Ways & Sounds: Book Introduction
Most of what transforms sounds into “music” are not the sounds by themselves, but the weave of human activities directed toward those sounds. These include ways of listening, ways of imagining, ways of generating sounds, ways of coordinating people, and ways of conveying information within that process.
When people, especially musicians, talk about “musical structure” they usually mean how the sounds are organized, but there are other structures in play, even more fundamental, that affect our understanding and interpretations of what we hear. These structures are less often spoken of, and more often taken for granted, if thought about at all. What kinds of structures are these? And what are their roles in the “putting together” — in the composing — of a musical event?
The Stuff, opens a reexamination of some of the most commonplace language and assumptions regarding music. How credibly can musical sound be depersonalized, anonymized, disembodied, whether that be through John Cage’s more erudite notion of “sounds in themselves” or through the aural carpeting marketplace designation of “music” as an inert consumer object? If we instead recognize person as real and inseparable from musical sound, what would we hear?
Part Two, Structures, explores a language regarding composition based in interaction, in the structures of possible social relations among musical participants, and in how musical information, how musical thought, may be communicated while a music is emerging into sound. These together help constitute an ecology of composing. The act of composition, the choosing among sounds in the assembling of a sonic image, can be variously situated, each circumstance affording divergent opportunities and circumscriptions. These conditions yield very different sonic events, and each may require distinct recalibrations of recognition, listening and interpretation.
interactive matrix. Neologisms such as dialogical and monological composing, metacomposition and personics were invented to invoke a web of understanding potentially more true to what actually happens in music than do current status quo assumptions about musical structures.
Other Thoughts, extends from the previous sections to muse over that still recently arrived elephant in the room known as recording, its multiple transformations of our experiences and conceptions of music, as well as a few of the implications of that frequent extrasonic musical actor, rhythm.