MUSIC AND MATERIALISM

Music Philosophy and the Arts /

Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art
Sam Wilson
 “MATERIAL TURN” IN MUSIC STUDIES

 Emily Dolan:
 interest in ‘how music’s perceived immateriality and absoluteness
What “materials” depended upon concrete, material changes in orchestral practice
does music make [focusing on the music of Haydn]’.
use of?
 Eliot Bates on instruments:
(How) does the  ‘I argue for taking objects, and particularly musical instruments,
body play a role in seriously—but not simply as things that humans use or make or
music? exchange, or as passive artifacts from which sound emanates.’
 Interest in: ‘the myriad situations where instruments are entangled
in webs of complex relationships—between humans and objects,
between humans and humans, and between objects and other
objects.’
CONTEXT (1):
ANTHROPOCENTRISM AND THE ANTHROPOCENE
 Anthropocene: a (proposed)
geological epoch that marks
“human” impact on /
 Anthropo-: humans interconnectedness with
“natural” systems (after the
 Anthropocentrism: Holocene).
privileging the human  Derived from 2002 work of
view, human-centred. Nobel Prize winning chemist
Paul Crutzen.
 Post-anthropocentrism?  The apparent end of a
‘notion of a pure nature-[in-
itself…,] replaced by natural
worlds that are inextricable
from the world of humans’.
(Donna Haraway)
 CONTEXT (2):
NEW MATERIALISM AND POSTHUMANISM
Two terms that sometimes overlap:

New Materialism Posthumanism

“Materiality” turned to often in response How has the concept of the human
to previous understandings of society, changed?
nature, gender – “linguistically”,
“culturally”, etc. (see Braidotti’s interview in Humans and technology?
Dolphijn and van der Tuin, p. 21; Coole and Frost, p. 6)
Relation to ‘our genetic neighbours
Often interested in “agency” and the animals and the earth as a
“activeness” of matter. whole’? (Braidotti)
Cartesian “mind-body” dualism
‘How do we reconceive the
(after René Descartes’s philosophy).
body no longer as a passive
medium or instrument
‘Many of our ideas about materiality in fact remain
indebted to Descartes, who defined matter in the
awaiting the enlivening
seventeenth century as corporeal substance constituted capacity of a distinctly
of length, breadth, and thickness; as extended, uniform, immaterial will?’
and inert [….] According to this model, material objects
are identifiably discrete.’
Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter
Coole and Frost, New Materialisms

Two questions: What is “matter”? / What is “the body”?

 ‘materiality is always something more than “mere” matter: an excess,
force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active,
self-creative, productive, unpredictable.’
(Coole and Frost, 2010, p. 9)

 Artistic practice and pedagogy:

 “artistic practice [can] be
viewed as the production of
knowledge or philosophy in
action.”
‘intersection of
(Barrett cited in Hickey-Moody and
making and
Page, 2016, p. 2)
thinking’
(Hickey-Moody and Page,
2016, p. 1)

PASSIVE (MUSICAL) BODIES
 Stravinsky:
 performer undertakes “execution” of
the text: a “strict putting into effect of
an explicit will that contains nothing
beyond what it specifically commands”.
 performer as a “transmitter” of a “pure
music”, rejecting “extramusical” ideas
beyond the musical work itself
(Stravinsky cited in Taruskin, Text and
Act, p. 129).
Performers bodies/instruments
as material to be mastered
 Varèse:
 Imagined ‘instruments obedient to my thought and which
with their contribution of a whole new world of
unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the
exigencies of my inner rhythm.’
(in ‘The Liberation of Sound’, pp. 13-14)
 EXTENDED / LIVELY (MUSICAL) BODIES
 Instrument as prothesis / bodily extension?
 Bodies existing in relation to technologies
(including instruments).
‘the posthuman view thinks of the body as the
original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so
that extending or replacing the body with other
prostheses becomes a continuation of a process
that began before we were born’
- N. Katherine Hayles
 Human-nonhuman (instrument, sound)
relation as “cyborgic” (see Iddon 2006; Wilson 2017) … ‘the myriad situations
 Technology blurring boundary of musical where instruments are
self (subject and object)? entangled in webs of
complex relationships—
between humans and
objects, between humans
and humans, and between
objects and other objects.’

To quote Eliot Bates again

 THE ROLE OF NEW TECHNOLOGIES IN
COMPOSITION / PERFORMANCE / LISTENING?
An ‘agency of assemblages’ at
work in the world, ‘a
confederation of human and
Consequences for agency?
nonhuman’
(what is agency?)
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter

Contra: ‘instruments obedient to my

thought’ (Varèse)
 BECOMING AND RELATIONALITY
Relationships between objects as crucial
(“relationality”)
E.g. Human/nonhuman “confederation” of
instrumentalist/instrument: their becoming
(emergence) in relation to one another…
An ‘agency of assemblages’ at
work in the world, ‘a
confederation of human and
nonhuman’
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter
Contra: ‘instruments obedient to my
thought’ (Varèse)
IS IT POSSIBLE TO PHILOSOPHISE ABOUT
“SOUND ITSELF”?
 Christoph Cox’s sonic materialism:
“I propose an alternative theoretical
framework, a materialist account
able to grasp the nature of sound and
to enable analysis of the sonic arts. I
suggest, moreover, that this
theoretical account can provide a
model for rethinking the arts in
general and for avoiding the pitfalls
encountered in theories of
representation and signification…”
“The attempt to move ‘beyond
signification and
representation’ founders on
the fact that its mechanism of
movement – analogy – relies
on cultural patterns of likeness
and the practices that develop
and encourage the hearing of
likenesses.”
– Brian Kane, in response to Cox.
 SUMMARY  The “Material Turn”
 In musicology / music studies
 Context (1): post-anthropocentrism
 Context (2): New Materialism and posthumanism

Recommended reading  Theorising matter and the body

ahead of next week’s  Passivity and activity
lecture:  Instruments, cyborgs, extended bodies…
 Agency and relationality
Cox, ‘Beyond  Sound and matter in context
Representation and  “Sound itself” and the “nature of sound”
Signification’  Culture, politics, “sound itself” – philosophical debates (we’ll
start with this next week).