Sound as object, sounding objects

As is well known, numerous composers in the twentieth century turned their attention to sound and the objects of its production (most obviously, musical instruments) through exploring sound in its specific and ambiguous objecthood. Some twentieth-century music has questioned established structures of meaning through asserting the ‘primacy of its material as sound before its organization as musical grammar’.Footnote ¹³ Most radically, a Cagean aesthetic famously orientates the listener towards an unpredictable sonic field. A kind of Barthesian death of the author is enacted where the composer is withdrawn from the act of composition – turning the listener completely to (the) sound as their object of attention.Footnote ¹⁴ Or at least, this is the ideal. There is a grand irony in the expectation of emphasizing Cage’s name when celebrating an aesthetic that dissolves compositional subjecthood.Footnote ¹⁵ Where Barthes’s modern poet focuses the reader on ‘language itself’ – not on what is expressed by the author through this language – the composer can choose to draw the listener’s attention to sound itself.

‘Sound itself ’ – as an object of academic and compositional intrigue – has in some senses come to inhabit the place once occupied by ‘the music itself’, a formerly sanctified notion connoting immediacy, later thoroughly scrutinized and made profane by the once new musicology. Indeed, speaking of sound studies, Steven Connor has cautioned against asserting the apparent immediacy of sound, which he suggests is often presumed by this approach and is most acute in a condition of acousmania that ‘asserts the possibility of identifying or experiencing sound in a raw or pure condition’ and that ‘affirms some particular value in such a condition’.Footnote ¹⁶ Connor argues that cohering the diverse practices of sound studies is a generative disciplinary fantasy – one that can be problematic in presuming the dynamic aliveness of sound and sonic culture, as opposed to the static, dead representationalism of visual culture. Sound is always secondary, he argues; when writing histories of sound, for example, one in fact writes histories of the production of sound. Although unnamed in Connor’s discussion, this calls forth the notion of mediation – an idea I develop below – in so far as sonic materiality’s apparent immediacy becomes recognized as taking place within a web of relations. I argue similarly that in order to understand apparently immediate musical encounters with specific and ambiguous objects one must engage with questions of mediation. My perspective is in this respect in keeping with, for example, Thomas W. Patteson’s recent study of electronic musical instruments and experimentation, in which Patteson states that, ‘The history of instruments, when properly told, concerns not just the objects themselves but also what they promise, portend, and make possible.’Footnote ¹⁷

I outline broadly two apparent limits manifested in encountering musical objects in the twentieth century: under the first extreme, by no means limited to but most immediately recognized in the work of a number of early and mid-century musical experimentalists, objects and materials are co-opted, mastered or determined as the means through which a subject reaches aesthetic ends. I make brief use of the thinking of Ferruccio Busoni, Luigi Russolo and Edgard Varèse by way of illustration. Under the second, opposing option – which is often associated with Cage and his generation – the material object is taken or explored on its own terms. Under the first scheme, the object is dominated by the subject in accordance with the latter’s needs; the second option sees the object recognized and enjoyed in its otherness. The first makes use of the object, speaking through it, in such a way that through it emerges something more than the object itself; the second is non-subject-orientated, apparently – if only ideally – withdrawing the ego of the composer, performer and/or listener in such a way that the object might be given space to speak a language of its own being, in a manner that is fascinating for the very fact that its meaning cannot be fully comprehended – or is absent entirely – and cannot be traced back to humanly intended action.Footnote ¹⁸

On closer inspection, however, these apparently oppositional attitudes conceal points of connection and contradiction negotiated in spaces of musical practice, where paradoxes arise immediately. For instance, with the first approach, autonomous subjects – who make their material do their bidding – seek to dominate and go beyond worldly physicality, but this is achieved only through investing heavily in a plethora of material objects and practices: through constantly looking through a relation to the outside, in a manner that, like the second approach, orientates us away from the subject. Indeed, the firm divide between inside and outside on which this construction is founded is itself brought into question where (as noted already) music and sound permeate boundaries of the listening subject, transversing and bringing into question the line between self and other.

The mastery of material that is pursued in encounters with the object – and the dialectical tensions inherent in these relations – can be put in a longer history of the concept of mastery. The Freudo-Marxist theories of the Frankfurt School are useful here, in so far as one might, through these, evoke mastery as a domination and control of material (evoking Marx and Hegel before him) and mastery in the psychoanalytic sense (conjuring Freud), as a control of aspects of one’s own relation to the world that must become transmuted or remain repressed. As argued in both Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music and Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, freedom and control are dialectically intertwined – a point Lydia Goehr explores in her discussion of the experiment and the experimental. The experiment, she suggests, implies forward planning and control, whereas the experimental correlates with open-endedness. Drawing on Adorno’s dialectical thinking, Goehr problematizes this distinction.Footnote ¹⁹ This dialectic I further develop by drawing on aspects of post-Marxist and feminist thinking. I argue, additionally, that by taking seriously the psychoanalytic connotations of ‘mastery’, one might begin to acknowledge desires and anxieties made manifest in musical practices that affirm or dispel one’s control over oneself and one’s (material, physical, sonic) others.

Sonic exploration as conquest

There is much at stake in the way in which one celebrates one’s control of or free openness to the specific and ambiguous objects of sound and music. Under a classic Cartesian schema, the material world is presumed to be a passive resource that then comes to be acted upon – and mastered – by the will of an active subject. The composer labours with sonic resources in such a way that something aesthetic is made. Similarly, the instrument is a tool of performance work: ‘In playing the clarinet the performer holds his breath in his own two hands where he can work on it and shape it out in the open, in full view of anyone who cares to watch.’Footnote ²⁰ Here air itself becomes a material to be sculpted.Footnote ²¹ The performer’s body itself must be a physicality mastered in order that something is brought into being – through which the immaterial musical work takes material form. Stravinsky’s view of the ideal performer as ‘transmitter’ of a ‘pure music’ is a paradigmatic example of this attitude.Footnote ²²

For some, the performer and their bodily matter presented a problem: an inherent resistance to the clean translation of the content of the abstract work into material form. Some imagined that the limitations of the performer as medium could be overcome technologically; Busoni, for one, lamented that composers could never avoid in human performers ‘the tremulous ardor of the cello, the hesitant entry of the horn, the timid shortness of breath of the oboe, the showy loquaciousness of the clarinet’.Footnote ²³ Varèse (in 1936) was sure that, ‘The time will come when the composer, after he has graphically realized his score, will see this score automatically put on a machine which will faithfully transmit the musical content to the listener.’Footnote ²⁴ Further, for some, music was itself a materialization determined compositionally. Varèse quoted approvingly a definition of music from the philosopher and mathematician Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński (1776–1853): ‘the corporealization of the intelligence that is in sound’.Footnote ²⁵ In this earlier twentieth-century modernism one observes the object’s imagined obedience to the compositional subject.

The situation is, however, more complex than the composer’s total domination of the sound(ing) object. Note that while both Busoni and Varèse cement the place of a compositional subject over their material, they also both evoke a spectre of agency in their objects of reference (instruments and sound). Busoni cites the instruments themselves as metonyms for their players (cello, horn, oboe and clarinet; not the cellist, horn player, oboist and clarinettist), as if the instruments themselves are tremulous, timid or hesitant.Footnote ²⁶ Varèse calls attention (via Hoene-Wroński) to ‘intelligence that is in sound’, not simply the intelligence brought to bear upon sound after the fact.Footnote ²⁷ Yet despite this, under this schema, material concerns – foremost the performer’s body and their instrument – are overwhelmingly conceived of as problems to be engaged, ‘worked-through’ and ultimately overcome in the service of aesthetic ends. Indeed, one could push this point even further, by interpreting Busoni’s and Varèse’s ultimate assertion of dominance over their materials as stemming from an anxiety about the possible existence of the non-human agencies and intelligences they mention only in passing. The assertion of dominance suggests a latent awareness of the insistent presence of material itself as a somewhat active, powerful force – something repressed, threatening return – which might as such risk conferring impotence on the part of the compositional subject.Footnote ²⁸ (The psychoanalytic implications of activity and passivity are more fully developed below.) This possibility is countered by overwhelmingly casting (sound) material instrumentally – both literally in often deriving from a musical instrument and also in the sense of an end-directed instrumental reason that asserts creative freedom through practices of mastery over one’s materials, which are sonic and bodily in nature.

New instruments offered possibilities of exploring new practices of musical material. As Patteson notes, Busoni, in his widely read Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music (1907), ‘was the patron saint of the movement for new instruments’, which would take creation beyond traditional instruments’ limitations.Footnote ²⁹ Busoni wrote: ‘The development of music is impeded by our instruments.’ Their possibilities ‘are constrained, and their hundred chains shackle the would-be creator as well’.Footnote ³⁰ This issue of control was made more explicit when Busoni asserted:

Traditional instruments are here taken as a material resource exploited and ultimately exhausted. Indeed, Busoni’s comments evidently articulate his view through a hegemonic masculinity: an abundant freedom and virginal purity is offered by the untainted and limitless new, a feminized sonic material at the service of a technical – even machinic – abstraction.Footnote ³² A dialectic of enlightenment manifests in historical and aesthetic progression achieved technically and technologically.

In his The Art of Noises Russolo echoed Busoni’s demand to develop new instruments in the service of musical freedom. He argued that one must ‘conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds’ to go beyond the limited timbres of traditional instruments and ensembles.Footnote ³³ In ‘conquering’ these noise-sounds the composer does not so much invent new sounds as become an explorer of new territories. They explore in the colonial rather than Cagean sense of the word – across territories that are to be captured and plundered for artistic possibilities that derive urgently from the technological and sonic conditions of modern life. To this end, Russolo suggested we ‘cross a large modern capital with our ears more sensitive than our eyes’.Footnote ³⁴ While this perhaps seems akin to a Cagean openness to the sound of the street, there is a crucial difference: Russolo insisted on the centrality of the composer in transforming sonic resources into an artistic product. The art of noises, he wrote in his manifesto, ‘will achieve its greatest emotional power in acoustical enjoyment itself, which the inspiration of the artist will know how to draw from the combining of noises’.Footnote ³⁵ With the historical development of machines (and thus noise), ‘We will be able to distinguish ten, twenty, or thirty thousand different noises, not simply by imitation but by combining according to our fancy’.Footnote ³⁶

The freedom afforded by new sonic resources came in many forms. As Varèse put it in 1939, machine instruments would provide harmonic liberation ‘from the arbitrary, paralyzing tempered system’.Footnote ³⁷ Like Busoni, Varèse argued that machines could perform beyond the limitations set by human performers and would provide new materials for the composer. In this latter aspect, and reflecting Varèse’s view that sound is ‘the raw material of music’,Footnote ³⁸ new possibilities of sonic production were envisioned as akin to developments in industrial machinery that allowed the extraction of natural resources from previously inaccessible depths and territories.Footnote ³⁹ For Varèse, these machines permitted new explorations of harmonic spectra, ‘new dynamics far beyond the present human-powered orchestra’, and accurate renditions of complex rhythms and contrapuntal lines in a manner that is ‘humanly impossible to attain’.Footnote ⁴⁰ The machine-performer, it was imagined, could be fully mastered in such a way that every aspect of performance and sound was subject to the will of the composer – and not subject to the limits of the human performer’s body.

The manner of sonic and therefore compositional production opened new possibilities for musical freedom. Three years before his death, Varèse suggested that, ‘As far back as the twenties, I decided to call my music “organized sound” and myself, not a musician, but “a worker in rhythms, frequencies, and intensities”.’Footnote ⁴¹ Music derives here from a worker who organizes their raw material. This movement from natural resource to aesthetic outcome requires suitable tools: the composer dreamt of ‘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’.Footnote ⁴² Here, as instrumental, the instrument again permits a sculpting of something from the raw material of sound in a gesture that brings outwardly into materialization something that was previously within the artist’s inner being. While Varèse’s music bore an influence of machine thinking, as Erik Levi points out, the composer stated (in 1917) some objections to the Futurist thinking that this influence implied: ‘Why, Italian Futurists, have you slavishly reproduced only what is commonplace and boring in the bustle of our daily lives?’Footnote ⁴³ Here Varèse expressed a view developed by a number of thinkers at this time, that the future of musical machines lay in their possibilities for sound production over sound reproduction: musical machines should not be secondary in duplicating what exists already, but be generative in the creation of something original.Footnote ⁴⁴ By implication, in Varèse’s eyes, Russolo failed in delivering on his earlier demand, ‘The Art of Noises should not limit itself to an imitative reproduction.’Footnote ⁴⁵ Accordingly, for Varèse, responsibility fell on the composer to ensure that something be crafted productively by the possibilities that new technologies afforded.

In a 1959 lecture Varèse went on to state, ‘Our new liberating medium – the electronic – is not meant to replace the old musical instruments, which composers, including myself, will continue to use. Electronics is an additive, not a destructive factor in the art and science of music.’Footnote ⁴⁶ This can be seen as a qualification of his earlier statements in which he denied explicitly any implication that he wished to prohibit the use of ‘traditional’ instruments and their human players in favour of technologies fully obedient to the composer. But this comment can be read as more than a qualification; there is some truth in Varèse’s suggestion that his understanding of electronic instruments builds on an earlier tradition of instrumentality. Varèse’s characterization of the new inherits a tradition in which the instrumental object and the performer’s body are taken as something directed and actively mastered.Footnote ⁴⁷ The ‘new liberating medium’ of the electronic continued to rely on mastery in the service of artistic freedom. What is different, however, is that the mastery of the human performer is fully concealed, whereas the machine is imagined directly to render the composer’s will; no longer does the composer need to direct and determine the gestures of an instrumentalist who has come to master their instrumental object (and is recognized as such by the listener). Instead, in performance, the composer appears, paradoxically, both elevated – in so far as their musical mastery is, it seems, transcendently untethered from material reality – and absent – in that this is conditional on a dissolution of their own materiality and presence as a performer who has determined what and how musical sounds are produced.Footnote ⁴⁸ This notion of the absent subject returns in a very different context below.

Sonic exploration as defence

In contrast with Busoni’s, Russolo’s and Varèse’s encounters with their objects are those approaches that de-emphasize the composer’s (and sometimes performers’) control over their materials. Cage’s generation and those that followed were closely associated with this orientation. In her Experimental Music since 1970, Jennie Gottschalk suggests that experimentation with ‘non-subjectivity’ is one characteristic, among others, that helps to define experimental music.Footnote ⁴⁹ This perceived turn away from the subject is attested by Cage’s influential reflections on silence: silence, for him, famously does not exist as such – something that one realizes when one attends to the sonic environment beyond oneself. This led to what Iain Campbell describes as ‘a conception of sound wherein it is not defined simply by its analytical characteristics, but also by how it necessarily exceeds intentionality, of both composer and of listener’; sound and silence are themselves suggestive of activity beyond the determination of these by subjectivities.Footnote ⁵⁰ As Charles Eppley points out, Richard Kostelanetz, ‘like many others, admired Cage’s processes for “[getting] one’s mind and one’s desires” out of the way of one’s art in order to let life “act of its own accord”’.Footnote ⁵¹

This Cagean approach suggests a notion of freedom, inherent in both materials themselves and in our relationships with them, whereby we open ourselves to an awareness of what is beyond us. As suggested above, freedom and constraint should not be viewed exclusively, however, but as in a problematic dialectic. This is true also of Cagean freedom. As Goehr puts it, Cage aims to ‘relinquish all control or, more carefully, all traditional control over a performance event that continued nevertheless to occur in the work’s name’.Footnote ⁵² Ryan Dohoney has suggested similarly that Cage attempted a difficult balance, wanting to maintain (some) ‘authorial control over even the unknown and unforeseen’.Footnote ⁵³

David W. Bernstein characterizes Cage’s view of composition as ‘an activity integrating opposites: the rational and the irrational’, a juxtaposition of ‘the composer’s ideas of order on the one hand, his or her spontaneous actions and inspiration on the other’.Footnote ⁵⁴ For example, in the collection of texts comprising ‘Happy New Ears!’ Cage suggested that in music that embraces indeterminacy, ‘The performers are no longer his [that is, the composer’s] servants but are freemen.’Footnote ⁵⁵ This is more problematic than the emancipatory rhetoric appears at first sight. To continue Cage’s analogy: while the freemen may escape the authority of the composer they are nonetheless subject to conditions that constitute the terms of this new-found freedom.Footnote ⁵⁶ As Adorno might point out, their subjectivity is mediated by objective social and historical conditions; while a comparison between Cage’s approach and ‘determinate’ scores underlines performers’ freedom from the composer’s will, this is to say nothing of the institutional frameworks that, first, permit our recognition of the performer as a musician and, secondly, shape their ‘free’ decisions to be familiar with and play Cage’s music in the first place.

Dohoney and Benjamin Piekut are both correct to note that Cagean freedom is conditional on an internalization of a particular set of values and practices. Dohoney notes how, for instance, Cage’s rejection of Julius Eastman’s realization of his Song Books ‘revealed the limits of Cagean acceptance and the degree to which Cagean freedom was contingent on performers having internalized Cage’s own tastes and preferences’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Piekut has argued elsewhere that Cage’s various assistants in the early 1960s ‘possessed a kind of deep knowledge’ of ‘Cagean’ practice, owing to embeddedness within a ‘particular sociomusical network’. Indeterminate sounding was, as such, not the result of a pure open-endedness, but was effected through a network of individuals who knew what indeterminacy was meant to sound like through having internalized this aesthetic.Footnote ⁵⁸

Furthermore, even more fundamentally, Michel Foucault’s work underlines this mediation in terms of ‘discipline’: like the democratic liberal subjectFootnote ⁵⁹ (when compared with the subject under the absolute monarch), Cage’s freemen are no longer under complete authority of another, yet are still subject to disciplinary logics.Footnote ⁶⁰ Indeed, in this new situation, they might even come to observe themselves closely – a practice of self-surveillance in the name of self-mastery – in order to maintain these logics, rather than being subject to disciplinary forces discernibly coming from ‘outside’. Cage himself made this clear when speaking about his indeterminate works, in which he could explore his interest in ‘things going on, and changing, not in their being fixed [as certain sounding results]’.Footnote ⁶¹ As he put it: ‘When I say “Make disciplined action”, I’m not saying, “Do whatever you like”, and yet that’s precisely what some people now think I’m saying.’Footnote ⁶² Furthermore, after being given the opportunity to speak after what Cage judged as a poor performance of his Song Books, he pointed out ‘not uncertainly that the freedoms I’ve given have not been given to permit just anything that one wants to do, but have been invitations for people to free themselves from their likes and dislikes, and to discipline themselves’.Footnote ⁶³ Christopher Shultis summarizes: Cage encouraged ‘the control of intention’.Footnote ⁶⁴ This focused mastery of the self – in whatever is done – is perhaps manifested most clearly in 0' 00" (1962), the score of which reads: ‘In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action.’Footnote ⁶⁵ While this arguably draws critical attention to details of everyday actions otherwise unobserved, the manner through which attention is drawn to incidental and unordered sounds of life is anything but accidental.Footnote ⁶⁶ As such, these new practices of compositional, performance and listening freedom existed in uneasy yet constitutive relations with new disciplinary logics.

In accordance with Cage’s view of the performer as ‘freeman’, and sounds as only themselves, the conductors’ disciplinary role changed, too: ‘The conductor of an orchestra is no longer a policeman. [They are simply] an indicator of time – not in beats – like a chronometer.’Footnote ⁶⁷ Notably, this apparent overthrow of the old regime – under which ‘the composer was the genius, the conductor ordered everyone around, and the performers were slaves’Footnote ⁶⁸ – is contingent on an internalized discipline on the part of the conductor, whereby their body becomes a docile material that emulates a machine-like function. In fact, as a consequence, the conductor ‘is not necessary if all the players have some other way of knowing what time it is and how that time is changing’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Ironically, in becoming machinic through emulating non-human timekeeping, the conductor becomes redundant in the face of performers’ uses of literally mechanical devices (clocks, stopwatches). As with Horkheimer and Adorno’s historical dialectic, the human comes to dominate and negate their own humanity through emulating the rationalizing technologies that characterize their own, modern age. Furthermore, this attitude towards performed temporality – Foucault might refer to this as a ‘control of activity’Footnote ⁷⁰ – links directly with the question of compositional control, as much as performers’ control of their own bodies. As Piekut points out, in much of Cage’s music, whereas (pitch) content was often relatively open-ended, Cage expected performers to follow specified timings exactly.Footnote ⁷¹

Looking beyond Cage’s declarations of freedom (which are generative of new ways of thinking, in as much as they are paradoxical), one can observe an uneasy negotiation of freedom and constraint in various aspects of Cage’s attitudes to composing, performing and listening throughout his career. For example, in his 1937 lecture ‘The Future of Music: Credo’, Cage outlines his vision of an ‘all-sound’ music ‘where any division between musical sound and non-musical sound is dissolved and the composer deals with the entire field of sound’.Footnote ⁷² This holistic approach might at first sight appear to pre-echo his suggestion, made 20 years later, that one should aim to discover the ‘means to let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for man-made theories or expressions of human sentiments’.Footnote ⁷³ Patteson argues, in contrast with this interpretation, that Cage’s expressed interest in sound might be better understood in its contemporary context, in which a number of composers explored what new electronic devices (some of which have been discussed briefly above) made possible.Footnote ⁷⁴ With that context in view, one might read his ‘all-sound’ approach as guaranteeing mastery over his sonic resources; Cage argued that electrical instruments would ‘provide complete control of the overtone structure of tones […] and make these tones available in any frequency, amplitude, and duration’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Furthermore, as Bernstein notes, it was only musical works from slightly later, in the 1940s (a ‘period of emotional distress resulting from the end of his marriage, a reorientation of his sexuality, and a realization that he was unable to communicate his emotional experiences through music’), that confirmed a shift in Cage’s thinking, and a questioning of ‘the notion that music is a means by which a composer expresses his or her emotions’.Footnote ⁷⁶

Even when compositional control was somewhat limited (for example, where indeterminacy was explored), both spectres of control and something beyond the ‘sound itself ’ were not silenced entirely. Campbell cites Cage’s statement that ‘writing is one thing, performing another, and listening a third; and that there is no reason for these three operations to be linked’,Footnote ⁷⁷ and goes on to demonstrate that this did not, however, stop Cage from disapproving of Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik’s rendition of his 26' 1.1499" for string player (1955), in which ‘Paik, stripped to the waist, took the place of the cello, his back being bowed by Moorman’.Footnote ⁷⁸ As Piekut notes wryly of their decision to have a topless Paik temporarily become a human cello, ‘It is difficult to imagine how they could have interpreted Cage’s markings to include this action.’Footnote ⁷⁹ (In line with the comments above regarding temporality and control, it should be noted that Cage was also critical of Moorman’s lax attitude towards the prescribed time-structure of the piece.Footnote ⁸⁰) Dohoney has explored in detail a similar situation, in which Cage rejected Julius Eastman’s 1975 realization of 0' 00" (which was included in the Song Books as ‘Solo for Voice No. 8’), when Eastman interpreted the composer’s instructions as an opportunity to ‘give a lecture in which he outlined a “new system of love” that was given as a mock anatomy lesson’.Footnote ⁸¹ Regarding Moorman’s performance, Cage later spoke of the ‘striking thing’ that was ‘tak[ing] a piece of mine and playing it in a way that didn’t have to do with the piece itself ’ and of the ‘liberties taken […] in favor of actions rather than sound events in time’.Footnote ⁸² Evidently, these comments imply an interconnectedness between composition and performance (the link between ‘a piece of mine’ and ‘playing it’) and between performance and listening (the ‘actions’ of performance and their necessary relation to ‘sound events’) that was more openly denied.Footnote ⁸³ Cage pronounces a delinking of composition, performance and listening while paradoxically maintaining that the theatrical spectacle of performance was ‘meant to serve the higher project of sound production’.Footnote ⁸⁴

I would also like to add here that the comment cited by Campbell seems to be a rearticulation of another statement by Cage, uttered in response to the words of another.Footnote ⁸⁵ This appears after the end of his essay ‘The Future of Music: Credo’:

This qualification is important, as while Cage asserts a (relative if not absolute) separation of these practices there is also a contradictory implication: where in ballet one can take pleasure in the ‘ardor’ that dancing entails (not only in the choreographed gestures and actions ‘in themselves’), in musical performance one might see, hear and enjoy more than just the ‘sound itself ’ that results from the perceived efforts of the musicians. Cage’s anecdote symbolizes critical paradoxes in the roles for sound(ing) objects in post-Cagean aesthetics. Cage promotes a notion of listening to ‘sound itself ’ (as object) that detaches the sonic product from its emergence through process, the labour of its production in performance. Paradoxically, the ‘ardor’ of the musician is celebrated while, simultaneously, in focusing solely on the sonic object itself the performer’s efforts are erased from it. The apparent immediacy of the sonic object thus has an uneasy relationship with its own history.

Post-Cagean listening is often said to open the listener to their environment, to what is beyond them. This ‘field of sounds’,Footnote ⁸⁷ in contrast with intended and humanly directed sounds, does not say anything – and that is what made it so interesting for Cage. Sound is suggestive of its own activity; it is not merely a passive resource or raw material ( pace Varèse) to be transformed through the composer’s labour.Footnote ⁸⁸ As Cage put it in a 1991 interview:

The composer goes on to imply a kind of honesty to these sounds in which they are not in the service of (concealing) anything else, where they disclose only themselves:

Where one turns from directed sounds, attention shifts to a field of possibilities and to that which is otherwise ignored. In listening, for example, to the sounds of a New York street, one finds that the ‘things that happen in the cracks, in the transitions we barely notice as we go about our business, are elevated to a position of attention’ (a phrase that Gottschalk used to refer to experimental music more generally).Footnote ⁹¹ This might be taken as a surrendering of the self to a world beyond it, and as such, the very opposite of the mastery encountered above, in the views of Cage’s early twentieth-century precursors.Footnote ⁹² But what is interesting here is that in turning attention to something like traffic noise the listening subject takes on an active role – makes a choice – to enact a process that effaces the human agency behind sounding (the activities of composer, performance and ‘musical’ listener in the normative sense).

Here it is useful to bring forward the psychoanalytic dimensions implicit within some of the critical theory developed above. This is because these ask us to consider explicitly what claims of mastery (or lack of it) over objects do for subjects. Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud and many after them have suggested that one might often make active one’s relation to objects that are causes of our anxieties and disturbances, in order to master aspects of oneself and one’s environment. An object of unpleasantness can be mastered through recasting the object on one’s own terms, something often done symbolically. Sigmund Freud’s description of the infant’s fort–da game is a prototypical example: the infant puts themselves in a position of symbolic control by concealing and finding a toy, with the toy standing in for a mother whose absence and presence is otherwise beyond their control.Footnote ⁹³ Indeed, connections between musical sound and a psychoanalytic conception of mastery have been long explored by clinicians and theorists.Footnote ⁹⁴

Turning back to listening post-Cage, I would like to suggest that the subject, through acting towards apparent passivity to whatever might be heard, enacts a mastery of their relations to their sonic environment: a defence that forecloses the possibility of one’s being overwhelmed by noise. This is interesting, potentially, given Cage’s emphatic claims that he is distinctly not regarding sounds symbolically, but as only themselves. The blurry, ambiguous object that is sound becomes an object of attention, something to be regarded, and its once disturbing presence is turned into its opposite: it becomes a source of pleasure. Writing of Cage’s Atlas eclipticalis, a work that included high levels of volumes, feedback and distortion, Piekut suggests that with this piece ‘Cage wanted to help train our ears to the sounds of daily life in the jet age’; Cage himself stated, ‘If [our] ears don’t get stretched by me they’ll be stretched by something else later on, and it just might be more painful.’Footnote ⁹⁵ Piekut places Cage’s intention in the context of David Savran’s analysis of post-Second World War white masculinity, a masochistic presentation of the masculine ‘that proves manhood through displaying the ability to withstand pain’; of the listener, Piekut writes, ‘By becoming willing victims, by subjecting ourselves to the pain – or is it pleasure? – of sonic violence, we allow our ears to be stretched by Cage.’Footnote ⁹⁶ I would like to supplement Piekut’s reading beyond the masochism of noisiness-as-pain, by considering moments of quiet, active passivity.

The unavoidable noisiness of modern life to which Russolo drew our attention becomes transmuted through a technique that is aesthetic rather than explicitly technological. It evokes something close to what Pauline Oliveros called an ‘attentional strategy’, a modality of awareness with regard to one’s sonic environment.Footnote ⁹⁷ That said, even if labelled ‘aesthetic’, this strategy is in fact technological in so far as it institutes a ‘matrix of practical reason’ that permits specific practices of relations between ourselves and the world we inhabit; specifically, it constitutes what Foucault calls a technology of the self – something that ‘permit[s] 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 way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality’.Footnote ⁹⁸ In summary, sounds seem to demand our attention within the phenomenology of modernity; one can attempt to control them (as did Busoni, Russolo and Varèse), in which case one’s efforts at mastery are directed outwardly, or one can adopt an orientation vis-à-vis sound in which mastery is more implicit and a matter of an inward condition – in which one transforms one’s passive relation to noise so that one takes active enjoyment in it.Footnote ⁹⁹

Cage has, for instance, spoken of how he came eventually to enjoy even the drones heard in modern life, which were at first less interesting for him than something like traffic noise, which is by contrast ‘easy to recognize as beautiful’. By way of example, Cage cites the drone of a refrigerator, which if working correctly will be unavoidably present (silence here would imply a mechanical fault). In fact, the sound itself is ‘felt’ to have some kind of agency and manner of insistence: ‘I have a feeling that it’s as though the sound was finally reaching me rather than I was reaching it.’Footnote ¹⁰⁰ It is not incidental that Cage begins his essay ‘The Future of Music: Credo’ as follows: ‘Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.’Footnote ¹⁰¹ (Jacques Attali echoed this sentiment – ‘Noise is violence: it disturbs.’Footnote ¹⁰²) In this strategy one chooses to listen to, to enjoy, something which is beyond our ability to change. Faced with the unavoidability of sound, our only recourse is to transform the nature of our relationship with it. In a gesture that echoes a formation long recognized by psychoanalysis, one chooses to transform a source of pain into one of pleasure. A chronic condition of modern life translates into an acutely active strategy.Footnote ¹⁰³

It should be noted that mastery not only plays a role in facing ‘sound itself ’ as an ambiguous object, it also – returning us to sound’s dual nature – has a hand in our relation to particular sonic objects, to both specific sounds and the objects that produce them. There is an unpredictability inherent in worldly materials (sounds, sound-producing objects, objects more generally) and relationships with them. To approach these materials – to play (with) them in open-ended encounter that recalls the curiosity of childhood (more on this below) – is to become accustomed to them and to their possibilities and affordances.

In fact, even when control is pursued, this can lead instead to a recognition of objects’ particularity – a call to focus oneself on a more open-ended exploration of these differences and resistances. Cage’s own development of the prepared piano followed this trajectory, in so far as the frustration implicit in a failed attempt to dictate results exactly was transfigured into another source of fascination and pleasure, a renegotiation of feelings about problematic relationships with the materials of music-making (which in this account includes the performer themselves):

This renegotiation not only occurs with conventional instruments and instrumentalists such as pianos and pianists. In fact, the performance practices of Cage and his generation opened up possibilities for renegotiating our relations – through playful sounding – with a plethora of previously non-musical objects and resources.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ For instance, in Child of Tree (1975) and Branches (1976) Cage asks that cacti and other plants become amplified, sound-producing objects. Cage explained, ‘My reason for improvising on them is because the instruments are so unknown that as you explore the spines of the cactus, you’re not really dealing with your memory or your taste. You’re exploring.’Footnote ¹⁰⁶ A useful term here is ‘instrumentalizing’, a word Andy Keep uses to refer to a process whereby a non-musical object becomes regarded musically in performance. In this instance, the instrument is no longer a predetermined thing, and one undertakes ‘an act that explores an object for its inherent sonic properties’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Unlike playing an (unprepared) piano that one has learnt to interact with in embodied and expressive terms, when exploring an object with which one is unacquainted one becomes acutely aware as a performer and listener of how one’s interaction with the object produces certain – unforeseen – effects. One develops an awareness not only of an object – which is itself undeniably present – but also of one’s own body in relation to this other. This orientation – ‘What happens if I do this?’ – recalls a childlike exploration of one’s environment that assures us of our own place within it. And while it is suggestive of openness to one’s environment, there is also an undertone of ‘Look what I can do with this object!’ whereby the ‘player’ pursues an activeness that denies their status as just another object or material within this setting and confirms their position as relative master of their environment.

Music’s paradoxical objects

In this final section, I interweave some of the paradoxes and contradictions outlined above. In particular, I draw attention to how discourses vis-à-vis objects constitute specific practices of subjectivity and selfhood. Finally, I make explicit some of the dialectical relationships transformed – and sometimes obscured – in our regarding of both sounding objects and sounds as objects. Hence, the issue of mediation returns front and centre.

As outlined above, musical practices of composition, performance and listening that seek to foreground their sonic objects contrast with those early twentieth-century approaches in which sound is a ‘raw material’ to be shaped by the composer’s will. It is commonplace to suggest that attending to sound itself shifts attention from issues such as creative intention and authorship. As Gottschalk puts it, here the ‘listener’s focus is directed towards the behavior of sound itself under the given circumstances, rather than the decisions or expressivity of the composer’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Furthermore, Cage and works such as 4' 33" (1952) are closely associated with this kind of practice of listening, which moves our attention away from the composer as subject: ‘Cage does not instruct the performer or the audience on how to approach this event [4' 33" ]. In the absence of such direction, one’s own thoughts and perceptions become primary,’ continues Gottschalk.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

As Brian Kane argues persuasively, it must be remembered here that the listening subject is a subject of ‘auditory culture’, a subject shaped by presumptions about what sound is and what sound means.Footnote ¹¹⁰ To put this another way: the role of subjectivity is crucial in regarding its objects. As Rey Chow and James A. Steintrager state, ‘Objects as sonic phenomena are points of diffusion that in listening we attempt to gather. This work of gathering – an effort to unify and make cohere – implies that subjectivity is involved whenever we try to draw some boundary in the sonic domain.’Footnote ¹¹¹ Indeed, where one’s own ‘thoughts and perceptions become primary’, this might also promote self-reflexivity upon these perceptions as objects of thought themselves.

Yet, while one might reflect on one’s own status as listener, and thus one’s relation to the object, regarding sound itself also implies a separateness. Our total focus on the object can reduce our awareness of the subject to a point that obscures the subject’s act of regarding the object in the first place. Taken to its limit, this approach – which seemingly demands that we let go of our limited notion of self and open ourselves to the world – in fact only obscures the subject from view, abetting its insularity and, at worst, allowing the dominance of normative subject positions that can now go unchallenged. As Stacy Alaimo points out (writing critically of Ian Bogost’s object-orientated ontology), ‘Feminist, postcolonial, and environmental epistemologies have long critiqued modes of knowing that install a gap between the subject and the object of knowledge.’Footnote ¹¹²

Without situating our knowledge of objects (and in situations where one becomes completely engrossed in them, imagining them beyond the human), one is ironically in danger of reinstalling ‘a humanist and masculinist sense of a disembodied subject’, despite one’s declaration to be looking beyond the human.Footnote ¹¹³ Focusing on the object itself enables ideological preconceptions to slip in by the back door, as it were, as, for example, when Cage writes that,

The place of scientific advances here recalls another aspect of Horkheimer and Adorno’s dialectic of enlightenment, in which nature becomes known through technological mediation – and thus only by increasing our distance from it – and that therefore claims to imitation of nature itself should be regarded suspiciously. Adorno is emphatic on this question of mediation: what ‘appears not to be made is of course all the more made’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Furthermore, in Cage’s account, continuing a classic line of thought, nature is gendered feminine – implying a number of connotations about its essence and value (purity, physicality …).

It has been argued that this Cagean appreciation of a – separable – nature conceals its ideological and historically mediated dimension. Piekut, for instance, suggests that this idea of nature echoes a scientific perspective in which the listener, like the scientist, becomes a ‘modest witness’ to the events of a (distinctly non-human) nature. This witness does ‘nothing more than create situations in which the natural realm can speak for itself, thereby supposedly eliminating uncertainties and disputations of the social realm’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Here, the composer is again elevated yet apparently absent (as was observed earlier of Varèse). Turning to a nature, beyond the human, in the name of art, he does not appear to assert normative aesthetic (that is, ideological) values – yet these still undeniably bear force in our relation to the nature that is identified in sound. Furthermore, Marie Thompson identifies a raced element in the (apparent) absence of the subject in post-Cagean listening: a normative whiteness. ‘As with whiteness more generally, the presence of white aurality’, she summarizes, ‘is marked by its absence.’Footnote ¹¹⁷ In Piekut’s ‘witness’ and Thompson’s ‘whiteness’ coalesce fantasies of worlds and worldly objects divided from (now-obscured) subjectivities. In the face of this and related discourses about the sonic object, what would be productive, I suggest again, would be to ask what pronouncements about objects ‘themselves’ – sounds, ‘Nature in her manner of operation’ – paradoxically do for composing, performing and listening subjects.

Consider, for example, David Tudor’s statement in an interview in 1988, in which he celebrates a notion of sound that he shares with Cage, as being something that might be enjoyed when lacking intention:

These sounds without intention are held as exhibiting a freedom that gives pleasure to the listener. In fact, these free sounds stand in place of a freedom that is arguably unattainable by the listening subject themselves. Similarly, Cage said that in indeterminate music in which the parts are considered independently from one another, ‘Sound sources are at a multiplicity of points in space with respect to the audience so that each listener’s experience is his own.’ This freedom can be compared to ‘the mobiles of modern sculpture […], but the parts they have are not as free as those of a musical composition since they share a common suspension means and follow the law of gravity’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Not only do the parts escape authorial determination, but Cage’s evocation of the escape of a natural law – gravity – implies, too, that sound seems to elude a constraint that will always bind the human.

Despite the fact that in Tudor’s and Cage’s accounts sound itself seems to be celebrated for what the subject cannot do, this connection is often openly rejected on the basis that, ‘We’re talking about sound itself, not the listener.’ In his interview with Tudor, the interviewer, Teddy Hultberg, seems to be aware that this conception of sound might be suggestive of something beyond sound itself. Hultberg asks Tudor, ‘Do you think that this freeing of the sounds has some social implications?’ Notably, the composer responds by acknowledging this question but by also withdrawing from answering it, effectively evading the possibility of recognizing the conclusion that leads from it: Tudor says, ‘Yes, I hope so, but you’ll never hear me talk about it […] I’m not that kind of a composer.’Footnote ¹²⁰ Sound might, one could say, here approach a position of a proxy for the subject – or at least of our fantasies and ideals of freedom about it – but this connection is, ironically, silenced.Footnote ¹²¹

Imagining through playing with objects themselves, or attending to an open-ended exploration of them, is also observable in Keep’s concept of instrumentalizing. A link with the play of childhood is evident here, and references to the childlike quality of musical experimentation with objects are commonplace. Simple ‘everyday objects found around the house’ become heard as having compelling sonic potential. ‘With objects that are so easily attainable, [in experimental music] an aspect of play is brought out that is reminiscent of the way that small children explore their surroundings, not with intention or preoccupation, but with curiosity.’Footnote ¹²² What I am interested in here are the ways in which play becomes a managing of one’s self and the relations to one’s material environment, and thus (recalling psychoanalytic principles again) might constitute elemental forms of mastery.

Freud’s characterization of the infant’s fort–da game, a paradigmatic example of the passive mastered actively through play, is again a relevant point of reference here – and it is an idea that has been applied to twentieth-century music by myself and others elsewhere.Footnote ¹²³ Supplementing this framework, one can also find inspiration in Walter Benjamin’s fascination with the curiosity of childhood, and in how children’s curiosity offers a modality of encountering objects and the material world more generally – one that is arguably recalled and furthered in aspects of experimental musical practice. In his One-Way Street, a collection of thoughts, short essays and aphorisms from 1928, Benjamin provides a compelling description of children’s fascination with things, and processes that concern things. This is worth quoting at length:

Before critically considering the nostalgia inherent in Benjamin’s account, I would first like to note that Benjamin attests to the child’s fascination with making something with those things that are accidental to or leftover from the adult’s world of production. (It is for this focus on production, and for reflecting this interest in found objects, that here I draw on Benjamin’s account of children’s relationships with objects rather than Freud’s – even if the latter’s still hovers in the background.) At least the child seems to have a fascination with detritus, from the viewpoint of the adult. With the child not respecting the adult’s division of worldly objects as product or waste, useful or useless, central or peripheral, for the adult the child’s actions can constitute a defamiliarization that recasts objects in perception, placing them in positions that cut across these adult taxonomies.

Benjamin imagines childlike production – like experimentalist musical practices as discussed here – as open-ended, unlike the adult’s goal-directed action, which transforms resource into product. The world seemingly presents itself in its material particularity. In another parallel with the Cagean explorer, something other than the goals of instrumental actions is uncovered as a result of the child’s negotiation of their materials. Benjamin continues:

One could ask if the spaces of musical practice, in which materials and objects are explored – spaces of musical ‘playing’ – similarly constitute ‘a [childlike] material world, a small one within a large one’. Furthermore, in developing this connection between our encounter with objects in both experimental musical practices and childhood, one could ask if there is, as in Benjamin’s reading, a nostalgia inherent in the adult’s musical act, an attempt to redress the limitations of an adult conception of worldly objects as wholly disconnected from ourselves.Footnote ¹²⁶ Recall again that Cage implied an honesty and self-evidence in the presentation of ‘sound itself ’, qualities which promise the possibility of spanning the everyday, alienating distance that divides the subject from its object during twentieth-century modernity.Footnote ¹²⁷ ‘Hearing’, wrote R. Murray Schafer, ‘is a way of touching at a distance’;Footnote ¹²⁸ it is then no surprise that sound becomes regarded readily as transport across this expanse.

As in Cage’s cactus works, and in Horkheimer and Adorno’s dialectic, contact with natural objects and objects’ nature might be technologically mediated. Electronics have been used elsewhere to draw out the sonic characteristics of objects, as for example in Tudor’s Rainforest IV (1973). In this installation work, Tudor created an ‘electroacoustic environment’ in which performers and audience could move among objects in which sounds were projected and from which resonant frequencies were produced. These resonances were also captured by microphones and relayed through the speaker system: ‘It becomes like a reflection and it makes, I thought, quite a harmonious and beautiful atmosphere, because wherever you move in the room, you have reminiscences of something that you have heard at some other point in the space.’Footnote ¹²⁹ In the summer 1973 workshop on this work, reported Jaap Blonk, these objects included ‘old bedsprings, barrels, cookie sheets, wood planks. Someone blew out two transducers by trying to resonate the bathroom plumbing under the toilet.’Footnote ¹³⁰ Tom Johnson’s account underlines the exploratory quality of an event that promoted curiosity on the part of the performer: ‘I suppose they were having an enjoyable time feeding various sounds into various objects, testing how the objects responded to different things, trying to find resonant frequencies, and listening to subtle variations.’Footnote ¹³¹ In this installation, one is free to explore the space, to consider how one’s physical relation to these objects changes our experience of them – objects that are separate from us yet ambiguously linked in shaping a field of sound that also bridges this separation.

In discussions of the technological mediation of experience by objects cohere questions about the dialectics of intimacy and dominance, the interrelation of the object’s apparent self-sufficiency and its mediation. Varèse, for example, suggested in 1962 that the sounds offered by electronic technologies might quell the inner ear of the composer, which would lead to a complete effacing of compositional subjectivity: ‘We should […] remember that no machine is a wizard, as we are beginning to think, and we must not expect our electronic devices to compose for us.’Footnote ¹³² In this rhetorical performance Varèse is, of course, reasserting the power of the subject over their materials at a time in which both compositional practices and performers’ relationship with their objects were changing. Furthermore, Patteson reminds us that the magic apparent in instruments and music’s materiality derives from a dialectic of human and non-human: ‘Tracing the contours of what has been called the instrumentality of music is not a question of exposing aesthetic experience as the subjective by-product of an underlying material reality, but rather of grasping how the spell of art is technologically cast.’Footnote ¹³³

Note the reappearing trope of ‘magic’ within these discourses. Music – with its long-standing associations of transcendence and immaterially – is well suited to suggest a magical inner life; its apparent immediacy seems to foreclose reflection on the processes of mediation that give it this character. Marx’s classic analysis of commodity fetishism is instructive on this point: the commodity (taken as a ‘form’ rather than a particular commodity) is the product of human labour – it derives from relations between people and people, and between people and things. Yet, in a capitalistic system of exchange and consumption, it comes to be regarded only as an object held in relation to other objects: as just another product among products in a marketplace. Marx famously wrote of the ‘mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities’.Footnote ¹³⁴ In the practice of theory, this is to caution against accepting the seemingly immediate and interior quality of the powers of the object in itself. Indeed, rather than taking the magical object itself as sufficient, one might regard objects in light of their processes of production, and what has been referred to elsewhere as their ‘social life’ – taken here to mean the web of relations through which the object itself is nonetheless mediated, especially in its life after production. Considering objects’ heterogeneous gestation, birth and afterlife takes us beyond what Marx called a reifying ‘necromancy’. These relations are silenced when the object becomes everything. We could say, after Marx, that one risks fetishism when extolling the magic of ‘sound itself’Footnote ¹³⁵ – that situation where a focus on the sonic object alone muffles what Marie Thompson calls ‘sound’s relationship to the social world’.Footnote ¹³⁶

This can be more fully considered with respect to silence; an attendance to relations goes also for those silences that open (or close) different possibilities. Douglas Kahn’s reading of 4' 33" is pertinent here. According to Cage’s own testimony, 4' 33" was initially conceived after a desire to ‘compose a piece of uninterrupted silence and sell it to Muzak Co. It will be 3 or 4½ long – those being the standard lengths of “canned” music – and its title will be Silent Prayer.’Footnote ¹³⁷ Kahn argues that Cage’s move from the silence of Silent Prayer to that of 4' 33" was a ‘retreat from the social’. Whereas in the case of the former, the social relevance of silence – the act of silencing muzak – was clear, the latter’s turn to environmental noise obscures the social dimension.Footnote ¹³⁸ Just as silence acts as the inverse of sound, I would like to finish by turning here from sounding and situations produced or acknowledged by composers to, conversely, an instance where the institutional and social contexts of cultural production come to change the significance of sound and silence. This mediation is made clearer if one considers the genesis and afterlife of a sounding, physical object – in this case one produced by Marcel Duchamp, an artist whose work, like Cage’s, has commonly been said to disrupt established practices of artistic creation and authorship.

On Easter Day 1916, Duchamp screwed together two brass plates with a ball of twine between them. He asked his friend and patron Walter Arensberg to place an object within the ball, between the plates, and never let him know what that object was. Duchamp called the result À bruit secret (With Hidden Noise), a piece which, if shaken, would rattle owing to the unknown object held within it. It is commonplace to point out that in employing found objects, and in concealing the ‘content’ of the work (even from the artist himself ), Duchamp questioned the authority of the artist-creator in determining artworks. While I do not dispute this, what is not commented upon but is also telling is what the object has become – how it has historically lived up to its name in a way unknowable to either Duchamp or Arensberg. Today, on viewing this piece in a gallery, one can perhaps imagine shaking the object but cannot literally do so. As a historically significant object, as a museum piece, it cannot be picked up and its rattling cannot be heard by the gallery-goer. Within the sanctity of this curatorial context the ‘noise’ of the work’s title is doubly ‘hidden’: one cannot know what causes the noise and, now, one cannot even hear it. This is something which is left to our imagination, a dimension underlined in this piece’s (in)capacity for sounding. This silence confirms the (non-)sounding work’s reified and rarefied presence. The object, as a fetish, appears only among other objects displayed. The curatorial, institutional context demands a production of silence that constitutes a space of closure rather than Cagean openness. And this complex mediation of both object and silence would surely be obscured if one were to regard only the ‘magic’ object itself.

When listening to and reflecting on encounters with ambiguous and specific objects, one is contesting and constituting a set of relationships that exceeds the object of immediate reference. This goes for composers’, performers’ and listeners’ conceptions of sound in its immediacy, and for the more apparently mediated afterlives of the objects in question (as in the case of À bruit secret). A dialectic of mastery and freedom is at work in different approaches to one’s object, be this when one seeks to dominate one’s material (as with Busoni, Russolo and Varèse) or when one de-emphasizes the artist’s ego in such a way that what remains is sound or objects explored on their ‘own’ terms (as with Cage and Tudor). The former strategy conquers outwardly, asserting dominance over and thus defending against the ‘activity of sound’ that, conversely, Cage so admired. By contrast, the latter technique, turning inwardly, enacts self-disciplinary actions that manifest in apparent passivity on the part of the subject. In this view, post-Cagean claims to let sounds speak for themselves are theoretical impossibilities that are, paradoxically and at the same time, actually generative of new forms of musical practice and material potentialities. To quieten oneself is not inaction, but disciplined action. (Indeed, this echoes Cage’s own words, quoted above.) To put this in stark, critical terms: pronouncements about retracting oneself from sonic matters do not negate but rather neglect a subject who undertakes their active passivity mediated by particular historical, technological and cultural contexts. And, in sum, what is at stake in this dialectic of outward dominance and inward discipline is the status of subjectivity under the unfolding conditions of twentieth-century modernity.

One might wish to reflect briefly on what these encounters meant by the end of the twentieth century, as well as what they might mean for us in the early twenty-first. Of the role of electronic technologies, Patteson has suggested that by the end of the twentieth century a state was reached in which our attempted mastery of our musical object led to a state of technovertigo, in which a ‘deepening engagement with technology in twentieth-century music, born of a desire for control […] brought about a centrifugal expansion of the art (and indeed of all art), unleashing an almost incomprehensible multiplicity of sounds, techniques, politics, and practices’.Footnote ¹³⁹ Yet on this point one might also say something of post-Cagean aesthetics that are not explicitly ‘about’ technologies of sounding, but regard sound itself. As Schafer argues, the modern world involves ‘an indiscriminate and imperialistic spread of more and larger sounds into every corner of man’s life. Noise pollution is now a world problem.’Footnote ¹⁴⁰ One could say that by the end of the twentieth century – and by extension by the early twenty-first – the unavoidability of noise has made only more urgent a post-Cagean strategic defence-to-noise. Furthermore, drawing a connection between this listening practice and its historical conditions, one could add that it is notable that the sound of traffic was for Cage a constant source of inspiration and reference. This chosen object is a metonym of the urban, and of the forward march of modernity as such. As Schafer also points out, ‘As the factories and the airports of the world multiply, local culture is pulverized into the background.’Footnote ¹⁴¹ By way of defence, one might listen to the sounds of modern culture musically, turning anxieties over losses inherent in the modern into the pleasure of something gained. When one speaks of the object, be this sound or its means of production, one speaks both of oneself and of one’s own relation to a socially and historically entangled world of objects and materials.