Introduction

To open with Trakl.

("Verhallend eines Gongs braungoldne Klänge."

("Echoes away the gong's browngolden blasts."1 So begins Trakl's "Traum des Bösen" ("Dream of Evil"), and so we begin here-not with a philosophical point of departure, but with poetry. Appropriate for the topic of music, a topic much on which much has been written, perhaps because music will always lie outside of our ken. As Heidegger noted once after listening to some music: "We cannot [do] that with philosophy" (Picht 1977, 205).2 Maybe it is only with the opening of a Traum des Bösen that we can open on to music; given Heidegger's foreclosure of philosophical approach, we are left with poetry.

Yet what I seek is an understanding of how the aural dimension might serve as a point of departure for discourses surrounding the self and its place in the world. Obviously, that is a lifework, so I am starting, at this moment, with the quest for a theory, however tentative, equivocal, dubious: what might music be?

1

Music has, through history, scored the apices and nadirs of humanity. From the depths of depravity and evil, the apocryphal Nero fiddling while Rome burned and the orchestras in Auschwitz, to the heights of ecstatic joy, the archetypical 'chorus of angels,' humanity has ascribed to music an almost inherently mystical power. It is, variously, ritualistic, sacrificial, healing, bestial, taming, and arousing, to name just a few. And, indeed, music is a seemingly universal phenomenon; like language, it is spread among all peoples of the world. Given all of this, it is striking how there is no theory of music from a phenomenological perspective, which is to say at the level of our perception. We have categorized and collated music's effects, but we seemingly cannot decide whether the chirping of the songbird that rousts us from our slumber in the morning is music, despite a lengthy, albeit frequently non-musicological discourse on precisely that topic from Johann Gottfried Herder, to Theodor Adorno, up through R. Murray Schafer, which generally focuses on the songbird as a limit case. While the role of birds as a marker of ecology, a division bell between man and nature, is deserving of further study, what strikes me as salient here is whence this necessity of a limit case emerges. The lack of discourse at this moment, the definitional moment, to me, seems like something of an oversight.

For how can we think through the effects and affects of something without understanding it in its place in the world? How can we not know that we have not elided something simple and basic-yet nevertheless crucially important? Or, perhaps even more importantly, that we have not run over something, violently throwing a concept over something that, in the end, may be impossible to conceptualize? It is this way with all objects and concepts that we take for granted; complexity is gladly imprisoned under the seemingly placid sea in favor of an eased life. Naturally, this tendency towards simplification should not and cannot be condemned. If we lived in the world where everything appeared in all its complexity all the time, we would surely be overwhelmed, dragged under its sirenic depths.

2

Yet it is nevertheless important to consider how a phenomenon is in the world, and that is the goal of Phenomenology, Soundscape, Music. It aims to consider:

1. the constitution of music, possibly in contradiction with commonly accepted definitions of music, with as few preconceptions as possible (and these noted),

2. the topology and sources of music with regards to the reconsideration of its constitution, and

3. the human relationship with music, especially with regards to our own ontological (self-) constitution.

This is to say, in a somewhat less schematic way, that I wish to evaluate what we know about music in terms of its signification, its sources (i. e., human construction/composition and natural noises), and, in light of these two prior considerations, the relationship between music and the listener-possibly in ways that run counter to commonsense judgments of music that have been historically advanced. I aim to pursue this track by placing emphasis on the listener itself, as opposed to a strictly objective/empirical analysis; this rhetorical maneuver will be accomplished by methodologically adhering to what I call, following Reiner Schürmann, a deconstructive phenomenology, drawing on, among others, Derrida, Husserl, and Heidegger. Eventually, I arrive at the position that music is potentially all-surrounding-an ontology of music will fall into hauntology, with the spectre of the primordiality of the experiencing of music affecting the very ontology of the listener, allowing for the potential of listening for the communication of the soundscape, be that the whine of a species on the edge of extinction, a stomach shuddering in hunger, or the ecstatic fall rain heralding the magical appearance of mushrooms. This is a project engaged with and seeking to unsettle issues of exclusionary politics, anthropocentric views towards the environment, and other modalities of the universalizing project and normative agenda(s) of the Enlightenment that seek to draw boundaries that prevent connection, communication and encourage violence, figurative or vastly literal. In other words, where "missionaries and naturalists," the great Alexander Humboldt among them,3

made an effort to include foreign music in their travel accounts. their impressions generally amounted to a drastic Europeanization of what they observed. At worst, the attempts to transcribe foreign [and we should be wary already of this marker of otherness, auth.] music lopped off its distinctive qualities and turned it into a grotesque approximation of European music. (Liebersohn 2019, 3).

The same can be said, if not with greater emphasis, of possible examples of natural music that surround us. We here seek, if not to undo these intellectual and literal trends, then to chart a path-tenuous, tremulous though it may be-forward.

Essentially, I want to consider definitions of music from the perspective of the listener, both vague and unique, as opposed to definitions that strive for (scientific or verifiable) objectivity. This has the potential to be an extremely broad understanding of music-radically so-and, indeed, I am attempting to formulate a theory of music that does not impinge on its practice throughout the world. This means considering the possibility of musical experiences to be emergent in aural spaces that might not otherwise be considered in an historical definition of music: the space between notes of a chorale, breaks between movements, ritualistic noise ignored or scorned by colonial logic, a forest rent by fracking, and even bodily noises. Sonny Rollins puts it in the Euro-American context thus: "Any definition which seeks to separate Johann Sebastian Bach from Miles Davis is defeating its own purpose of clarification. The Musings of Miles is then the Bouncing of Bach, both played against each other" (Rollins 2024, 26). "It might even mean accompanying the Goldberg Variations-in particular the rollicking fifteenths variation-on the Ghanaian drum," as Ato Sekyi-Otu evocatively put it in a more global context (2018, 63). Such considerations open up a space to interrogate how what we always stutteringly and hesitantly call "subject" constitutes itself in the world, as it quests after foundational questions of naming, conceptualization, and even the separability of itself from its surroundings. I will argue that just as music can be constituted as such by the listener, so too can the listener be constituted by the aural experience of the world, specifically in the case of music. The intellectual movement at work here can be linked with what Adrienne Janus has called, following Martin Jay, the "anti-ocular turn" in theory and philosophy-but I would caution against the use of "anti." I am not "anti" film, painting, or optometrists. Simply, I wish to focus on the sense that has been occluded by the domination of the eidos, the ocularcentrism in the tradition of Western thinking, "from the shadows of Plato's cave and the divine light of Augustine to Descartes' 'steadfast mental gaze' and the Enlightenment faith in the sensory observation" (Janus 2011, 184).

I am less concerned with proffering what a Marxist theoretician might (with probity) accuse of being an idealist vision of music, instead instantiating a critique (Kritik) of music as it has been heretofore defined and put to use by society. While we can speak of the various tragedies with which 'music' (even traditionally defined) has been complicit (though more on that later), including but certainly not limited to a certain social infantilization via the medium of popular music and, even more perniciously, music made popular, in and through the culture industry, in and through habituation and commercialization, we here turn our eyes and ears towards understanding the constitution of music and how it constitutes us as broadly as possible, in order to...