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THE DISCOURSE OF SOUND

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2016

Martin Kaltenecker
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Abstract

This article offers a short overview of the development of listening theories concerning Western art music since the end of the eighteenth century. Referring to Michel Foucault, I consider such theories as discourses which produce ‘power effects', such as the training of listening attitudes, or the construction of specific spaces, such as the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. During the eighteenth century, predominant discourses considered musical pieces as orations and, since the nineteenth century, as complex organisms or structures. In the last third of the twentieth century a focus on sound, evinced for instance by the field of ‘sound studies', has produced a new configuration that dissolves the prevailing model of structural listening. This perspective may shed light on some technical features of contemporary compositional styles, which I examine by considering the use of melodies, gestures and loops in two compositions by Fausto Romitelli and Simon Steen-Andersen.

Type
RESEARCH ARTICLES
Information
Tempo , Volume 70 , Issue 277 , July 2016 , pp. 5 - 15
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

1 For instance, Organised Sound (Cambridge), or the French magazine cultures sonores (online). During the 1990s and up to 2011, the venerable Neue Zeitschrift für Musik bore the subtitle ‘Magazine for new Sounds’.

2 See, among many others, Sabine Sanio and Christian Scheib, eds, Das Rauschen (Frankfurt: Wolke Verlag, 1995); Joanna Demers, Listening Through the Noise: the Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Caleb Kelly, Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); Makis Solomos, De la Musique au Son (Rennes: PUR, 2013); Camille Hongler, Christoph Haffter and Silvan Moosmüller, eds, Geräusch – das Andere der Musik (Berlin, Transcript, 2014).

3 See Karsten Lichau and Viktoria Tkazcyk, eds, Resonanz: Potentiale einer akustischen Figur (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2007), or Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York: Zone, 2010).

4 See for instance Peter Sloterdijck, ‘Wo sind wir, wenn wir Musik hören?’, in Weltfremdheit (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 294–331. For a phenomenological approach, see Jean-Luc Nancy, À l’écoute (Paris: Seuil), 2002.

5 Held in Cologne, in October 2012.

6 Held in Arcueil (France), in November 2014.

7 Title of the programme book for the 2014–2015 season of the Rias Kammerchor in Berlin, comprising the usual works by Bach, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Rihm and Dusapin.

8 Flyer for the 2011–2012 season at San Fedele, in Milan.

9 See for instance the Soundscape: The Journal of Acoustic Ecology (online).

10 In the recent Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld define sound studies as an ‘interdisciplinary area that studies the material production and consumption of music, sound, noise, and silence, and how these have changed throughout history and within different societies’. See Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, ‘Introduction’, In Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, ed. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 6–7.

11 See for instance Alain Corbin, Village Bells (London, Macmillan, 1994); Mark M. Smith, ed., Hearing History: A Reader, ed. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2004); Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the Arts, Humanities and Social Science (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).

12 See for instance, Petra Maria Meyer, ed., acoustic turn (Munich, Wilhelm Fink, 2008).

13 Trond Reinholdtsen, quoted in Hübner, Ole, ‘Meine Unsicherheiten’, MusikTexte, 138 (2013), pp. 5–10Google Scholar, here 8.

14 René Descartes, Les Principes de la philosophie, (1644), § 45.

15 Jacques Rancière, Le Partage du sensible (Paris: La Fabrique, 2000), p. 27.

16 See for instance the article ‘Hauptsatz’, in Johann Georg Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste, Teil 1 (Leipzig, 1771), pp. 522–4, or Johann Nikolaus Forkel, Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik (§ 99), ed. Othmar Wessely (Graz: Akademische Druck und Verlangsanstalt, 1967), vol. 1, p. 50.

17 Mark Evan Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 4.

18 Vincent d'Indy, Cours de composition musicale, 2e livre, 1ère partie (Paris: Durand, 1909), pp. 377–8.

19 Charles Burney, A General History of Music, IV (London, 1789), p. 630.

20 Hugues Dufourt, Musique, pouvoir, écriture (Paris: Bourgois, 1991), p. 292.

21 Dufourt in interview in: Pierre-Albert Castanet ‘Hugues Dufourt: les années de compagnonnage avec l'Itinéraire (1976–1982), in Vingt-cinq ans de création musicale contemporaine: l'Itinéraire en temps réel, ed. Danielle Cohen-Levinas (Paris, L'Harmattan, 1998), pp. 15–40, here 27.

22 See for instance the contributions by Frank Ilschner, Kim Cascone, Norbert Schläbitz and Christopher Cox to Soundcultures, ed. Marcus S. Kleiner and Achim Szepanski (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2003); Deleuze and Music, ed. by Ian Buchanan and Marcel Swiboda (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004); Heuzé, Bruno, ‘Du Devenir-insecte de l'iPodiste’, Chimères 73 (2010), pp. 65–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 See Theodor W. Adorno, Einführung in die Musiksoziologie (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), chapter 1, and Rose Rosengard Subotnik, ‘The Challenge of Contemporary Music’ [1987] in Developing Variations. Style and Ideology in Western Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 279–83.

24 Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), chapter 11.

25 Helmut Lachenmann, Musik als existentielle Erfahrung. Schriften 1966–1995 (Wiesbaden, Breitkopf&Härtel, 1996), pp. 83–93.

26 Michel Foucault, ‘L'Inquiétude de l'actualité’ [1975], in Le Monde, September 19–20, 2004.

27 Michael Bull and Les Back, eds, The Auditory Culture Reader (Oxford/New York: Blooksbury, 2003).

28 In 1788, Baron Knigge's list of ‘minor social inconveniences’ mentions ‘chattering during concerts’ (Adolph Freiherr von Knigge, Über den Umgang mit Menschen (Frankfurt/Main: Insel, 2001), p. 65). For other instances see Peter Schleuning, Das 18. Jahrhundert: Der Bürger erhebt sich (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1984), pp. 103–8 and 171–9; James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris. A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), chapter 3; Martin Kaltenecker, L'Oreille divisée. Les discours sur l’écoute musicale aux xviiie et xixe siècles (Paris: Editions MF, 2010), pp. 69–78.

29 See Martin Geck, Zwischen Restauration und Romantik. Musik im Realismus-Diskurs 1848–1871 (Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler/Bärenreiter, 2001), pp. 1–16.

30 Günther Wagner has shown, for instance, that the rhetorical grid (considering a sonata as an oration) does not allow Heinrich Christoph Koch to explain ‘immanent musical techniques’ that determine the autonomous unfolding of a sonata movement (‘Anmerkungen zur Formtheorie Heinrich Christoph Kochs’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 41 (1984), pp. 86–112CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 94).

31 See for instance Dean, Jeffrey, ‘Listening to Sacred polyphony c.1500’, Early Music, 30 (1997), pp. 611–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Peter Gay, Naked Heart: The Bourgeois Experience (New York and London: Harper Collins, 1995), p. 21.

33 Paul Valéry, Eupalinos ou l'architecte (1921) in Œuvres II (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 105–106.

34 Something comparable may be said for the importance gained in retrospect by composers whose influence was limited at their time. Inspired bricoleurs such as Luigi Russolo, Henry Cowell, Harry Partch or Giacinto Scelsi acquired a new status as important predecessors in the 1980s, and were inserted in the common ‘genealogy’ of sound practice.

35 See Pierre Schaeffer, Le Traité des objets musicaux, chapter 6, as well as the recent Pierre Schaffer. Les Constructions impatientes, ed. by Martin Kaltenecker and Karine le Bail (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2010).

36 Urbain, Jean-Didier, ‘Lieux, liens, légendes. Espaces, tropismes et attractions touristiques’, Communications, 87 (2010), pp. 99–100Google Scholar.

37 Announcement for a concert by the Ensemble Garage, 7 December 2014.

38 See Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982).

39 See Christopher Small, Musicking. The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998) and Jonathan Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), pp. 185–97.

40 Arild Bergh and Tia DeNora, ‘From Wind-Up to iPod: Techno-Cultures of Listening’, in The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Eric Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 102.

41 See Tia NeNora, Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

42 See for instance Sulzer, ‘Hauptsatz’.

43 Quoted in H.C. Robbins Landon, Haydn: Chronicle and Works (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976–80), vol. III, p. 103.

44 Arnold Schoenberg, Fundamentals of Musical Composition (London/Boston: Faber, 1970), pp. 98–105.

45 Ernst Toch, Melodielehre (Berlin: Max Hesse, 1923), pp. 34–5.

46 See Lourié, Arthur, ‘An Inquiry into Melody’, Modern Music, 8/1 (1929–30), pp. 3–11Google Scholar.

47 Note that Luigi Nono already considered a single note in Webern to be the equivalent of a whole melody by Schubert, ‘an extreme concentration of a melodic curve’ (Matteo Nanni and Rainer Schmusch, eds, Incontri: Luigi Nono im Gespräch mit Enzo Restagno (Hofheim: Wolke, 2004), p. 24).

48 Quoted in Herzfeld, Isabel, ‘“Radikal und unmittelbar”: Ein Porträt des dänischen Komponisten Simon Steen-Andersen’, MusikTexte 135 (2012), pp. 5–12Google Scholar, here 8.

49 Steen-Andersen, conversation with the author, 21 September 2013.

50 Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 5: Music in the Late Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), chap. 10.

51 For examples by non minimalist composers, see for instance Giuliano d'Angiolini, Und'ho d'andà (1995), Salvatore Sciarrino, Notturno no. 3 (1998), Johannes Schöllhorn, rota (2008).

52 See for instance ‘Zealots’ by The Fugees (1996), where an instrumental loop accompanies the text, or the entire melodic writing of the album The Terror (2013) by The Flaming Lips.