Sound Ideas paragraph samples
From the Preface, page xiii,
It is at this limit that the phenomenology that characterizes the method of this book meets the ontology, aesthetics, and ethics that are its central issue. And this is the point about the limit. The limit or threshold is the dynamic reference, the force or meeting of forces where territory is contested, won, granted, and lost. Disciplinary methods are adequate to the relative stasis within a given territory. They describe a pattern of behavior but do not account for its generation. It is not only a rhetorical maneuver but also an ethical commitment to search for the ordinary by way of the extraordinary, to heed the limit case as the inscrutable source of the forces that shape sound. It is precisely where measurement fails, where standard explanations fall apart that we must discover the dynamic forces that give rise to those standards.
The emphasis on the dynamic limit already alters the founding question of music studies. The question is not, What is music?, but rather, What is musical? What is music? has been particularly popular throughout the last century, as all the arts called their own statuses, ontological, aesthetic, and epistemological, into question. Though productive in its progress, the ultimate result of this intense questioning has been to void the question itself of most of its force. That is, it now appears arbitrary to draw a line between music and some other kind of sound, and to define the activity of music is to shed little light on its nature. As such, the musical is a more worthy quest, for it refers not to the territory of music but to the limit at which sound becomes musical. The notion of the musical invokes not only the ontological question of whether or not something is music, but also the aesthetic question of music’s quality or value. The musical is the limit that makes music music, but it also makes some music better than other music. The musical is what we listen for in music, what we attempt to engender in music, what we long to hear, what is satisfying about music. Moreover, the notion of the musical need not confine itself to music, but may well be tied to other arts, and other subjects and activities.
From Chapter One, “Sound and Noise,” pages 23 and 24,
This is enough to debunk the whole myth of the absolute sound, for expressive music is never the same thing twice. One should not ask of a recording that it recreate the experience of live music, but that it create new expressions, that it involve the listener in a new world. And this is only possible through an accord with the listening context, a sensitivity to the environment, including not just the space, but also the listening event. Some recordings and some equipment may demonstrate this sensitivity better than others, and perhaps the “noise of analog” meshes better with much music than does the “noise of digital.” But there will still be contexts for any recording when it just doesn’t sound right. Expression is a delicate balance between implication and explication, a mixture of the clear and the obscure. If the absolute sound is a matter of repetition, the repetition of the musical event, then we should look not so much to fidelity, which is only ever an objective standard, but to the implicated, which repeats entire events in expression. One climbs a mountain listening to Beethoven in one’s living room, one is drunk to the point of sickness with Nick Cave. Though there are no sore legs or nasty mess to clean up afterwards, these events are real, if implicated. We hear them in the music, differently each time. The idea is to climb a new mountain, to find a new intoxication. The reproduction of sound is not a matter of physics, but of affect and percept. Expression exceeds fidelity, so hold on to your LPs.
From Chapter Two, “Sound and Time,” pages 27 and 28,
For its part, inflection seems to be all about sound. Though in music an inflection is usually a change in pitch, this definition must be expanded to include alterations of all sorts in a sound. Not just pitch, but timbre, rhythm, voicing, tempo are all inflections, and must be inflected to compose, perform, or hear a piece of music. Inflection shapes words to express gender, number, mood, and tense, twisting their vowels, prefixes, suffixes, so that they point to the words and world around them. Even this broad definition is too restrictive, for every word is inflected by its context; else we would need a different word for every difference of meaning. Inflection makes language possible in speech. Meaning becomes sonorous only by virtue of the articulation of sound; and sound must be bent to invite the listener to share in its meaning. In her turn, the attentive listener must bend her hearing just so, in concert with the sound she hears. Every sentence, every sound is thus an instruction, a set of directions to follow as best we can. To understand is to follow these directions by striking the poses they suggest, to practice an aural tai chi in which one bends one’s listening this way and that according to the inflections of the sound. We do not all follow directions the same way even if they are the same directions, and it may take a few different attempts, different ways of inflecting one’s understanding, before the instructions become effective. The difficulty of understanding is linked to a fundamental ambiguity of inflection: inflection is never fully articulate, can never instruct conclusively, because in language as in sound generally, inflection inflects innuendo. You begin to speak without knowing exactly what you will say; you begin with innuendo and you inflect. Do you express an idea by anticipating its entirety in thought before articulating it in speech or writing? Do you speak a sentence only after first choosing each word? Before you utter a word, have you planned each phoneme, each motion of lips, tongue, lungs, jaw, cheeks, throat? No. Idea, sentence, and word all begin in innuendo, and to inflect that innuendo is to invent a sound that may surprise the speaker as much as the listener. At least one image of semiotics is thereby disrupted: the speaker does not reveal a prior private knowledge to the listener, but articulates the sound between them. Listener and speaker share the innuendo to be inflected, and the difference between them is not a matter of an understanding already held by the speaker and lacking in the listener, but a matter of attitude: the speaker inflects sound spoken, the listener inflects sound heard.
From Chapter Two, page 55,
Lucier’s experiment confirms that memory’s job in perception is to forget. For the room, while imparting its sonic signature, dis-articulates the text-speech even while remembering it. His words lose their definition progressively with each iteration, until speech becomes music. But neither the room nor Lucier’s process introduces this music into speech as something new, for the pitched notes in the final iteration can only consist of frequencies already in the speech to begin with, frequencies excited by the room. Speech is made to yield the music already in it, while the room invites this music by spreading out the edges of the sounds, successively flattening the inflections, smoothing the consonants to give rise to a drone that one might hear in the music of Young or Charlemagne Palestine. The room effectively forgets inflection, crushing inflection into the innuendo whence it came. The most articulate sound is washed into the hum of noise. Lucier’s stutter, a rhythmic punctuation in the original text-sound, becomes first a continuous consonant roll, and eventually only another smooth glissando of pitches, open vowels streaming through virtual organ pipes, which render a stutter all but unthinkable. This is another molecularization of sound, a pulverization of words in order to instill a spatial memory of them, to bleed them into each other. In this sense, Lucier’s reverberant technique places before the microphone the event at every juncture of sound and noise. His piece explodes the transition from inflection into innuendo, the dissolve at which sound melds into noise, inviting its close observation. Lucier and Stockhausen thus share an artistic goal, proceeding by very different means.
From Chapter Three, “Sound and Digits,” pages 67 and 68,
More than just the form of fingers, double-articulation is the very principle of their form. Which is to say that each articulation is itself doubled, to join heterogeneous elements. Each hand is opposed to the other, but each is also differentiated in itself: the vice formed by left and right hands broadens and refines its reach by the further articulation of thumb from fingers. The thumb is one finger among others, but is also unique among fingers in its opposition to the others. Fingers are united by their mutual opposition to thumb, but divided twice; each is divided from the others at the first knuckle (or, according to the skeletal structure, at the wrist), and articulated again within itself by the other knuckles. Each knuckle lies between heterogeneous divisions, themselves further articulated. These multiple double-articulations do not simply divide into two parts, but divide asymmetrically, so that the resultant parts are not at all the same. Left hand and right hand are not indifferent doubles, enantiomorphs, any more than the thumb is simply the opposite number to the fingers. It is not the mere fact of division but the difference in excess of this division that provides fingers with their powers, immense and subtle, over form.
From Chapter Three, page 85,
The piano is the analytic instrument par excellence. Horizontal for pitch and vertical for dynamics; black keys and white keys organized according to the well-tempered twelve-step octave, asserting the priority of the Church modes based on the major diatonic scale; a logarithmic presentation of the whole range of the orchestra, laid out within reach of a seated performer who commands the entire instrument. The piano is a uniquely European instrument, as each of its characteristics reflects European music and a Western rational sensibility. Eighty-eight keys corresponding to the eighty-eight playable pitches. Push a key and the mechanism responds, sounding the note until the button is released. A grand piano action features over one hundred parts for each of the eighty-eight keys, to transfer the force from the pianist to the strings, a baffling complexity. The piano key is a lever, a seesaw with a finger at one end and a hammer at the other. Its alignment with the finger lends it a particular affinity for form; short of digital instruments, the piano maximizes the possibility of placing any (chromatic) pitch at any point in time. For this power of the arbitrary placement of notes, the piano sacrifices a fine control over timbre and microtonal pitch, which is why bowed and blown instruments are considered more typically melodic. The piano is thus built in complicity with Western musical notation, which also allows the placement of any chromatic pitch at any point in time, but has no refined language for timbre, and is poorly suited to microtonal or non-Western tuning systems.
From Chapter Four, “Making Music,” page 162,
Resistance therefore is not a refusal to conform to the musician’s desire, but is rather the condition of a problem, a musical problem. Like every good problem, the musical problem does not preexist the conditions of its expression. That is to say, the instrument is not employed instrumentally, toward some end independent of the instrument itself. The problem is as much in the instrument, in its resistance, as it is in the musician and in the music. The resistance of the instrument is the problem it poses to the musician, but also the precariousness of the music, embodied in the material forces that define that resistance. It would not be problematic if it didn’t threaten the music, impose itself on the musician; a problem you can safely ignore is not much of a problem. Left alone, the instrument returns to its static equilibrium, a death that threatens the music around each note, at the bar line of each measure, at the resolution of each cadence. The instrument is the accumulated inertia of resistance, the concrete material wherein the forces of resistance are held.