Inhabiting Sound

Seamus Heaney – ‘Clearances’
In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984

She taught me what her uncle once taught her:
How easily the biggest coal block split
If you got the grain and the hammer angled right.

The sound of that relaxed alluring blow
Its co-opted and obliterated echo,
Taught me to hit, taught me to loosen,

Taught me between the hammer and the block
To face the music. Teach me now to listen,
To strike it rich behind the linear black.

I begin with an assumption: that hearing is a privileged form of knowing, of understanding (making sense of) an encounter with the world, which has the capacity to generate ‘meaning’. And I’ll assume too that meaning is situated, contingent, and that the culturally and experientially fragmented nature of contemporary experience enhances the sense that meaning is individuated. But as an improvising performer and composer I’m concerned not to work in a vacuum. I want what I do to afford meanings which have some capacity for sharedness – for meaning as socially and collectively rather than individually conceived: for musicking to be about ‘soundly organized humanity’ as well as about ‘humanly organized sound’ (Blacking, 1973).

This paper will look at the paradoxical nature of intention in musical making, and at the closely associated notion of attention. It draws on previous publications (e.g. Waters 2013) in which the privileged relationship between tactility and hearing has been explored (both theoretically and through practice-based research manifesting as a hybrid physical/virtual flute improvisation system). The author – an improvising performer and electroacoustic composer – suggests connections between music’s occupation of physical space, its relative ‘presence’ (using Edward Hall’s notion of proxemics), and the various senses of movement which pervade it.

Movement might be seen to operate with respect to music at a variety of levels of metaphorisation (and here I’m broadly following Lakoff and Johnson (1980) in regarding all linguistic forms as metaphorical – as increasingly complex chains of analogy which point back to our early physical experience of the world). But of course music is, fundamentally, action. Humans put energy into systems – external or internal to themselves – which transduce that energy into the movement of air. At the acoustic level music is, emphatically and unmetaphorically, movement.

Perhaps such simple physical perceptions might form one route through which it might be possible to understand and explore shared senses of meaning and their capacity for movement, for ‘transduction’ between different individuals – a model for collective understanding of at least one level of musical function. Our (developmentally) early sensory models of the world, built from encounters with its physical resistances and affordances, might be a route to understanding our more clearly encultured and abstracted (higher level) understandings of music.

Using instances from the author’s own practice: improvising on guitar, double bass and flute – and several recent electroacoustic compositions involving acoustic instruments, and performers with varying degrees of improvisational and compositional involvement in the works written for them – issues of intention and attention, tactility and hearing, individuated and collective decision-making and ‘meaning’ making, music’s capacity to move and be moved, and the extent of the musician’s conscious ‘presence’ in musicking are explored, and a network of relations suggested which might afford the establishment of a context for musical meaning despite the highly individuated nature of contemporary experience and the lack of ‘common’ cultural level.

Simon Waters joined the staff of SARC in September 2012, moving from his previous role as Senior Lecturer and Director of Electroacoustic Studios at the University of East Anglia (1994 – 2012). Establishing a reputation as a composer of acousmatic electroacoustic works for contemporary dance in the 1980s, the focus of his work has since shifted to reflect a sense that music is at least as concerned with human action as with acoustic fact. His current research assumes a distribution of ‘compositional’ responsibility in musicking, and explores continuities between tactility and hearing, being particularly concerned with space as informed by and informing human presence, rather than as a benign ‘parameter’. He is also preoccupied by instrument making in the broadest sense.

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