1. SOUND PEDAGOGY: TEACHING LISTENING SINCE CAGE

In this article, I propose a new analytical frame for understanding the aims and effects of some important works of post-Cagean experimental music and sound art. I show how telling, or teaching, audiences how to listen is central to works by John Cage, George Brecht, La Monte Young, Max Neuhaus, R. Murray Schafer and Pauline Oliveros. Probing this pedagogical approach to listening in the sonic arts, this article uncovers its surprising resonances with ‘participation’ as figured by the visual arts; with critical pedagogy; and even with ‘music appreciation’ of the Western canon. Pedagogy in the sonic arts is riddled with productive tensions: silent observation versus inclusive sound-making; linguistic explanation versus non-linguistic ‘pure sound’; the optimal state of ‘open ears’ as a new, vanguard practice requiring cultivation, or as an underlying primordial condition to which we are exhorted to get back.

Little attention has been paid to the disparity in the role and status of pedagogy between music and sound art. Pedagogy is plainly constitutive of art musics; Booth and Kuhn (Reference Booth and Kuhn1990: 418) categorically define art musics by the formal enculturation they require and produce. By contrast, pedagogy’s role in sound art has been occluded, hardly examined, and most conspicuous in its absence; Alan Licht’s (Reference Licht2007: 135–55, 200–10) genealogy of sound art centres the work of numerous artists who, he notes, are untrained in music. In a similar vein, Cage’s ‘musicalisation of aurality itself’ (Kahn Reference Kahn2001: 102) seems at first to promise a kind of democratisation and deschooling (Illich Reference Illich1971):Footnote ¹ work in this tradition echoes and reproduces a politicised break with the plainly hierarchical pedagogical norms of art musics, which demand (and produce) sufficiently enculturated, ‘music literate’ performers and audiences. This article argues that sonic artists since Cage have critiqued music’s normalising and hierarchical pedagogies, but simultaneously offered their own strikingly ambitious counter-pedagogies, often addressing listening not only within an aesthetic frame, but in the very life of the subject.

I begin my genealogy of pedagogy in sonic art with Cage’s 4'33". It is often held that 4'33" articulated a redefinition of music: any sound you hear can be aestheticised and subjectively reframed as music. In one reading, this means that 4'33" changes not only the acceptable content but also the very ontology of music, positing that the listeners’ own perception, not the composer’s design, is the locus of musical aesthesis (Licht Reference Licht2007: 12). For an audience member suitably prepared, while waiting and ultimately failing to hear the expected piano performance, 4'33" could be the gateway to a revelation that music is everywhere. Far from silence, what the audience hears is the totality of contingent environmental sound surrounding them, yet these sounds are newly reframed. Their ears primed for attentive concert hall listening, they hear instead the music in the sounds of lived space and time. It is the mode or habitus of the listener’s listening, then, that determines whether a sound is music or not.

Following this logic, listeners, not musicians, produce ‘music’. For Cage, sounds need not be organised by a musician; they need only be organised perceptually through intentional listening. Thus, everyone is capable of ‘producing’ music and any instance of listening can produce an art experience. In a single philosophical manoeuvre, Cagean listening thus opens up new vistas for participatory, inclusive and immediate engagement with sound-as-art – anyone can do/make it at any time.

Yet it remains an open question whether a performance of 4'33" could succeed in redefining music for any particular listener, especially one who comes to the performance uninitiated. One who already accepts the dicta of Cagean listening hardly needs to attend a performance of 4'33" to hear the potential music all around them, but for someone who does not already agree, the contingent environmental sounds of a given 4'33" performance may be literally inaudible, (un)consciously ignored as background noise. Presumably, it was audience members who felt this way, who failed to hear 4'33" as music, who caused the scandal around the piece’s premier (Gann Reference Gann2010: 5–7). Thus, 4’33” might not accomplish on its own a change in listening. Yet it remains important for inaugurating – and symbolising – a long tradition of sonic artists trying to teach people how to listen. This tradition, of composers trying to convince their publics to listen differently, is the tradition I call ‘sound pedagogy’, the subject of this article.

I would suggest that – precisely because 4'33" may fail to convince its audience – Cage and likeminded artists also produced linguistic discourses, which would more directly instruct listeners on how to change their listening. For sound art collective Ultra-red, such uses of language are best thought of as ‘protocols for organised listening’, which give ‘priority to transforming auditory perception’ (Ultra-red 2012: 2). I call such uses of language sound pedagogy. Some are plainly pedagogical in that they are part of an instructional programme, but all are pedagogical in a broader sense: they aim at (trans)forming perception and, ultimately, subjectivity. That is, these artists aspire or claim to affect the listener beyond the domain of art, such that their everyday sonic experience, and perhaps even their conduct and cognition, are permanently transformed.

Sound pedagogy resonates with critical pedagogy discourses: both claim to offer anti-repressive knowledge, a means towards liberation from entrenched systems of knowledge/power. Situating itself as an alternative to the straitjacketed norms of a dominant Eurocentric music culture, sound pedagogy promises to free your listening from an artificial and harmful set of prejudices about which sounds are worthy of (aesthetic) attention. Moreover, these listening experiences, artists insist, are accessible to all, certainly irrespective of past musical experience. In thus addressing a putatively universal faculty of listening, sound pedagogy functions as a critique of the narrow and parochial public address of art musics – with the Western classics presumably squarely in the crosshairs – that assume and require a rarefied cultural competence to be understood (let alone to be composed and performed).

So what were the dominant currents of music pedagogy against which sound pedagogy defined itself as the liberatory alternative? In the Unite States, the dominant approach has been ‘music appreciation’, a pedagogy designed to enculturate listeners en masse into the codes underlying Western art music and to provide moral uplift through experience and exegesis of ‘the classics’ (Hund Reference Hund2014: 260–2). This emphasis on a historical tradition defined as ‘ours’ (i.e. the cultural patrimony of Europeans and their descendants) remains an influential one (cf. El Sistema and the programmes it has inspired). Where music appreciation posits the desirability of such uplifting (Western classical) musical enculturation, sound pedagogy posits instead the universality and preferability of listening to all sound as potentially aesthetic/musical. By locating a preferable aesthetic experience in the sounds of everyday life, sound pedagogy permits the de-emphasis and denigration of conventional Western musical training, with its long apprenticeship from novice instrumentalist to creative musician, as unnecessary and perhaps socially pernicious. It is in this way that a pedagogical sonic art might open up possibilities for broader and more immediate participation than Western art music.

Despite the aesthetic gulf (and the sometime antipathy) between experimental musicians and the defenders of the Western canon, music appreciation and sound pedagogy actually share deep structural commonalities. Both aim to shape and transform listeners and listening. Both do so primarily through linguistic discourses that nevertheless point beyond language to give priority to non-linguistic sonic experiences. Both aim to help people, perhaps even to improve them. But where ‘music appreciation’ ideology identifies both music training and music listening as forms of uplift or bildung, sound pedagogies tend to regard our musical enculturation and learned habits as interfering with an authentic and immediate experience of the sounding world. We require an ‘ear-cleaning’ (Schafer Reference Schafer1967: 1), a set of ‘happy new ears’ cut loose of cultural baggage and trained habit (Cage Reference Cage1967: 30). Thus, as I will show, some artists frame their practice as a kind of deprogramming, an attempt to remove harmful enculturation. This claim, influential as it has been, is ripe for deconstruction: protocols for organised listening are themselves a form of enculturation.

Thus, this article will unfold a tension at the heart of sound pedagogy. On the one hand, artists posit listeners’ universal capacity to ‘make music’ out of any heard sound. On the other hand, the same listeners need an ‘ear cleaning’ intervention to transform and improve auditory perception. In other words, we all could attend to the full range of sounds, on the basis of our human sensory capabilities, with hardly a need for artists, but in order to hear with ‘clean ears’, we need to be subjected to some artist-initiated ‘protocol for organised listening’. With the help of some (admittedly slippery) algebraic substitution, the paradox becomes yet more grinding: on the sole basis of our nature, we can all produce culture/aesthesis, yet in order to get our listening back to this untampered-with natural, we need to take a lesson from a bearer of aesthetic culture.

What follows is a critical history of those ‘lessons’. Brecht, Young, Neuhaus and Cage offer an implicit pedagogy through text-driven artworks whose verbal discourses plainly address the audience and request a change in listening behaviour. These works presage and set the terms for Oliveros and Schafer’s later, more explicitly instructional sound pedagogies. Along the way, I want to suggest that, unlike Western art music’s pedagogical norms, which sharply divide legitimate works and performances from the activities of amateurs in their course of learning, sound pedagogies can offer a lean alternative whereby teaching experimental sonic art is a form of simply doing it.

2. LECTURES ON LISTENING

In the 1950s, during the same years he crystallises theories of indeterminacy and non-intentional sound, Cage begins turning lectures into music. By manipulating the durations of each spoken utterance in textual works such as Lecture on Nothing, 45' for a Speaker and Indeterminacy according to the same chance procedures he was applying to other sound material, he was able to position linguistic discourse in and even as music. These texts are mainly about Cage’s own musical aesthetics and ethics – effectively transforming the preconcert talk into the concert. In what can seem an almost desperate bid to fuse form and content, process and presentation, Cage made sure his audiences heard his compositional method simultaneous with its explanation and justification. Cage says as much in the first paragraph of the ‘Forward’ to Silence: ‘I have employed in [these texts] means of composing analogous to my composing means in the field of music. My intention has been, often, to say what I had to say in a way that would exemplify it; that would, conceivably, permit the listener to experience what I had to say rather than just hear about it’ (Cage Reference Cage1961: ix). Accordingly, especially when performed simultaneously with Cage’s other musical compositions, these texts describe, advocate and enact the Cagean sound ethos of interruption, disruption and disjuncture: ‘A cough or a baby crying will not/ruin a good piece of modern music’ (Cage Reference Cage1961: 161) he says in 45’ for a Speaker, a work from 1954 which can be superimposed with four of Cage’s other timed works from the same period (Fetterman Reference Fetterman1996: 206). In fact, such coughs and cries might actually comprise a ‘good piece of modern music’ in a realisation of 4'33", if you know how to listen. But in order to alter listeners’ perceptions such that these sounds become audible as part of 4’33” (and not as mere interruptions of it), Cage needed to teach people a different way to listen. This is precisely what, I am arguing, Cage’s lecture pieces seek to do: ‘All you can/do is/suddenly listen/in the same way/that, when you catch a cold/all you can do is/suddenly/sneeze’ (Cage Reference Cage1961: 148). The suddenness of the sneeze or of the baby’s cry, its unrelatedness to future and past, its dissolution of any coherence in temporal structure, its absolute contingency, these are the features that Cage tells us our listening should aspire to. More precisely – ‘all you can do’ – Cage tells us that our listening is inexorably and already an unwilled biological imperative, a sudden sneeze. Such ‘sudden listening’ is, not coincidentally, the exact opposite of what Rose Subotnik called ‘structural listening’. This mode of listening, taught in music appreciation classrooms and allied with the prestige of the Western classics, suggests that listeners can extract meaning through attention to this music’s internal development and variation over time (Subotnik Reference Subotnik1995: 148–56).

Literally forswearing such inherited codes of listening and norms of value within his compositions, Cage shoehorns disparate functions into his talking pieces: polemic against the Western music canon, exhortation to changed listening, and explanation with simultaneous realisation of a compositional process. His efforts to unify compositional process with a verbal discourse that makes that process plain would enormously influence later sound and conceptual artists, as well as the Judson Dance Theatre, where it was common to narrate actions while executing them (Kotz Reference Kotz2001: 61, 74). Works that strive for such unification are almost inherently didactic, explaining themselves to obviate the need for an external explanation. They attempt to show or teach their audience what is being done while, or better, through doing it.Footnote ² Even Cage’s ‘I Have Nothing to Say and I am Saying it’ can be read as a (blatantly pedagogical) reductio ad absurdum of the very ontology of musical ‘utterance’, insisting, as Cage often did, on the ultimate meaninglessness, the absence of semantic content, in all music (Cage Reference Cage1961: 51).Footnote ³ So, while he locates (ultimately meaningless) musical aesthesis in the ear of the beholder, he simultaneously talks audiences’ ears off in advocating his ideas and music. Thus, the language of explanation and argumentation steps in where music’s (inability to produce) semantic content fails.

So, by creating works that seek to explain themselves, and by arguing that listening is, like a sneeze, an uncultivated, unwilled, almost biological universal, Cage’s sound pedagogy promotes a kind of cultural deprogramming. If we do as Cage suggests, we will let sounds ‘be themselves’ and listen without preference, hierarchy or attempt to extract structural relations or meanings. But how do we come to listen in that manner? Perhaps not, as I have argued, by just heading to the concert hall and hearing, unprimed, a performance of 4’33”. If Cage’s rise from scandal-causing ‘bad boy’ to his institutional ratification and the 1961 publication of Silence is anything to go by, a much more effective way to spread the Cagean dictum is to talk about it. Yet, there is an irony in Cage’s lecturing on how to listen non-preferentially: in order to attain this deprogrammed, anarchic, non-hierarchical listening, we need to be schooled.

3. TEXT SCORES THAT TEACH

While techniques for listening to music are part and parcel of any form of music education or music appreciation, the discourses I call ‘sound pedagogy’ offer techniques for listening in general, often promising some benefit to the listener in everyday life. Cage often describes the emancipatory payoff of more open, less prejudicial listening. Once we realise that ‘nothing is accomplished by writing … hearing … [or] playing a piece of music’, not only are ‘our ears … now in excellent condition’, but, he claims, ‘we wake up to the very life that we are living’ (Cage Reference Cage1961: xii, 49). Does not the promise of a transformation to ‘the very life’ (an ‘awakening’, as in a conversion narrative) echo the personal uplift promised by advocates of bildung, as in ‘music appreciation’? In contrast to his polemic against conventional expectations about what Western art music can do to and for you, Cage says that something momentous in the life of the subject is actually ‘accomplished’ through an acceptance of his favoured mode of listening. Thus, Cage not only refutes music appreciation’s power to uplift and transform, he actually proposes that his sound pedagogy is capable of what music appreciation had claimed for itself; he negates the content of music appreciation, but reproduces its structure.

The younger artists to whom I now turn followed Cage in talking specifically about cleansing/renewing actions directed at the ears. But while audition itself is the primary site or problem at which these artists direct their pedagogy, all assert and expect that an altered audition will have broader ramifications for the life of the subject. Questioning the strict audience–performer binary of concert hall performance, they suggest that changed listening should engender more active, inclusive relationships. Thus, the discursive/linguistic practices I call sound pedagogy – telling people when, where, how and why to listen – are their pivot point out of the normative social and spatial relations of the concert hall and into interdisciplinary art practices (acoustic design, soundwalks, sonic meditations, event scores) which might fit more comfortably under the ‘sound art’ umbrella. I turn to these now as a way of exploring the diversity of pedagogical strategies yoked to American experimental music’s ‘ear cleaning’ mission. For, at times, all these artists do appear to become missionaries for the credo and cause of deeper/better/cleaner listening. Certainly Cage’s efforts to bring his own words about music into his music sometimes resulted in a kind of self-referential, heightened sermonising, a verbal music that comes with its own illustrative sound effects. But where, in the 1950s, Cage proselytised from the stage, later sonic artists would try to win converts by engaging them in experiences that concert halls could not contain. Perhaps in sympathy with the growth of mass social and political movements – the call for ‘participatory democracy’ was a major plank of the epochal SDS Port Huron Statement (Hayden Reference Hayden1962) – sonic art in the 1960s developed new modes of participation that increasingly called the congregation out of their pews.

This pivot of sound pedagogy out of the concert hall begins in the context of the ‘Experimental Composition’ course Cage taught at the New School for Social Research. Cage urged students in that class, most untutored in musical notation, to write simple instructions as scores, proposing, in effect, that anyone, regardless of musical background, could compose.Footnote ⁴ Moreover, these scores can be read as passing on a similar participatory injunction to the reader: just as anyone can compose such works, anyone can realise them. Brecht, later a Fluxus mainstay, attended Cage’s course beginning in 1958 and, in 1959, composed Drip Music, a text score which reads, ‘A source of water and an empty vessel are arranged so that the water falls into the vessel.’ If realised by performers on a concert stage, this work might fit within a Cagean tradition of chance-based musical compositions, though, of course, it does not rely on music-trained performers (Kotz Reference Kotz2001: 55–73). However, Brecht claimed he did not care if any of his event scores were realised; he wrote that his event scores are ‘like little enlightenments I wanted to communicate to my friends who would know what to do with them’. Thus, the piece can stand as a kind of communicative or teacherly text independent of ‘music’. Given that Brecht’s scores were often actually mailed to friends before ever being performed (Johnson Reference Johnson2008: A33), they seem to be as much epistolary literature as they are musical notation, direct mailers with a transmissable insight designed to change how the recipient hears. In short, irrespective of realisation, the text score itself is a pedagogical intervention about listening.

An even clearer example of the discursive-pedagogical quality of event scores is La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #15: ‘This piece is a little whirlpool out in the middle of the ocean’ (Young Reference Young1963). Like Brecht’s, this event score is a performative speech act in the present tense; Young’s words enact a conceptual performance that occurs inside the mind. Like other instances of sound pedagogy, Composition 1960 #15 transparently aims to alter and broaden one’s auditory percept. It directs readers to strain their listening beyond its normal objects, in this case towards the literally inaudible and inaccessible. Brecht is more concerned with audible sounds carelessly ignored, with ‘ensuring that the details of everyday life … stop going unnoticed’ (Johnson Reference Johnson2008: A33). Drip Music, whether read or heard in performance, attunes listeners to the quotidian sounds that practically surround them; the piece is probably being realised somewhere in your home right now. Brecht’s insistent double negative (‘stop going unnoticed’) suggests a serious and consequential injunction; he wants to ‘ensure’, not invite, us to correct our errors of omission in perception and life. Thus, the Fluxus listening ‘event’ is not just a ‘post-studio’ art-making practice that aims to include the stuff of everyday life; it is always already a pedagogical event that attempts to reshape the life of the subject.

Closely linked to the staging of whirlpool or drip as an ‘event’ – potentially classable as a musical work, but equally a pedagogical attunement and a self-contained linguistic performative utterance – is the practice that has come to be known as the ‘soundwalk’, now a mainstay of sound art, invented in 1966 by Max Neuhaus. As Neuhaus describes the initial inspiration:

In response, Neuhaus created a work called LISTEN, his ‘first independent work as an artist’. He describes a first ‘performance’ of the work, in which he ‘rubber-stamped LISTEN on each person’s hand and began walking with them’ through the streets of New York, past interesting environmental sounds he had pre-selected. LISTEN might, at a raw perceptual level, sound similar to an outdoor performance of 4'33" – in both works, the heard sounds will be contingent on whatever is happening in a particular location during the piece’s duration. Yet in most other senses LISTEN is quite different: it articulates a direct demand where 4'33" just assumes audiences will listen. LISTEN thus replaces the Cagean (pre)concert talk with a handstamp. LISTEN sidesteps the question of whether these sounds are or are not ‘music’, and simply asks people to attend to them, obviating the need for a Cagean polemic about what music is.

Both the event score and the soundwalk have been claimed by visual art theory as ‘post-studio’ practices, but, as direct extensions of Cage’s compositional critique of Western music appreciation and structural listening, they are also plainly contributions to musical theory and practice. Like Cage’s lectures-as-music, the event score and the soundwalk function simultaneously as pedagogical intervention, communicative text and audible sonic artwork. Neuhaus, abandoning percussion performance, becomes instead a performer of listening, elevating audition above sound-making in a striking normative inversion that, as will become clear below, is also the central feature of R. Murray Schafer’s sound pedagogy.

Despite Neuhaus’s desire to give ‘aesthetic credence’ to environmental sounds, he does not frame listening as a purely aesthetic experience. The soundwalk is also a teaching moment whose effects ramify into everyday life:

Yet in asserting that his ‘Lecture Demonstrations’ thus succeeded, Neuhaus glosses the contradictory content of this pedagogical encounter. How and why is focus ‘contagious’ here? Might the presence of the sonic professional and his performance-of-listening, leading by example, be the real ‘lecture’? And is Neuhaus really accurate in saying that those won over by the piece’s pedagogy learned to listen ‘for themselves’? If they had not already learned how before taking part in the soundwalk, participants certainly did not learn to listen by themselves. Common sense holds that the soundwalk, and its author, Neuhaus, are actually doing the teaching, yet Neuhaus seems to want to efface his role and insist (in an echo of the critical pedagogy tradition) that no pedagogical authority is needed, that the student is the true teacher.

Thus far, I have traced a gradual economising of language over the historical genesis of these listening-centred works, from the linguistic excess of 45' for Speaker to the one-sentence scores of Fluxus to Neuhaus’s single-word handstamp. Across this trajectory, there is a productive tension between listening and language: these artists wanted to change how people listened, and the best tool they knew to directly address and convince was language. Yet they strongly prioritised non-linguistic sound – contingent, environmental, and ignored sound, perhaps even ‘pure sound’. Perhaps the apotheosis and logical conclusion here is the unannounced, unmarked sound installations of Max Neuhaus. In his series of Time Pieces, a sustained sound blends unnoticed with the ordinary ambience and acoustic of the space where it is installed. Then, on the hour, the installation’s sound abruptly ceases, leaving in its place an abrupt silence that cannot escape notice, an apt illustration of Cage’s ‘all you can do is suddenly listen’ (1961: 148). Here, Neuhaus discovers the rare situation in which an experience of sound, unmediated by language, creates a lesson, even a revelation, about the nature of audition, attention and listening. Could this be an example of sound pedagogy without language?

In teaching a lesson about listening in general (i.e. in daily life) without recourse to language, as well as in their rigorous economy and material purity, Neuhaus’s Time Pieces represents a sort of ne plus ultra in sound art. Indeed, they could be regarded as retooled, perfected realisations of 4'33" that further liberate Cagean listening ethics from the expectations attendant upon musical performance. Consisting, like Cage’s score, of a series of ‘tacets’, the Time Pieces require no concert hall staging and no learned habits of concert behaviour to ‘reframe’ the contingent sounds of the environment and thus to teach hearers to listen to their own everyday listening.

4. COMPOSERS IN THE CLASSROOM

R. Murray Schafer and Pauline Oliveros have used Cage’s lectures on listening as a different sort of jumping off point. In their explicitly pedagogical activities, as teachers in workshop and classroom settings and as authors of widely known texts that instruct initiates on how to improve their listening, both composers have maintained their faith in language as a medium to educate the ear. Both have remained closely associated with music, but have also built new disciplines and institutions that address sound and listening in wider aesthetic and socially instrumental contexts.

In his A Sound Education: 100 Exercises in Listening and Soundmaking, Schafer reformulates for classroom teachers much of the polemic of his influential The Tuning of the World (1977). Following on that book’s broad consideration of the soundscape, ‘the total field of sounds wherever we are’ (Schafer Reference Schafer1992: 8), A Sound Education offers a classroom method for young students to better engage with sound both as listeners and as makers. Most of the book aims to increase the ‘effectiveness’ of listening, and, as the book goes on, to teach new approaches to soundmaking (Schafer Reference Schafer1992: 7). Indeed, as a graduated pedagogical method in which mastery of each exercise is the prerequisite for the next, and in which listening is the prerequisite for sound-making, the book has structural similarities to a ‘learn-to-play’ method for a musical instrument. Strikingly, however, Schafer repeatedly devalues the sound-making side of this listener/maker binary; mastery of this ‘method’ thus diverges from any conventional notion of musical competence.

Indeed, Schafer’s equivocal view of students’ sound-making underscores Douglas Kahn’s point about Cage’s project of noise abatement: the search for silence means silencing someone (Kahn Reference Kahn2001: 161–74). This is possibly the most uncomfortable gulf separating Schaferian sound education from more traditional music pedagogies. Learning about sound, from Schafer’s perspective, often seems to mean learning not to make any. Schafer is nearly halfway through his book before he reaches exercise 43 of A Sound Education, the first to concern sound-making: ‘In the next set of exercises we will use our voices. Only by uttering (outering) sound can we demonstrate that our perception has been complete and accurate’ (Schafer Reference Schafer1992: 63). Perception here has priority and primacy; far from evincing creative expression, sound-making here is a mere assessment of whether the ‘Ear Cleaning’ exercises preceding it have succeeded in improving perception. Because Schafer regards perception as nearly impossible to perfect, he wants all of us to spend a good long time poised in silent listening before opening our mouths:

Assertions like this last one are not only queasily controlling, they are logically circular: being quiet makes us listen; listening makes us want to be quiet. Perhaps this could become a virtuous cycle, but it is still one that evidently needs to be put into motion by an authoritative wisdom teacher. On this point, Schafer’s sound education comes to closely, and perversely, resemble traditional Western music education: students require a long apprenticeship of being told how to listen, before they may participate meaningfully in, or even properly understand, sonic art and reality.

An even more problematic politics clouds Schafer’s project when he moves from an aesthetic to a socially instrumental view of sound. In The Tuning of the World, he reframes Cagean listening in expansively political terms. For Schafer, 4’33” ‘treat[s] the world as a macrocosmic musical composition’ whose ‘orchestration is a musician’s business’ (Schafer Reference Schafer1977: 5). Yet, because he sees the modern soundscape, with its constantly escalating noise levels, in dangerous, almost eschatological terms – ‘There is growing evidence that modern civilisation may be deafening itself with noise’ – the called for ‘orchestration’ must, by and large, consist of silencing: ‘The prevention of sound may well be as important as its production. It may be that we already have too many sounds in the world for them all to be heard to advantage’ (Schafer Reference Schafer1992: 9). Moreover, ‘The world’s soundscape has reached an apex of vulgarity in our time, and many experts have predicted universal deafness as the ultimate consequence’ (Schafer Reference Schafer1992: 3). Since this grave situation calls for immediate intervention on grounds of public health, Schafer’s prescription of sound education is not just a gateway to a certain post-Cagean aesthetic experience; it is a stringent prerequisite for responsible citizenship.

Though the relative prominence of listening over sound-making in the 100 Exercises seems at first to consign the ‘sound educated’ largely to contemplative observation, Schafer means this training to prepare the way for socially instrumental ‘acoustic design’:

This learning-to-listen is always framed as resensitisation, a recovery of ‘a lost unity in the past’ (Gardner Reference Gardner2010), and not merely in his conjuring of ‘first soundscapes’ that tribal/ancient peoples hear/d or even in his underlying valorisation of endangered soundscapes requiring preservation. More narrowly, it is his declinist narrative of a modern decay in listening itself that fails to convince. On what factual basis can Schafer assert that ‘we’ have ‘forgotten’ how to listen, especially since he so frequently cites Cage’s 4’33” as opening the space of possibility for his own work? Why, when he obviously recognises the centrality of this (then) recent aesthetic breakthrough, does he insist on a narrative of returning to listening’s past, rather than recognising his brand of pan-aural attention and orientation towards soundscape as representative of a new mode of listening?

Like Schafer’s 100 Exercises, many of Pauline Oliveros’s compositions offer instruction in organised listening and sound-making. Though framed in her oeuvre not as exercises per se, but as text scores, these works were developed in the context of Oliveros’s classes and workshops, which (then as now) typically welcome participants irrespective of musical background. Moreover, the initial genesis of her text scores was in a pedagogical setting. Tasked with teaching a course on ‘The Nature of Music’ for a heterogeneous group of non-musicians at the University of California, San Diego, Oliveros had to confront the spectre of music appreciation head on; this was the course that this new and pedagogically innovative institution offered instead of a music appreciation course which, at most other schools, certainly would have focused on Western classics. By contrast, Oliveros’s course on the ‘nature’ of music confronted and opposed ethnocentric beliefs about European music’s supposed superiority, primarily through a pedagogy rooted in post-Cagean aurality, emphasising environmental listening, field recording and sound-making with everyday objects (all of which remain central to her teaching today). So, while she too explicitly frames her sound pedagogy as a stripping away of harmful Eurocentric enculturation, she avoids Schafer’s declinist historiography and inverts his noise-equals-pollution stance, equating and eliding biological and technological sounds in her music, teaching, and writing.Footnote ⁵ Yet Oliveros’s sound-pedagogical writings and scores and subsequent Deep Listening pedagogy are otherwise much related to Schaferian ‘sound education’, guiding the novice to listen more deeply and attentively to the world; where Neuhaus merely says ‘LISTEN’, Oliveros and Schafer strive to unpack exactly how.

Similarly, when she asserts that both novices and trained musicians come equally prepared to realise her Sonic Meditations or learn her Deep Listening practice, she insists on sound pedagogy’s autonomy from the domain of music. Where ‘readiness’ to perform music is ordinarily modulated by differences in cultural competence and experience, in the Sonic Meditations, as in much of Oliveros’s work, ‘No special skills are necessary. Any persons who are willing to commit themselves can participate’ (1974: 1). Many of Oliveros’s scores and pedagogical interventions begin with verbal protocols for organised listening (often framed as ‘listening meditations’) which, like 4'33", LISTEN, or Schaferian ear cleanings, initially minimise the sonic presence of self in order to better hear contingent environmental sound. Yet Oliveros diverges, and implicitly answers Kahn’s silence-entails-silencing thesis, by granting a more central role to personal, expressive and improvisatory sound-making, which emerges directly from such listening.

If aforementioned works by Cage, Neuhaus and Young are ‘audience participation’ pieces (the listeners are ‘making’ the music, inside their percept, by listening) in a rather conceptual sense, and are revealed to be tacitly ‘pedagogical’ only under deconstructive close reading, Oliveros’s music has long been both participatory and pedagogical in a more direct sense. Though her Sonic Meditations were initially made, performed, and taught in the context of academic courses and workshops for (potentially) novice pupils, she soon began presenting audience-participatory versions of these scores in public concerts (Oliveros Reference Oliveros2014).Footnote ⁶ Thus, Oliveros presages and intersects the aims of contemporary participatory art: to forge the audience as a self-conscious collective through mutual interaction; to respect and value what non-artists can do; to break down the conceptual binary and practical boundary between artists and non-artists.

Though, like Cage, she starts with an assumption of a universally shared listening faculty buried underneath enculturation, Oliveros makes a different conclusion about what it means to free the listening body from its enculturative chains, a conclusion based in a different conceptualisation of the very limits of listening itself. By emphasising the importance of listening to the sounds inside (in dreams, the inner mental voice, imagined sounds) as well as outside us, Oliveros’s dissenting notion of listening comes here to counter-intuitively overlap with and ultimately include intentional, creative, participatory sound-producing activities such as vocalising.Footnote ⁷ In a paradigmatic such work, one of her most famous and oft-performed text scores, ‘Teach Yourself to Fly’, the score instructs ‘any number of persons’ in a standard protocol for organised listening, beginning with ‘observing your own breathing’. Breathing, like the body sounds Cage famously heard in the anechoic chamber, is one of the signs/sounds of presence that is a precondition for listening and a guarantor that there is no such thing as silence. But rather than quieting listeners’ bodies to let in as much contingent environmental sound as possible (as one would likely do in a realisation of 4'33", LISTEN or most of Schafer’s exercises), Oliveros finds value in and builds her piece out of a different kind of nature: the inner, somatic ‘human nature’. The piece exhorts participants to attention (‘always be an observer’), but here observation does not preclude sound-making. Continuous with the unstoppable breath, and emerging gently from it, is the voice: ‘allow your vocal cords to vibrate in any mode that occurs naturally’ (Oliveros Reference Oliveros1974: 1). A realisation of ‘Teach Yourself to Fly’, thus begins as, but ultimately exceeds, an instance of contemplative individual perception. Oliveros finds a participatory chorus of singers (the ur-sound of participatory art, the ur-participation in music) at the heart of the Cagean project.