Current Musicology, No. 95 (Spring 2013) © 2013 by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York 259 Eleven Theses on Sound and Transcendence Brian Kane I. Listening can only be localized in the ear by force of reduction. Imagine a room (call it the “music room”), in which sounds are heard; any normal person entering the room is presented with sounds which are audible only there, but which can be traced to no specific source . . . A specific sound—middle C at such and such a volume, and with such and such a timbre—can be heard in the room. Yet there are, let us suppose, no physical vibrations in the room: no instrument is sounding, and nothing else happens there, besides this persistent tone.1 The “music room” is a hypothetical. To function, it requires the force of reduction. This is most apparent in the claim that, “let us suppose,” these sounds are correlated to no physical vibration. That moment authorizes the philosopher to distinguish the sonic from the musical: one vibrational, with everything that comes in tow, such as the acoustic, the resonant, the spatial, and the causal; the other, a pure event bathed in divine ontological indifference. II. To split the senses one needs technê. [The acousmatic situation] symbolically precludes any relation with what is visible, touchable, measurable. Moreover, between the experience of Pythagoras and our experiences of radio and recordings, the differ- ences separating direct listening (through a curtain) and indirect listening (through a speaker) in the end become negligible.2 Don’t be fooled by this dubious negligibility. Even if one were to doggedly maintain the historical difference that distinguishes the Pythagorean curtain from the loudspeaker, the conceptual difference would be subsumed, for the modern–day akousmatikoi, by the end to which the technology is applied. Even the “music room” would require some hidden technology to remove the vibration from sound; otherwise it would be a supernatural experience. Technê is the prerequisite for isolating a sense modality. A philosopher’s rule of thumb: veiling the visual unveils the auditory—and veiling is a technique. Current Musicology 260 III. Technê is to be understood as both technique and technology, no matter how rudimentary. Cognitive scientists and German romantics agree: the closed eyelid and averted glance are the most rudimentary acousmatic techniques! Closing one’s eyes while listening to sound . . . evokes shifts in style of processing by modifying focus of attention, while keeping targeted stimuli the same. The main outcome of such a shift could enhance the perceived intensity of emotional stimulus, making positive attributes more positive and negative ones more negative . . . Closing the eyes indeed characterizes a specific brain state that can be affected by the individual’s mental set. Accordingly . . . eyes closed position represents a well defined mental set by which perceived emotionality can be modulated, thus probing its neural respect.3 Whenever Joseph [Berglinger] was at a big concert, he seated himself in a corner, without looking at the brilliant gathering of auditors, and listened with the very same reverence as if he were in church, —— just as quietly and motionlessly and with his eyes fixed upon the ground before him . . . 4 The eyelid can be projected outward, onto screens, veils and coverings: To explain the plan of the festival–theater now in course of erection at Bayreuth I believe I cannot do better than to begin with the need I felt the first, that of rendering invisible the mechanical source of its music, to wit the orchestra . . . 5 The prevailing doctrine of nineteenth–century music aesthetics—the idea of “absolute” music, divorced from purposes and causes, subjects and clear–cut emotions—gave rise . . . to the demand for an “invisible orchestra” concealing the mundane origins of transcendental music. What Wagner was able to institute in Bayreuth was also, around 1900, attempted in the concert hall.6 Or permanently sealed in its sublimation by sound recording: At the time when music critic Paul Bekker was trying his hand as opera house director, he may have been the first to have spoken of opera as a museum . . . The form of the LP makes it possible for more than a few musically engaged people to build up such a museum for themselves. Nor need they fear that the recorded works will be neutralized in the process, as they are in the opera houses . . . these recordings awaken to a second life in the wondrous dialog with the lonely and perceptive listeners, hibernating for unknown purposes.7 Brian Kane 261 IV. Technê cannot be subordinated to physis. Do not be persuaded by purposiveness. The end to which technê is applied does not mean the end of technê. To resist the hardheaded forgetfulness of purposiveness, one could do worse than follow the Peripatetic as he takes art and nature—technê and physis—for a walk. Step one: “Art imitates nature.”8 Technê, which follows after the prod- ucts of physis, develops its capacities by copying from the works of nature. Technê would take what physis has already provided, as a model, and imitate it. Technê reproduces, replicates, or copies an original. Step two: “Technê carries to the end what physis is incapable of effecting.”9 Technê has no model, it reproduces nothing given; rather, it gives itself over to supplement a deficiency or lack found in physis. The blockage that halts the achievement of physis is overcome by a technique, trick, know–how or art. Yet what comes to the aid of physis lacks physis altogether. How can technê both imitate nature, and thus duplicate the model that nature provides, while simultaneously perfecting or accomplishing what nature cannot achieve? Where would technê have learned its skill at fulfilling nature’s ends (and better than nature itself)? How can technê be both disciple and master of physis? The Peripatetic’s competing views about the relationship of physis and technê cannot be consistently reconciled (with apologies to the apologetic Ancient commentators). If technê comes to the aid of physis, and brings physis to completion, then physis cannot be conceived as a simple plenitude or potentiality without lack. Thus the inability of physis to realize its ends without the aid of technê reveals that the relationship of the two cannot be simple subordination. Rather, the relationship is supplementary. (Don’t believe me? Get a load of this: “The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude . . . It cumulates and accumulates presence. It is thus that art, technê, image, representation, convention, etc. come as supplements to nature and are rich with this entire culminating function.”10) V. Veiling is the technê of truth. And while we’re speaking of plenitude: [Heidegger] enabled us to perceive the ontological plenitude or the truth that addresses us in art through the twofold movement of revealing, unconcealing, and manifesting, on the one hand, and concealing and sheltering, on the other.11 Current Musicology 262 Heidegger’s essence of truth depends on the the double movement of concealing and unconcealing, argued via an appeal to an anamnesis of the Greek notion of truth, ἀλήθεια (aletheia), a condition of being un–hidden or dis–closed. The essence of truth, as the overcoming of hiddenness, also contains the nonessence of truth. This is to be contrasted with the view that untruth is simply a human deficiency, as if the truth were simply “out there” but inaccessible because of a failure of human cognition or intellect. Originally for the Greeks hiddenness, as an act of self–hiding, permeated the essence of being and thus also determined beings in their presentness and accessibility (“truth”); and that is why the Greek word for what the Romans call “veritas” and for what we call “truth” was distinguished by the alpha–privative (ἀ–λήθεια). Truth originally means what has been wrested from hiddenness. Truth is thus a wresting away in each case, in the form of a revealing. The hiddenness can be of various kinds: closing off, hiding away, disguising, covering over, masking, dissembling. Since, according to Plato’s “allegory,” the supremely unhidden must be wrested from a base and stubborn hiding . . . [it] gives us a special glimpse into how “privation”—attaining the unhidden by wresting it away—belongs to the essence of truth.12 Heidegger offers an exposition of the essence of truth through a reading of Plato’s allegory of the cave. In Heidegger’s reading, the confusion of idea and eidos distorts the original meaning of aletheia by turning the essence of truth into an anthropomorphic adequacy of (human) subject and object. Alethetia must be recovered from this distortion. Yet, the anamnesis of the essence of truth as aletheia doesn’t clear out the ghosts of purposiveness that haunt Heidegger’s views. The double movement of concealing and unconcealing ultimately avoids the problem of physis and technê, of hiddenness as the technê of the unhidden, of truth’s physis. If “concealment preserves what is most proper to ἀλήθεια as its own,” then what is proper to concealment?13 Is hiddenness only to be the handmaiden of unconcealedness, the matrix from which aletheia perpetually wrests itself? Heidegger neglects to note how the opening passages of the “allegory” allegorize the role played by technê in the production of truth. When Socrates describes the cave’s mise–en–scene to Glaucon, one might recall its archi–tectural design. (Note the use of present perfect tense.) Between the fire and those who are shacked there runs a walkway at a certain height. Imagine that a low wall has been built the length of the walkway, like the low curtain that puppeteers put up, over which they show their puppets.14 Brian Kane 263 And don’t neglect the sound design either: And now what if this prison also had an echo reverberating off the wall in front of them? Whenever one of the people walking behind those in chains would make a sound, do you think the prisoners would imagine that the speaker were anyone other than the shadows passing in front of them?15 Here technê has already set the stage for a scene of aletheia, of wresting away one’s perpetual (cue the litany) closing off, hiding away, disguising, covering over, masking, dissembling. The physis or essence of truth as unconcealedness is wrested away from that which is concealed only after the stage has been properly set for the production of concealment. Technê can be nothing more than an unconcealment effect. A repoussoir. VI. Transcendence is a form of separation. A narrow definition of transcendence: that which lies beyond our sense modalities and knowledge, and thus a form of separation. The transcendent is separated from the everyday world of sensation, knowledge and experience. According to the Sage of Königsberg: we will call the principles whose application stays wholly and completely within the limits of possible experience immanent, but those that would fly beyond these boundaries transcendent principles.16 Transcendent principles are those that “incite us to tear down all those boundary posts and to lay claim to a wholly new territory that recognizes no demarcations anywhere.” And thus, “transcendental and transcendent are not the same.” Indeed, a condition of the possibility of experience is not an experience of the unconditioned. This narrow definition must be relaxed when moving outside the boundar- ies of philosophy. While preserving the importance of separation, there is a broader definition of transcendence: the positing of any sphere (whether it be religious, secular, philosophical, ethical, aesthetic or otherwise) that exists outside the bounds of the mundane world, and which is manifested to this world only at special or singular moments. One could easily ap- peal to Wagner’s description of the “mystic gulf,” charged with the task of “part[ing] reality from ideality,” however I prefer this anonymous bit of musical prolepsis from 1826. Imagine a hall in which, first of all, the orchestra with its people and instruments is hidden from the audience’s view by a light curtain, this Current Musicology 264 would put a whole crowd of destructive demons in chains, not to mention how much more atmospheric music becomes when it resounds unseen. Imagine further that instead of the many burning candles there is a single hanging light, which gives forth only as much subdued illumination as wretched decency demands . . . Would not the dim light, full of forebod- ing, compose the souls of those who entered, purifying away the dross of everyday life and setting them into that mood which alone is appropriate for the enjoyment of art? Would not the spring–like sounds, coming as though from another world, lift these poor earthly worms, swimming in the sludge of the everyday world, for a moment at least into the bright, heavenly regions of a more beautiful world?17 VII. Sound has often been understood as the site for the revelation of transcendence. Ἀρμονία. Q. E. D. VIII. The divided sensorium is applied to support the production of transcendence. In eighteenth–century aesthetics, the experience of music often prefigured the angelic choir. Every Saturday evening at the hour of Compine one sings the Salve Regina . . . thus, at the appointed hour therein one finds music, the organist and the sacerdotes . . . the music begins and the organ responds, and then the organ and the music [sound] together, with such sweetness and such beautiful harmonies, which, because they seem an angelic choir, generate in the hearts of the listeners a whole–hearted composure and a holy devotion to the Mother of God.18 In Milan, Federigo Borromeo, employed the trope of the angelic voice in his discourses on music. In his Assumption Day sermon, Borromeo began with the topos of the angelic song, “surely no accident considering that the prelate’s audience was probably composed of musical nuns” and returned to the trope as a musical model to be imitated by the nuns’ own performances.19 This model went hand in hand with a prohibition on vanity during the nun’s performances, which had begun to veer, for Church officials, uncomfortably close to the kinds of spectacular musical performances taking place outside the cloister. In the period following the Council of Trent, when the practice of clausura was instituted, it was declared that nuns “should, without exception, be Brian Kane 265 confined within convent walls.”20 Many of the convents were walled in, with only grilles to allow for the passage of sound. [The Tridentine Reforms are] so esteemed not only in Rome but through al Italy that thou shalt never see Nonne out of her Cloister, and being in the Churche thou shalt only hear their voices singing their service most melodiously, and the Father him self, that is, their Ghostly father heareth their confession through a grate in a wall, where only voice and no sight goeth between: and I have seen the blessed Cardinal of Milan Borromaeo say Masse in their Chapel at Milan before them, when I could not possibly see any of them . . . and in Bononie [Bologna] and Rome having been many times at their service in the Chappels and hearing the goodly singing, never did I yet see one of them.21 Sound, which penetrates and pierces enclosures, became an important mechanism by which the nuns could still be present to the world beyond the convent wall. Although the voice of the nun can resemble the voice of the angel even without any kind of visual reduction, clausura can be understood as a technology that, despite its obviously repressive aspects, splits the senses in order to make the transcendent audition of the angelic voice all the more sensuous. The Convent of Santi Domenico e Sisto in Rome, in addition to containing a extraordinarily high altar with grated windows above it, to the left and the right, possessed an interior punctured by a series of grated open- ings placed high up near the vaults that circled the church. The voices ema- nating from these high grates were juxtaposed against the frescoed ceilings, depicting images of the heavenly host. The architectural space reinforced the fantasy: the listeners were encouraged to identify the vocalic body, imagined in the nuns’ voices, with the celestial figures floating above their heads.22 But the trope was never completely secured. The vocalic body heard in the nun’s voice could just as easily be associated with an angelic source as with the actual mundane, and potentially erotic, body from where it emerged. For Rousseau, the dialectics of the angelic voice fascinated and maddened him on his trip to Venice in 1743. Every Sunday, in the church . . . motets are sung during vespers, for full choir and orchestra, composed and conducted by the greatest masters in Italy and sung in the grilled galleries by these girls, the oldest of whom is under twenty. I cannot conceive of anything so pleasurable or so moving as that music . . . Never did Carrio or I miss those vespers in the Mendicanti, and we were not the only ones. The church was full of music–lovers; even singers from the opera came here to have a real lesson in tasteful singing from these excellent models. What distressed me were the accursed grilles, which only let the sound through but concealed those angels of beauty—for the singing was worthy of angels—from my sight. Current Musicology 266 Rousseau’s erotic drive to peer behind the grilles and behold the (real) heavenly body fantasized in the nun’s voice, leads to a cruel and misogynist joke. After begging, Rousseau is taken to meet the girls. As we entered the room where sat these beauties I had so desired, I felt such an amorous trembling as I had never known. M. Le Blond introduced me to one of these famous singers after another, whose names and voices were all I knew of them. “Come Sophie” . . . She was hideous. “Come, Cattina” . . . She had only one eye. “Come, Bettina” . . . She was disfigured by small pox . . . Two or three, however, seemed passable to me; they only sang in the chorus.23 In the musical art–religion of the nineteenth century, the grilles of the convents were reinstalled, now as injunctions to obscure and erase the traces of musical performance. The sonorous element in music . . . [is] the ultimate consideration. The visual element of the performance does not belong to the work’s essence . . . It is for this reason that orchestral musicians rightly appear in the simplest clothes; it would be best if they were not visible at all.24 We could say that Berglinger’s averted glance became an architectural apriori for constructing the ideal concert hall. I would like to see a hall which is rather small, seating no more than a thousand persons, with only one kind of seat throughout, with no boxes, neither large nor small. I would like the orchestra to be out of sight so that neither the musicians nor the lights of the music desks can be seen by the audience. This would create a magical effect . . . 25 The presence of the orchestra amongst the audience, playing in full view of them, is every bit as disturbing as would be the sight of the back stage machinery and the stage hands working away on it . . . 26 Or, when the concert hall wasn’t adequate, there were other solutions. One could employ forms of bodily technê in the production of transcendence: I have sat close up, I have sat farther and farther back, I have tried a corner in the theater where I could completely lose myself in the music. The better I understood it . . . the farther away I was . . . I stand outside in the corridor; I lean up against the partition which divides me from the auditorium, and then the impression is most powerful: it is a world by itself, separated from me; I can see nothing, but I am near enough to hear, and yet infinitely far away.27 Brian Kane 267 And, as always, there is Wagner who, as a young man, attended a rehearsal of Beethoven’s Ninth at the Paris Conservatoire. Arriving late, he is placed in a room separated from the main hall by a parti- tion or half–wall; entranced by the sound coming over the divider, he later writes that music, when freed of the visual aspects of its mechanical production, “came to the ear in a compact and ethereal sort of unity.”28 According to Lydia Goehr, the ideal of invisibility in musical performance entails two demands: first, that visual aspects of performance are inessential given music’s purely sonorous essence; second, that what is heard in the performance is subordinated to the transcendent meaning of the work. Given that transcendence can never be materialized without loss of fidelity, the performer must produce a performance that “undermines their own presence as necessarily flawed mediators.”29 The ontological condition of sound as the resultant of an event was subordinate to an ontology of sounds as bearer of a content whose transcendence is heard in the sounds, and whose very status as transcendent undermines their material clothing. The signifier cannot sully the (transcendental) signified. IX. The fantasy of transcendence produced without technical mediation is divine listening. Wackenroder articulates the fantasy of unsullied musical transcendence through the guise of Joseph Berglinger: I venture to express from the depths of my being the true meaning of the musical art and say: Whenever all the inner vibrations of our heartstrings . . . burst apart with one outcry the language of words, as the grave of the inner frenzy of the heart—then they go forth under a strange sky, amidst the vibrations of blessed harpstrings, in transfigured beauty as if in another life beyond this one, and celebrate as angelic figures their resurrection.30 The signifier is the grave in which the musical soul lies; yet the musical outcry, which shatters the tomb of language and resurrects the musical soul, departs from the subject in its transfiguration. Wackenroder’s image depends on the transformation of the heartstring (Herzenfibern) into a harpstring (Harfensaiten)—a metamorphosis that musicalizes the language in which it is written. Musical sublimity overtakes the subject, carrying the listener away to “another life beyond this one.”31 The iconic listener who gladly leaves this world for another life, different in kind, is St. Cecilia. In Raphael’s depiction, which circulated widely amongst the early German Romantics, Cecilia stands above a pile of discarded Current Musicology 268 and broken instruments, eyes turned upward, listening to the sounds of the angelic choir. The angels are positioned in the intermundia: visible to the viewer, invisible to the depicted figures, audible only to Cecilia. Raphael’s junk heap guarantees that the viewer will not mistake the sounds in Cecilia’s ears with any sort of musica mundana. By drawing an ontological line between the earthly and the divine, Raphael also grants the viewer an image of listening without seeing, which lacks technical me- diation. Neither Pythagorean veil nor grilled interior separates the figures. But Raphael’s image is itself a form of technê that indicates the concep- tual content of divine listening, but never fills our ears with its sound. For Nietzsche, Raphael’s necessary failings deserve mention. Populate the air with the imagination of a Raphael and contemplate, as he did, how St. Cecilia is listening, enraptured, to the harmonies of angelic choirs: no sound issues from this world though it seems to be lost in music. An image or word stands to music as a schema to a concept; the schema can only act as an illustration for the concept but can never be adequately substituted for it. It sacrifices generality for phenomenality. If the power of the general were to manifest itself directly, all schematism and individuation would be burst asunder as quickly as Wackenroder’s grave. But if we imagined that this harmony did actually acquire sound by virtue of a miracle, where would St. Cecilia, Paul and Magdalen and the singing angels suddenly disappear? We would immediately cease to be Raphael, and even as the instruments of this world lie broken on the ground in this painting, our painter’s vision, conquered by something higher, would pale and vanish like shadows.32 X. Divine listening can only be taken on faith. It is solipsistic and cannot be shared. It leaves no artifact. It can only be simulated through artificial means. If divine listening ruptures the order of the signifier and lies beyond all acts of individuation, then there can be no artifact of divine listening. It can only be taken on faith. In Kleist’s story, “Holy Cecilia or the Power of Music,” there is no sonic account of the transformation, effected by the Corpus Christi Festival music, which sublimes the four iconoclastic brothers. Just after the mo- ment when the music begins, the narrator leaps ahead six years, only to Brian Kane 269 retrospectively relate the events from the perspective of an eyewitness. The lacuna is necessary; even a description of the music would not be able to bridge the gap, because the question of divine listening is not an objective question concerning the music played—for Kleist offers precisely such a description in the guise of the witness—but a solipsistic question concerning what is being heard in the music by the brothers. Although moved by music to the point of self–annihilation, Wackenroder’s Joseph does not experience divine listening, as do Kleist’s brothers. Wackenroder positions Joseph between the immediacy of divine listening and an anxiety directed at musical technê. In the first half of the tale, Cecilia remains an icon to whom Joseph begs assistance, So that I, through music’s power, Master of their souls might be; That my soul the world infinite Sympathetically penetrate, Intoxicate in Fantasy!33 In the second half of the tale, after Joseph has become a conductor and composer, he grows disillusioned and despondent with his new life. It is a wretched life that I am leading . . . I thought that I wanted to dream on ceaselessly and pour out my full heart in works of art—but how strange and austere the very first years of apprenticeship seemed to me. How I felt when I stepped behind the curtain! That all the melodies . . . were based upon a single compelling mathematical law! That, instead of flying freely, I first had to learn to climb about in the awkward scaffolding and cage of the grammar of art! How I had to torment myself in order to first produce a correct work with the ordinary, scientific, mechanical understanding . . . It was a tedious mechanical effort.34 Joseph’s despondency registers his intermediate status: poised between the ideal of the transcendent listener and the charlatan who has “stepped behind the curtain” to learn the mechanical tricks that produce such transcendence, Joseph becomes an icon unlike that of St. Cecilia. By acquiring technê, he can no longer experience the transcendence for which it is employed. Despite the modern distaste for Wackenroder’s style of “outpourings,” one could do worse than to recall Joseph’s state of disillusionment. For “sound” is easily carried by ahistorical and ideological fantasies that misrecognize their reflection in the past. Only rarely are such fantasies held in check. Current Musicology 270 The immersiveness of sound, its three–dimensionality, set a precedent then for the evacuation of the technological apparatus in the production of audio, supporting the belief that three–dimensionality overrides the fact of mediation, and thereby creates a space that is beyond technology and culture. Like the speaking tube of deific transmission, it has been necessary to construct and then deny a mechanism that channels, delimits, transduces and sanitizes the materiality it transports. These interfaces are both technical and conceptual—consisting of wires, circuits, relays, etc. and transcendent spaces, such as the ether, the cosmos, or the irreducible vibration, to which the technical infrastructures are conceptually attached, and through which the presence of technology is masked.35 XI. In the production of transcendence, technology must be hidden. It cannot appear as the real cause, but must hide its own role by becoming invisible or remaining a black box. We know, now, the supernatural wonders wherewith a priesthood once deluded childlike men into believing that some good god was manifesting himself to them: it was nothing but Mechanism, that ever worked these cheating wonders. Thus to–day again the super–natural, just because it is the un–natural, can only be brought before a gaping public by the wonders of mechanics; and such a wonder is the secret of the Berliozian Orchestra.36 Wagner’s critical words also betray the lesson he learned—hide the machinery. But a tension runs through Wagner’s thinking. On the one hand, the dream- like state “into which we thus are plunged through sympathetic hearing” produces an experience where “our eyesight is paralyzed” to the point that “we no longer intensively see.” This experience of musical blindsight is produced anytime the music “really touches us” despite the fact that “the most hideous and distracting things are passing before our eye,” such as “the highly trivial aspect of the audience itself, the mechanical movements of the band, [and] the whole peculiar working apparatus of an orchestral production.” Wagner argues from the fact that we are ordinarily inattentive to such a spectacle, and that absorbed listening puts us into “a state essentially akin to that of hypnotic clairvoyance”.37 (McLuhan could have cited Wagner to support his claim: “Psychologists define hypnosis as the filling of the field of attention by one sense only.”)38 Brian Kane 271 On the other hand, the subversion of vision by hearing is compromised in the opera house, where musical blindsight is unacceptable. Here the mechanism of the orchestra must be literally concealed, so as to regulate and discipline the attention of the audience in the correct manner. The reader of my previous essays already knows my views about the concealment of the orchestra and . . . [my condemnation of] the constant visibility of the mechanism for tone–production as an aggressive nuisance . . . I explained how fine performances of ideal works of music may make this evil imperceptible at last, through our eyesight being neutralized, as it were, by the rapt subversion of the whole sensorium. With a dramatic representation, on the contrary, it is a matter of focusing the eye itself upon a picture and that can only be done by leading it away from the sight of any bodies lying in between such as the technical apparatus for projecting the picture.39 But even this might not be enough. In September of 1878, Cosima tran- scribed this statement: I cannot stand all this costume and grease–paint business! And when I consider how these figures such as Kundry will have to be masqueraded—I immediately think of these repulsive artists’ carnivals, and, after having invented the invisible orchestra I would like to create the invisible theater.40 Wagner just missed the mark. The phonograph was invented the year before. Even musique concrète, predicated on the use of recorded sound, is also premised on concealing the machinery involved in its production, in order to produce an acousmatic situation where the ear can begin its act of l’écoute réduite. This condition persists from its very moment of discovery. 19th April. By having one of the bells hit I got the sound after the attack. Without its percussion the bell becomes an oboe–sound. I prick up my ears. Has a breach appeared in the enemy ranks? Has the advantage changed sides?41 Experimenting in the studio, Schaeffer discovered that by removing the transient attack from a recording of a bell its source became unrecogniz- able. Rather than conceptualize this feature as an affordance of recorded sound, Schaeffer interpreted his discovery as disclosing an entryway into the phenomenology of listening. A number of historical circumstances have led to the notion of the sound object. First, the initial discoveries of “musique concrète” with its two inaugural experiments: the closed groove and the cut bell; then, the aware- Current Musicology 272 ness of a listening situation, not new but whose originality had never been identified or given a specific name; the acousmatic situation.42 Like the Gestalt figures that littered the pages of Merleau–Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, Schaeffer understood this little cloche coupé as emblematic of a much larger field—namely a field of listening, constituted not simply as a response to an auditory stimulus, but as a field of sound objects intentionally constituted by the listener’s acts and modes of attentive- ness. What this cloche coupé revealed was the way in which the listener’s intentionality preceded the auditory stimulus. One forgets that it is the sound object, given in perception, which designates the signal to be studied, and that, therefore, it should never be a question of reconstructing it on the basis of the signal.43 Wrap that up with the phenomenological reduction and you’ve got a situation where the essence of listening is now understood as being utterly indifferent to its mode of presentation, that is, whether the sound was real or imagined. Only the content matters, and the content is understood as indifferent to its ontological status. (A prolongation of Kantian disinterestedness.) Schaeffer’s manipulations become theorized as sonic attempts at “eidetic reduction” via Husserl’s method of imaginative free variation. For example, Starting from this table–perception . . . we vary the perceptual object, table, with a completely free optionalness, yet in such a manner that we keep perception fixed as perception of something, no matter what. Perhaps we begin by fictionally changing the shape or color of the object quite arbitrarily . . . In other words: Abstaining from acceptance of its being, we change the fact of this perception into a pure possibility, one among other quite “optional” pure possibilities—but possibilities that are possible perceptions. We so to speak, shift the actual perception into the realm of non–actualities, the realm of the as–if.44 Change the example from a table to a tape loop and you’re well on your way to an orthodox musical phantasmagoria—oops, I meant, phenomenology. But like the “music room,” this too only succeeds by force of reduction. For this kind of phenomenology refuses to recognize the remainder produced in its drive towards the eidetic reduction. The question is not simply whether a sound can present itself qua perception or qua imagined. Because these modes of presentation are not indifferent to the haptic aspect of vibration simultaneous with these sounds, a different set of possible modes of pre- sentation is needed: perceived sounds with perceived vibrations, perceived sounds with imagined vibrations, perceived sounds without vibrations; Brian Kane 273 imagined sounds with perceived vibrations, imagined sounds with imag- ined vibrations, imagined sounds without vibrations; and lastly, perceived vibrations without sounds, and imagined vibrations without sounds. Only by bracketing the haptic aspect of sonic modes of presentation, can the musical phenomenologist be satisfied with free variation as a technique for disclosing sonic essences.45 Orthodox musical phenomenology deludes itself about its haptic condition, neglecting the fact that the mode of presentation for sounds is not totalized between real and imagined perception, or between seeing and hearing, but includes another sense modality. But this is not to assert that the haptic aspect of vibration is primary for a sonic ontology, for that too would depend on the isolation and privilege of one modality from the rest—and the production of such isolation would require its own set of techniques. It would be the technê of some other phantasmagoric physis. To praise blindness in order to privilege listening, as Arnheim did, is to substitute the centrism of the eye for that of the ear, while ignoring the incorrigible fact that both modalities are not independent of touch. That problem, easy to state, is difficult to conceptualize. Even Diderot vacillated in his “Letter on the Blind,” calling idealism, “an extravagant system, which must have been invented by the blind,” while putting these words in the mouth of the blind mathematician Samuelson: “If you want to make me believe in God you must make me touch him.”46 Notes 1. Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, 3. 2. Schaeffer, Traité des objets musicaux, 93. 3. Lerner et al. (2009). 4. Wackenroder, “The strange musical life of the Musical Artist Joseph Berglinger”, in Confes- sions and Fantasies, ed. Mary Hurst Schubert, 149. Italics mine. 5. Wagner, “The festival–playhouse at Bayreuth,” in Actors and Singers, trans. Ellis, 333. 6. Dahlhaus, Nineteenth–Century Music, 394. 7. Adorno, “Opera and the Long Playing Record,” in Adorno on Music, ed. Leppert, 285. 8. Aristotle, Physics, 194a. 9. Ibid., 199a. 10. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 144–5. 11. Gadamer, Relevance of the Beautiful, 34. 12. Heidegger, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” Pathmarks, trans. Thomas Sheehan, 171–2. 13. Heidegger “On the Essence of Truth,” Pathmarks 148. Current Musicology 274 14. Plato, The Republic, VII 514b. 15. Ibid., VII 515b. 16. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Guyer and Wood, B352/A296. 17. Anonymous, “Our Concerts”, Musikalische Eilpost 4 (March 1826). In The Critical Recep- tion of Beethoven’s Compositions by his Contemporaries, vol. 2, ed. Wayne Senner and William Meredith, trans. Robin Wallace (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 127. 18. Morigia, Paolo, La nobilita’ di Milano, 306. 19. Kendrick, Robert, Celestial Sirens, 158–9. 20. Monson, Craig, “Putting Bolognese Nun Musicians in their Place,” in Women’s Voices Across Musical Worlds, ed. Jane Bernstein, 119. 21. Martin, Gregory, Roma Sancta (1580–1), 141–2. 22. Monson, 122. 23. Rousseau, Confessions, Book 7. 24. Robert Zimmerman, Allgeimein Aesthetik als Formwissenschaft, excerpted in Bujić (ed), Music in European Thought, 46–49 25. André–Ernest–Modeste Grétry, Mémoires, ou essais sur la musiqu, vol. 3, Paris (1797), 32. 26. Alexandre Choron, and J. Adrien de La Fage. Nouveau manuel complet de musique vocale et instrumentale, ou, Encyclopédie musicale. Pt. 2, Tome 3. Paris: Roret (1838), 117–120. 27. Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. D. F. and L. M. Swenson, i. 119. 28. See Geoffrey Skelton, “The Idea of Bayreuth,” in The Wagner Companion, ed. Burbidge and Sutton, 390–1. Compare with Wagner’s claims about the evils of the Berliozian orches- tra, with its emphasis on the mechanism of production: “We know, now, the supernatural wonders wherewith a priesthood once deluded childlike men into believing that some good god was manifesting himself to them: it was nothing but Mechanism, that ever worked these cheating wonders. Thus to–day again the super–natural, just because it is the un–natural, can only be brought before a gaping public by the wonders of mechanics; and such a wonder is the secret of the Berliozian Orchestra.” (Wagner, Opera and Drama, trans. Ellis, part I, sec. V.) 29. Lydia Goehr, The Quest for Voice, 142–3. 30. Wackenroder, Confessions and Fantasies, 190–1. 31. I am indebted to John Hamilton’s reading of Wackenroder in his Music, Madness and the Unworking of Language, 121ff. 32. Nietzsche, “Fragment on Words and Music,” reprinted in Dahlhaus, Between Romanti- cism and Modernism, 109–10. 33. Wackenroder, 153. 34. Ibid., 155. 35. Frances Dyson, Sounding New Media, 47. 36. Wagner, Opera and Drama, part I, sec. V. 37. Wagner, “Beethoven” in Actors and Singers, 74–5. 38. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 17. 39. Wagner, “The festival–playhouse at Bayreuth,” in Actors and Singers, 333. 40. Cosima Wagner’s Diaries: Volume 2, 1878–1883, entry of September 23, 1878. Brian Kane 275 41. Pierre Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music, 7. 42. Schaeffer, from the Traité, quoted in Chion, Guide des Objets Sonores, 18. 43. Schaeffer, Traité des objets musicaux, 269 44. Husserl, Ideas, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson, 70. 45. Notice that, to Husserl’s credit, his visual example works better than the sonic example; in the specular situation, the tactility of the object seen is available to the viewer if they reach out to touch it; thus, there is no necessary simultaneity between visual and tactile perception, and this is in distinction to sound, where auditory and tactile perception can never be dis- sociated, even if the tactile is attenuated to the point of imperceptibility. 46. Diderot, “Letter on the Blind,” in Diderot’s early philosophical works, ed. and trans. Mar- garet Jourdain, 104 and 109. References: Adorno, Theodor W. 2002. Opera and the Long Playing Record. In Essays on Music, edited by Richard Leppert. Berkeley: University of California Press. Anonymous. 2001. Our Concerts. Musicalische Eilpost 4 (March 1826). Reprinted in The Critical Reception of Beethoven’s Compositions by his German Contemporaries, Vol. 2, edited by Wayne M. Senner. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Aristotle. 1941. The Basic Works of Aristotle, translated by Richard McKeon. New York: Random House. Chion, Michel. 1983. Guide des objets sonores. Paris: Buchet-Chastel. Choron, Alexandre, and J. Adrien de La Fage. 1836. Nouveau manuel complet de musique vocale et instrumentale, ou, Encyclopédie musicale, Part 2, Tome 3. Paris: Roret. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dahlhaus, Carl. 1989. Nineteenth-century Music, translated by J. Bradford Robinson. Berkeley: University of California Press. Diderot, Denis. 1916. Letter on the Blind. In Diderot’s Early Philosophical Works, translated by Margaret Jourdain. Chicago: Open Court. Dyson, Frances. 2009. Sounding New Media. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1986. The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, edited by Robert Bernasconi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goehr, Lydia. 1998. The Quest for Voice. Berkeley: University of California Press. Grétry, André-Ernest-Modeste. 1971. Memoires; ou, Essais sur la musique, Volume 3. New York: Da Capo Press. Hamilton, John T. 2008. Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language. New York: Columbia University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1998. Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1931. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, translated by William Ralph Boyce Gibson. London: G. Allen & Unwin. Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Paul Guyer, and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kendrick, Robert L. 1996. Celestial sirens: nuns and their music in early modern Milan. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1944. Either/Or, Vol.1, translated by D. F. and L. M. Swenson. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Current Musicology 276 Lerner Y., Papo D., Zhdanov A., Belozersky L., and Hendler T. 2009. Eyes wide shut: Amygdala mediates eyes-closed effect on emotional experience with music. PLoS ONE. 4 (7). http:// www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2705682/ Martin, Gregory. 1969. Roma sancta. Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura. Monson, Craig. 2004. Putting Bolognese Nun Musicians in the Place. In Women’s voices across musical worlds, edited by Jane A. Bernstein. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Morigia, Paolo. 1979. La nobilità di Milano. Bologna: Forni. McLuhan, Marshall. 1967. The Gutenberg Galaxy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1980. Fragment on Words and Music, translated by Walter Kaufmann. In Carl Dahlhaus, Between Romanticism and Modernism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Plato. 1961. The Collected Dialogues of Plato, including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. New York: Pantheon Books. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1953. The Confessions, translated by J. M. Cohen. London: Penguin Books. Schaeffer, Pierre. 2012. In Search of a Concrete Music, translated by Christine North and John Dack. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press. _____. 1966. Traité des objets musicaux, essai interdisciplines. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Scruton, Roger. 1999. The aesthetics of music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Skelton, Geoffrey. 1979. The Idea of Bayreuth. In The Wagner Companion, edited by Peter Burbidge and Richard Sutton. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich. 1971. Confessions and Fantasies, edited by Mary Hurst Schubert. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Wagner, Cosima. 1980. Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, Volume II: 1878-1883, edited by Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack, translated by Geoffrey Skelton. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Wagner, Richard. 1995. Actors and Singers, translated by W. Ashton Ellis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. _____. 1995. Opera and Drama, translated by W. Ashton Ellis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Zimmerman, Robert. 1988. Excerpts from Allgemein Aesthetik als Formwissenschaft. In Music in European Thought, 1851-1912, edited by Bojan Bujić. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.