I just went through (the solo violin version of)
Koan by James Tenney, and now you have to too. To sweeten the deal I get you the slightly "easier" string quartet version.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=k9Um-9kISSM
I think, even more than Cage's
4'33",
Koan asks the question "What do we actually do when we say we are 'listening' to a piece of music?" Are we looking for patterns? How come we are never able to hold onto one pattern? And how many of the "patterns" we think we have perceived are actually illusionary? And how much do we confuse the imperfection of a performance with the music itself?
Well, I think Cage was more asking "Why in God's name did I spend all that money getting a music degree?", but it's a fair question none the less.
I think my answer would be something along the lines of, "what do we mean by 'we'? What do we mean by 'music'? What do we mean by 'listening'?" That is to say, music is a highly subjective experience, yes? The act of listening (and therefore, the motivations, purpose, acts-inherit-within, etc) will not just different from person to person individual to individual, but it can even be different, for each person, from piece to piece, and from particular instance of listening to particular instance of listening.
For instance, if I am hanging out with a friend, I might put on a Merzbow album just to piss him off:
I'm not really "listening for" anything; in fact, so far as the audio is concerned,
I'm actively trying to tune it out. My "doing" rests on the act of "not doing", and the degree to which I "do" is the degree to which I've failed at the act of listening as I have defined it, for myself, in this instance. And my reason "for" listening is not to discern patterns or ruminate on the subtle imperfections that add colour and human feeling to Merzbow's robot vacuum cleaner noises. I'm not even listening "for" the "music" at all; I'm listening "for" the reaction it illicits in my friend, listening to piss him off and to see how it'll take until he forces me to turn the album off. It's a completely metatextual reason, something both implicit within and location completely without, the specific aural instance of the music itself.
But, sometimes I listen to Merzbow with a different mindset. Like, right now, I'm listening to Merzbow in order to help me focus on my writing. Here, the act of listening is more an act of passive non-listening, neither tuning out nor tuning in, but simply allowing the sound to wash over me; like using white noise to help you sleep, I suppose? Of course, my mind is not focused solely on writing; it's dipping and out, finding little footholds of consciousness in which I start to grasp at particularly interesting rythmic or harmonic... well, I was going to say patterns, but it's more like, developments. It's not really a pattern that I'm trying to hold, and generally speaking there are no patterns in a Merzbow album at all - although it
might be the
illusion of pattern which ellicits these occasional moments of concentration. Honestly can't say for sure. Still, the main "reason" - "for" - "listening", in this instance, is precisely so that I don't
have to listen, and can instead focus on other things. The doing is not so much the doing of listening (or the doing of non-listening), but rather it's the doing of other things around, and informed by, the listening. If that makes any sense?
(also, there might a certain performative aspect at work, too; an effort to be, and intent to being perceived to be, "that guy on the internet listening to noise music")
And yet, other times, I can listen to Merzbow
specifically for the experience of patterns - or, perhaps more accurately, for the re-experiencing of familiar aural developments. I have some (admittedly not many, but some) genuine emotional memories tied to specifics pieces by Merzbow. In such an instance, then - yes, I am very much looking for patterns - I cannot hold onto the patterns because, by design, they don't exist - and again, yes, the patterns I perceive do tend to be illusionary. But that's not really "why" I'm listening, is it? I'm listening for the same reason an elderly man might put on his favorite recording of Liszt's
Sarabande und Chaconne aus dem Singspiel Almira, or why a young grad student might relive her 6th form year by listening to that first PPCocaine song she ever heard on Tiktok. In such cases, the act of listening may, at least on the physical level of doing, be focused on the
discernment of patterns - but, in such instances, are we really "looking for" patterns? If a song is familiar to us, so familiar that we can hum the bars and sing the words at a moment's notice, then is looking even part of the doing? Instead of looking for patterns, are we no simply
remembering patterns? These are patterns we have already found; we don't have to "look" for patterns already found, we merely have to call them back to mind, reinforce them in our memory.
(from here, we might go into things like chronically misheard lyrics, or the feeling of disspointment when you hear a live version of a popular studio song, but that would probably be too much of a tangent for this thread)
Anyway, my point is, I think the question "What do we actually do when we say we are 'listening' to a piece of music?" is far too broad, and has far too variables, to ever answer properly, and while I appreciate Tenney's effort to bring this question to our attention, I think it's a fundamentally misguided effort. Every person, every piece, and every instance of listening, could theoretically lead to a different answer! So, in order to make sense of the question, I think that we'd have to restrict it, like:
"What do you, the Kiwifarmer, actually do when you, the Kiwifarmer, say you are 'listening' to James Tenney's Koan, right now?"
But maybe I'm overthinking this...?
