time Traces in Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus’, Contemporary Music Review 39/5 (2020), 561. 96 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 1. 97 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 20. 98 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 20. 99 Morton, Ecology without Nature, 96. 100 Morton, Ecology without Nature, 41. 101 Morton, Ecology without Nature, 164. 102 Morton, Ecology without Nature, 13. 103 Lim, ‘A Mycelial Model for Understanding Distributed Creativity’, 2, 13, and 7. Lim suggests that often the performer’s role in collaboration is merely ‘partitioned off as “technical resource”’ (p. 7). 104 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 4. 105 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), xiv.

Afterword

This brief afterword is an opportunity to glance quickly across the bounds of each of the chapters, to fly over the landscape already explored more thoroughly on foot, perhaps forgetting some of the details found from that latter perspective – yet also cutting across some of the borders that line those chapters as bounded territories. In the end, I would like to emphasise not a unity of ideas, but a lack, an incompleteness: the multiplicity of bodies, objects, and materials that constitute the contemporary mean that my account of them is necessarily partial. There are of course musical works and musical practices that I could have but have not included in the preceding pages; bodies, objects, and materials also surely manifest identities and mediations that have, similarly, gone unconsidered. I ­acknowledge that this incompleteness is a limitation – if, it should be said again, a necessary one. But in another sense, it points to something productive: the necessary inability to conceive of bodies, objects, and materials as such, in their (if only imagined) complete wholeness and totality. And our inability to reach this impossibility marks out a gap in interpretive accounts of bodies, objects, and materials – hence something which, again, mobilises impulses, desires, to (re) figure and (re)­interpret them. It is for connected reasons that my theorising of musical materialities does not unproblematically crystalise into a unified theory of musical materialities – that is, a systematised and synchronic account of what the material is and how it operates musically. Rather than advocate a packageable theory – a kind of intellectual product – I prefer to advocate emphasising the productive relations between music and the material, and within music as material. I am interested in providing new formulations from which myself and others derive sensitivities and sensibilities towards the material and/in music, all the while maintaining critical awareness that these relations are mediated by registers that can broadly be labelled historical, social, and technological. Or, negating this negation of my suspicion of developing a theory of the material and/in music: if I am putting forth a theory of musical materialism, this is in so far as this constitutes a productive theorising of relations operative within specifiable musical-material situations;1 this is a theory that underlines an attitude (or, following, Ahmed, an orientation), an acclimatisation of myself and others to intertwined concerns of shifting relations and mediations; it is not a theory operating determinatively at the level of systematic principles.2

154  Afterword This fluidity of theoretical practice echoes the liquid modern character of contemporary music, in its historical, social, and technological dimensions. This spirit of openendedness is for example manifested perhaps most directly in Chapter 5, in which I put forward a reconsideration of some terms of the Adornian critical theory canonised and contested in a great deal of music philosophies, yet while resisting the notion that critical theory be ossified as method, or as a ‘new’ theory per se. I suggest this means not that the work of Theodor W. Adorno et al. is outdated as such, but that its contemporary relevance emerges most urgently in productive dialogue with more recent critical writing. Indeed, I insist that the dialectical and immanently antagonistic character of chronologically earlier thinkers such as Adorno counters some potential pitfalls in theories that mark themselves as self-consciously ‘new’ (most prominently, so-called new materialisms). While this later body of theory does provide a rich vocabulary for discussing the materiality of agency and the activity inherent in material encounters, I argue this must not occlude the recognition of the historical and social contingency of these processes, as is emphasised by Adorno and others. Hence while not prescriptively outlined, some common themes emerge in the preceding pages as fugally intertwined. What follows now is their re-entry in stretto: first, the notion that materiality, inhabited most (un)familiarly in the materiality of our own bodies, is a problem for a late modern subject. Rosi ­Braidotti has argued that the concept of ‘the human’ has proliferated throughout a range of contemporary posthumanist, antihumanist, and transhumanist perspectives because of the disappearance of this category’s axiomatic status: ‘Categories become thinkable when they lose the self-evidence that comes from being dominant.’3 Echoing this, my suggestion is that materiality is thought and practised multiply and divergently at the paradoxical moment of its evanescence. More acutely, this problematic becomes urgently embodied in an art form – music – that has historically encompassed conjoined earthly materials and transcendent immaterialities, substances and expressive sensibilities, bodies and souls. This bridging is not itself new; to consider music as, for example, a potential bodily extension is not in itself new. What I do emphasise as new however is this potentiality meaning something different in a technological age in which bodily extensions are a fact of everyday life, and a post-anthropocentric age that insists on the embeddedness of the human within broader ecologies. Furthermore, this new situation, and the heady sense of bodily dispossession that comes with it, is refigured in musico-corporeal extensive acts that enable us to locate reformed bodies through these same activities (as explored in Chapters 1 and 2). Again, this finding of the self through the other is not in itself new – one may think of Hegel’s influential master–slave dialectic. What is new, however, is the staging of these relations through the specific kinds of music-material practices explored throughout this book, the material conditions in which this dialectic unfolds, and the implications of and promises afforded through these practices. Indeed, the mobilisation of dialectics when thinking through these paradoxes is worth underlining in terms of its methodological commitments. In particular, this pertains to the relation of self and other just mentioned. This is because the self–other duality is problematised in and by a contemporary technological and

Afterword  155 ecological age that is widely recognised to blur the boundaries of the one with the other. In retaining this, what I am effectively suggesting, is that within discussions of distributed subjectivity – that fall across self and other – there is still a place for immanent disputation. By disputation, I mean that extensions across self and other manifest tensions and paradoxes about what subjectivity is, and how it can and cannot align, how it variously adopts and resists, a world of objects beyond itself. Indeed, as alluded to already in a previous chapter, if musical material ‘embodies’ sedimented subjectivity, this also constitutes a kind of distribution of (historical) subjectivities across self and other. In this way, one can read Adorno in light of new – technological, ecological, and economic – contexts of distribution; conversely, the antagonistic and immanently contradictory is emphasised in this reading of the distributive. Potentially one can emphasise the processual, performative aspect of such distributions: this opens the possibility that disputations take place also in practices of ongoing distributed subject formation, mediating the conditions under which emerge the experiential and affective dimensions of late modernity. In accordance with the themes discussed in Chapter 5, this plays on an irreconcilability of subject and object, at odds with (a faint memory, haunting spectre, ego-ideal?) of a self that exhibits glorious dialectical unification or (à la new materialism) a monist flattening of this duality. If my dialectical theorising does mobilise some of the vocabulary of the new materialists, such as the trope of transversality, this transversal, this blurring and crossing of boundaries, here admits to the boundaries that are being blurred: temporally, in the moments of their crossing, and the trace of their having been crossed, and spatially, in the gaps evident between conceptual territories gestured across. It admits to rather than omits reference to the borders transversed, and to the fact that these borders – like any borders  – provoke moments and places of contention, and clarify questions of power and access, with some passing through, whereas others are denied this possibility. Music manifests temporalities and spatialities that provide and query the objects that subjects face and, furthermore, sounds differentiated processes of ­subject-formation that comprise contested contemporary identities, in their material composition. I hope to have contributed some reflections on what this means in some artistic, sonic practices. Hence my focus on the piano-object in Chapter 3, as one focused example of how this can happen. Here I propose some steps for developing further thoughts about this relation: the subject returns to an object that is paradoxically contemporarily present yet simultaneously – as an object foregrounded as ‘historical’ – anachronistic, something protruding uneasily from the present phenomenological background. But there is more work to be done regarding such objects and the relations and conditions of their encounter. Taken cumulatively, the kinds of compositional strategies and multifarious practices discussed in the preceding pages point toward something fundamental, beyond the merely ‘technical’, if diverse, aspects of compositional approaches to material. My suggestion is that one is left to draw a possible conclusion from them: that the difficulty of determining ‘the material’ in fact effects its reformulation in composition. This reformulation can be said to operate at two interrelated registers, of process and product – that is, firstly, in each new artwork, understood

156  Afterword as a made object, the ‘thing’ produced, and secondly, through artistic working, that is through the practices of making and acting responsively to sound. Hence the rise of sculptural and curatorial musical attitudes (see Chapter 4), which undertake new conceptions of products and processes, under which composition comprises activities of handling and distributing (musical, sonic, related although other) materials. To say that composition can grasp towards a reformulation of ‘the material’ is here to emphasise the activity of the creative subject. This activity sits in dialectical relation to passivity (as explored in Chapter 3). Indeed, it can be read as responsive – as reaction – to the threat of pacification of oneself through one’s distributive evaporation into a world of objects and materials beyond oneself. The notion of the distributed subject is inversely undertaken by this subject where the subject takes the place of that which distributes (its) objects – and, if it is intertwined with its objects, the subject in this way grapples with the distribution of itself. This constitutes an action that reforms the material situation that the subject finds itself in; the subject asserts agency in the face of this situation, through decidedly distributing materials, the materials through which it finds itself. If the subject is reformulating the material object(s) in the musical/sonic work, they are here also reformulating themselves through or in relation to it. Again, there is a ‘problem’ in our relation to matter here, one that the subject addresses through sonic practices, but one that stems from the unhomeliness of historically situated material conditions that do not provide surety, but demand our constant, responsive attention. Under liquid conditions, form appears most clearly in swells and contours of reformulation. (Recall Bauman’s suggestion, cited in Chapter 4, that, unlike the solid, the liquid demands a constant effort to hold it in shape.) In fact, sound – when posed compositionally at risk of decay and disappearance without tangible trace – provides an appropriate medium for the transience and precarity of late modern materialities, and is hence imagined to stand operationally ready as medium for posing, exploring, and verifying the ontological terms of ‘the material’ today. To say, however, that each new work reforms the material is not to assert a new world formed each time; indeed the preformed character of musical material is crucial to Adorno’s musical materialism, as explored earlier. I have throughout insisted on the historical and social contingency of ‘the material’. There is surely more work to be done here too. New Music provides a distinct form of critical practice vis-à-vis these contingencies. Like its modernist precursors, it multiples out the implications and contradictions of modernity. But of course it is not exclusive in its criticality, and in its ability to critically reformate bodies, objects, and materials. I would welcome scholars more knowledgeable than I to continue already existing strains of critical reflection that rethink bodies and materials as practised collectively in an array of musical domains beyond (a capitalised) New Music. What I can say however – acknowledging the partiality of my ­perspective  – is that the genealogy of the music I’ve focused on provides techniques and compositional technologies that are remodulated, reformed, and repurposed for the needs of our present – for example, musical indeterminacy is mobilised as a technique practising readiness towards an unknown future.

Afterword  157 The contingency of material and/in music I also emphasise in ecological compositional approaches (Chapter 6). One might underappreciate this if the ecological is conceived predominantly as a spatial arrangement of objects and materials; music is helpful here as it can insist upon the temporal dimension of ecological relations. (Although it needn’t necessarily do this, where for example it connotes a transcendent and ‘timeless’ nature.) And, as just alluded to, in temporalising the material environment, music can explore an anticipatory character that asserts uncertainty and precarity as part of the problem of late modern temporality. Indeed, if, as is typified by an ecological frame of reference, music and materiality unfold relationally, then this unsure future connotes also a sense that uncertain material conditions will determine open-ended practices and ontologies of music. Again, to pose a theory of musical materialism risks stumbling over an autonomously defined ‘material’ (as such) that reifies the material in/and music, effectively trampling over any possibility of music and material’s relational coformulation. In the spirit of theorising, as action, I would suggest instead one ask if and how music continues to diagnose changing material conditions – encompassing bodies, objects, and materials – without presumptions about what these things are, yet while recognising their preformed and mediated character. In short, I am proposing that the contemporary handling of musical material acts variously as symptomatic and diagnostic of a problematic materiality. This is a problematic that bears out historical and cultural contingencies. Its sounding in music practices the transformation of the agency, production, and distribution of bodies and objects under late modernity.

Notes 1 Correspondingly, if this theorising is a product, it is a product that accords with the quintessential flexibility and transience of the product under the most recent developments of capitalism; my hope is that, nonetheless, it is a critical counterpart to this dominant logic. 2 In this way, my emphasis on productive processes and relations is sympathetic to the ‘relational musicology’ advocated by Georgina Born and others. See Georgina Born, ‘For a Relational Musicology: Music and Interdisciplinarity, Beyond the Practice Turn’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 135/2 (2010), 205–243. 3 Rosi Bradotti, ‘What Is the Human in the Humanities Today?’, lecture presented at the Future Lectures Series at the School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University (20 September 2018). Retrieved from https://youtu.be/UEMLBSRh5Dk (discussion at 35:45).

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Index

Page numbers in Italics refers figures and page numbers followed by “n” refers note numbers absenting 66–69 abstractness 111 actant 116, 122n64 activity: and matter 107–110, 125, 154; of negation 67; of objects 93; and passivity 10, 50, 54, 59–60, 69, 70, 156; performative 20, 61 Adorno, Theodor W. 2–3, 7, 10, 35, 55, 74–79, 82–83, 91–93, 103–119, 125–127, 135, 138, 143, 146, 154–156; concept of musical material 105–107, 118, 120n10 affordances 125–127, 140; sonic 89, 93 Agacinski, Sylviane 40 agency 10, 94, 105–107, 154, 156, 157; compositional 3, 10; human and nonhuman 141; and musical material 114–119; and performer 89 Ahmed, Sara 4, 9, 11n9, 49–52, 54–56, 57, 60, 62, 65, 69, 153 Allen, Aaron S. 135 Allora, Jennifer, Stop, Repair, Prepare 62–64, 69 Amacher, Maryanne 28, 29, 43 ambient poetics 146–147 Anthropocene, the 128 anthropocentrism 107, 118; challenge to 111; post-­anthropocentrism 136, 148 anticipatory 145–146 anti-­hylomorphism 125–126 Arman: Accord Final 68–69; Chopin’s Waterloo 68 artificial intelligence 21 Auner, Joseph 42 autonomy: aesthetic 37, 39–40, 76, 84; bodily 15–18, 24, 34, 36, 40; personal 15; of sounds 87; of the subject 115

Bacon, Francis 93 Ballon, Séverine 140 Barad, Karen 149n31 Barthes, Roland 54 Bauman, Zygmunt 3, 7, 26, 91, 95n1, 148, 156 Beethoven, Ludwig van 129; Ode to Joy 63 Benjamin, Walter 136 Bennett, Jane 7, 10, 106–109, 116, 120n18 Berg, Alban 82 Berger, Karol 6 Bergson, Henri 120n18 Berio, Luciano 54, 108; Sequenza series 110 Berman, Marshall 5, 20 Bernard, Jonathan W. 81, 95n3 Bernstein, Leonard 63 Beuys, Joseph 68 Bielecki, Bob, Wild Energy 139 bioengineering 21 bodies: and instruments 20–21, 26–27; and performance practices 21; and pianos 51–52; as places of memory 39; posthuman 33–46; see also body, the bodily inwardness, outward 26–30 bodily material, and musical material 22–24 bodily practices, and modernist music 17–18, 22–24 body-­making, and music-­making 37–40 body, the 55, 108; and (dis)possession 15–32; extended 34–36, 39–40; feminised 52; and instruments 109, 133, 140; material 9; and mind 111; musical 15–32; of performer 15; place in music 8; posthuman 17; problematic 43–44; schema 58; as site of heterogeneity 110;

Index  169 and sound 87; and the voice 41–42; see also objects, and the body Bolleter, Ross 64–66, 69 Bonds, Mark Evan 6 Born, Georgina 4, 144, 157n2 Bowie, Andrew 19, 112 Bozzi, Robert 72n55; Choice series 66 Braidotti, Rosi 3, 4, 17, 20–21, 43, 105, 136 Brecht, George: Incidental Music 69; Piano Piece 60–62 Bruckner, Anton 124 Bussotti, Sylvano 83 Butt, John 6 Cage, John 8, 54, 89, 108, 113, 118, 132, 134, 145; For the Birds 86; Child of Tree 110; Concert for Piano and Orchestra 110 Calzadilla, Guillermo, Stop, Repair, Prepare 62–64, 69 capitalism 15–16, 19–20, 26, 39, 128, 135, 136; cognitive 19, 93; late 5, 92, 118; post-­industrial 44 Cassidy, Aaron 8, 22–24, 23, 29, 43, 83, 85, 108; The Crutch of Memory 22; Second String Quartet 22–24, 22, 32n35 Cerha, Friedrich, Spiegel series 78–79, 95n14 Chaplin, Charlie 16 Chua, Daniel 6 Clarke, Eric 95n10 Clough, Patricia 36 Cohen Elias, Sivan, Hack 142 colonialism 135 colour 80–81 complexity 33, 37, 45n15; of temporality 144 complicity 119n5 composition 2, 4, 33, 57, 113, 115, 117, 125, 144, 146, 155–156; the body in 43; as building 26; critical 109–110, 119n7; and ecology 124–152; of extended posthuman bodies 39; and field recording 138; and nature 124–152; paperless 53; and plastic art 74–99; posthuman 36 Cook, Nicholas 42–43 Coole, Diana 4, 111 Corner, Philip, Piano Activities 66–68 Cowell, Henry 112 Cox, Christoph 4, 111–113, 122n49, 139 Cox, Frank 17 criticality 3, 7, 103–105, 114, 119n5, 127, 156

critical theory 3, 7, 103–105, 154 cultural turn, the 4, 50 culture 124; consumer 93; liquid 103; mass 2; and nature 94, 111, 128, 136, 142, 147–148; nuclear 139; as an organism 134; and the piano 49; of time and space 74 cyborg, the 9, 30, 39, 43; see also performer, the, cyborg identity of Dahlhaus, Carl 106 Davies, Angharad 90 Dawe, Kevin 53, 135 decoupling 24, 26 de-­embodiment 52–53 Delaroche, Paul 92 Deleuze, Gilles 93, 111, 124, 125, 129, 130 DeNora, Tia 115 Derrida, Jacques 94 Descartes, René 111 dialectics 77, 104–106, 108, 154; of activity and passivity 10, 60; and dualisms 110–114; master–slave 38; of musical material 10; of musical objecthood 69–70; of nature and culture 136; neo-­Marxian 75; of orientation 60; subject–object 50; of time and space 75 Doğantan-­Dack, Mine 56, 57, 65, 71n33 Dolan, Emily 4 Dolphijn, Rick 4, 111 DPOAEs 28–29 Driesch, Hans 120n18 dualisms 10; and dialectics 106, 110–114; of materiality and immateriality 107, 111; music–language 112; music–sound 113; nature–culture 128 Duchamp, Marcel 29, 61 Dunn, David 137–138 ecological thought/thinking 95n10, 129, 136, 142 ecologies, (post)natural 135–142 ecology 129, 131, 135–137, 142; of activities and agencies 85; and composition 124–152; dark 129, 135, 148n10; of imagery 82; post-­natural 140; sonic 10 efficiency, concept of 35–36 embodiment 2, 16, 28, 106, 108, 109, 114; and disembodiment 87; effacement of 52 emergence, process of 143

170  Index entropy 64–66 extensions, bodily 17, 33–36, 41, 43–44, 154; see also instruments, as bodily extensions; prostheses; voice, as extension of body Feldman, Morton 67, 83, 110 Fernandez, Armand see Arman Ferneyhough, Brian 7–9, 18, 20, 24, 26– 27, 34–35, 93, 108; Time and Motion Study cycle 33, 35–44 fetish/fetishism 54, 60–62, 75, 93 flatness 6, 75, 78, 80–81, 83–85, 90 Flørisdal, Anders 30 Fluxus 9, 50, 57, 60–61, 66–68, 72n54, 89 Foucault, Michel 16, 17, 38 Freud, Sigmund 4, 40–42 Frost, Samantha 4, 111 futurists 72n54 Geimer, Peter 82, 91 genetic engineering 21 Gesamtkunstwerk 36 Gibson, James 95n10 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 129 Goh, Annie 121n43 Gottschalk, Jennie 18 Graw, Isabelle 92–93 Greenberg, Clement 10, 75–76, 78, 79, 81, 90, 95n9, 134 Griffiths, Paul 81–82 Grisey, Gerard 7, 8, 142; Le Noir de l'Étoile 139 Grosz, Elizabeth 111, 112 Guattari, Félix 111, 124, 125, 129, 130 Hamilton, Richard 19 Hanslick, Eduard 129 Haraway, Donna 43, 87, 136 Hartman, Hanna, Borderlines 141–142 Harvey, David 136 Hayles, N. Katherine 15, 30, 34, 35, 37, 39, 40, 43, 87, 97n57 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 129 Heidegger, Martin 127 Helmholtz, Hermann von 19; On the Sensations of Tone 80 Hickey-­Moody, Anna 109 Higgins, Dick 67 Hindemith, Paul 125, 126 Hoeckner, Berthold 119n3 Hoëne-­Wronsky, Józef Maria 80 Hoffman, E. T. A. 129

Holliger, Heinz 8, 29, 43; Cardiophonie 26–27 Horkheimer, Max 3, 7, 146 Horn, Rebecca, Concert for Anarchy 68 Hübler, Klaus 18 human, and nonhuman 1, 33, 35, 39, 41, 113, 116, 118–119, 128, 132, 141 humanism, Enlightenment 107 Husserl, Edmund 52, 55 hylomorphism 126 Iddon, Martin 18, 33, 37–41 immateriality 107, 111–113 indeterminacy 118, 132, 144, 145; musical 73n63, 156; see also precarity information 37, 40, 86, 87; disembodied 36; informated 87; role of 20; supplied by score 22 information society 5, 19 Ingold, Tim 125, 126, 130–132, 137, 142–143 instruments: and bodies 20–21, 26–27; as bodily extensions 37–38; as objects 141–142 inwardness, bodily see bodily inwardness Jameson, Fredric 3, 5, 7, 36, 104, 114–115 Johnson, Julian 5, 6, 18, 30, 33, 35, 51, 108–109, 126, 129–130 Joselit, David 82 Judd, Donald 99n75

Kahn, Douglas 29 Kane, Brian 113–114, 121n41 Kant, Immanuel 129, 131 Kapoor, Anish 96n33 Kaprow, Allan 57 Kelly, Caleb 67 Kern, Stephen 74 Kim-­Cohen, Seth 57, 69, 97n54, 98n68, 138–139 Kirkegaard, Jacob 8, 43; 4 Rooms 138– 139, 146–147; Labyrinthitis 28–29 Klein, Yves 81 Knockaert, Yves 84, 85 Knowles, Alison 67 Kramer, Lawrence 15 Krauss, Rosalind 75, 82 Krenek, Ernst 106 Kristeva, Julia 104, 121n46 Kubisch, Christina 151n77

Index  171 labour 16, 36, 60, 119, 135, 143; artistic 56, 93; differentiated forms of 51–53; flexibility of 6; musical 38 Lacan, Jacques 42 Lachenmann, Helmut 7, 8, 24, 27, 29, 43, 88, 108; Guero 109; Pression 25, 26, 109, 134 Lang, Pe 141 language 6, 19, 42, 104, 112 Latour, Bruno 122n64, 132, 139 Lefebvre, Henri 15 Leppert, Richard 53, 69 Ligeti, György 9, 78, 79, 86, 88; Atmosphères 81–82; San Francisco Polyphony 81; Sonata for Solo Viola 108–109 Lim, Liza 8, 141–143; Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus 144; Invisibility 132–134, 133, 147; an ocean beyond earth 140, 140 listening: deep 29; see also physicality, of listening Lockwood, Annea 8, 66; Piano Transplants series 64; Wild Energy 139 López, Francisco 137–138 Lucier, Alvin 88–89; I am Sitting in a Room 138; Music for Solo Performer, for enormously amplified brain waves, and percussion 29 Lutosławski, Witold, Symphony No. 2, 79

of 9, 43–44, 114, 117, 139, 157; of sound 86, 89, 97n54, 98n60, 112–113; ‘as such’ 93 matter 1; and activity 107–110 medium 17–18, 37, 38, 57, 74–75, 77–78, 81–82, 156; concept of 76 Merleau-­Ponty, Maurice 55, 58 modernism 5–8, 36, 75, 108–109; and materiality 6–7; musical 34, 78, 85 modernist music, and bodily practices 17–18, 22–24 modernity 3, 5–8, 19–21, 95n1, 156; late 30, 33, 43, 127, 144, 155, 157; liquid 7, 26, 58; and nature 128; solid 7, 80 Morton, Timothy 16, 127, 129, 130, 135, 136, 139, 146–147 Muir, Rob 65 music: as discourse 30; electronic 28, 42, 86–88; materiality of 52–53; modernist see modernist music; and nature 10, 125–126, 128–135; new see new music; and painting 76–82; as technology of extension 21; and temporalities of processes 143–144 musical material: Adorno’s concept of 105–107, 118, 120n10; and agency 114–119; and bodily material 22–24; dialectics of 10 music-­making, and body-­making 37–40 musicology, relational 157n2 mycelial, the 129–135, 145, 147–148

MacCormack, Carol 142 MacDonald, Malcolm 79 Maciunas, George 60–61, 67; Piano Piece No. 13 for Nam June Paik 66 Mahler, Gustav 124, 136 Malevich, Kazimir 81 Mao, Douglas 6 Marx, Adolf Bernhard 129 Marx, Karl 4, 9, 15–16, 21, 36 material, musical see musical material materialism 1–2, 103, 118; critical 114; musical 7, 153, 156–157; new 3–4, 49, 105, 111–113, 117, 155; sonic 4; vital 7, 10, 107, 113, 116, 120n19 materialist theory 105–107 materiality 30, 33, 103, 106–107, 154; bodily 22, 28; Cartesian 111; changing notions of 1, 3; crises of 9, 19–21, 70, 144–145; critical aesthetics of 107; of decay and entropy 59; effacement of 52; and language 42; and modernism 6–7; musical 53, 74, 85, 92, 105, 108–109, 118; and particularity 109; problematics

nature 124; and composition 124–152; conceptualisations of 124–125; and culture 94, 111, 128, 136, 142, 147– 148; and music 10, 125–126, 128–135; second 119, 127, 138, 143 new music 7, 43, 104, 117, 156; and bodies 21; concept of 1–3; and the piano 49 Nietzsche, Friedrich 16 nonhuman, the 117, 136; see also human, and nonhuman non-­identity 77, 107–108; concept of 110–111 non-­materiality 111 Nonnenmann, Rainer 119n3, 119n7 notation 109–110 nuclear, the 138–139 Nyman, Michael 58 OAEs 27–29 objecthood 93–94, 103; musical 9, 69–70; of sound 88

172  Index objects 1, 3, 19, 43, 50–56, 105, 107–108, 110–111, 153, 155–157; and the body 21, 26, 44, 117; curating of 94; heterogeneity of 107–108; of knowledge 42; musical 49, 60; nonhuman 42; and ourselves 93–94; and the performer 38, 40, 58–59; positioning of 64, 89, 92; quasi-­objects 139; relationships between 86, 89–91, 94, 140; sculptural 94; sonic 85, 86, 89–90, 141–142; of thought 104; see also piano, as object obliteration 66–69 Oliveros, Pauline 29 ontology 20, 112–114; onto-­aesthetics 113–114; ontological turn, in sound studies 114 orientations 49–73, 93–94; active affirmation 62–64; active negation 66–69; passive affirmation 60–62; passive negation 64–66 Orning, Tanja 17 otoacoustic emissions see OAEs otoacoustic emissions distortion products see DPOAEs Ouzounian, Gascia 18, 28 overpainting 84–85 Pace, Ian 37, 45n15 Page, Tara 109 Paik, Nam June 49, 62, 67; Exposition of Music–Electronic Television 68; Klavier Integral 68; One for Violin 66 painterly, music’s re-­examination of 82–85 painting: modernist 75; and music 76–82 Papalexandri-­Alexandri, Marianthi 142; Connector 141; Untitled IV 140–141, 141 Parkinson, Tim 90 Partch, Harry 114 particularity/ies 9, 76, 108–109, 112, 127, 139; of compositional practice 8; and materiality 109 passivity 60–62; and activity 10, 50, 54, 59–60, 69, 70, 156 Patterson, Benjamin 67 Penderecki, Krzysztof, Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima 79 perception, of objects 51 performance practices, and bodies 21 performer, the 17–18, 30, 35, 56–58, 64; cyborg identity of 39, 43; and instrument 50, 51, 53–55, 58–62, 74, 121n28, 143; notion of 71n33; virtuoso 15, 38

physicality: of bodies and sounds 18; of listening 29 pianism 56 piano 9; and bodies 51–52; as furniture 60–62; as object 49–73 Piekut, Benjamin 132 Pisaro, Michael, Ricefall (2) 142 plastic art, and composition 74–99 plasticity, during liquid times 91–94 Plato 16 poetics, ambient see ambient poetics possession, in artistry 16 post-­anthropocentrism see anthropocentrism, post-­anthropocentrism post-­Fordism 5, 19 posthuman 9, 17; see also bodies, posthuman postmodernism 5 postmodernity 36 practices, bodily see bodily practices precarity 16, 20, 58, 73n63, 132, 144–145, 148, 156, 157 presence 62–64 process 64–66 prostheses/prosthetic 33–37, 39, 40, 43 Rădulescu, Horaţiu, Clepsydra 62 Rainer, Arnulf 84–85 rhizome 130 Rihm, Wolfgang 43, 83–85; Klavierstück No. 7, 117–118 robotics 21 Rothko, Mark 81 Rottmann, André 82 Ruskin, John 134 Russolo, Luigi 72n54 Saunders, James 142; materials vary greatly and are simply materials 89–90, 91 Scelsi, Giacinto, String Quartet No. 4, 24 Schenker, Heinrich 129 Schmidt, Gunnar 67 Schmit, Tomas 68; Piano Piece No. 1, 60–62 Schnittke, Alfred 123n70 Schoenberg, Arnold 77, 82 Scott, Stephen 65 sculpturality: impermanent 91; sonic 86–91 self, the 6, 26, 42–44, 57, 83–84, 131; and the other 44, 53, 154–155 self-­making 94

Index  173 self-­reflexivity 83, 104, 147 self-­sufficiency 15, 87, 90–91, 94 Sergeant, Matthew 83–85 service economy 5 Shusterman, Richard 16 sound art 112, 113, 118, 137, 147 sound-­mass 80 space/spatiality 10, 74; intramusical 95n3; of painting 76; of situation 55; of sound 88 spectacle 62–64 Spivak, Gayatri 31n32 Steen-­Andersen, Simon 43 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 67, 88 Strathern, Marilyn 142 Stravinsky, Igor 17, 36, 82, 117 subject 156; autonomous 17, 39, 106; and the body 20–21; as composer 115–116; disappearance of 52; formation 155; late modern 19, 24, 154; and object 50, 57, 60, 77, 94, 111, 155; performing 58–59, 64; post-­Enlightenment 117; posthuman 43; psychoanalytic 41; see also dialectics, subject-­object subjectivity 43, 49, 130, 131, 155 Sullivan, Nikki 31n32, 119n1, 148n12 Taylorism 35 texture 10, 81, 82, 85; negation of 96n33 theory, materialist see materialist theory Thompson, Marie 11n14, 113, 114, 122n49 Thoreau, Henry David 132 timbre 80, 98n60 time/temporality 10, 74–75, 142–144; as medium 74–75, 95n5 touch 41, 87; promise of 146; withdrawal of 93

Tsing, Anna 125, 131–132, 134, 144, 145 Tudor, David 54, 89 Ustvolskaya, Galina, Piano Sonata No. 6, 29 van der Tuin, Iris 4, 111 van Elferen, Isabella 97n53, 98n60 Varèse, Edgard 9, 78–81, 85, 86, 96n26, 96n27, 114; Amériques 79–80; Hyperprism 79 voice: extended 40–44; as extension of body 41–42; as instrument 40; and the performer 1 Vostell, Wolf 67 Wagner, Richard 63, 124 Walshe, Jennifer 43 Watkins, Holly 129, 142 Watson, Chris 137, 138 Webern, Anton 82, 136 Welin, Karl-­Erik 67 Williams, Alastair 84, 85, 93, 117–118 Williams, Emmett 67 Williams, Raymond 125, 128, 130 Winderen, Jana, The Noisiest Guys on the Planet 138 Winnicott, Donald W. 141 Xenakis, Iannis 18, 24, 83; Synaphaï for Piano and Orchestra 22–24 Young, La Monte 67; Piano Piece for David Tudor #1, 62 Zimmerman, Tabea 109 Zuboff, Shoshana 87