Perceptual Music
“To begin with Cage: WAYS OF HEARING.”
Maryanne Amacher would reiterate this throughout her life. It is a phrase that makes clear her commitment to the listener and her interpretation of Cage’s compositional work as one that uncovered the receptive capacities of the auditor.[1] The post-Cagean musical moment was a fleeting instance of perceptual music making: gradually, music’s focus became how we hear sound – what those sounds were, the materials that made up a piece, became secondary to the manner in which they were heard. For the first time in the Western Classical tradition, musical listening was no longer heard as naturalized. The habituated modes of listening to music – in which the listener attends solely to rhythm, pitch, harmony, timbre and their relationships and elaborations over time— were no longer a given. Instead, composition would take seriously all of the listener’s capacities for engaging sound, drawing in particular on the ways we listen everyday. Modes of listening formerly repressed within the musical context became the foundation for this new Perceptual Music.
This was by no means the first Perceptual Music to be made, but as Gavin Steingo notes in Lateral Addition #81, “Western music has historically been divorced from questions of perception. This is both in terms of making music (composition, performance, etc.) and theorizing music.”[2] Steingo suggests that western music’s drive has primarily been idealist, characterized by a tendency towards an abstraction that verged on the mathematical: “Pythagoras’ hammers were merely abstractions rather than sounding bodies. The birth of ‘modern’ instrumental music ca. 1800 also traded primarily in abstractions: of pure and organic form. The listener is often less than an afterthought.”[3] The auditor remains unarticulated within the classical paradigm. Instead, the listener, via a series of formalized disciplinary practices, was directed towards a specific set of material interests. This content centered largely on issues of construction and the forming of materials over time. It is not that the Western Classical canon didn’t consider the listener’s reception – rather, it worked to enforce a singular form of reception. Internalized as a bodily practice, the feeling of naturalized listening is always an intense form of discipline and pedagogy.[4]
Contemporary experimental music takes up this project of naturalized listening— a project antithetical to the music’s first principles. How did this happen? As experimental music cohered into a genre, a set of linguistic codes emerged which would define its burgeoning aesthetic: certain materials, affects, and gestures were increasingly coded as experimental while others were left out entirely.[5] This process, one of reification, in turn divorced these sounding materials from the listening act – from considering how these sounds were heard and received. Experimental music’s genre stability combined with the codification of an industry dedicated to its distribution – the associated venues, record labels, presses, and publications – shifted the focus away from “WAYS OF LISTENING” and onto the surface character of the sounds themselves. Perhaps this burgeoning industry believed that an appeal to the affective strangeness of the materials was what would allow for its streamlined marketing and dissemination? In the process, these works of Perceptual Music were mistranslated – the forms of listening integral to the conception of the work were abstracted into markers of style indicating the newly formed boundaries of “experimental” as genre. This development in turn affects the compositional act: the composer increasingly composes with materials coded as experimental with little regard for the types of listening these materials might suggest or enact.
The result: most of the music currently produced within the generic bounds of “experimental” does nothing but reproduce the forms of habituated listening developed ad nauseam within the historic catalog of musical listening. Experimental music has become an aesthetics of expectations: it is a Bandcamp, Rate Your Music, Discogs, SubStack genre whose primary focus is the frictionless marketing of the music. There is an “illusion of stability,”[6] of unmediated impact that characterizes the conversation around listening in this “experimental” music.[7] It is one that flattens all social distinctions that exist in our sensing and seeks to make universal a set of constricted expectations for how we encounter sound, a process once again enacted through discipline. This belief in unmediated sound is nothing less than the total withering of what Benjamin calls the “immense and unexpected field of action,”[8] the complete neutralization of all possibility for social transformation as posited by the work of art. How can the artwork even exist under these conditions?
Perceptual Music suggests a possibility insofar as it is fundamentally oriented towards transformation. By composing the listening act, focusing on the various “WAYS OF HEARING” sound, we bring attention to our sensing. This type of audition, in which we hear ourselves listening, estranges us from our perception: in this listening, our perception becomes an object of analysis. The possibility of analysis – of formalizing, rearranging, remaking our audition – allows for a kind of creative play. It is a play “in which the whole reified surface of a period seemingly beyond history and beyond change now submits to a first ludic un-building.”[9]
Perceptual Music is primarily concerned with an ethics of production and reception: through sound, the musician (listener) seeks a transformation in our perception that posits our sensing of sound as historical and thus subject to transformation. Perceptual Music has the potential to recuperate and radicalize contemporary music.
[1] A discovery solely within the context of the Western Classical canon, as many other musics took as their structuring principle the listener’s perception.
[2] Perceptualism (First Study), Gavin Steingo. https://www.lateraladdition.org/#81
[3] Ibid.
[4] Many thanks to Bill Dietz for elucidating and emphasizing the disciplinary function of musical listening. See his “L’ecole de la claque.”
[5] This impulse is identifiable in Cage’s first attempts at defining experimental music. In claiming indeterminate music as experimental music an attempt was made at a linguistic or procedural cohesion in service of the music’s status and potential marketing. These early moves ensured that some compositional strategies were coded as experimental while others were not.
[6] Frederic Jameson, Brecht And Method; pg. 60.
[7] This is captured by the musicians who speak of: immediacy, pure affect, sounds that just hit you, perfectly placed sounds, etc.
[8] Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Gesammelte Schriften; pg. 499.
[9] Frederic Jameson, Brecht And Method; pg. 60.