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Strategies of Conquest and Defence: Encounters with the Object in Twentieth-Century Music

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 November 2020

SAMUEL WILSON
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Abstract

Reacting to recent materialist developments in music studies and beyond, I argue for the value of dialectics in accounting for compositional orientations vis-à-vis their objects – be these objects sound-producing, non-human entities, such as musical instruments, or the object that is ‘sound itself ’. Engaging the compositional thought and practice of Busoni, Russolo, Varèse, Cage and Tudor by way of example, I highlight two intersecting tendencies: the first constitutes a presumed mastery over the object in question; the second is suggestive of an exploration of the object on its own terms. Interweaving aspects of post-Marxist and psychoanalytic theory, I argue that, ultimately, our orientation towards the object manifests a negotiation of the self in a changing material world.

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Article
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Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 145 , Issue 2 , November 2020 , pp. 457 - 484
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© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Royal Musical Association

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Footnotes

I am grateful to Fiorenzo Palermo for his detailed comments on an early draft of this article, and to the anonymous reviewers for JRMA for their valuable insights.

References

1 Pauline Oliveros’s strategy of ‘deep listening’ recognizes a similar duality: one might listen focally, with a keen and acute attention ‘renewed moment by moment, in order to exclusively follow a stream of some sort’, or globally, that is, inclusively and broadly across a sonic field that consists of ‘everything that is around you; inside of you’. Oliveros, quoted in Gottschalk, Jennie, Experimental Music since 1970 (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 107.Google Scholar

2 Chow, Rey and Steintrager, James A., ‘In Pursuit of the Object of Sound: An Introduction’, The Sense of Sound Google Scholar, ed. Elizabeth Weed and Ellen Rooney, special issue, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 22/2–3 (2011), 1–9 (p. 2).

3 Ganchrow, Raviv, ‘Hear and There: Notes on the Materiality of Sound’, Oase, 70 (2009), 70–81 Google Scholar (p. 78).

4 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgement, trans. Pluhar, Werner S. (Indianapolis, IN, and Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987), 200 Google Scholar, § 53.

5 Kohut, Heinz, ‘Observations on the Psychological Functions of Music’, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Music, ed. Feder, Stuart, Karmel, Richard L. and Pollock, George H. (Madison, WI: International Universities Press, 1990), 21–38(p. 30)Google Scholar; David Schwarz, Listening Subjects: Music, Culture, Psychoanalysis (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1997), 7–22; Samuel Wilson, ‘Introduction’, Music–Psychoanalysis–Musicology, ed. Wilson (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 2–6.

6 Wilson, Samuel, ‘The Composition of Posthuman Bodies’, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 13 (2017), 137–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Abbate, Carolyn, ‘Music: Drastic or Gnostic?’, Critical Inquiry, 30 (2003–4)Google Scholar, 505–36; Elisabeth Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006); Eliot Bates, ‘The Social Life of Musical Instruments’, Ethnomusicology, 56 (2012), 363–95; Emily Dolan, The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

8 See, for example, Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009 Google Scholar); Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, Carnal Knowledge: Towards a ‘New Materialism’ through the Arts (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2013); and Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013).

9 Aaron Cassidy, The Pleats of Matter, <http://aaroncassidy.com/music/pleats.htm> (accessed 14 September 2017).

10 A video of Untitled VI is available at <https://vimeo.com/153683036> (accessed 14 September 2017).

11 These discursive and compositional contexts are not absolutely separate, of course; for instance, Sergeant has spoken of the influence on his thinking and practice of the new materialist thinkers Barbara Bolt and Karen Barad, among others.

12 Rutherford-Johnson, Tim, Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017), 64 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Rutherford-Johnson is discussing Crane’s Sparling (1992); another excellent example would be his 20th-Century Music (1999).

13 Johnson, Julian, Out of Time: Music and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 273 Google Scholar.

14 Barthes, Roland, ‘The Death of the Author’, Image, Music, Text, trans. Heath, Stephen (London: Fontana, 1977), 142–8Google Scholar.

15 There have been attempts to offset this by tracing aspects of Cage’s thinking in a longer historical trajectory. For instance, Charles Eppley asks, in contrast with post-Cagean aesthetics: ‘How would a post-Cowellian aesthetics transform our understanding of postwar art and music?’ Eppley, , ‘Beyond Cage: On Sonic Art History and Historiography’, Parallax, 23 (2017), 342–60 (p. 356; emphasis original)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Steven Connor, ‘Acousmania’, 2015, <http://stevenconnor.com/acousmania.html> (accessed 1 September 2017). As Alastair Williams has written in a different context, ‘Practices designed to allow the sounds to speak for themselves would indeed seem to be predicated on the notion that sounds can be experienced in a more fundamental sense than we are accustomed to believe.’ Williams, , ‘Cage and Postmodernism’, The Cambridge Companion to John Cage, ed. Nicholls, David (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 227–41 (p. 233)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Patteson, Thomas W., Instruments for New Music: Sound, Technology, and Modernism (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016), 4 Google Scholar.

18 For reasons that will become obvious, I have used the term ‘non-subject-orientated’ rather than ‘object-orientated’ in order to distinguish this practice clearly from recent object-orientated philosophies and ontologies.

19 Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor W., Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London and New York: Verso, 1997)Google Scholar; Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, MN, and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Christopher Shultis similarly distinguishes two sorts of experiment: that which is open-ended and that which evidences known truths. Shultis, Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the American Experimental Tradition, new edn (Hanover, CT, and London: University Press of New England, 2013), 4.

20 Burrows, David, ‘Instrumentalities’, Journal of Musicology, 5 (1987), 117–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar (p. 117).

21 For a critique of this view, see Hardjowirogo, Sarah-Indriyati, ‘Instrumentality: On the Construction of Instrumental Identity’, Musical Instruments in the 21st Century: Identities, Configurations, Practices, ed. Bovermann, Till, de Campo, Alberto, Egermann, Hauke, Hardjowirogo, Sarah-Indriyati and Weinzierl, Stefan (Singapore: Springer, 2017), 9–24 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 See Taruskin, Richard, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 129 Google Scholar.

23 Busoni, quoted in Patteson, Instruments for New Music, 13.

24 Varèse, Edgard and Wen-chung, Chou, ‘The Liberation of Sound’, Perspectives of New Music, 5/1 (1966), 11–19 CrossRefGoogle Scholar (p. 12).

25 Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński, quoted ibid., 17. As Jonathan W. Bernard puts it, ‘Varèse never tired of quoting’ this definition. Bernard, The Music of Edgard Varèse (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 20.

26 This characterization is not uncommon: instruments are conceived of as extensions of performers’ bodies, standing in for them. Both instrument and body serve the conductor’s and, ultimately, the composer’s will. See Small, Christopher, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998)Google Scholar, chapter 4: ‘A Separate World’. I am indebted to Fiorenzo Palermo for making this connection to Small’s writing.

27 Malcolm MacDonald suggests that Varèse probably became acquainted with Hoene-Wroński’s writings, which are partly lost, through the musicologist Camille Durutte’s Esthétique musicale: Résumé élémentaire de la technie harmonique et complément de cette technie (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1876). MacDonald writes that Hoene-Wroński’s ‘original French certainly implies that “intelligence” is an inherent quality of the musical tones themselves’. MacDonald, , Varèse: Astronomer in Sound (London: Kahn & Averill, 2003), 51–2Google Scholar.

28 See Julian Johnson’s discussion of the return of the repressed in Out of Time, 275–87.

29 Patteson, Instruments for New Music, 13. Patteson also notes that, ‘The movement for new instruments was not a monolithic project but rather an arena in which different worldviews collided.’ Ibid., 5.

30 Busoni, quoted ibid., 1.

31 Busoni, quoted ibid., 13.

32 Marie Thompson has noted that feminized music and cultural activities are often association with noise as ‘extraneous, unwanted, unpleasant, disruptive or meaningless sound’. See her ‘Feminised Noise and the “Dotted Line” of Sonic Experimentalism’, Contemporary Music Review, 35 (2016), 85–101 (p. 86).

33 Russolo, Luigi, The Art of Noises, trans. Barclay Brown (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986), 24–5Google Scholar (emphasis original).

34 Ibid., 26.

35 Ibid., 28 (emphasis added).

36 Ibid., 29 (emphasis adapted).

37 Varèse and Wen-chung, ‘The Liberation of Sound’, 12.

38 Varèse, quoted in Mattis, Olivia, ‘Varèse and Dada’, Music and Modern Art (New York: Routledge, 2010), 129–62 (p. 143)Google Scholar.

39 As Julian Johnson puts it, ‘Composers’ conception of their musical material, and the processes through which they shape it, are themselves an aesthetic mediation of nature and culture, raw material and technology’. These show us something of the conditions of modernity, even where the music is not explicitly ‘about’ these conditions. Johnson, Out of Time, 141.

40 Varèse and Wen-chung, ‘The Liberation of Sound’, 13–14. The phrase ‘human-powered’ suggests that even the human here becomes a matter of means – fuel for the orchestra-machine.

41 Varèse and Wen-Chung, ‘The Liberation of Sound’, 18.

42 Varèse, quoted in Holmes, Thom, Electronic and Experimental Music: Technology, Music, and Culture, 3rd edn (London: Routledge, 2016), 3 Google Scholar.

43 Varèse, quoted in Levi, Erik, ‘Futurist Influences upon Early Twentieth-Century Music’, International Futurism in Arts and Literature, ed. Günter Berghaus (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 322–52 (p. 351)Google Scholar.

44 As Patteson points out, this distinction was formalized in László Modoly-Nagy’s 1922 essay ‘Produktion–Reproduktion’, De Stijl, 7 (1922), 98–100. Patteson, Instruments for New Music, 7.

45 Russolo, The Art of Noises, 27–8 (emphasis original).

46 Varèse and Wen-chung, ‘The Liberation of Sound’, 15.

47 In contrast with his predominant focus on the composer’s control over their material, in the late 1950s Varèse did experiment briefly with graphic scores realized by jazz performers. Mattis, Olivia, ‘The Physical and the Abstract: Varèse and the New York School’, The New York Schools of Music and the Visual Arts: John Cage, Morton Feldman, Edgard Varése, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, ed. Steven Johnson (New York: Routledge, 2002), 57–74 (p. 72)Google Scholar.

48 In his early essay ‘The Future of Music: Credo’, Cage similarly celebrates the directness of transmission from composer to audience offered by electronic instruments: ‘It is now possible for composers to make music directly, without the assistance of intermediary performers.’ John Cage, ‘The Future of Music: Credo’, Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 3–6 (p. 4).

49 Gottschalk, Experimental Music since 1970, 3.

50 Campbell, Iain, ‘John Cage, Gilles Deleuze, and the Idea of Sound’, Parallax, 23 (2017), 361–78 (p. 361).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

51 Eppley, ‘Beyond Cage’, 346, including quotations from Kostelanetz.

52 Goehr, Elective Affinities, 120 (emphasis original).

53 Dohoney, Ryan, ‘John Cage, Julius Eastman, and the Homosexual Ego’, Tomorrow Is an Open Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies, ed. Benjamin Piekut (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 39–62 (p. 49)Google Scholar.

54 David W. Bernstein, ‘Cage and High Modernism’, The Cambridge Companion to John Cage, ed. Nicholls, 186–213 (p. 193).

55 Cage, John, ‘Happy New Ears!’, A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1963), 30–6 (p. 32; emphasis added)Google Scholar.

56 Chance procedures in composition, like indeterminacy in performance, also suggest specific forms of control as well as offering new freedoms. See Bernstein, ‘Cage and High Modernism’, 211.

57 Dohoney, ‘John Cage, Julius Eastman, and the Homosexual Ego’, 47.

58 Piekut, Benjamin, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and its Limits (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), 48 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 Notably, exploring the New York Philharmonic’s performance of Atlas eclipticalis, Piekut has argued, ‘What most clearly emerge in this story are the themes of liberalism […]: autonomy, choice, the will to reason, justice as fairness, and small government.’ Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise, 23.

60 An exemplary account of ‘discipline’ is provided by Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). The polycentric nature of power is also outlined in the ‘Method’ section of Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 3 vols. (London: Penguin Books, 1979–91), i: An Introduction (1990), 92–102.

61 Cage, quoted in Kostelanetz, Richard, Conversing with Cage (London, New York and Sydney: Omnibus Press, 1988), 102 Google Scholar.

62 Cage, quoted ibid.

63 Cage, quoted ibid. (emphasis added).

64 Shultis, Silencing the Sounded Self, 33 (emphasis original).

65 Cage, John, 4' 33'' (No. 2) (0' 00'') (Leipzig: Edition Peters, 1962)Google Scholar.

66 For discussion, see Williams, ‘Cage and Postmodernism’, 232–3, and Gottschalk, Experimental Music since 1970, 4.

67 Cage, Silence, 72.

68 Cage (speaking in 1968), quoted in Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise, 60.

69 Cage, Silence, 72.

70 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 149–56.

71 Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise, 150. Shultis reads Cage’s interest in time lengths, taken as a core organizational principle, as an attempt to overcome the control implied when privileging harmony instead, given that the latter necessitates an ‘imposition of unity upon musical material’. Shultis, Silencing the Sounded Self, 87.

72 Cage, summarized by Campbell, ‘John Cage, Gilles Deleuze, and the Idea of Sound’, 366.

73 Cage, Silence, 10. This later comment was made in 1957.

74 Patteson, Instruments for New Music, 157.

75 Cage, quoted ibid.

76 David W. Bernstein, ‘Music I: To the Late 1940s’, The Cambridge Companion to John Cage, ed. Nicholls, 63–84 (p. 81).

77 Cage, quoted in Campbell, ‘John Cage, Gilles Deleuze, and the Idea of Sound’, 364.

78 Campbell, ‘John Cage, Gilles Deleuze, and the Idea of Sound’, 372–3.

79 Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise, 156.

80 Ibid., 163.

81 Dohoney, ‘John Cage, Julius Eastman, and the Homosexual Ego’, 45.

82 Cage, quoted in Campbell, ‘John Cage, Gilles Deleuze, and the Idea of Sound’, 372–3. For discussion, see Shaw-Miller, Simon, ‘Object and Idea: Music in the Art of Kandinsky, Duchamp, Paik, and Marclay’, The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Western Art, ed. Kaduri, Yael (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 371–96 (p. 386)Google Scholar.

83 Alastair Williams also notes Cage’s ‘frustration with the orchestral musicians in a performance of Europeras 1 & 2 for performing medleys of operatic tunes instead of playing the parts assigned to them’. Williams, ‘Cage and Postmodernism’, 232.

84 Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise, 163.

85 This was not the first time that Cage recounted a story in a different version later. One could cite Cage’s changing account of his experience with Schoenberg, for instance. See Patterson, David W., ‘Words and Writings’, The Cambridge Companion to John Cage, ed. Nicholls, 85–99 (p. 94)Google Scholar.

86 Cage, ‘The Future of Music: Credo’, 6. Despite appearing after ‘The Future of Music: Credo’ (1937) in Silence, Cage’s anecdote is itself undated. Note also Cage’s phrasing in this version of the story: ‘next to nothing’.

87 Ibid., 4.

88 Writing in 1958, Cage stated that, for him, Varèse’s contemporary relevance derived from his ‘acceptance of all audible phenomena as material proper to music’. However, he remained in control of his musical material: ‘In these respects Varèse is an artist of the past. Rather than dealing with sounds as sounds, he deals with them as Varèse.’ Cage, ‘Edgard Varèse’, in Silence, 83–5 (p. 84).

89 John Cage, interview, 1991, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcHnL7aS64Y> (accessed 5 September 2017), at 0:00–0:36 (emphasis added).

90 Ibid., at 1:47–2:47 (emphasis original).

91 Gottschalk, Experimental Music since 1970, 4.

92 This accords with Shultis’s reading of Cagean listening in his Silencing the Sounded Self, xix.

93 See Freud, Sigmund, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, The Penguin Freud Reader, ed. Philips, Adam (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 132–95Google Scholar. A dynamic of (symbolically) re-enacting is also central to the ‘compulsion to repeat’. See ‘Remember, Repeating and Working Through’, ibid., 391– 401. See also Joseph Sandler with Anna Freud, The Analysis of Defense: The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense Revisited (Madison, WI: International Universities Press, 1985).

94 See, for example, Heinz Kohut and Sigmund Levarie, ‘On the Enjoyment of Listening to Music’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 19 (1950), 64–87; Richard Sterba, ‘Psychoanalysis and Music’, American Imago, 22 (1965), 96–111; and Kohut, ‘Observations on the Psychological Functions of Music’. Musicologists such as David Schwarz have also explored this connection. See his Listening Subjects.

95 Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise, 43.

96 Ibid., 50, 54.

97 Oliveros, quoted in Gottschalk, Experimental Music since 1970, 107.

98 Foucault, Michel, ‘Technologies of the Self ’, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Martin, Luther H., Gutman, Huck and Hutton, Patrick H. (London: Tavistock Publications, 1988), 16–49 (p. 18)Google Scholar.

99 Both strategies are conceived in this sense as techniques, with each being differentiated by their relations to their objects. Technique, Adorno suggests, is ‘the aesthetic name for mastery over material’. Adorno, Theodor, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Adorno, Gretel and Tiedemann, Rolf, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (New York and London: Athlone Press, 2002), 212 Google Scholar.

100 Cage, quoted in Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 97. Thanks to Bonnie Taylor-Blake (via twitter as @ULTweets) for helping me track down a print reference to Cage’s discussion of refrigerator noises.

101 Cage, ‘The Future of Music: Credo’, 3.

102 Attali, quoted in Iddon, Martin, ‘Siren Songs: Channels, Bodies, and Noise’, Noise: A Non-Ference, ed. Hall, Alec (New York: Qubit, 2013), 61–91 (p. 69)Google Scholar.

103 Martin Iddon, making use of Greek myth and Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionism, has written of the transmutation of noise into music more generally: ‘Noise is both poison and remedy. Music may well always already be noise, but it is also the channelling of that noise, which is to say that through noise, music masters noise itself.’ Iddon, ‘Siren Songs’, 76.

104 Cage, quoted in Eppley, ‘Beyond Cage’, 351. It should also be added that the prepared piano was initially developed owing to the necessity of creating a percussive sound in a space too small to incorporate a percussion ensemble. Bernstein, ‘Music I’, 78; Eppley, ‘Beyond Cage’, 350.

105 Cage’s curiosity towards found objects has been said to have been influenced by the film-maker Oscar Fischinger. Kahn, Douglas, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 196–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bernstein, ‘Music I’, 69; Patteson, Instruments for New Music, 157.

106 Cage, quoted in Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music, 348.

107 Keep, Andy, ‘Instrumentalizing: Approaches to Improvising with Sounding Objects in Experimental Music’, The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music, ed. Saunders, James (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 113–30 (p. 113)Google Scholar.

108 Gottschalk, Experimental Music since 1970, 3.

109 Ibid., 5.

110 For discussion and a critique of a ‘purely’ ontological focus on sound, see Kane, Brian, ‘Sound Studies Without Auditory Culture: A Critique of the Ontological Turn’, Sound Studies, 1 (2015), 2–21 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

111 Chow and Steintrager, ‘In Pursuit of the Object of Sound’, 2.

112 Alaimo, Stacy, ‘Thinking as the Stuff of the World’, O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies, 1 (2014), 13–21 (p. 15)Google Scholar.

113 Ibid., 15.

114 Cage, ‘Happy New Ears!’, 31; see also Campbell, ‘John Cage, Gilles Deleuze, and the Idea of Sound’, 361. Kahn has noted that ‘Cage’s motto “Art is the imitation of Nature in her manner of operation”’ derives originally from St Thomas Aquinas. Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, 170.

115 Adorno, quoted in Goehr, Elective Affinities, 127.

116 Piekut, Benjamin, ‘Sound’s Modest Witness: Notes on Cage and Modernism’, Contemporary Music Review, 31 (2012), 3–18 (p. 4)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Here Piekut effectively disputes Shultis’s reading of Cage as a non-dualist.

117 Thompson, Marie, ‘Whiteness and the Ontological Turn in Sound Studies’, Parallax, 23 (2017), 266–82 (p. 274)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

118 Teddy Hultberg and David Tudor, ‘“I Smile When the Sound Is Singing through the Space”: An Interview with David Tudor’, 1988, <http://davidtudor.org/Articles/hultberg.html> (accessed 5 September 2017). Note that Tudor’s reference to sound being ‘live’ in the space relates to a comment earlier in the interview in which he says he finds that ‘machines are not interesting and that behind any music there has to be a live person’ who uses their skill and judgment in order to ‘enliven the situation’.

119 Cage, ‘Happy New Ears!’, 32 (emphasis added).

120 Hultberg and Tudor, ‘“I Smile When the Sound Is Singing through the Space’.

121 Piekut has commented on another occasion (in 1969) when Tudor similarly denied explicitly the use of his music for ‘political or social ends’. Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise, 166.

122 Gottschalk, Experimental Music since 1970, 89.

123 See Schwarz, David, Listening Awry: Music and Alterity in German Culture (Minneapolis, MN, and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 79–82 Google Scholar, and Wilson, ‘The Composition of Posthuman Bodies’, 11.

124 Benjamin, Walter, One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. James Amery Underwood (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 55 Google Scholar.

125 Ibid.

126 Horkheimer and Adorno suggested a dialectical formulation underpinning this distance: ‘The distance between subject and object, a presupposition of abstraction, is grounded in the distance from the thing itself which the master achieved through the mastered.’ Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 13.

127 Discussing Schoenberg and Stravinsky, Adorno argued that this division became historically irreconcilable. See his Philosophy of New Music.

128 Schafer, R. Murray, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994), 11 Google Scholar.

129 Hultberg and Tudor, ‘“I Smile When the Sound Is Singing through the Space’.

130 Jaap Blonk, quoted in Gottschalk, Experimental Music since 1970, 210.

131 Tom Johnson, quoted ibid.

132 Varèse and Wen-chung, ‘The Liberation of Sound’, 18.

133 Patteson, Instruments for New Music, 5.

134 Karl Marx, Capital, i, section 4, ‘The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof ’, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm> (accessed 1 September 2017).

135 An exploration of sound and/as fetish deserves a substantial discussion on its own terms, a fuller one than can be undertaken here. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytical thought and Slavoj Žižek’s reading of fetishism, I do this in my contribution to a forthcoming collection of essays, ‘Cage, Reich, and Morris: Process and Sonic Fetishism’, The Sound of Žižek: Musicological Perspectives on Slavoj Žižek, ed. Mauro Fosco Bertola (forthcoming).

136 Thompson, ‘Whiteness and the Ontological Turn’, 278. Paul Rekret, critiquing new materialism, has said something similar of those post-anthropocentric views of ‘matter itself’ that efface mediation: ‘Invocations of matter or materiality obscure, and at times risk naturalising the logics by which non-human nature enters into social relations.’ Rekret, ‘A Critique of New Materialism: Ethics and Ontology’, Subjectivity, 9 (2016), 225–45 (p. 237).

137 Cage, quoted in Shultis, Silencing the Sounded Self, 94.

138 Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, 188, 182. This obscuring accords with what Kahn terms Cage’s ‘musical silencing of the social’ (ibid., 160).

139 Patteson, Instruments for New Music, 167.

140 Schafer, The Soundscape, 3.

141 Ibid., 77.