Learning to Listen: The Construction of Listening in Electroacoustic Music Discourse

Michelle Melanie Stead

School of Humanities and Communication Arts Western Sydney University.

September, 2016 A thesis submitted as fulfilment for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Western Sydney University.

To the memories of my father, Kenny and my paternal grandmother, Bertha. <3

Acknowledgements

Firstly, to Western Sydney University for giving me this opportunity and for its understanding in giving me the extra time I needed to complete.

To my research supervisors, Associate Professor Sally Macarthur and Dr Ian Stevenson: This thesis would not have been possible without your mentorship, support, generosity, encouragement, guidance, compassion, inspiration, advice, empathy etc. etc. … The list really is endless. You have both extended your help to me in different ways and you have both played an essential role in my development as an academic, teacher and just ... as a human being. You have both helped me to produce the kind of dissertation of which I am extremely proud, and that I feel is entirely worth the journey that it has taken. A simple thank you will never seem enough.

To all of the people who participated in my research by responding to the surveys and those who agreed to be interviewed, I am indebted to your knowledge and to your expertise.

I have learnt that it takes a village to write a PhD and, along with the aforementioned, ‗my people‘ have played a crucial role in the development of this research that is as much a personal endeavour as it is a professional one. To my dearest and most cherished friends, colleagues and co-workers Jacob Leonard, Paul Smith and Stephanie Doohan. You have offered a vital support network based on mutual love and respect. You have provided unwavering friendship during periods of personal crisis, and you have read endless drafts of my writing and offered much-needed feedback on the research. Above all else, you are just absolutely beautiful, irreplaceable friends. To Dr Maria Angel, you read my work as a friend, a role model and a colleague. You have helped me immeasurably by including me in symposia, by being extremely generous with your time, and by offering your advice and your feedback. To Dr David McInnes, you offered your expertise in helping me to understand the process of discourse analysis that inevitably shed a light on things in the data that I did not think existed. You graciously invited me to various discourse analysis workshops, you provided me with a lot of opportunities to help develop my analytical skills, and you have shown me immense kindness and compassion for which I am indebted. To all of my students past, present and future, who give me the strength and motivation to get out of bed each day and who drive my passion for research, for education and for musicology.

To my best friend of at least 25 years and now husband Mark Thomas, the length of this thesis could not adequately describe the level of patience and support you have offered me throughout this lengthy process. Your fortitude has been bedrock.

To my loving parents Blanka and Kenneth Stead who have always allowed, encouraged and nurtured my free thinking even when that led to argument.

And lastly to Jack, this thesis will be submitted as you turn 92. You are the oldest and most extraordinary person I have ever met. You are not only my grandfather in-law but you are also one of my most precious friends.

Statement of Originality

The work presented in this thesis is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, original except as acknowledged in the text. I hereby declare that I have not submitted this material, either in full or in part, for a degree at this or any other institution.

Michelle Stead.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents ...... i

List of Figures ...... iii

Abstract ...... iv

Chapter 1. Introduction How I Learnt to Listen ...... 1

1.1 Theoretical Framework and Methods ...... 4 1.2 Significance ...... 14 1.3 Summary of Chapters ...... 15

Chapter 2. Defining the Discursive Limits ...... 21

2.1 Terminology...... 25 2.2 But that‘s not music! ...... 28 2.3 The Grand Narrative of Electroacoustic Music...... 34 2.4 ‗Writing‘ the Wrongs of Music HIStory ...... 54

Chapter 3. Discipline and the Mechanics of Ear-Training ...... 72

3.1 Disciplining Listening: Music Theory, Ear-Training and Sight Singing in the Western Tradition ...... 75 3.2 The Exercises ...... 77 3.3 Self-Discipline ...... 84 3.4 Disciplinary Knowledge ...... 89 3.5 Looking and Listening ...... 96 3.6 Power and Resistance ...... 110

Chapter 4. Enunciative Modalities of Listening to Electroacoustic Music...... 114

4.1 Enunciative Modalities ...... 117 4.2 The Enunciative Modality of Acousmatic Listening: ...... 118 4.3 The Enunciative Modality of Techno-Aesthetic Listening ...... 137 4.4 The Enunciative Modality of Referential Listening ...... 147 4.5 Epistemologies of Listening ...... 157

Chapter 5. Gender and the Enunciative Modality of Corporeal Listening ...... 159

5.1 ‗Women Should Be Seen and Not Heard‘ ...... 168 5.2 Oliveros‘ Deep Listening ...... 176 5.3 Alternative Listening Epistemologies ...... 185

Chapter 6. Enunciative Strategies, Experts and „What Can Be said‟ ...... 187

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6.1 Processes and Function of the Surveys and Interviews ...... 188 6.2 Recruitment and Demographic ...... 189 6.3 Surveys and Interviews ...... 190 6.4 Methods and Methodology ...... 192 6.5 Analysis and Findings ...... 194 6.6 Conclusions ...... 218

Chapter 7. Conclusion Imagining an Aesthetics of Listening: Non-Normative Listening Subjectivities and the Art of the Listening ...... 220

7.1 Imagining an Aesthetics of Listening: ...... 235

Bibliography ...... 239

Appendix 1 Survey Questions ...... 260

Appendix 2 Interview Questions...... 266

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List of Figures

Figure 1. Adler Sight Singing Exercise 88 Figure 2. Adler Intervallic Sight Singing Exercise 89 Figure 3. Karpinski Melodic Dictation Exercise 91 Figure 4. The Acousmonium and Francoise Bayle 107

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Abstract

The short history of electroacoustic music is a history that, in many ways, shares in and benefits from the Eurocentric and androcentric grand narratives of centuries of Western music. Yet, paradoxically, it operates on the margins of music because it directly challenges common sense approaches to music that privilege melody and harmonic progression while also treating these as ubiquitous and universally applicable. Traditional aural training (in an institutional setting), I argue, disciplines listeners in ways that alter their receptive capacity for electroacoustic music. Electroacoustic music values different kinds of sonic objects and, according to its discourse, requires music-specific training, thus further perpetuating its marginalisation and hindering its accessibility. Music-specific training methods are prolific and, due to the diffuse and emergent nature of the field, there are no widely agreed upon methods of training. Listening is, therefore, constructed within the discourse as being fundamentally problematic.

This thesis examines the construction of listening in electroacoustic music discourse. It asks questions surrounding the impact of discourse on the ways in which we learn to listen to music, and considers how it is that discourse itself might teach us how to listen. The dissertation, part-historiography, part-ethnography and part-discourse analysis, draws on the analytical processes offered by French theorist Michel Foucault (specifically his conceptions of discourse, discipline and power) in order to interrogate the discursive field of electroacoustic music with particular interest in the ways in which ideas of listening are affected, represented, constructed and produced. With attention to the gendered nature of the field of electroacoustic music, and through the productive capacities of power, I conclude by imagining how non-normative listening subjects can self-fashion through an aesthetics of listening.

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Chapter 1. Introduction How I Learnt to Listen

I want to begin with a personal anecdote. I hope that the reader will grant me this indulgence on the basis that it does more than simply explain my interest in the topic. Rather, it enacts, via personal experience, some of the problems that will form the theoretical basis of the thesis and it will frame some of the problems that will follow.

I started learning music in the early eighties when I was about six years old. My parents found a music teacher in our local, suburban paper and I was very excited to start to learn the piano (and, after I turned 16, singing). My parents and I had no experience of what it meant to learn music privately, and we had no expectations about the types of music I might encounter. We went into the experience completely naïve. I remember my father telling me that once I knew the basics of music, I would be able to play anything (little did he know!). I learnt very early on that playing and singing music was only one small part of what was considered, at the time, to be a well-rounded musical education. The first few music lessons I had were spent learning how to read music and once I was capable, my teacher suggested I do the preliminary piano exam set forth by the Australian Music Education Board (AMEB).1 From that point forward every teaching session was dedicated to exam preparation and I recall not being particularly impressed with all of the legwork involved in becoming a ‗good‘ musician. A typical hour lesson was made up of music theory homework, singing/playing scales, sight singing and aural exercises. It was only during the last few minutes of our lesson where we actually played any music, and it was only music that I had never heard before. Yet, it was this very music that came to play a fundamental role in the construction of my listening subjectivity.

1 The Australian Music Examination Board is a private institution which offers both a method of training and formal assessment of students learning how to play musical instruments. 1

In order to be assessed and ‗graded‘ I needed to memorise long lists of composer names and contemporaries, stylistic features, Italian terminology, modulations etc. Learning these things by rote and in a ‗just because‘ manner was perhaps the most effective way of preparing for the exam given the lesson lasted only an hour a week (that was already quite expensive for my parents). However, this meant that through many years of musical training I learnt very little about music beyond how to read notes on a page. This made the music seem even more foreign and even further removed from my very working-class life.

In Australia during the eighties and nineties, the potency of the AMEB was considerable. According to Sally Macarthur, it functioned to impose a system of value on the processes of learning and to maintain the concert hall status quo.2 This status quo, Macarthur explains, is made up of a repertoire that is tonal and focused on the achievements of the white, male composer throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.3 These systems of value not only imply the greatness of the chosen repertoire but they function to maintain what is perceived to be the highest standards of training. Though this has now changed, at the time, the AMEB did not offer much outside of the Western, European repertoire and, for me, a young girl growing up in working-class suburbia, this music was utterly foreign and completely removed from my world. I had never been to an opera and I had never seen a live orchestra. Even the secondary school music education I received was constructed around the use of glockenspiels and keyboards. The only real ‗classical‘ music I had ever heard was in movies and television advertising. Otherwise, I had absolutely no real-world experience (let alone cultural understanding) of the music that I had been learning since I was six years old. My private musical education did little to rectify this.

I abandoned my private studies about the same time as I embarked upon a tertiary music education in my mid-twenties when I was presented with conflicting approaches to music. On the one hand, composition classes reiterated and reinforced the private training I had received (along with all of its values and assumptions), while, on the other hand, I was being confronted with the strange sounds of

2 Sally Macarthur, 'AMEB, or not to be?' in Cate Poynton and Sally Macarthur, eds., Musics and Feminisms (Sydney, N.S.W: Australian Music Centre, 1999), 19-27. 3 Macarthur, ‗AMEB, or not to be?,‘ 21-22. 2 electroacoustic music that, importantly, seemed to bring the experience of listening to the fore.4 For me, this experience was extremely profound – so profound, in fact, that more than ten years later it is still the topic of my research. To this day I can vividly recall the first time I was presented with electroacoustic music, how I had felt completely affronted by the fact that this music – that even calling it music – was challenging everything that I had come to know about what music was, and what it was supposed to do. This was the nail in the coffin that led me to abandon years of musical training. Because in one single moment, two decades of my musical existence had been dismantled and it was this experience of listening to electroacoustic music that had become responsible, in part, for altering my world.

The point I am trying to illustrate with this anecdote is that the rigid training I had received had played a powerful role in the construction (and subsequent deconstruction) of my own listening subjectivity. It taught me the value that was accorded to the Western European tradition and accordingly, it taught me the value of the music with which I identified outside of this tradition. It taught me a whole range of musical values that I was not even aware I had. And, importantly, it reinforced, through musical training, my place in the world. My socio-economic status. My gender. My sexuality. My world view. My identity. Discourse had, quite literally, taught me how to listen to music and music quite literally taught me a lot about my identity. It was through the experience of being confronted with electroacoustic music, a vastly different discourse, that granted me permission to challenge everything I had been taught. The possibility that there existed other musics outside of the Western European tradition and outside of popular music was challenge enough without even considering, via the French theorist Michel Foucault, the possibility for other ways to know this music and, importantly, other ways to listen to it.

This thesis is, therefore, very much a personal pursuit for which I make no apology. However, this does not mean that it is not also an academic one. My research asks questions about the nature of discourse and the role it might play in the construction

4 I was presented with this music in a class called ‗Digital Musics‘. Notable examples included John Claude Risset, ‗Sud‘ (1985), John Chowning, ‗Stria‘ (1977), Ros Bandt, ‗Mungo‘ (1992), Pierre Schaeffer, ‗Etude aux chemins de fer‘ (1948), Elsa Justel, ‗Au Loin Bleu‘ (1997), Paul Lansky, ‗Idle Chatter‘ (1984), Hildegard Westerkamp, ‗Gently Penetrating‘ (1998). 3 of listening subjectivities. In this way, the term ‗discourse‘ is apprehended in a specific Foucaultian manner for which there is no suitable synonym and this inevitably leads to overuse – an overuse that I cannot avoid. Additionally, I draw on feminist, musicological literature which, to the contemporary feminist, might seem out-dated. For example, in the case of musicology, renegades such as Susan McClary, Marcia Citron, Suzanne Cusick and Ruth Solie have already done this important feminist musicological work. In the realm of electroacoustic music significant contributions have been made by authors such as Andra McCartney, Tara Rodgers and Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner. However, this work is still in its infancy (to which I hope this thesis will contribute).

Rather than posit solutions to the complicated problems of gender that are raised herein, my research interests lie in examining the processes that allow these problems to manifest in the first place, and I believe this to be in line with the Foucaultian frame. After all, problems need to be understood before they can be fixed. Thus, on the one hand, the thesis seeks to participate in musicological debate aligned predominantly with the new musicology.5 While, on the other hand, it seeks to engage in the regulated field of sound studies. These are fields (new musicology and sound studies) that have tended not to speak to each other and, in some ways, could be seen to be diametrically opposed. In this way, I challenge the reader to engage with the arguments that follow with open ears.

1.1 Theoretical Framework and Methods The provocative French theorist Michel Foucault begins the preface to The Order of Things by citing a passage from Jorge Luis Borges. Foucault explains that the passage references a Chinese encyclopaedia that states:

This passage quotes a ‗certain Chinese encyclopaedia‘ in which it is written that ‗animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn

5 David Beard and Kenneth Gloag explain that ‗new musicology‘ seeks to engage with disciplines outside of musicology. They explain that this reflects the questioning of accepted forms of knowledge as influenced by Michel Foucault. In, David Beard and Kenneth Gloag, Musicology: The Key Concepts, Second Edition ed. (London & New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2016), 180. 4

with a very fine camel hair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.6

It was upon reading this preface, and this particular passage, that I was first introduced to Foucault. The bizarre manner in which ‗things‘ can be organised and categorised seemed to resonate with my experiences of being confronted with strange sounding electroacoustic music (a category that I attempt to negotiate in Chapter 2). I was given this preface to read by one of my mentors, Dr Maria Angel, and it was accompanied with the statement that Foucault had taught her ‗how to think‘.

Indeed.

Foucault is considered one of the great thinkers of our time, primarily because his views challenge conventional conceptions of the history of Western knowledge and his work directly contests any preconceived ideas of progress.7 Foucault‘s work seeks to uncover assumptions in the fabric of knowledge and he demonstrates how epistemological changes are not built on rationality or reason. Rather, he argues that they are grand narratives that tend to simplify complex events.8 In the words of Mitchell Hobbs:

Foucault‘s extensive oeuvre has forced scholars within the social sciences to reflect on the assumptions that underpin their empirical endeavours, to pay acute attention to matters of epistemology and ontology.9

There was something here. My experience of being inculcated into the dominant Western musical framework of listening appeared so natural to me, at least, until I was confronted by the strange sounding electroacoustic music in a parallel class. It

6 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1994), xv. 7 Paul Oliver, Teach Yourself Foucault: The Key Ideas (London: Hodder Education, 2010), 19. 8 Geoff Danaher, Tony Schirato, and Jen Webb, Understanding Foucault (London; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2000), 16-24. 9 Mitchell Hobbs, "On Discourse and Representation: Reflections on Michel Foucault's Contribution to the Study of the Mass Media," http://www.tasa.org.au/uploads/2011/05/Hobbs-Mitchell-Session- 19-PDF.pdf. Accessed 13th October, 2014. 5 was through this experience that I became aware of the fact that other ways of thinking about and listening to music existed. However, it was only through this experience with Foucault that I was given the tools to think through this complexity.

Foucault, according to Gavin Kendall and Gary Wickham, takes a ‗problem-based‘ approach to historical analysis rather than a historical ‗period-based‘ approach.10 A ‗period-based‘ approach is necessarily bound by notions of progress in the sense that it seeks to draw causal relationships between significant events. This is typified in the oft told grand narrative of Western music in which each new and notable composer, dating back to the medieval period, offers some kind of innovation that can be seen to lead to the next notable composer. Composers are grouped according to musical periods that are categorised according to an overarching set of principles. This ‗period-based‘ approach suggests a simplified version of history that inevitably solidifies the status of European, white men. Conversely, a ‗problem-based‘ approach functions with a view of diagnosing the present by removing, or perhaps critiquing, notions of causality and progress. As Kendall and Wickham point out, Foucault‘s work is ‗crucially about problematisation‘ and it is this problematisation of events that allows Foucault to dislodge assumptions about progress with a view to ‗not letting history stop.‘11

Within the context of electroacoustic music, listening is a problematic on the basis that the music values different sonic objects to those in a conventional musical setting, and it directly confronts the pedagogical mechanisms that function to train listening, along with those that function to position it as self-evident. For instance, melodic dictation might be a useful training exercise if the music has a melody, and if the music is represented in terms of a musical score. Electroacoustic music, broadly speaking, does not value either of these. In this way, the ‗problem‘ of listening is central to electroacoustic music and to this study.

Foucault‘s work disrupts existing progress narratives by arguing that advances in history often occur at random rather than as a necessary process of cause and

10 Gavin Kendall and Gary Wickham, Using Foucault's Methods, Introducing Qualitative Methods (London; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1999), 22 - 23. 11 Kendall and Wickham, Using Foucault's Methods, 22. 6 effect.12 In this way, Foucault rallies against notions of tradition, origin, causality and the seamless continuity and teleology of historical observation.13 In fact, he implores his readers to question these principles in the very first place.14 Notwithstanding the fact that postmodernism had allegedly cast doubt on music‘s grand narrative, the weight of such a narrative can still be felt, and its potency is witnessed in David Bennett‘s study.15 Music, he argues, is largely impervious to the scepticism that is afforded by postmodernism.16 To quote Sara Mills:

We might think that conventional history‘s aim is to offer an explanatory framework for events in the past, an aim which Foucault rejects. He uses historical methods to analyse the development of academic disciplines themselves and to show the triumphalism of their accounts of their own history.17

Foucault does not see the past as predictably leading to the present. On the contrary, Mills explains that, for Foucault, ‗it is the very strangeness of the past which makes us able to see clearly the strangeness of the present.‘18 This means that, whilst the impact of Foucault‘s method of inquiry has been mostly accepted within the critical lexicon of contemporary academic studies (in particular the humanities), and though it is far reaching, it is still subject to a certain shock value. This is due to its constant and unrelenting refusal to work within accepted knowledge that has come to be taken as true. Foucault‘s theories have a significant influence on, and emerge out of the larger epistemological framework of postmodernism. Stuart Sim categorises postmodernism broadly as a school of thought that ‗sets out to undermine other philosophical theories claiming to be in possession of ultimate truth, or of criteria for determining what counts as ultimate truth.‘19 Truth emerges within discourse, or it is perhaps produced through discourse, and it is a product of the mechanics of

12 Danaher, Schirato, and Webb, Understanding Foucault, 27. 13 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. by A.M. Sheridan Smith (Oxon: Routledge, Reprinted in 2011), 24. 14 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 24. 15 David Bennett, Sounding Postmodernism: Sampling Australian Composers, Sound Artists and Music Critics (Sydney: Australian Music Centre, 2008). 16 Bennett, Sounding Postmodernism. 17 Sara Mills, Michel Foucault (Oxon & New York: Routledge, 2003), 23. 18 Mills, Foucault, 24. 19 Stuart Sim, 'Postmodernism and Philosophy' in Stuart Sim, ed. The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, 3rd ed. (London ; New York: Routledge, 2011), 3. 7 power/knowledge. Consequently, what is definitively true is of little concern to Foucault. Sara Mills points out that Foucault is not concerned with authentic, accurate or true representations of the real.20 Instead, Foucault asks different kinds of questions of history, questions that seek to interrogate the mechanisms that give rise to the production of dominant discourses and how they come to be considered real in the first place.21

For me, one of the most compelling aspects of Foucault‘s ideas and perhaps one of the most central to this thesis is the unique way in which he treats discourse. It is also through his very specific conception of discourse, however, that Foucault‘s ideas perhaps become their most abstract. At least this is a common criticism of his theoretical position. The term discourse operates differently in different settings of his ideas, making it extremely difficult to offer a definition that stands on its own without reference to an example. However, one of the most useful definitions comes from Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge, a work that functions as a kind of retrospective methodological commentary on the formations and workings of discourse. He says that we should ‗no longer consider discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak.‘22 Mills offers a valuable summary of this idea by suggesting that ‗discourse is something which produces something else.‘23 Discourse is not simply a form of description of something after the fact; it is, instead, constitutive of our ways of understanding.

Language is one of the ways in which discourse makes itself visible and language, therefore, plays an important role within this thesis. As Jeff Danaher et.al. suggest, ‗discourses can be understood as language in action.‘24 Although language is not the only place that discourse is manifest, it is the place that is best able to demonstrate our understandings, ideas, values and meanings as they are emerging through discourse. That is not to say that language and discourse are synonymous; they are not, and nor does Foucault treat them as such. Rather, language is used as one of the

20 Sara Mills, Discourse, 2nd ed., The New Critical Idiom (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2004), 17. 21 Mills, Discourse, 17. 22 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 54. 23 Mills, Discourse, 15. 24 Danaher, Schirato, and Webb, Understanding Foucault, 31. 8 ways in which we are granted access to some of the workings of the discursive. Language provides a system through that our daily existence is mediated, and it does this, Gary Gutting suggests, through ‗structures that are, so to speak, too close for us to notice.‘25 Foucault is interested in the ways that language might draw our attention to the workings of the discursive structures of life, structures that are taken for granted, invisible, or become inseparable from the ideas, values and meanings that we associate with them. And, his interest lies in thinking about how these ideas, values and meanings came to be considered as such in the first place – how these discursive structures came to elude our awareness.

Though I would avoid making such an either/or distinction, this focus on the structural procedures of discourse inevitably implies that Foucault‘s theories function within the broader workings of structuralism. However, Foucault vehemently denies this claim, and on this point I will quote him:

In France, certain half-witted ‗commentators‘ persist in labelling me a ‗structuralist‘. I have been unable to get it into their tiny minds that I have used none of the methods, concepts, or key terms that characterize structural analysis …There may well be certain similarities between the works of the structuralists and my own work, it would hardly behove me, of all people, to claim that my discourse is independent of conditions and rules of which I am very largely unaware, and which determine other work that is being done today. But it is only too easy to avoid the trouble of analysing such work by giving it an admittedly impressive-sounding, but inaccurate, label.26

One of the reasons Foucault‘s work is considered from the perspective of structuralism is its positioning in dealing with the operation of discourse (and perhaps language) at a structural level. These dealings with the structural levels of discourse occur mostly in his earlier works. Despite the fact that some of his works may be compatible with structuralism, for me Foucault does not fit neatly into the category of structuralist. Gutting explains that given that structuralism is an

25 Gary Gutting, Foucault: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, UK ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 15. 26 'Foreward to the English Edition' in Foucault, The Order of Things, xiv. 9

‗avowedly non-historical (synchronic rather than diachronic) approach‘ there is merit to Foucault‘s rejection of the label.27 Danaher et al. point out, nonetheless, that Foucault was influenced by some of the ideas that structuralism made available, such as the notion that meaning was not implicit or autonomous, and that meaning made sense only in relation to other meanings.28 They also note that Foucault was a contemporary of Roland Barthes and was influenced by his ideas concerning the subject, as epitomised in The Death of the Author.29 Interestingly, Barthes also awkwardly straddled structuralism and post-structuralism.30 Thus, Foucault‘s work emerged within and in relation to both structuralism and post-structuralism. However, as I have suggested, I would argue that making these distinctions is not a meaningful way to think about his contribution.

Another of the many criticisms of Foucault is that he adopts an ambiguous terminology to describe the tools of his analyses. Devereaux Kennedy describes Foucault‘s style as ‗wildly rhetorical, bitingly polemical, given to dizzying staccato- like neologisms.‘31 In a similar fashion, Mills suggests that, whilst it is one of the most frequently used terms in the work of Foucault, ‗discourse‘ is also one of the most contradictory.32 Mills explains that the fact that the term cannot be situated within ‗a larger system of fully worked-out theoretical ideas‘ (this would be fundamentally antithetical to Foucault‘s objective) is perhaps one of the reasons why there are variations in the meaning of the term ‗discourse‘.33 Foucault himself admits the slippery handling of the term and explains that the ambiguity is necessary ‗in so far as they [discourses] can be assigned particular modalities.‘34 Here, Foucault‘s precautionary usage of the terminology is deliberate in the sense that his analytical work is diagnostic and relevant only to its given instance. Kendall and Wickham clarify that the goal of Foucaultian research is to avoid universalising usage of the

27 Gutting, Foucault, 61. 28 Danaher, Schirato, and Webb, Understanding Foucault, 7-8. 29 Roland Barthes, ‗The Death of the Author‘ in eds. Roland Barthes and Stephen Heath, Image, Music, Text (New York & London: Hill and Wang; Fontana, 1977), 142-48. 30 Jonathan Culler, Barthes: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 2002), 65. 31 Devereaux Kennedy, "Michel Foucault: The Archaeology and Sociology of Knowledge," Theory and Society 8, no. 2 (1979): 270. 32 Mills, Michel Foucault, 53. 33 Mills, Michel Foucault, 15. 34 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 120-21. 10 term and to circumvent the notion that discourse is all encompassing.35 In this respect, discourse is not necessarily limited to what is written or what can be said. Discourse is something that is dynamic. It constructs, or, to use Foucault‘s terminology, produces ideas, meanings and objects both in terms of what can exist and what can possibly exist.36 The implications of Foucault‘s assertions on discourse, Hobbs points out, are such that ‗when taken literally, and to its logical conclusion, makes the somewhat nihilistic proposition that nothing can exist outside of discourse.‘37 Mills rejects this claim and suggests that Foucault does not entirely refute the idea that there is such a thing as the non-discursive. Rather, she argues that the only way it is possible to think or say the non-discursive, is through the discursive.38 Unlike some of his contemporaries, Foucault does not entirely reject the notion of an ‗external world‘, and neither does he subscribe to the idea that thought is representational. Foucault‘s conception of discourse is not representational in the way that it might be seen to reflect ‗truth‘. Rather, discourse creates what is perceived to be truth.

Discourses also produce substances of study, things that are made to exist and things that become visible (and audible) to us (this is in contrast to those things that tend to evade our awareness and appear self-evident). Foucault refers to these substances of study as ‗objects of knowledge‘ and it is through the transformation of listening from being something that is taken-for-granted and considered in terms that are relatively invisible, into something that is heavily scrutinised and theorised (through electroacoustic music discourse) that, I argue, listening becomes one of these ‗objects of knowledge‘. Objects of knowledge can then function to produce particular identities, and Foucault demonstrates this when he examines how, for instance, the object of psychiatry produced the identity of ‗the madman‘.39

35 Kendall and Wickham, Using Foucault's Methods, 34 and 41. 36 Foucault outlines this specifically in the chapter ‗The Formation of Objects‘ in Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 44-55. 37 Hobbs, "On Discourse and Representation," 8. 38 Mills, Michel Foucault, 55-56. 39 See Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (London: Routledge, 1989). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 2nd Vintage Books ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). 11

As Annamarie Jagose states:

Foucault‘s argument is premised on his assertion that around 1870, and in various medical discourses, the notion of the homosexual as an identifiable type of person begins to emerge. No longer simply someone who participates in certain sexual acts, the homosexual begins to be defined fundamentally in terms of those very acts.40

It is only when things cease to become objects of knowledge that they exist in a manner that appears to be undeniable. It was Foucault‘s interrogation of homosexuality, as self-evident, that demonstrated the category of ‗homosexuality‘ was, in fact, an invention that came about because, at one point in our history, ‗homosexuality‘ became an object of knowledge. In other words, it was the discourse of ‗homosexuality‘ that produced the identity of what we now know and take-for- granted as the ‗homosexual‘. These ideas can also be seen in the conventional context of ear-training whereby certain assumptions amass such institutional potency and cultural currency that they cease to be visible. Thus, they appear as natural, self- evident and become taken for granted. However, it is only when confronted by music (for example, electroacoustic music – but there are others) that challenges the foundations upon which Western music was built, does the act of listening become an object of knowledge and thus, becomes subject to scrutiny and rendered visible to us.

Foucault is not only interested in what elements constitute discourse; equally, he considers the elements that are excluded from discourse. He argues that what is thinkable and knowable is already evident – these are the things that we can easily identify. Nonetheless, according to Mills, what is important to Foucault is that these thinkable and knowable things only come into being because of what has been excluded.41 Furthermore, this means that discourses are in continual competition with other discourses and Foucault highlights the fact that several discourses might

40 Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 11. 41 Mills, Discourse, 11. 12 be producing different types of knowledge about any one thing at any given moment. Dominant discourses, as Mills points out, attract institutional and or government funding, they are supported in their growth through the various resources offered to them by the State and subsequently, they are accepted and validated by the greater community.42 While the dominant discourse is accepted as valid knowledge, the correlate suggests that the non-dominant discourse is shrouded in doubt, thus, operates at the margins of society and carries with it all of the implications that come with operating with this status.43

In this way, Foucault‘s ideas, though they are slippery, offer an epistemological framework that is suited to thinking about the complexities involved in listening and, in particular, listening to electroacoustic music. Foucault‘s conceptions of discourse, then, inform every element of this study. I do not simply ‗apply‘ his ideas so much as I attempt to think through them and with them. Cited in Mills, Foucault says ‗theory does not express, translate or serve to apply practice: it is practice.‘44 Furthermore, in thinking about how best to use Foucault‘s ideas, Mills herself states that, ‗since Foucault was very concerned to question ways of thinking rather than simply locating themes to apply, it seems best to concentrate on the critique of thinking and concepts.‘45 This element of critique is essential to understanding Foucault‘s work and it is essential to accepting that Foucault was extremely sceptical about formulating a coherent methodological position to begin with.46 The point of using Foucault‘s ideas as a theoretical framework is to examine and critique the mechanisms that give rise to particular ways of thinking and it is these elements of his work that I find extremely useful and that are pivotal to the argument that follows. Foucault‘s methods, if they can be said to exist (Kendall and Wickham argue that they can) are, paradoxically, methods in the eschewal of methods. For example, Kendall and Wickham‘s position is that the Foucaultian scholar should ‗look for contingencies rather than causes‘ and should ‗be as sceptical as possible in regard to all political arguments.‘47 Although this thesis is largely historical and

42 Mills, Discourse, 17. 43 Mills, Discourse, 17. 44 Mills, Michel Foucault, 110. 45 Mills, Michel Foucault, 111. 46 Mills, Michel Foucault, 111. 47 Kendall and Wickham, Using Foucault's Methods, 3-13. 13 musicological in scope, it does, as I suggested earlier, combine the research methods of historiography, ethnography and discourse analysis informed by Foucault.48

1.2 Significance Paul Oliver makes a noteworthy point that articulates one of the important contributions of this thesis. He explains that the purpose of Foucault‘s work on power was not to educate people to exercise revolutionary power as if it would function to overthrow dominant models of thought or control. Instead, Oliver asserts that Foucault focused on the analysis and description of existing models of power for the purpose of reorganising influence in order to change the way people think.49 Because power is tightly bound with discourse, Oliver explains that:

Those who had the power to influence the nature of discourse exerted considerable control over the nature of the educational system and the manner in which people thought about the world.50

In a similar fashion then, the significance of this thesis lies in its ability to bring about change in the ways we think about electroacoustic music, the ways we think about listening and, notably, the ways we listen.

The thesis, therefore, contributes to current pedagogical research in the field of sound studies, but its strength is that it is not limited to this field. Although the thesis is written from the context of contemporary musicology (that has itself been deeply influenced by Foucault), the thematic nature of the thesis means that it also offers valuable knowledge to the fields of gender studies, critical theory, cultural studies, history and musicology.

Foucault says:

My role – and that is too emphatic a word – is to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some

48 Kendall and Wickham, Using Foucault's Methods, 3-13. 49 Oliver, Teach Yourself Foucault, 34. 50 Oliver, Teach Yourself Foucault, 37. 14

themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed. To change something in the minds of people – that‘s the role of an intellectual.51

Obviously, I am not suggesting that my contribution is parallel to Foucault‘s. Rather, this thesis contributes to the container of knowledge by adopting some of Foucault‘s ideas in a music-specific context to interrogate and diagnose the construction of listening as it emerges in electroacoustic music discourse.

Specifically, the contribution to new knowledge can be found in the categories of listening that I posit in chapters 4 and 5 along with the ways in which these categories render new objects of audition. Additionally, in the final chapter of the thesis, I theorise an aesthetics of listening that functions as an opportunity to enable new forms and organisations of listening subjectivities that are in constant transformation and, which operate to extricate listening subjectivity from conceptions that aim to essentialise it.

1.3 Summary of Chapters Chapter 2 maps the field of electroacoustic music as it is constructed within its discourse. I begin by examining the inconsistent manner in which terminology is employed to define the music and to demonstrate how definition of the music is erratic. I then turn my attention to diagnosing the historical construction of the music. Rather than attempt to present some kind of ‗true‘ or coherent narrative, I focus, instead, on areas of disruption and critique in order to intervene in the reporting processes. The music, I argue, is represented in ways which are divergent, thus leaving it to occupy a peculiar space that is, at the same time, both marginal and dominant. The music was born out of the hegemonic, Western, musical tradition but also functions as a point of confrontation and resistance to this tradition. This confrontation inevitably casts doubt on the existence of ‗the field‘ in the first place, thus setting the tone for the chapters that follow. I position ‗the field‘ of electroacoustic music as one that is fraught with issues concerning its own musical identity such that it is represented and constructed in its discourse as fractured,

51 Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Martin, eds., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 10. 15 inconsistent and in a state of emergence. Importantly, I consider how it is that listening is discursively produced within this field. Issues surrounding the definition and terminology of electroacoustic music come to play a central role in perceptions of the musical status of the music. This also comes to function as the ultimate marker for value and, in later chapters, I illustrate how these tensions come to inform listening practice. Furthermore, I question the historical tendency towards quasi- romantic conceptions of the composer-genius as pioneer trailblazer (akin to other ‗great‘ composers of the canon) who, in the words of Captain Kirk, ‗boldly goes where no man has gone before‘, searching for new sounds and new ways of producing them. These images are damaging, I argue, insofar as they replicate the privileged, heterosexist position of the composer as he is manifest across Western music history. The idea that language functions as a gateway to accessibility of the music is an undercurrent that emerges in different forms throughout each chapter. Most importantly, Chapter 2 is concerned as much with the things that are included and represented in the discourse of electroacoustic music as it is in the things that are not. I conclude the chapter with a critique of the gendered nature of the history of electroacoustic music by examining some of the gendered language tropes used to report it, and I consider how these tropes function to erect gendered boundaries around the music as a means to exclude the representation of women.

Given electroacoustic music was born out of the Western music tradition, Chapter 3 examines how the disciplinary practice of listening has become institutionalised and normalised in this setting. Discourses should be considered in their relationship to other discourses, and in this manner I seek to understand the relationship between conventional approaches to listening and, in the following chapters, electroacoustic music-specific approaches.52 The listening skills that are taught through aural training and music theory have accrued significant institutional currency and, I argue, they come to appear unquestionable. I begin my analysis of the discursive construction of listening in this context for the sake of comparison to electroacoustic music-specific contexts in later chapters. Through my study I discover that listening, in this context, is constructed through a visual epistemological framework that favours literacy, scored, pitched material, and harmonic progression. These

52 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 25. 16 mechanisms function to reinforce the valued status of the musical score as it embodies the composer‘s creative vision and voice. The self-evident nature of ear- training in this context means that it is practically invisible to discourse and circumvents construction as an object of knowledge (unlike the way listening is constructed in electroacoustic music discourse) thus it evades scrutiny and can come to be considered the standard by which everything else judged. This framework functions, I argue, to identify subjects on the basis of their capacity to conform to the listening standards accorded by this model, and it inevitably instils the values, assumptions and ideologies implicit in this context. These values and ideologies come to frame the subjectivities of listeners thereby potentially impeding the reception of musics that fail to conform to these standards.

Chapters 4 and 5 are interconnected in the sense that each moves to consider approaches to listening as it is constructed within an electroacoustic music context. In this music-specific context, listening emerges as an object of knowledge that becomes visible to discourse (unlike in a conventional context where it is simply assumed) and as it is subject to intense examination. These chapters function both as a survey of electroacoustic music-specific models (although this survey is by no means exhaustive) and as an analysis of the listening models as they come to represent the field of electroacoustic music in its incipience. The represented listening models were selected on the basis that they were flagged as regularities in the discourse and that they were mentioned by the participants in the data collection phase of the research (see Chapter 6). In both chapters I frame this survey of listening models as a set of ‗enunciative modalities‘ that I call the enunciative modalities of ‗acousmatic listening‘, ‗techno-aesthetic listening‘, ‗referential listening‘ and, in Chapter 5, the enunciative modality of ‗corporeal listening‘.

In Chapter 4, specifically, the enunciative modalities of ‗acousmatic listening‘ and ‗techno-aesthetic listening‘, I discover, operate from pseudo-scientific, ideological positions that function to produce a listening subjectivity that eschews any relationship to context, feeling or, emotion for the purpose of maintaining an objective listening stance. ‗Acousmatic listening‘ functions to develop a terminology that is more suitable for the description and categorisation of the sound object than the terminology that is found in the conventional context. This terminology enables 17 the typological categorisation and description of sounds that extend beyond musical ‗tones‘. ‗Techno-aesthetic listening‘ is concerned with the structuring of electronically synthesised sound material according to the multifarious procedures of serialism. These procedures function ideologically to maintain absolute control over the music. The ‗enunciative modality of referential listening‘, in contrast, functions to further complicate the listening process because, rather than repudiating the cultural implications of music and sound like the previous two modes, ‗referential listening‘ insists on their necessity. ‗Referential listening‘ relies solely upon the listener‘s experience of the sound world as it evokes and arouses. Each of these enunciative modalities positions the listener as playing an active listening role and this becomes a key pivot point for the following chapter.

Chapter 5 considers that which has been excluded from the discourse of listening. Listening is highly implicated in gender politics. For example, in the conventional aural training context, listening ceases to become an act that is associated with the ears. Instead, it becomes aligned with literacy via the eye that is positioned as the primary sensory organ. Physically, it appears as though the ear is a passive organ. Unlike the eye, it has no lids to shut out sound. The eye can be controlled based on what takes its attention; it can be manoeuvred and it is ‗the watchful eye‘ that penetrates. Foucault was particularly mindful of the power of vision and he recognised that ‗looking‘ is a form of control (discipline), it is a form of judgement (the gaze), and it is in the space of darkness, where things cannot be seen, that he targets his analyses to bring to light the devices of power that we are blinded to. In the enunciative modalities I posited in Chapter 4, the ear is positioned through discourses that disembody it. This occurs, I argue, through the masculine appropriation of listening in the ‗active‘ and through the relationship of the previous modalities to the transcendental thinking subject. The body has long been relegated to the domain of the feminine where it is positioned as passive and, given that the ears belong to the body, women have typically occupied the role of the listener. I argue that listening has been strategically annexed into discourses that position it in the masculine to the exclusion of women. Thus, in this chapter, I propose the enunciative modality of ‗corporeal listening' that draws on Pauline Oliveros‘ Deep Listening approach. The enunciative modality of corporeal listening functions to bring the body back into the discourse of listening. 18

In Chapter 6, I consider the ways that the discourse of listening is constructed in electroacoustic music by those experts who produce it. Through surveys and interviews this chapter examines what can be said about listening. The data has played a very practical role in shaping the analyses across the thesis in the sense that I have allowed the data to influence and shape the previous chapters. Moreover, the themes from the previous chapters have also influenced the shape of the analysis of the data. In this chapter, I focus specifically on the performative role of the language of the participants as it enacts discursive boundaries and strategies that reinforce the volatile nature of electroacoustic music. I demonstrate that participants construct the field in terms that are relatively inaccessible to listeners who are untrained, thus, highlighting the specialised nature of listening in the field. Listening, according to the participants, is imagined in terms that are indistinct beyond its construction as something that is attentive, concentrated and engaged. This formation of listening also facilitates the direction of techno-language specific to electroacoustic music. The use of this specialised language, I show, functions in a conflicting manner in the sense that the participants seemed to be aware of issues of inaccessibility and alienation for listeners (due to the highly technical position of the music), yet the discursive structure of the ‗field‘ means that participants must participate directly in this exclusive culture through the use of technical language in order to access it themselves. Therefore, the use of ‗techno-language‘ functions as an enunciative strategy to enact limitations on the accessibility of the music to listeners.

In Chapter 7 I conclude the thesis by turning my attention to the construction of subjectivity and an aesthetics of listening. Like all music, electroacoustic music is implicated in the politics of identification and subject-formation where subjects become ‗subjectified‘ in and through discourse. Throughout the thesis I have suggested that listening is implicated in self-structuring processes and it is the unique status of the field of electroacoustic music that offers occasions for listeners to self- structure in ways that, I argue, are distinctly non-essential. Identity, Foucault has argued, is ‗an historical contingent construction.‘53 In this chapter, then, I return to the notion of the listening subject and consider how the construction of an aesthetics

53 Kendall and Wickham, Using Foucault's Methods, 53. 19 of listening might function as it relates to the construction of non-normative listening subjectivities. I conclude by arguing that learning to listen to electroacoustic music can be seen as an opportunity similar to ‗queering‘ that can function to dislodge fixed notions of essential listening identity. Listening practices, as technologies of the self, operate to enable the self-construction of listening subjectivity within an aesthetics of listening as an ethical process in the self-transformation of listening agency.

20

Chapter 2. Defining the Discursive Limits

Foucault argues that discourse constructs our world, and for many disciplines within the humanities, this holds true. Disciplines such as philosophy, history and literary studies have long accepted the creative role of discourse in the ways in which we come to know our world. Music, on the other hand, is by and large a conservative discipline that has had a tendency to reject the creative influence of discourse because it is perceived to pose a threat to the Romantic ideals of the composer as originating genius and to conceptions of divine inspiration. Though these Romantic ideals are contested in small pockets of contemporary musicology, their potency is evidenced by the continued, near religious reverence for ‗the greats‘ of Western art music (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart etc.). Further, this reverence is not restricted to the Western canon but is mimicked in the broader Western popular music realm through the canonisation of artists such as The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Frank Zappa. To quote Nicholas Cook at length:

Academic writing on music almost invariably emphasises the innovators, the creators of tradition and the Beethovens and Schoenbergs, at the expense of the many more conservative composers who write within the framework of an established style. A value system is in place within our culture, then, which places innovation above tradition, creation above reproduction, personal expression above the market-place. In a word, music must be authentic, for otherwise it is hardly music at all.1

These ideas form what Richard Taruskin refers to as the ‗mythology of historiography‘ whereby the greatness of Bach or Zappa becomes treated by history as empirical fact.2

1 Nicholas Cook, Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988a), 14. 2 Richard Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century, 5 vols., vol. 4, The Oxford History of Western Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 197. 21

As I have suggested in Chapter 1, Foucault challenged these standard notions of history whereby the author is considered creative genius. Rather than just challenge the standard constructions of music history, this chapter will therefore consider the creative role of discourse in relation to the development of knowledge surrounding listening to electroacoustic music. I am particularly interested in uncovering the underlying assumptions that are taken as ‗natural fact‘ within discourse in order to then demonstrate how these move from the purely discursive through to how they are taken up as practices of listening (as I will show in later chapters).

Because Foucault does not subscribe to a ‗standard‘ progressive view of history it is difficult then, within the context of a thesis that seeks to critically engage with electroacoustic music, to find a place to begin given the post-structural criticisms of and interventions into history and discourse that will follow. In this chapter, it is my goal not only to review the literature by presenting a survey of the literature that is already available to know about this music, but also to intervene in the reporting procedures of this literature to consider some of the elements that have been excluded from it. Thus, the purpose of this chapter is to think about the ways in which the discourse itself describes and constructs the music in order to uncover assumptions and in order to highlight what it may exclude or limit.

Our conceptions of discourse, Foucault states, must become disconnected from the notion of a tradition, or a lineage of history.3 This is, Foucault is adamant, a mythology of the function of history. The need to assign origin, he remarks, is ‗the naivety of chronologies.‘4 The source of a single event does not exist; it is an illusion, because any origin is nothing more than a process (rather than a fixed point) of forces that come together. Thus, to demonstrate the origins of such things becomes an impossible task given the complexity and quantity of forces involved. This means that any history that functions in this manner is either a false history or one that is highly simplified. Foucault warns that this kind of manifest discourse (one which is based on the chronology of events and which functions to locate origin) is, to cite him at length:

3 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 27. 4 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 27. 22

Secretly based on an ‗already-said‘; and that this ‗already-said‘ is not merely a phrase that has already been spoken, or a text that has already been written, but a ‗never-said‘, an incorporeal discourse, a voice as silent as a breath … The first theme sees the historical analysis of discourse as the quest for and the repetition of an origin that eludes all historical determination; the second sees it as the interpretation of ‗hearing‘ of an ‗already-said‘ that is at the same time ‗not-said‘. We must renounce all those themes whose function is to ensure the infinite continuity of discourse and its secret presence to itself in the interplay of a constantly recurring absence.5

It is pertinent that Foucault refers to hearing. Clearly, he was not writing directly about music but he was not oblivious to the fact that ‗to hear is to know‘. ‗To listen is to learn‘. Jacques Attali suggests that:

Any organization of sounds is then a tool for the creation or consolidation of a community, a totality. It is what links a power centre to its subjects, and thus, more generally, it is an attribute of power in all of its forms.6

To hear, then, is to know, and to know is an act of power. Thus, in the above quotation, Foucault suggests that the possibilities for emerging knowledge are restricted by the discursive structures that are already in place and that, through the functions of power, seek to keep existing knowledge in circulation and seek to keep what has already been heard and said on high rotation. What is heard and known is only what has already taken place before, because what has been heard in the past tense defines the limits for what can be said today and in the future. What exists as knowledge in the past defines the limits of what can be known and this is true for the discourse of electroacoustic music as it is for any other discourse. This leaves room for knowledge to be built upon underlying assumptions that have become so tightly wound into the core beliefs of Western knowledge that they are no longer noticeable and they evade the scrutiny of critical thought. Importantly, these forces of discourse work to strategically and actively silence what lies just outside of its perimeter. As I

5 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 27-28. 6 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Theory and History of Literature; V. 16 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 6. 23 have suggested in Chapter One of this thesis, it is exceptionally difficult to work outside of discourse and outside of the regulatory procedures that maintain and recirculate it.

For Foucault, what discourse does not say is just as important as what it says because it is in what is not said that the possibility for new thoughts, new practices and new ideas emerges. Discourse also excludes the representation of some events, activities and practices and this exclusion is important for recognising how any field of knowledge is delineated and how the margins of the field are maintained and regulated. For these reasons, defining the music has proven to be one of the most difficult tasks I was faced with. Yet it has also proven to be significant. What is considered valid disciplinary knowledge, according to Foucault, is regulated by those who produce it and those who are accepted as experts. Experts in the field of electroacoustic music comprise composers, performers, critics, theorists, listeners and researchers who are legitimated mostly by the institutional support of the university. How do experts come to possess the authority to make claims about their field and to impact the knowledge that comes to be accepted? Discourse discriminates in favour of those whom it decides are qualified to create, or make decisions about, what comes to be considered truth within a discipline. As a result, according to Mills, only those who have authority to make truth claims are subject to the rules of ‗commentary, the author, disciplines and the rarefaction of the speaking subject‘.7 Similarly, as Danaher et al. point out, most of the knowledge that comes to be considered valid is due to a combination of disciplines (that regulate fields of knowledge), commentary (by reinterpreting the works of previous experts ad infinitum) and authors (who are considered to be the authority on a given subject).8 To cite Foucault:

By a paradox which it always displaces but never escapes, the commentary must say for the first time what had, nonetheless, already been said, and must tirelessly repeat what had, however, never been said.9

7 Mills, Michel Foucault, 58. 8 Danaher, Schirato, and Webb, Understanding Foucault, 23. 9 Michel Foucault, 'The Order of Discourse' in Robert Young, ed. Untying the Text: A Post- Structuralist Reader (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 58. 24

Knowledge is, therefore, dependent upon these procedures of commentary that function to keep old knowledge in circulation and make it difficult for new knowledge to emerge. Experts acquire their status by authoring commentary on the ideas that had come before them, and that conform to the regulations of disciplinary knowledge.

2.1 Terminology The term ‗electroacoustic music‘ is generally used to refer to a broad range of music that requires some form of electronic intervention in relation to the ways in which the music is composed, produced or experienced. However, this definition is inadequate given that it could be used to refer to all manner of musics. Douglass Keislar explains that electroacoustic music specifically ‗arose in the context of twentieth century developments in Western art music.‘10 The term, as Keislar explains, overlaps and is sometimes used interchangeably with other terms such as computer music and electronic music.11 There is also a plethora of other interchangeable or related terms that emerge in the discourse. To name a few, these include: musique concrète, elektronische Musik, acousmatic music, sound art and organised sound. In Simon Emmerson‘s Living Electronic Music, he suggests that the book is ‗intended for anyone with an interest in contemporary music‘ but explains that it will also attract the attention of those with an interest in electroacoustic music.12 Though he uses the term ‗electroacoustic music‘ very broadly, he defines it unproblematically as a ‗music heard through loudspeakers or sound with the help of electronic means.‘13 Luke Windsor describes ‗electroacoustic music‘ as a wide range of musics that ‗involve the mediation of loudspeakers.‘14 Similarly, Trevor Wishart begins his book with a definition of ‗sonic art‘ that ‗includes music and electroacoustic music‘ as if the two things were separate.15 Though there is no definition given for electroacoustic music (this seems implicit), Wishart explains that ‗sonic art‘ encompasses the art of ‗organising sound-events in

10 Douglass Keislar, 'A Historical View of Computer Music Technology' in The Oxford Handbook of Computer Music, ed. Roger T. Dean (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 11. 11 Keislar, ―A Historical View of Computer Music Technology,‖ 11. 12 Simon Emmerson, Living Electronic Music (Aldershot, Hants, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), xiii. 13 Emmerson, Living Electronic Music, xiii. 14 Luke Windsor, 'Through and Around the Acousmatic: The Interpretation of Electroacoustic Sounds' in ed. Simon Emmerson, Music, Electronic Media, and Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 8. 15 Trevor Wishart, ed. On Sonic Art (The Netherlands: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996), 4. 25 time.‘16 Joel Chadabe is slightly more specific in that he defines electroacoustic music as involving the combination of electronic and acoustic instruments.17

The problem with these definitions is articulated in an article co-written by Emmerson and Denis Smalley who define electroacoustic music as music that uses electronic technology (usually computer-based) to create, structure and/or explore sonic material.18 However, they point out the difficulty in reinforcing boundaries between ‗electroacoustic art music‘ and ‗vernacular musics‘ that utilise electroacoustic methods and approaches.19 For example, electroacoustic practices are a regular part of the composition, production, performance and consumption of a lot of different types of music, especially popular music. Yet the term is seldom used in this context or outside of the electroacoustic music realm.20

Whilst some may see the term as being too broad, Nick Collins and Julio d‘Escriván see the term as being divisive, elitist and oppositional. In The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music they state that they aim to:

Confront one division in contemporary musical life which is the subject of much discussion (and stress to come): the polarity of electroacoustic (caricatured as serious academic art music) and electronica (as popular electronic music but also including many forms of experimental electronic music).21

The title of the book, however, uses the term ‗electronic music‘ that functions, according to the editors, to purposely ‗reconcile electroacoustic and electronic worlds‘ to bridge the gap in what they perceive as a split between the impenetrable

16 Wishart, On Sonic Art, 4. 17 Joel Chadabe, Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1997), x. 18 Simon Emmerson, and Smalley, Denis, "Electro-Acoustic Music," Oxford Music Online, November 11, 2010. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/08695. 19 Emmerson and Smalley, "Electro-Acoustic Music". 20 See for example Roy Shuker, Popular Music: The Key Concepts, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2005). Thomas Swiss and Bruce Horner, Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1999). 21 Nick Collins and Julio d'Escrivan, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music (Cambridge: Cambridge Univerisity Press, 2007), 3. 26 and inaccessible academic world of electroacoustic music, and the more popular manifestations of these practices.22 They explain that the book:

[M]ay show that electroacoustic composition is nothing but ‗academic‘ if it doesn‘t acknowledge what is happening in the popular ambitus, and that electronica is inconsequential and disposable if it doesn‘t learn from the history of electronic creativity‘.23

Similarly, Tara Rodgers describes a ‗new audio culture‘ where a ‗significant cross- pollination among formerly more distinct academic, experimental and popular genres of electronic music‘ is emerging.24 Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner also note this ‗cross-pollination‘ and cross-disciplinarity. Their book, specifically on ‗audio culture‘, situates writing by composers, performers, theorists and critics alongside magazine articles and liner notes. In including all of these different forms of discourse in the book, they claim to challenge ‗aesthetic distinctions between ―high art‖ and ―popular culture‖.‘25

This is an interesting commentary on the ways in which the history of electroacoustic music has been constructed and is perceived. It speaks directly to the notion of discipline as one of the regulators of discourse in relation to what is and what is not accepted as electroacoustic music, and what is and what is not heard as electroacoustic music. As all of the aforementioned authors suggest, there are internal power tensions that imply a divide between what they perceive to be a hierarchical split between the academic and vernacular types of music. Therefore, operating on the margins of any discourse is difficult and the term ‗electroacoustic music‘ is not monolithic. As Johanna Demers writes:

I have until now referred to electroacoustic music as one discrete entity, which is misleading, since there is certainly not one single community of electroacoustic musicians and listeners but rather networks of producers and

22 Collins and d'Escrivan, The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music, 4. 23 Collins and d'Escrivan, The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music, 4. 24 Tara Rodgers, Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound (Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press, 2010), 4. 25 Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (New York; London: Continuum, 2004), xv. 27

audiences throughout the world. There are certain general traits, however, that are consistent throughout electroacoustic music. It tends to be produced in educational or research institutions, usually universities or governmentally subsidized centers that specialise in music and computing.26

Demers goes on to list a range of institutions such as the Insititut de recherché et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) and the Groupe de Receherches Musicales (GRM) among others.27

Although electroacoustic music is not marginalised per se, it operates on the margins of what is commonly considered to be ‗music‘. Whilst there are perceivable internal tensions that see the more vernacular and popular areas locked into a power struggle with their academic counterparts, there are also tensions in the broader realm that subordinate the music to the dominant Western canon. Thus, in thinking about defining the music, all that can be said is that electroacoustic music has something to do with the way we listen through loudspeakers, something to do with computers (though not all music that uses computer technology is electroacoustic), something to do with composing with sound (though not all music that composes with sound can be considered electroacoustic) and, it has something to do with the academy (though not all electroacoustic music is academic).

I acknowledge that a definition filled with caveats barely functions as a definition at all. However, it is precisely this issue that comes to play a major role in the formation of systems of value about how what we come to consider music more broadly.

2.2 But that‟s not music! Electroacoustic music, as Wishart explains, is frequently criticised by scholars on the basis that ‗it is not music‘.28 In the same way that critics dismiss electroacoustic music as not being musical, the music is often regarded by listeners as being incomprehensible, ‗noise‘ or ‗not-music‘ due to its stylistic features and its

26 Joanna Demers, Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 24. 27 Demers, Listening Through the Noise, 24. 28 Wishart, On Sonic Art, 5. 28

‗unconventional‘ treatment of sound (at least when positioned within the context of centuries of Western, tonal music). Linda Kouvaras remarks:

Sound art abounds with explorations in the socio-cultural meanings and possibilities of sound - including the incidental that occur in the everyday. Such elements have been traditionally deemed decidedly ‗noise‘, not-music.29

And, as Nicholas Cook notes:

Throughout the twentieth century, the most characteristic response to avant- garde music on the part of its detractors has not been a cool indifference, but a hot-blooded denial: ‗that‘s not music!‘ is the pronouncement not of somebody who is simply uninterested in the new music, but of someone who feels that his basic musical values are being challenged by it.30

It is the writings of Foucault that have led me to reflect on this process and to consider how this discourse might impact the way we listen to electroacoustic music in a very practical sense.

Debating the musical status of electroacoustic music may, on the surface, seem trivial. And, no doubt, some will argue that this debate has been exhausted through decades of musicological debate to the point where criticisms about the musicality of electroacoustic music are outdated, have been rehearsed ad nauseam without resolution, or are even irrelevant. However, my research has demonstrated that debate about the musical status of electroacoustic music is still appropriate because it impinges upon ideologies surrounding what we define, perceive and accept to be music more broadly and this, inadvertently, impacts the reception of and engagement with the music. This issue also plays an important role in the perceived status of the music. For example, the problem with the classification of something as ‗music‘ implies that there is something that is ‗not‘ music. At the very least, it is a problem due to the value-laden aesthetic judgement of any music that is perceived to be

29 Linda Kouvaras, Loading the Silence: Australian Sound Art in the Post-Digital Age (Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate Pub., 2013), 147. 30 Nicholas Cook, Music, Imagination, and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 13. 29 aligned with the values accorded by Western tonal music that would privilege the development of melody and harmony above all else. In other words, tonal music has come to be held up as the ‗yardstick‘ for all music and thus upholds its disciplinary boundaries according to these conventions. As my argument develops I will interrogate these rules. For the time being, however, it is clear that these largely assumed rules tend to stipulate what is and is not music.

Mills explains that ‗for Foucault discipline is a set of strategies, procedures and ways of behaving which are associated with certain institutional contexts and which then permeate ways of thinking and behaving in general.‘31 As bodies of knowledge, disciplines restrain discourse because they govern what is accepted as knowledge within a subject field, and this means that completely new knowledge is particularly difficult to create unless it emerges only within existing and predefined limits.32 If we accept that discourse constructs what is possible to know, then it is not completely impossible to suggest that discourse plays a significant role in constructing our experiences of listening to electroacoustic music (or any other music for that matter). Electroacoustic music directly confronts common, pre- existing ideas about what music is. It forces a re-evaluation of all of the elements that are commonly taken for granted and makes them visible. If discourse constructs our world, then these terms, ‗electroacoustic music‘ and ‗music‘, are not limited to language-based regulators of discourse.

As Jonathan Culler points out, some literary theorists consider language as having a performative function. He explains that ‗performative utterances do not describe but perform the action they designate.‘33 Therefore, the terminology that is employed in order to discuss, describe, name or think about the music is not neutral or passive. This terminology plays an active, performative role in constituting the music and thus frames the ways in which it is listened to in the most practical sense. The terminology helps to shape the meanings, values and ideas at the level of the creation of the music but also – and this is what I am most interested in – the process by which these discursive practices inform the meanings, ideas and values of listeners.

31 Mills, Michel Foucault, 44. 32 Mills, Michel Foucault, 60. 33 Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 95. 30

In a similar vein, thinking about the performative function of genres and how they might impact on music, David Beard and Kenneth Gloag argue that ‗understanding genre also suggests ways of listening‘ and it also impacts the way in which music is composed.34 One of the features of genre is that it is always contested territory. But more than this, definitions and labels carry with them values. Music, as Susan McClary has demonstrated, not only influences the way we experience our world but it actually constitutes the experiences of listeners (a point I return to in the final chapter).35 Genres, she explains, often appear solidified because they are treated as if they are neutral. However, McClary‘s work has again and again offered significant argument against this idea.36 Music is not neutral. As she explains:

So long as music reaffirms what everyone expects, it can manage to seem apolitical, to serve as a mere frill. But as soon as it transgresses some deep- seated taboo, it can bring boiling to the surface certain antagonisms or alliances that otherwise might not have been so passionately articulated.37

Despite claims about what music ‗is‘, contemporary musicology has accepted the mantra that ‗everything can be music but not everything is music‘. Yet, when confronted with music that pulls, stretches and sometimes tears at the fabric of our preconceived ideas about what music is, this tearing at the seams can appear to be a transgressive act. Therefore, labelling something as ‗electroacoustic music‘ is difficult given the lines of regulation are not clearly demarcated and always remain contested. It also suggests a range of other political and ideological problems that, as I will continue to diagnose throughout this thesis, play a powerful role in informing the ways in which we listen to electroacoustic music.

Electroacoustic music is not necessarily transgressive in the sense that it is able to overcome the regulatory pressures that have worked to see the dominance of more conventional views about what music is. Transgression would suggest that these

34 Beard and Gloag, Musicology, 72. 35 Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 9. 36 McClary, Feminine Endings, 27. 37 McClary, Feminine Endings, 27. 31 regulatory processes are no longer adequately functioning to contain the music. However, discourse does regulate music even if it operates along indistinguishable and unstable lines. As Cook explains:

The response elicited – ‗that‘s not music!‘ – is one of moral outrage, not of simple taxonomic classification. It is the kind of response that is generally provoked when deep-rooted, and probably unconscious, values are being threatened – as when, for example people are given the wrong sort of food to eat, or the fundamental tenets of democracy are questioned.38

This sort of response exists only because of the mechanisms that reinforce the boundaries surrounding what music is or at least what it should be. These mechanisms form a set of values that mostly operate outside of our awareness. Yet, they are exercised during any act of listening. If discourse constructs what is possible to think about music (including how we listening to it), then the things that are excluded and that operate along the margins are important for this very reason.

Furthermore, Cook argues that ‗when we speak of music we are really talking about a multiplicity of activities and experiences.‘39 Similarly, Philip V. Bohlman states that ‗what music is remains open to question at all times and in all places.‘40 In this way, what is or is not music becomes entwined in a power struggle that, to draw on David Bracket, is apparent through the connections between ‗institutions, discourses, and the resultant effects of ‗truth‘.‘41 Clearly, what is accepted as music remains contested, and is no less the case in the realm of electroacoustic music. However, context plays a significant role in the ways in which we listen to, consume and accept music. As Bennett suggests, the musical work is very porous to its contexts.42 To draw on an example, Cook explains that it is easy to imagine and accept Karlheinz Stockhausen‘s Mikrophonie II as the sound track for a science-fiction film.

38 Cook, Music, Imagination, and Culture, 14. 39 Cook, Music, 5. 40 Philip V. Bohlman, 'Ontologies of Music' in Rethinking Music, eds. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 17. 41 David Brackett, 'Music', Key Terms in Popular Music, eds. Swiss and Horner, 125. 42 Bennett, Sounding Postmodernism, 12. 32

However, when positioned in a different context such as in the concert hall, it solicits a different kind of reception.43 To quote R.A Sharpe:

Most of the music found ―difficult‖ by the contemporary non-specialist listener is music that requires a great deal of technical mastery to compose, such as the music of Elliot Carter, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen or Harrison Birtwistle. It is music that is difficult because we find it hard or impossible to ―follow‖ in the way in which we follow earlier music.44

In other words, listeners are not typically equipped with the skills required to listen to this kind of music. Listeners, therefore, usually find this music difficult because it is heard in comparison to the context of Western tonal music. Tonal music has a dedicated, yet unspoken, set of criteria for what constitutes music (namely, mostly tonal works that prioritise melody or harmony) such that even the most naïve listener is typically acquainted with these conventions on some level. Thus, when removed from a musical context it appears to be accepted on different grounds.

These problems are captured by David Bennett who asks:

What ‗should‘ … listeners be ‗looking for‘ in such music? Should they be listening for structure, for texture, for ‗meaning‘, for ‗expression, for intentionality, or should they simply – in the tradition of the avant-garde – be expecting the unexpected, waiting for the doors of perception to be opened wider by a defamiliarising treatment of sound/noise? 45

The questions raised by Bennett are questions that could be applied to much contemporary art music. However, Bennett‘s questions point to a particular problem that scholars and composers working within the electroacoustic music paradigm have since tried to reconcile. That is, given its relatively short history, Bennett asks how listeners should approach a music that challenges the very foundations of centuries of tonal Western music. Why do we find the music difficult to listen to and, further,

43 Cook, Music, Imagination, and Culture, 13. 44 R. A. Sharpe, Philosophy of Music: An Introduction (Chesham: Acumen Publishing Limited, 2004), 33. 45 Bennett, Sounding Postmodernism, 90. 33 difficult to call music? The core of my argument hinges upon the idea that the problem of how we listen to electroacoustic music is partly contingent upon this ‗music vs. non-music‘ debate, at least in terms of the ways in which the discourse operates at the level of listening. As I have previously suggested, electroacoustic music operates on the margins of what a lot of people believe to be music, and this is both a restrictive position and a liberating one. The amount of energy that is invested in definition and terminology suggests that these elements play a significant role in shaping how we come to think about the music by challenging the listening practices and capacities that identify us as competent to exercise musical judgement. Ultimately, the discourse will shape the ways in which we can think about, know about and listen to the music and, conversely, the ways in which we think about, know about and listen to the music will also define the scope of the discourse. This makes both the discourse and the music somewhat elusive because they both continue to transform each other. However, Foucault‘s histories are histories of the present and, as Kendall and Wickham suggest, ‗they cannot be said to stop because they cannot be said to be going anywhere.‘46 Thus, how we have identified and defined electroacoustic music in the past, how we do so in the present, and whether it should be considered music at all, are regular discursive key points.

2.3 The Grand Narrative of Electroacoustic Music Another telling feature of the nature of electroacoustic music is its sometimes unproblematic relationship to its own history. John H. Arnold explains that one of the difficulties associated with writing history is that a choice must be made about the point in which any given event or action could be said to have taken place.47 In other words, when does it become possible to write or think about an event and when did it come into existence?48 Electroacoustic music‘s history is written such that not only does it privilege the names of composers but, due to its ties with technology, it also privileges their inventions. Given this close association with the emergence of electronic technologies, electroacoustic music‘s origins are typically set within the context of twentieth century art music that recounts key events, figures and inventions that are reported on, I argue, uncritically. These storytelling devices are

46 Kendall and Wickham, Using Foucault's Methods, 4. 47 John H. Arnold, History: A Very Short Introduction, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 91. 48 Arnold, History, 91. 34 not easily identified because the stories inevitably cross over, intersect and overlap. Additionally, due to their repetition throughout academic literature, they have come to be afforded much validity. However, it is my intention to discuss some of these lenses with which the history of electroacoustic music views itself – at least from the perspective of the historians and musicologists that collect and report it.

One approach to telling the history of electroacoustic music is to identify its origins within the context of modernism. Modernism, in the view of Georgina Born, can be understood as an ultimate rejection of the past and, in music, this includes severing ties with all earlier forms of melodic and harmonic tonal procedures for the sake of rewriting the rules of music.49 Although modernism was seen as an instrument for social change, Taruskin explains that, the focus on breaking with the past culminated in art that was (allegedly) completely removed from the social/cultural context out of which it arose.50 This ‗break from the past‘ reportedly concluded with what Bennett refers to as the ‗telos [that] was the liberation of sound from the tyranny of a tonic or ―key‖ more commonly referred to as ―the breakdown of tonality‖.‘51 Modernism, Taruskin explains, ‗asserts the superiority of the present over the past (and, by implication, of the future over the present).‘52 The future then, in line with these ‗enlightened‘ ambitions, could only be known or imagined through scientific and rational thought.53 As Born suggests, modernism is about an overall fascination for experiment, scientism and revelling in the wonders of technology.54 It represents a significant trend, practice or set of beliefs that all move towards a utopian re- definition of art, and it seeks to provide one over-arching, all-knowing ‗grand‘ story (referred to by Jean-François Lyotard as the master narrative, grand narrative or progress narrative).55 This narrative, according to Taruskin, adopts a Hegelian view of history that is ‗unashamedly teleological‘ and falls victim to ‗historiographical

49 Georgina Born, Rationalizing Culture: Ircam, Boulez and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California and London, England: California University Press, 1995), 41. 50 Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century, 4. 51 Bennett, Sounding Postmodernism, 53. 52 Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century, 1. 53 Kenneth Gloag, Postmodernism in Music (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 4. 54 Born, Rationalizing Culture, 41. 55 Gloag, Postmodernism in Music, 4. 35 bias‘.56 History is constructed in narrative form and the narration of music history is particularly problematic because it is an operation of power. In other words, those events that receive mention are typically events that have currency through academic commentary. Clearly, Foucault would be extremely sceptical of these processes.

One of the most commonly associated and discursively reproduced figures of modernism in music and throughout the twentieth century is Arnold Schoenberg (1974-1951).57 Schoenberg‘s name is synonymous with ‗atonality‘ because he developed a system of composing with twelve-tones that, as Thomas Holmes explains, ‗lacks a tonal center or key‘ and is therefore referred to as ‗atonal music‘.58 Schoenberg was not directly involved with electroacoustic music. However, the propensity of the progress narrative that Schoenberg‘s name has come to be most strongly associated with is one that has remained largely unquestioned. Further, the take-up of this narrative has also been used to justify the necessity of a lot of music from the twentieth century – electroacoustic music included. For example, Paul Griffiths describes Schoenberg as one of three great forefathers of ‗modern‘ music (alongside Ives and Stravinsky).59 Born‘s study, an extremely comprehensive and valuable study in relation to the history of electroacoustic music, does however, like many others, position Schoenberg as an ‗ambivalent revolutionary‘ a radical historical figure who singlehandedly dismantled tonality.60 Glen Watkins pronounces Schoenberg as the ‗father of atonality‘ and defines him as a pre-eminent twentieth- century figure who invented twelve-tone composition.61 Hans Mersmanna, cited in Bennett, positions Schoenberg as ‗the single greatest revolutionary in music of our time … he breaks all boundaries, destroys all that music previously affirmed.‘62 Schoenberg, according to Watkins, has been ‗blamed for much, praised by some, and championed by few.‘63 The vigour of Schoenberg‘s influence on music history, and

56 Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century, 4, xx. 57 Gloag, Postmodernism in Music, 4. 58 Thomas B. Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music: Pioneers in Technology and Composition, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002), 36. 59 Paul Griffiths, Modern Music and After, 3rd ed. (Oxford [England] ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 57. 60 Born, Rationalizing Culture, 48. 61 Glenn Watkins, Soundings: Music in the Twentieth Century (New York, London: Schirmer Books; Collier Macmillan, 1988), 24. 62 Bennett, Sounding Postmodernism, 55. 63 Watkins, Soundings, 24. 36 on the way that history is written, are so entrenched that they almost cannot be questioned.

Thus, music‘s grand narrative is perpetuated by Schoenberg himself who argued that his music was the natural successor to Beethoven‘s music.64 As Roland Nadeau points out, Schoenberg ‗assumed that tonality had run out and was incapable of producing new music.‘65 In accordance with the principles of modernism and its focus on progress, the goal of Schoenberg‘s serialism was to invent an entirely new system of composition. Thus, Schoenberg‘s grandiose claims inexorably concluded with what he saw as the logical evolution in the progress of Western music‘s history, that is, the emancipation of dissonance from tonality but also, significantly, the ‗breakdown of tonality‘. The implicit nature of these kinds of historical claims is taken up by the reporting of history as encapsulated by Holmes when he makes the assertion that ‗he [Schoenberg] discarded the time-honoured rules governing tonal harmony and key relationships.‘66 But as McClary reminds us, these time-honoured rules (such as tonality) are not a necessary condition for the existence of music, and nor are they natural.67

The idea of a ‗tonal crisis‘ refers to the notion that tonality had achieved all that it could possibly achieve, that, tonality was at its limits. Therefore, in order to make truly new music (in line with the necessary modernist pressure of progress) a new system of organisation and a new musical language had to be invented. These views are best encapsulated by Born who suggests that Schoenberg‘s ‗revolutionary new‘ twelve-tone serialism was a direct result of this ‗tonal crisis‘.68 To quote her:

Serialism and its elaborations became the centrepiece of postwar musical modernism, with the ambition to remake completely the foundations of the western musical ―language,‖ to provide a universal basic system for

64 Bennett, Sounding Postmodernism, 53. 65 Roland Nadeau, "Debussy and the Crisis of Tonality," MENC: The National Association for Music Education 66, no. 1 (1979): 70. 66 Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music, 36. 67 Susan McClary, 'The Blasphemy of Talking Politics During Bach Year' in Richard D. Leppert and Susan McClary, eds., Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 13-62. 68 Born, Rationalizing Culture, 48. 37

composition, as tonality had once been. This was the epitome of a high modernism, founded on a belief in the possibility of a total, deep-structural, and scientistic renewal of the grounds of musical progress.69

Posterity positions Schoenberg contradictorily as both a hero and a villain. He is positioned as an ambivalent trailblazer whose claims to completely break from tradition all the while drawing a lineage to ‗the great Germanic tradition‘ that came before him and this serves as a source of confusion.70 As Taruskin points out, the problem was that Schoenberg had attempted to ‗reconcile the new means of tonal organization with traditional ―classic‖ forms and traditional ―expressive‖ rhetoric.‘71 Thus, despite the contradiction, it is discourse that ensures Schoenberg‘s story remains in circulation and, regardless of whether one is critiquing Schoenberg‘s position, and regardless of whether history considers him to be a hero or a villain, the difference between these positions becomes irrelevant as his status in history remains the same.72 The circulation of his name throughout history, and the rarefaction of discourse and commentary, means that his name continues to circulate and functions as the origin of many other stories (including the story of electroacoustic music). This means that history has ceased to question the ways in which power works to produce it. Although discourse works its magic at a level that often escapes our awareness, Foucault believes that the identification of these storytelling mechanisms helps us to remember the complexity of the ways in which history functions. Schoenberg has become a historical fact and history has lost its capacity to question the authority of his status.

Furthermore, musicology, McClary points out, often assumes that tonality constitutes the foundation of Western music. To quote her directly:

69 Born, Rationalizing Culture, 3. 70 Born, Rationalizing Culture, 48. 71 Richard Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century, 5 vols., vol. 5, The Oxford History of Western Music (Oxrford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 20. 72 Susan McClary, 'From the Universal and Timeless to the Here and Now: Rethinking Music Studies' in Sally Macarthur, Judith Lochhead, and Jennifer Shaw, eds., Music's Immanent Future: The Deleuzian Turn in Music Studies (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2016), 25. 38

Once the listener has accepted the premises of tonality, any specific manifestation of it seems virtually natural – as though it operates without cultural intervention: tonality erases its ideology as it unfolds.73

Therefore, if we accept the argument that tonality is a construct (as McClary, Bennett and Taruskin, for example, all suggest it is) then we would have to think harder about what this perceived collapse of tonality might actually mean for music that has been composed since the collapse.

Thus far, I have suggested that the term ‗music‘ is as much a description of some ‗thing‘ as it is a construction of it. Implicit in the term ‗music‘ is a set of unspoken assumptions that, to reinvoke the lengthy Foucault quote at the start of this chapter, is ‗really no more than the repressive presence of what it does not say‘.74 One of these assumptions is the understood, but widely contested, notion that a necessary condition of music is tonality. Even in the narrowest sense, the earliest written records of music precede tonality and in the broadest sense, music can exist without it.75 Precisely how much music since this perceived collapse is atonal (or perhaps non-tonal)? If tonality collapsed, then why does tonal music in the form of popular music or film music still exist? The notion of the ‗breakdown of tonality‘ has long since been held as an empirical fact by musicologists and historians. It is a regular discursive feature in the history of twentieth century music that has become a ‗buzz‘ phrase that emerges in academic literature, thus giving it the discursive potency to remain as an ‗empirical fact‘ and one that is seldom subject to rigorous scrutiny.76 Moreover, it functions as a useful handle to enter into music history in the twentieth century such that we can refer to music history pre- or post-breakdown. Taruskin challenges this view and makes the assertion that tonality never collapsed, simply because tonal music still exists and it still accounts for the majority of music that is composed and performed in the West.77

73 Susan McClary, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 68. 74 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 28. 75 Richard Taruskin, 'The Curtain Goes Up' in Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century, 5 vols., vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1-36. 76 Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century, 359. 77 Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century, 359. 39

If we accept that the conventional version of Western music history is a result of this modernist or even Hegelian process that functions to massage changes in music according to a linear, goal-driven story, we should also accept that these processes equally function to eradicate complexity. In other words, if history wants to remain convincing it has to offer up a sequential progress narrative whereby one event neatly causes another. Foucault argues that these narratives function to eradicate difference and serve to iron out the complexities of the way history performs. Furthermore, it is often assumed that the past is a less-advanced version of today that we can somehow understand, access, or even reproduce.78

As Kendall and Wickham point out, ‗Foucaultians are not seeking to find out how the present has emerged from the past. Rather, the point is to use history as a way of diagnosing the present‘.79 In this sense, tonality should not be seen as the liberation of music from noise, any more than atonality (or serialism) should be seen as liberation of music from tonality. In the eyes (or ears!) of a concert-going audience, tonality is still very much relevant. Atonal and serial musics were criticised as being sonically inaccessible and the jarring dissonances, hard-to-follow melodies and lack of tonal centre were particularly distancing for anyone who was unfamiliar with the new ‗rules‘ of music. This meant that new approaches to listening had to be developed80 resulting in a culture that was elitist, exclusive and, to reinvoke Taruskin, deliberately extracted from the socio-cultural context out of which it arose.81 Cited in Bennett, Schoenberg declares that modernist music must intentionally eschew the culture out of which it was born, and it must be intentionally difficult to follow.82 Schoenberg‘s own description is particularly telling. Cited in Bennett, Schoenberg says:

78 Danaher, Schirato, and Webb, Understanding Foucault, 97-98. 79 Kendall and Wickham, Using Foucault's Methods, 4. 80 See for example: Joseph Nathan Straus, Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2005); Miguel A. Roig-Francoli, Anthology of Post-Tonal Music: For Use with Understanding Post-Tonal Music (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2008); Stefan M. Kostka, Materials and Techniques of Post-Tonal Music, 4th ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2012); Arved Mark Ashby, The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology, Eastman Studies in Music, (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2004). 81 Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century, 4. 82 Bennett, Sounding Postmodernism, 56. 40

Intelligent people have always been offended if one bothered them with matters which any idiot could understand at once; no artist, no poet, no philosopher, no musician whose thinking occurs in the highest sphere would degenerate into vulgarity in order to comply with a slogan such as ―Art for All‖. Because if it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.83

This provocative take on modernist art serves in the first instance as a defence of, or as Bennett argues, a justification of, serial music.84 It is extremely polemical and functions as a ‗war cry‘ at the cost of those whose musical tastes might lie within the domain of popular music (or perhaps any form of art that is considered to lie within the realm of popularity). Schoenberg has no direct ties with electroacoustic music, yet it would be difficult to argue that his music or ideas have played no part in the development of and evolution of electroacoustic music (or much music since).

The accepted history of electroacoustic music helps to perpetuate the myth of the ‗breakdown of tonality‘ by assuming, as Andrew Hugill does, that ‗Western music was beginning to evolve to a point at which such new means of expression would be required.‘85 And, in this sense, electroacoustic music has complex relationships with tonality, modernism and serialism. Whilst Schoenberg is not immediately connected with the music, the history of electroacoustic music tends to be told in relation to other twentieth century developments of which, as I have demonstrated above, Schoenberg is perceived to be a central figure. For example, Richard Toop categorises electroacoustic music as a derivative of serialism.86 Hugill points out that, in the same vein as Schoenberg, other musicians felt that the Western tonal system had exhausted all options for the progression of music.87 He goes on to suggest that because of this ‗dead end‘ the advent of electroacoustic music ‗began with the invention of new electronic instruments.‘88 And, with the invention of new instruments, the grand telos of electroacoustic music (as Bennett would put it) sought

83 Bennett, Sounding Postmodernism, 56. 84 Bennett, Sounding Postmodernism, 53. 85 Andrew Hugill, 'The Origins of Electroacoustic Music' in The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music, eds. Collins and d'Escrivan, 15. 86 Richard Toop, 'Expanding Horizons: The International Avant-Garde, 1962-75' in Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople, eds., The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music, The Cambridge History of Music (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 454. 87 Andrew Hugill, 'The Origins of Electroacoustic Music,' 15. 88 Andrew Hugill, 'The Origins of Electroacoustic Music,' 15. 41 to deliver ‗any sound you can imagine.‘89 The story of electroacoustic music is, in many respects, positioned as a continuation of the legacy of Schoenberg where composers turn to new instruments, new sounds and new technologies to help them create new music. This is also a utopian production of history that is aligned with the rhetoric of progress as it becomes interwoven with conceptions about the value of technology.90

The historicity of electroacoustic music is such that it is reportedly divided into two ‗camps‘ of opposing aesthetic practice, schools of thought and nationality. Even Taruskin, a musicologist who is often critical of this reductive method of retelling history, suggests that such a divide existed between ‗the Germans‘ (who follow in the Schoenbergian or Webernian tradition and whose links to serialism were drawn quite early on) and ‗the French‘ (who operate contrary to this tradition).91 Chadabe explains how Herbert Eimert, the first director of the Norwestdeutscher Rundfunk broadcasting studios (NWDR and WDR) in Cologne, Germany, that spawned ‗elektronische Musik’, saw elektronische Musik as a direct extension of post- Webernian serialism.92 Eimert believed that the potential of elektronische Musik opened up a lot more parameters for the composer to control and organise outside of pitch alone.93 Quoted in Chadabe, Eimert says ‗this electronic music is not ‗another‘ music, but is serial music.‘94 Composers thought to be associated with the Germanic style were allegedly following the path that Schoenberg had set for them during the 1920s. The music was considered to be ‗post-serialist‘ since every aspect of the composition (not just pitch) could be organised according to the same series.95 Peter Manning also notes this strong and deliberate association between elektronische Musik and serialism.96 However, the links to serialism are not necessarily as clear-cut as music history would have us believe.

89 Paul Theberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press: University Press of New England 1997). 90 See for example, Jennifer Daryl Slack and J Macgregor Wise, Culture and Technology (New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc., 2007). 91 Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century, 187. 92 Chadabe, Electric Sound, 36. 93 Chadabe, Electric Sound, 36. 94 Chadabe, Electric Sound, 37. 95 Chadabe, Electric Sound, 37. 96 Peter Manning, Electronic and Computer Music, Fourth ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 42. 42

Elektronische Musik, in line with the modernist agenda and set against the backdrop of debates surrounding music as entertainment vs. serious music, promised sound that was completely synthesised and therefore ostensibly free from stigma and social relation.97 The term ‗elektronische Musik’, according to Taruskin, is much more specific than the English ‗electronic music‘ and describes music that is ‗based exclusively on electronic synthesised sounds – the purer, the better.‘98 These claims to ‗pure‘, unadulterated sound are clearly reminiscent of earlier sentiments that argued for the autonomy of art as exemplified in the famous essay by Eduard Hanslick, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (The Beautiful in Music, 1854).99 Coupled with the monetary backing of the institution and the perceived ‗scientific‘ objectivity of the new technologies at the time, elektronische Musik was distanced from any kind of association with Western tonal music (including electronic instruments) that might seem to be imitating or synthesising acoustic instruments. Manning explains that:

The early advocates of elektronische Musik not only restricted themselves to entirely synthetic means of sound production but also were at pains to dissociate their work from the imitative qualities of electronic musical instruments.100

Working within the operative modes of modernism, music that is ‗of culture‘ is considered to be less valuable. In drawing a lineage to the music of Schoenberg, history also validated elektronische Musik as a ‗higher‘ form of art. On the one hand, this origin story that links Schoenberg to elektronische Musik serves to make the grand narrative of Western music faultless in that the line of progression from one event to another is uninterrupted, thus giving the music a history and an origin. And, on the other hand, claims to the autonomy of the music make the music appear to function for the elite because it alienates the average listener. This alienation of the listener on the basis of an elite formed what McClary has called the ‗Terminal Prestige‘ of the avant-garde whereby the alienation of the listener was, at the same

97 Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century, 189. 98 Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century, 189. 99 Hanslick, Eduard, ‗Eduard Hanslick from Vom Musicklisch-Schone‘ in Ruth A. Solie, Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship (Berkeley: University of California, 1993). 100 Manning, Electronic and Computer Music, 42. 43 time, the withdrawal of the composer from the public sphere.101 Kouvaras explains that the goal was a formalist one. That music should withdraw from modern life for the sake of the pursuit of progress so it could be free to ‗revel in its difficulty and purist, hermetic isolation.‘102

Stockhausen, who is perhaps one of the most widely cited composers to be connected with the NWDR studios, and who eventually replaced Eimert as director in 1963, moved away from serialism.103 Composed in 1956 by Stockhausen, (notably before Stockhausen replaced Eimert) Gesang der Jünglinge deviated from a strict version of serialism and even utilised musique concrète techniques.104 Additionally, it is widely acknowledged that many of the composers associated with elektronische Musik (Luciano Berio, Herbert Eimert, Bruno Maderna, Luigi Nono, Andre Boucourechliev, John Cage, Olivier Messiean, Pierre Boulez and, as I have mentioned already, Stockhausen) also composed musique concrète, worked at the French studios themselves or visited to use the equipment.105

Furthermore, the division of music based purely on nationality raises a variety of concerns that appear, on the surface, to be naïve. For example, what it means to be ‗French‘ or ‗German‘ is not absolute. National borders are drawn and re-drawn. The Schoenbergian/Viennese school, for example, is not necessarily a wholly Germanic one, given Schoenberg, who was born in Austria, fled the war and moved to America in 1933, as was the case with many other composers.106 Race, ethnicity and national identity are areas of significant debate that, when reported in this manner, have the effect of generalising and simplifying the complexities involved in such multifarious histories.

Discourse, as Mills points out, causes ‗a narrowing of one‘s field of vision, to exclude a wide range of phenomena from being considered as real or as worthy of

101 Susan McClary, 'Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Composition' in David Schwarz, Anahid Kassabian, and Lawrence Siegel, Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), 54-74. 102 Kouvaras, Loading the Silence, 21. 103 Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century, 191. 104 Watkins, Soundings, 518. 105 Watkins, Soundings, 506-27; Manning, Electronic and Computer Music, 69 and Chadabe, Electric Sound, 35-44. 106 Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century, 303-64. 44 attention, or even as existing‘.107 Thus, the picture as it is often presented is a simplified version of a much more complex whole. It was not only ‗the French‘ and ‗the Germans‘ who participated in the history of electroacoustic music, yet it is precisely this kind of omission that demonstrates the strategic nature of the function of exclusivity in the ways that discourses work to produce and restrict knowledge. The identification of two traditions locked into a power struggle operates historically as much as a strategic position of exclusion as a naïve one. As I have suggested earlier, there is no part of electroacoustic music that is self-contained and even the most notable proponents of elektronische Musik crossed paths with the French school of musique concrète in Paris and with other ‗schools‘ of music across the world.108

‗Early advocates‘ of the music, to borrow Manning‘s words, did not always only restrict themselves to electronic means and nor did they only restrict themselves to serial techniques. Stockhausen, for example, composed Gesang der Junglinge in 1955 and used concrete sounds (voice) and compositional techniques. Emmerson, for example, points out that:

The simplistic view that the great debate between musique concrète and elektronische Musik was about materials alone misses much about the motivations. This point is not merely academic, it influences how we teach and compose today.109

Discourse functions in an exclusive manner, and though it makes for a much easier way to write (or tell) history, it is the exclusive and reductive nature of discourse that has come to produce truths that are taken up as a priori knowledge.

Musique concrète, historically set in contrast to elektronische Musik, was led by, in Manning‘s words, the ‗pioneer‘ Pierre Schaeffer and predates elektronische Musik chronologically.110 Schaeffer started his career as an electronic engineer (a point that

107 Mills, Discourse, 46. 108 Griffiths, Modern Music, 54. 109 Simon Emmerson, The Language of Electroacoustic Music (New York: Harwood Academic, 1986), 1. 110 Manning, Electronic and Computer Music, 20. 45 seldom goes unmentioned) whose experiments with sound were, according to Manning, inspired by the Italian Futurists.111 As Taruskin observes, Schaeffer‘s earliest collection of pieces, Concert de bruits, which is translated as Concert of Noises, directly references the language of Futurism.112 Chadabe points out that after the Concert de bruits concert was well-received, Schaeffer was able to secure a team of assistants, one of whom later became his working collaborator Pierre Henry.113

In 1950 Schaeffer founded the GRM and Timothy Taylor makes the point that because Schaeffer was not a trained composer, he was uninterested in Western music history and thus unaffected by the burden of tonality (incidentally, these are claims that are contested by Schaeffer‘s own account of his relationship with music as evidenced in his autobiographical diary).114 Kouvaras also makes mention of the fact that Schaeffer was a ‗radio engineer rather than a composer.‘115 She continues to explain that Schaeffer was part of a trend towards a do-it-yourself aesthetic made possible by the recent advances in technology at the time and states that ‗Pierre Schaeffer came to stand for the new species of musicians: an amateur researcher.‘116 The point that Schaeffer was an engineer and not a ‗trained‘ musician receives regular mention. It suggests a level of suspicion that casts doubt on his musicianship as a composer and calls into question whether he has earned the right to radically alter the goals set forth by Western music‘s teleology. These seemingly innocuous statements that cast doubt on Schaeffer‘s musicianship have been sanctioned as a relevant part of the story of electroacoustic music. Thus, they are repeated and rehearsed, which means that, as Mills warns, ‗they have a profound influence on the way that individuals act and think.‘117 At this point I would like to cite, at length, a statement made by Christine North and John Dack. In the translators‘ notes to Schaeffer‘s In Search of a Concrete Music, they say:

111 Manning, Electronic and Computer Music, 20. 112 ‗Futurism‘, broadly, is an artistic movement from the early 20th century largely concerned with ideas of the future. Common themes included machines, industrialisation, war and urbanisation. See, Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century, 188. 113 Chadabe, Electric Sound, 27. 114 Timothy Dean Taylor, Strange Sounds: Music, Technology & Culture (New York: Routledge, 2001), 47. 115 Kouvaras, Loading the Silence, 31. 116 Kouvaras, Loading the Silence, 31. 117 Mills, Discourse, 55. 46

Indeed, his [Schaeffer‘s] technique of manipulating recordings of real-world sounds is regarded as prescient … Nevertheless, such accounts seem to be unacquainted with Schaeffer‘s formidable training as a radio engineer, his awareness of traditional musical skills, his emphasis on the listener‘s perceptual activity, and his profound knowledge of French literature and thought, particularly that of the post-Romantic era. And yet these are precisely what enabled him to explore in his own inimitable manner the relationship between broadcasting media and sound-based art forms - principally music … There has been a marked improvement in Schaeffer studies since the 1900s, and concrete music is no longer regarded as a colorful if rather inconsequential prelude to the more important activities of the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR) studio in Cologne.118

In their view, Schaeffer‘s musical contribution to the history of music has been largely undervalued and it has also been devalued. Despite the fact that Schaeffer actually had a lot of musical knowledge, his status as an engineer first and foremost has provided further opportunity to repudiate the musical qualities of musique concrète. As Luc Ferrari (a composer, collaborator of Schaeffer‘s and successor to Schaeffer as head of the GRM) explains:

Musique concrète represented the avant-garde, but the bad boys of the avant- garde. The good boys were the electronic music composers at Cologne, the studio where all the sounds were clean and pure … In comparison, musique concrète was a collection of dust: the sound objects were dirty, the source material was found in any old corner, it was literally made of dusty old bric- a-brac, like coils, sheet metal, and broken pianos. So vis-à-vis the slowly mounting institutionalization of contemporary music, Stockhausen was respectable, as well as Boulez and the Domaine Musical.119

118 Christine North and John Dack ‗Translators‘ note‘ in Pierre Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music, trans. Christine North and John Dack (Berkely, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press, 2012), x. 119 Brigitte Robindor and Luc Ferrari, "Luc Ferrari: Interview with an Intimate Iconoclast," Computer Music Journal 22, no. 3 (1998): 10. 47

Prior to Ferrari however, Henry was Schaeffer‘s early collaborator and due to his contribution to musique concrète in many compositions (such as, Voile d’Orphée, Symphony pour un homme seul, Orphée 51 etc.) he is positioned as the largely underrepresented musical half of the duo who made up for Schaeffer‘s ‗musical‘ limitations. According to Holmes ‗Henry‘s presence at the studio brought an immediate sense of musicality to the work that had been lacking in Schaeffer‘s collages.‘120 Holmes‘ seemingly innocent judgements continue:

Henry was not an engineer like Schaeffer: He was a composer. Unlike his colleague, he did not rely on the phenomenological analysis of sound for motivation. He worked with the emotional content of music, composing with an acute instinct for the communicating power of musical and non-musical sounds.121

These sentiments are perpetuated in much the same way throughout the historical literature that positions musique concrète as cold, clinical and music-less. Kouvaras suggests that musique concrète is a ‗formalist procedure‘, adding to the view that the music lacks, as Holmes put it, a certain ‗emotional‘ quality.122 However, it was also true that the composers working in the Cologne studio (if such a distinction is possible to make) were actively working in the domain of formalism. Schaeffer‘s music is, therefore, often considered clinical on the basis of his musical deficiency (itself a fallacy) while those in the Cologne studio were positioned as musical experts who were making decidedly aesthetic, formalist, decisions. To quote Holmes, ‗Pierre Schaeffer decreased his activity as a composer as ―trained‖ composers spent more time in the RTF studio.‘123 Born also comments on Schaeffer‘s perceived deficiency that, she says, functioned as an area in which Schaeffer and musique concrète could be criticised.124 She states ‗Schaeffer was trained as an engineer, not as a musician, and was thus vulnerable to the charge of

120 Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music, 94. 121 Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music, 96. 122 Kouvaras, Loading the Silence, 25. 123 Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music, 97. 124 Born, Rationalizing Culture, 77. 48 not being a legitimate voice on compositional developments.‘125 Schaeffer‘s (and by association, his music‘s) ‗lack of‘ cannot be made any clearer.

After a poorly received broadcast of Symphonie pour un homme seul, Manning reports that the debate about the different approaches was taken up at the Darmstadt Summer School where a series of symposia was organised to take up the issue of the differences between the ‗German‘ and the ‗French‘ methods.126 Quoted in Chadabe, composer Morton Subotnik explains:

At that point, there was a big battle between the Stockhausen elektronische Musik and the Schaeffer musique concrète, and we wanted to bridge these differences by calling it ‗tape music‘ which could be anything that was on tape.127

In a letter to Stockhausen, David Tudor (a pianist, composer and, collaborator of John Cage‘s) says ‗it is obvious that Schaeffer is digging his own grave in Paris – and I hope you will complete the arrangements for his burial in Cologne.‘128 Similar sentiments are voiced by Pierre Boulez:

I shall tell you that the experimental studio is more and more crap, and that Schaeffer is a pain in the arse; and that I hope I shall soon be working with Stockhausen at the electronic music studio of Radio-Cologne.129

Unlike elektronische Musik, Musique concrète did not make the same musical connections to Schoenberg and serialism and this was another potential area of critique. The potency of Schoenberg‘s claims to emancipation are summarised by Stockhausen (cited in Bennett) who states that, ‗Schoenberg‘s great achievement … was to claim freedom for composers: freedom from the prevailing taste of society and its media; freedom for music to evolve without interference.‘130 Peter Manning

125 Born, Rationalizing Culture, 77. 126 Manning, Electronic and Computer Music, 28. 127 Chadabe, Electric Sound, 88. 128 Martin Iddon, New Music at Darmstadt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 163. 129 Pierre Boulez et. al., The Boulez-Cage Correspondence, (Cambridge, England; New York, USA: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 145. 130 Bennett, Sounding Postmodernism, 59. 49 highlights the potent undercurrent of the Schoenbergian tradition and its value to the school of elektronische Musik. Many of its proponents, Manning states, ‗became avowed disciples of the cause of furthering the principles of serialism.‘131 This means that elektronische Musik appeared to be furthering a cause that was much bigger than music. It backed the cause of freedom and this was an important point coming out of World War II. Thus, in order to be avant-garde it was important to stand for freedom and more importantly, if you stood for freedom then you stood on the side of Schoenberg. Musique concrète clearly did not stand on this side of the fence (at least that is how it is discursively positioned) and it had been charged with being amateurish, random and non-musical thus it had to defend itself against these criticisms. This defence is reflected in a point made by Francois Bayle (as stated in Chadabe):

Musique Concrete wasn‘t at all a music of noises, not at all a music of provocation. It was the contrary. It was a music that uses all the resources that are available to us, a music that uses all the sounds of life. Musique concrete sounds have meanings for us, as photographs and films have meanings. They show life as we experience it, as we live it in the everyday world.132

Another well-reported point, Griffiths suggests, were the difference in the approach of Musique concrète to pre-composition.133 He explains:

Every example of musique concrète was an improvisation created by the composer working directly with the sounds available: notation and performance were therefore bypassed, and many traditional compositional skills – those of imagining sounds and shapes, and setting them down precisely enough for the needs of performers – were irrelevant.134

131 Manning, Electronic and Computer Music, 41. 132 Chadabe, Electric Sound, 35. 133 Griffiths, Modern Music, 18. 134 Griffiths, Modern Music, 18. 50

Born explains that unlike elektronische Musik, musique concrète produced a written score only after the fact (if at all).135 Thus, if a score was produced, it was only produced as a result of the sound rather than as instruction for it.

Born reflects on the crossovers and contradictions between the GRM and IRCAM. IRCAM opened in 1977 and was founded by Boulez.136 According to Born, it is a large, well-funded, computer music research and production facility and she suggests that, despite Boulez‘s vehement rejection of Schaeffer and his methods, there existed many similarities in approach between the two.137 At the same time, however, she comments on the perception that Boulez‘s negation of the approaches of Schaeffer is often considered the driving force behind the emergence of IRCAM in the first place. As Born states:

The GRM was, then, the original French model for a music and technology centre, and until the rise of IRCAM it retained a position as the leading centre in France. However, the GRM has never enjoyed the status of IRCAM. It is not an autonomous and dedicated institution; it is smaller and more national in scope. Thus, when IRCAM came along in the 1970s, although the two institutions became rivals, it effortlessly surpassed the GRM.138

Andra McCartney argues that these distinctions between the two schools were completely artificial.139 Yet, the distinctions continue to frame the history and discourse of electroacoustic music. McCartney states that ‗conceptualisations of musique concrète as fundamentally different from, and inferior to electronic music, continued to structure the way the field of electroacoustic music developed‘.140

The problems with this kind of polarising approach to history suggest that, in the first instance, there are absolute boundaries that wholly separate musique concrète from elektronische Musik. Adding fuel to the fire, these perceived musical

135 Born, Rationalizing Culture, 76. 136 Born, Rationalizing Culture, 77. 137 Born, Rationalizing Culture, 77. 138 Born, Rationalizing Culture, 77. 139 Andra McCartney, "Gender, Genre and Electroacoustic Soundmaking Practices," Intersections 26, no. 2 (2006): 21. 140 McCartney, "Gender, Genre and Electroacoustic Soundmaking Practices," 21. 51 differences between musique concrète and elektronische Musik were further highlighted by the supposed and much reported on differences in personal approaches to sound. These differences, often constructed as an ideological feud between Stockhausen and Schaeffer, form only two sides of a multifaceted story, a story that becomes highly romanticised and mythologised in the literature. This ‗feud‘ between the two schools has been well constructed, well documented and well-rehearsed; thus it is not my aim to reiterate or reinterpret the accepted history of electroacoustic music.141 What I do wish to suggest is that this version of electroacoustic music history, that links the German school to the school of serialism and the French school to the Futurists, exemplifies the type of ‗hegemonic modernism‘ story that Bennett is sceptical of and the kind of narrative that Foucault warns against. To cite Bennett:

Contrary to popular belief, composers such as Boulez, Stockhausen, Ligeti, Berio and Nono may only have occupied very marginal positions in relation to the Dramstadt summer school for new music during the 1950s, but it was precisely their outsider position and their reputations as enfant terribles that helped ensure what Schreffler terms ‗the enormous impact of this circle‘s explicitly avant-garde stance‘.142

These origin stories function to erase the complexity of history by offering a false sense of seamless historical coherence. To cite Foucault:

Take the notion of tradition: it is intended to give a special temporal status to a group of phenomena that are both successive and identical (or at least similar); it makes it possible to rethink the dispersion of history in the form of the same; it allows a reduction of the difference proper to every beginning, in order to pursue without discontinuity the endless search for the origin; tradition enables us to isolate the new against a backdrop of permanence, and

141 See Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century, 5.; Griffiths, Modern Music; Manning, Electronic and Computer Music; Chadabe, Electric Sound; And, Taylor, Strange Sounds. 142 Bennett, Sounding Postmodernism, 62. 52

to transfer its merit to originality, to genius, to the decisions proper to individuals.143

The identification of tradition and origin has a range of purposes. By demonstrating links to the past, one renders the present more valid because it follows the line of causation, thereby appealing to reason and common sense. It also makes it easier to conceive of the future by erasing difference.

Links to the past are also constructed through developments in technology (in terms of objects, instruments, ideologies and these include musical developments i.e Serialism etc.) and also through the identification of the key people involved. Thus, the frequency of statements such as ‗Pierre Schaeffer pioneered musique concrète‘ or ‗there have been enormous challenges to overcome for the pioneers of computer music‘ serves to legitimate this claim to ‗natural‘ genius. 144 Legitimated disciplinary knowledge is contingent, in part, on the function of key people or ‗names‘.145 Knowledge is created this way, it is circulated this way and it is perpetuated this way and this means that new knowledge is particularly difficult to create. Despite the way we usually conceive of the past, in Foucault‘s view, the past does not exist in the present, and nor is it the same as or similar to the present. Therefore, to conceive of history as teleological, and to assume that it progresses from primitive origins through to a complex utopia is problematic. 146

The positing of two opposing ideological positions is useful in some respects because it offers two very simple but opposing perspectives with which to view a range of other problems. However, as Arnold points out, this story ‗is still a ‗true‘ story and not the whole truth‘.147 By polarising these two highly constructed strands of music (and their proponents) it becomes possible to gloss over the imperfections

143 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 23. 144 For a few examples see Andrew Murphie and John Potts, Culture and Technology (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), 63. Paul Doornbusch. 'Early Hardware and Early Ideas in Computer Music: Their Development and their Current Forms' in Dean The Oxford Handbook of Computer Music, 44. 145 Danaher, Schirato, and Webb, Understanding Foucault, 23. 146 Foucault explains that the point is to ‗identify the accidents, the minute deviations – or conversely, the complete reversals – the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us; it is to discover that truth or being does not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents.‘ in Paul Rabinow, ed. The Foucault Reader (New York and Toronto: Pantheon Books, 1984), 81. 147 Arnold, History, 91. 53 in the story. Major developments in the history of electroacoustic music also occurred in other parts of Europe, the United States, Asia and South America, and these are excluded in this simplification of events, as is any account of the contributions of women (a point that will be unpacked shortly). Foucault points us to one of the historical, discursive mechanisms that operates to ensure the fluid transfer of one event to another and the seamless positioning of history to categorise and simplify events. To quote Foucault at length:

There are the notions of development and evolution: they make it possible to group a succession of dispersed events, to link them to one and the same organizing principle, to subject them to the exemplary power of life (with its adaptations, its capacity for innovation the incessant correlation of its different elements, its systems of assimilation and exchange), to discover, already at work in each beginning, a principle of coherence and the outline of a future unity, to master time through a perpetually reversible relation between an origin and a term that are never given but are always at work.148

What I wish to point out here is that this particular historical ‗sphere‘ of electroacoustic music has never been autonomous and nor is it monolithic. As I have shown thus far, the field of electroacoustic music is contested, diffuse and complex. Yet, as a function of the processes of power, the history of electroacoustic music is built upon a range of assumptions that have become entrenched, thereby making it difficult to act outside of the discourses already in circulation. Up until this point I have attempted to uncover the processes of power that seek to keep in circulation ‗the already said‘ or the accepted versions of history. I have done this, not for the sake of presenting a more accurate or ‗truer‘ version of history but simply for the sake of demonstrating the ways in which power functions through narrative to strategically omit complexity.

2.4 „Writing‟ the Wrongs of Music HIStory Thus far I have argued, via Foucault, that discourse constructs what is possible to know, think, do or say about electroacoustic music. I have focused on the ways in

148 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 24. 54 which the history of electroacoustic music has been represented by its discourse in the form of a review of the literature. And, to some degree, my goal has been to intervene in those reporting processes, not in order to bring to light a new ideal or ‗truth‘, but in order to ask how these ideas came to exist in the first place. This is a theme that will continue throughout the course of the thesis. However, the deliberate positioning of this section on gender at the end of the chapter is not because I consider it less important than the discussion that has preceded it. To the contrary, it is because I firmly believe that only after one has engaged with the ideas I have presented can one begin to consider how these operations of power have come to be taken as absolutes, and only then can one be open to engaging seriously with the questions that will be raised herein. The cautious positioning of this section at the end of the chapter is a means to navigate an issue that all scholars working directly with Foucault‘s ideas must face. That is, the need to work directly from within the complex processes of power. The rarefaction of the discourse of electroacoustic music has functioned to produce truth claims that have seldom been questioned, and that have therefore been exhaustively reproduced. This rarefaction operates so that the things that are possible to say, think or write about a subject are, in theory, limitless and inexhaustible, yet in practice, they are surprisingly predictable, as Mills suggests.149 In other words, it is extremely difficult to intervene in or operate outside knowledge that is already in circulation. Yet this is precisely the task I have set myself. This intervention however, poses a much larger dilemma: that as a woman and a feminist, I am very personally invested in the marginalisation of and ―Othering‖ of women. I am actively embedded within, and produced by, the discourse I aim to critique, and this goes against the aims of objectivity in academic research more broadly.

Furthermore, my own subject position rubs against Foucault‘s androcentrism. His writing is very clearly gendered and this is made visible through the use of gendered pronouns and the use of first person writing that positions Foucault as the ‗authorial man‘. More importantly however, Foucault has a tendency to write from the perspective of a man speaking about men, so that the positioning of ‗man‘ at the centre of the world is palpable. This reinforces to any reader that he does indeed

149 Mills, Discourse, 63. 55 view the world from a masculine point of view.150 Mills goes so far as to state that his work is sexist because the ideas and concepts are skewed towards a focus on men. However, given Foucault‘s gender and his sexuality, it is hardly surprising.151 Mills warns against assuming that Foucault has all of the answers to the problems he posits, or that they are easily fixed by inserting women into the picture.152 There is an argument to be made for the exclusion of women from Foucault‘s work in terms of its historical nature. For example, one could question how regularly women featured in the penal discourse of the nineteenth century. Despite this, it is important to underscore the point that almost all of Foucault‘s work excludes direct engagement with women and women‘s issues and that this has been a sticking point for feminist theory more broadly.153 There are thus limitations to any kind of feminist intervention that restricts its framework to Foucaultian theory without any kind of modification. This thesis is not, however, positioned as a feminist intervention nor is it my goal to use Foucault to posit solutions to the problems that I identify herein. I adopt Foucault in a purely analytical manner (to examine the problem of power as it frames and shapes the discourse of electroacoustic music) and by no means in a definitive or exhaustive manner to critique the masculine processes that underlie the discourse of the music. It is therefore precisely Foucault‘s androcentrism that make this is an apt manner in which to examine and critique such processes. A feminist intervention would, without a doubt, require a more comprehensive defence of and use of his ideas.

In addition to the aforementioned, there is also the issue that Foucault fails to identify the influence of power relationships in his own writing and he fails to contextualise his subjectivity within these theories. This brings a false sense of objectivity to his work and it is this that I wish to avoid. I argue that it is not possible to simply eschew my own subject position, to rise above it, or to exist outside of the discourses of which I am product, and nor is that my aim. As Kendall and Wickham argue:

150 I am also aware that essentialising a ‗masculine point of view‘ is extremely problematic. 151 Mills, Michel Foucault, 7. 152 Mills, Michel Foucault, 123. 153 Caroline Ramazanoğlu summarises these concerns in, Up against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions between Foucault and Feminism, 1-26. 56

The suspension of judgement involved in any good Foucaultian use of history is largely about suspending judgements other than those you happen to recognise as your own: what we would call second-order judgements.154

In other words, Kendall and Wickham believe that it is more important that the researcher should make a serious attempt to be sceptical of the authority of knowledge that is already considered to be ‗valid‘ than it is for the researcher to be sceptical of her own judgements (provided she is aware they exist), given that these are inescapable, and given that they are already made possible through the flow of power. They also acknowledge that, though this suspension of second-order judgements is the objective, it is never fully possible to implement in full.155

Notwithstanding the fact that I am familiar with the history of the exclusion of women from the Western music canon, and despite operating from a feminine/ feminist point of view, my research did not initially factor in any discussion of gender imbalance. What I wish to stress here is that my original research questions did not consider gender as a part of my research. Rather, these concerns were very much encountered as a result of other research I had been undertaking. The problem emerged through the research of electroacoustic music. Yet, what I have learnt has impacted every part of my research in significant ways. I made a deliberate change in the trajectory of my research after a database I had been keeping (tracking styles, names, technologies etc.) suggested that the male composers in the twentieth century grossly outnumbered female composers. In fact, there were no females at all.156 This was, of course, no great surprise; I have learnt to see and expect disparity when it comes to gender. However, what was surprising for me was that despite all we know about gender disparity, history continues to perpetuate it in uncritical ways. These are ways that I would consider regressive, unethical and detrimental to how we engage with music, and they are ways that have material implications.

154 Kendall and Wickham, Using Foucault's Methods, 13. 155 Kendall and Wickham, Using Foucault's Methods, 13. 156 This database has not been included in the thesis as quantitative discourse analysis as it is not a formal part of the research. I began keeping a database of all of the composers that were mentioned in books specifically about electroacoustic music for the sake of thinking about how the discourse maps its own boundaries. It was not for the sake of making quantifiable claims about the representation of women. 57

Though my database should not be considered an accurate representation of the numbers, it hinted at a problem that I not only felt ethically implicated in, but it profoundly impacted the way I began to view the thesis. This feeling of surprise coincides with Kendall and Wickham‘s ideas surrounding undertaking Foucaultian analysis. They suggest that anyone working with Foucault should be prepared to allow themselves to be surprised by whatever results are generated.157 This means accepting ideas that might feel strange or out of the ordinary, and as they suggest, any Foucaultian analysis will inevitably yield surprising and strange results.158 More to the point, however, after more thorough research what I found most disturbing is that despite the progress we have made in the liberal arts, and despite all we know about the gendering of language and discourse, this very male-centric history continues to be perpetuated in ways that are explicit.

Though I expected to see disparity, what I did not expect to see was this disparity perpetuated in peer-reviewed, academic literature without any critical consideration of the marginalisation of women. Thus, by far the most shocking element of this research was the uncritical nature of the contemporary histories, anthologies and surveys that continue to perpetuate white-male versions of history with an implicit and embedded assumption that this version of history is representative of everyone, that it is neutral and that it is the accepted (therefore ‗true‘) version of history. Histories are still being written that not only exclude notable women, but that also perpetuate androcentric versions of history that exemplify modernist applications of history (such as those I have critiqued earlier) despite the far reaching attempts of postmodernism to break down such barriers.

The representation of women throughout historical surveys of electroacoustic music could give the impression that women simply do not exist. On the surface, it is easy to draw the conclusion that electroacoustic music, for whatever reason, was a field created by men for men, and that women simply did not play an active role in the creation, production or reception of electroacoustic music. Mainstream accounts of history that conflict with, or offer different versions of, the widely accepted male- centric grand narratives I have outlined above are not entirely non-existent, but my

157 Kendall and Wickham, Using Foucault's Methods, 22. 158 Kendall and Wickham, Using Foucault's Methods, 22. 58 research seldom led me to find them. Furthermore, I encountered little evidence in the literature of a critical awareness of this exclusion of women. Even the most conservative music histories tend to have a little pocket of dissenters who scrutinise the representation of minorities within its field. However, as Mary Simoni points out ‗the frequency at which the achievements of men are cited in established historical references dwarves the contributions of women.‘159 Simoni‘s article, described by the editor as being about ‗gender implications‘ is tucked at the back of The Oxford Handbook on Computer Music published in 2009 in which there are 32 essays (the majority being written by men). Of particular interest is the chronology of events in the history of computer music featured as part of the appendix. Spruiked by the editor as being ‗the most substantial and probably the most balanced currently available‘, the chronology cites ‗selected‘ significant musical events, ‗main‘ technological events and computer music events from 1939 to 2009 along a timeline.160 One needs to only scan the contents of the chronology to get a sense of how skewed it actually is. Needless to say, there is no mention of the criteria used to judge what constituted a ‗significant event‘ or how they were selected. And importantly, there is no evidence of critical awareness of the problems associated with re-presenting history in this manner.

The lack of female representation, as Rodgers points out, ‗profoundly underestimates the presence and diversity of expressions by women working with sound over the last century.‘161 She explains that ‗electronic music cultures overall seemed to discourage or deny women‘s participation. This was made clear by the lack of substantive coverage of women in electronic music magazines and history books.‘162 An example of this can be found in the magazine Source: Music of the Avant-Garde that was a publication of ‗new music scores, essays by composers and artists, statements, interviews, artworks, sound and concrete poems, photo essays, circuit diagrams, instrument designs, event reports, documents and LP recordings in print between 1967 through to 1973.‘163 According to Douglas Kahn, the editors of the

159 Mary Simoni, 'Toward the Gender Ideal' in Dean, The Oxford Handbook of Computer Music, 493. 160 Roger T. Dean, 'The Many Futures of Computer Music' in Dean, The Oxford Handbook of Computer Music, 6. 161 Rodgers, Pink Noises, 2. 162 Rodgers, Pink Noises, 2. 163 Larry Austin and Douglas Kahn, Source: Music of the Avant-Garde, 1966-1973 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), ix. 59 original publication were always conscious of the selective process for the magazine that was decided by an all-male board.164 To cite Kahn at length:

[Seeking out the work of women] was difficult because it was difficult to find out who they were and then to encourage them to let us publish their work. There was the Brazilian composer, Jocy de Oliveira, as well as Annea Lockwood and Pauline Oliveros, both of whom we published repeatedly. In my academic career beginning in Davis [the University of California], there weren‘t many female students who took up composition, much less taking up electronic music, computers, and advanced musical concepts. Declaring that you‘re a composer as a female in the 1960s was quite a different, if not dangerous declaration. The women simply weren‘t there. Pauline‘s Some Sound Observations was extremely important and it was significant that it was published in Source; she has always been a leader and a provocateur.165

Whilst the author acknowledges the misgivings of the publication in relation to gender imbalance it is a point, it should be noted, that is generally overlooked in even the most recent or detailed publications. The defence is problematic and, as I have learnt, simply incorrect. Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner‘s research, for example, has since established that women‘s music, particularly post-World War II, has been neglected by history books.166 She cites several texts that document the achievements of women in North America throughout the twentieth century.167 However, it is her painstakingly detailed research of female composers of electronic music post-World War II that is in direct contrast to Kahn‘s perspective that they simply did not exist. This is a common misconception (granted it is a mistake that is easily made given the evidence), yet it is a misconception that very clearly goes unquestioned.

Manning‘s book Electronic Music and Computer Music, now in its fourth edition (originally published in 1985) is widely cited, and was named as a prescribed reading by some of the tertiary educators who participated in this research. In the preface

164 Austin and Khan, Source, 7. 165 Austin and Khan, Source, 7. Emphasis in the original. 166 Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner, Women Composers and Music Technology in the United States: Crossing the Line (Aldershot, Hants, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005). 167 An abridged list of these can be found in Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner, "Women and Music Technology: Pioneers, Precedents and Issues in the United States," Organised Sound 8, no. 1 (2003). 60

Manning states that his book still leaves many issues unresolved, and that its aim is to ‗provide a comprehensive point of reference for developing an informed understanding of the issues that have arising in this context from the birth of the medium to the present day.‘168 Despite this claim, it is clear from its contents that an equitable history, one that acknowledges the input of non-canonical figures (namely women) is not considered one of those unresolved issues – or even an issue at all.

Additionally, in the introduction to The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music, the editors Nicolas Cook and Anthony Pople, two well-published musicologists who (based on their past publications) are versed in the marginalisation of women throughout Western music history, admit the omissions of their book. Of the twenty-two chapters only two are written by women. The remainder, they state, are written by white men.169 This is explained away as being due to a lack of representation of female musicologists and that the gender balance, ‗in the UK, remains far from equal.‘170 Additionally, they are concerned about a general lack of coverage of female musicians in the book. Yet, as Sophie Fuller points out, there is no ‗dedicated and systematic consideration of gender‘ in the book, that potentially could have unpacked the issue.171

The list of contemporary publications that remain silent to the contributions of women continues. Griffiths‘ book, in its third iteration (published in 2012), is described on the back cover by an unnamed author:

Over three decades, Paul Griffiths‘s survey has remained the essential study of music since the Second World War; this fully revised and updated edition re-establishes Modern Music and After as the preeminent introduction to the music of our time. The disruptions of the war and the struggles of the ensuing peace were reflected in the music of the era: in Boulez‘s radical reformation of compositional technique and in Cage‘s development of zen music; in Babbitt‘s settling of the serial system and in Shostakovich‘s unsettling

168 Manning, Electronic and Computer Music, viii. 169 Cook and Pople, The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music, 1. 170 Cook and Pople, The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music, 1. 171 Sophie Fuller, "Review of 'Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople, Eds. The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)'," Twentieth-Century Music 5 (2008): 251-58. 61

symphonies; in Stockhausen‘s development of electronic music and in Nono‘s pursuit of the universally human, in Xenakis‘s view of music as sounding mathematics and in Berio‘s consideration of it as language. The initiatives of these composers and their contemporaries opened prospects that are still unfolding.

The book is flagged as being about ‗the music of our time‘, yet its contents are characterised in a way that evokes Romantic conceptions of the master-work, of genius and innovation, and of course, of the canonical revolutionaries who created them (all of whom we should now accept critically as being white men).

Thom Holme‘s Electronic and Experimental Music includes a section at the back of the book entitled ‗Pioneering Works of Electronic Music‘ and on this Holmes says:

These recommended tracks include many classics of electronic music, some reaching back to the origins of the discipline. In selecting the music, I was looking for pieces that were well enough known even in their day to influence other people working in the field.172

Five out of the thirty composers listed (sixteen per cent) are women and interestingly one of those women is Wendy Carlos who is a trans woman.173 Holmes does, however, in the preface, explicitly highlight the importance of women in the history of electroacoustic music, and he does discuss these women throughout the book. New to this 2012 edition, Holmes says, are:

Additional accounts of the vastly under-reported contributions of women composers in the field, including new discussion of Daphne Oram, Delia Derbyshire, Lily Greenham, Teresa Rampazzi and Jacqueline Nova.174

172 Thom Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music: Technology, Music and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2012), 468. 173 Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music, 468-71. 174 Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music. There is no page number for this entry because it features on one of the opening pages prior to the publisher information and dedication. 62

Despite the efforts of some scholars, the achievements of women working with electroacoustic music have gone largely unreported. However, the mainstream accounts do often include examples of exceptional women who have managed to make the cut, or who, at least within the Western ‗classical‘ canon, are relegated to anthologies on the forgotten ‗women‘ composers. Perhaps one of the most widely cited and most famous examples of female electroacoustic composers is Pauline Oliveros, whose work is mentioned (sometimes in passing, sometimes in more extensive terms) in even the most conservative texts. The ‗exceptional‘ status of Oliveros leaves her, to draw on McCartney, as the stand-out, isolated exemplar of the female composer in the electroacoustic music canon, and even though she receives deserved mention, women are still relegated to the states of the ‗cultural nonentity‘.175 As Rodgers suggests, ‗recognition of Oliveros is crucial and admirable, but her isolation has at times positioned her work as representative of an essentialized, ―feminine‖ aesthetic.‘176 Hannah Bosma states that:

A female composer is thus considered to be abnormal. She interrupts the status quo and threatens normative (mostly unconscious) ideas about music. Because composition is gendered male, her femininity is called into question.177

I would add to this that the exclusion of women further perpetuates the polarisation of the essentialised masculine and feminine that is taken up throughout history and repeated.

Clearly, these problems are not only restricted to electroacoustic music. For example, Roger Kamien‘s Music: An Appreciation, the textbook that is used (albeit critically) to teach music history to first-year, undergraduate students at Western Sydney University, lacks female representation. In its sixth edition, the first female composer brief begins with Hildegard of Bingen in the Middle Ages and the next female composer does not appear until Clara Schumann in the Romantic Period, suggesting

175 McCartney, "Gender, Genre and Electroacoustic Soundmaking Practices," 31. 176 Rodgers, Pink Noises, 11. 177 Hanna Bosma, "Musical Washing Machines, Composer-Performers, and Other Blurring Boundaries: How Women Make a Difference in Electroacoustic Music," Intersections 26, no. 2 (2006): 102. 63 that approximately 700 years elapsed between ‗noteworthy‘ female composers.178 Furthermore, a gender imbalance is not only manifest in what is ‗not‘ represented in the content of the book; it is also manifest as a structural element of the book itself. For example, all of the composers of Western art music are granted a second-level heading in the contents – all except Hildegard of Bingen who is relegated to a third- level heading that suggests she is not even considered to be exemplar.179 Thus, the politics of the page functions to designate importance through differences in typeface and heading structure.

Similarly, the entry on Clara Schumann appears only after her more popular husband, which could only make sense if composers were ordered chronologically according to their year of birth. Clara Schumann was born in 1819, whereas her husband (who precedes her in the table of contents and in the book) was born in 1810. However, the entry that immediately succeeds Clara Schumann‘s is Franz Liszt who was born in 1811. The ordering of the composers makes little sense and it means that the important work of Clara Schumann is discussed only in relation to her more famous husband. This is a historical trope that appears harmless or unimportant, but I would argue that it is significant because it fails to acknowledge the efforts of Clara Schumann as an important historical musical figure in her own right. The revised eleventh edition of the same textbook erases Clara Schumann altogether, leaving Hildegard to stand as the only example of a female composer until Amy Beach who appears at the very end of the history grouped in a section entitled ‗Music in America‘.180

The frame and structure of books might on the surface appear neutral, but this cloak of invisibility is one of the features of the ways in which discourse works to make structures appear neutral and apolitical. Thus, over time, histories become the history. Foucault was sceptical of the book as a bearer of the ‗unity of discourse.‘181 Foucault‘s own suspicion was that the ‗book‘ was not ‗as immediate and self- evident‘ as it might first appear.182 Discourse is always political, and the politics of

178 Roger Kamien, Music: An Appreciation, 6th ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2008). 179 Kamien, Music: An Appreciation, vi-xi. 180 Roger Kamien, Music: An Appreciation, ed. McGraw Hill, 11th ed. (Boston, 2015). 181 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 151-52. 182 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 151-52. 64 representation stipulate what there is to know and who is able to know it. The book is, therefore, both a kind of archetype of the content of a particular discourse, but it is also a stand-alone, discourse-in-action that performs power relationships through the structural organisation of material. The history book, then, at least within the context of music as a discipline, not only plays a very important role in music education, but it also directly impacts the formation of listening because in order to demonstrate authority, knowledge and cultural cachet, one must be familiar with the accepted version of the musical canon (as exemplified in books such as Kamien‘s Music: An Appreciation). As Mills explains:

We must be very suspicious of any information which is produced, since even when it seems most self-evidently to be adding to the sum of human knowledge, it may at the same time play a role in the maintenance of the status quo and the affirming of current power relations.183

Not only is this an example of the way in which discourse functions in an exclusionary fashion, but it is also an example of the ways in which discourse has the power to impact the way we listen to music. The perceived neutrality of something as simple as a first-year music history textbook for students who might still be developing their critical capacity has, I argue, serious repercussions because it distorts our views about history, which in turn distort the way things are and how they will come to be. I will return to these repercussions throughout this thesis. For now, however, I want to spend more time focusing on the complex nature of this discourse and the way it functions.

The discourse of gender, like all discourses, functions to provide a vocabulary for speech, for actions and for behaviours.184 True to its form, the discourse of gender has rules that define who can speak or be spoken to, what can be said, how it can be said, and who is silenced and excluded from the discourse altogether.185 Historically, within the context of Western music, the discourse of gender has played out through centuries of the exclusion of women from accessing, learning and composing music.

183 Mills, Michel Foucault, 72. 184 David Buchbinder, Masculinities and Identities (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994), 30. 185 Buchbinder, Masculinities and Identities, 30. 65

Women were very literally rendered invisible and thus received little representation in formal written and recorded versions of the history of music.

Both Hinkle-Turner and Marcia J. Citron comment on the perception that women lack the creative skill and gusto required to compose music that can be considered worthy of inclusion in the ‗masterwork‘ category.186 Citron points out that ‗creativity‘ is, historically, a category reserved for and applied to men.187 Creation, in her view, involves the mind and thus ‗procreation‘, concerned with the body, is set- aside for women.188 She argues that ‗labor refers to men‘s production, to women‘s reproduction. Conceiving for males is mental and takes place in the head; conceiving for females is physical and occurs in the womb.‘189 Though extremely problematic, it is precisely these kinds of gender-biased language dichotomies that are commonplace throughout the history of Western music. For example, it is not uncommon to encounter androcentric terminology in Western music history books that might position a particular work as a masterwork, a composer as a revolutionary, a seminal figure, a pioneer or even just blatantly as ‗the father of…‘. The results of a survey undertaken by McCartney on the language employed in popular electronic music magazines suggests that some of the most common terms are in fact gendered tropes or metaphors for power, control, violence, purity and realness.190

The term ‗masterwork‘, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is etymologically related to the term ‗master‘ and is described as a term solely reserved for referring to men.191 The dictionary goes on to define the term as ‗a person or thing having control or authority‘ and as ‗a person (predominantly, a man) having authority, direction or control over the action of another or others.‘192 Clearly, the term ‗master‘ has other implications because of its relationship to its perceived binary

186 Hinkle Turner says ‗Women, it is still sometimes argued, cannot possess these far-seeking creative energies and must be content with becoming skilful imitators of their more imaginative male counterparts‘ in Hinkle-Turner, "Women and Music Technology," 32. 187 Marcia J. Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge: Cambride Univeristy Press, 1993), 45. 188 Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon, 45. 189 Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon, 45. 190 Andra McCartney, "Inventing Images: Constructing and Contesting Gender in Thinking About Electroacoustic Music," Leonardo Music Journal 5 (1995): 63-64 191 Oxford English Dictionary, "Masterwork, N.",Oxford University Press, February 10, 2015. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/114789?redirectedFrom=masterwork&. 192 Oxford English Dictionary, "Master, N.1 and Adj.", Oxford University Press, February, 10, 2015. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/114789?redirectedFrom=masterwork&. 66 opposite ‗slave‘, and of course, to slavery. Slaves are people (both men and women) who are, by force, owned as property, and they are controlled by masters. Presumably then, the ‗masterwork‘, or masterpiece, is a work that is created by masters, a category very clearly reserved for men and, by lateral association to the word ‗slave‘ as machine or, worse. Slaves are seen to be controlled by masters, slaves are passive, slaves are obedient and, importantly, slaves are ‗Other‘.

Women, Rodgers explains, are seldom positioned as producers of electronic music due to the fact that women are already entangled within what she calls ‗a logic of reproduction.‘193 This ‗logic‘ maintains the links to female maternalism (a word that, ironically, my Microsoft spell check does not recognise and, therefore, wants to replace with one of the suggested words ‗paternalism‘), reception and passivity.194 Within the realm of electronic music and sound technologies, Rodgers argues that forms and processes that have been coded as feminine are routinely dismissed, diminished and subordinated.195 Drawing on the work of Zoë Sofia, Rodgers uses the example of magnetic tape, a ‗container technology‘, coded as feminine because it is only given meaning by the presence of sound.196 Presumably, the sound is seminally implanted by the great genius composer in all of its masculine forms. Thus, the feminine is imagined as a vessel – passive and waiting to be filled, inscribed upon or instructed.197 McCartney discusses the use of the word ‗virgin‘ as a metaphor for a blank tape – a term widely employed in the industry.198 She argues that, like blank tapes (whose job it is to be fertilised with sound), the roles that have historically been afforded to women also involve acting as ‗vessels‘.199

Technologies that were used for the purpose of recording and storing sound (such as the tape recorder and magnetic tape) have been instrumental to the formation of electroacoustic music as an experimental music across the latter half of the twentieth century. Foucault points to the significance of the function of the author throughout the formation of seamless accounts of the evolution and progression of history.

193 Rodgers, Pink Noises, 12. Emphasis is in the original. 194 Rodgers, Pink Noises, 12. 195 Rodgers, Pink Noises, 12. 196 Rodgers, Pink Noises, 12. 197 Zoë Sofia, "Container Technologies," Hypatia 15, no. 2 (2000): 181-201. 198 McCartney, "Inventing Images," 57-58. 199 McCartney, "Inventing Images," 57-58. 67

Electroacoustic music, on the other hand, in addition to relying on authors (in the form of pioneering composers), relies upon the development of key technologies.200 New technologies are therefore viewed as a measure of the evolution and progress of electroacoustic music. When these innovations are coupled with the alleged breakdown of tonality, where explorer-composers boldly stepped into the unknown of electronic sound (with the invention of the synthesiser and more recently the computer), they form an intoxicatingly persuasive narrative that relies on the exclusion of women at almost every turn.

‗Technology‘ is a nebulous term that is employed within the realm of electroacoustic music and its scholarship. It is often taken to mean, unproblematically, the tools of production and consumption. Born discusses the use of technology within electroacoustic music culture at IRCAM. ‗IRCAM culture‘, according to Born, is the ‗historical culmination of attempts to integrate musical composition with advanced scientific developments.‘201 Her research demonstrates that within ‗IRCAM culture‘ technology is conceived of uncritically as ‗objects brought into a particular aesthetic practice, and they are seen as instrumental in, and central to, generating aesthetic innovation.‘202 Thus, Born continues, there is a failure to ‗examine the actual uses of technologies, which are often depicted in idealized, unproblematic, and normative ways.‘203 Technology, whatever it is, is therefore not neutral. Rather, technology is invented, used and theorised by particular people for particular reasons and technology is always political. According to Jennifer Daryl Slack and J. Macgregor Wise, ‗it almost seems as if technology here has become autonomous: that it moves on its own, develops on its own, and controls itself.‘204 Indeed, technology is barely perceptible, invisible even, and it functions to maintain the highly guarded boundaries of exclusion. The relationship of electroacoustic music to technology is very simply constructed on the basis that technology means one thing only, and it fails to consider that the invention of music notation was a technology, or that a new way of thinking about music is a technology in the same way that the invention of the synthesiser was. Further, composers of electroacoustic music often seem to go to

200 Michel Foucault 'What is an Author?' in Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, 101-20. 201 Born, Rationalizing Culture, 15. 202 Born, Rationalizing Culture, 15. 203 Born, Rationalizing Culture, 15. 204 Slack and Macgregor Wise, Culture and Technology, 60. 68 great lengths to describe the tools of its production, how elaborate algorithms function, how they were designed, and for the uninitiated, this can be quite alienating.205 Women, as I have argued, simply do not fit into this picture.

Violence, another theme that features regularly in the discourses of both new media/technology and electroacoustic music, functions to maintain the status of masculinity as potent, as powerful and above all else, as being in control. For example, Rodgers points out that electroacoustic music language is littered with militarised language and violent metaphors.206 Terms such as ‗trigger‘, ‗command‘, ‗controller‘, ‗bang‘ and ‗crash‘ are, Rodgers exclaims, very much a part of the act of making electronic music and ‗thus unfolds with reference to high-tech combat, shot through with symbols of violent confrontation and domination.‘207 Within the context of twentieth century masculinity, Buchbinder asserts that one cannot overlook the effect of war.208

War, along with violence, is an important theme across the twentieth century. War has not only impacted the music and the way we conceive it, but as Buchbinder argues, it has impacted the ways in which we view and perform gender. He points out that during wartime women could not rely on the traditional gender roles society had afforded them.209 And during this time, women experienced particular hardships that inevitably resulted in them undertaking duties and roles that were otherwise reserved for men.210 In other words, women in many respects, had to learn to act like men, and with the rise of the women‘s suffrage movement, this resulted in a kind of displaced sense of masculinity. Buchbinder explains:

To those soldiers it must have seemed that radical revolution in femininity had taken place, and that women were no longer defenceless objects to be cherished and protected, as familiar gender definitions had taught. The men must also have feared that their strengths and skills as men might no longer

205 Dante Tanzi, "Information Technology and Communication of Musical Experience: Categories, Conflicts and Intersections," Organised Sound 9, no. 01 (2004). 206 Rodgers, Pink Noises. 207 Rodgers, Pink Noises, 7. 208 Buchbinder, Masculinities and Identities, 8. 209 Buchbinder, Masculinities and Identities, 8. 210 Buchbinder, Masculinities and Identities, 8. 69

be required; that indeed, they had been emasculated by the very practice – war – which had traditionally allowed men to display masculine qualities such as courage, fortitude, endurance, stoicism and sheer physical strength.211

Despite the normalising tendency of the grand narrative of the history of electroacoustic music, and setting aside the problematic nature of such a thing, the accepted story of electroacoustic music almost always commences in the early twentieth century with the pre-eminent figure of Luigi Russolo and his Futurist manifesto The Art of Noises written in 1913.212 The manifesto, according to Cox and Warner, is ‗among the most important and influential texts in 20th century musical aesthetics.‘213 Kouvaras describes the series of Futurist manifestos of the time as incendiary and ‗as war cries proclaiming the dynamism of the industrial and of noise.‘214 The fact that Futurism happened to correspond with World War I and the rise of women‘s suffrage is no surprise. It is my suggestion here that if this is the time that electroacoustic music is thought to have commenced (a point I would hotly contest) then it is no wonder that the discourse and the music are highly gendered.

Images of craftsmanship, strength, potency, power and control all represent qualities that are positioned as belonging to masculinity and also happen to be qualities that women are seen to lack.215 The discourse of gender, according to Buchbinder, like all discourses, functions to provide a vocabulary for speech, for actions and for behaviours.216 As I have argued, the mainstream literature that has emerged from the field of electroacoustic music thus has a tendency to adopt these gendered language tropes. As problematic as this may seem, these are tropes that position masculinity as essential and as a hegemony. I argue that although this hegemony has been systematically unpacked by feminism, it is still axiomatic to electroacoustic music. As McCartney so rightly points out, ‗to be a woman composer of electroacoustic music is to straddle two worlds, both gendered male.‘217 Here, McCartney is

211 Buchbinder, Masculinities and Identities, 8. 212 Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises, Monographs in Musicology; 6 (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986). 213 Cox and Warner, Audio Culture, 10. 214 Kouvaras, Loading the Silence, 3. 215 For a more detailed example of the gendering of language and metaphor in the field of electroacoustic music see McCartney, "Inventing Images,"; Rodgers, Pink Noises, 7-8. 216 Buchbinder, Masculinities and Identities, 30. 217 McCartney, "Inventing Images," 57. 70 referring to the notion that both music composition and technology are codified in masculine terms and further, she is arguing that for a woman to participate in electroacoustic music, she has to be able to penetrate, or straddle, both worlds (composition and technology) successfully.

Gendered language tropes and metaphors not only reflect gendered discourses, but they also construct and shape them. Thus, they also construct and shape the ways in which we experience the music. As R.W. Connell suggests:

A familiar theme in patriarchal ideology is that men are rational while women are emotional. This is a deep-seated assumption in European philosophy. It is one of the leading ideas in sex role theory, in the form of the instrumental/expressive dichotomy, and it is widespread in popular culture too. Science and technology, seen by the dominant ideology as the motors of progress, are culturally defined as a masculine realm. Hegemonic masculinity establishes its hegemony partly by its claim to embody the power of reason, and thus represent the interests of the whole society.218

As I have demonstrated, the mainstream literature that has emerged from the field of electroacoustic music (and music more broadly) has a tendency to adopt these gendered language tropes that not only inform what it is possible to say, think or imagine about electroacoustic music, but also impact the ways in which we engage with the music. As problematic as this may seem, these are tropes that position masculinity as the dominant discourse and hegemony. This particular discourse of gender is a binary system that operates out of the assumption that masculinity is diametrically opposed to femininity. Later in the thesis I will unpack these ideas in more depth. For the moment, however, I am interested only in highlighting the dominant discourse of gender as it pertains to electroacoustic music.

218 R. W. Connell, Masculinities (St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1995), 164. 71

Chapter 3. Discipline and the Mechanics of Ear-Training

In the previous chapter, I discussed the ways in which several discursive fields coalesce and intersect to form a discourse of electroacoustic music (or rather, one version of it). I also established that the problem of how to listen to electroacoustic music has been a central concern within its discourse. Additionally, and following Foucault, I selected marginal entry points in order to ascertain some of the things that are ‗not-said‘ as a means of defining and describing the discursive field within which this thesis is situated. In doing this, I challenged the accepted version of the history of electroacoustic music, not for the sake of positing a more truthful or representational version of its history, but in order to uncover some of the underlying assumptions that have come to be taken as fact. This chapter will take this idea one step further by examining the values that have come to underpin conventional approaches to listening. The discourse of ear-training, as it is institutionalised through the processes of discipline and through the mechanics of power/knowledge, claims to be training listening. However, I argue that it emerges within a visual epistemological framework that privileges musical literacy (in the form of reading and writing music) and further, that this model seeks to build listening skills that are not necessarily useful for music such as electroacoustic music that falls outside of this rigid, visual frame.

In doing this, I posit that the way in which ear-training is discursively produced impacts the ways that it is taught (and thus practised). What I show is that the conventional, pedagogical approaches to listening, at least in the more traditional and conservative contexts (for instance, the music conservatorium), are limiting due to their treatment of literacy (reading and writing) as being central. The conception of what constitutes listening within this model is therefore very particular in that it values the ability to, as Gary Karpinski defines it, ‗think in music.‘1 That is, its aims are to build skills that enable listeners to perfectly imagine the way a piece of music

1 Gary S. Karpinski, Aural Skills Acquisition: The Development of Listening, Reading, and Performing Skills in College-Level Musicians (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 4. 72 will sound just by looking at the written score. Further, ‗thinking in music‘ aims to train listeners to notate a piece of music accurately just by hearing the music. I suggest that these skills, though they may be beneficial for a lot of music, have been developed with the repertoire of the canon as its foundation and thus they have the potential to imbue, in the listener, a set of predetermined values, meanings and judgements. The perceived ubiquity and universality of these methods operates to produce particular types of habits within the listener (though these become unique to the individual) that inevitably favour scored, pitched material and harmonic progression.

Throughout the course of this chapter, then, it is my goal to briefly survey some of this literature, starting with conventional ear-training methods that are typical of the kind on offer in academic institutions. In the next chapter, I move to examine electroacoustic music-specific ear-training methods. This survey is not representative of an unchanging whole, and nor is it exhaustive. Its purpose is to compare and contrast different ear-training models (starting with the conventional) in order to shed light on the listening experience as a problem. I will examine how these processes, in their different forms, function discursively within a pedagogical setting, and later, I will consider how these processes become possible points of resistance.

The perception that these conventions are both universally applicable and ubiquitous in their application is therefore central to this chapter. With this in mind, however, it is important to point out that my concern is only with institutionalised ear-training methods that have been reified through centuries of scored, Western music and, as such, my intention is not to suggest that this is the only method that exists. I acknowledge that there are many other institutional and non-institutional approaches to ear-training.2 I also acknowledge that more recently academic music institutions are more accepting of a variety of different genres, styles and approaches to listening but full coverage of these are outside the scope of the thesis. Given electroacoustic music emerges from, in reference to and, as a rejection of the canon, it is therefore

2 For example: Anahid Kassabian, Ubiquitous Listening Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity, (Berkley, Lost Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2013)., Jonathan D. Kramer and Robert Carl, Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening, 1st ed. (London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016)., and Sally Macarthur, ‗Immanent Listening‘ in Music’s Immanent Future: The Deleuzian Turn in Music Studies, (London, New York: Routledge: 2016), 171-178. 73 important to consider how listening is constructed in this context. As Kouvaras notes:

In traditional music, it is the teleological progression from note to note, chord to chord, subsection to subsection that comprises its essential underpinning. Experimental music‘s focus was the purposefully unconnected, discrete (often non-conventional) sounds themselves.3

I would add that the ‗traditional music‘ to which Kouvaras refers is also solely score- based.

The examples I have selected to discuss herein are not selected at random, and they do not take on the function of demonstrating a representation of discourse. Rather, these are examples that have arisen out of the discourse itself. It is not plausible to imagine a unified discipline that functions to produce an immutable, unitary listening subject and nor is that my aim. Instead, this chapter will consider the efficacy of these models of listening in relation to Foucault‘s conceptions of disciplinary power and resistance. I argue that these ear-training practices instil ideologies that aim to co-opt the listener into a framework of listening that, when considered in isolation, has become almost impervious to change. Therefore, I am particularly interested in the ways that ear-training methods come to be conventional, and how these processes are internalised by students through the apparatus of the institution. I model my analysis on Foucault‘s ‗carceral systems‘ in order to consider the material (and immaterial) effects on the ways in which we come to listen to and engage with electroacoustic music.4 In other words, I ask: How does the discourse of ear-training impact the ways we listen to electroacoustic music?

3 Linda Kouvaras, Loading the Silence, 23 4 The carceral is a model for the control of criminals who are incarcerated and, though I will explain this in more detail, Foucault‘s argument is that this model comes to be implemented in a whole range of other social settings outside of the prison. 74

3.1 Disciplining Listening: Music Theory, Ear-Training and Sight Singing in the Western Tradition According to Christopher Fry and Piers Spencer, ear-training classes ‗have long been part of the curricula of conservatories and university music departments, both in Britain and abroad.‘5 For Fry and Spencer, ear-training is considered the opposite of sight singing and it is in ear-training classes that students are taught to ‗identify pitches and rhythms and, by practice and guidance, to learn to write them in musical notation.‘6 They stress the importance of understanding ‗the grammar of written music‘ in order to be able to accurately represent sounds as they should appear on paper.7 Sight singing (also referred to as ‗sight reading‘), on the other hand, is ‗the performance of music from notation that the singer or instrumentalist has not previously seen.‘8 Together, these skills are often referred to as ‗aural skills‘ and they are taught in conjunction with ‗music theory‘ that deals with the ‗rudiments of melody and rhythm, to harmony, counterpoint, and form.‘9 Similarly, Beard and Gloag, define ‗music theory‘ as a pedagogical knowledge that is intended to direct music students in ‗harmony, counterpoint, orchestration and composition.‘10 They claim that the aim of music theory is to ensure that music students gain skill and knowledge of the syntactical and sometimes esoteric components of the language of music that comprises ‗tones, intervals, scales, rhythms, timbres and key signatures.‘11

The development of these ear-training skills is what Karpinski categorises broadly as ‗music reading‘ and ‗music listening.‘12 For Karpinski, music reading involves more than just looking at music. He explains that students ‗must understand what every symbol on the page means‘ in order to ‗produce the sounds they represent.‘13 And

5 Christopher Fry and Piers Spencer, "Ear-Training," Oxford University Press, April 8, 2016. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/opr/t114/e2166. 6 Fry and Spencer, "Ear-Training". 7 Fry and Spencer, "Ear-Training". 8 Piers Spencer, "Sight-Reading," Oxford University Press, April 8, 2016. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/opr/t114/e6180. 9 David Carson Berry and Sherman Van Sokema, "Theory," Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online July 15, 2015. www.grovemusiconline.com 10 'Theory' in Beard and Gloag, Musicology: The Key Concepts, 182. 11 Beard and Gloag, Musicology, 182. 12 Gary S. Karpinski, Manual for Ear Training and Sight Singing (New York: W.W. Norton Company, Inc, 2007), xi. 13 Karpinski, Manual for Ear Training, xi. 75 further, he states that ‗this is fundamental to good music reading.‘14 Music listening, on the other hand, is absolutely vital in order to be a good musician or, as he puts it, ‗to be a good musician, to truly live in music, your ability to hear and understand sound is crucial.‘15 Karpinski further explains that these types of skills allow a musician or listener to ‗think in music‘ as opposed to ‗think about music.‘16 He explains that ‗music listeners who understand what they hear are thinking in music. Music readers who understand and auralize what they read are thinking in music.‘17

This account of ‗thinking in music‘, as articulated by Karpinski, is reinforced by Joel Phillips et al. who explain that gaining an understanding of music is dependent upon the ability to imagine and perform the sounds of notated music, the ability to recall music by playing and notating it, and the ability to put these skills into practice through composition, performance and analysis.18 Samuel Adler explains the purpose of his book, Sight Singing: Pitch Interval Rhythm, is to enable readers to ‗learn to read all music at sight‘ and he says this despite the fact that not all music is written down.19 He stresses the importance of being able to sing on sight and stay faithful to the intention of the composer as expressed in the notation and the musical score.20 Karpinski stresses the importance of the relation between vision and audition by suggesting that music students should endeavour, above all else, to become fluent readers of music in order to have a precise idea of how any given piece of music will sound just by looking at the notes on the page.21 One ear-training book promises ‗Beethoven‘s musical perception enabled him to write after losing his hearing. Your perception will allow you to transcribe or compose music without an instrument.‘22 This reference to Beethoven is interesting in that Beethoven is the archetypal Romantic musical figure and he is seen as the embodiment of these nineteenth century traits that reinforce the status of the individual composer as the creative-

14 Karpinski, Manual for Ear Training, xi. 15 Karpinski, Manual for Ear Training, xi. 16 Karpinski, Aural Skills Acquisition, 4. 17 Karpinski, Aural Skills Acquisition, 4. 18 Joel Phillips, Jane Piper Clendinning, and Elizabeth West Marvin, The Musician's Guide to Aural Skills, 1st ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), xi. 19 Samuel Adler, Sight Singing: Pitch Interval Rhythm (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1997), 1. Emphasis in original text. 20 Adler, Sight Singing, 2. 21 Karpinski, Manual for Ear Training, xi. 22 Ron Gorow, Hearing and Writing Music: Professional Training for Today's Musician, Expanded 2nd ed. (Studio City, Calif.: September Pub., 2006). 76 author-genius. More significantly, Beethoven is the exemplar of the ability to imagine the tones and timbres of music without actually being able to hear them. His deafness meant that he was forced to draw on these skills that have since come to be considered essential and common sense skills for all ‗good‘ musicians. Implicit in this model, then, is the idea that even profound deafness can be overcome, or perhaps even Beethoven‘s genius can be emulated, provided one is well disciplined in music theory.

Despite the many different approaches to music theory and ear-training, their purposes can be summarised as being broadly twofold. Firstly, music theory aims to develop music literacy. That is, music theory aims to develop the capacity to read, write and understand music alongside the ability to accurately transcribe a piece of music. Secondly, music theory develops a student‘s capacity to sing or play a piece of music just by reading the notation and without having heard the piece before. If one wishes to become a musician, it is broadly assumed that these two skills are not only fundamental, but that they are transferable to all kinds of music. As Robert J. Frank and Kenneth Metz state, ‗an understanding of the principles used in Western art music can help one to understand all musical art forms.‘23 Clearly, this raises a range of different problems and these problems will be addressed later in the chapter. However, it is important to consider first how it is that these skills are taught. 3.2 The Exercises Skills relating to ear-training and sight singing are typically taught in ways that seek to introduce one musical parameter (pitch, rhythm, harmony, timbre etc.) at a time and in a teleological fashion. Often, though not always, the development of these parameters mimics the linear manner in which Western music history is frequently conceived.24 That is, it begins with pitch and eventually moves to perceivably more complex parameters such as harmony and timbre.25 As Karpinski points out, ‗exactly which features of the music are to be understood may be left to individual curricula. Most seem to center on meter and rhythm on the one hand and pitch on the other.‘26

23 Robert J. Frank and Kenneth Metz, Fundamentals for the Aspiring Musician: A Preparatory Course for Music Theory (New York: Routledge, 2011), 1. 24 As epitomised in Jean Ferris and Larry Worster, Music: The Art of Listening, 8th ed. (New York London: McGraw-Hill Higher Education; McGraw-Hill [distributor], 2010). 25 Ferris and Worster, Music. 26 Karpinski, Aural Skills Acquisition, 78. Emphasis in original. 77

Karpinski‘s treatment of aural training sits slightly ‗left of field‘ to most, given it claims to be able to teach the understanding of musical passages without any regard to musical notation (although his model does still teach musical notation – it claims to not rely upon it).27 Rob Gorow‘s model, however, functions specifically to train ‗hearing‘ alongside ‗writing‘, although it does avoid ‗notes‘ in the first half of the book.28 Jean Ferris‘s book, on the other hand, offers a more conventional approach in that it commences with notation and moves through pitch and tone, rhythm, tempo and meter, melody, harmony, texture and timbre.29 Like Ferris‘s model, the model put forward by Frank and Metz is an example of one that parallels developments in music history more broadly.30 In fact, the preface states that the book is designed to help college-level musicians ‗become familiar with some of the most important and universal works in the common practice repertoire.‘31

A typical example of a preliminary sight-singing exercise, then, will ask students to sing (or play on their instrument) a short, melodic passage that the student has not encountered before. Depending on the difficulty level, which is stereotypically conceived in a linear fashion, the passage may be simply a few notes, it may be a whole, single-lined melody or, if the student is learning to play the piano for example, it may contain several lines. Again, depending on the difficulty level, the passage may or may not contain rhythm. Another variation of this exercise might focus on rhythm, in which case a student is asked to clap the rhythm of a passage. This type of exercise can be used to train different types of skills, however, the goal and the method remain the same. That is, the goal is for a student to be able to play/sing/clap the passage correctly without pause or error the first time around. In the following sight singing example (see Figure 1), from Adler‘s model, major and minor second intervals are emphasised. This has a dual function of developing the student‘s capacity to be able to sight read while also entraining the sounds of a major and minor second. Incidentally, the ability to be able to memorise and recall intervals is a skill valued by all of the models surveyed.

27 Karpinski, Aural Skills Acquisition, 78. 28 Gorow, Hearing and Writing Music, 4. 29 Ferris and Worster, Music. 30 Frank and Metz, Fundamentals for the Aspiring Musician. 31 Frank and Metz, Fundamentals for the Aspiring Musician viiii. 78

Figure 1 Adler Sight Singing Exercise.32

The development of interval recognition in students, as I have already suggested, is essential to all of the models surveyed (although each model approaches intervallic recognition and sight-singing differently). The focus on the repetition of an interval is an important mechanism for the disciplining of these skills, and even when the content differs between different ear-training exercises, the framework is still similar. As depicted in Figure 2, intervals are expected to be sung at least three times prior to moving on to the next exercise, with the exercises gradually becoming

32 Reprinting with kind permission From W. W. Norton Company. SIGHT SINGING PITCH INTERVAL RHYTHM, 2ND EDITION by Samuel Adler, 30. Copyright © 1997, 1979 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 79 longer and more complex. For Adler, the goal of this repetition is for students to be able to sing ‗all intervals within any musical context, tonal or non-tonal.‘33

Figure 2 Adler Intervalic Sight Singing Exercise.34

Unlike Adler‘s model, Karpinski‘s does not use conventional notation until chapter seven. Instead, Karpinski initially focuses on protonation35 and solmisation36. Protonation is also used for sight singing, transcription and dictation exercises early on, although as the student progresses conventional notation is gradually introduced. Karpinski‘s textbook is accompanied by a CD that contains musical examples for

33 Adler, Sight Singing, xi. 34 Reprinting with kind permission from W. W. Norton Company. SIGHT SINGING PITCH INTERVAL RHYTHM, 2ND EDITION by Samuel Adler, 39. Copyright © 1997, 1979 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 35 Protonation, according to Karpinski, ‗uses vertical lines to represent pulses and meter, horizontal lines to represent rhythms, and scale degree numbers and syllables to represent pitches‘. Karpinski, Manual for Ear Training, xix. 36 Solmisation which, according to Karpinski, ‗refers to scale degrees in two ways: (1) with careted numbers (1, 2, 3, etc.); and (2) with movable-do solmization (do, re, mi, etc.)‘. Karpinski, Manual for Ear Training, xix. 80 students to practise their transcription skills and a series of these transcription exercises accompanies every chapter. An example of this kind of transcription exercise can be seen in Figure 3.

81

Figure 3 Karpinski Melodic Dictation Exercise.37

37 Reprinting with kind permission from the publisher. From MANUAL FOR EAR TRAINING AND SIGHT SINGING by Gary Karpinski, 42. Copyright © 2007 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 82

Karpinski‘s transcription exercises begin by giving students some information about the music they will hear in the transcription exercises. For example, students are advised firstly which musical example to find on the CD. Then students are provided with the clef and tonic for the musical example they will transcribe (note that all of these exercises are in C major) and, lastly, with the lower number of the time signature (the lower number indicates a variety of simple and compound time signatures).

Like sight-singing, transcription requires musical literacy but it also relies heavily upon the student‘s auditory memory. Before a student can transcribe a musical passage, they must first be able to remember it. An incapacity to recall a musical passage or an inability to read or write music would result in an inability to complete the ear-training and sight singing exercises. Thus, competency in any of the aforementioned listening exercises depends upon both musical literacy and musical memory. The style of these exercises varies little across different methods. However, the content changes depending on the method and the difficulty level. A preliminary exercise would be considered simple in that it contains no rhythm, or at the very least, slow and steady rhythms. The simplest exercise would be in the key of C major and would have no accidentals including sharps or flats in a melody will increase its perceived difficulty.

Interestingly, Frank and Metz refer to these training exercises as ‗drills‘.38 In the context of military training, the term ‗drill‘ refers to the rigorous repetition and disciplining of tasks such as ‗foot drills‘ in military recruits.39 In military training, subjects are expected to become completely compliant and obey unquestioningly the instructions of the ranking officer. In common parlance, to ‗drill into someone‘s head‘ means to habituate knowledge by way of repetition or perhaps it relates to the repetitive motion of a drill boring a hole. This conception of ear-training exercises as ‗drills‘ is interesting insofar as it relates to the notion of habituation via repetition and discipline.

38 Frank and Metz, Fundamentals for the Aspiring Musician, x-xi. 39 Oxford English Dictionary, "Drill, N.2," Oxford University Press, April 13, 2016 http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/57728? 83

3.3 Self-Discipline ‗Discipline‘ is one of the central concepts in Foucault‘s work. The term is used in two distinct ways. First, it is used to refer to ways of ordering knowledge (such as the disciplines within a university). The second and most pertinent meaning relates to the control and punishment of individuals.40 As described by Anne Schwan and Stephen Shapiro, discipline ‗is the name that Foucault gives to the combination of the practical and theoretical attempts to make the body both docile and more useful (increase its utility).‘41 In Discipline and Punish Foucault demonstrates a historical shift from the punishment of criminals as a physical form of torture enacted upon the body (during public displays such as public hangings) through to what is typically considered a more humane treatment of prisoners that does not require physical violence (such as incarceration and criminal ‗reform‘ programs) and occurs away from the public eye.42 Foucault says:

The reduction in penal severity in the last 200 years is a phenomenon with which legal historians are well acquainted. But, for a long time, it has been regarded in an overall way as a quantitative phenomenon: less cruelty, less pain, more kindness, more respect, more ‗humanity‘.43

However, Foucault argues that modern discipline, as a mechanism of control, is no less sinister because it occurs in a subtle way through coercive procedures that usually evade detection and function to make the body docile.44 Foucault thus fundamentally rejects the perceived level of common knowledge that penal history has by-and-large progressed and treatment has improved for criminals.

Linked to the capitalist ideology of production, the privatisation of the body, through discipline, produces docility that means an efficient and productive body more akin to a machine. In this conception of the term discipline, it becomes possible to imagine how students of music become embroiled in and conditioned by the drills

40 Anne Schwan and Stephen Shapiro, How to Read Foucault's Discipline and Punish (London: Pluto Press, 2011), 99. Also Danaher, Schirato, and Webb, Understanding Foucault, 50. 41 Schwan and Shapiro, How to Read Foucault's Discipline and Punish, 99. 42 Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 43 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 16. 44 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 104-31. 84 and exercises they practise. As an Adornian scholar who has examined the specialised listening habits of conservatory-trained composers, Rose Rosengard Subotnik has argued that these ear-training and sight singing procedures produce, in the listener, a particular notion of listening called ‗structural listening‘.45 According to Andrew Dell‘Antonio, structural listening can only be achieved ‗through technical training and serious self-discipline; such training and self-discipline, in their turn, are the mark of an aesthetically prepared and culturally elevated individual.‘46 The notion that musicians must have ‗self-discipline‘ is appropriate because it suggests an application of control of the self over the self and it is important to note that this measure of regulation is not an imposition from some external force pushing down upon subjects. In Foucault‘s conception, it is an effect of complex systems of discipline that work to produce the body, and the ear, as sites through which these power relations flow. In other words, discipline is enacted and enforced upon students through all of the mechanisms of music theory as described earlier, but it is also actively and willingly sought out by students. Thus, Foucault finds it more apt to describe power as a de-centralised network of forces rather than something that is enforced. As Foucault explains:

Now, the study of this micro-politics presupposes that the power exercised on the body is conceived not as a property, but as a strategy, that its effects of domination are attributed not to ‗appropriation‘, but to dispositions, manoeuvres, tactics, techniques, functionings; that one should decipher it in a network of relations, constantly in tension… In short this power is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the ‗privilege‘, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic positions – an effect that is manifested and sometimes extended by the position of those who are dominated.47

This quote highlights several important features of the ways in which Foucault conceives not only discipline but also the way power functions more broadly. Firstly, according to Foucault these coercive, disciplinary features are strategies that are not

45 Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 46 Andrew Dell'Antonio, Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 3. 47 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 26-27. 85 simply enacted upon the body (or the ear) by a unitary, dominant force (such as the institution). Rather, these are strategies that become manifest on the body through a non-localised system of intricate power struggles. This means that power is the effect of the struggles between forces. The allure of these disciplinary procedures for music students is that they ensure that the highest quality musician is produced if the procedures are practised and abided by accordingly. Subjecting oneself to these disciplinary measures, if successful, grants access to a culture that is typically reserved for the elite.

Self-discipline, in the context of music training, would therefore relate to a musician‘s capacity to devote the necessary time to practice. Practice supplements face-to-face contact with teachers, and especially when learning a musical instrument, it is practice and repetition of the skills stipulated by this conventional conception of music theory that become an efficient method of training. This means that students end up doing most of the work themselves, willingly and in their own time, thereby streamlining the political production of education. Private lessons, for instance, might start early on in life, as early as 5 or 6 (such was the age that I started), or the student might attend a school that has a large musical focus – perhaps both. Even within a tertiary music educational setting, the amount of face-to-face contact with a music teacher is limited and therefore it is expected that a significant part of music training will involve students practising independently – hence the need for strict self-discipline. Furthermore, self-discipline, as it is intimately bound up with the forces of capitalism, is also required in relation to the sheer stamina required to overcome the mundane production-line style repetition of tasks.

Ear-training tasks are perceived to be extremely linear and blatantly teleological in their approaches. This is for the sake of measurement and quantification of the growth of the student. Repetition, then, is perceived to be fundamental as it habituates a listener‘s auditory memory to becoming attuned to the sounds and qualities of certain musical phrases and instruments. But it is also a requirement for progress to the next level of study. As Foucault points out, ‗exercise is that technique by which one imposes on the body tasks that are both repetitive and different, but

86 always graduated.‘48 For Foucault, most of this exercise takes place on the body and, as a fundamental sensory organ, it is important to emphasise the ear. As Danaher et. al. point out, ‗knowledge makes us its subjects.‘49 Thus, this process of discipline flows both ways because, for example, in order for a musician to become ‗disciplined‘ they are required to ascertain certain ‗acceptable‘ levels of knowledge (gained through training) yet, in order to gain entry to that system of training, aspiring musicians must make themselves known and subject themselves to that system for observation, assessment and ranking. Discipline, in this way, is a form of biopower that works on the body through regulation, control and analysis.50 Foucault states:

By operating at every level of the social body and by mingling ceaselessly the art of rectifying and the right to punish, the universality of the carceral lowers the level from which it becomes natural and acceptable to be punished.51

This system of discipline comes to appear natural and self-evident, or perhaps it ceases to appear at all, and importantly, this is true not just for the punishment of criminals. The point Foucault is making is that the carceral model becomes a means of organising and structuring the social body more broadly, and strangely, its mechanisms are accepted so wholly, and at base level, that they are almost impossible to detect. Thus, in Discipline and Punish Foucault not only maps a history of the prison but goes on to demonstrate how this model of power permeates the broader social structure of society and, of particular interest to me, into other kinds of institutions and training situations such as ear-training.52

Whereas previous regimes of discipline were enforced upon bodies (through capital and corporal punishment), Foucault‘s focus is on the shift to more subtle means of discipline that work to make the body docile (though, as I have stated earlier, they are no less sinister). As Foucault explains:

48 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 161. 49 Danaher, Schirato, and Webb, Understanding Foucault, 50. 50 Danaher, Schirato, and Webb, Understanding Foucault, ix. 51 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 303. 52 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 303. 87

The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it. A ‗political anatomy‘, which was also a ‗mechanics of power‘, was being born; it defined how one may have a hold over others‘ bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines. Thus discipline produces subjected and practised bodies, ‗docile‘ bodies. Discipline increased the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience).53

This notion of a docile body, in the way I understand it, is one that is intricately linked with the means of production and economy that have an ultimate goal of increasing the efficacy and utility of the body to perform tasks in the way that a machine or robot would, and ultimately, without question or resistance. However, as Mills points out, ‗individuals should not be seen simply as the recipients of power, but as the ‗place‘ where power is enacted and the place where it is resisted.‘54 The point is that although the goal of the carceral system (not as a monolithic source of power but one that functions within a more complicated system) is to produce docile bodies, these processes are firstly processes that people often willingly seek out and subject themselves to. And, secondly, they are processes that also produce forces of resistance (such as alternative musics or alternative ways of listening). It is also important to reiterate that power is not something that is enforced by these carceral systems. Rather, power is seen as something that flows through these systems rhizomatically, not hierarchically. And, as I have been arguing, participants embroiled in the system often willingly subject themselves to these self-policing forms of discipline.

The function of training within any system, Foucault argues, is ‗not to educate people, or to render them capable of autonomous, critical thought.‘55 To the contrary, as Paul Oliver points out, it is to make students capable of ‗adhering automatically

53 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 138. 54 Mills, Michel Foucault, 35. 55 Oliver, Teach Yourself Foucault, 61. 88 and without thinking to the defined norms of society‘.56 To become ‗trained‘ in music, then, is to become disciplined (in every sense of the word) in the norms and procedures that are considered conventional, and to be able to reproduce these procedures for the process of examination and assessment. Power is thus simultaneously given (through the accumulation of knowledge), and taken away (by becoming subject to the methods of surveillance and judgement) and it is resisted (a point I will return to). Oliver explains:

The examination system also became a kind of metaphor for accepting the organizational system. It became a ritual in which acceptance of the examination system was an agreement to the legitimacy of the overall organization. It represented an acceptance of the inherent differences in power and authority, between those who imposed the examinations and those who took them.57

Though the institutional contexts in which these ‗conventional‘ ear-training methods are taught are vastly different, and given that a survey of these contexts is outside the scope of thesis, I argue that they must navigate similar discursive territories.

3.4 Disciplinary Knowledge Earlier in this chapter I suggested that Foucault uses the term ‗discipline‘ in two ways. Earlier I focused on discipline as a system of control and punishment. As a body of knowledge and as a way of ordering ideas in the form of academic disciplines, disciplinary knowledge relates to the ways in which power is accrued, sanctioned and defined through the processes of power/knowledge. Power/knowledge relates to the idea that power is intimately bound with knowledge. On this Foucault says:

Knowledge and power are integrated with one another, and there is no point in dreaming of a time when knowledge will cease to depend on power; this is just a way of reviving humanism in a utopian guise. It is not possible for

56 Oliver, Teach Yourself Foucault, 61. 57 Oliver, Teach Yourself Foucault, 63. 89

power to be exercised without knowledge, it is impossible for knowledge not to engender power.58

This notion of power/knowledge relates to disciplines in the sense that they are responsible for the regulation of discourse through exclusion, and as Mills suggests, disciplines sanction what can be considered truth.59 A discipline orders the chaotic flow of discourse by both limiting what is included (thus marginalising that which is not) but also through its constant re-articulation and reinforcement of its own regulatory boundaries.60 Claims to truth can only occur within the rigid rules of knowledge production and these rules ensure that ‗new‘ knowledge is produced incrementally and only when it can demonstrate causal links to pre-existing knowledge. Furthermore, the production of ‗legitimate‘ knowledge requires that it be produced by ‗experts‘. An expert (typically an academic – though not always) is familiar with the dominant discourses in their disciplinary field of expertise and they accrue power (in the form of status) through the accumulation of knowledge of these dominant discourses.61 Though I have already extensively discussed the problems with limiting discourse to what is written, disciplinary knowledge within the academy is almost exclusively built around what is written (though it is not restricted to it).62 Key, primary texts tend to hold a privileged place within disciplines such that any well-respected academic would have to frequently demonstrate familiarity with these texts in order to maintain their own status. In this way, Foucault contends that disciplines actually generate experts.63 Experts can only gain expertise by studying the discourses that are dominant within a discipline.64 And, as experts-in-the-making, listening subjects must become habituated to the discourses of conventional music theory. These discourses inevitably impact the ways listeners engage in music such that these ear-training mechanisms become internalised.

58 Michel Foucault and Colin Gordon, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, trans. Colin Gordon, et al. (New York: Random House, 1980), 52. 59 Mills, Michel Foucault, 60. 60 Michel Foucault, "The Order of Discourse‖, 61. 61 Mills, Discourse, 61. 62 The presentation of conference papers, teaching, round tables and symposia are just some examples of how academics engage in non-written discourse. However, one must be well read in order to be able to actively contribute to these discourses. 63 Danaher, Schirato, and Webb, Understanding Foucault, 22. 64 Danaher, Schirato, and Webb, Understanding Foucault, 22. 90

As a regulatory discipline, then, Thomas Christensen states that music theory ‗seeks to draw from practice normative rules of syntax and models of structure, while at the same time disciplining that practice through pedagogical strictures.‘65 And, musical literacy functions to underpin the practice of ear-training at every point in the students training. In this way, Matt Sakakeeny explains that music theory functions to untie musical notes from their extramusical settings to the point where the sensory experience of sound is ignored while the written components (namely musical notation) are privileged.66 Likewise, Beard and Gloag argue that:

Despite the fact that music is experienced through the medium of sound, musicologists, even those associated with the new musicology, have historically emphasised the notated aspects of sound, its pitch structures, harmonies, rhythms and so on, over its purely sonorous, aural dimension.67

Because music is ephemeral, and because it has no object, Lucy Green makes the point that without any formal method of making music visible (through writing, for example) music is an extremely problematic medium for theorists.68 The transient nature of music, Green explains, directly impacts the ways listeners engage with it by rendering listening skills particularly abstract. To quote her at length:

Music education has developed a sophisticated set of criteria and practices for assessing performance. Many of these are, in general terms, internationally, though not universally, recognized by musicians and music educators across all levels and many styles … However, the assessment of music listening is generally much less developed. It has tended to rely on requiring learners to produce some kind of account of what is going on inside their heads while they listen. Such accounts can range from general descriptions of the music, to naming specific properties or relationships within it, to taking down music by dictation. All in all, it is hard both to

65 Thomas Christensen, The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, The Cambridge History of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 14. 66 Matt Sakakeeny, 'Music' in Keywords in Sound, eds. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 116. 67 Beard and Gloag, Musicology, 230. 68 Lucy Green, Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy, Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 67. 91

enhance and to assess music listening through education, other than as an offshoot of other activities.69

In this way, these conventional approaches to ear-training function to habituate ways of listening that are structured according to principles that arise solely within the context of musical literacy in the Western tradition. That is, these ways of listening are relegated to the ways in which music can be represented in written form and according to the grammatical rules of conventional notation. As Green rightly points out, this makes listening skills particularly esoteric and difficult to assess autonomously without being mediated through writing. In this way, music notation is treated as if it were similar to the written form of language. Ola Stockfelt makes the point that within academic musical education in the last hundred years, the formal governance of this language has engendered the values upon which the ‗bourgeois concert-hall listening ideal of adequacy were based.‘70 It is this way of listening, (what Stockfelt calls ‗bourgeois concert-hall listening‘, what Subotnik calls ‗structural listening‘, and what Cook would call ‗musicological listening‘) that appears fundamental and natural to the academic study and teaching of music such that its value comes to be assumed.71 This ‗structural‘ way of listening functions in the sense that its legitimacy is no longer questioned and in the sense that ‗structural listening‘ is simply the accepted way to engage with music. Clearly, this viewpoint overlooks the notion that ‗structural listening‘, as Subotnik has argued, emerges out of very precise socio-politico power struggles.72

Furthermore, the idea that music can be understood in the same way as language is problematic because language and music are two vastly different things and they do not serve the same function.73 As I have been arguing, the significance of music that is scored (throughout the history of Western art music) is often taken as universal,

69 Green, Music, Informal Learning and the School, 67. 70 Ola Stockfelt, 'Adequete Modes of Listening' in Keeping Score, eds. Schwarz, Kassabian, and Siegel, 129-46. 71 Ola Stockfelt, ‗Adequete Modes of Listening,‘ 138. Subotnik, Deconstructive Variations, 148. Nicholas Cook, 'The Two Sides of the Musical Fabric' in Music, Imagination, and Culture, 122-59. 72 Subotnik, Deconstructive Variations, 148. 73 For contrasting ideas see for example, Michel Chion, Guide to Sound Objects. Pierre Schaeffer and Musical Research, trans. J. Dack and C. North (Leicester: EARS De Montfort University, 1983 trans. 2009), 83-88. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, trans. Carolyn Abbate, Music and Discourse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, c1990). 92 self-evident and natural. However, reading and writing music are skills only useful to individuals who are interested in music that has been written down. Therefore, I argue that this type of music literacy has limited application outside of the visual or literate music epistemology that, inevitably, raises problems for music that is not intended to be scored or engaged with in the same ways. This kind of conventional listening not only assumes the value of a particular style of listening (what Subotnik calls ‗structural listening‘), it also assumes the value of the type of music that is supposed to be listened to and, importantly, the type of music that is not.

As an ‗intellectual tradition of analysing musical texts as an autonomous language‘ music theory, according to Matt Sakakeeny, has been ‗for centuries directed almost exclusively at Western art music.‘74 Similarly, Patrick McCreless highlights the entrenched nature of music theory within music programs across the West.75 He explains that music theory has been set the formidable task of teaching what are widely considered ‗fundamental and traditional musical skills.‘76 However, he confesses that these skills are often taught in a fashion that has less in common with late twentieth and twenty-first century scholarship than they do with the scholarship of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.77 In other words, McCreless suggests that the ways in which these skills are taught are out dated. This is a view shared by Brian Hulse, who, in thinking about the changing field of composition, argues that it is no longer relevant to introduce aspiring composers to compositional techniques derived from the canonical repertoire. He explains:

Even in the most venerable institutions the practice of composition can no longer be considered synonymous with the idea of a ―vanguard‖ of Western classical music. There are many more musical traditions from around the world that feed into today‘s new music than what is more or less known as the Western canon.78

74 Sakakeeny, 'Music,' 116. 75 Patrick McCreless, 'Rethinking Contemporary Music Theory' in Keeping Score, eds. Schwarz, Kassabian, and Siegel, 13. 76 McCreless, 'Rethinking Contemporary Music Theory,' 13. 77 McCreless, 'Rethinking Contemporary Music Theory,' 14. 78 Brian Hulse, "Becoming-Composer," Perspectives of New Music 53, no. 1 (2015): 220. 93

Music theory (including ear-training and sight singing) underpins Western music at every level including music listening, analysis, performance and composition. However, what underpins music theory, McClary points out, is the premise that tonality constitutes the foundation of Western, musical knowledge.79 Tonality is perceived to be free from ideology, it is perceived to be the natural way that music functions, and it is perceived to be universal. In this way, music theory functions to justify and advocate the preferences of a particular dominant group in much the same way that tonality does.80

Supported by the positivism and rationalism of the dominant scientific cultural paradigm, these ear-training skills are accorded the same level of legitimacy because they are perceived to be objective. This perspective of epistemological certainty, according to Subotnik, ‗has given science a culturally privileged status that is tantamount to a guarantee by Western society of its very existence.‘81 This positivism is reinforced at all points of academic musical engagement, as Sally Macarthur asserts, and it ‗focuses on ‗factual‘ and ‗technical‘ information, on what can be easily quantified, measured and explained in terms of its operations and procedures.‘82 Closely linked with the pseudo-science of music analysis (that assumes a work‘s value prior to analysing it), music theory functions to construct the listening experience within very particular boundaries and through means that have become codified in accordance with the norms and values permitted by the Western canon.83

This perceived neutrality and ubiquity is evident across music theory textbooks that often blatantly position the ‗great‘ works as timeless classics. Ferris, for example, locates these ‗timeless classics‘ directly in opposition to popular music that he claims requires little or no formal training and that soon becomes dated.84 Though not necessarily explicit, these types of value judgements are nonetheless embedded

79 McClary, Conventional Wisdom, 68. 80 McClary, Feminine Endings, 27. 81 Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 267. 82 Sally Macarthur, Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music (Farnham, England and Burlington, USA: Ashgate, 2010), 48. 83 Beard and Gloag, Musicology, 15. 84 Ferris and Worster, Music, xxx. 94 within the practice of ear-training and sight singing. These value judgements inevitably function to prop up the valued Western canon (viewed as the only music worthy of study) such that the importance placed on these ear-training and sight singing skills gives the impression that they are the foundation for any comprehensive music program. Lastly, and most importantly, these conventional approaches to ear-training vary in their how they deal with the notion of listening, and though the claims are that listening is fundamental to music (to all music), the notion of listening is considered in terms limited to Western music that has been written. Listening, in a conventional context, is conceived simply as an act that is essential to music, and it can be trained and assessed via the skills of reading and writing music. The impact of this method of training is assumed without acknowledgement, without consideration of why these skills are necessary in the very first place, and with little thought about what kinds of listening experiences and what kinds of listeners they might produce.

As a mechanism for disciplinary control, music theory is able to discipline subjects through self-reinforcing procedures, namely the acquisition of literacy skills that, I am arguing, are deemed to translate directly into the acquisition of listening skills. These are procedures that function to make the body docile on different levels although they are all interrelated. These procedures include technique and execution, but importantly, discipline operates at the level of the ear so that students become familiar with sounds that are sanctioned by the discipline as ‗good‘. These ‗good‘ sonorities have come to be enculturated (especially in Western culture) over centuries, and I argue that they are very powerful in shaping the perceptions of subjects as they are reinforced by these conventional ear-training methods. Thus, these procedures come to play a significant role in the construction of the musical status of electroacoustic music and subsequently its reception.

Lastly, music theory functions as a discipline of knowledge (although not a discipline in its own right in the strictest sense) that has remained practically unchanged for centuries. Disciplinary boundaries have been maintained by the ceaseless reproduction of commentary on ear-training models that all circulate around the same key parameters: pitch, melody and harmony. The core tenets of the discipline are seldom questioned because they are already taken to be the foundation 95 of any serious engagement with music. Ear-training procedures as disciplined by music theory are assumed to be morally ‗good‘ for the music student and presumably they make for better musicians. However, why these procedures are believed to make better musicians is often left to assumption or speculation. Thus, I argue, that these are very powerful political procedures because they appear to be neutral and natural such that they often evade attention. Furthermore, they shape not only the way that students listen to music, but also the way that students think.

3.5 Looking and Listening As I have been arguing, the training procedures proposed by conventional ‗music theory‘ offer a limited engagement with the notion of listening, such that these skills are most useful to scored music that occurs within a conventional, Western music context. The principal focus is on a student to being able to write what they hear. Thus, listening skills come to be seen as secondary to literacy, or at the very least they are limited to it. The prestige of the musical score, as it embodies a composer‘s creative vision, is one of the dominant forces underpinning conventional music theory. The musical score is therefore fundamental to most Western art music leading up to the twentieth century.

The function of the musical score, broadly speaking, is that it acts as a visual representation of the musical composition, it acts as instruction for the performer and it also acts as the principal artefact for music analysis. Importantly however, it is held as both the container of, and the key to, unlocking the composer‘s intentions.85 Supported by music analysis, the written score is considered the ultimate authority over and above any audible realisation of the work.86 To quote Taruskin, ‗the score produced by such exacting toil is now regarded (or if the composer is great enough, venerated) as a definitive text embodying the ‗work‘, of which performances can only be imperfect representations.‘87 This view inevitably evokes and reinforces hierarchical and value-laden relations between composer and performer, between score and performance, and between vision and audition. Taruskin characterises the rise of the prestige of the musical score as a nineteenth century Romantic relic driven

85 Dell'Antonio, Beyond Structural Listening?, 3. 86 Dell'Antonio, Beyond Structural Listening?, 3. 87 Richard Taruskin, Music in the Nineteenth Century, 5 vols., vol. 3, The Oxford History of Western Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 10. 96 by the search for the ultimate and objective truth, in the form of the composer‘s intention or romantic vision.88 The rise of the score is also inexorably linked to the rise of the individual as a self-governing and sovereign subject. This conception of the individual, often taken as a historical a priori, is a discursively produced object of what Foucault calls the Modern episteme, and it is fundamental to the ways in which discipline functions.89

This pervasive governance of the visual within music scholarship is supported by the sub-discipline of music analysis that, according to Cook:

[Didn‘t] ask whether the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms was of value. It assumed the music was of value, and tried to demonstrate this by showing how the music really was coherent, providing you dug down deep enough. It was, in short, an apologetic discipline, in the sense of being designed to defend a valued repertory, to underwrite its canonic status.90

Taruskin points out that the greatness of Beethoven, for example, is simply a judgement that is based on opinion and nothing more.91 Therefore, he maintains that to assert this as a ‗fact‘ is the kind of false claim upon which the grand narrative relies.92 Along with the instigation of commodity capitalism, printing played a part in the objectification of music as an artefact and importantly, as an artefact that was imprinted with the name of the composer. A work that is imprinted with the name of the composer is thereby rendered visible to history. Taruskin importantly notes that Western music has come to be regarded as first and foremost a literate medium rather than an oral one.93 Following Foucault, he warns that the act of naming is both a mechanism of power and a symptom of the grand narrative.94 It took Barthes nearly a century after the Romantics to demonstrate that the authority of the composer-as-author is not natural but rather an effect of capitalism – a construct.95

88 Taruskin, Music in the Nineteenth Century, 61. 89 Danaher, Schirato, and Webb, Understanding Foucault, 20. 90 Cook, Music, 92-93. 91 Taruskin, Music in the Nineteenth Century, xv. 92 Taruskin, Music in the Nineteenth Century, xv 93 Taruskin, Music from the Earliest Notations, 779. 94 Taruskin, Music in the Nineteenth Century, 3, xix. 95 Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author,' 142-48. 97

The very notion of an author, in Foucault‘s view, is an attempt to make the author appear stable through the act of writing. He also argues that names and naming are used as mechanisms of support for the grand narrative.96 This conception of the author is about making their entire oeuvre appear to follow a linear narrative starting from the less developed and progressing to the more complex in a cohesive manner so that each new work demonstrates the personal growth of the composer-genius as a composer but also as an identifiable type of person. Contrary to this, Foucault sees each new work, each text, produced by the author as different and unrelated to the previous works and thus unrelated to the individual‘s persona.97 Foucault explains:

The author‘s name serves to characterize a certain mode of being of discourse: the fact that the discourse has an author‘s name, that one can say ―this was written by so-and-so‖ or ―so-and-so is its author,‖ shows that this discourse is not an ordinary everyday speech that merely comes and goes, not something that is immediately consumable. On the contrary, it is a speech that must be received in a certain mode and that, in a given culture, must receive a certain status.98

The act of writing music for the purpose of communicating musical ideas from composer to performer is an act of power that reinforces the elevated status of the composer-as-author. Furthermore, naming validates the work as historical documentary fact and therefore functions as an exclusionary measure that maintains disciplinary boundaries.99 Works that are considered for inclusion within the canon have to undergo a complex process which means that the works will be, to quote Mills, ‗circulated throughout society, reproduced in books, they will appear in school curricula and they will be commented on, described and evaluated by others in books and articles‘ thus confirming and perpetuating the idea that the work, as represented by the score, is in fact a ‗masterwork‘ and that the composer is in fact a genius (categories, that I have argued earlier, are reserved for white men).100 Moreover, if these ideas are kept in circulation long enough, they contain enough institutional

96 Michel Foucault, 'What is an Author' in Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, 101-20. 97 Foucault, 'What is an Author,' 101-20. 98 Foucault, 'What is an Author,' 107. 99 Mills, Michel Foucault, 60. 100 Mills, Michel Foucault, 74. 98 influence to be taken as natural, common sense knowledge.101 This is exactly what Taruskin is getting at when he says that the greatness of Beethoven, the archetypal Romantic figure, is an opinion not a fact. Beethoven‘s perceived greatness is accepted as common sense knowledge in an uncritical manner – a manner that musicologists such as McClary were sceptical of. Beethoven was, after all, a human being.

Upholding disciplinary boundaries is a complex process that is also enforced by the score itself as exclusive to those who can interpret it, as instruction for the performer, as guidance for the analyst or listener, and as a literary artefact. As part of the discourse of music, the score therefore has the power to regulate the focus of the listener by structuring the listening experience and instructing the listener on how they should listen.102 Therefore, when students learn how to read scores, they are also learning how to listen in a particular way, and how to represent this listening experience in a particular way. This process is exclusive because in order to become a serious or expert listener, one has to be familiar with the dominant discourses within the discipline. Listeners are therefore produced through different mechanisms and manifestations of power by way of the institution, and this occurs throughout music education. In this sense, the image of the musician (as a composer, a performer, or analyst etc.) is one that is shadowed by the image of the expert listener produced through a range of music discourses.

Whilst electroacoustic music operates by and large from within this Western tradition, it fits only awkwardly because it eschews the privileged status of pitch and, with exceptions, the visually notated musical score. As discussed in Chapter 2, Landy explains that electroacoustic music, unlike most notated Western art music, takes ‗sound‘ as its basic building block rather than pitch, ‗musical notes‘ or visual representations of the music.103 Additionally, it is not uncommon to find electroacoustic music that is not notated and, when it is, composers often notate their work after it has been composed. When electroacoustic pieces are notated,

101 Mills, Discourse, 55. 102 Dell'Antonio, Beyond Structural Listening?, 3. 103 Landy explains that all ‗sound-based music ... typically designates the art form in which the sound, that is, not the musical note, is its basic unit.‘ Leigh Landy, Understanding the Art of Sound Organization (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 17. 99 composers mostly employ graphic notational methods because traditional music notation is unable to adequately visually capture music that might not contain any musical notes at all. It is worth quoting Emmerson at length here:

Electroacoustic music challenges the listener in two fundamental ways. In the case of tape music it asks that the imagination replace the visual stimulus of live performance – something which radio initiated and which is paradoxically reinforced in popular music video. It also allows little recourse to another visual cue: the score. Scores for electroacoustic music exist, of course, but have a variety of functions: for performance with instruments or over complex loudspeaker systems, or simply for reading and background information, but rarely for the re-creation of the work itself. The score moves away from prescription towards description. The emphasis in all cases away from a reliance upon the written hieroglyph as a means to express, or at least to transmit, musical utterance.104

It is Jonathan Crary‘s argument, then, that since the Romantic nineteenth century, the subject has been discursively constructed in terms of an ability to pay attention.105 In other words, he argues that the problem of a ‗lack of attention‘ is symptomatic of the greater social and cultural conditions of the second half of the nineteenth century rather than a natural fact or idea.106 He demonstrates how, during the Romantic period, the very idea of ‗paying attention‘ became a new object of knowledge and similarly the ‗lack of attention‘ became a new problem, one that has carried into the present day, and a problem that, I will argue, remains a fundamental issue for electroacoustic music.107 Similar to Crary, Taruskin describes how this problem, as a by-product of Romanticism, is manifest in music through the birth of aesthetics.108 This is where Taruskin believes music history ‗encounters transcendent and autonomous art – which focused on the notion that the function of music is purely for deep contemplation.‘109 Further, Taruskin believes that this deep contemplation

104 Emmerson, The Language of Electroacoustic Music 2. 105 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture, (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: the MIT Press, 2001), 1. 106 Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 17. 107 Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 17. 108 Taruskin, Music from the Earliest Notations, 65. 109 Taruskin, Music from the Earliest Notations, 65. 100 can only be undertaken by those privileged with the correct training in the conventions of music theory and the syntax of musical notation, as explained earlier in the chapter.

Crary refers to Richard Wagner‘s reforms at Bayreuth where an existing opera house was transformed specifically for the performance of Wagner‘s operas.110 The opera theatre was the first of its kind to implement elements that are taken today as standards in both opera and the theatre more broadly. These include a frontal view of the stage for every spectator, along with a contrasting lighting system so that the theatre itself is extremely dark in order to isolate the illuminated stage for the viewer.111 Cited in Crary, Wagner states:

As soon as the spectators are sitting in their seats, they find themselves in a virtual ‗theatron‘, that is, a space designed solely for looking at what can be seen from its seats. Between the spectators and the scene to be observed nothing is clearly visible; there is only ‗space‘.112

To these alterations, Wagner also made a significant change in the location of the orchestra, so that rather than being on or in front of the stage for an audience to view, it was moved below the stage and hidden from view in what Taruskin calls a ‗mystic abyss.‘113 Crary exclaims that the invisibility of the orchestra mystified the music because its source was unidentifiable.114 With this, Crary notes that Wagner was able to assume control of the audience and remove their autonomy by channelling the gaze and fixing attention solely on the spectacle of performance.115

This focus on channelling the attention of the audience is also recognised in electroacoustic music listening, especially in relation to (but not limited to) acousmatic music. Though I will return to the notion of acousmatic listening, as a specific listening practice, in more detail in the following chapter, I want to spend

110 Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 251. 111 Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 251. 112 See the footnote in Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 251. 113 Taruskin, Music in the Nineteenth Century, 499. 114 Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 251. 115 Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 253. 101 some time thinking about the broader implications of acousmatic listening as it relates to attention and the visual field.

Wishart explains that acousmatic listening means that the sound should be appreciated ‗independent of, and detached from, a knowledge or appreciation of its source‘.116 The term acousmatic, from which we get acousmatic music, stems from the Greek word akousmaticoi and is commonly associated with Pythagoras. It is alleged that Pythagoras‘s teachings were delivered from behind a curtain in the hope of removing any visual distraction and thus forcing students to concentrate on the content.117 In a similar fashion, electroacoustic, acousmatic music is experienced solely through loudspeakers and without any performers present.118 As Emmerson points out, ‗the acousmatic was intended not just as a description of how listeners would perceive sounds, but of an attitude composers should develop towards their material.‘119

Though I will unpack this further in the following chapter, the acousmatic situation, in some ways, results in what Windsor refers to as an ‗impoverished‘ state of listening because of the lack of visual connection between the performers, their gestures and the production of sound.120 Though this is debated, it is generally held that this environment, due to its ‗impoverishment‘ of the spectacle of performance, is conducive to an intensely concentrated level of listening, thus heightening the sensory, auditory experience for the listener.121 Acousmatic listening then, ideally aims to ignore the origins of the sound source so that the sound can be considered in isolation of its context.122 This means that the isolation of the sound, coupled with the fact that it is mediated through the loudspeaker, suggests what Crary defines as a detachment from a broader area for the purpose of emphasising a reduced number of

116 Wishart, On Sonic Art, 67. 117 Ian Stevenson, 'Schaeffer's Sound Effects' in Music's Immanent Future, eds. Macarthur, Lochhead and Shaw, 106. 118 Stevenson, 'Schaeffer's Sound Effects,' 106. 119 Emmerson, Music, Electronic Media, and Culture, 8. 120 Luke Windsor, "A Perceptual Approach to the Description and Analysis of Acousmatic Music " (London: City University 1995), Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, April 24, 2013. http://www.zainea.com/Acousmatic.htm 121 For example, see Chion, Guide to Sound Objects. Eric F. Clarke, "The Impact of Recording on Listening," Twentieth-Century Music 4, no. 1 (2007); Windsor, "A Perceptual Approach." 122 Wishart, On Sonic Art, 67. 102 stimuli.123 In this way, listeners of acousmatic music are shaped, following Crary, in terms of their capacity for ‗paying attention‘ and this emphasis on the ability to pay attention is reinforced, or perhaps constructed, by its discourse. Landy and others, for example, have argued that the general distaste for the music could be attributed to the fact that listeners are not equipped with the necessary skills to achieve the level of concentrated listening that is required to appreciate it.124 It is, Landy argues, a state of listening that has proven to be difficult for listeners to accept and to achieve, and this has led him to develop a series of tools that listeners can use to navigate the music.125

It is not unusual for most first-time listeners of any twentieth century music to feel, at the very least, a little bit lost. In this respect, electroacoustic music is no different. However, unlike other music of the twentieth century, electroacoustic music stands out particularly because of its relationship to sound rather than to tones. For example, Schoenberg‘s serial music, though it was a new way of organising tones, still relies upon the foundations of musical language taught through music theory. Unlike electroacoustic music, in serial music a note is still the basic unit for organisation and it is still written according to traditional notational methods.126 However, as Taruskin rightly suggests, ‗it is the listening process that has proved durably problematical.‘127 Just as listening to serial music challenged the models that listeners were supposed to use to direct their listening experience, acousmatic music presents similar if not more difficult challenges.128 Listening models suited specifically to acousmatic music exist (in fact I will return to survey some of these in more detail later in the following chapter), however, I argue that the ubiquity of

123 Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 1. 124 As an example of this see Leigh Landy, What's the Matter with Today's Experimental Music?: Organized Sound Too Rarely Heard (Chur, [Switzerland]; Philadelphia: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1991). 125 Leigh Landy,"The 'Something to Hold on to Factor' in Timbral Composition," Contemporary Music Review 10, no. 2 (1994). 126 Clearly, the boundaries between serial music and acousmatic music are far from rigid and there is plenty of overlap between the two. 127 Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century, 163. 128 Listeners were supposed to be able to hear to tone row being transformed across the course of the work – they were supposed to be able to hear the process of its composition. It soon became evident however, that many listeners were unable to practice this skill. Furthermore, as Bennett points out, the resulting serial composition, a highly ordered and structured work, ended up sounding like something which was more comparable to music composed using aleatoric and indeterminate procedures. Bennett, Sounding Postmodernism, 78. 103 traditional approaches to ear-training (such as those outlined above) remains palpable.

Electroacoustic music clearly has a close relationship with the advent of technologies such as the gramophone and tape recorder. The recordability of music is thought to have altered the relationship between notation and composition which, Taruskin argues, signals the possibility of a musical ‗post-literacy‘.129 A ‗post-literate‘ music poses a range of challenges, in particular, to the ways in which we teach music and how the teaching of music relates to the traditional and conventional music theory approach I have outlined above. However, I am sceptical of Taruskin‘s claims to a ‗post-literate‘ music on the basis that this view is deterministic. Recording technologies cannot, in and of themselves, be the sole cause of changes in culture.130 More often than not, what we perceive to be the result of technology is a far more complicated affair. No technology can be separated from the culture out of which it arose, and it cannot be separated from the agents that invent, use and engage with the technology (agents who are also, to some degree, products of culture). Furthermore, a ‗post-literate‘ music would ignore the existence of the orally transmitted musics (folk music for example) that have existed throughout the course of history. Even within the limits of Western music, we know that orally transmitted music predates written music and we also know that orally transmitted music continues to exist in parallel with written music.131

Therefore, the changes that occurred in the relationship between the score and the music itself in the twentieth century were not simply a result of technological innovation. Rather, these changes were more than likely the result of a whole range of activities, ideas, beliefs, meanings and power relationships that should be considered in ways that do not function to simplify this complexity. Regardless of the reasons for this shift in thinking about the score, Taruskin‘s point about the altered relationship between electroacoustic music and the score (as a visual representation of the music) warrants further consideration.

129 Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century, 52. 130 ‗Technological determinism‘ as defined by Slack and Macgregor Wise is the belief that technology has the power to cause revolutionary changes in culture. This is usually manifest in the ways in which we talk about technology and they cite the example of the printing press, industrial technology and the computer. In Slack and Macgregor Wise, Culture and Technology, 44-45. 131 Taruskin, Music from the Earliest Notations, 1-36. 104

Electroacoustic music, unlike more traditional forms of music, does not depend on writing at all. Composition is usually undertaken in the studio, and in the case of acousmatic music, the loudspeaker replaces the performer and a score is not needed to record or reproduce the piece given it already exists as a recorded artefact. In this way the recordability of music, Taruskin explains, ‗achieves what written texts achieve – namely, the fixing of the unique artwork – even better than written texts can do, and it does so without the use of texts.‘132 Traditionally, the score functions in a literary way both in the sense that it is something that is ‗read‘ and something that is treated as a historical artefact. Music history begins with what we know about music, and what we know about early music is only through what was written down. Therefore, the relationship of music to the visual, written ‗text‘ is one that has, for centuries, been a complex one. Anything that is scored for electroacoustic music is likened by Taruskin to a picture or a painting.133 This means that the score loses its predominantly literary relation to the work, and it becomes something that cannot be ‗read‘ in the same way that scores have traditionally been read, simply because there is no common language for the ‗writing‘. He continues:

What is produced is a unique ―art object‖ rather than a set of directions for performance. And therefore, obviously, ―score‖ is the wrong word for it, since a score is something written, and electronic music can dispense with writing. 134

The relevance of traditional music theory to acousmatic music is questionable given music theory aims to teach the ‗reading‘ and the ‗writing‘ of music. Learning to be literate in music, as the convention demands, is only useful for music that is written and, in this context, aural literacy occurs solely and exclusively in combination with visual literacy. Given electroacoustic music is not generally written according to traditional methods, the altered relationship with the score further complicates any analysis of the music, at least if the anlaysis is based on the traditional analytical models that take the score as the artefact. Even if the recording is taken as the

132 Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century, 481. 133 Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century, 210. 134 Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century, 210. 105 artefact, traditional analysis can still only reveal so much about the work. If the work was not a tonal work (a lot of them are not) then I would question whether traditional analysis could reveal anything at all.

3.5.1 Performing Electroacoustic Music Historically, the score is also tasked with providing instructions for the performer and given that in acousmatic music there are no performers, this function is rendered redundant.135 In a conventional context, the performance of a work is mediated through the performer‘s interpretation of the written artefact, thus it is open to be read in different ways and to some degree, the performer is able to stamp the performance with their own style. In contrast, acousmatic works are, by their very nature, exclusively created for the loudspeaker, which means that any ‗performance‘ of the work would not only mean a concert without any human performers but, more significantly, a concert without the pomp and spectacle of human performers. As Chadabe puts it:

Who, after all, enjoys sitting in a darkened theatre watching inanimate loudspeakers? And why would one go to a concert hall to hear something that could be played on a stereo at home? The problem was how to make the playing of tapes lively in a concert.136

There are many examples of what could be considered ‗theatrical‘ acousmatic music performances. However, they play a different role in capturing the attention of a concert audience and I would argue that they are considered ‗theatrical‘ for different reasons – if they are theatrical at all. For example, the ‗acousmonium‘ designed by composer Francois Bayle (b. 1932) in the mid-1970s is described by Chadabe as a ‗loudspeaker orchestra created specifically for playing tapes‘.137

135 Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century, 190. 136 Chadabe, Electric Sound, 189. 137 Chadabe, Electric Sound, 68. 106

Figure 4. The Acousmonium and Francoise Bayle.138

The Acousmonium was a collection of 80 speakers sprawled across the stage for the audience to witness (see Figure 4).139 The sounds emerged from different sized speakers that were chosen for their particular sound qualities, and as the sound passed through different speakers it gave the illusion of motion. In this respect the loudspeakers replaced both the human performers and the instruments of a traditional orchestral setting. However, aside from the sheer visual presence (what could be called the technological sublime)140 there is not really a great deal of material to ‗watch‘. Bayle controlled the Acousmonium in a manner that could be likened to a conductor shaping the sonority of an orchestra and perhaps this was performative. His position, back facing the audience, also reinforced the likeness to conducting. Nevertheless, the audience still lacked connection with the visual and gestural elements of the performers playing their instruments (for example, the subtle sway of the violinist as she bows the strings, the emotive expression on the faces of the chorus or the stomping foot of a guitarist). Obviously, loudspeakers are inanimate objects and thus they cannot engage our attentive capacities in the same way as live human performance, and this has been as a limitation for composers of

138 Chadabe, Electric Sound, 68. 139 Chadabe, Electric Sound, 68. 140 Slack and Macgregor Wise say 'the technological sublime refers to the almost religious-like reverence paid to machines'. in Slack and Macgregor Wise, Culture and Technology, 17. 107 electroacoustic music ever since its inception. However, it has functioned to produce innovative ways of attempting to engage the audience in a performance.141

Even in a non-acousmatic setting of electroacoustic music, where there are human performers (for instance a laptop performance), the performance element is very often (though not always) low-key and down-staged. Because of the largely academic setting of electroacoustic music, the music does not usually aim to fulfil the same purposes as typical staged performances, and the aim is therefore not necessarily to engage the audience in the same way. The absence of a mainstream audience contributes to the absence of staging in the sense that, when performed, the music is not bound by the same principles as the more mainstreamed types of music (orchestral music, rock music, music theatre etc.). The goal is not to entertain a paying audience. Attention is focused on the music itself, and perhaps the same could be said of the more conventional orchestral concert setting. However, depending on the repertoire, it is easy to imagine that a familiar Beethoven symphony could be entertaining for an untrained listener given our cultural familiarity with the function and qualities of the orchestra and with Beethoven‘s privileged name throughout history more broadly. And in this way, being present for a rock concert or an orchestral work is as much about the music as it is about the experience of being present for its display. Acousmatic music, on the other hand, does not rely upon the performance as a spectacle for the audience.

It becomes apparent, then, that electroacoustic music does not rely on the written score or the performer in the same way as other kinds of Western music, and given that our relationship to the canon has long been constructed as a literate one, it is no wonder that questions surrounding how we might listen to the music become an issue. When you consider the veracity and ubiquity of music theory that, I am arguing, perpetuates a predominantly visual approach to music, it is difficult to envisage how electroacoustic music might fit in.

141 In addition to Bayle‘s Acousmonium another example could be the performance of live sound diffusion of acousmatic music. 108

3.5.2 Vision and Attention Crary‘s argument is that vision has too often been posed as an apologetic problem, and that to proclaim the authority of vision is erroneous because what usually constitutes a domain of the visual is more often than not an effect of complex power relations.142 In other words, Crary is suggesting that the perceived hegemony of vision is one that is a constructed hegemony. The very idea of attentiveness (that is evidenced in acousmatic music) is concerned with subjectivity. The notion of the gaze, for example, is concerned with the way a subject is positioned through the eyes of the viewer.143 Attention is therefore about how an observer is able to claim their own perception but it is also a mechanism for power insofar as it leaves the observer open to coercion.144 Spectacular culture, according to Crary, relies upon strategies that isolate and separate individuals, and they inhabit time as dis-empowered.145 These power relations functioned to make the subject productive during the 19th century through increasing the capacity for paying attention, and by increasing the utility of the body.146 Clearly, these ideas draw on and resonate with Foucault‘s conception of docile bodies that I outlined earlier.

Spectacular culture is therefore about reducing the subject‘s attentive field for the sake of docility. The emphasis on concentrated listening through the discourse of acousmatic music is essentially a ‗problem of attention‘ constructed through an epistemological framework that cites a hegemony of vision. In this way, attention imitates ‗real‘ experience but it also compensates for it.147 This suggests that there is something to be compensated for – a desire for the real that can never fully be reconciled by the subject and thus can only be qualified as a ‗lack‘.

The discursive framework of visual culture means that knowledge can only operate within the norms offered for this paradigm. Discourses therefore have effects and the effects of the governance of vision in relation to electroacoustic music equate to a

142 Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 3. 143 ‗The gaze‘ is a concept typically associated with Jacques Lacan. Theorists such as Laura Mulvey and Michel Foucault have developed these ideas. For example see Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke, England and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 144 Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 5. 145 Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 3. 146 Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 4. 147 Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 361. 109

‗lack of‘. Speaking specifically about Schaeffer‘s piece Étude aux chemins de fer, Sean Higgins says that ‗there is no score to intuit, as the ‗score‘ is inseparable from the piece itself. There is no musical notation, no transcendental instance against which it stands.‘148 Therefore, the ontological nature of the recording has a fundamentally different presence to that of the written score and the performance (as a representation of the written score) primarily because it is not acting as a representation of anything else – there is no object to represent.149 If music is constructed according to the hegemony of vision (by favouring literacy) then it starts to become clear that electroacoustic music does not always fulfil the visual, literate element of the history of music theory and all of its relations. Furthermore, in channelling the listener‘s attention to the sound through the loudspeaker, the relationship to visual, spectacular culture is severed. Thus, the ability to render subjects docile, according to Foucault, occurs on the plane of being able to enact disciplinary measures that arise out of a standard that seeks to make subjects visible.150

3.6 Power and Resistance At this point, it is important to reiterate the fact that conventional approaches to ear- training (as outlined above) are, as systems of power, not solely oppressive forces. It is easy to fall into the trap of framing these ear-training systems as forces that control listening subjects, and as systems that impose disciplinary measures on subjects because this is how power and control are often conceived. However, the problems with this view are many. Firstly, it assumes that power is a top-down system and that it is apprehended by some governing agent who exists at the top of an imaginary hierarchy. At the level of the subject it assumes that subjects come to systems tabula rasa and without history, as if, through power, subjects become passive and can therefore be programmed to follow instructions independently of all of their previous experiences.151 And lastly, that this also assumes that subjects do not have a choice about whether they comply or resist. 152 Of course, one of the many criticisms of

148 Sean Higgins 'A Deleuzian Noise/Excavating the Body of Abstract Sound' in Brian Clarence Hulse and Nick Nesbitt, eds., Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Theory and Philosophy of Music (Farnham, Surrey ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 69. 149 Higgins 'A Deleuzian Noise,‘ 69. 150 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 171. 151 Foucault and Gordon, Power/Knowledge, 98-99. 152 Mills, Michel Foucault, 40. 110

Foucault‘s ideas on resistance is that if resistance is a necessary part of power (as he says it is) then this diminishes the agency of subjects who do resist.153 As Mills explains, ‗given Foucault‘s model of power, it is difficult to account for the fact that these individuals have chosen to oppose and challenge oppression, rather than to simply acquiesce.‘154 Despite this criticism, Mills suggests that Foucault‘s point was that resistance to oppressive forces occurs frequently (because power cannot exist without resistance) and, with that, he navigates away from the notion that the subject is inactive.155 In this way, Foucault‘s conception of resistance has been useful for minority groups as a strategy to move away from master-slave or oppressor-victim models of power relationships and I return to this idea in later chapters.156

The relationship of power to resistance is fundamental to Foucault‘s conception of power. He explains:

There are no relations of power without resistances; the latter are all the more real and effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised; resistance to power does not have to come from elsewhere to be real, nor is it inexorably frustrated through being the compatriot of power. It exists all the more by being in the same place as power; hence, like power, resistance is multiple and can be integrated in global strategies.157

In this way, resistance is essential to power such that without resistance, power cannot be seen to exist. Foucault, however, argues that power does exist, and so does resistance. If power is a network of relationships, and if it is dispersed across networks (such that it is not easily localisable) then resistance occupies the same space.158 Resistance need not be considered solely as a revolutionary force, though it is power that makes revolution and reform possible.159 Earlier in the chapter I mapped some of the disciplinary forces of ear-training as they become disciplined in

153 Mills, Michel Foucault, 40. 154 Mills, Michel Foucault, 40. 155 Mills, Michel Foucault, 40. 156 Mills, Discourse, 37. 157 Foucault and Gordon, Power/Knowledge, 142. 158 Brent L. Pickett, "Foucault and the Politics of Resistance," Polity 28, no. 4 (1996): 458. 159 Foucault and Gordon, Power/Knowledge, 142-45. 111 a conventional, musical context. These are forces that work on the ears and brains of subjects and they are forces to which I can personally attest. At this juncture it is possible to map out some of the processes of power and resistance as they come to construct the listening subject as permeable and mutable. I have maintained that Foucault conceived of power as a force that was not solely oppressive. In the case of ear-training, for instance, it would be false to conceive of a single, unified power that seeks to indoctrinate subjects, and similarly, it would be false to conceive of subjects solely as docile objects of subordination to this power. In his reading of Foucault, Gilles Deleuze remarks:

What is power? Foucault‘s definition seems a very simple one: Power is a relation between forces, or rather every relation between forces is a ‗power relation‘. In the first place we must understand that power is not a form, such as the State-form; and that the power relation does not lie between two forms, as does knowledge. In the second place, force is never singular but essentially exists in relation with other forces, such that any force is already a relation, that is to say power: force has no other object or subject than force.160

Deleuze is highlighting the notion that the institutional machines that make possible these ear-training processes are in themselves multiple and are in themselves effects of other relations of power. Furthermore, it is useful to think about power as a strategy (or perhaps, series of strategies) that, Kendall and Wickham point out, ‗maintains a relation between the sayable and the visible‘.161 Power does not exercise agency and cannot function to make listening subjects acquiesce (even though this might be one of its possible effects) nor can it make subjects acquiesce entirely anyway. It is easy to trace the effects of power if we imagine there to be only one force involved, especially when it is imagined to be focusing its attention downwards onto subjects. The point here is that power is often not one single force, and for this reason, it is difficult to achieve (and identify) one standardised result in subjects.

160 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand, Continuum International Publishing Group (London and New York 2006 first English translation published in 1988 by the Athlone Press), 59. 161 Kendall and Wickham, Using Foucault's Methods, 49. 112

The production and consumption of music, Jodie Taylor contends, functions in a performative manner that ‗constitute(s) an assemblage of identity-markers.‘162 This means that music plays an important role in the self-structuring procedures of subjects. Music offers multiple entry points of subjectification for listeners (where subjects can engage in processes of self-identification, self-structuration and subject re-formation) and it can also function to deny access at these entry points by moving to exclude, marginalise and ‗other‘ subjects. Often, these structuring processes, regardless of whether subjects are aware of them or not, are rendered on the assumption that listeners are familiar with the conventions of Western music, conventions that are imbued with politics. In their assumption that the subject is universal, these forces often fail to account for a listener‘s very specific subjectivity, therefore they are often not wholly internalised, and thus, they are or, can be, resisted.

162 Jodie Taylor, Playing It Queer: Popular Music, Identity and Queer World-Making (Bern; New York: Peter Lang, 2012), 43. 113

Chapter 4. Enunciative Modalities of Listening to Electroacoustic Music

In the previous chapter, I examined how the notion of ear-training emerges as a disciplinary practice that systematically forms its objects of musical knowledge (such as the note or tone, the interval, rhythm and metre), and in particular, how ear- training becomes discursively produced through a set of disciplinary practices that comes to be taken as self-evident. I argued that, despite ear-training appearing to be fundamental to pedagogical musical frameworks, it is positioned in terms that are both limited and limiting. Furthermore, I demonstrated that these limitations result in a notion of listening that is conceived through a visual, epistemological framework that conflates listening with literacy. In this way, learning to listen is equated to learning to listen to music that falls within the realms of ‗conventional‘ music. For instance, traditional ear-training practices are disciplined in such a way that they reinforce conventional conceptions of music. Conventional conceptions of music, however, imply that the music is scored, thus reduced to a visual medium that is made up of discrete units of musical information (notes etc.) and their relations within a system of norms that must be learnt and adhered to. Students undergoing typical aural training classes are taught that pitch is the most important element of music: they are given exercises that involve accurately converting pitch, intervals, melody, chords and harmony into their notated forms. As a disciplinary practice, ear- training appears to be neutral in that it simply tests the ability of a listener to accurately listen and to produce answers that are either right or wrong. Further, it teaches skills that are assumed to be good for listeners of all musics. I challenged this positivist positioning of ear-training as neutral and objective by demonstrating how these methods are imbued with assumptions surrounding value and universality. In the same way that music emerges out of very specific social, political and cultural conditions so, too, do the methods we use to engage it.

114

In the context of electroacoustic music, however, the notion of listening has been treated to much judicious scrutiny such that its positioning lies in direct contrast to that of ear-training in the conventional setting. As Demers points out:

With the latitude to use both conventional musical figures and random, seemingly unintentional sounds, electroacoustic composers have generated an amount of theoretical literature concerning the act of listening that is unrivalled in any other genre of music. This literature argues over the extent to which composers, materials, and listeners themselves can control the listening process. At its heart, this discourse is concerned with the signifying properties of sound: whether sound can be heard separately from any social, cultural, natural, or historical associations.1

Conventional pedagogical musical settings treat listening as self-evident and the act of listening is practically invisible. In contrast, electroacoustic music has devoted much effort to thinking through the problems and issues that are related to listening. These efforts are, by and large, driven by an ethos that is perceived to have emerged in response to the fracturing of twentieth-century music styles, and the ‗crisis of tonality‘ that ensued (as described in Chapter 2). This means that the problem of listening is largely unresolved, at least in the sense that there are no widely agreed- upon methods of training or unitary knowledges of listening. Yet, the production and proliferation of knowledge explicitly dedicated to listening is palpable. If knowledge about listening in its conventional context can be perceived as a relatively whole, self-contained and unquestioned discourse, then listening in an electroacoustic music-specific setting, by comparison, becomes constructed as an object of knowledge and is thoroughly contested. Unlike the previous chapter, that demonstrated how ear-training was taken as self-evident and how the methods of training across the different approaches are similar, this chapter focuses on the construction of listening as an object of knowledge. Listening is an unresolved problem for electroacoustic music and I argue that it is a problem that constitutes the nucleus of the formation of at least four distinct ‗enunciative modalities‘ as they

1 Demers, Listening Through the Noise, 22. 115 function to express areas of the nascent field of electroacoustic music.2 These include ‗acousmatic listening‘, ‗techno-aesthetic listening‘, ‗referential listening‘ and ‗corporeal listening‘ (that will be discussed in the following chapter). I identify these four modalities as they have, to use Foucault‘s words, ‗made possible the formation of a whole group of various objects.‘3 These enunciative modalities, I argue, not only render new musical objects audible but also make possible new ways of speaking about, thinking about and listening to electroacoustic music.

Along these lines I demonstrate how the discourse of listening within electroacoustic music is scattered and diffuse, and how it can be loosely grouped into these enunciative modalities. Accordingly, I examine some of these trajectories in their production of knowledge about listening, and in the following chapters, how they come to construct the listener. In doing this, I will therefore consider a range of existing theoretical and practical approaches to listening in order to demonstrate that the disciplinary construction of this problem is splintered, such that listening to electroacoustic music is treated in uncertain terms and therefore emerges as an object of knowledge and a new area of study. This survey, however, is not intended to be exhaustive (a survey of this kind could be the topic of a thesis in its own right). Rather, it is intended to demonstrate the levels of diversity and discontinuity among listening methods, along with their respective objects of audition. Here, I am concerned primarily with the conditions under which alternative forms of knowledge about listening have emerged. With this, I argue that disciplinary knowledge about listening in an electroacoustic music context is diffuse and it is contested such that even a simple definition of the term ‗electroacoustic music‘ (as I demonstrated in Chapter 2) becomes a difficult task. Thus, the amount of energy that is invested in definition, terminology and methods of listening suggests that these elements have a fundamental role to play in constructing how we come to think about the music by continually challenging prevailing listening practices.

2 Foucault, 'The Formation of Enunciative Modalities' in The Archaeology of Knowledge, 55-61. 3 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 49. 116

4.1 Enunciative Modalities As Foucault points out, ‗the analysis of discourse operates between the twin poles of totality and plethora.‘4 In this way Foucault emphasises coherence as much as inconsistency, contradiction and irregularity. He explains that:

The discursive formation is not therefore a developing totality, with its own dynamism or inertia, carrying with it, in an unformulated discourse, what it does not say, what it has not yet said, or what contradicts it at that moment; it is not a rich, difficult germination, it is a distribution of gaps, voids, absences, limits, divisions.5

In other words, discourse is not simply constituted by its coherence, or by the things that it constructs. Rather, discourse is subject to highly regulated procedures that occur in relation to other discourses and that are regulated by them.6 The enunciative modality is a part of the discursive expression of discourse such that these modes of enunciation, I posit, comprise a part of the discourse of electroacoustic music, and, they give rise to listening as an object of knowledge. The implication that these enunciative modalities constitute coherent and stable parts of one whole discursive field of electroacoustic music would be to miss the point. Foucault‘s own historical analyses are concerned with ‗discontinuity, rupture, threshold, limit, series, and transformation.‘7 Therefore, if these proposed enunciative modalities feel disruptive in their relation to the previous chapter‘s presentation of listening, then that is because they are disruptive, and that is precisely my point.

Enunciative modalities are an element of the formation of discourse. They make possible ways of speaking, knowing, imagining and hearing objects that have not previously occurred in discourse. They are quite literally, Foucault states, forms of expression that are subject to diagnoses of the authority of the expert who produced the discourses, the institutional settings in which the expert produced them, and the

4 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 133. 5 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 134. 6 Foucault explains these processes in Foucault, "The Order of Discourse". 7 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 23. 117 various subject positions that are made possible for subjects to inhabit via these processes.8

4.2 The Enunciative Modality of Acousmatic Listening: As I have explained in previous chapters, the term ‗acousmatic‘ is used across electroacoustic music in different and complex ways. At the time when Schaeffer was first experimenting with music and sound, the term ‗acousmatic‘ was atypical. Recording equipment was considered specialist, the methods used for recording were crude, and the ways in which people experienced music were vastly different from today. Today, the term ‗acousmatic‘ is much more encompassing than what it was at its inception.9 Schaeffer claims to have coined the term ‗acousmatic‘ and this is first mentioned in his autobiographical diary in 1948. However, the origins of the term have been debated.10 Despite this, his contribution to the discourse of listening cannot be underestimated. In addition to being an important discursive compositional figure, Schaeffer wrote one of the most thoroughly systematised and comprehensive approaches to listening to electroacoustic music and to sound more broadly. This is reflected in the fact that his music theory has been taken up, commented upon, revised, extended and rejected by composers and theorists ever since.11

In Chapter 2 I suggested that one of the most fundamental challenges facing electroacoustic music relates to the lack of systematised language and vocabulary. As Brian Kane argues:

8 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 55-61. 9 See for example Clarke, "The Impact of Recording on Listening." 10 Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music, 14. The origins of this term have also been debated. See, for example, the differences between the explanations offered by Chion and by Kane. Chion, Guide to Sound Objects, 12. Brian Kane, "L'objet Sonore Maintenant: Pierre Schaeffer, Sound Objects and the Phenomenological Reduction," Organised Sound 12, no. 01 (2007): 24. 11 François Bayle, "Image-of-Sound, or I-Sound: Metaphor/Metaform," Contemporary Music Review 4 (1989); Jacqueline Caux, Almost Nothing with Luc Ferrari: Interviews with Texts and Imaginary Autobiographies by Luc Ferrari, trans. Jérôme Hansen (California: USA: Errant Bodies Press, 2013); Robert Normandeau, "A Revision of the Tartyp Published by Pierre Schaeffer" (paper presented at the Electroacoustic Music Studies Conference: Heritage and Future, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2009); Elizabeth Anderson, "An Interview with Annette Vande Gorne, Part One," Computer Music Journal 36, no. 1 (2012). John Dack, "Excentric Sounds/Balanced Sounds and the 'Sublime'" (paper presented at the Electroacoustic Music Studies Conference: Musique concrète - 60 years later, Paris, France, 2008). 118

The most important tool for establishing an aesthetic of electroacoustic music is language. We must have words to express and explain what we do as much as we must engage in doing.12

Furthermore, Dennis Smalley points out that:

The lack of terminology is a serious problem confronting electroacoustic music because a description of sound materials and their relationships is a prerequisite for evaluative discussion.13

The lack of an implemented vocabulary for the discussion of electroacoustic music is particularly significant because without a language to underpin the music, it is vulnerable to criticism and to condemnation.14 Furthermore, without formalised mechanisms to discuss the music there can be no formalised systems to analyse it, to understand its compositional procedures, to understand the music, to communicate our understanding, and, most importantly to begin to think about how listeners might engage the music and make sense of their experiences. Thus, a lack of standardised language impacts the ways we can discuss and analyse the music, but as I have been arguing, it also impacts the ways we listen to it. Thoughts are filtered through language, and when there is no language to think about music, it becomes difficult to envisage what kinds of listening experiences are possible.

As the most comprehensive and clearly defined of the four enunciative modalities, ‗acousmatic listening‘ constitutes a mode of listening that had not previously existed and that was developed relatively independently of the disciplinary practices and ideologies that had come to underpin the Western canon. The ‗enunciative modality of acousmatic listening‘, then, directly challenges the prevailing discipline of listening that had, for centuries, been accepted and considered immutable (see Chapter 3). In this way, listening becomes re-disciplined through the practice of sound identification and typo-morphological sound classification/description. Such

12 Brian Kane, ‗At the Threshold of an Aesthetic‘ in Emmerson, The Language of Electroacoustic Music, 118. 13 Denis Smalley, ‗Spectro-Morphology and Structuring Processes‘ in Emmerson, The Language of Electroacoustic Music, 63. 14 Smalley, ‗Spectro-Morphology and Structuring Processes,‘ 93. 119 disciplining is reflected upon by Annette Vande Gorne who is a prominent electroacoustic music composer trained in the Schaefferian tradition. Vande Gorne remarks:

The system permits me to ―find myself‖ by classifying sounds. Pierre Henry said, ―I classify, therefore, I compose,‖ and I think that it‘s true. By virtue of this classification, one can give a personal vision to the entire sonic universe that one has recorded at the tip of a microphone. One can then make relationships between different sounds through the typology. Something that I also discovered, and which I think is very important, is the notion of ―grain‖ that Schaeffer developed in his classification system. This really helped me to think about sound as matter. One doesn‘t think about this in the European classical music world where, on the contrary, one avoids the imperfections in sound material.15

This is a very real example of the ways in which power functions to produce new encounters with sounds that had not yet been made available. Furthermore, it demonstrates the ways in which a different form of listening emerges with new objects of audition that stand separate from those found in conventional music and ear-training procedures. The ‗enunciative modality of acousmatic listening‘ is therefore characterised by its capacity to render new sound objects audible (and knowable as objects of knowledge) through disciplinary practices. Manifest within this modality are concerns that the language and vocabulary available to the listener may constrain their capacity to know and to hear the sound object as it is dislocated from its means of production (if at all this is possible) and, as it is categorised and described. Schaeffer sought to remedy this by adopting language from the already well-established and well-supported discipline of philosophy.

4.2.1 Musique Concrète In his autobiographical diary Schaeffer explains what he means by the term ‗musique concrète‘:

15 Anderson, "An Interview with Annette Vande Gorne, Part One," 11. 120

I have coined the term Musique Concrète for this commitment to compose with materials taken from ―given‖ experimental sound in order to emphasize our dependence, no longer on preconceived sound abstractions, but on sound fragments that exist in reality and that are considered as discrete and complete sound objects, even if and above all when they do not fit in with elementary definitions of music theory.16

Schaeffer felt that ‗conventional‘ music in the Western tradition had become too abstract.17 Conventional music, according to Schaeffer, is typically imagined prior to the music being written down or scored.18 Once it is scored, the music can then be performed. Demers states that ‗Schaeffer regards music notation as a signifier whose relationship to the signified musical idea is arbitrary.‘19 However, for Schaeffer this only applies to the distinct case of ‗pure music‘ of the Western tradition in which the musical meaning can be understood without the sound. In all other cases, musical sound, unlike speech, is the material out of which musical meaning emerges, and it cannot have an arbitrary relation to musical meaning. As Michel Chion explains:

In music the perceptible properties of the basic musical element – note or sound object – maintain a link with the music ―meaning‖ – whatever one understands by this word which is not arbitrary.20

In other words, the sonic realisation of music is abstracted in and by notational processes and is therefore, very clearly, not arbitrary.

Schaeffer‘s extensive framework (the program of music research) arose out of compositional, musical experiments in sound, and ever-present throughout his autobiographical diary is one of the primary concerns for the music, for musique concrète: how to listen to it. Additionally, Schaeffer‘s concern for the possibility that the music would not be received as music (a possibility that was not without warrant as I have mentioned earlier) was potentially a part of what drove the

16 Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music, 14. 17 Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music, 25. 18 Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music, 25. 19 Demers, Listening Through the Noise, 25. 20 Chion, Guide to Sound Objects, 84. My emphasis. 121 painstakingly carved out theories that underpinned musique concrète. As Kane remarks:

From the very inception of musique concrète – before he articulated his project in terms of acousmatics – Schaeffer‘s desideratum was to articulate an art of listening appropriate to his compositions, a way of conveying to others how to listen to musique concrète.21

Although most of Schaeffer‘s writing remains untranslated from French, there are a few key entry points into the ideas.22 This means that those non-French speakers who wish to engage with Schaeffer‘s ideas directly (myself included) must rely heavily on translated, second- or third-hand accounts of his work.

North and Dack point out that Schaeffer is considered to be the inventor of musique concrète and that this has been his lasting legacy. However, North and Dack stress the important compositional, theoretical and pedagogical work that Schaeffer undertook that both supported and underpinned his music.23 They explain:

A la recherché d’une musique concrete contains the first hints of Schaeffer‘s sophisticated attitude regarding the effects of technology on the processes of composition and listening. Schaeffer frequently used the term gènèraliser, and it is important to remember that his ideas, particularly in later works such as the Traitè des objets musicaux (1966), can be applied beyond their obvious origins of studio practice. For example, analyses of the status and role of the musical instrument (always a contentious issue in contemporary technological contexts) benefit from Schaeffer‘s insights.24

21 Brian Kane, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014), Book, 26. 22 These include the translation of Schaeffer‘s autobiographical diary offered by North and Dack, the translated version (also translated by North and Dack) of Michel Chion‘s Guide to Sound Objects which functions in a dictionary-like manner and as a guide to Schaeffer‘s ‗Traité des Objets Musicaux’, a book of essays gathered under Polychrome Portraits devoted to the topic of Schaeffer (which features a small previously unpublished essay of his) and lastly the ‘ olf ge de l o jet sonore’ (a book and sound recording). 23 Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music, x. 24 Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music, x. 122

In other words, Schaeffer was not simply the founder of musique concrète. To the contrary, Schaeffer‘s work provides an extremely thorough pedagogical framework for thinking about, composing and listening to sound that also rivals conventional conceptions of music theory. This pedagogical framework is one that stands in contrast to (but not necessarily in opposition to) the ways in which the fundamentals and conventions of music are typically conceived because it accounts for complex sounds while still having relevance to acoustic instruments.

It is difficult to summarise Schaeffer‘s approach to listening without taking into consideration the full theoretical position, the social/cultural climate and the broader circumstances out of which it arose. That being said, however, a full account of such things could be the topic of a thesis in its own right, and can, in fact, be found in writing elsewhere.25 My goal here, then, is to engage directly with Schaeffer‘s conception of listening as it gave rise to new ways of knowing, thinking and listening, as it contrasts with the conventional ear-training models described in the previous chapter, and as it relates to the formation of new objects of knowledge.

Without romanticising, the fact remains that Schaeffer was more than just a sound engineer. Schaeffer felt, like many of his contemporaries, that music had exhausted all of its creative potential. Thus, through experiments with sound (namely the cut bell and closed groove experiments),26 and through his knowledge of phenomenology, Schaeffer firmly believed that a new musical paradigm was possible. As Schaeffer states:

25 For example see Taylor, Strange Sounds., Marc Battier, "What the Grm Brought to Music: From Musique Concrète to Acousmatic Music," Organised Sound 12, no. 03 (2007)., Carlos Palombini, "Machine Songs V: Pierre Schaeffer: From Research into Noises to Experimental Music," Computer Music Journal 17, no. 3 (1993). Lasse Thoresen and Andreas Hedman, "Spectromorphological Analysis of Sound Objects: An Adaptation of Pierre Schaeffer's Typomorphology," Organised Sound 12, no. 02 (2007). 26 These experiments suggested that when a sound is sampled and repeated it loses its perceived origin or identifying qualities and, when the sustaining resonant element was removed from a recorded bell sample the sample took on different sound characteristics which no longer resembled the sound of a bell. 123

As long as we stay with ordinary instruments and the usual symbolism, the formal and material development of music will necessarily be limited to combinations of instruments and combinations of notes.27

This new musical paradigm not only included the production and composition of new music (musique concrète) but it also accounted for a new way of listening to music (reduced listening) and a new way of thinking about and composing with sound (the sound object and the program for music research) that did not exclusively refer to acoustic instruments or have a preoccupation with musical ‗notes‘ (as I have suggested is the case with conventional music theory). Schaeffer‘s work was also sensitive to the impact of what were at the time new recording technologies on the compositional, performance and listening processes (the acousmatic situation). In this way, Schaeffer‘s music theory was concerned with the identification of, classification of and description of musique concrète. These ideas form the basis of the ‗enunciative modality of acousmatic listening‘ in the sense that the identification of the sound object and the capacity to classify and describe the sound object (via the typo-morphology) constitute the formation of a new way of knowing, This makes it possible for new ways of thinking, speaking and listening to emerge.

4.2.1.1 Reduced Listening and the Phenomenological Reduction Reduced listening is the specific mode of audition that emerges within the ‗enunciative modality of acousmatic listening‘ such that it renders the sound object audible to the listener. This sound object, as a new object of audition, stands in contrast to those objects that were rendered audible in conventional contexts.

Chion provides a detailed explanation of reduced listening. He says that officially, reduced listening is ‗the listening attitude which consists in listening to the sound for its own sake, as a sound object, by removing its real or supposed source and the meaning it may convey.‘28 In other words, reduced listening is the ideal way to listen to musique concrète and it is this specific mode of listening that emerges through the ‗enunciative modality of acousmatic listening‘. The term ‗reduced listening‘ is derived from the field of philosophy, more specifically, phenomenology. Like the

27 Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music, 118. 28 Chion, Guide to Sound Objects, 30. Emphasis in original. 124 phenomenological reduction that functions to bracket out all preconceived knowledge of the external, objective world for the benefit of focusing on the experience of perception (a process called epoché), reduced listening functions to bracket out the origins and the social/cultural meanings of sound in order to focus attention on the sound object. In other words, the goal of reduced listening is for the listener to exclude all referential and source material from the sound so as to appreciate the sound for the sake of itself and to draw attention to the listener‘s own perceptual capacities. This of course, is an approach to listening that is not standard and must therefore be learned. Demers points out that ‗with sufficient discipline, though, Schaeffer was certain that reduced listening was possible.‘29

Reduced listening stands in contrast to conventional musical listening practices (such as those that have been outlined in the previous chapter) but also, in contrast to practices that Schaeffer broadly refers to as ‗natural‘ or ‗ordinary‘ listening (although there are several other listening modes Schaeffer specifically outlines and I will return to these shortly). To cite Chion:

In ―ordinary‖ listening the sound is always treated as a vehicle. Reduced listening is therefore an ―anti-natural‖ process, which goes against all conditioning. The act of removing all our habitual references in listening is a willed and artificial act which allows us to clarify many phenomena implicit in our perception.30

Reduced listening, however, is the second phenomenological reduction. The first reduction is what happens by virtue of the acousmatic situation (also called the acousmatic reduction or acousmatic experience) whereby the listener is already once removed from the source of the sound by way of the mediation of sound through the loudspeaker that, as Chion claims, functions in a similar way to Pythagoras‘ veil.31 As Kane suggests:

29 Demers, Listening Through the Noise, 28. 30 Chion, Guide to Sound Objects, 31. 31 Chion, Guide to Sound Objects, 12. 125

The introduction of the acousmatic reduction is modeled on Husserl‘s epoché. By barring visual access to the source of the sound, it is intended to draw our attention to the sounds‘ immanent properties and objectivity.32

The acousmatic situation, created by listening to sound through loudspeakers and by removing visual material, thereby reduces the field of sound into a purely audible domain.33

Reduced listening is a means to access what Schaeffer calls ‗the sound object‘ or objet sonore and, as I mentioned previously, the listener can access the sound object during the second phase in the phenomenological reduction. Again, this is terminology that is borrowed from the philosophical sub-discipline of phenomenology where it is fully theorised and thus very specific. The sound object is at the very foundation of reduced listening and, as Demers describes it, the sound object ‗was Schaeffer‘s means of discussing sound material as separate from its notation, its means of production, and the listener‘s state of mind.‘34 The sound object, then, refers to both the sound itself (as a complex sound mass derived from pre-existing elements) and the way in which the sound is perceived (the sound object is perceived as one whole, discrete sound akin to a gestalt).35 Speaking about Schaeffer, Emmerson explains:

Not only (according to his view) was source identification (and any associated ‗meaning‘) unnecessary, it was misleading, and distracted from the establishment of a potential musical discourse: carefully chosen objet sonores become objets musicaux through studio montage (their relationship to other sounds) guided by the listening ear. The necessary skills were developed in a thorough training combining research and practice.36

The reciprocal relationship between listening and composing is supplemented by theorising sound objects via the typo-morphology. The typology and morphology,

32 Kane, Sound Unseen, 24. 33 Kane, Sound Unseen, 30. 34 Demers, Listening Through the Noise, 26. 35 Chion, Guide to Sound Objects, 32. 36 Emmerson, Living Electronic Music, 5. 126 just two parts of Schaeffer‘s five-part program of musical research, provide a platform for identifying, classifying and describing complex sounds from which composers can make selections and judgements regarding the appropriateness of a particular sound object for a piece of musique concrète. This process requires a discerning ear and familiarity with the terminology required to adequately identify, classify and describe complex sounds. Chion describes the typo-morphology as ‗models for a method.‘37 The first phase is sound identification or ‗typology‘ and this is expressed via one of the many tables that Schaeffer created. The table is referred to by Schaeffer as the TARTYP (The Tableau Récapitulatif de la Typologie) or Summary Table of Typology. Without detailing the specifics (this can be found elsewhere)38 the TARTYP comprises 29 types of sound objects some of which include pitched instruments.39 However, depending on the context and circumstance, some types of sound objects will be suitable as sound objects while other sound objects will not. The morphology (along with parts of the other five stages of the program), is also detailed in table form, called Tableau Récapitulatif du Solfège des Objets Musicaux or summary table of music theory of musical objects (TARSOM).40 In this sense the classification of sound via the typology is an important phase in the program of musical research. Furthermore, it constitutes a significant component of the ‗enunciative modality of acousmatic listening‘ in the sense that it suggests the emergence of a different mode of discourse. Broadly speaking, a typology functions as a system of classification for objects that sorts them into types. Within the context of the ‗enunciative modality of acousmatic listening‘, the typology functions as an auxiliary to the development of a systematised language, and it aids in the analysis of sounds by identifying, classifying and describing them.41 In this way, the basis of epistemic knowledge within this particular enunciative modality can be formulated according to a set of principles that seeks to classify sound according to a typology.

37 Chion, Guide to Sound Objects, 107. 38 Chion, Guide to Sound Objects, 107. 39 A full English translation of the TARTYP table is published in Chion, Guide to Sound Objects, 195. 40 A full English translation of the TARSOM table is published in Chion, Guide to Sound Objects, 199-200. 41 Rob Weale, "'Typo-Morphology', English Definition.," http://ears.dmu.ac.uk/.Accessed 5th May, 2016. 127

4.1.1.2 The Four Listening Modes The extent to which these two tables (the TARTYP and the TARSOM) relate to the listening experience is presented in yet another schematic via Schaeffer‘s four listening modes that are: listening, perceiving, hearing and comprehending.42 Listening, the first mode, in which the word has a more specific meaning than it does in common usage, refers to an intentional act on the part of the listener that attends to the source or the cause of any sound.43 Smalley explains this listening mode as an ‗information gathering‘ mode of listening in which a listener is attuned to the information being transmitted with the sound, rather than the quality of the sound itself.44 Perceiving, on the other hand, the second mode of listening, is a passive act, and is perhaps the most basic in that it literally refers to the psycho-physiological reception of sounds through the ear and the way in which sounds emerge from the unconscious background.45 The perception of a sound, for example, requires no intention to listen – it is something that simply happens. Hearing, the third mode, again used in a more specific way than to its conventional usage, relates to a subject‘s intention or choice to focus on particular aspects of any given sound that therefore determines what it is that is heard.46 And, lastly, comprehending functions semantically – in which the listener not only perceives the sound but also understands what that sound means.47 Modes three and four (hearing and comprehending), Smalley explains, are the two modes of listening that are engaged when listening to music.48

The four modes of listening also have a set of related terms, opposites that, according to Schaeffer, are engaged throughout every act of perception, and Schaeffer calls these the ‗abstract‘ and the ‗concrete‘ (one oppositional pairing) and the ‗objective‘ and ‗subjective‘ (another oppositional pairing).49 The ‗abstract‘ and the ‗concrete‘ both derive from the processes involved in musique concrète (sound materials

42 A full English translation of the four listening modes table is published in Chion, Guide to Sound Objects, 21. 43 Chion, Guide to Sound Objects, 20. 44 Denis Smalley, "The Listening Imagination: Listening in the Electroacoustic Era," Contemporary Music Review 13, no. 2 (1996): 78. 45 Demers, Listening Through the Noise, 27. 46 Landy, Understanding the Art of Sound Organization, 81. 47 Chion, Guide to Sound Objects, 20. 48 Smalley, "The Listening Imagination," 79. 49 Chion, Guide to Sound Objects, 37. 128 derived from concrete sources for the purpose of deriving ‗abstract musical values from [them]‘ that is the opposite of ‗classical‘ music and of serial music).50 The abstract correlates to the third and fourth modes of listening (hearing and comprehending respectively). This is because, to cite Chion, ‗the object is stripped down to qualities that describe perception (3) or constitute a language, express a meaning (4).‘51 While the concrete relates to the first and second modes of listening (listening and perceiving retrospectively) due to the fact that the sound sources (listening, mode 1) and bare sounds (perceiving, mode 2) are limitless and they are pre-given.52 The pair should, ideally, be balanced within any compositional process.53 For example, Chion states that a sound object should be formed through the interaction between the abstract and the concrete that refer back to the object – as opposed to the object being formulated to derive an abstract meaning or a concrete source.54 The ‗objective‘ relates to listening modes one (listening) and four (comprehending) in the sense that attention is focused on the object. The ‗subjective‘ relates to listening modes two (perceiving) and three (hearing) because attention is focused on ‗the activity of the perceiving subject.‘55 In this way, the discursive strategy brings into existence new ways of conceiving of and describing listening experiences, and it also brings into being new ways to discuss them.

The sorting of sound objects into the categories provided by the typo and spectro- morphologies encourages a close listening relationship with complex sound, and in particular to timbre (although Schaeffer eventually found that the term ‗timbre‘ was inadequate).56 This relationship to timbre does exist in conventional contexts insofar as it implies that a listener must have the capacity to distinguish between instruments (the difference between a violin and a flute for example) and, to some degree, between the different ways an instrument might be played (for instance, the difference between a violin being bowed or plucked). This process is, however, characterised solely by the source of the sound. Further, as James A. Steintrager

50 Chion, Guide to Sound Objects, 37. 51 Chion, Guide to Sound Objects, 21. 52 Chion, Guide to Sound Objects, 21. 53 Chion, Guide to Sound Objects, 21. 54 Chion, Guide to Sound Objects, 37. 55 Chion, Guide to Sound Objects, 21. 56 Timbre, as Schaeffer discovered, is a simplified term for a complicated set of phenomena which, despite popular conception, is not simply reducible to the frequency spectrum of a sound. For a more detailed account of Schaeffer‘s views on timbre see Chion, Guide to Sound Objects, 48-52. 129 explains, timbre is seldom notated and it is typically unnotatable; thus, it is an often ambiguous and problematic concept in the Western tradition.57 In this sense, the ‗enunciative modality of acousmatic listening‘ transforms existing conceptions of timbre (that exist in neglected, vague and unspecific terms) into an object of knowledge. Timbre, as it emerges here, is treated in far more specific terms than it is in common usage.

4.2.2 Smalley‟s „Spectro-Morphology‟ Extending on Schaeffer, Smalley‘s spectro-morphology lays the foundations for thinking through compositional structures and a language of electroacoustic music. However, this is not spectro-morphology‘s only function. Once the language and way of thinking has been established, the spectro-morphology functions as a framework for thinking through compositional structures and for describing/ analysing electroacoustic music.58

Smalley argues that reduced listening is possible in specific contexts and under particular circumstances, and that, in fact, reduced listening is essential to spectro- morphology.59 Smalley, however, warns that reduced listening should not be considered the ultimate goal of the listening experience because it encourages a listener‘s attention towards micro details (Smalley refers to these as intrinsic qualities) and thus reduces a listener‘s capacity to appreciate the overarching quality of a work as a coherent whole.60 This is especially problematic for composers of electroacoustic music who might be unable to detach from micro details that would impact the overarching quality of the work and that most listeners would not perceive anyway. That said, however, when listeners exercise spectro-morphological procedures, attention is focused on the intrinsic qualities of the work. 61

57 James A. Steintrager, 'Closed Grooves, Open Ears' in Sound an Acoulogical Treatise, trans. James A. Steintrager (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), vii. 58 Denis Smalley, "Spectromorphology: Explaining Sound-Shapes," Organized Sound 2, no. 2 (1997): 107. 59 Smalley, "Spectromorphology: Explaining Sound-Shapes," 111. 60 Smalley, "Spectromorphology: Explaining Sound-Shapes," 111. 61 Smalley, "Spectromorphology: Explaining Sound-Shapes," 110. 130

Both Schaeffer and Smalley point out that all musical works hinge upon the balance between the ‗abstract‘ and ‗concrete‘ (using Schaeffer‘s terminology and meaning).62 However, Smalley explains that listeners tend to be more familiar with the objective aspects of sounds (such as their physical causes) and less familiar with the abstract, subjective and intrinsic qualities – hence the need to acquire and practice the skills necessary for reduced listening. Smalley therefore synthesises Schaeffer‘s four modes of listening into three and re-names them ‗listening relationships‘.63 Smalley prefers the term ‗listening relationships‘ as opposed to listening modes because he views this process as fluid and as moving through subtle shifts in perception.64 However, it should be noted that these listening relationships are related directly to Schaeffer‘s modes of listening and they are, like Schaeffer‘s, intended to be descriptive rather than prescriptive.65

4.2.2.1 Listening Relationships The first relationship closely relates to the first of Schaeffer‘s listening modes and Smalley calls this the ‗indicative relationship‘. This relationship refers to the content of the sound or what the sound might be communicating to the listener. Smalley explains that this can either be a passive experience of sound or it can be an active engagement with a sound depending on a listener‘s intention.66 The second relationship, called the ‗reflexive relationship‘, refers to the listener‘s affective response to the sound. This response tends towards being a passive response (although active reflexive relationships are possible) since it functions as an almost primal, emotional response to sound.67 The last of the relationships, the ‗interactive relationship‘, is a continuously active process focused on the qualities of the sound rather than the content of the sound, what it means, or what it is communicating.68

62 Smalley, "Spectro-Morphology and Structuring Processes," 64. 63 Smalley, "The Listening Imagination," 82. 64 Smalley, "The Listening Imagination," 82. 65 Smalley says these listening relationships are ‗designed to summarise the basic relationships between the listener and sounds, between the subject who is perceiving, and the objects of perception‘. Smalley, "The Listening Imagination," 82. 66 Smalley, "The Listening Imagination," 82. 67 Smalley, "The Listening Imagination," 82. 68 Smalley, "The Listening Imagination," 82. 131

Another, fourth mode of listening is discussed in a separate publication and is positioned as being unfavourable. Yet, as Smalley states, it is an often engaged mode of listening that is referred to as ‗technological listening‘.69 Technological listening occurs when a listener is drawn to the technical processes underlying the piece – including how a piece was created, what studio techniques were used, and what processes were used to manipulate sounds.70 As Smalley explains:

Technological listening occurs when a listener ‗perceives‘ the technology or technique behind the music rather than the music itself, perhaps to such an extent that the true musical meaning is blocked.71

Technological listening, Smalley points out, is particularly problematic for composer-listeners who have a tendency to be engrossed in complex technologies for the creation of electroacoustic music. They often lose the capacity to be able to make adequate musical judgements because their judgements have been so impaired by the technology.72

4.2.2.2 Gesture and Texture By virtue of the acousmatic situation, and through the processing and synthesis associated with electroacoustic music more broadly, sounds become dislocated from their sources. Thus gesture, according to Smalley, comes to play an important role in the ways that listeners perceive and value sounds.73 In conventional music, listeners are conditioned to hear the human gesture behind any sound – for example, the audible difference between a violin being bowed and a violin being plucked. However, in the context of electroacoustic music, where sounds are abstracted from their sources, the ability to hear gesture becomes complicated. Smalley employs the phrase ‗gestural surrogacy‘ to describe and define the different relationships between a gesture and its resulting sound and the extent to which listeners can perceive that gesture. Smalley explains:

69 Smalley, " Spectromorphology: Explaining Sound-Shapes," 109. 70 Smalley, " Spectromorphology: Explaining Sound-Shapes," 109. 71 Smalley, " Spectromorphology: Explaining Sound-Shapes," 109 72 Smalley, " Spectromorphology: Explaining Sound-Shapes," 111. 73 Smalley, " Spectromorphology: Explaining Sound-Shapes," 111. 132

Gesture is concerned with action directed away from a previous goal or towards a new goal; it is concerned with the application of energy and its consequences; it is synonymous with intervention, growth and progress, and is married to causality. If we do not know what caused the gesture, at least we can surmise from its energetic profile that it could have been caused, and its spectro-morphology will provide evidence of the nature of such a cause.74

Gestural surrogacy then, refers to the level of perceivable relationship between a sound and the gesture-cause of the sound. Smalley introduces several levels of surrogacy: ‗first-order surrogacy‘, ‗second-order surrogacy‘, ‗remote surrogacy‘ and ‗dislocated surrogacy‘ to describe the various stages of removal.75 Any sound that has a knowable and perceivable gesture-cause belongs in the first-order category.76 For example, first-order surrogacy makes no distinction between an actual finger plucking a violin string, a recording of a finger plucking a violin string and a fully synthesised version of a finger plucking a violin string. All of these sounds, because they have a knowable and perceivable gesture-cause, belong to the first-order. As sounds move away from having knowable and perceivable gesture-causes, they move into second-order surrogacy and remote surrogacy. Remote surrogacy contains very little traceable and discernable connection to gesture-cause. Dislocated surrogacy is therefore where there are absolutely no connections between a sound and its possible gesture-cause. This would perhaps describe fully abstracted sound material and all unfamiliar, fabricated sound material.77

The relationship between gesture and texture plays an important role in spectro- morphological structuring mechanisms for electroacoustic music. The two terms make up a binary that are, ideally, balanced throughout the course of any electroacoustic work. Music that is primarily gestural would sound, according to Smalley, teleological and linear.78 Furthermore, sounds that have weak gestural connections, gestural connections that are slow forming over a long period of time, or have no gestural connections at all, limit the capacity of the listener because they

74 Smalley, "Spectro-Morphology and Structuring Processes," 82. 75 Smalley,"Spectro-Morphology and Structuring Processes," 82-83. See also, Smalley, "Spectromorphology: Explaining Sound-Shapes," 111-12. 76 Smalley, "The Listening Imagination," 85. 77 Smalley, "Spectro-Morphology and Structuring Processes," 83. 78 Smalley, "Spectromorphology: Explaining Sound-Shapes," 113. 133 focus the ear towards intrinsic features of the sound, micro details, such that the overall quality of the work gets lost. In fact, Smalley asks:

Is there a stage at which the dislocation from experience becomes intolerable? … Many a listener‘s problem can be related either to the loss of tangibility created by the severance of direct gestural ties, or to the difficulties in comprehending the remoteness of new surrogacy.79

Sounds that lack strong gestural connections focus attention on the intrinsic qualities of a sound‘s texture. The more removed a sound becomes from its gesture-cause, the more likely it is that the texture will become a stronger audible focus of attention. This means that sounds that lack strong gestural connections could potentially be more disorientating for listeners. As Smalley suggests:

I suggest that if the listener does not discover some gesture-field attributes in a musical work then the music will seem to be distanced from the more intimate, internalized domain of personal experience; the listener may feel as if ‗observing‘ invisible phenomena displayed on a screen or in a space.80

Music that is primarily textural concentrates on micro-level detail at the cost of forward motion.81 Texture, in this case, is concerned with the internal behaviour of sound, and the sound of the sound itself while gesture is more to do with the way that the sound is being produced.

4.2.3 Chion‟s Three Modes of Listening As a member of the GRM and assistant to Schaeffer, Chion was interested in listening within the context of the function of sound within a film and other audio- visual media. Chion has also proposed three listening modes, and although they do not necessarily function as a standalone listening model, they are notable insofar as they offer a slightly different perspective to listening to sound than those already

79 Smalley, "Spectro-Morphology and Structuring Processes," 83. 80 Smalley, "The Listening Imagination," 86. 81 Smalley, "Spectromorphology: Explaining Sound-Shapes," 114. 134 surveyed above.82 Chion refers to the three listening modes as ‗causal listening‘, ‗semantic listening‘ and ‗reduced listening‘. Like Schaeffer‘s ‗listening modes‘ and Smalley‘s ‗listening relationships‘, Chion‘s three modes of listening function descriptively rather than prescriptively.83 These modes of listening can also overlap or can be practised simultaneously.

The first mode is ‗causal listening‘ and it is, perhaps, the polar opposite of Schaeffer‘s reduced listening because it focuses on the cause of a sound. At first this might seem quite straightforward, but Chion warns against a simplification of causal listening given it is often complex.84 For example, the identification of a unique sound source is seldom possible without witnessing (through seeing) precisely what is making the sound and even then, this can be misleading. The human voice has unique characteristics such that it is often recognisable as a voice even after substantial decay of the signal, and it has been the human voice that has proven notoriously difficult to accurately reproduce artificially. Chion argues that when causal listening is engaged, what we typically perceive is a general quality of a sound source rather than its individual or unique features.85 For instance, it might be possible to distinguish particular bird species from their calls and this is a type of generalised causal listening. However, if a group of birds, all from the same species were to call, it might be difficult to ascertain which bird had made which particular call without witnessing the event. Furthermore, Chion points out that a sound, more often than not, has several different sources.86 The sound of writing this thesis, for example, is generated by my fingernails clicking over the keys, by the weight and pressure I apply to the key and the sound of the key being depressed. Chion speculates that causal listening is probably the most common and widely employed of his proposed modes of listening.87

82 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 25. 83 Chion, Audio-Vision, 25. 84 Chion says ‗We must take care not to overestimate the accuracy and potency of causal listening, its capacity to furnish sure, precise data solely on the basis of analyzing sound. In reality, causal listening is not only the most common type but also the most easily influenced and deceptive mode of listening‘. Chion, Audio-Vision, 26. 85 Chion, Audio-Vision, 27. 86 Chion, Audio-Vision, 27. 87 Chion, Audio-Vision, 25. 135

Semantic listening is another complex mode of listening because it involves the ability to interpret a message either via a language or a code – being able to identify and understand the difference between a major scale and a minor scale, for example, or to be able to interpret a language. This mode of listening involves a knowledge and understanding of the conventions and rules that underpin any form of message. For example, a listener might be able to ascertain that someone is speaking in French due to the general qualities of the sounds being produced (nasal, long connected phrasing etc.). However, without any previous knowledge of the words, sounds and grammar of French it would be impossible to determine the meaning of what the French speaker is saying.

The last mode of listening is, of course, reduced listening and Chion uses this mode of listening in much the same way as Schaeffer. However, Chion provides some valuable insight into why it is useful to practise reduced listening and further, why reduced listening has value. As I mentioned earlier, Chion is writing in relation to film, thus his perspective on reduced listening involves a different context for the practice of reduced listening. Importantly, Chion draws attention to the fact that prior to Schaeffer, there was no thorough system for organising and classifying sounds. For example, Chion points out that when speaking about sounds and their qualities, it is often very difficult to define sound without reference to its source, its content or its meaning.88 According to Chion, any description of a sound‘s qualities is often reducible only to ambiguity (the sound is a scratchy sound, for instance). Typically the term ‗timbre‘ is used to describe the qualities of a sound. However, as I have already explained, Schaeffer argued that this term is inadequate. Chion says:

Present everyday language as well as specialized musical terminology are totally inadequate to describe the sonic traits that are revealed when we practice reduced listening on recorded sounds.89

Chion thus highlights the important contribution made by Schaeffer in his attempt to implement a delicately nuanced system for the description and classification of sounds. This system, however, is only possible through reduced listening and the

88 Chion, Audio-Vision, 29. 89 Chion, Audio-Vision, 29. 136 acousmatic situation because of the uniqueness of every sound.90 For example, it is practically impossible to manually repeat the same sound exactly. This means that it is only possible to practise reduced listening on sound that is recorded and therefore precisely repeatable.

The repeatability of sound has further significance in the sense that, as Chion points out, in order to be able practise reduced listening effectively, it is necessary to be able to listen to a sound several times.91 Schaeffer felt that the acousmatic situation was an environment conducive to reduced listening (where because the sound source was obscured listeners were able to focus on the sound object). However, what Chion argues is that the opposite is more often the case – that because the sound source is obscured during the acousmatic situation, listeners become more curious about the cause of the sound and thus their attention becomes fixated on the source.92 Repeatability is imperative in this sense because it functions as a training procedure in many respects. As Chion points out:

When we listen acousmatically to recorded sounds it takes repeated hearings of a single sound to allow us gradually to stop attending to its cause and to more accurately perceive its own inherent traits.93

In this way Chion demonstrates that these three modes of listening can in fact be used, in the context of film, to manipulate listeners in affective and semantic ways. However, I would argue that these principles also have relevance to electroacoustic music.

4.3 The Enunciative Modality of Techno-Aesthetic Listening As I have suggested above, ‗acousmatic listening‘ is identifiable through its specific discursive mode that renders new ways of listening to and engaging with music. These strategies foreground the development of new terms aimed at clarifying taken- for-granted knowledge about listening practices (via the identification, classification and description of the sound object as it becomes audible through these disciplinary

90 Chion, Audio-Vision, 30. 91 Chion, Audio-Vision, 32. 92 Chion, Audio-Vision, 32. 93 Chion, Audio-Vision, 32. 137 practices). The ‗enunciative modality of techno-aesthetic listening‘, by contrast, is characterised explicitly through its relationship to the advent of various electronic media and sound production methods. Initially, this relationship foregrounded the necessity for the composer to exercise absolute and total control over the musical work as it is mediated through the perceived neutrality of technology and as it is organised according to the rigid processes of integral serialism. As Stockhausen explains, ‗we wanted absolutely pure, controllable sounds without the subjective emotional influence of ―interpreters‖.‘94 In this way, sounds were generated electronically and they were organised according to the principles of serialism that allowed for a perceived, total determinism of all musical elements. This way of composing music meant that the performer (as one of the possible ‗interpreters‘ Stockhausen refers to) was largely redundant.95 Additionally, it meant that composers of this music were invested in unbinding music from its capacity to represent, and to ensure its ascendance from any social or cultural grounding.96 The listener, then, is also an ‗interpreter‘, and although it was not the primary aim of the music to deliberately alienate the listener, this alienation was seen as necessary collateral damage. As McClary points out:

Even though Schoenberg, Boulez and Babbitt differ enormously from each other in terms of socio-historical context and music style, they at least share the siege mentality that was given rise to the extreme position we have been tracing: they all regard the audience as an irrelevant annoyance whose approval signals artistic failure.97

Importantly, however, Taruskin argues that the composer‘s own subjectivity, feelings and emotions are also an ‗interpretation‘.98 Even if it was possible that the music transcended the realms of the lived experiences of the listener and the performer, the question remains as to the extent to which the mediation of compositional intent through electronic media and through serial procedures adequately transcends the own interpretation of the composer. Control presupposes

94 Karlheinz Stockhausen, "The Origins of Electronic Music," The Musical Times 112, no. 1541 (1971): 649. 95 Manning, Electronic and Computer Music, 42. 96 Manning, Electronic and Computer Music, 42. 97 McClary. 'Terminal Prestige,' 57. 98 Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century, 43. 138 intent. However, this notion of control became a discursive strategy employed by composers who were promoting total determinacy to denigrate musique concrète.99 In this way, composers of musique concrète were not seen as composers who deliberately and decidedly arranged sounds in specific ways but they were seen as amateurs who had no control over the sounds they were making and arranging.100

As Taylor explains, this suggests problems surrounding human agency as it relates to these new electronic media.101 Musique concrète is positioned as music almost bordering on the random since composers lack control over the sounds they create. Notions of agency and control are tropes frequently evoked in association with debates surrounding the term ‗technology‘, often in the context of modernism. Slack and Macgregor Wise, for example, highlight the issue that control, as it relates to technology, is typically considered according to how technologies are seen as the means to control nature and culture, but also, how they are perceived as escaping human control.102 They point out that this question of control illustrates an essential ‗circularity of many of the arguments about technology and its relation to humans.‘103 As they explain:

If technology is conceived as a matter of control and dependence, of Master and Slave, it is set apart from human culture, treated as autonomous, then either blamed or praised. Either we have control over technology, or it has control over us … Either way we look at it, technology is considered as something apart from human culture. The question of control or determinism simply shifts weight and focus from one side to the other and back again.104

Kendall and Wickham assert that technology is frequently considered in deterministic ways and so theories about technology are often positioned as having an impact on society. 105 However, they argue that systems of technology are the

99 Taylor, Strange Sounds, 51. 100 Robindor and Ferrari, "Luc Ferrari," 10. 101 Taylor, Strange Sounds, 53. 102 'Control' in Slack and Macgregor Wise, Culture and Technology, 51-64. 103 Slack and Macgregor Wise, Culture and Technology, 63. 104 Slack and Macgregor Wise, Culture and Technology, 64. 105 Kendall and Wickham, Using Foucault's Methods, 78. 139

‗embodiment of complex social, cultural and political assumptions.‘106 Additionally, the seemingly neutral nature of technology is brought to mind when terms such as ‗pure‘, ‗synthesised‘ and ‗abstract‘ are used as rhetorical devices to discursively separate ‗techno-aesthetic listening‘ from ‗acousmatic listening‘. If electronic music is, by definition, ‗pure‘, ‗synthesised‘ and ‗abstract‘, then presumably everything else is ‗impure‘, ‗natural‘ (and therefore referential) and ‗concrete‘. The implications of this for the ‗enunciative modality of techno-aesthetic listening‘ are such that listeners must often audibly navigate sounds and processes that are extremely abstract. Speaking about Stockhausen‘s Kreuzspiel (1951), Griffiths explains:

That the process enacted in the music is a way of making it, not a way of hearing it. For the listener, the process lies hidden, and what is heard is a succession of instants, just as, for the observer of the world, elementary laws of physics and genetics – laws Stockhausen might have preferred to interpret as the purposes of God – are concealed behind and within a seeming chaos of phenomena.107

In other words, though the compositional processes are extremely complex, highly determined and decidedly structured, the music tends to sound chaotic, unstructured and indeterminate. Despite this seemingly rigid doctrine, the vast assortment of electronic music is surprisingly difficult to lump together, and as I have suggested in Chapter 2, composers who are often considered in relation to electronic music did not always strictly adhere to these dogmatic principles.108

Here, I am less interested in whether various composers adhered to or rejected the doctrine than I am in the ways in which the ‗enunciative modality of techno-aesthetic listening‘ is formed through these discourses that appear across history. I have previously argued that these discourses are not immutable. Thus, regardless of whether the music strictly conforms to electronically generated sound material or serial procedures is not really the concern. Even after composers relaxed their

106 Kendall and Wickham, Using Foucault's Methods, 78. 107 Griffiths, Modern Music, 43. 108 Manning states that ‗the desire to adopt more flexible approaches to compositional procedure, however fuelled the earlier-noted move away from the strict dogma of the earliest years‘. Manning, Electronic and Computer Music, 67. 140 position on these rigid organisational processes, the abstract quality of the music still remained audible. Like all of the modalities that I am arguing for, the ‗enunciative modality of techno-aesthetic listening‘ is not clear-cut or definitive, and this is evidenced by the sheer variety of musics, composers and theorists that could be considered. Thus, the ‗enunciative modality of techno-aesthetic listening‘ can be identified on the basis that it seeks to render audible the qualities and nature of sounds that are electronically generated. Unlike ‗acousmatic listening‘, that makes possible new ways to identify, categorise and describe the sound object, ‗techno- aesthetic listening‘ has no consolidated doctrine at its foundation beyond these strategies of total determinism or the electronic generation of sounds and their organisation according to the processes of integral serialism. However, as I have already pointed out, these strategies, although initially quite obstinate, became quite hard to police. ‗Techno-aesthetic listening‘, then, appropriates techno-scientific tropes from a range of disciplines outside of music that come to inform the underlying compositional features of the music, and thus become embedded within the music so that the listener will perceive these in ‗pure‘, objective and abstracted ways. The music, in other words, becomes constructed through these tropes but it is also understood through them. Furthermore, the ‗enunciative modality of techno- aesthetic listening‘ functions to consider the qualities of music from a disembodied and pseudo-objective perspective, thus producing conceivably abstract modes of articulating. In this way, the decidedly esoteric qualities of ‗techno-aesthetic listening‘ value an aesthetic of abstraction that equate to an absence of signification.109

4.3.1 Elektronische Musik As I pointed out in Chapter 2, elektronische Musik is a term that is not identical in meaning to its English translation ‗electronic music‘ as the term specifically relates to music that is founded solely on electronically produced sounds.110 In its early stages the music was exclusively dependent upon the kinds of technologies that were available to electronically generate sound. The goals and the problems are encapsulated by Herbert Eimert, as cited in Manning:

109 Taylor, Strange Sounds, 53. 110 Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century, 189. 141

A far reaching, still unresolved question is whether electronic music as a universal source of all sounds possesses any coherent form-sustaining force corresponding to tonality – a self-sustaining system of timbres.111

In this way, the initial purpose was to implement a system for the organisation of rhythm and timbre along the same lines that serial music organises the twelve notes (the tone row) of a chromatic scale. The difficulty for elektronische Musik, as Griffiths asserts, was that rhythm and timbre have no equivalent to the principle of the octave or to the equal temperament system of tuning.112 In other words, there is no way to organise rhythm or timbre into the equivalent of twelve tones – although there were many attempts to do so.113

Taruskin points out that the quintessential examples of these early electronic compositions and experiments with the organisation of timbre were Stockhausen‘s two serial Studien (1953-1954).114 The pieces are significant because they are exemplars of total determinism in which all parameters within the music were organised according to highly elaborate procedures and were generated electronically.115 The sound material in the piece is constructed from a sine wave generator and, as Taruskin suggests, the sine wave is ‗the purest sound of all‘. He explains that sine waves are pure because they are ‗single frequencies without overtones, obtainable only under laboratory conditions in the studio, never in nature‘.116 Interestingly, Toop contests the ideological positioning of the ‗purity‘ of the sine tone and the historical potency it carries.117 In the first of Stockhausen‘s studies, each sound comprises up to six pure frequencies and these combinations of sine tones were called ‗note mixtures‘.118 ‗Note mixtures‘, Manning suggests, became a major sonic feature of elektronische Musik.119

111 Manning, Electronic and Computer Music, 43. 112 Griffiths, Modern Music, 50. 113 Griffiths, Modern Music, 50-51. 114 Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century, 189. 115 These procedures are detailed in both Griffiths, Modern Music, 52-53. Manning, Electronic and Computer Music, 45-48. 116 Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century, 189. 117 Richard Toop, "Stockhausen and the Sine-Wave: The Story of an Ambiguous Relationship," The Musical Quarterly 65, no. 3 (1979). 118 Griffiths, Modern Music, 52-53. 119 Manning, Electronic and Computer Music, 45. 142

However, it is interesting to note the discursive strategies that are adopted when elektronische Musik is discussed. Stockhausen himself remarks:

When visitors come to the Cologne studio to hear electronic music, they very quickly get over the initial shock caused by the unfamiliar sounds and ask why there is no rhythm (they of course mean regular metres with bars having three or four beats), why no melodies, no repetitions, etc. And so the discussion usually doesn‘t deal at all with electronic music as such, but rather the manner in which it is composed – the language.120

In other words, discussions about the music tend to fall into discussions about how the music is organised or made. In Manning‘s book, for instance, several pages are dedicated to an explanation of how exactly several sine tones are combined according to particular frequency tables and calculated from harmonic ratios.121 In this way, Emmerson describes the ways in which techno-scientific language was adopted to discuss the use of electronically generated sound material.122 The use of terms like ‗parameter, formant, phase, spectrum‘, Emmerson notices, bleeds out into the broader realms of conventional instrumental music analysis that adds a perceived logical and objective element to the discourse.123 Although techno-scientific language is adopted as a discursive mechanism within the ‗enunciative modality of techno-aesthetic listening‘, the music soon diverged from this language and its associated ideologies. This suggests an inconsistency in the discourse that is typical of the kinds of discursive inconsistencies and ruptures that Foucault describes.124

To cite Stockhausen at length:

In general, one can already recognize a first criterion of quality in an electronic composition in the extent to which it is kept free of all instrumental or other sound associations. Such associations distract the listener‘s mind from the autonomy of each sound world presented to him, because he is

120 Karlheinz Stockhausen, 'Electronic and Instrumental Music' in Audio Culture, eds. Cox and Warner, 372. 121 Manning, Electronic and Computer Music, 45-50. 122 Emmerson, Living Electronic Music, 37. 123 Emmerson, Living Electronic Music, 37. 124 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 23. 143

reminded of bells, organs, birds or water-taps. Associations are created through our experiences and fade away again; they say nothing about the form of a piece of music or about the meaning of the sounds or noises in a particular composition. Hence we ought to draw the obvious conclusion that electronic music sounds best only as electronic music, which is to say that it includes as far as possible only sounds and sound relationships that are unique and free of associations, and that make us believe that we have never heard them before.125

Presumably then, listeners are supposed to hear the purity of the music as it exists above all social and cultural relations, and as it draws on the rhetoric of the Western canon to justify the greatness of the ‗master composers‘. Despite the fact that the music continues to be discussed along terms that suggest it is pure, highly ordered and controlled, the music itself did not live up to these standards. For example, Stockhausen‘s Gesang der Jünglinge (1956) layers the sound of a boy‘s voice singing a biblical parable alongside quintessentially electronically generated sounds.126 Both layers are then organised according to serial procedures.127 This work draws directly on the use of compositional techniques associated with musique concrète in the sense that the human voice, singing a biblical parable, is referential (although, perhaps due to its biblical nature, it was free from censure). Another example, Hymnen (1967) used pre-recorded (concrete) national anthems organised in a kind of counterpoint. Cited in Taruskin, Stockhausen explains that intended the counterpoint of national anthems as ‗a metaphor for international cooperation.‘128

In this way the appropriation of techno-scientific language, along with its associated ideologies of purity and determinism, were undermined by the music itself. Though the music was positioned as a seemingly separate strand of electroacoustic music, it often appropriated a language that already had a significant institutional potency, along with the techniques of a music it actively disparaged.

125 Stockhausen, 'Electronic and Instrumental Music' in Audio Culture, eds. Cox and Warner, 374. 126 Chadabe, Electric Sound, 39. 127 Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century, 191. 128 Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century, 192. 144

4.3.2 Boulez and IRCAM As I have already suggested, the perceived rivalry between musique concrète and elektronische Musik, functions as a significant discursive marker for re-telling the history of electroacoustic music. Though it has gone largely unacknowledged, Born argues that ‗in many of the major developments emanating from the GRM in the mid 1950s and early 1960s, major dimensions of IRCAM were already present‘.129 IRCAM is a computer music facility in Paris that was founded by Pierre Boulez in 1977.130

Boulez is remembered by history books as being a provocative and polemical figure who gained esteem by rejecting tonality. Boulez also made his disagreements with other composers quite public. For example, Boulez denounced Schoenberg and the serial style (in favour of Schoenberg‘s student Anton Webern) in a published manifesto entitled ‗Schoenberg is dead‘.131 Boulez‘ friendship with composer John Cage eventually disintegrated over ideological differences about the musical nature of everyday sounds.132 Furthermore, there was Boulez‘s contempt for musique concrète and for Schaeffer. Cited in Taylor, Boulez argues that musique concrète reveals a ‗lack of directing thought‘ that results in a ‗flea market of sounds‘ that are ‗bare to the bone of all intention of composition‘ and he accuses composers of musique concrète of being ‗amateurs, as worthless as they are impoverished‘.133 In this way, Boulez was firmly fixed in his opinion that sound should be non-referential and that it should be abstract.134 Boulez capitalised on what he viewed as a weakness of musique concrète by calling for sounds to be electronically generated deliberately so that they do not reference anything from the real world, and according to Taylor, ‗so that listeners could not bring previous associations to them.‘135

Boulez did not share Schaeffer‘s concern about the ways that listeners would be able to engage with the music, or his concerns for the musical status of musique concrète.

129 Born, Rationalizing Culture, 77. 130 Chadabe, Electric Sound, 118. 131 Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century, 18-19. 132 Boulez et al., The Boulez-Cage Correspondence. 133 Taylor, Strange Sounds, 51. 134 Taylor, Strange Sounds, 53. 135 Taylor, Strange Sounds, 54. 145

And, as Born argues, he did not need to.136 She states that her book is an investigation into:

How IRCAM continually legitimizes itself in order to reproduce its current dominant position, in the absence of great public or industrial success and while at the same time enunciating avant-garde ideology.137

In other words, because IRCAM is funded by the French State, the music it produces does not need to answer to a paying audience.138 In this way, the music can afford to be decidedly abstracted from the real-world experiences of its listeners. As McClary argues, the success of the music was rooted in the notion that it had surpassed any kind of social context and ‗that it was too difficult for the uninitiated to comprehend.‘139 McClary cites examples (including the example of Griffiths‘ book Modern Music and After that has informed this thesis) of the ways in which the music is discussed according to ‗quasi-mathematical‘ and techno-scientific language that fails to engage with the music on a musical level (although it is important to point out that these enunciative modalities function as a shift away from the ways music might typically be discussed and that this is an integral part of the function of the modalities that I am proposing).140 Importantly for McClary, this failure could ‗come to influence the listener‘s perception of the world and the self.‘141 This is a point I return to in Chapter 7.

In her critique, she notably compares the language and writing employed in a music trade magazine to a program note for ‗serious music‘ and, in particular, she illuminates the ways in which the trade magazine employs techno jargon to discuss a pop song.142 Interestingly, she points out that:

The electronic nuts and bolts dimension of the music is highlighted in this trade journal partly for the sake of other professionals (who indeed are

136 Born, Rationalizing Culture, 4. 137 Born, Rationalizing Culture, 4. 138 Born, Rationalizing Culture, 4. 139 McClary, 'Terminal Prestige', 58 140 McClary, 'Terminal Prestige', 59 and 69. 141 McClary, 'Terminal Prestige', 59. 142 McClary, 'Terminal Prestige', 69. 146

interested in how certain effects were achieved) and partly for the sake of advertising Roland equipment. But this mechanical display is not the intended reception of the song – this is not what it means, and this not the principal way it strives to acquire prestige.143

In this way, McClary‘s critique suggests several important points that relate to my argument. Firstly, that the ways in which this music gains its prestige is through its rejection of tonality, use of intentionally complex and specialised procedures that permeate every aspect of its discourse – for instance, in the way the music is produced (using electronically generated sounds), the way the music is structured (with serial procedures) and the way the music is written about (in jargonistic, specialised language). Secondly, and importantly, rather than offering a ‗meaningful‘ way for listeners to engage with the music, composers and musicologists tend to write and speak about the music in ways that have more in common with an instruction manual. This is precisely what constitutes the ‗enunciative modality of techno-aesthetic listening‘. The ‗enunciative modality of techno-aesthetic listening‘ transforms existing notions of how the music is understood in ‗meaningful‘ ways and this suggests a shift in the ways we understand the purpose and function of the music in the first place. It also suggests a shift in how the music is discussed. For McClary the ‗meaningful‘ ways listeners engage with music are fundamental to experience and they are a fundamental feature of music itself. However, it is only through the ‗enunciative modality of techno-aesthetic listening‘ that it becomes possible to subject this very premise to inquiry.

4.4 The Enunciative Modality of Referential Listening As I have shown, both ‗acousmatic listening‘ and ‗techno-aesthetic listening‘ deal, to some degree, with the institutionalisation of a theory and method of making music that focuses on the organisation of sounds not previously considered musical. Thus, in many ways, these modalities make it possible to think through the musical nature of sound and the various means to engage it. Through these modalities it becomes possible to ask ‗what does it mean to be musical?‘ Although both elektronische Musik and musique concrète were operating firmly within the realms of musical

143 McClary, 'Terminal Prestige', 69. 147 modernism, both could still be heard today as esoteric (in the case of elektronische Musik this was deliberate) and, as the music is well-contained within the ivory tower, the music can often only be viewed by looking up from the ground. In other words, access to the music is typically limited to academic institutional contexts. With developments in ‗acousmatic listening‘ listeners must become disciplined to hear the sound object as it is, divorced from any kind of context. Likewise, with the developments in ‗techno-aesthetic listening‘ listeners must become disciplined in recognising various features of sounds as they are electronically produced, manipulated and organised according to highly complex procedures. Each of these ways of listening positions listening as a solitary, transcendental exercise where most of the listening is confined to thinking. Both operate from pseudo-scientific positions that function to repudiate the thinking-feeling self, lest it contaminate objectivity.

In the case of ‗acousmatic listening‘ however, the identification of sound sources became problematic.144 As Landy explains:

What separates musique concrète from most of the other categories is, as Jean-Claude Risset has noted: ―In the first instance Schaeffer placed the accent on the primacy of the listening experience and on the necessity to develop a solfège of effects as opposed to causes‖ (cited in Thomas 1999, 37ftn.). In other words, this music is not to be appreciated primarily in terms of a deep understanding of the music‘s or any sound‘s construction, according to Schaeffer. ―Cause‖ here is a key word, as the sounds‘ causality is equally not of fundamental importance as a result of the reduced listening strategy. This approach to listening can be a difficult challenge for less experienced listeners. Instead, the focus is to be on the pure sound itself.145

The ideology surrounding the notion of purity (either in the form of the purity of the sound object or in the form of electronically generated sounds) is a notion that tells us much about the prevailing musical zeitgeist at the time. The fact that it was considered wholly possible for listeners to experience ‗pureness‘ is further indicative of the level of formalism that flowed freely in the veins of the musical discourse, and

144 Emmerson, Living Electronic Music, 5. 145 Landy, Understanding the Art of Sound Organization, 75. 148 it is only really with the benefit of hindsight that we can understand its problems. Both Schaeffer and Stockhausen, for instance, were, in different ways, adamant that it was possible for listeners to experience sound in ways that were considered to be ‗pure‘ and uncontaminated by experience, context and environment.

This perspective has been challenged in different ways throughout history.146 For instance, the phenomenological epoché was considered by many to be unfeasible and it is challenged on the basis that it is not possible to objectively bracket out context, on the basis that sound is never for the sake of itself. In this way both the enunciative modalities of ‗acousmatic listening‘ and ‗techno-aesthetic listening‘ are accepted by history as being necessary steps in the theoretical workings of the development of electroacoustic music more broadly147 but, as Demers points out, ‗most feel that reduced listening, if possible at all, can occur only under limited circumstances.‘148 Wishart explains, for instance, that we are biologically determined to hear the sources of sounds as an essential survival mechanism.149 Furthermore, within the context of instrumental music, Wishart remarks that, ‗we are always very aware of the instrumental source of the sounds we hear.‘150 He continues to explain that listeners have become hyper-aware of certain extra-musical characteristics to do with the performance of the music and that this hyper-awareness can become ‗part and parcel of our aesthetic reaction to the concert experience.‘151

Like the previous two modalities, ‗referential listening‘ can only be considered in vague terms due to the levels of diversity of approaches.152 However, in stark contrast to the previous enunciative modalities, ‗the enunciative modality of referential listening‘ functions to make possible ways of thinking about the listener‘s position within the environment such that it extends their perceptual field outwards onto the world, and makes it possible for the sonic environment of everyday sound to

146 Emmerson, Living Electronic Music, 7-18. 147 Manning points out that both musique concrète and elektronische Musik are considered formally recognised, complementary elements of electroacoustic music. Manning, Electronic and Computer Music, 67. 148 Demers, Listening Through the Noise, 31. 149 Wishart, On Sonic Art, 129. 150 Wishart, On Sonic Art, 129. 151 Wishart, On Sonic Art, 130. 152 Eric F. Clarke, Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Windsor, "A Perceptual Approach." 149 be considered from the perspective of the listener within the realms of subjective experience. Whereas the previous modalities consider the listening process in autonomous terms, and in terms that limit the broader sonic field to the abstract and non-representational, ‗referential listening‘ considers the listening process to be intricately connected to representation, and to the context and surroundings of the broader sonic environment.

Lastly, and importantly, ‗referential listening‘ brings into discourse a moral dimension of listening and aesthetic appreciation. Clearly, this moral dimension is present in all of the modalities and perhaps all music. However, in the previous enunciative modalities it is often disguised as ideology. The ‗enunciative modality of referential listening‘ foregrounds this issue.

4.4.1 Ferrari‟s Anecdotal Music Ferrari became affiliated with the GRM after he was invited by Schaeffer to join.153 Ferrari, however, unlike Schaeffer and Stockhausen, was interested in the anecdotal properties of sound. Given this term had previously been used to denigrate musique concrète for its unsuccessful attempts at divorcing sounds from their sources, Ferrari claims to use the term defiantly.154 Cited in Wishart, Ferrari explains:

I thought it had to be possible to retain absolutely the structural qualities of the old musique concrète without throwing away the content of reality of the material which it had originally. It had to be possible to make music and to bring into relation together the shreds of reality in order to tell stories.155

In other words, instead of eschewing the contextual and auditory relationships of sound via reduced listening, Ferrari wanted to harness these while remaining within the frames of concrete sound artefacts. Ferrari called this music ‗anecdotal music‘. While still affiliated with the GRM he composed Hétérozygote (1964).156 The piece included the use of real-world sound material that was un-abstracted and therefore it

153 Robindor and Ferrari, "Luc Ferrari," 8. 154 Caux, Almost Nothing with Luc Ferrari, 130. 155 Wishart, On Sonic Art, 129. 156 Caux, Almost Nothing with Luc Ferrari, 34. 150 was completely attributable to its context and source.157 In many ways this was a departure from the esoteric ways in which both musique concrète and elektronische musik treated sound material. However, Ferrari claims that this was not for the sake of being deliberately provocative.158 The construction of Hétérozygote marked a departure from the GRM for Ferrari because the piece was not received by Schaeffer in the way that Ferrari thought it would be.159 Emmerson points out that Ferrari‘s departure from musique concrète was seen as an act of rebellion.160 Ferrari, however, did not see his actions as a form of dissent. To the contrary, Ferrari explains that, at the time, he felt that he was furthering the cause of musique concrète but due to the anecdotal nature of the sound, his actions were seen by Schaeffer as a rejection of the principles of musique concrète.161 Evoking earlier debates surrounding absolute and programmatic music, Ferrari explains his relationship to anecdotal sounds:

To incorporate the social within sound, to capture the voice of people talking in the street, the metro, the museum … we are like wandering ears stealing sound in the same way you would take a picture. That voice then becomes a found object within a dramatic form. So that means incorporating society, intimacy or an expression of feelings … These sounds represent an image, a memory; they are objects that take part in a creation.162

Ferrari deliberately uses sounds that are evocative and sounds that reference the world without the need to transform them. Ferrari felt that the act of recording sound was a creative gesture in and of itself, and found the methods of abstraction used in the musique concrète to be quite limiting.163 In his view, the cutting, mixing and editing of sounds, along with their organisation, was too close to the ways in which instrumental music functions.164 Ferrari was interested in new ways of composing music and it is evident throughout his autobiography that he disavowed the institutionalisation of any pre-established methods of composition.165 He saw

157 Caux, Almost Nothing with Luc Ferrari, 34. 158 Caux, Almost Nothing with Luc Ferrari, 33-36. 159 Caux, Almost Nothing with Luc Ferrari, 35. 160 Emmerson, Living Electronic Music, 7. 161 Caux, Almost Nothing with Luc Ferrari, 35. 162 Caux, Almost Nothing with Luc Ferrari, 36. 163 Robindor and Ferrari, "Luc Ferrari," 12. 164 Robindor and Ferrari, "Luc Ferrari," 12. 165 Caux, Almost Nothing with Luc Ferrari, 10. 151 himself as a pioneer who stood ‗outside of any confinement, in freedom and openness.‘166

The inclusion of anecdotal sounds within musique concrète coupled with Ferrari‘s passion for the creativity of anecdotal sounds in their own right, is reminiscent of an ideology that can be found elsewhere. The music of John Cage is an example, and in fact, Ferrari claims to have been influenced by Cage to some degree.167 This demonstrates the intricate levels of connection between the different musics and modalities, given the disintegration of the friendship between Cage and Boulez over the inclusion of anecdotal sound within music. It also demonstrates that composers, at the time, felt passionately that this issue was of pressing importance, to the extent that its weight was felt as a subject of aesthetic morality. Interestingly, this moral dimension of music is one of the defining features of ‗the enunciative modality of referential listening‘.

4.4.2 Schafer, Acoustic Ecology and Ear Cleaning Underpinning much of the work of R. Murray Schafer is the notion that the world has become deaf to the nature and quality of the sonic landscape and it is implicit across Schafer‘s many publications that he believes this deafness is endemic. Such is the nature of this deafness that noise pollution falls into the ambient background to evade awareness, resulting in an ever increasingly noisy ambient soundscape.168 This damages our hearing, damages the sonic environment and importantly, damages the ways we listen. Among Schafer‘s many concerns is the drowning out or loss of particular sounds that mark any given landscape, and in the same way that visual features of a landscape might be preserved, Schafer argues that there are certain sounds, inherent to the landscape, that should also be preserved.169 Schafer says:

The failure of the twentieth century to protect the natural habitats of birds and animals is largely due to the fact that we no longer hear nature or can put names to its voices. If you can‘t name the birds, if you don‘t know how to

166 Caux, Almost Nothing with Luc Ferrari, 10. 167 Robindor and Ferrari, "Luc Ferrari," 12. 168 R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World: Toward a Theory of Soundscape Design, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 1977), 185-86. 169 Barry Truax and Gary W. Barrett, "Soundscape in a Context of Acoustic and Landscape Ecology," Landscape Ecology 26, no. 9 (2011): 1202. 152

recognize the leaves of the trees by the sounds they make, or hear a cataract down the river, or recognize when a winter wind is bringing in a storm, nature is anaesthetized, and its survival will depend on forces other than human.170

Unlike those who celebrate the idea that sound or noise should become a regular feature of music, or that everyday sounds can or should be musical (i.e. Russolo, Schaeffer, Ferrari, Cage etc.) Schafer‘s concerns were aligned less with the aesthetic qualities of sound (although his ideas were taken up in ways that highlight these aesthetic qualities) and more with environmental or ecological issues, and as a result, he founded the World Soundscape Project in 1971.171 The World Soundscape Project, according to Andrew J. Eisenberg, had the ‗aim of assessing sonic environments through rigorous audio documentary and analysis of recorded ‗soundscapes.‘172 Brandon LaBelle adds that the World Soundscape Project also aimed to raise awareness of the negative effects of sound on the human condition through the collation and analysis of sound data, through sound recordings, soundscape compositions, community surveys and workshops that, in turn, added to the emerging field of sound art.173 For example, the project spawned notable soundscape compositions by Hildegard Westerkamp and Barry Truax.

4.4.2.1 Acoustic Ecology The term ‗acoustic ecology‘, according to Schafer, refers to:

The study of the effects of the acoustic environment or soundscape on the physical responses or behavioural characteristics of creatures living within it. Its particular aim is to draw attention to imbalances which may have unhealthy or inimical effects.

Schafer firmly believes that acoustic ecological studies must be undertaken in the field, on location and only through deep awareness of the sonic environment,

170 Murray Schafer, 'Open Ears' in Michael Bull and Les Back, eds., The Auditory Culture Reader, Sensory Formations Series (Oxford, UK ; New York: Berg, 2003), 38. 171 Schafer, The Tuning of the World, 275. 172 Andrew J. Eisenberg, 'Space' in Keywords in Sound, eds. Novak and Sakakeeny, 197. 173 Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (New York: Continuum International, 2006), 199. 153 typically through sound recording and through listening.174 Acoustic ecology is therefore concerned with the moral nature of the types of sounds that warrant preservation, along with the types of sounds that do not.175 Schafer is unambiguous about the kinds of problematic, noisy sounds that threaten the sonic landscape, but at the same time, he is also sensitive to the subjective and blurry nature of what constitutes noise in the first place.176 As he aptly puts it, ‗one man‘s music may be another man‘s noise‘.177 Despite these sensitivities, Schafer is clear about the fact that sounds that are human-made (he uses the term technological) are often the sounds that cause the most hindrance and that drown out the sounds of nature. Schafer appropriates the terms ‗hi-fi‘ and ‗low-fi‘ to describe the signal-to-noise ratios of sonic landscapes. For instance, a low-fi environment would have a low signal-to-noise ratio; it would have high levels of ambient noise or perhaps a lot of sounds occurring at once so as to mask the clarity of a single sound.178 In this way an urban sonic landscape would be, in Schafer‘s view, a low-fi environment in comparison to a rural sonic landscape that would have a high signal-to-noise ratio.179 However, in order to be able to make this distinction in the first place, listeners must become aurally attuned to their environments through what Schafer calls ‗ear cleaning‘, a group of unconventional ear-training exercises.

4.4.2.2 Ear Cleaning The sonic landscape of the world should be, in Schafer‘s view, a large composition in which everyone is a composer and everyone is a listener so that the world begins to regain control over the kinds of sounds that warrant preservation, multiplication or deletion.180 For Schafer, the decline in aural landscape is a failure on the part of the listener to be able to discern the sounds that have a negative impact on the environment, and because of this, he devised a range of exercises that aim to develop and focus a listener‘s auditory attention – exercises that he calls ‗ear cleaning‘ exercises.181 These exercises, explains Schafer, were part of a first year,

174 Schafer, The Tuning of the World, 205. 175 Schafer, The Tuning of the World, 176 Schafer, The Tuning of the World, 181-182. 177 Schafer, The Tuning of the World, 183. 178 Schafer, The Tuning of the World, 43. 179 Schafer, The Tuning of the World, 43. 180 Schafer, The Tuning of the World, 205. 181 Schafer, The Tuning of the World, 208. 154 experimental music unit offered at Simon Fraser University in Canada.182 However, he has written extensively on the importance of learning to listen within the context of music education across various age groups.183

Each of the listening exercises is framed as set of instructions given to a music educator rather than given directly to the listener or student. They are divided into ‗lectures‘ each of which is focused on a key theme such as noise, silence or texture.184 The first and most important exercises, according to Schafer, function to ‗teach the listener to respect silence‘.185 These exercises are spread over the course of two lectures that focus on the differences between noise and silence. The first lecture begins with a definition of noise and then leads students through a series of exercises that aim to develop and intervene in perceptions about what constitutes noise.186 One of the exercises asks students to record a classroom discussion, play back the recording and to listen to the sounds that the students did not intend to record.187 A homework exercise asks students to try to find silence.188

In a lecture on ‗tone‘, students are given a single tone and are asked to create a single-toned composition.189 One student is instructed to conduct the room and students are then asked to consider how expressive a single-toned work could be made, simply by adding sections of silence.190 The class is asked to consider different ways that a one-toned composition could be varied, and through a series of experiments Schafer leads the class into thinking about sonic space. In experimenting with timbre, Schafer asks students to experiment with different singing and speaking voices, and with eyes closed, the class is asked to identify and describe the different voices.191

182 R. Murray Schafer, Ear Cleaning: Notes for an Experimental Music Course (Toronto, Canada: Clark and Cruickshank, 1967), 1. 183 R. Murray Schafer, The Thinking Ear: Complete Writings on Music Education (Toronto, Canada: Arcana Editions, 1988). 184 Schafer, Ear Cleaning. 185 Schafer, The Tuning of the World, 208. 186 Schafer, The Thinking Ear, 49. 187 Schafer, The Thinking Ear, 49. 188 Schafer, The Thinking Ear, 50. 189 Schafer, The Thinking Ear, 53. 190 Schafer, The Thinking Ear, 54. 191 Schafer, The Thinking Ear, 56. 155

In a lecture on ‗amplitude‘ Schafer says:

In music we usually recognise three grades of softness: P, PP, PPP, and three levels of loudness: F, FF, FFF. How many distinguishable grades of softness can you produce with your voice? With your instrument? How many of loudness?192

The lecture then moves through a series of experiments that leads students to contemplate the complex nature of amplitude and its ability to add interest to a single-tone composition.193

The lecture on melody begins by assigning students two tones with which to compose a melody through improvisation – the students are told to make the melody as expressive as possible. Gradually the students are allowed to add one more tone but only after the full expressive potential of the previous tones has been fully exploited.194 Schafer‘s lecture on rhythm engages students in a group exercise to make rhythm with their bodies. The exercise, initially designed by Gabriel Carpentier, is scored in a non-traditional in which each of a series of numbers from 1 to 4 is assigned to a particular action. For example, the number 1 means that performers should shout once, the number 2 requires performers to stamp their feet twice, the number 3 requires performers to snap their fingers three times and the number 4 requires performers to clap their hands four times.195 Students are then given a score that has different combinations of the numbers 1 through 4 and they are asked to perform the actions required.196 Though not exclusively a model directed towards listening to music, Schafer‘s approach aims to teach listeners how to listen to the world in ways that are unconcerned with aesthetic discussions but which highlight the moral dimension of listening.

192 Schafer, The Thinking Ear, 58. 193 Schafer, The Thinking Ear, 59. 194 Schafer, The Thinking Ear, 61. 195 Schafer, The Thinking Ear, 67. 196 Schafer, The Thinking Ear, 67. 156

4.5 Epistemologies of Listening Earlier in the thesis I suggested that electroacoustic music occupied a seemingly anonymous space. I argued that without a history under its belt to parallel the Western tradition, and without an agreed upon theory to underpin its values, the music straddles an awkward space, somewhere between the dominant and the marginal. In this way, each of the proposed enunciative modalities opens up a space for new approaches of engaging with the music to be considered (outside of those that have been instilled by and through the Western canon) and this includes the capacity to render new objects of knowledge audible. In the previous chapter, I examined how some of these objects were made audible by examining specific disciplinary ear-training exercises. In contrast, however, the unique thing about these proposed enunciative modalities is that they each hear music differently, and they each construct their own knowledges about music and listening in discrete ways. Listening becomes an object of knowledge. Furthermore, they all heavily contribute to the overarching (albeit diffuse) discourse of listening within the context of electroacoustic music that exists in a different sphere, as an emerging discursive formation, separate and distinct from the discourse of listening within the Western music tradition.

As I suggested in the previous chapter, the focus on literacy sets up rigid boundaries around what can be considered in musical terms, and I demonstrated how this was quite limiting. The significance of the departure from notation and literacy for electroacoustic music (and, of course, other musics), has been largely underestimated considering, as Taruskin puts it, the changes in musical literacy over the past thousand years have ‗made possible all kinds of new ideas about music.‘197 If music has been tied to literacy in varying degrees across the last thousand years, and, if this connection has driven disciplinary approaches to ear-training (as I have argued it has) then this leaves electroacoustic music occupying an exceptional space filled with potential. Foucault demonstrates that literacy and language are fundamental to the development of knowledge and for academic disciplines to function successfully they rely upon terminology that is discipline-specific. This discipline-specific terminology has a variety of different purposes and plays different roles in the

197 Taruskin, Music from the Earliest Notations, 1. 157 distribution of power at the level of the subject, but also at a broader level. A discipline-specific (or perhaps music-specific) language is essential to the validation of the music, both for setting it apart from the norm (in this case, the Western canon) and for maintaining its status as marginal (in its self-identification as different from the norm). Furthermore, this discipline-specific language plays a significant role in the disciplining of listening-subjects. Language does not simply offer a way of representing the music (or the listener‘s experience of the music). Rather, the language gives rise to new ways of knowing and new ways of listening that were not previously possible. These proposed enunciative modalities are ways of expressing discourse and each makes use of this space of potential in idiosyncratic ways, thereby eliminating the need for a whole range of practices that are considered indispensable to Western music but are superfluous to electroacoustic music. It is the enunciative modality that provides the opportunity for novel conventions to emerge, and it is these listening innovations with which I have been concerned.

158

Chapter 5. Gender and the Enunciative Modality of Corporeal Listening

In the previous chapter, I argued that the discourse of ear-training within an electroacoustic music context has not been considered in absolute terms. This, I suggested, is contrary to the positioning of ear-training in a conventional setting (as I described in Chapter 3) whereby certain ideas have remained unquestioned for centuries. Electroacoustic music is extraordinarily sensitive to the permeable qualities of listening, along with the multifaceted approaches we can take to examine it. Consequently, its discourse is abundant with thinking that seeks to examine the problem of listening. Additionally, I posited the emergence of several ‗enunciative modalities of listening‘ as productive spaces that breed new objects of knowledge and new objects of audition. These enunciative spaces also make room for new ways of thinking about, knowing about and speaking about electroacoustic music, along with, importantly, new approaches to listening to it. The previous chapter proposed three of these enunciative modalities (‗acousmatic listening‘, ‗techno-aesthetic listening‘ and ‗referential listening‘), this chapter, however, will focus solely on the final enunciative modality, ‗corporeal listening‘.

The ‗enunciative modality of corporeal listening‘ is a mode that foregrounds the role of the body in a practice that, I will argue, has come to be highly gendered. Earlier in the thesis, I highlighted several issues related to the positioning of gender within the context of electroacoustic music. However, it is in this chapter that I really want to solidify my position on these assertions, considering they are assertions that were discovered and born entirely of the research.1 Given that the role of the body has typically been relegated to the domain of the feminine, it is worthwhile to consider how ‗corporeal listening‘ gives the body a voice. In this chapter, I will argue that the ‗enunciative modality of corporeal listening‘ mobilises a politics of listening that, I will suggest, does something unique. Whilst the body has been relegated and

1 Reinvoking Kendall and Wickham‘s point I cited in chapter 2. ‗it is crucial that we allow our investigations of a problem to surprise us‘. Kendall and Wickham, Using Foucault's Methods, 22. 159 subordinated, the ears, as part of the body, have also been positioned in largely disembodied terms. As I suggested in the previous chapter the enunciative modalities of ‗acousmatic listening‘ and ‗techno-aesthetic listening‘, for example, function to position the ears as an extension of the brain, and listening as an intellectual pursuit that ignores the corporeal elements of listening.

In this way, ‗corporeal listening‘ functions to restore the rightful place of the ear (and the body) to a discourse of listening that fails to consider the corporeal and the feminine.

As I have already argued, electroacoustic music occupies an unusual territory in that it does not fit neatly into regular classifications of what constitutes music. The unusual nature of this musical territory is such that although the music arose out of the dominant, Western musical paradigm it does also, awkwardly, occupy the fringes. If the Western musical paradigm is the prevailing musical paradigm, then that is not to imply that it is a paradigm that wields its influence over its less powerful Others such as electroacoustic music. According to Foucault, power is not something that can be held. Nor is it something that can be administered.2 Yet, it is power that, nonetheless, constructs and legitimises systems to serve prevailing notions of governance.3 In other words, power is distributed across systems in non- localised ways such that the system itself is perceived to hold and wield power, and it therefore becomes constructed as a dominant, power-wielding force that impacts the real world (it was one of Foucault‘s many tasks to discover how these systems come to be seen as dominant, unitary authorities to begin with). Power is negotiated between things and it flows through discourses so that discourse structures reality.4 Furthermore, Buchbinder asserts that discourses are not neutral. Rather, he explains that they emerge within (and often reproduce) dominant socio-political issues and various cultural ideologies.5 Buchbinder states:

2 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1, 94. 3 Susan Bordo, 'Feminism, Foucault and the Politics of the Body' in Caroline Ramazanoğlu, ed. Up Against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions between Foucault and Feminism (London; New York: Routledge, 1993), pg 190. 4 Mills, Discourse, 48. 5 Buchbinder, Masculinities and Identities, 30. 160

In addition to defining what can be said, discourses also reflect dominant cultural preoccupations and limitations with regard to what is said and to whom; and with regard to who is to be ‗heard‘ and thus empowered by being a voice, and who is to be silenced and hence disempowered.6

Though Buchbinder is not particularly interested in listening, it is fascinating that there is reference to ‗hearing‘ in relation to discourse. If discourse reflects limitations about who can speak and who can be heard, then there is just cause to deduce that discourse will directly impact the way that we listen, what we hear, who can be heard and what there is to hear. As I argued, in Chapter 2, the discourse of electroacoustic music, as diffuse as it is, is a discourse that reproduces the dominant ideologies that function in an exclusionary fashion to strategically limit the ways that women are represented. For example, if only men can utter, then, what is possible to know becomes restricted to and mediated through a masculine subject position (whatever that may be). Similarly, if electroacoustic music is, as I have argued, represented only in the masculine, then this masculine discourse structures the music along with our experiences of it. Importantly, however, Foucault considers power to be a productive force and it is along the margins where power functions at its most creative. In this way, resistance to power, according to Caroline Ramazanoğlu, ‗comes through new discourses producing new truths‘ and, to some degree, I propose that it is these ‗enunciative modalities‘ that offer opportunities for new discourses to emerge.7 Therefore, it is through the ‗enunciative modality of corporeal listening‘, I argue, that the body and the ear are brought into being.

It is well established in feminist theory that the body has long been associated with, and relegated to, femininity. Elizabeth Grosz, for example, has been critical of the Western philosophical tradition on the basis that the mind has been theorised ad nauseam while the body remains ‗a conceptual blindspot.‘8 Furthermore, she argues that when it is theorised, it appears only in a male form.9 Thus, she surveys a tradition that unaccountably reconciles masculinity with the mind, intellect, reason,

6 Buchbinder, Masculinities and Identities, 30. 7 Ramazanoğlu, Up against Foucault, 4. 8 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 1. 9 Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 4. 161 logic and rationalism while the body is consigned to occupy a marginal status.10 Additionally, Buchbinder explains that women‘s bodies are generally ‗culturally constructed as open to men.‘11 In this way ‗men may pass through her body sexually from the outside‘ thus reinforcing the notion that women‘s bodies are passive while men‘s are active.12 These debates have been central to feminist critique (particularly within second-wave feminism) because of the lateral association of the mind with the masculine ‗thinking‘ subject and the body with the feminine ‗objectified‘ subject.13 Setting aside for the moment Foucault‘s androcentrism, and the fact that Foucault, according to Ramazanoğlu, ‗did not recognise that his supposedly neutral analysis of true, power and sexuality as produced in discourses, comes from a male perspective,‘14 Foucault sees the role of the body as being essential to the ways that power functions. Power is what produces the subject, and it is on the body that these politics are enacted.15

In this way, the body, and in particular women‘s bodies, have been the concern of much feminist discussion. This discussion often debates the extent to which bodies are differentiated and how they are differentiated. For example, is sexual difference purely a matter of biology? If so, this would mean that the differences between men‘s and women‘s bodies are the reasons for the development of certain gendered features that are considered to be essential and ‗naturally‘ different. It is popular belief, for instance, that women are emotional while men are stoic. Or, is difference something that is entirely constructed through discourse? Grosz‘s mapping of the body to its biological underpinnings in Darwinism argues that feminist theory has too often focused on the construction of the body through discourse. She explains:

We need to understand not only how culture inscribes bodies—a preoccupation of much social and cultural theory in the past decade or more—but, more urgently, what these bodies are such that inscription is possible, what it is in the nature of bodies, in biological evolution, that opens

10 Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 1. 11 Buchbinder, Masculinities and Identities, 42. 12 Buchbinder, Masculinities and Identities, 42. 13 Margaret Walters, Feminism: A Very Short Introduction, (New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 2005), 110. 14 Ramazanoğlu, Up against Foucault, 4-5. 15 See for example, Foucault, Discipline and Punish; The History of Sexuality. 162

them up to cultural transcription, social immersion, and production, that is, to political, cultural, and conceptual evolution. We need to understand, with perhaps more urgency than in the past, the ways our biologies work with, and are amenable to, the kinds of cultural variation that concern politics and political struggle.16

According to Grosz, then, knowledge about the body must move into the realm of the pre-discursive. For Judith Butler, however, sexual difference is already always in the discursive.17 She has argued that sex (typically understood as the biological differences between men and women) does not precede gender (typically understood as the socio-cultural differences between men and women). Sex, Butler argues, is already discursively produced, and therefore sex and gender are one and the same.18 The classification of ‗sex‘, Butler asserts, is already normative and already operating from within a heterosexual, structural framework that presupposes sexual difference as it occurs in a binary relationship between man and woman.19 Thus, Butler posits a performative approach to sex and gender that supports the idea that they are constituted through the performative reiteration of gendered acts. She explains:

Performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate ‗act‘, but rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names. What will, I hope, become clear in what follows is that the regulatory norms of ‗sex‘ work in a performative fashion to constitute the materiality of bodies and, more specifically, to materialise the body‘s sex, to materialise sexual difference in the service of the consolidation of the heterosexual imperative.20

I think it is relatively clear that a portion of Butler‘s argument is influenced by the constructivism offered by Foucault. This means that what is perceived to be natural in the very first place can only be apprehended through discourse. Foucault

16 Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely (Crows Nest, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 2004), 2. 17 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993), xi. 18 Butler, Bodies That Matter, xi. 19 Butler, Bodies That Matter, xx. 20 Butler, Bodies That Matter, xii. 163 demonstrated how, for instance, certain scientific disciplines (such as medicine, psychiatry and the human sciences) that are typically positioned as being neutral and outside of discourse are, in fact, entirely constructed within the limits of discourse and are subject to all of its rules. In this way, biological sex is constructed and limited to explanation within pre-existing discursive frameworks of knowledge. This is a view that is reflected in feminist critiques of the sciences. For instance, these critiques suggest that the normalisation of knowledge occurs through a patriarchal lens. Viewing knowledge through this lens inadvertently impacts the things that we come to accept as truth, including our biology.21 Jill A. Fisher explains:

Patriarchal ideas have heavily shaped the pursuit of science, and science has supported the patriarchal system by naturalizing its norms and values. Many scientific pursuits can be labeled androcentric, meaning that knowledge has been constructed with a decidedly male focus or perspective.22

The formation of knowledge through a patriarchal framework has real consequences for the ways that we come to perceive things like gender, sex and sexuality. This is exemplified in an article by Bonnie B. Spanier and Jessica D. Horowitz that critiques the legitimacy of scientific studies of gay people.23 Many of these studies, the authors argue, have begun with the question ‗what are the biologically recognizable differences between gay people and straight people?‘ The question imposes and structures any possible conclusions into only two categories of difference, straight or gay.24 Similarly, Anne Fausto-Sterling‘s work (a biologist herself) has done much to problematise the simple, presupposed, binary gender divisions of male and female in the field of biology by demonstrating how bodies are forced into male/female categories even when they do not belong to either.25 The normalisation of these

21 Buchbinder points out that the term ‗patriarchy‘ is often used incorrectly. Within feminist theory, however, ‗patriarchy‘, he explains, ‗has come to signify the domination of society by men and their values‘. Buchbinder, Masculinities and Identities, 33. 22 Jill A. Fisher, 'Gendering Science: Contextualising Historical and Contemporary Pursuits of Difference' in Jill A. Fisher, ed. Gender and the Science of Difference: Cultural Politics of Contemporary Science and Medicine (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 3. 23 The phrase ‗gay people‘ is preferred here on the basis that this is the phrase that the authors employ. Bonnie B. Spanier and Jessica D. Horowitz, 'Looking for Difference? Methodology is in the Eye of the Beholder' in Gender and the Science of Difference: Cultural Politics of Contemporary Science and Medicine, eds. Fisher, 43-66. 24 Spanier and Horowitz, ‗Looking for Difference?,‘ 43. 25 Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sex/Gender: Biology in a Social World (New York: Routledge, 2012). 164 binary categories has had real impacts on real people such that those who do not conform to these conceptions of what constitutes a ‗normal‘ body risk being considered abnormal or deviant.

Difference has been used as a political strategy by feminists and other marginalised groups, such the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex (GLBTQI) community. For the GLBTQI community, difference has been used to argue against homophobic discourses that are, according to David Halperin, employed to dispute the extent to which homosexuality is positioned as an ‗immutable characteristic.‘26 Philip Brett points out that in this way, if gay identity is considered to be constructed in culture, then this opens out to the homophobic criticism that ‗this production can simply be unproduced, erased, silenced.‘27 For women, the implications are similar. Arguing for difference has been an important tactic in achieving identification of a subject position that is not already assumed to be a hegemonic masculine one and this has been particularly important for female composers who were (and still are) ignored, forgotten or assumed not to have existed in the first place. According to Citron, women had been subsumed into a masculine discourse on the basis that they have not been differentiated.28 This view is echoed by McClary who states that ‗the relative absence of women from symphonic and opera repertories has often been cited as evidence of their inability to achieve ―greatness‖.‘29 Thus, difference became an important mechanism in the fight for women to achieve autonomy from a history that had categorically denied or excluded their existence, and it functions as a form of resistance to the hegemony.30 Foucault called this kind of resistance ‗reverse discourse‘ which, as Kate Soper explains, refers to the ways that marginalised groups challenge their marginalisation by insisting on their difference as being ‗natural‘.31

26 David Halperin, Saint = Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 33. 27 Philip Brett, 'Musicality, Essentialism and The Closet' in Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary Thomas, eds. Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 10. 28 Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon, 5. 29 Susan McClary, "Reshaping a Discipline: Musicology and Feminism in the 1990s," Feminist Studies 19, no. 2 (1993): 400. 30 Kate Soper, 'Productive Contradictions' in Up against Foucault, ed. Ramazanoğlu, 33. 31 Soper, 'Productive Contradictions,' 33. 165

Claiming that women and men have essential differences, however, is problematic on the grounds of essentialism. Ruth A. Solie says that the problems with essentialising bodies are such that:

On the one hand we confront the familiar danger or labelling some person or group as outside, inferior, or Other; but on the other hand we take the risk of demanding similarity or adherence to a norm whose valuation may be tacit.32

In other words, to assume that women have some kind of essence also assumes that all women are the same, and that there is some kind of monolithic category that could possibly account for every type of woman. Clearly, this is not the case, and therefore, as Solie is suggesting, women who do not conform to a particular type of body (white skinned for example) are Othered. Furthermore, using essentialism as a strategy can be damaging for women in the sense that it functions to reinforce binary categories between male and female within a heterosexual matrix, thus leaving no room for the experience of women to emerge outside of heterosexual desire.

Foucault rejected essentialism on the basis that these differences are conceived through discourse, and that bodies are also conceived through discourse. To cite Foucault:

The individual is not to be conceived as a sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive atom, a multiple and inert material on which power comes to fasten or against which it happens to strike, and in doing subdues or crushes individuals. In fact, it is already one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourse, certain desires, come to be identified and constituted as individuals.33

In this way, subjects are not reducible to essences because these essences are always apprehended in the discursive anyway, and only ever as a manifestation of power. It is important to point out, however, that this does not mean that Foucault thinks difference does not exist, or that difference does not manifest real effects in the

32 Solie, Musicology and Difference, 2. 33 Foucault and Gordon, Power/Knowledge, 98. 166 world. Mills and Mullany explain that despite the fact that gender difference has been problematised in post-structural thinking, it does, however, manifest real effects in the real world.34 They argue:

What has to be considered is the simple binary division between female and male, and also the way that gender operates at the level of a system which has been institutionalised. This system operates in stereotypes and assumptions which have a material impact on groups as well as individuals in terms of what is thought to be appropriate behaviour.35

The point is that although gender difference is not understood in ways that essentialise the subject, discourse often structures the subject in essential ways (through power relationships), and it is this that has to be examined and dismantled. To return to the context of music, then, much has been said about the ways in which music is gendered. In the broader context of the arts, music has historically been considered as feminine and, therefore, the weakest of the arts.36 McClary declares:

To the very large extent that mind is defined as masculine and body as feminine in Western culture, music is always in danger of being perceived as a feminine (or effeminate) enterprise altogether.37

In this way, the systematic exclusion of women is a patriarchal strategy that functions to support masculine dominion.

Furthermore, Suzanne Cusick, has discussed the ways in which music theory is gendered according to the masculine hegemony that privileges the ‗thinker‘, and as such, Cusick has imagined what an ‗embodied‘ music theory would be.38 The principles of music theory (such as those that I have outlined in Chapter 3), according to Cusick, hinge upon a conception of the composer that is inherently

34 Sara Mills and Louise Mullany, Language, Gender and Feminism: Theory, Methodology and Practice (Abingdon, Oxon ; New York: Routledge, 2011), 44. 35 Mills and Mullany, Language, Gender and Feminism, 44. 36 See for example Beard and Gloag, ‗Gender‘, in Musicology, 112. 37 McClary, Feminine Endings, 151. 38 Suzanne G. Cusick, "Feminist Theory, Music Theory, and the Mind/Body Problem," Perspectives of New Music 32, no. 1 (1994). 167 masculine.39 She remarks on the inappropriateness of using music theory to help explain and analyse constructions of gender in a composition by female composer Fanny Hensel.40 Cusick explains that music theory could not offer her help in thinking about Hensel‘s music because ‗it is a discipline that identifies nearly totally with the composer as mind, and which identifies music as mind.‘41

As I have previously posited, this notion of the composer is presaged by the identification of his name on the written, musical score, and in this way, the score functions as the object of analysis, thus reinforcing the focus on the mind. To cite Cusick ‗we end up ignoring the fact that these practices of the mind are non-practices without the bodily practices they call for – about which it has become unthinkable to think‘.42 The preoccupation with the score, both Citron and Cusick assert, may stem from the ‗male wish for self-reproduction.‘43 Once coupled with the gendered metaphor of the composer‘s pen as harbinger of the creative seed that is responsible for giving life to a musical idea, as Citron suggests it does, it becomes possible to imagine how effective this idea is at denying artistic creativity from women and their bodies.44 In this discursive incarnation, women‘s bodies occupy the realm of the blank piece of paper, they occupy the realm of the passive, they occupy the realm of nature (that must be tamed by man) and, therefore they occupy the realm of the corporeal.

5.1 „Women Should Be Seen and Not Heard‟ In Chapter 3, I argued that Western music operates out of a visual, epistemological framework and I implied that this played a role in the dismissal of acousmatic music. Citron takes this one step further by suggesting that the dominant, visual epistemology is actually a masculine epistemology. As she says, ‗some have argued that this reliance on the visual represents a male epistemological mode, and by implication perhaps a suppression of female experience.‘45 Prior to Citron, John Berger famously examined the ways in which the feminine is constructed as an

39 Cusick, "Feminist Theory," 16. 40 Cusick, "Feminist Theory," 16. 41 Cusick, "Feminist Theory," 16. 42 Cusick, "Feminist Theory," 16. 43 Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon, 40. 44 Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon, 50. 45 Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon, 38. 168 object of display for the looker, who Berger argues, is inherently male. The construction of men‘s power, in Berger‘s view, is defined by what ‗he‘ is capable of doing.46 Men ‗act‘, he says, and women ‗appear‘.47 This means that, regardless of the gender of the looker, looking is constructed within discourse as an inherently masculine act and this impacts the ways in which it becomes possible to see.48 For Laura Mulvey, for instance, this means that women are unable to adopt the position of the authoritative looker.49 In this way, looking is something that happens to women‘s bodies and it is something that transforms women‘s bodies into objects of the male gaze.

Foucault was also interested in the authority of the gaze and though he never explicitly engaged with gender politics (that is a source of frequent criticism by feminist scholars of his work)50 he was very interested in body politics generally because this is the place where power is brought to light most blatantly but it is also the place where power because localised and where it becomes resisted. Though it is not the only place where Foucault articulates his interest in body politics, the most obvious is laid out in Discipline and Punish (although there are other examples such as in The Birth of the Clinic).51 This is where Foucault maps the shift from disciplinary measures being conducted on the body externally (in the form of torture) through to their internalisation as they are policed through surveillance. As Foucault states:

He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in

46 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London, England: Penguin Books, 1972), 45. 47 Berger, Ways of Seeing, 47. 48 Laura Mulvey famously adopted these ideas along with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory for feminist film criticism in order to examine the ways in which women were constructed in cinema. See for example Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures. 49 Suzanna Danuta Walters, Material Girls: Making Sense of Feminist Cultural Theory (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1995), 54. 50 See for example, Ramazanoğlu, Up against Foucault and Mills, Discourse, 69-93. 51 Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, (London: Routledge, 1989). 169

which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.52

Looking, then, is not simply an act of power enacted upon bodies. Rather, looking functions through power to produce bodies and to ensure that bodies are policed and, importantly, that they police themselves. In other words, Foucault suggests that we invite these regulations and that we regulate ourselves.

A common assumption, Macarthur points out, ‗is that, unlike seeing, in which ‗the gaze‘ is understood as a central trope, there is no central auditory trope that is equivalent to ‗the listen.‘53 One could make an argument that supports a listening perspective or point of view in relation to music that contains words. Here, I am thinking specifically about the many undergraduate essays I have marked that suggest that students adopt the subject position of the singer. However, Eric F. Clarke has demonstrated that this subject position is not universal and complicates the possible roles that listeners can adopt in a variety of popular musics and instrumental musics.54 There is nonetheless a marked difference, as Macarthur rightly points out, between adopting a listening subject position (where one could potentially experience the world as another experiences it through their ears) and adopting an authoritative listening position to parallel ‗the gaze‘ (a position that produces and is embroiled within power relationships such that they effect bodies). Cited in Karen Pegley and Virginia Caputo, Beverly Diamond states:

The strong essentialist arguments of many schools of music critics and music theorists – those that build an argument on the undeniable abstraction of many of the parameters of musical language, especially instrumental musical language, posit the meaning of music as ―integral‖ and independent of contextual considerations. In place of this I query whether we hear and

52 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 202. 53 Sally Macarthur, 'Immanent Listening' in Music’s Immanent Future, eds. Macarthur, Lochhead and Shaw, 173. 54 Clarke, 'Subject Position' in Ways of Listening, 91-125. 170

explain what we hear with a ―male ear,‖ the musical analogy of the ―male gaze‖ identified in feminist film and art history studies.55

Pegley and Caputo argue that the sameness implied by the analogy of ‗the male ear‘ denies women‘s agency (in all its difference).56 They wonder, in turn, what it might be like to inhabit a ‗female ear‘ that ‗allows the possibility of hearing and explanation from a female perspective … that is itself pluralistic.‘57

Outside of music, however, listening is typically positioned as a feminine act. For example, Wayne Koestenbaum (cited in Freya Jarman-Ivens), says ‗to hear, is a metaphorically to be impregnated – with thought, tone and sensation.‘58 Fisher comments on the perceived biological nature of this trope in which, she argues, women are considered to be ‗hardwired‘ as listeners and nurturers while men are ‗hardwired‘ to be speakers and problem solvers.59 Mills uses the example of a wedding whereby the men (the father of the bride, for instance, the groom and the best man) all occupy active speaking roles while the women do not.60 In this way, men are perceived to contain all of the essential criteria that constitute the capacity to adopt the role of the authoritative speaker, while women, on the other hand, are understood in this discourse to occupy a more passive, listening role. It is my suggestion here that, outside of the domain of music, listening has been produced through the forces of patriarchal discourse and is coded to the feminine. Yet, within the discourse of music, and specifically, electroacoustic music, listening appears in the active.

The ‗enunciative modality of acousmatic listening‘ for example, highlights the active role of the ear as it is made possible through the acousmatic situation and through the ear‘s capacity to be able to identify, categorise and describe the sound object. Coupled with the institutional currency already granted to phenomenology (a

55 Karen Pegley and Virginia Caputo, 'Growing Up Female(s): Retrospective Thoughts on Musical Preferences and Meanings' in Queering the Pitch, eds. Brett, Wood, and Thomas, 299. 56 Pegley and Caputo, ‗Growing Up Female(s),‘ 299. 57 Pegley and Caputo, ‗Growing Up Female(s),‘ 299. 58 Freya Jarman-Ivens, Queer Voices: Technologies, Vocalities, and the Musical Flaw, 1st ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 3. 59 Fisher, Gender and the Science of Difference, 2. 60 Mills, Discourse, 87. 171 philosophical discourse that, as I have already stated, privileges the thinker), the heavy focus on theorisation suggests that ‗acousmatic listening‘ is less concerned with the act of listening itself than with how we can understand and think about the act. Additionally, the ‗enunciative modality of techno-aesthetic listening‘ functions to adapt pre-existing techno-scientific discourses that seek to eschew or perhaps control nature. This is a common technological theme, as Slack and Macgregor Wise assert:

Typically, the rational application of scientific principles, often cited as the definition of technology, is based on the idea of the domination of nature. Technology as a rational system is a system of domination and control.61

Nature is typically constructed in the feminine (as ‗Mother Nature‘ for instance) and as Mary Wyer et. al. points out, science is cast ‗as a practice designed to subdue Mother Nature.‘62 The determinism offered by integral serialism and its attempts to colonise the foundations of Western music is coupled with notions of control. As Born points out, in efforts ‗to provide a universal basic system for composition, as tonality had once been‘, notions of control are central, and it is no coincidence that notions of control also happen to be central to the discourse of hegemonic masculinity.63 It could be argued that the ‗enunciative modality of techno-aesthetic listening‘ works to deny the role of the ear altogether, at least in the sense that, to reinvoke McClary‘s comments, the music is far too difficult for a non-specialised listener.64 Despite the fact that both the enunciative modalities of ‗acousmatic listening‘ and ‗techno-aesthetic listening‘ are products of the modernist musical climate, they are both highly specialised approaches to electroacoustic music and they are both modalities that, in different ways, treat intellectual engagement with the music as primary. Importantly, these modalities still function today and they still have academic influence.65

61 Slack and Macgregor Wise, Culture and Technology, 54. 62 Mary Wyer et al., Women, Science, and Technology: A Reader in Feminist Science Studies, 3 ed. (Florence: Taylor and Francis, 2013), xix. 63 Born, Rationalizing Culture, 3. 64 McClary, 'Terminal Prestige,' 58. 65 Evidence of this activity can be seen in the journal Organised Sound or in the various conferences such as the annual International Conference on New Interfaces of Musical Expression, the International Computer Music Conference, the Electroacoustic Music Studies conference, the Australian Computer Music Conference to name but a few. 172

The ‗enunciative modality of referential listening‘, in contrast to the other enunciative modalities, goes some way to considering the relationship between the listener and their experiences of the sound world. According to Schafer the sound world of ‗Mother Nature‘ is actually privileged over the constructed and man-made sound world. In this way, listening is not solely constructed through discourses that belong to hegemonic masculinity. The ‗enunciative modality of referential listening‘ positions the listener (and perhaps their ears) within an imaginary sound world.

The positioning of the ear as active within these discourses, I have repeatedly asserted, denies corporeal experience (and thus feminine experience) because it privileges thinking, and as I stated earlier, thinking is produced through the discourse of masculinity and from a masculine subject position. The ear, then, has become disembodied through the appropriation of a discourse (initially perceived to be feminine) into a masculine discourse. To add weight to my argument it is necessary to quote McClary at length:

Throughout its history in the West, music has been an activity fought over bitterly in terms of gender identity. The charge that musicians or devotees of music are ―effeminate‖ goes back as far as recorded documentation about music, and music‘s association with the body (in dance or for sensuous pleasure) and with subjectivity has led to its being relegated in many historical periods to what was understood as a ―feminine‖ realm. Male musicians have retaliated in a number of ways: by defining music as the most ideal (that is, the least physical) of the arts; by insisting emphatically on its ―rational‖ dimension; by laying claim to such presumably masculine virtues as objectivity, universality, and transcendence; by prohibiting actual female participation altogether.66

Therefore, when the discourse of masculinity intersects with listening, when it produces listening through power, then it is the experiences, meanings and musical values that are mediated through the masculine and that are dictated by these forces.

66 McClary, Feminine Endings, 17. 173

Discourses seldom appear in the singular and they seldom work autonomously. As Foucault states:

Indeed, it is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together. And for this very reason, we must conceive discourse as a series of discontinuous segments whose tactical function is neither uniform nor stable. To be more precise, we must not imagine a world of discourse divided between accepted discourse and excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse and the dominated one; but as multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies.67

This, I argue, means that electroacoustic music is the intersection that several masculine discourses converge and are overlayed to erect and maintain rigid exclusionary boundaries around listening that are extremely powerful, and that function strategically to colonise listening and to contain it within the boundaries of masculinity. Clearly, what constitutes ‗the masculine‘ or a ‗masculine subject position‘ here is problematic and by this I do not mean that ‗the masculine‘ (or the feminine for that matter) is a monolith.68 It is possible to speak, however, of a hegemonic masculinity as it is essentialised through discourse, and as it emerges as something that all men (and women), despite their infinite difference, have to negotiate.

As I suggested earlier in this thesis, the achievements of women within electroacoustic music practice have gone largely unreported. This is, I have argued, a result of a combination of discursive power struggles that form the junction of electroacoustic music. Music operates through a nexus of gendered discourses and this imbues listening practice with meanings that are constructed within this nexus. To cite Victoria Armstrong:

67 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1, 100. 68 In discussing the problems with essentialist language Mills and Mullany point out that feminist theory needs to be able to make qualified generalisations so long as it is accepted that not all women and men behave in ways which are homogenous. Mills and Mullany, Language, Gender and Feminism, 45. 174

Within Western thought, the dualisms that construct the oppositional male/female, mind/body, reason/emotion, culture/nature splits reproduce a gendered discourse that polarizes masculinity and femininity, and we construct musical experiences and meanings through this gendered lens.69

These meanings are enculturated and socialised such that they impact all aspects of electroacoustic music. Therefore, they appear neutral (if they appear at all). Electroacoustic music, as I have been suggesting, is overlayed with all manner of complexities that concern pre-existing gendered discourses.

Thus, my argument here hinges upon the notion that both music and listening have been constructed within a patriarchal framework as passive and as belonging to the feminine. Femininity is a threat to hegemonic masculinity because, as Buchbinder points out, there is a fear that the masculine will become feminised or emasculated.70 Therefore, in order to maintain the integrity of masculinity, femininity must be contained, controlled or excluded altogether. If listening is positioned as a feminine act, then men who listen, or men who take pleasure from listening to music, risk becoming feminised or emasculated. Furthermore, if the body has been relegated to the domain of the feminine, then any consideration of listening means that the ears are also feminised, and thus, they must be detached from the experience of the body (also coded to the feminine) if they are to remain in the realm of the masculine. The listening body, according to Serena Guarracino, ‗can become a contested space where diverse discourses about gender identity come into play.‘71 In this way, it becomes possible to examine the strategic transformation of feminine discourses (such as listening) into masculine discourses and thereby they become the products of complex power relationships. In the context of electroacoustic music, the amount of academic literature discussing the ‗active‘ role of the listener is, as I have already pointed out, unparalleled. This literature functions in accordance with Foucault‘s conceptions of commentary. Statements are kept in circulation (and thus come to appear to be natural and neutral) through the constant reiteration and commentary that is necessary to produce and maintain knowledge within the rules and regulations

69 Victoria Armstrong, Technology and the Gendering of Music Education (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 6. 70 Buchbinder, Masculinities and Identities, 37. 71 Jarman-Ivens, Queer Voices, 3. 175 of academia, and that make it very difficult to create new knowledge.72 This is how power/knowledge functions, and as Mills asserts, ‗in order for something to be established as a fact or as true, other equally valid statements have to be discredited and denied.‘73 To quote Foucault, ‗it is not possible for power to be exercised without knowledge, it is impossible for knowledge not to engender power.‘74 In this way, Mills highlights the fact that when one is making a claim to knowledge, one is also making a claim to power.75 This constant reiteration of listening as ‗active‘, I argue, is a strategy that functions to ensure that listening is contained within the realms of masculinity and is maintained through the denial of the body as an integral part of the listening experience. The ear, like the eye, is political insofar as what is possible to hear is governed by the discourses through which listening emerges. These discourses are not neutral and therefore come to imbue listening practice with various meanings, values and norms constructed and mediated through a masculine lens. In this way, the ear, as part of the body, is a gendered space and it is a space where complex gender politics and power struggles take place.

The strategic exclusion of the feminine, however, does not mean that resistance to these measures is not possible. In fact, it is my argument that the ‗enunciative modality of corporeal listening‘ is produced through these power relations and offers the potential for new listening practices that complicate and problematise the passive role of the body by making new objects (such as the body itself) audible.

5.2 Oliveros‟ Deep Listening Pauline Oliveros is perhaps the most well-known, lesbian and female composer of electroacoustic music, and she is certainly the most widely cited in the literature. Oliveros‘ music features regularly in compilations alongside the ‗great‘, pioneering men such that her name (through no fault of her own and possibly much to her disgust) has come to represent a kind of tokenism so often applied to the few notable women that are accorded mainstream success. Consequently, I am cautious of Oliveros‘ inclusion in this chapter on the basis that it will further perpetuate that tokenism at the cost of recognition of her important contribution to music history as

72 Michel Foucault, 'The Order of Discourse', 48-78. 73 Mills, Michel Foucault, 67. 74 Foucault and Gordon, Power/Knowledge, 52. 75 Mills, Michel Foucault, 69. 176 a composer, performer, writer, theorist and feminist.76 On the other hand, her work on ‗deep listening‘ is too unique to not include in this chapter and it raises some noteworthy issues in relation to listening that do not seem to appear elsewhere within the literature.

Deep listening is a practice that emphasises listening as much as it does sound- making. For example, Oliveros‘ Deep Listening pieces and the Sonic Meditations are ‗soundings‘ that emphasise deep listening as a form of collaborative music-making practice.77 The pieces are not improvisations but are structured works that, according to Oliveros, ‗have to be there, directing attention, and empowering people to use the attention to grow, and to explore and learn with sound.‘78 Deep listening, then, first and foremost, is not a practice that was developed solely for electroacoustic music, and nor is it a listening practice that is restricted to electroacoustic music. Oliveros states that throughout the 1960s she was immersed in electronic music-making, taught electronic music and eventually came to teach a course for students who had no musical training.79 She began to notice that not only were the students not listening to themselves while they were performing, but that there was a perceivable disconnect between the audience and the environment during these performances.80 These observations, coupled with her interest in sound and listening, began a process of investigation that led to the development of deep listening as a practice and as a program that was taught, across the span of 10 years, at a series of deep listening retreats.81 Each retreat, Oliveros says, ‗lasts for one week and proposes listening twenty-four hours a day. This includes listening through dreaming as well as waking.‘82 In addition to the retreats, the deep listening practice has its own program whereby accredited ‗deep listeners‘ can actively train others in the process.83 The accreditation system is maintained by the Deep Listening Institute (formerly the Pauline Oliveros Institute) and maintains its own set of disciplinary practices outside

76 Rodgers, Pink Noises, 27. 77 Martha Mockus, Sounding Out: Pauline Oliveros and Lesbian Musicality (New York: Routledge, 2008), 38. 78 Pauline Oliveros and Fred Maus, "A Conversation About Feminism and Music," Perspectives of New Music 32, no. 2 (1994): 180. 79 Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2005), xvi-xvii. 80 Oliveros, Deep Listening, xvii. 81 Oliveros, Deep Listening, xviii. 82 Oliveros, Deep Listening, xviii. 83 Unknown author, "Http://Deeplistening.Org."Accessed 15th Februrary, 2016. 177 of those that are considered to be more mainstream (such as those I examined in Chapter 3).84

In the strictest sense, then, deep listening is not technically an electroacoustic music- specific listening model. To the contrary, the limits of deep listening extend well beyond musical genres. However, deep listening does lend itself to electroacoustic music because of its non-discriminatory properties (deep listening does not discriminate between sound, silence, music and or noise), because of its propensity towards concentration and awareness of sound, and of course, because of Oliveros‘s musical, disciplinary affiliations. Deep listening is the ability to be able to ‗expand the perception of sounds to include the whole space/time continuum of sound – encountering the vastness and complexities as much as possible.‘85 This includes the ability to be able to alternate between modes of perception that focus on discreet sounds as well as the ability to perceive the soundscape as a gestalt. The deep listening experience is one of deep concentration, awareness and attention to sounds. In an interview with Fred Maus, Oliveros distinguishes between ‗active listening‘ and ‗deep listening‘. She explains:

I think probably focussed aural attention is a very active kind of listening. And it probably takes that kind of listening for highly intellectual musical structures, in order to perceive those structures that a composer wants to be perceived. When some people try to work with that idea of active listening, it tends to turn into something different, sort of like listening to something and describing it to yourself the whole time … Active listening is the grasp, the ability to perceive the structure as it‘s happening: but not by describing it to yourself, because if in fact that‘s what‘s happening, you‘re missing the sensual aspect of the sound, and I think that happens very often. With some balancing, you can listen actively and have the sensual aspect simultaneously. But if you add describing, as it‘s going, then there‘s loss.86

84 Unknown author, "Http://Deeplistening.Org."Accessed 15th Februrary, 2016. 85 Oliveros, Deep Listening, xxiii. 86 Oliveros and Maus, "A Conversation About Feminism and Music," 182. 178

Interestingly Oliveros goes on to agree with Maus‘s assertion that, if the ears were ‗banana shaped‘ it would be far more difficult to consider that they were passive receivers of sound.87 Thus, Oliveros directly addresses the masculine bias in the context of listening.

Deep listening, according to Oliveros, is an intense engagement and includes activating all possible modes of listening at once without discriminating between sounds.88 She explains that ‗deep listening comes from noticing my listening or listening to my listening and discerning the effects on my bodymind.‘89 In this way the practice of deep listening channels attention to both the exterior world of sounds and the internal processes of the awareness of embodied listening – thus it is both projecting awareness outside of the body at the same time as inwards. This is unique in the sense that none of the other listening models I have surveyed has functioned to develop this level of self-awareness in the process of listening. Deep listening wants the listener to be aware of the fact that they are listening to sound while they are listening to sound.

Deep listening, Oliveros states, is a form of meditation in every respect.90 However, this meditation is not religious. Deep listening is a secular practice that, to cite Martha Mockus, ‗involves the dynamic of global awareness and focal attention.‘91 The deep listening program has a whole series of guided exercises that aim to develop mindfulness and are all designed to bring awareness to the self as it encounters the soundscape of life. A deep listening class is divided into sections relating to ‗bodywork‘, ‗breath‘, ‗listening‘, ‗listening journal‘, ‗Extreme slow walk‘, ‗four modes of thought‘, ‗discussion circle‘, a ‗rhythm circle‘ and ‗field recording‘.92

The class begins by organising subjects into a circle and guiding them in ‗bodywork‘ exercises. As Oliveros explains, ‗ways of listening can be discovered by doing these

87 Oliveros and Maus, "A Conversation About Feminism and Music," 182. 88 Pauline Oliveros, "Acoustic and Virtual Space as a Dynamic Element of Music," Leonardo Music Journal 5 (1995): 19. 89 Oliveros, Deep Listening, xxiv. 90 Oliveros, Deep Listening, xxiv. 91 Mockus, Sounding Out, 39. 92 Oliveros, Deep Listening, v-viii. 179

(Chi) exercises.‘93 These exercises take their inspiration from Chi Kung, T‘aL Chi, Yoga and ‗kinetic awareness practices‘ that have been adapted for use within the deep listening program.94 An example of one of these exercises is as follows:

The Energy of Rising/Falling (T‟ai Chi) Gather in a full circle with the whole class facing each other. Take natural stance, breathe with palms extended and turn downward toward the earth. Bend the knees down and up six times with the palms rising and falling. Be aware of the whole circle as well as your own as palms rise and fall in unison.95

A lot of the exercises encourage (and even rely upon) collaboration with other listeners and this collaboration plays a fundamental role in the context of the deep listening retreats. As Mockus explains: ‗her [Oliveros‘] compositions that call for collaborative music-making (especially the Sonic Meditations) usually insist on a ―continuous circulation of power‖ between listening and sounding.‘96 In this way, deep listening is not about the creation of expert listening subjects who acquire specialist musical knowledge (unlike in other contexts). Rather, deep listening is accessible to anyone who wishes to take part regardless of their musical skill level. Mockus states:

The Sonic Meditations challenge many of the established conventions of western art music on several levels. First, the invitation to ―untrained‖ musicians to take part upsets the traditional separation between ―expert‖ and ―amateur‖ in western music... Furthermore, the sounds that are made will not meet normative expectations of virtuosity, and this is the desired effect.97

The next part of the program focuses on breath and includes two exercises. The first exercise asks students to improvise a short piece with their breath by using short or

93 Oliveros, Deep Listening, 9. 94 Oliveros, Deep Listening, 9. 95 Oliveros, Deep Listening, 8. 96 Mockus, Sounding Out, 10. 97 Mockus, Sounding Out, 43. 180 long puffs of air but without vocalising the breaths.98 The second exercise focuses on inhaling, holding and exhaling over a controlled period of time to the sound ‗hahhhhhhh‘.99

The next set of exercises fall under the heading of ‗listening‘ and commence with the students being instructed on how to sit (legs crossed, on the floor), how to adjust their posture (relaxed upper body, balancing on the sitz bones and knees) and are then instructed to listen to the whole soundscape.100 Students are instructed to follow a sound to its end if a particular sound stands out for the listener. Once the instructor signals that this process is over, students reflect on the listening process through writing in a journal. The journal, stipulates Oliveros:

Should be private, like your own room. This journal is a place to write, graph, add collage, or draw whatever you would like to record. There is no need for anyone else to look at your journal unless you decide that you want to share a part of it or all of it. Your journal is your sanctuary for your listening experiences. Through journaling over time, your experiences in relation to one another accumulate meaning.101

The purpose of this is to compile, over time, a record of the awareness of sound/s and it reinforces the listening experience in the same way that taking notes in a lecture does. It also draws attention to the process of reflection and mindfulness that is an essential quality of deep listening.

The next part of the program is an ‗extreme slow walk‘ whereby students must try to walk in the slowest possible fashion in order to interrupt the normal rhythm of walking. Once this pattern is disrupted, listeners are then more in tune with, or perhaps more susceptible to, picking up on subtle shifts in patterns and energies.102 Another listening exercise called ‗Four Modes of Thought‘ is drawn from Jungian theory. Oliveros explains that ‗sensation‘ is what happens when we experience

98 Oliveros, Deep Listening, 10. 99 Oliveros, Deep Listening, 10. 100 Oliveros, Deep Listening, 12. 101 Oliveros, Deep Listening, 17. 102 Oliveros, Deep Listening, 20. 181 something through our senses, ‗intuition‘ is about intuiting and understanding messages and is concerned with the future, ‗feeling‘ is differentiated from emotion in the sense that feelings are built up over time and they are associated with the past and lastly ‗thinking‘ is an activity that involves language and analysis.103 The exercise asks students to participate in a conversation with others and to be aware of which mode of thought others are expressing. It asks listeners to consider a series of questions, such as ‗are you aware of feelings as you listen?‘ and ‗are you engaged in a daydream as you listen?‘104

The session concludes with a ‗rhythm circle‘ that covers a range of exercises that focus on clapping and listening. For example, one exercise asks the class to clap in sync to a soft but regular pulse. Each member in the clapping group alters or changes the accent of their claps.105 Once the clapping exercises are over, students are asked to make a series of creative works based on field recordings of sounds, and to edit these sounds to create pieces.

There are several noteworthy characteristics that deserve mention in relation to the deep listening practice and its use as a program of learning to listen. The first thing that struck me about this model was its acceptance and incorporation of the corporeal elements of listening. No other listening model I have surveyed pays such attention to the body as an active element in the listening process. Oliveros treats the body (among other things) as being essential to achieving a deep listening state and she refers to the concept of the ‗bodymind‘. According to Oliveros ‗bodymind expresses the continuum of the living matrix, that there is no separation between mind and body.‘106 This reference to the separation of the mind and body is significant insofar as it has a long, Western, philosophical history (at least since the inception of Western philosophy as an autonomous discipline in Greece).107 The mind/body problem refers to the notion that the mind is fundamentally separate from the body, that correlates with the idea that the body inhabits the physical, external world while the mind exists in non-physical space. Modern philosophy (as opposed to ancient

103 Oliveros, Deep Listening, 21. 104 Oliveros, Deep Listening, 22. 105 Oliveros, Deep Listening, 25. 106 Oliveros, Deep Listening, 95. 107 Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 5. 182 philosophy) generally attributes the promulgation of this duality to René Descartes. Thus, it is often referred to as Cartesian Dualism (although it is important to point out that this dichotomy predates Descartes).108 Cartesian Dualism, however, has been criticised because it privileges the mind by seeing it as the centre of the thinking subject and it cannot account for interactions between the mind and body.109 Furthermore, as I have been suggesting, these debates have been central to feminist critique (particularly within second-wave feminism)110 because of the lateral association of the mind with the masculine ‗thinking‘ subject and the body with the feminine ‗objectified‘ subject.111

This acceptance of the body in the deep listening program is significant for a range of reasons but not least because it does not downplay or relegate the role of the body within listening and, it is evident throughout Oliveros‘s work that she is acutely aware of the body and its marginalisation throughout listening discourse. She says:

Listening from the stomach I satisfy hunger and reject that which would harm me Listening from the liver I purify what I have ingested Listening from the kidneys I discard what I don‘t need Listening from the spleen I redden my blood and increase my courage Listening from the lungs I sustain my life. I breath and change my emotions Listening from the heart I open to life. Says Master T.K Shih ―The ocean is big but the heart is biggest.‖ The heart has ears for the path my journey is to take Listening from the centre I do my dance Listening from the bones I know what to do.112

Throughout the length of this creative writing piece, references to the body highlight that it is an integral part of the listening process.113 Furthermore, the deep listening

108 Stephen Mumford, Metaphysics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012), 67-68. 109 Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 6-7. 110 Walters, Feminism, 110. 111 Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 4-5. 112 Pauline Oliveros, "The Earth Worm Also Sings: A Composer's Practice of Deep Listening," Leonardo Music Journal 3 (1993): 37. 183 program treats the body as a passage to self-awareness through physical exercises designed to bring about mindfulness. The body is thus constructed as an active participant within the complex feedback structure of deep listening, and this is fundamental because the body is, by its lateral association with femininity, as I have demonstrated, constructed as passive. Thus, the ‗activation‘ of the body as an integral part of the deep listening program (in comparison to listening programs that are more often than not conceived of as having little or no relationship to the body) is a significantly different listening model, and one that is potentially more accessible to those who identify with non-hegemonic identities and further, with those who are not so well acquainted with the specialist technical knowledge required of others.

Accessibility is a key function of the deep listening program, and when set against other, more specialised listening models it functions to subvert, resist and reject existing constructions of listening within a conventional Western context, along with all of its associations with the privileging of the composer as creative genius within a patriarchal discursive framework. In this way, deep listening functions to break down the barriers between the composer and the audience, and it also functions to subvert traditional ideals surrounding what constitutes a performance.114 In fact, Mockus explains that the term ‗performance‘ is redundant in the deep listening model because there is no audience in the sense that everyone who is present is already participating in the sounding.115 As Mockus suggests:

Listening to music as a primarily intellectual behaviour (or an emotional escape) is cast aside in favour of active, fully embodied aural perception. Listening physically occupies a central position, as most of the Sonic Meditations begin with an observation of one‘s own breath cycle. Indeed it is the bodily experience of meditating that matters most.116

By virtue of the acknowledgement of the body as an integral part of the listening experience within the practice of deep listening, this reinforces its capacity to be more inclusive.

113 Oliveros, "The Earth Worm Also Sings," 37. 114 Mockus, Sounding Out, 44. 115 Mockus, Sounding Out, 44. 116 Mockus, Sounding Out, 44. 184

Many of the electroacoustic music-specific listening models that I have surveyed throughout the previous chapters could be classified as being composer-centric. This means that they construct listening in relation to development and structuring procedures that are more suited to composers and analysts of electroacoustic music than they are to listeners. Pertinently, composing and analysing also have ties to hegemonic masculinity. Therefore, they further engage the listener in ways that exclude connection to the feminine. Furthermore, these composer-centric models fail to acknowledge an approach to listening that can best be described as ‗listening for the sake of itself‘ or simply, for the joy and pleasure of listening as an aesthetic experience in its own right. This listener-centric approach is only identifiable within Landy‘s ‗something to hold onto‘ model117 and within Oliveros‘s deep listening model in that they do not presuppose the purpose of any listening experience and therefore have wider application. Listener-centric models teach self-gratifying listening practices in which the listening experience can be rewarding without the glory of an audience to revel in the composer‘s genius. Thus, they are inclusive and could be considered as forms of resistance to dominant practices.

5.3 Alternative Listening Epistemologies Throughout this chapter I have plotted a trajectory of the body that has argued that its eschewal (based on discursively constructed gender differences within a patriarchal framework) plays a key role in the exclusion of women from the discourse of electroacoustic music and from ways of listening to it. Given the historic association of the body with the feminine, this denial of corporeal experience (by lateral association to femininity) functions to negate certain kinds of experience and further, as I have argued, the corporeality of the ears. I have examined how the enunciative modalities of ‗acousmatic listening‘ and ‗techno-aesthetic listening‘ have functioned in different ways to deliberately or inadvertently disembody the ears through the colonisation of the ears in masculine discourses. I have also suggested that electroacoustic music is a space in which these masculine discourses converge and fortify.

117 Landy, "The 'Something to Hold on to Factor'." 185

Though they may first appear to be oppressive discourses, this is not always the case because these discourses are not solely oppressive forces, as Foucault would say, power is not possible without resistance. The ‗enunciative modality of corporeal listening‘ is therefore a good example of a resistant listening practice that is made possible through the productive forces of power. ‗Corporeal listening‘ directly challenges the exclusive nature of these masculine discourses and it does so through a variety of channels that make possible new ways of knowing about, speaking about and thinking about listening that do not fall into normative categories. In rejecting conventional conceptions of learned musical knowledge, for instance, the ‗enunciative modality of corporeal listening‘ makes possible ways of engaging with electroacoustic music that do not rely upon the acquisition of expertise. In this way, ‗corporeal listening‘ rejects what McClary calls ‗terminal prestige‘.118 This is the notion that the specialist composer has rendered the listener irrelevant due to their failure to understand music that exceeds reasonable levels of complexity.119 In this way, ‗corporeal listening‘ is not specialised since it does not require expert musical knowledge in order to listen or in order to ‗sound‘. From this, it becomes possible to imagine new experiences of music that are not provided in other enunciative modalities.

The ‗enunciative modality of corporeal listening‘, I argue, makes possible new ways of engaging with music and it renders the body as a new audible object for the listener. In a discourse that has systematically functioned to metaphorically remove the ears from the body, ‗corporeal listening‘ works to reinstate the listening experience as it is embodied in discourse.

118 McClary, 'Terminal Prestige', 57. 119 McClary, 'Terminal Prestige', 57. 186

Chapter 6. Enunciative Strategies, Experts and „What Can Be said‟

Throughout the preceding chapters I have, in various ways, laid the foundations for ideas that will be developed herein. These ideas relate to the question of how academic discourses impact the ways we listen. In Chapter 2, I reviewed and critiqued the history of electroacoustic music and, in doing so I suggested that the writing of history plays a significant role in shaping the ways we learn to listen to electroacoustic music. In Chapter 3, I examined how it is that power/knowledge comes to produce the extensive, written discourse of ear-training within the longstanding history of Western music, and I considered how this written discourse functions to inform the disciplinary practices of listening. In Chapters 4 and 5, I posited four ‗enunciative modalities of listening‘ and I identified these as nascent discursive formations that make possible new and different objects of audition. I argued that these nascent formations allow for new forms of knowledge to emerge and, importantly, new ways of listening. In the previous chapters I have concentrated predominantly on discourse in its written, formal forms as it is produced through the mechanisms of power/knowledge and through institutionalisation. Whilst I acknowledge that this is problematic on the basis that electroacoustic music production is not restricted to academic contexts or to written discourse, I argue that it is never wholly possible to know or account for all aspects of discourse anyway. The erection of these ‗discursive limits‘ allows for a more concentrated analysis. Moreover, electroacoustic music, by and large, has a long and strong history of being associated with the academy. Therefore, it makes sense to limit the study to this context. That is not to suggest, however, that the music is impervious to the non- academic, and nor is it my intention to perpetuate what has been considered a largely elitist culture.1 Rather, as I have maintained, my aim is to consider how these histories and discourses come to be formed and contained in the first place. And, more importantly, to consider how they impact on the ways in which we listen to electroacoustic music.

1 Here I am invoking the criticisms of Nick Collins and Julio d‘Escriván as previously discussed in Chapter Two. See Collins and d'Escrivan, The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music, 4. 187

In this chapter, I build on the previous chapter‘s analyses by examining specific accounts of discourse-in-action as it is produced by educators in the field. Extending beyond the purely historical, this chapter moves away from the realms of a discourse that is highly regulated in formal contexts through to more focused instances of discourse as it is apprehended in specific and directed contexts (surveys and interviews). In doing this, I draw lateral association between the themes in the thesis and specific accounts of ‗what is said‘, following Foucault.2 Additionally, I observe regularities and consistencies between the themes that have emerged so far, but also pay attention to the points of divergence that arise within the discursive context of the survey and interview situations.

6.1 Processes and Function of the Surveys and Interviews Data for this chapter was gathered in two parts: in a survey and in follow-up interviews. The survey was constructed and administered in the very early stages of the thesis and, although the timing was not ideal, the interviews were conducted several years later. Both the survey and the interviews have several layers of function within the thesis. It should be made explicit, however, that the goal of undertaking such an exercise was not to produce generalisable quantitative results that could lay claim to some manner of truth. Foucault‘s approach to history is fundamentally about problematisation. In this way, I adopt Foucault‘s views that what is ‗true‘ is only of interest in terms of how it came to appear that way.3

In the first instance, the analysis of the data seeks to examine the face-value of the responses of those who are considered experts in the field, and those who are responsible for producing the accepted, academic discourse. Secondly, it examines how participants responded to the questions. Ann Grey categorises this distinction as one between content and form.4 The content of a response, Grey asserts, ‗can be crucial in opening up avenues of research, of formulating different, usually suppressed, versions of events and requires ‗documentation.‘5 This was especially

2 As I have repeatedly suggested, discourse limits and sanctions what is possible to say. 3 Kendall and Wickham, Using Foucault's Methods, 22. 4 Ann Gray, Eight Strategies and Tactics in Analysis, Research Practice for Cultural Studies (London: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2003), 148. 5 Gray, Eight Strategies, 148. 188 true in the case of the survey data. The survey phase initially played an important role in gathering information. Several of my survey questions specifically asked participants to identify key texts, key composers and key electroacoustic pieces. This drove the early research into the identification of the discourse of electroacoustic music that was essential for the literature review in Chapter 2 and for laying the historical foundations of the thesis. Furthermore, the survey played an important role in the identification of key themes that then came to impact the shape of the interviews and the subsequent analysis of the data.

6.2 Recruitment and Demographic My only specification for the recruitment phase was that participants should have had some experience at teaching electroacoustic music within a tertiary education institution. My rationale for this came from very early conceptions of the thesis as an intervention into the pedagogical models of ear-training suited specifically to electroacoustic music in tertiary institutions. However, as the research focus developed, and as new issues came to light, the research shifted slightly to thinking about discursive issues in relation to the music. Namely, the research came to consider the impact of historical and pedagogical discourse on conceptions of the music, and further, how these are taken up within practices of listening to electroacoustic music. I imagine the reader will notice this shift especially with the differences in types of stylistic responses between the survey and the interviews, given there were several years that separated them.

After securing an ethics approval, I issued direct invitations to participate to approximately 50 people. Additionally, I posted invitations on academic community noticeboards within electroacoustic music networks. At the time of recruitment, the research was unconcerned with issues like gender representation and I do not recall making any concerted efforts to recruit women. Although this is unfortunate, it was also a necessary mistake in that it was only through omissions like this that I came to appreciate the fundamental role Foucault needed to play in my research. The more familiar I became with Foucault‘s ideas (that was happening in parallel to the construction and administration of the survey and the writing of the thesis) the more capable I became at seeing power in play and asking questions of it. In this sense,

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Foucault taught me very directly how to be critical, and it was only once I had a grasp on his ideas (if that can ever be the case) that I was able to reflect this critical element across the research. Of the 13 people who volunteered to participate, one was female and twelve were males. Although this is disappointing in the context of a thesis that makes gender one of its key themes, the imbalance goes some way to demonstrating directly the very gender problems it critiques.

Despite all of my efforts to achieve a large sample I ended up with 13 survey participants and four of those agreed to undertake a follow-up interview. At first I was quite disappointed with the small sample size because I believed that this would not be substantial enough to make any kinds of claims. Again, it is here that Foucault played a vital role because it soon became evident that to make any kinds of generalisable claims would be antithetical to the Foucaultian framework. Instead, I aimed to focus on individual accounts of the discourse-in-action.

Out of those who participated, and at the time of their participation, four of the thirteen participants were affiliated with institutions in the United Kingdom, four with institutions in Canada, two participants had affiliations in Australia, one participant had affiliations in the United States and one participant was unaffiliated. All participants had previously or were currently (at the time of the survey) teaching in units or courses that dealt with electroacoustic music at a tertiary level. Initially, I had wanted all of the participants to remain identifiable throughout the thesis because this would have added another level of analysis to the thesis as it aptly illustrates the processes and function of the role of ‗the author‘ in relation to discourse. Although many of the participants gave their consent to remain identifiable throughout the research, there were some who wished to remain anonymous. For this reason, and for the sake of consistency, I have presented the responses of participants in a non-identifiable format using pseudonyms.

6.3 Surveys and Interviews For the analysis of the data I combined the responses to the survey and interviews rather than treat them as separate entities. I chose to present the analysis in this fashion in order to ensure the fluidity of the thematic material. While there are

190 elements of the survey design that would have lent themselves to quantification, the interview data did not. I have, where appropriate, opted to avoid presenting data in a quantitative manner for reasons I have already discussed.

The survey comprised 21 questions. The first nine were designed to obtain information specific to the background of each participant. They included questions about listening habits, level of formal musical education and the amount of and types of ear-training that the participant had received. The remaining questions were directed towards the teaching practices of the participant including questions about the efficacy of conventional aural training procedures in the education of tertiary students as they relate to electroacoustic music, along with the types of teaching materials that the participants used (textbooks, musical examples, significant people etc.). This part of the survey focused on the different types of educational strategies that existed among the participants in their teaching practices, along with their perceived efficacy. The survey was, despite my initial concerns, quite a productive and useful exercise in that it produced in the vicinity of 10 000 words of pure data. A copy of the administered survey is available in Appendix 1.

Each of the four interviews lasted approximately an hour and yielded a substantial amount of data (roughly 25 000 words). The interviews, unlike the surveys, were designed to solicit relatively unstructured data from the participants. There were 18 generic questions and some participant-specific questions that directly related to the responses in the surveys. The generic questions were mostly informed by the emergent themes in the thesis, but these emergent themes were also impacted by the survey results. The first four questions related to the use of and importance of language, terminology and definition. Several of the questions related to the use of and importance of technology, along with questions regarding gender disparity and the academic status of electroacoustic music. The last few generic questions were directed towards the participant‘s own relationship with electroacoustic music. These questions that asked them to comment on their first experiences with electroacoustic music, whether they had had to learn to listen to it (and how) and, in what context they encountered the music. A copy of the administered interview questions is available in Appendix 2.

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6.4 Methods and Methodology After conducting the interviews, and after attending several discourse analysis workshops, I became interested in how the responses were shaped by language, and what this said about the experiences of the participants (what Gray would call the ‗form‘ of the responses).6 Gray states that it is important to ask different kinds of questions of the data. As she explains:

You want to ask questions about the subjectivity and subject position of your respondents, about the language they use, and the interpretive frames or cultural repertories which they can call on in order to articulate their experience.7

Language is essential to discourse and therefore, I avoid treating language as a representational account or mediated account of experience. Rather, in keeping with the Foucaultian frame, I treat these accounts of language as discursive events that do not simply reflect experiences in a passive fashion, but function in a constructive manner to create experiences, values, meanings and, importantly to affect listening. Given the ‗expert‘ status of all of the research participants, the constructive nature of the discourse carries immense institutional currency. As Kendall and Wickham point out:

The insistence that there is no ‗inside‘ [of discourse] is Foucault‘s way of telling us to forget the idea of a thinking process operating prior to the use of words and symbols in order to make their use possible.8

Thought, then, does not simply precede language, and nor is language simply a representation of thought. Rather, within Foucault‘s histories, thought and language are governed by the prevailing discourses within which they are constructed and in which they, in turn, construct.9

6 Gray, Eight Strategies, 148. 7 Gray, Eight Strategies, 148. 8 Kendall and Wickham, Using Foucault's Methods, 35. 9 Foucault, "The Order of Discourse", 67. 192

In the introduction to the thesis I explained the ways in which I adopt Foucault‘s ideas as part of a methodology to frame the thesis – it has also framed some of the methods. This has, at every level, played a critical role in the analytical processes that came to form the thesis, and this has shaped the ways in which my own analytical capacities have developed. Despite the fact that there are aspects of Foucault‘s work that are useful for the analysis of texts, and that there are elements of Foucault‘s methodological stance that are worth engaging, Mills warns that ‗Foucault did not develop a fully worked out methodological position and criticised the very notion of formulating one type of position.‘10 Kendall and Wickham agree that while there are features of Foucault‘s work that could be described as ‗methodological in tone‘ Foucault‘s methods are difficult to follow.11 Therefore, in addition to the resources offered by Foucault himself, I have also drawn on approaches from the field of ‗critical discourse analysis‘ in order to offer an additional level of support in relation to the analysis and discussion of the data within this chapter.12 Ruth Wodak defines critical discourse analysis in the following manner:

Most generally, CDA [critical discourse analysis] can be defined as a problem-oriented interdisciplinary research programme, subsuming a variety of approaches, each with different theoretical models, research methods and agendas. What unites them is a shared interest in the semiotic dimensions of power, identity politics and political-economic or cultural change in society.13

It is these power relationships that I find to be most useful and most relevant for the analysis of the collected data, insofar as they both construct and determine the discourse of electroacoustic music that, as I have been arguing, functions to shape the listener‘s experience of the music.

10 Mills, Michel Foucault, 111. 11 Kendall and Wickham, Using Foucault's Methods, 4. 12 Methods such as those which are outlined in Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, eds., Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis 1st Edition ed. (London: SAGE Publications, Ltd). and Norman Fairclough, Language and Power (Essex; England: Addison Wesley Longman Limited, 1989). 13 Ruth Wodak, ‗Critical Discourse Analysis‘ in Ken Hyland and Brian Paltridge, eds., Continuum Companion to Discourse Analysis (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011), 38. 193

Sandra Hale and Jemina Napier identify two approaches to analysing discourse: the top-down approach and the bottom-up approach.14 The top-down approach is where the researcher imposes pre-existing themes onto the data in order to address specific questions, or to prove/disprove a particular hypothesis. The bottom-up approach, on the other hand, allows the data to determine the type of structure without any pre- existing or preconceived ideas.15 At various stages my research has adopted a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches. In this way, the data plays a reciprocal role in the generation of the thesis in the sense that I have allowed themes in the data to inform the research (for example, literature was selected on the basis that it was identified by the research participants) and similarly, I have allowed the research to inform the themes in the data. The data has played a very practical role in shaping the analyses across the thesis in the sense that I have allowed the data to influence and shape the previous chapters.

6.5 Analysis and Findings In structuring the analysis and findings I have, like David McInnes et al., allowed the organisation of the themes to be led by statements made by the participants.16 Additionally, I begin my analysis as it is organised, following Hale and Napier, in a top-down manner whereby the themes were imposed on the data (as they arose out of the research for the previous chapters). However, I want to emphasise that the use of this top-down approach is not entirely clear-cut in the sense that although the themes were imposed on the data, they were emergent themes in the research that was, importantly, guided by the responses of the surveyed participants.

„Sorry, definition is necessary.‟ (Bob) While discussing the importance of an agreed-upon definition of electroacoustic music, Bob prefaced his response with an apology:

14 Sandra Hale and Jemina Napier, Research Methods in Interpreting: A Practical Resource (London; New York: Bloomsubry Academic, 2013), 5 15 Hale and Napier, Research Methods in Interpreting, 4. 16 David McInnes, Jack Bradley, and Garrett Prestage, "The Discourse of Gay Men's Group Sex: The Importance of Masculinity " Culture, Health & Sexuality 11, no. 6 (2009). 194

Sorry, definition is necessary. I think it‘s not just for electroacoustic music but for anything we do. Definitions are key to be sure that you‘re talking about using the same language. (Bob)

The apology at the start of the sentence is significant in the sense that it takes priority over any of the other statements and immediately sets up an expectation that the participant is moving into territory that may be provocative, thus requiring justification and defence. The apology implies that Bob feels that some would disagree with the assertion that a definition is necessary or, perhaps, that there would be disagreement about the fact that it is language that can play such an important role in the formation of the music and the ways it is experienced. Either way, it is evident that on some level, the participant is aware of the role of language in relation to the music and further, that it may be a sensitive issue. For Bob, ‗definitions are key‘ and are thus crucial indicators that ‗you‘re talking about using the same language‘. A similar sense of apprehension is reflected in the statements of Megan who, when asked what terminology she used to talk about the music, replied:

I like the term sonic art but it tends to be misinterpreted too narrowly over here. I go with electroacoustics. I have research projects on terminology so I understand that it‘s complex. But also I think as we get in further, I‘m always arguing in favour of talking about music and the fact that it‘s electroacoustic or not shouldn‘t be quite as high profile in certain circumstances. (Megan)

Here too, we encounter language that indicates that Megan is sensitive to the provocative nature of the issue. Megan likes the term ‗sonic art‘ but finds that it is ‗misrepresented too narrowly‘. The next sentence begins to verify Megan‘s authority by claiming that she is familiar with this particular issue, ‗I have research projects on terminology so I understand that it‘s complex‘. This statement functions as an enunciative strategy in the sense that it is in accordance with the ways that Foucault describes the processes of the speaking subject. Before any truth claims can be accepted as valid knowledge the author of the claim needs to stake out their authority. Foucault specifically discusses this strategy from the perspective of a doctor. He says

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Medical statements cannot come from anybody; their value, efficacy, even their therapeutic powers, and, generally speaking, their existence as medical statements cannot be dissociated from the statutorily defined person who has the right to make them, and to claim for them the power the overcome suffering and death.17

These enunciative strategies are therefore strategies that are not unique to Megan. To the contrary, they are strategies that are necessary for everyone to adopt in order to navigate the production of knowledge as it exists within the complex processes of power/knowledge conceived by Foucault. The differences in the ways that men and women exercise these strategies within discourse tend to mean that men assume their own authority while women often to have to prove it.18

The declaration, ‗I have research projects on terminology so I understand that it‘s complex‘, also functions as a caveat for the statements to follow and suggests that the participant feels that their particular response to the question goes against the accepted view. Implicit in the response ‗I‘m always arguing in favour of ...‘ is the view that there is an argument to be made, that there is a need for defence, and that we may be encountering a response to the issue that is somewhat contentious. The ongoing nature of the ‗argument‘ is made clear by the use of the terms ‗always‘ and ‗arguing‘ that suggests that the ‗argument‘ is pervasive and that it is occurring in the present tense. Additionally, there is the use of terminology that values, as the participant states, ‗the fact that it‘s electroacoustic or not shouldn‘t be quite as high profile‘. In Megan‘s view, this issue of categorisation is a ‗high profile‘ issue and seemingly, at least in some cases, she believes that it is an unnecessary preoccupation.

What is evident is that both Bob and Megan are acutely aware of the notion that discussions of terminology are controversial, and that they are current issues central to electroacoustic music.

17 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 77. 18 For example see Mills and Mullany, Language, Gender and Feminism. 196

„I set my ground rules, and let the games begin. As someone has written, “All the Rest is Noise”.‟ (Darren) At the level of the formation and maintenance of electroacoustic music as a set of rules and regulations for the production of knowledge, navigation of the terminology and the anxieties surrounding it can be viewed through the values that govern the term ‗music‘. The conceptual battleground regarding what constitutes music has, as I have shown, provided the impetus for electroacoustic music to repeatedly justify its position as a valid form of ‗music‘ and to reiterate its ‗musical‘ status. The term ‗music‘ is inherent to the term ‗electroacoustic music‘ and it is often for this reason that others prefer to avoid the term ‗music‘ altogether. (As I stated in Chapter 2 some prefer terms like ‗organised sound‘ for instance.) Definition and terminology are, for the aforementioned participant Darren, volatile issues: ‗I set my ground rules, and let the games begin.‘ This statement is particularly evocative because, typically, ‗games‘ have rules, ‗games‘ are competitive and, importantly, ‗games‘ usually result in a winner and a loser. ‗Games‘ often require risk, but they also often require strategy. Therefore, Darren‘s comment reminds us that this topic is sensitive and that it requires strategic navigation that further reinforces the vexed nature of issues surrounding definition, terminology and classification.

Darren continues in this evocation by stating ‗as someone has written, ―All the Rest is Noise.‖‘ The phrase ‗the rest is noise‘ is common parlance, and therefore it could simply be meant in this way. However, the phrase could be pointing to the book by Alex Ross titled The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century that charts the history of twentieth century music in a way that extends to an audience beyond an academic, one or it could also be signalling Hamlet‘s famous last words ‗the rest is silence‘. Regardless of its intended meaning (I do not wish to speculate about how it was meant), the statement does conjure interesting imaginary boundaries. Noise has been positioned as the polar opposite of music and, to refer to any music as noise extends beyond a simple disparagement – this kind of slight has more sinister and far-reaching implications. For Schafer, noise is a source of pollution, a harmful contaminant.19 For Attali noise is the source of power because it is ‗inscribed at the

19 Schafer, Ear Cleaning. 197 start within the panoply of power‘.20 And, as Cusick has found, noise is complicated, it is ambiguous and it is not simply the ‗other‘ of music. Music can become noise when it is used in ways that function to harm individuals and it can be used as a means of torture.21 For me, the coupling of terminology used to describe these issues as ‗a game‘ where ‗the rest is noise‘ indicates what the stakes are.

Darren expresses further consternations:

Regarding ―ea‖ [electroacoustic music] I have not used the term ―electroacoustic music‖ [sic] without ―‖ quotation marks for probably about three decades ... I do not use the word ‗music‘ attached to electroacoustics, except in the term: ――electroacoustic music‖‖ – which I put in two sets of quotation marks for you to differentiate is from the superset fields of ‗electroacoustics‘, and ‗music‘… It follows that your first question, within the framework given above, would be that [1] I don‘t talk about this ―music‖. But [2], this does not negate my negotiation of some sound events as ‗music‘.22 (Darren)

The fact that anyone would avoid using the term ‗music‘ when it occurs in relation to ‗electroacoustic music‘ reinforces the ideological nature of the prevailing power relationships within the language that go on to have material effects. These power relationships also illustrate the level of discomfort in the affiliation between the two terms. Another participant, Harry, expresses his concern differently by using the tension between the terms ‗music‘ and ‗electroacoustic music‘ as a learning opportunity and as a point of discussion with students who may not have experienced the music previously. Harry usually introduces students to electroacoustic music by:

First 'opening their ears' to a variety music (including popular, classical, non- Western genres, electroacoustic works and excerpts that are actually not

20 Attali, Noise, 6. 21 Sussane G Cusick, "Musicology, Torture, Repair," Radical Musicology 3 (2008), http://www.radical-musicology.org.uk; "―You Are in a Place That Is out of the World. . .‖: Music in the Detention Camps of the ―Global War on Terror‖," Journal of the Society for American Music 2, no. 01 (2008). 22 This response is as written by the participant including use of the term [sic]. 198

musical works) and asking them to reflect on whether what they hear is music or not. If it is music, then they are asked to explain why and to think about its function. (Harry)

The notion of ‗opening their ears‘ is likely a reference to Schafer (see Chapter 4) but it also suggests that, for students to have a valid opinion on whether electroacoustic music can be considered ‗music‘, students must first be equipped with the knowledge to appreciate this distinction in the first place, by ‗opening their ears‘. It also implies that the ears of students require opening. That perhaps, students come to the music with ‗closed ears‘. These comments support the notion that electroacoustic music is something that one needs to open one‘s ears to, that perhaps it is necessary to learn to listen to the music. They also demonstrate the volatile relationship between electroacoustic music and its relationship to the broader ‗musical‘ realm.

When asked if terminology and definition were important Megan responded:

They might be – I guess they might influence some people's receptive stance but I would hope that wouldn't be the case with someone who's well trained. (Megan)

Terminology and definition are seen by Megan as having the capacity to ‗influence some people‘s receptive stance‘ or, in other words, terminology and definition can impact the ways people engage with the music. The use of the term ‗receptive‘ is interesting insofar as it both pertains to a listener‘s inclination to accept new ideas and has currency in relation to the ways listening is conceived more broadly. Are listeners, for example, passive ‗receivers‘ of meanings? Or, are they, as Barthes would argue, active contributors to it?23 The qualifier in Megan‘s statement is, however, that for ‗well-trained‘ people terminology will not (or perhaps should not) impact the ways listeners engage with the music. Interestingly, Megan feels that it is a musician‘s training that enables them to be immune to the ideological implications of language. In direct contrast, participant Edward signals that it is ‗traditionally

23 Barthes, 'The Death of the Author', 142-48. 199 trained musicians‘ who are usually the most ideologically implicated when it comes to the consideration of electroacoustic as music. He states:

'Musicians', especially traditionally trained musicians, are often suspicious of electroacoustic music (many don't regard it as music at all!), especially if it uses 'non-musical' sound sources. (Edward)

Here, unlike in the previous comments, ‗traditional‘ training is seen as something that restricts the abilities of listeners to appreciate electroacoustic music as a valid form of music. I have written extensively about the disciplinary mechanisms of ‗traditional‘ ear-training procedures and the production of their possible effects (see Chapters 3 and 4). What is evident, however, is that both Megan and Edward view training as something that impacts (either by regulating or enhancing) the listener‘s experience of electroacoustic music and their capacity to accept it as a valid form of music. Participant John also mentioned education and training when asked the same question. John explains:

Well, I suppose that having had some sort of – well, music education, the terms have an impact on how you listen to the music or how you learn to appreciate it. I mean, it's certainly been important to me and I think it's part of the mechanism that structures the sort of cultural expectations. But it's probably possible to have – to engage with all sorts of different music without knowing definitions and terms and I'm sure lots of people do. (John)

It is ‗music education‘ that structures the expectations of listeners, according to John, and it impacts how they listen to music. For John, like some of the others mentioned earlier, appreciation is something that is ‗learned‘ rather than naturally occurring or simply a matter of personal taste. Learning, however, is only one point of access for listeners. As John states, ‗But it‘s probably possible to have – to engage with all sorts of different music without knowing definitions and terms and I‘m sure lots of people do‘.

Terminology and definition, whilst they may seem innocuous, actually play a vital role in the construction of the discourse of the music, and these values inevitably 200 filter their way into the listening experience. Because discourse is not simply representative, it impacts the listening experience at various levels by shaping the possible values, meanings and experiences of listeners. These issues also impact the listening experience insofar as the language constructs the shape of the disciplinary mechanisms that are in place within the pedagogies such as those present within the enunciative modalities I posited earlier. At the level of discourse, the two terms (‗electroacoustic music‘ and ‗music‘) are locked into a struggle for power and status whereby electroacoustic music constantly needs to situate itself in its broader relation to the term ‗music‘ in order for it to be legitimised. Music, in any sense, not only carries with it preconceived values about what it should be, what its purpose is and how it should function but also, the term functions as a marker of status. Language has emerged as one of the most significant themes in the discourse of electroacoustic music (and of this thesis) as it is both recurring and replicated across the thesis, the survey responses and the interview data. The polarising nature of terminology, generally speaking, can be witnessed whenever a public figure makes a statement that is considered to be politically incorrect. Such issues are often played out in the media. The statements are either actively condemned on the basis that they demean the experiences of a marginalised group or they are defended by those who feel that political correctness has spiralled into absurdity thus downplaying the crucial role language plays in both constructing and reflecting our experiences of the world. As Culler states:

Language is not a ‗nomenclature‘ that provides labels for pre-existing categories; it generates its own categories … Language is both the concrete manifestation of ideology – the categories in which speakers are authorized to think – and the site of its questioning or undoing.24

I have already discussed the performative role of language and I have argued that anxieties surrounding terminology and definition play a fundamental role in the discourse of electroacoustic music as a disciplinary practice. These issues surrounding definition, terminology and status function to impact the listener‘s

24 Culler, Literary Theory, 59-60. 201 experience of the music and this is reinforced by the testaments of the research participants.

„[Listeners‟] need to be highly trained musically speaking (in the genre) to be able to appreciate the language and grammar.‟ (Aaron) Academic literature on electroacoustic music highlights training as another central feature, often signalling that the music requires skills that are not taught within conventional, musical, pedagogical frameworks (such as those I described in Chapter 3) and are thus specialised. This conception of the music as being highly specialised impacts its accessibility but it also contributes to the perceived marginal status of the music. As the aforementioned participant Aaron suggests, musical appreciation depends on training and, in particular, it depends upon the amount of training a listener has. Not only do listeners need to be trained, they need to be ‗highly trained … in the genre‘. ‗The genre‘ is therefore something that is imagined as having its own genre-specific ‗language and grammar‘. When Aaron was asked to list the important skills, attitudes or knowledge that need to be taught in relation to electroacoustic music he responded in the following manner:

I would say the ear need [sic] to appreciate the difference between technically transparent materials (and original sounds) compared to ordinary sound and degraded sound (not intentionally but which comes across like this no matter the composer's intentions). (Aaron)

Interestingly, he draws on terminology, concepts and ideas that describe particular sonic characteristics highly specific to electroacoustic music discourse such that this terminology would elude even the most educated musician trained outside of electroacoustic music, and significantly, it speaks to the precise nature of the music. The ‗grammar‘ of electroacoustic music is an important metaphor and receives regular mention. As Bob explains:

So while electroacoustic music usually doesn't have grammar, it has conventions. At least certain schools in it (for example the Montreal acousmatic school) may have certain techniques that are extremely familiar to those who practice it – be it using field recorded sound based on its 202

gestural properties, or even utilisation of very specific gestures (such as some kind of glissandi in pitch, space, or dynamics concluding on some kind of transient). Again, knowing the conventions enhances the listener's experience and ability to understand the music. (Bob)

In contrast to the previous comments by Aaron, Bob states that electroacoustic ‗has conventions‘ but it ‗usually doesn‘t have grammar‘. Grammar, generally speaking, refers to the use of language and, in particular, to the ways that language is apprehended and structured. ‗Grammar‘ is compared by Bob to ‗convention‘ that typically refers to unwritten/unspoken rules that govern something, in this case, electroacoustic music. Being familiar with the conventions of electroacoustic music, then, ‗enhances the listener‘s experience and ability to understand the music‘. Interestingly, from here, Bob also employs a range of specialised, technical terms that are unique to electroacoustic music. For example, he refers to the use of ‗field recorded sound based on its gestural properties‘ and the ‗utilisation of very specific gestures (such as some kind of glissandi in pitch, space, or dynamics concluding on some kind of transient)‘. This indicates that these are some of the ‗conventions‘ that listeners are required to know in order to enhance their experience and, importantly, their ‗ability to understand the music‘.

Participant John, however, believes that understanding convention can enrich a listener‘s experience but can also restrict it. John says:

The perceived need to comprehend a given musical style can be a barrier to enjoyment. Learning to listen for certain things can be a great source of enjoyment but that discovery in itself can inhibit less goal-oriented forms of listening. (John)

There are several layers to what John is saying here. ‗The need to comprehend a given musical style‘ is a ‗perceived need‘ and, in John‘s view, can hinder the listener‘s enjoyment. This speaks to the goals and functions of listening to electroacoustic music. Is the goal to understand the music? Is the goal to enjoy the music? Are the two mutually exclusive? The use of the term ‗perceived‘ suggests that comprehension of the music is not a self-evident goal. This is confirmed when 203

John continues to suggest that understanding the music can actually ‗be a barrier to enjoyment‘. As I argued in Chapter 3, music education purports to educate on music but ‗music‘ is often considered in very limited terms and this education is considered to be morally ‗good‘ for subjects. However, as John aptly points out, education can also restrict listening, especially ‗less goal-oriented forms of listening‘. Given electroacoustic music is typically non-teleological (in contrast to much Western tonal music), it is significant that John refers to ‗less goal-oriented forms of listening‘. Learning to hear a perfect cadence, to use one specific example, has currency as a musical convention in tonal music. It can tell the listener that the music has come to an end, or a composer might use a perfect cadence to draw out and confuse the listener‘s expectations of the music. This particular convention is often deeply ingrained such that most listeners, even listeners without any musical training, will understand what it means. Electroacoustic music works in stark contrast to the conventions accorded by Western tonal music and therefore can potentially restrict a listener‘s audible field or guide the listener towards objects of audition that are specific only to Western tonal music. In this way, music-specific objects of audition, constructed through discourse, can function to impede a listener‘s experience of the music by setting up expectations that cannot be met.

Discourse, as I have maintained, functions in exclusive ways. Therefore, if we can understand discourse as a means of constructing these musical conventions then it can also limit them. For example, as John continues:

Learning to hear certain features can make us deaf to other things that are going on in the music and lead to dissatisfaction when we hear what sound "derivative" or clichéd. (John)

These statements are particularly instructive when considered in relation to the previous chapters. Education not only constructs new objects of audition, it also has the capacity to limit them. In being educated about what to listen for, listeners are also being educated on what not to listen for, and these selected criteria are positioned in ways which are perceived to be a matter of ‗convention‘ and that therefore purport to be entirely neutral. Convention stipulates what is appropriate

204 within a given field, and in this respect, it has a similar function to discourse. Mills asserts:

Discourse causes a narrowing of one‘s field of vision, to exclude a wide range of phenomena from being considered as real or as worthy of attention, or as even existing.25

It is discourse, then, that can impact what we hear and how we hear it. It focuses our attention, our audition, or ‗vision‘ as Mills calls it, and in doing this it inevitably excludes everything else. John is therefore explaining that, in a very practical sense, discourse impacts the ways we listen to the music by limiting the field of audition, by focusing attention on specific objects of audition, and by excluding those objects that do not conform to conventions. The conventions are, however, as Megan explains, entirely esoteric.

„There are a lot of unspoken rules about what's considered proper and improper.‟ (Megan) Several participants made mention of musical conventions, and did so quite often. Megan‘s statements stand out as she describes these conventions as ‗unspoken rules‘. In her interview Megan recited a personal anecdote about how she had once used musical examples such as Jimi Hendrix and Kraftwerk. She explained that the examples were deemed to be inappropriate to the genre of electroacoustic music by a colleague who questioned her judgement on this matter. After the anecdote, Megan said:

There are a lot of unspoken rules about what's considered proper and improper. But I don't like unwritten rules, maybe because I often don't grasp what they are. But I think it's unfair for people to set them up and then expect you to follow them. You only hear of them if you're a member of the club. (Megan)

25 Mills, Discourse, 46. 205

The mention of ‗unspoken rules‘ and being a ‗member of a club‘ resonates with themes in the thesis that I have already discussed, namely the specialised nature of the music and its perceived exclusivity in terms of its accessibility and its status. Rules that are ‗unspoken‘ and ‗unwritten‘ are thus uncertain and I have already argued that electroacoustic music does not operate according to conventions and rules that are highly organised around central governing principles. Quite the contrary, as I have shown, particularly in Chapters 4 and 5, there are no single, unitary pedagogical methods specific to electroacoustic music. Instead, knowledge about learning to listen to electroacoustic music is both prolific (there are numerous possible approaches to learning to listen to electroacoustic music) and fractured in the sense that there is not one agreed upon method, and nor are there necessarily shared principles across methods. Different enunciative modalities, for example, value and construct different objects of audition and focus listening in different ways. This makes training the music particularly complicated, but also speaks to the accessibility of the music in that gaining ‗club membership‘ is particularly difficult because the ‗unspoken‘ and ‗unwritten‘ rules that govern membership are vague.

Though I will return to constructions of gender later, I think it is worth highlighting Megan‘s gender here, especially as she talks about ‗the club‘ and ‗membership‘. For me, this speaks to Megan‘s subject position because it conjures images of ‗the boys‘ club‘ and resonates with issues surrounding accessibility to the music for women. Megan is the only female that participated in my research and I think it is particularly significant that she is describing the music and its surrounding culture in this fashion, even though she has not directly mentioned gender or made direct reference to it. Many (though not all) of the other research participants participated in this ‗club‘ without demonstrating an awareness that it is a club. This is evidenced in their use of language to enact their authority. Megan‘s comments, therefore, show an acute responsiveness to the forces that function to exclude her, even though she may not see them as gendered forces. Despite her extensive expertise and qualifications in the field of electroacoustic music, she writes and speaks, unlike the others, from an outsider‘s perspective.

206

Obscurity surrounding convention is also mentioned by Darren in the context of teaching a composition class. He begins by explaining how he teaches ‗traditional‘ music theory, how he moves through inter-chromatic harmony and then he says:

Which is fine until you get to an electroacoustics course when they have a sound that goes meep and then they say well, what sound should follow that? The answer is who the hell knows? We'll make it up; make it up as we go along. (Darren)

While there is a hint of facetiousness to Darren‘s comments, what they highlight is the elusiveness surrounding convention in electroacoustic music. Darren implies that there are, in fact, no conventions: ‗we‘ll make it up; make it up as we go along‘. He implies that composers do not really know how to decide ‗what sound should follow‘. Depending on which school of thought one follows, some of the music is laboriously structured according to specific principles, and I discussed some of these methods in Chapter 4. Other forms of the music are not so concerned with overall structure. Instead, they are concerned with the sonic qualities of individual sound events. Conventions surrounding musical structure are entirely unclear in the sense that, similar to the proliferation of listening models, there has been a proliferation of theories regarding how best to structure the music.

„Just it's inaccessible. It's not something that you come by, that you can hear anywhere or be exposed to‟. (Bob) The specialised nature of the music and the language required to access it is reinforced across most of the surveys. Notions of accessibility take many shapes among the responses of the participants. Bob remarks on the absence of the music in ordinary listening situations and its accessibility to the listener: ‗It‘s not something you come by, that you can hear anywhere or be exposed to‘. In this way, encountering the music is not likely to be a chance experience. Electraocoustic music is therefore not music ‗that you can hear anywhere‘. This means that, unlike popular music that is relatively ubiquitous, the music can only be heard in specific contexts and because of this it is inaccessible. John sees the notion of accessibility as an issue related to its production. When asked if he felt that there was a divide

207 between the more academic types of electroacoustic music and the more vernacular types John responds by explaining that:

If there are two different sorts of contexts for music or genres or whatever, then there's not much – there's not so much of a divide technologically. So they probably share a lot of the same technical processes … Electroacoustic music is on the margins. So it's a pretty marginal form of music and while people who are interested in electroacoustic music might also be interested in more vernacular forms of electronic music – for example, pop music or electronic dance music or – the reverse is probably not true. So there'd be less interest in electroacoustic music on the part of the audiences for the more mainstream forms of electronic music. So in that respect, there is a divide. Whereas, in terms of technology, there probably isn't. (John)

For John, the issue of accessibility is also related to the ways that technology is conceived. Academic electroacoustic music ‗probably share[s] a lot of the same technical processes‘ to musics that are more readily available and widely accessible. The differences in musics can therefore only be considered from the perspective of the audience that engages them and, as John states, ‗they‘d be less interested in electroacoustic music on the part of the audiences for the more mainstream forms of electronic music. So in that respect, there is a divide.‘ If electroacoustic music is a marginal music, as John suggests, then encounters with the music will be limited for a whole range of complex reasons.

Bob sees these differences as geographic ones. He remarks that:

In the US the Electroacoustic music scene is very – generally speaking it's very tight in contemporary composition, very tight in traditional thinking, at least in those years, of course. In Canada it's a different story. In Canada Electroacoustic music is much more its own thing. People can come to it without any musical background and do really well if you have a good ear and good mind, very creative. But in the States it mostly was in the universities and music departments. (Bob)

208

Bob compares electroacoustic music in the US to music in Canada. Electroacoustic music in Canada is categorised by Bob as ‗much more its own thing‘. Canadian electroacoustic music, according to Bob, is not bound by ‗traditional thinking‘ and is therefore more diverse and less academic than that which is found in the US.

I think it is worth pointing out here that this employed language is not simply describing the listening skills or the music and not is it simply describing the culture of the music. Rather, I am arguing that it is enacting this culture, enacting the boundaries of ‗the club‘, enacting the conventions of the music, enacting its marginal status, and I am arguing that this happened as the participants participated in the research in real time. In this manner, the specialised language functions in a performative manner, not only as a description of the discourse, or the music itself, but as it enacts all of those discursive properties that, crucially, seep into and affect the experiences of listeners. The marginalisation of the music, then, contributes to the limited number of contexts in which a listener could encounter the music, and when they do encounter the music they require specialised listening skills that functions to further marginalise the music.

„The mind must be engaged in order to introduce a new aural experience and concept.‟ (Michael) Accessibility to electroacoustic music is also regulated through the specialist skills that listeners are required to gain in order to listen. Michael expresses this in terms of the listener‘s engagement. Implicit in the statement ‗the mind must be engaged‘ is the idea that the music is of the mind and it should therefore ‗engage‘ the mind of the listener. Additionally, he categorises the listening experience as ‗a new aural experience and concept‘ that further highlights the role of the thinking listener in participating in a ‗new aural experience‘ that is articulated using very precise language. The listener is not simply listening to music. Rather, they are having ‗a new aural experience‘. Furthermore, the addition of the term ‗concept‘ at the end of the statement further alludes to the abstract nature of the music and the intellectual nature of the music. Concepts are central to disciplines that are typically theoretical and abstract, and so they reiterate the intangible qualities of the music and the need for the listener to be able to deal with abstract ideas. These kinds of conceptions of listening to the music are relatively common among the research participants. For 209 example, when asked about the types of important listening skills that might be required for electroacoustic music, Gerry responds:

Attention to audio spectra. Familiarity with various DSP treatments. Attention to textural blending and the unfolding of formal structure. Awareness of spatial location and motion. (Gerry)

Here, Gerry uses the terms ‗attention‘, ‗familiarity‘ and ‗awareness‘ which suggest that, for Gerry, it is important that listeners are mindful of their engagement with technical processes such as ‗audio spectra‘, ‗DSP treatments‘, ‗textural blending‘ and ‗spatial location and motion‘. These are all technical processes that draw on the precise nature of electroacoustic music. Yet, paradoxically, these comments also highlight the fractured nature of the discourse due to the fact that all of the participants seem to value different listening skills and methods. Participant Harry explains that:

Electroacoustic music requires additional focus on gesture and texture (which also applies to spectralist music), and in some cases on sound recognition vs. non-recognition. (Harry)

Similar to Gerry, Harry uses the terms ‗focus‘ and ‗recognition‘. Both suggest that these listening processes should be active processes and should engage the listener‘s critical capacities to consciously reflect. Harry continues to explain that important listening skills can:

Include guided listening to representative repertoire followed by further listening to sufficient repertoire to establish a 'horizon' and intuitive grasping of the structural and discursive principles that articulate the music. (Harry)

‗Listening‘, by Harry‘s account, needs to be ‗guided‘, which points to accessibility. Like Michael earlier, Harry also draws on elements that highlight abstract thinking in relation to the listening experience when he refers to the ‗discursive principles that articulate the music‘. In this way, new listeners require instruction and they also require knowledge of the governing principles of the music. Edward explains that: 210

The most necessary thing is the ability to listen in a focused way, rather than simply letting sound or music wash over you or act as aural wallpaper. (Edward)

Edward, like most of the others, conceives of listening as an activity that is ‗focused‘. This implies a moral dimension to the ways that listening is conceived. It is bad to let ‗sound or music wash over you or to act as aural wallpaper‘ as this would suggest that a listener is unfocused and undisciplined in their approach to the music. However, it also speaks to the qualities that listeners are supposed to possess in order to listen to the music in the ‗right‘ way.

In contrast to most of the other surveyed participants, Bradley does not think there are listening skills specific to the genre of electroacoustic music. He explains:

I don't think it is genre specific. But Wishart's discussion about moving from the lattice to the continuum should be considered seriously when thinking about morphology of sound which is central to much electroacoustic music. (Bradley)

Bradley goes on to suggest that the following things are what listeners should listen for:

Texture, density, intensity, brightness, morphological structure ... (Bradley)

Although these skills might be transferable to other kinds of musics as Bradley suggests, he does draw on terminology such as ‗morphological structure‘ that points to particular discursive features and a language specific to electroacoustic music. This means that even though you may not need music-specific listening skills, you do need some knowledge of music-specific ideas.

As I have suggested in previous chapters, electroacoustic music tends to be represented in ways which limit engagement with the music to intellectual engagement, and I argued in Chapter 5 that this results in a denial of the corporeal

211 qualities of listening and, by association, a denial of the feminine. I want to be explicit and clear about the fact that I am not directing accusations towards the research participants, and nor is my intention to position them in a negative light. Without their very generous participation there would have been no research. Rather, I am suggesting that this denial of the body is constructed through means that transcend the personal, such that all of the participants function within and are constructed through the prevailing discourses that are subject to the workings of power/knowledge. What is important here is how the participants construct and navigate their experiences within these mechanisms that are organised by the discourses of electroacoustic music, and which are also filtered through the discourses of gender. To recall Buchbinder, discourse functions within the dominant socio-political climate, and it often functions to reproduce this climate.26 Discourse stipulates what is possible to say, and in this case what is possible to say reinforces the view that listening, within the context of electroacoustic music, is conceived in ways that value intellectual, active engagement with the music and by implication limit this engagement to one that is exclusive of any other forms of listening. These limitations work to obstruct access to the music and they also work to marginalise it. These contradictory forces function strategically in the sense that if the music is considered marginalised, then it is accorded marginal status. The marginal in this sense, is exceptional and stands in contrast to the status quo of the Western tradition (despite the fact that the music arose out of this tradition). Foucault worked to uncover these strategies as far as they are, to cite Oliver, ‗employed by institutions to exert their power and authority over the individual.‘27 These tactics are often diffused through complex systems of organisation and bureaucracy, making their identification and agency unassignable in accordance with the dispersed qualities of power more broadly.

„Actually there was a woman teaching it. I wondered in retrospect whether that was important to me.‟ (Megan) One of the many factors in the accessibility of electroacoustic music for women, according to Hinkle-Turner, is the lack of female role models. This is reflected in Megan‘s statement above where she wonders whether having a female teacher

26 Buchbinder, Masculinities and Identities, 30. 27 Oliver, Teach Yourself Foucault, 127. 212 played a significant role in shaping her path. Speaking specifically within the context of electroacoustic music, Hinkle-Turner says:

For the male composer, the finding of role models and the establishment of a close mentor relationship is made easier by the large number of men active in the composition profession. This is most true at the college and university level where the majority of teachers are men. The young female composer, however, encounters much more difficulty in finding a mentor and friend in the academic and musical community.28

Gender is a contributing factor in the accessibility of the music and these sentiments were reflected by the interviewed participants. As I suggested earlier, at the time of the administration of the survey I had not yet discovered gender as a significant concern. It was only with the benefit of hindsight that I was able to actively engage the four interviewed participants on this matter and, in doing so, I was apprehensive about the provocative nature of feminism. Therefore I attempted to shape the question (and unavoidably the responses) in ways that distanced me from the topic. Given most of my participants were men, and, given they had so generously shared their knowledge and time to participate in my research I was careful to ground the matter in previous research but I also wanted the question to be as open as it could be. My past experience has taught me that some people can feel quite confronted by feminism, and given my general anxiety surrounding the interview process I wanted to anticipate any foreseeable areas of tension and eliminate them. Therefore, in the question I made reference to Hinkle-Turner‘s claims that women were largely under- represented in electroacoustic music discourse and I asked the participants how they felt about this assertion. Darren responded in the following manner:

There are few women in ea. Count the numbers. (Darren).

Darren states the disparity in no uncertain terms and quite matter-of-factly, ‗there are few women in ea‘ (ea‘ is a shortened version of ‗electroacoustic‘). Bob, unlike Darren, demonstrates discomfort in discussing the topic of gender. While Bob agrees

28 Hinkle-Turner, "Women and Music Technology," 32. 213 that gender representation is an issue, he feels uncomfortable speculating about why this might be the case. He explains:

It's terribly true. I just – I don‘t know if it's a visibility issue or interest because we have – we're happy to have two out of the 30 students that are women, and we're conscious of that. I still don‘t know why. Yeah, I don‘t know why. I don‘t want to point to the stereotypical and go, gadgetry, that's a guy thing. I don‘t want to fall into that but I really don‘t have an explanation otherwise. I think that – yeah, no it's hard for me to say. (Bob)

It is pertinent that Bob brings up ‗gadgetry‘ as being a potential albeit ‗stereotypical‘ account of the lack of women. Technology, as I have discussed previously, plays a role in the exclusionary process that is evidenced in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) disciplines and any of their related disciplines such as electroacoustic music.29 However, it is also clear that Bob understands that the problem is far more complex than reducing it to the fault of technology and he feels uncomfortable speculating about the precise causes of gender imbalance. Bob is careful to avoid stereotypes while Darren evokes them:

―If‖ ‗music‘ is a mathematical domain [if!], look at the gender division in the field of mathematics. Is it similar to the division in the field of ‗serious composition‘ [sic]?.30 (Darren)

Here, Darren uses the example of the discipline of mathematics to illustrate the ‗gender division‘ and then goes on to express that gender disparity is also an issue for ‗serious composition‘. Presumably he uses the quotation marks to visually illustrate the gendered history implicit in the term ‗serious composition‘, meaning that there is a ‗field of composition‘ that is perhaps not-so-serious and thus, more suitable for women. According to the history books, women were not composers (despite the many examples that provide evidence to the contrary). Darren‘s

29 Fisher, Gender and the Science of Difference. 30 This response is as written by the participant including use of the term [sic]. 214 statements also remind me of Citron‘s conceptions of creativity that suggest that creativity is inherently associated with masculinity. 31

When John was asked how he felt about Hinkle-Turner‘s claims he responded in the following manner:

So, if the discourse is the way that this music is represented in things like books and academic journals and record catalogues, then which is probably quite true. She's probably quite right and she's probably done her research to back it up. But if we're thinking about practice more broadly, then I don't really know how true it would be and I don't quite know how you'd go about finding out. So I'm sure there are lots of women engaged in all sorts of angles and aspects of this sort of musical practice. (John)

John says that it is ‗probably quite true‘ that women are under-represented in the discourse of electroacoustic music. However, he does not see this as being representative of the way that things are in ‗musical practice‘. John is ‗sure‘ that ‗there are lots of women engaged in all sorts of angles and aspects of this sort of musical practice‘. This is an interesting perspective that highlights the complex nature of gender disparity, and it resonates with Bob‘s earlier comments. Is the issue, for example, a lack of representation? Or, is it a lack of participation? For John, it is not a lack of participation. He continues to explain that:

Because there are particular individuals who are very – who are significant players. But if you were to look at the pages of say, for instance, Organised Sound, which is Organised Sound and the Computer Music Journal, which are the academic faces of this form of music, then you'll probably – although I haven't done this myself but you'd probably find that the men outnumber the women by a large proportion. Yeah, so there are definitely women who make an impact in my – with the things that I listen to and think about. But yeah, in the sort of official discourse, they're probably less prominent. (John)

31 Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon, 45. 215

John uses the terms ‗significant players‘ and ‗academic faces‘ of electroacoustic music to signal the authoritative figures that can be found in the named academic journals. These comments also conjure images of the music as having at least two sides or aspects. Namely, the academic aspect, that is represented in the journals and ‗the sort of official discourse‘ where ‗you‘d probably find that the men outnumber the women by a large proportion‘, and the musical practice itself. But, John also states that there are ‗definitely women‘ who influence the things that he ‗thinks about‘ and ‗listen(s) to‘. In this way, John conceives of the gender disparity as being an issue of representation rather than an issue of participation and accessibility.

Given Megan was the only female I had the opportunity to interview on the topic of gender disparity I will cite her responses at length. When asked how she felt about Hinkle-Turner‘s assertions Megan responded:

I think it's probably true. It's a standard thing – I've been wondering lately – I used to think that there shouldn't be any discernible difference but I sometimes think that there are maybe some common aesthetics with some – you know, maybe a majority of female composers in electroacoustics or other may have a tendency to share some aesthetics more than some of the males. (Megan)

Megan categorises gender disparity as ‗a standard thing‘ that implies that she is unsurprised by Hinkle-Turner‘s claims. She then states ‗I used to think that there shouldn‘t be any discernible difference‘. She continues:

But in any case, it should – I always feel that there should be a breadth – a diversity of styles, authors and so on because different people like different things. (Megan)

Megan often employs language devices that avoid locking ideas into categories of difference: ‗there shouldn‘t be any discernible difference‘, ‗there should be diversity‘ and ‗different people like different things‘. This is also reflected in earlier comments, for instance, when Megan was asked about the terminology she responded by saying, ‗I like the term sonic art but it tends to be misinterpreted too narrowly over here.‘ 216

Megan‘s choice of language suggests that she is uncomfortable pigeonholing and instead opts for language that stresses diversity and inclusivity. She states:

I've noticed that I play some female composers that my colleagues who are men had never thought of playing, although – you know, they'll play a few people like Hildegard Westerkamp and so on. But I've said well, what about Beatriz Ferreyra and they said who? I thought well, I thought she was as famous as the rest of them. (Megan)

Megan compares the examples she uses in class to the examples that some of her male colleagues play: ‗they‘ll play a few people like Hildegard Westerkamp and so on‘. The phrasing ‗Hildegard Westerkamp and so on‘ implies a logical, linear progression of ‗canonic‘ female composers. It is significant that Westerkamp is a Canadian composer and a major figure in electraocoustic music. Westerkamp is a well-cited female composer who is represented liberally in electroacoustic music literature and, next to Oliveros, is also one of the few females to be accorded this status. ‗But I‘ve said well, what about Beatriz Ferreyra and they said who?‘ Ferreyra is an Argentinian born composer whose name, despite her being a fundamental figure in electraocoustic music, receives little mention in the history books. Ferreyra, a significant composer in her own right, and also worked with and helped Schaeffer realise some of his works for which she was not given credit.32 The comparison of Westerkamp to Ferreyra, for me, is a significant feature in Megan‘s expression. It implies that Megan‘s male colleagues tend to function in tokenistic ways by selecting examples that are mainstreamed or ‗famous‘ in the history of Western electroacoustic music. Megan goes on to explain later that she plays ‗Persian electroacoustic composers and stuff‘ and this signals that, unlike her male counterparts, Megan works to actively intervene in the processes that function to ensure the dominance of Western history.

Megan continues to explain that she prefers not to highlight gender:

32 Kim S. Courchene and Beatriz Ferreyra, "A Conversation with Beatriz Ferreyra," Computer Music Journal 25, no. 3 (2001): 15. 217

I would say too – I don't like to focus on gender but I like to focus on diversity and therefore gender goes into it, the same as I'm also playing some Persian electroacoustic composers and stuff.

It is evident that ‗diversity‘ plays an extremely important role in Megan‘s practice. When she can, Megan intervenes in the interview process by continually, although indirectly, eschewing the categories and themes I posit to her. Megan prefers to view electroacoustic music in ways which are encompassing of gender, race and class rather than separating these things out, and it is clear that Megan interrupts the dominant forces by refusing to perpetuate them in her classes. Another example of this occurs when I asked Megan whether she felt as though there was a divide between the more academic types of electroacoustic music and the more popular forms she remarks:

‗Well, I think there has been and I think there shouldn‘t be.‘ (Megan)

These are the comments that lead into her discussion of Hendrix and Kraftwerk as examples of electroacoustic music. Here, again, there is a display of Megan‘s eschewal of the conventions, categorisations and rigid boundaries that function to maintain the exclusive nature of the music. Megan avoids setting up individual categories of difference by choosing not to focus on these areas. Whilst I want to avoid any suggestions that Megan‘s comments are representative of a female subject position it is evidently clear that across both the survey and interview responses Megan employs enunciative strategies that stand in stark contrast to the other participants. These strategies function outside of the dominant processes of Western music such that Megan not only eschews these processes but refuses to perpetuate them.

6.6 Conclusions Through surveys and interviews this chapter has mapped a lateral connection with all of the emergent discursive themes up to this point and as they relate to learning to listen to the music. I have been predominantly interested in the ways that participants imagine the field of electroacoustic music as it is represented in surveys and

218 interviews, and as it relates to learning to listen. In particular, I used the instruments of the survey and the interview as a means to access ‗what can be said‘ about listening by educators who are active in a tertiary educational setting and I treated this as a form of discourse-in-action. This chapter demonstrated that issues of definition are, in fact, still contentious issues that are subject to debate and this reinforces the notion that the field of electroacoustic music is not a coherent field at all. However, what is a constant throughout the discourse is the construction of listening as an object of knowledge. Participants were particularly engaged in discussions about listening and were explicit in their approaches to formulating listening as something that is highly specialised. In the following chapter I elaborate some of these themes in order to posit an aesthetics of listening.

219

Chapter 7. Conclusion Imagining an Aesthetics of Listening: Non-Normative Listening Subjectivities and the Art of the Listening

Throughout this dissertation I have constructed the field of electroacoustic music in ways that are conflicting and contested, and in ways that could barely be conceived as a ‗field‘ at all. In Chapter 2 especially, I suggested that, on the one hand, this ‗field‘ is constituted within the narrative that positions the music as a continuation of the Western art music tradition, as an immediate result of the ‗breakdown of tonality‘ and as a pioneering new music. These are conceptions that largely see the music confined within academic contexts and they are conceptions that mean the music contradictorily inherits its elitism from the elevated status accorded to the scored, Western, European, music tradition while at the same time rejecting it. Within this narrative, the music participates in, perpetuates, and benefits from the canon‘s Eurocentrism and androcentrism through notions of the mastery and civilisation of technology, a discourse that, in its own right, could be positioned as a masculine discourse. On the other hand, however, the ‗field‘ is represented as marginalised, as non-standardised, as emerging and innovative (any sound is possible!), and as emancipatory (freeing music from the shackles of tonality and teleological, musical progression) thus, operating as a force of resistance to the normalised conventions of the Western tradition and ensnared within a complex power network. The contrary nature of the music means that it occupies a peculiar space that was born out of its relation to the hegemonic, Western, musical tradition while at the same time resisting and refuting this tradition.

In Chapter 3 I examined how the notion of ear-training emerges as a disciplinary practice, and I argued that, although these disciplinary mechanisms are positioned as a way of training the ear, they are nonetheless envisaged through a visual, epistemological lens that confines listening to, and conflates it with, literacy. Furthermore, I suggested that these approaches to ear-training are typically imagined as self-evident, neutral and normalised. As Taylor explains, normativity is

220 constructed and produced through networks of power and resistance such that they regulate the ‗behaviours, values, identities and desires deemed normal, acceptable and advantageous.‘1 In this way, normativity is held as a standard that everything else can be judged, that everything else can be set apart from. The essence of normativity is that in order for it to be even remotely useful, and for it to have ‗normal‘ status, it must remain in relation to those forces that seek to oppose it. In other words, in order for normativity to remain normative and in a position of power, it needs to persist in a state of contestation, always being challenged and always being resisted. This means that something can be normative without being essential or stable, and without being entirely effective despite the fact that it is often perceived to the contrary. That is precisely Foucault‘s point. Normativity is produced through power struggles and, because power is always a relationship rather than a thing, power can never be grasped. Deleuze explains that, in his reading of Foucault, the institutional machines (such as those associated with the regimes of ear-training) that make possible these networks of power are in themselves multiple and are in themselves the effects of other relations of power and resistance.2 Power is therefore not an agent, although it does seek to make subjects acquiesce. Thus, despite the fact that power often operates with specific goals, and aims to produce specific outcomes, this does not mean that power has agency, and nor does it mean that power is absolute.3 This speaks to the diffuse and productive nature of power to construct normativity that is never quite total. Those ear-training mechanisms that I describe throughout Chapter 3 acquire their normativity and power simply because they are able to be resisted and contested.

This aural training framework is positioned as one that is ‗good‘ for all musicians. It is also a framework that seeks to produce a standardised approach to listening and to normalise the ways that listening subjects hear the music. At minimum, these could be positioned as the goals of such frameworks. Their overall efficacy, however, is questionable. The self-evident nature of ear-training in this context means that it

1 Taylor, Playing It Queer, 28-29. 2 Deleuze, Foucault, 59. 3 Foucault says, for example, ‗there is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objectives. But this does not mean that it results from the choice or decision of an individual subject‘. He explains that power operates along lines which often disclose its aims in a clear fashion yet, he continues, ‗it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them, and few who can be said to have formulated them‘. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1, 95. 221 circumvents construction as an object of knowledge (unlike the way listening is constructed in electroacoustic music discourse) thus it evades scrutiny and can subsequently assume itself as the norm.4

In Chapters 4 and 5, I moved to consider conceptions of listening as they are constructed in the context of electroacoustic music. In this context, listening is positioned as an unresolved problem and it becomes an object of knowledge that is subject to much enquiry. I grouped together some of the music-specific ear-training models as a set of enunciative modalities expressed by the nascent ‗field‘ of electroacoustic music, and I suggested that these enunciative modalities make possible new objects of audition that function in stark contrast to those examined in Chapter 3. Due to the emergent nature of the field, these enunciative modalities have not yet become entrenched, and thus, the scope for new ways of thinking about, speaking about and listening to electroacoustic music is, in theory, boundless. In Chapter 4 specifically, I posited the enunciative modalities of ‗acousmatic listening‘ and ‗techno-aesthetic listening‘, each of which, in different ways, regards listening as a private, transcendent exercise whereby listening extends ‗thinking‘, but that also renders new objects audible. Both modalities operate from pseudo-scientific, ideological positions that function to produce a listening subjectivity that eschews any relationship to context, feeling or emotion for the purpose of maintaining an objective listening stance that, as I suggested, was not entirely successful. The ‗enunciative modality of referential listening‘ functions to further complicate the listening process because, rather than repudiating the cultural implications of music and sound like the previous two modes, ‗referential listening‘ insists on their necessity.

Chapter 5 is where I began to develop the argument that had been implicated in Chapters 2, 3 and 4. Listening, I argued, is tangled up with gender politics. For instance, in a conventional aural training context, the primacy of the ear is reframed as an extension of the eye. The ear is a sensory organ that is penetrated by sound, often whether we like it or not. The eye, on the other hand, is an organ that does the probing and that does the controlling. Foucault was acutely aware of the power of

4 Halperin, Saint = Foucault, 47. 222 opticality, both in the literal sense and the figurative. For Foucault, seeing is a form of control (discipline). It is a form of judgement (the gaze), and it is in the space of darkness, where things cannot be seen, that he targets his analyses to bring to light the devices of power that we are blinded to. In a similar fashion, I suggest, the thread of ‗active‘ listening that runs through electroacoustic music (one of the few constants throughout its discourse) is both a strategy that functions to dislocate listening from the body and a strategy that functions to co-opt listening into a masculine discourse by overwriting listening with language that positions the ear in the active. The ‗enunciative modality of corporeal listening‘ is political in the sense that it functions to restore the ear to its rightful, corporeal position and to bring the body back into discourse. Listening is not solely a corporeal experience, yet it has typically been positioned in terms that completely disavow its role. The ear is, after all, part of the body just like the eye.

In Chapter 6 I changed tack slightly in order to create a space that ‗hears‘ what is said and what can be said about listening to electroacoustic music. Through surveys and interviews, this chapter drew a lateral connection with all of the emergent discursive themes up to this point as they relate to learning to listen to the music. I focused on the performative role of the language employed by the research participants as it enacts the culture of listening to electroacoustic music. This analysis highlighted the culture as a conceptual chessboard on which academic battles are played out, and this analysis reinforced the ‗field‘ as volatile and in a constant state of resistance. Some participants, for example, sought to demarcate this ‗field‘ in very specific terms while others chose to reject the notion of a ‗field‘ altogether. The music was imagined by the participants as being relatively inaccessible to untrained listeners due in part simply to the availability of the music outside of academic contexts, but also due to the specific listening style required to be able to access the music. This listening style is not spoken about by the participants in explicit terms. Rather, it is articulated implicitly and expressed in ways which categorise this style of listening as simply different. What is a constant, and I suggested this earlier, is that participants envisaged this style of listening as one that highlights the active listener. Terms such as ‗engaged‘, ‗focused‘, ‗attention‘ and ‗recognition‘ were employed by the participants, often alongside language that signalled the music-specific language or ‗techno-jargon‘. The use of this type of 223 techno-language functions in a contradictory fashion because, on the one hand, participants in the research seemed to be aware of and sensitive to issues of inaccessibility and alienation for listeners (due to the highly technical nature of the music) yet, the structure of the ‗field‘ means that participants must participate directly in this exclusive culture through the use of technical language in order to access it themselves. Therefore, the use of ‗techno-language‘ functions as an enunciative strategy to enact limitations on the accessibility of the music to listeners.

By way of a conclusion, then, I wish to return to the idea of normativity as it relates to the subject, and in particular, the listening subject. My argument hinges on the idea that listening to music plays a fundamental role in the construction of subjectivity, and importantly, of listening subjectivity. It is its awkward positioning as a ‗field‘ that sits between the hegemony and the marginalised that means that electroacoustic music offers up unique possibilities to reject and destabilise this norm in a process that I argue is analogous to ‗queering‘. Listening to electroacoustic music can be a destabilising act based solely on the fact that there is no ‗right‘ way to listen. However, it also offers listeners distinctive opportunities to adopt listening subjectivities that challenge the norms and listening conventions adopted by the Western tradition. Like all music, electroacoustic music is implicated in the politics of identification and subject formation where subjects become ‗subjectified‘ in and through discourse. Therefore, this final chapter will conclude by considering how music such as electroacoustic music functions to channel these politics of subjectification and desire through what I call an aesthetics of listening.

Foucault‘s views on subjectivity are articulated throughout most of his major works in the sense that he determines how various types of subjects are made possible and are known within different epistemes.5 Mills points out that it was Foucault‘s goal to formulate a form of analysis that ‗focused on the impersonal and abstract forces of discourse in structuring the individual.‘6 The individual, as Mills explains, is therefore nothing more than the location where discourses are played out.7 Foucault sought to investigate the subject that exists at the heart of the notion of the

5 For example, the criminal, the deviant and the madman. 6 Mills, Michel Foucault, 97. 7 Mills, Michel Foucault, 97. 224 individual.8 Judith A. Peraino elaborates this position when she explains that Foucault viewed identity as the ‗regulated disposition of subjectivity‘ because it is regulated, disciplined and normalised through a series of social structures.9 This mapping of the subject means that Foucault views subjectivity as mutable, thereby eschewing the pre-given notion of an absolute self that can be known, studied and subjectified.10 Rather than view the self as a fixed category that can be described and analysed using theories, Foucault argues that it is these theories that actually constitute the self.11 To cite Patrick H. Hutton, ‗the self is an abstract construction, one continually being redesigned in an ongoing discourse generated by the imperatives of the policing process.‘12 In this way, Foucault rejects any universal notion of the subject. Subjects are made possible through subjectification and resistance to power (such as institutional power) and through discourse. Subjectivity, in these terms, is nothing more than a process constantly being formed and re-formed through relations of power and resistance.

Discourses of resistance, those that undermine power, have been successfully and most clearly apprehended by queer theorists who have done so in an attempt to evade the perceived ‗normality‘ and self-evident nature of the heteronormative subject.13 Queer is, however, not simply a synonym for homosexuality, despite the close relationship between the two. Halperin argues that:

Unlike gay identity, which, though deliberately proclaimed in an act of affirmation, is nonetheless rooted in the positive fact of homosexual object- choice, queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality.14

8 Mills, Michel Foucault, 97. 9 Judith A. Peraino, Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 6. 10 Danaher, Schirato, and Webb, Understanding Foucault, 118. 11 Patrick H. Hutton, 'Fouacult, Freud and the Technologies of the Self' in Technologies of the Self, eds. Martin, Gutman and Hutton, 135. 12 Hutton, 'Fouacult, Freud and the Technologies of the Self,' 135. 13 Jagose, Queer Theory, 17. 14 Halperin, Saint = Foucault, 62. 225

For Halperin, ‗queer‘ does not refer to some absolute category or fixed identity. Rather, he stresses that ‗queer‘ only ever exists in resistance to the norm.15 ‗Queer‘ is whatever the dominant, the legitimate, the norm, is not, and it is this inimitable position that allows it to act as a destabilising, reordering and restructuring force.16 To be queer is, as Taylor explains, to ‗call attention to identity as non-essential‘ and to ‗subvert the hegemony.‘17 ‗Queer‘ can also be positioned as a strategy to highlight inconsistencies in the perceived stability of the relationships between sex, gender and sexuality.18 In this way, ‗queer‘ is a process or a way of being that exists to subvert, refute and unhinge. It is a form of resistance against those forces that function to lock identity into something fixed, and it is a force, that, by virtue of its very existence, defies explanation given that any explanation locks it into stability. To quote Jarman- Ivens at length:

On the basis of queer theory‘s Foucauldian ancestry, we can understand queer as a system (albeit a peculiarly unsystematic one) of interrogating structures of sexuality as one expression of power and identity relations. Queer is one way of articulating the notion that identities, including and perhaps particularly sexual identities, are not natural but constructed, not fixed but negotiated. As a verb, ―to queer‖ allows us easily to appreciate this sense of negotiation and construction. ―Queering‖ can be readily understood as an ongoing practice; moreover, it affords a distinct agency to the reader of cultural artefacts, texts and histories, an agency that reflects queer‘s poststructuralist origins.19

It is this constant process of ‗queering‘ as a means to resist the hegemony, and as a means of (re)constructing subjectivity (in particular listening subjectivity), that I am most interested in. Because music has played an important role in the self- structuration of subjects it can function to express, regulate and constitute subjectivity. Thus, as Taylor explains, it ‗contributes significantly to our identity

15 Halperin, Saint = Foucault, 62. 16 Halperin, Saint = Foucault, 62. 17 Taylor, Playing It Queer, 35. 18 Jagose, Queer Theory, 3. 19 Jarman-Ivens, Queer Voices, 16. 226 work.‘20 Furthermore, music, like subjectivity, is constructed through discourse and is therefore not immune to the implications of power. As McClary has argued, music can tell us quite a lot about the discursive construction of subjectivity.21 In the case of conventional ear-training the goal is to produce a form of identity that recognises the qualities of Western European music and that the subject can identify with. The assumed ubiquity of this educational system thus imbues in the listener a range of judgements and assumptions that are taken as convention. These are judgements that are embodied in the musical score as it reifies the elevated status of the composer- genius. Thus, these conventions are accepted as the norm and continue to inform and shape the listener‘s subjectivity. As Brett asserts:

The attempts to appropriate music for the enforcement of patriarchal order, to anesthetize listeners from its effects and to defeminize it, lie most notably, however, within its own domain and in particular in its educational institutions … The elevation of this strain of music as ―serious,‖ and the devaluing of other kinds of music, is of course part of the process I am talking about.22

As I have suggested earlier, these disciplinary processes are not necessarily entirely effectual, but they do, nevertheless, imprint their values on some level. If music plays an important role in self-structuration, and if music is only represented in terms such as those described above by Brett, what might be the consequences for subjectivity? What kinds of subject positions are afforded for listeners to adopt? And, importantly, how does this impact the ways that listeners engage electroacoustic music? These values are inadvertently called into question when listeners encounter musics, such as electroacoustic music, that do not aspire to meeting the same standards.

McClary‘s analyses have skilfully demonstrated that music can tell us quite a lot about the social and cultural values encoded within music (including information regarding the construction of gender and sexuality). Furthermore, she argues that:

20 Taylor, Playing It Queer, 43. 21 See for example Susan McClary, 'Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert's Music' in Queering the Pitch, eds. Brett, Wood, and Thomas, 205-34. 22 Brett, 'Musicality, Essentialism, and the Closet,' 12. 227

Because such pieces influence and even constitute the ways listeners experience and define some of their own most intimate feelings, they participate actively in the social organisation of sexuality.23

Listening plays a constructive role in shaping the ways listeners identify and I spoke to these in my personal anecdote in the introduction to the thesis. Listening is inherently concerned with gender and sexual identity as they come to be seen as the foundation upon which identity is formed. However, whilst they are extremely persuasive, McClary‘s music analyses rely largely (though not always) upon the conventions of Western music (such as tonality). This is not to criticise McClary‘s analyses. Rather, part of my argument throughout this thesis has been to demonstrate that electroacoustic music cannot rely upon conventions because its conventions are contested and in a constant state of flux. This makes the music itself particularly difficult to analyse. Peraino remarks that music has been ‗notoriously resistant to legibility.‘24 She contends that it is precisely this ambiguity that has the potential to endure as a force of resistance and as a strategy analogous to queering.25 This is, I argue, especially so in the case of electroacoustic music that directly challenges the basis through which most Western music has been understood. Therefore, it could also be argued that listening to electroacoustic music destabilises the ways listeners are taught to listen to most Western music (and that as a result, it destabilises their subjectivity or, at the very least, demonstrates that it is not fixed).

In this way, listening to electroacoustic music could be experienced as a listening experience queered because the music appears in ways which subvert and circumvent expectations about what music is, how it is supposed to sound and importantly, how we are supposed to listen to it. It is at this stage, however, that I want to intervene in this line of argumentation and stop short of using the term ‗queer‘ in this manner on the basis that, in its own way, electroacoustic music participates in many of the hegemonic practices of Western music (and, in fact, it was born out of these practices). Halperin warns, for instance, that ‗queering‘ can be

23 McClary, Feminine Endings, 9. 24 Peraino, Listening to the Sirens, 7. 25 Peraino, Listening to the Sirens, 7. 228 difficult territory to navigate precisely because of its capacity to evade definition.26 This leaves ‗queer‘ open to misappropriation, Halperin contends, ‗by those who do not experience the unique political disabilities and social disqualification from which lesbians and gay men routinely suffer in virtue of our sexuality.‘27 Additionally, Sara Ahmed insists that:

Queer describes a sexual as well as political orientation, and that to lose sight of the sexual specificity of queer would also be to ‗‗overlook‘‘ how compulsory heterosexuality shapes what coheres as given, and the effects of this coherence on those who refuse to be compelled.28

Halperin finds it extremely problematic for the hegemony to commandeer discourses born out of marginalisation, and for the hegemony to adapt these marginal discourses to ensure their own position of power. Jagose suggests the term ‗queer‘ can be ‗annexed profitably to any number of discussions.‘29 However, this is a problem because it gives credence to those who are already accorded a position of power as the default within the patriarchy. Conversely, Jarman-Ivens argues that:

Once we see queer as an open-ended practice – not the exclusive property of any one group that is organised around a collective and stable identity, and not connected per se to any such identity – it becomes possible to reinsert queer into a framework concerned with subjectivity.30

Whilst Halperin contends that the use of queering as a strategy should be restricted to those who are marginalised in some way (Peraino, for example, comments on the intersectionality of the term)31, Jarman-Ivens argues that access to ‗queer‘ should not be denied to any subject on the basis that subjectivity finds its creation outside of the dominant social structures anyway.32 Electroacoustic music, as I have suggested,

26 Halperin, Saint = Foucault, 65. 27 Halperin, Saint = Foucault, 65. 28 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press), 172. 29 Jagose, Queer Theory, 2. 30 Jarman-Ivens, Queer Voices, 17. 31 Peraino, Listening to the Sirens, 6. 32 Jarman-Ivens, Queer Voices, 17. 229 participates in practices that were born out of the hegemony but it also defines its own hegemonic practices outside of this framework. Despite the fact that listening to electroacoustic music has the potential to be ‗queered‘ (on the basis that it challenges the dominant way of listening to music thus challenging a listeners subjectivity) it is, nonetheless, a music that benefits greatly from its peculiar status and its capacity to render listening subjects in accordance with the hegemonic practice of ‗active‘ listening. Therefore, I am hesitant to grant it ‗queer‘ status on this basis alone.

However, it is this unique queer space that I am drawn to and am interested in on the basis of its relation to sexuality and identity, and further, on the basis that it can function to dislodge and disarm those hegemonic discourses that seek to streamline identity. Importantly, it is its potential to displace the heterosexist, musical hegemony and because of this, ‗Queering‘ could be a useful strategy to navigate these hard boundaries of exclusion. As Halperin states:

―Queer‖, in any case, does not designate a class of already objectified pathologies or perversions; rather, it describes a horizon of possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope cannot in principle be delimited in advance. It is from the eccentric positionality occupied by the queer subject that it may become possible to envision a variety of possibilities for reordering the relations among sexual behaviours, erotic identities, constructions of gender, forms of knowledge, regimes of enunciation, logics of representation, modes of self-constitution, and practices of community – for restructuring, that is, the relations among power, truth, and desire.33

In this way, ‗queering‘ does more than just displace existing hegemonies. Rather, it functions to open up a space for possibilities in which new ideas, behaviours, practices and importantly, subjectivities can emerge without being restricted and relegated to binary positions. ‗Queering‘ is, therefore, a tactic to undermine the status quo, but it is also a site that functions to evade the processes of identification, thus, making possible a meaningful and useful space for subject re-formation and re- organisation.

33 Halperin, Saint = Foucault, 62. 230

As I suggested earlier, Foucault‘s ideas have been instrumental in discovering the subject as mutable and open to change depending on the prevailing ways of knowing. Contrary to the normalising tendencies of societies to label subjects and lock them into self-evident identity categories (such as ‗woman‘ or ‗lesbian‘), Foucault demonstrated that these identities are, in fact, the effects of power constructed through discourse.34 In earlier chapters, I adopted Foucault‘s constructivist position in order to demonstrate how listening subjects become subjectified through the disciplinary processes of conventional aural training. This training imagines ‗good listeners‘ as literate subjects who hear the conventions of the music (pitch etc.), and thus becomes identified in the process thereby locked into a category that limits their capacity to engage with other ways of listening. Despite the fact that listening subjects are, in theory, free to resist these mechanisms (on the basis that power cannot exist without resistance), the subject, in this conception, is not granted any kind of agency. Instead, it is assumed that individuals are by and large mute to their own construction in discourse and this has been a criticism of Foucault‘s earlier work.35 In his later work, however, Foucault moves to examine this problem by turning his attention to the subject in its relation to itself and as it recognises itself as a subject.36 Some of these ideas are contextualised within the Foucault‘s History of Sexuality where certain subjects become identified on the basis of their sexual preferences and desires. For example, as Mills states, prior to the nineteenth century homosexual activity had been conceived of as a series of ‗stigmatised acts engaged by males.‘37 Foucault demonstrates that in the nineteenth century these ‗acts‘ began to constitute a type of individual, the implications of which cast doubt on the self-evident nature of the stable subject.

It is through what Foucault called the technologies of the self that subjects can practise an ‗art of existence‘, giving subjects the agency to ‗transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that

34 Foucault and Gordon, Power/Knowledge, 98. 35 Danaher, Schirato, and Webb, Understanding Foucault, 150. 36 Foucault says ‗it appeared now that I had to undertake a third shift, in order to analyse what is termed ―the subject‖. It seemed appropriate to look for the forms and modalities of the relation to self by which the individual constitutes and recognizes himself qua subject‘. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books 1990), 6. 37 Mills, Michel Foucault, 85. 231 carries certain aesthetic values.‘38 ‗Technologies of the self‘ are defined by Foucault as those that:

Permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and a way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality.39

An art of existence is, therefore, to do with the role of the subject as they utilise the technologies of the self to creatively produce an ethical life rather than simply live it at the hands of those institutional forces that seek to impose their regimes of control upon the subject. This means that the subject takes a creative role in the design of subjectivity through self-awareness and through the active use of the technologies of the self and, this leads to the practise of an ethical way of life. In contrast to the Socratic principle of ‗knowing thyself‘, self-awareness, importantly, is not about getting to know the ‗real‘ or ‗authentic‘ self.40 This authentic self is a discursive construct. Rather, the goal is to continually construct and re-construct oneself in order to directly confront and eschew the process of identification in the first place as the basis for an ethical life. In this way, listeners should work to eschew models that would work to lock them into a fixed listening identity.

Leading an ethical life is important because it can be used as a technique in the resistance of power and as a means to self-structure.41 And, importantly, ethics is conceived of by Foucault as an activity rather than as some abstract idea.42 Ethics is something that subjects do. Cited in Halperin, Foucault explains that the key is ‗to become homosexual‘.43 Halperin argues, however, that this statement only makes sense if Foucault understood ‗homosexual‘ in the same ways as we understand ‗queer‘.44 That is, as a non-essential identity that offers opportunities for subject re-

38 Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 10-11. 39 Michel Foucault, 'Technologies of the Self' in Technologies of the Self, eds. Martin, Gutman and Hutton, 18. 40 Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, 362. 41 Danaher, Schirato, and Webb, Understanding Foucault, 131. 42 Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, 377. 43 Halperin, Saint = Foucault, 79. 44 Halperin, Saint = Foucault, 79. 232 formation and self-revolution.45 This means that ‗queering‘ can function as a technology of the self and as a means to deliberately intervene in the creation of one‘s own subjectivity. On this basis, subject re-formation is about intentionally marginalising oneself through the act of becoming queer as a means to become self- aware and to live a better life.46

Importantly, it is the term ‗becoming‘ that is the operative because ‗becoming‘ demands a process in constant (re)production rather than a process that is ever complete. Cited in Halperin, Foucault says, ‗to be gay is to be in a state of becoming … The point is not to be homosexual but to keep working persistently at being gay.‘47 To marginalise oneself by becoming queer, then, is to make use of ‗queer‘ as a technology of the self in order to fashion an ethical life through subject transformation and re-formation. Foucault‘s concluding statement, as it is cited in Halperin, anticipates Ahmed‘s use of the term ‗as a refusal that is a condition for the arrival of queer‘.48 Foucault says:

… To be gay signifies that these choices diffuse themselves across the entire life; it is also a certain manner of refusing the modes of life offered; it is to make a sexual choice into the impetus for a change of existence.49

Ahmed imagines what it means to live a queer life that involves the eschewing the preconceived identity roles that are already available for us to inherit. As she explains:

To inherit the past in this world for queers would be to inherit one‘s own disappearance. After all, as a mixed-race queer the choice is not either to become white and straight or to disappear. This is a choice between two different kinds of death. The task is to trace the lines for a different

45 Halperin, Saint = Foucault, 79. 46 Halperin, Saint = Foucault, 79. 47 Halperin, Saint = Foucault, 77. 48 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 178. 49 Halperin, Saint = Foucault, 78. 233

genealogy, one that would embrace the failure to inherit the family line as the condition of possibility for another way of dwelling in the world.50

It is in these ways that successive practitioners of electroacoustic music have taken on marginalised music production as an ethical act and submitted themselves to various listening practices as technologies of the self in order to transform themselves as listeners and as subjects. An aesthetics of listening involves the deliberate process of marginalising oneself to the dominant processes of listening that function to lock subjectivity into a fixed listening identity. This fixed version of listening identity is the antithesis to an aesthetics of listening. The process of marginalising oneself does occur, however, in-part when listeners encounter electroacoustic music on the basis that there is no fixed way to approach the music.

Life, according to Foucault, should be conceived of like a work of art. On this, Foucault says:

What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn‘t everyone‘s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object but not our life? ... From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.51

In this manner life and the self should be authored around the subject‘s desires and pleasures. It was sexual identity that Foucault viewed as being restrictive and as being easily manipulated so that it becomes a means of oppression and control (as a means to identify subjects). Thus, it is no surprise that Foucault looks to sexuality as one of the means of offering a form of resistance and a form of agency to subjects. In a similar fashion, then, we may view the practices of electroacoustic music, such as those characterised by corporeal listening, as creative acts of resistance that operate to construct new forms of listening subjectivities. These new forms of

50 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 178. 51 Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, 350-351. 234 listening subjectivities work against ‗authentic‘ and fixed versions of listening identity.

7.1 Imagining an Aesthetics of Listening: Throughout this thesis I have argued that discourse impacts the ways we listen to electroacoustic music, and I have considered the role that listening plays in the construction of subjectivity. Earlier, I demonstrated how the disciplining of ear- training functions to transform subjects by inculcating the norms and values accorded to the Western music tradition. These preconceived norms and conventions, I asserted, emerge within a framework that values, almost exclusively, the efforts of white men. The self-evident nature of the training, then, coupled with its perceived ubiquity, functions in an extremely potent fashion to ensure that listeners are led to understand music as being inherently teleological and pitched- based, and that the listening experience can be accurately represented through the visual medium of the written score. Aside from the fact that these disciplinary mechanisms find their ‗birth‘ in the prison, it is Foucault‘s point that these punitive measures are implemented outside of the prison as a mechanism for social control. These disciplinary measures function as a means of identifying subjects on the basis of increasing utility and docility to make them conform and, importantly, to make subjects enact and regulate these procedures on themselves (as exemplified by the panopticon and as a technology of the self).52 Danaher et. al. explain, ‗subjectivity is shaped according to the way in which individuals‘ bodies are acted upon by disciplinary technologies.‘53 Thus, conventional ear-training enacts limitations on the kinds of listening subjectivities that are permitted to emerge. I am not suggesting here that listening subjectivity is produced as an essential category within this model. Rather, I am suggesting that the types of subjectivities that are possible within this model are produced within certain boundaries that value the same musical conventions, and further, that these conventions carry eminence.

In an electroacoustic music context, on the other hand, listening becomes an object of knowledge that results in the proliferation of awareness about the act of listening such that its discursive construction becomes particularly unstable. The field,

52 Danaher, Schirato, and Webb, Understanding Foucault, 49. 53 Danaher, Schirato, and Webb, Understanding Foucault, 124. 235 moreover, sits in a strange space somewhere between the marginal and the hegemonic. In this context, listening is scrutinised on the basis that electroacoustic music offers a direct challenge to the taken-for-granted conventions of Western music, such as melody, pitch and harmonic progression etc. The sheer existence of electroacoustic music establishes that melody and fixed rhythm, for instance, are not necessary components of music. This destabilises the conventions that have long been accepted. Melody, to run with the example, is foundational to learning to listen in a traditional context as exemplified by melodic dictation exercises. Without the convention of melody, however, the question of how to listen becomes fundamental and this is the same for all of the other conventions. Without a harmonic progression ensuring the teleological framework of a piece of music, what is the listener supposed to listen to? And how? Presumably, the answer is that the listener is supposed to adopt an ‗active‘ listening position when they listen to the music. This ‗active‘ listening position, I have argued, is not without its own problems.

‗Active‘ listening functions as a gateway to accessibility and is based on the idea that listening is an act that is almost exclusively located in the masculine, thinking being within a heterosexual matrix. ‗Active‘ listening also evokes its opposite, ‗passive‘ listening. Therefore, as I argued in Chapter 5, these oppositions become laterally aligned with other binary terms that occur in the matrix of oppositional thinking. Terms such as man/woman, heterosexual/homosexual, mind/body and active/passive all function in ways that position the first term in each binary as untainted, as self- evident and, as Halperin aptly states, ‗the category to which everyone is assumed to belong.‘54 The second (queer) term in each binary is relegated, differentiated, and ultimately functions as a category that is demarcated on the basis of its resistance to conform to the standards accorded to the first term.55

An aesthetics of listening is not a matter of finding a ‗true‘ or pre-existing listening subjectivity as if it were simply a matter of changing hats. Rather, an aesthetics of listening is about the composition of one‘s own listening subjectivity for the purpose of self-transformation and in the pursuit of agency. Quoted in Danaher et. al. Foucault remarks:

54 Halperin, Saint = Foucault, 62. 55 Halperin, Saint = Foucault, 62. 236

The transformation of one‘s self by one‘s own knowledge is, I think, something rather close to the aesthetic experience. Why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting?56

This listening aesthetic is founded on the basis of its non-essentiality and on the basis that it rejects the procedures that function to identify it and to lock it into stability. It is a transformative listening subjectivity.

Given the close relationship between the function of music in the role of subject formation and the capacity for music to structure sexual and gendered identities, it is, I argue, the unique de-essentialising space that electroacoustic music engages that has the potential to offer new, variable and transformative listening subjectivities. Importantly, these listening subjectivities are non-normative. In this conception, the listening self is not an identity that can be produced in ways that relegate it to an identity. Rather, the art of listening is nothing beyond the pure relation of the listening subject to itself in its particular composition and exercise of authority and autonomy.57 Further, the listening self is fixed only insofar as it is fixed in a state of becoming. Halperin explains:

Hence to cultivate oneself … is not to explore or experience some given self, conceived as a determinate private realm, a space of personal interiority, but instead to use one‘s relation to oneself as a potential resource with which to construct new modalities of subjective agency and new styles of personal life that may enable one to resist or even to escape one‘s social and psychological determinations.

An aesthetics of listening is an ethical practice that is as much about transforming the listening experience as it is about transforming the listening subject, and it is through this cultivation of the listening subject that new and transformative listening subjectivities are made possible. Due to its awkward status (somewhere between the dominant and the minority), its capacity to directly challenge conventions that appear

56 Danaher, Schirato, and Webb, Understanding Foucault, 159-60. 57 Halperin, Saint = Foucault, 76. 237 self-evident, its nascent state of formation, its treatment of listening as an object of knowledge, and the proliferation of models of listening that are often contradictory, I argue that electroacoustic music offers unique occasions for subjects to engage in these technologies that function to bring about awareness of the self and that function to literally construct the self. Thus, to practice an aesthetics of listening is to practice the composition of one‘s own listening subjectivity through the technologies of the self and in a process analogous to ‗becoming queer‘.

Therefore, throughout the course of this thesis I have examined the construction of listening as it emerges through the discourse of electroacoustic music, and I have considered the ways that this discourse might impact the practice of listening. In this chapter, I have concluded my study with the suggestion that learning to listen can be more than just the production of rigid listening identities formed through disciplinary regimes. I conclude with the notion that learning to listen can involve an aesthetics of listening that is embodied in aspects of electroacoustic music and that, consequently, has the potential to function in ways that transform the listening subject beyond pre-given modes of identification.

238

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Appendix 1 Survey Questions

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Appendix 2 Interview Questions

1. The term ‗electroacoustic music‘ is used in my research as an umbrella term. What terminology do you use to talk about this music 2. How would you define the music? 3. Do you think definition and terminology are important? Why? 4. How would you describe the relationship of electroacoustic music to the term ‗music‘? 5. How important is the role of technology in this music? 6. How important is it for composers to discuss the role of technology in their music? 7. In their book …. Collins and … suggest that there is a split between the more academic types of electroacoustic music and the more vernacular types? Do you perceive there to be a split between these types of music? 8. In her book, Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner suggests that there is an overall lack of discussion and visibility of women in the discourse of electroacoustic music. How do you feel about this assertion and what are your thoughts on the matter? 9. How do you think people generally come into contact with the music? In what context? 10. The survey asked you a lot about your approaches to teaching electroacoustic music but it didn‘t really ask you about your own personal intersection with electroacoustic music. a. Can you recall when you first encountered the music? b. Can you recall what you thought about the music? c. Can you recall any specific examples? Do you remember the first piece you heard? d. Can you recall how you responded to the music? Did you like it for example? e. If this was under the guidance of someone else do you recall how the work was introduced to you? f. Do you recall who the significant figures were when you were first introduced to it? 266

g. Did you have to learn to listen to the music? If so, how did you do that? h. Can you recall in what context you came into contact with the music? Was it in an academic context for example?

Target questions for Darren58 1. In your survey you mentioned that you had written a two year university program for sight singing and you had also taught e/a ear training. In your opinion what are the key differences between these two? a. What are there crossovers in the skills that listeners should learn?

Target questions for Megan59 1. In the survey you completed you were asked to describe your own aural training and to evaluate the usefulness of these methods. You stated that they were not very useful. Could you please elaborate on why you feel they weren‘t very useful? 2. In the survey you completed you referred to 18/19th century ―standard‖ listening modes, I am wondering how pervasive you think these modes of listening are especially in relation to the academy. 3. You also expressed that you generally introduce students to electroacoustic music ‗casually (!)‘ and that they are usually receptive. Why do you think this is?

58 This is a pseudonym 59 This is a pseudonym 267