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254 Materialism, Ontology, and Experimental Music Aesthetics Joanna Demers How do we talk about music? Inevitably, through metaphors and signs. This piece sounds tragic, that one violent. These sounds make me think of death, of trees, or of childhood. And that is how it should be; music’s attraction has always been its practiced scrimmaging with signification. It intimates but rarely (arguably, never) states explicitly. It is, to quote Jankél évitch and his partisans, ineffable.1 All this we already know. And we also know that music reflects social practice, culture, and history, that it no more springs from a void than does any other human activity. Music is meaningful. We come to understand music by understanding the stories of the people who make and listen to it; conversely, we may begin to understand people by understanding their music.2 These have the air of well-worn truisms. But with experimental music that is posttonal, postserial, music that operates according to no particular codes, what and how does music signify? In sound that seems not to indicate meaning, how do we talk about what we hear? Is it possible to hear sound without attributing to it some meaning? Can we engage with artistic materials without interpreting them as signs? These questions are especially pertinent because many forms of recent art and music are abstract: they no longer operate according to codes (for music, tonality; for painting, perspective) that audiences and artists used to agree conveyed meaning. Abstraction poses formidable challenges to our understanding of contemporary art aesthetics as a whole and experimental music aesthetics in particular . I’ll therefore draw from both aesthetic theory and music to explore what about art (if anything) communicates and signifies. Specifically, I want to interrogate how we can fruitfully work with the traditional ontological definition of art—a combination of content and material—amid competing Materialism, Ontology, and Experimental Music Aesthetics • 255 claims that either content or material has grown irrelevant. These claims are neither trivial nor academic; as we will see, each in its own fashion carries considerable weight in theory and practice. In this essay I’ll consider four examples of recent experimental music for which artists and listeners have proposed interpretations emphasizing either the music’s content or its material, to the exclusion of the other. These interpretations are legitimate, but they sometimes fly in the face of experience, since we may alternate between listening to material and content, and can even listen to both simultaneously.3 Is there a better way to verbalize our experiences of experimental music? I suggest returning to Hegel, whose ontology of art states that content and material are linked not arbitrarily but through some affinity. I propose that we apply an integrated ontology to our understanding of experimental music, one that relieves us of the imperative to separate content from form, or to exclude either from the artwork. An integrated ontology does not entail adopting a new listening strategy—just the opposite. Through acknowledging the indispensability of both content and material, and their interchangeability, an integrated approach to ontology permits us to listen to experimental music in a manner that comes naturally. And this license in turn allows us to make some pragmatic observations about experimental aesthetics. To give a sense of the difficulties in determining an ontology of experimental music, let me begin with a preliminary example. Miki Yui has offered the concept of “small sounds” to describe her work. Small sounds can be drawn from field recordings or original material and occur at extremely quiet volumes. Yui’s work always sounds polished, as if she has taken great care in deliberating every detail. The music, especially in Lupe Lupe Peul Epul (2001) and Magina (2011), is beguiling; portions seem abstract or inscrutable , while other moments seem vaguely referential. But what I find most exciting about this music is the manner in which Yui’s peers discuss it. I can only assume that such statements reflect at least in part Yui’s own thoughts about her work. The inside cover for Magina contains several blurbs; one by Anthony Moore states: Miki Yui’s work seems to inhabit an etherous forest full of movement . And for me the extraordinary quality her sounds have is that they seem to take on the materiality of living creatures, almost solid but, paradoxically, without weight and therefore airborne. The only gravity they obey is determined by the exceptional sensitivity to sonic space that permeates all of her work...

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