Voluptuous Music

Listeners have recently become more skeptical of loud music. If music's to be loud, there better be a good reason. Unwilling to expose themselves to discomfort, even many previously adventurous listeners have begun to worry about the effects of loud music on their hearing, reaching for the earplugs at the slightest pretext of displeasure. Such listeners often attribute their sensitivity to physiological concerns, so this new value of protecting ones ears comes off as a value of self-preservation, a reaction to values of self-destruction, which they themselves may have once even courted. Exposure to extreme amplitudes can be aesthetically progressive for such listeners and artists, these lions of sensuality who once dabbled in the sublime, who invited catharsis. The openness to destroying ourselves is also a veiled attempt to put the world with all its unfreedoms behind us, to transform ourselves and transcend nature by articulating the limits of our own perceptual systems. Like Benjamin's observation of why we love ruins, it represents a desire to see an unfree world put behind us; this unfree world includes our limited aesthetic faculties which are still in an infantile, perhaps even arrested state of development. In other words, the desire to lay oneself in ruin can be an attempt at self-transformation. More importantly, for many music artists the articulation of limits and confrontation with aesthetic thresholds also implies the possibility of expanding and overcoming those limits of our aesthetic capacities, transforming experience. Consider the child who stares at the sun, longing to see God and have their vision transfigured. 

Loudness was often rarely about loudness for loudness's sake though. Extreme noise music, no less than Varese's literally alarming music, were never just about being loud. Music such as Florian Hecker's concerned perception, Amacher's music conjured "God's Big Noise", and noise music in its prime was much about the pleasure/pain relationship, amongst other things. And so on and so on — not even twenty years ago there was a great variety of characters of noise, in which loudness was at the service of broader, often ambitious aesthetic aspirations. But by the 2010s, there was already a reaction to so-called 'loudness' as such, with many listeners less willing to submit their hearing to ruinous intensities, less willing to trust the artist, whose ambitions often exceeded their capacities. Listener's literally got sick of pretentious hard-asses cranking their guitars to eleven without the slightest self-awareness of whether or not the music was compelling enough to warrant it. So there is of course justification for avoiding such loudness. The excitement of the 00s' experimental music was also often quite charlatan in its understanding of "sound", and the all-too-anti-music of the X/Millennials could often be a banal muck. The liberation of the experimental musician led to a lot of convoluted "sound" played at unnecessarily high volumes that had little physiological insight or aesthetic feeling into the listening faculty, and could indeed often damage hearing, in addition to being annoyingly ugly. I argue that it is the latter — ugliness — which is what truly offends in much experimental music, not the loudness. Whereas artists like La Monte Young or Amacher who inaugurated this experimental era amplified their glorious harmonic experiments to excite dormant perceptive capacities and expand consciousness, with any resulting pain being painful in the way a massage or growth is painful, a lot of experimental music was like bad massage. Although academically invested enough to acknowledge such forebears, the X/Millennial experiments were generally unable to draw adequate conclusions about the true meaning of such work, let alone advance it practically. The result was an understandable inhibiting or defensive reaction from listeners, who adjusted by retreating into a more passive, less immersive, and flatter music — most notably ambient music. Nevertheless something’s arguably been lost, for the visceral intensity of a full music composed compellingly can awaken us to feelings of Dionysian Oneness with a nature that we're otherwise alienated from. 

After making field recordings in a rainforest, the composer Ben Frost remarked that the true sound of nature can be almost deafeningly intense. Part of the state of nature we sometimes yearn for is not some twee pastoral birdsong, but an enervating polyphonic symphony. One also thinks of Werner Herzog’s humorous monologue about birdsong being not pretty, but rather a horrific screeching expressing the agony of life. Such insights may elude much experimental, ambient music and it's folkish birdsong which is only theoretically natural. The normalization of this fear of intensity within a broader turn towards conservative wellness culture, combined with a lot of musical experience and a barbaric type of knowledge about "sound", has created a situation in which listeners who find something merely disagreeable can now claim that it's physically damaging. There is more often than not little to no indication of any such harm. Children know how to petulantly exploit this fear when they merely don't want to listen —"It hurts my ears" is certain to motivate a compassionate parent to turn off the noise even if they know it's not damaging. (And Millennials have indeed refused to grow up.) What masquerades as "sensitive" can often be a conservative fear of things that lay outside of comfort levels — as if art is merely about comfort. It’s analogous to those who insist they can’t understand difficult readings, when in truth it’s that they don’t want to. In terms of experience of any music that might challenge complacency, this feels like a contracting, infantile aesthetic moment, not a moment of expansion of the senses. There is something comically effete and pretentious about listeners who claim to be overly sensitive, like a self-important hand model who must wear white gloves to protect their most cherished assets, as if to dramatically gesture with a fainting hand, "Oh my, I'm much too sensitive for all that!" But are they? Are they really? (And we all know many musicians today are more like hand models than artists!) Music for shrinking violets. And when one shrinks, they all do — once one listener reaches for the earplugs, the rest follow. But we music makers rather want our flowers to bloom and effloresce, do we not?

There is another aspect of scale, too, that articulates the state of our shrinking, our compressing consciousness — when we make things smaller, when we reduce them sonically, it is an attempt to own the thing, to reify and possess a musical process that is otherwise inherently abstract and exceeds us. It is not merely that one shrinks in fear, but that one tries to shrink the object of their fear. But what can be lost is the cathartic feelings music can auger when the listener submits to something much larger than oneself. “By putting the “wild beast” in a cage, all we preserve is a specimen whose life we can now completely control. So much of what we call art is made in the same way — as one would collect exotic animals for a zoo.” So said Morton Feldman.

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“Healing” — Or — The Tragic Need for Art

The change isn’t all negative. Along with this retreat came a recovered introspective sensibility that, in deemphasizing the sublimity of music, valued the art of its suggestiveness, and has pursued the beauty that Millennials tabooed. Perhaps simply writing an evocative melody might be more interesting? To be sure, a light and easy art can be just as profound as the most aggressively sublime. “All that is good is easy, all that is divine runs on light feet.” (Nietzsche) Nevertheless, the ideal is rarely achieved, and what we usually get instead of transcendent beauty is more of a cloying sentimentality; instead of divine lightness, we more often get a mundane laziness. There are other changes that came along with this shift, too, that one could generally file under an attempt at 'healing'. While for instance, the new trend of sound baths may be lame, there has been a healing dimension of music ever since Apollo took up his lyre. Although, one suspects that the brilliantly radiant Apollo would be so insulted by the association with a pseudo-music made for the retreat that he might banish sound baths entirely! This cultural shift of healing is portrayed in extremis in the movie Sound of Metal, where a music artist drummer loses his hearing and is forced to find an inner calm or enlightenment that replaces his music practice. But is it enlightenment, or rather a pedantic moralizing whose thesis resonates with every caricature of a finger-wagging anti-music schoolmarm who admonishes the youth that they'll damage their ears? (If the moral is delivered by a metal drummer then the message goes down much easier.) But make no mistake, calling an inhibition or incapacity spiritual is merely to rationalize given conditions, and a shrinking away from the ongoing development of the all-too-human listening faculty, which is still in its nascent infancy and subject to self-transformation and change. More to the point, the drummer must have long-known the loss of hearing was a very possible outcome and chose it anyway. The question is, knowing this, would he do it again, and if not, why? In other words, was the music worth it? And if not, then what would it mean to make a music in which the ruin of one's faculties might indeed be worth the sacrifice, in which one ear dying on the historical dissection table of sound might actually benefit the aesthetic development of the species as a whole? There was ostensibly a real need that was attempting to be fulfilled via loud music too, are we really to nullify that, to render the loss merely in vain? In my opinion, the movie suggests that the music wasn't worth the sacrifice, the music wasn't good enough, so to speak. And who could be surprised — how many musicians today are really delivering such Godly music when they turn the volume up? Maybe it is better if they do just retreat into (ac)quiescence. What is really of concern in the new wellness culture is the repression of the aesthetic beauty of destruction. Consider Nietzsche's still tragically relevant observation that cultures who cannot sublimate their destructive urges artistically — who cannot consign their violence to the Apollonian dreamworld of art — will ultimately resort to mass suicide or genocide. Nota bene, moralists and politicians! He notes that the inherently bloodthirsty Ancient Greeks would have slaughtered each other in tribal warfare were it not for their invention of Art. And of course this isn’t about the Greeks. The tragic need for Art, indeed!

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Saturated Harmonia

At least in experimental music It seems we're forced between a falsely transgressive noise music, and a fake healing music, neither of which is sufficient, although each points to a real need. Both appear to be play-acting until the real thing emerges. These tendencies have been unnecessarily segregated into different genres, whereas in much more ambitious and thoughtful music works they were integrated and in dynamic tension. In my opinion, there's another path, the path of the third ear that mediates extremes and maintains tension: a music which has at least some scientific understanding of listening, achieved by musicians who actually do their homework, but far more implicit aesthetic intuition of our listening faculty and the imaginative excesses it cultivates. This is the modern world, after all, so why do so many musicians cling to romantic expression, or conversely, asceticism, when the best composers have unified, and pointed beyond each? Some artists have successfully cultivated forms whereby the introspective inner world and violent external nature are negotiated at a threshold activated by the listener. Catherine Christer Hennix for example, built upon the biophysical oscillations of the inner ear by resonating it, by saturating the ear in harmony. In the 19th century, the pioneering scientist of tone Herman Von Helmholtz described his experiments with just-intoned harmonies as a kind of “saturated harmoniousness”. The nascent art of such a saturated harmonia has been scantly explored, mostly because the experimental musicians who might actually pursue such extremes are generally anti-harmony. The whole idea of resonance has been consigned to an academic exercise, a curiosity fit for social media diagrams or nonmusical metaphors, and has hardly transcended into actual practice, at least not in any voluptuous way. Although played at extreme volumes, Amacher's third ear music was not painful, but ecstatically pleasurable in its resonant intensity. It was no mere illustrative principle of resonance and a metaphysics of “sound”, but the actual practice of resonating our own listening. Such loudness — more accurately, a hyperacuity of tone to stimulate the listening faculty — excites the anenomie-esque hair cells of the inner ear to dance in a way that they seem to want to, that is their natural tendency, and such dancing in turn projects shapes into reflective consciousness. And the listening can feel liberating or cathartic as a result, a quite literal release. It’s as if the ear wants to be exercised, which is of course why we so often want to turn the music up. Yet we hardly know what is healthy exercise either. While I’m disappointed in my fellow Millennials, I appreciate their adventurous attempts to find out the hard way. But ultimately, one does have to put their music where their attitude is and become a physiologist of tone. Audiologists call the sounds the ear produces evoked emissions, a term as poetic as it is literal. Amacher called it the listener's music, a phrase as accurate as it is philosophical. The 'release' associated with it is ecstatic, and it is this release that is yearned for in both the excess of noise music and the healing of ambient. 

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Towards A Voluptuous Music

Loudness is rarely really about loudness — it is an attempt at ecstatic fullness, saturation, voluptuousness. The original and radical implication of various loud musics was such a transcendent unification of pain and pleasure, a living, ecstatic music. Noise music raised this as a possibility while being woefully incompetent to actually deliver, but this does not mean such a Godly dream should be abandoned. Yet why was it that only noise demanded sublime volume? — doesn't loudness exceed far better with tone? With beautiful tonalities, one can bring the volumes to Godly pitch without disfiguring the ear as in abrasive noise. Indeed, a well-composed tonal work almost seems to benefit far more from louder-than-noise levels, becoming profoundly immersive when the harmonics are permitted to work their acoustic magic, and much less damaging. Such a music can acoustically bloom. By comparison, music at normal volumes might then even appear one-dimensional. It's not to say that music shouldn't also be quiet at times, and formally gradate everything between depending on the artwork — but even silence benefits from the expansion of the spectrum at its other end. When one hears timbres gradually transform their evocative colors through a broadened spectrum, there is much more resolution and fullness to the music, it is fleshier, so to speak, a journey through much more figurative timbral shading. A voluptuous music would also be voluptuous in all musical dimensions — pitch at its most pitch-iest of pitch; silence at its most unnervingly anechoic; tempo at its most uncannily precise and hyperacute; and so on. A voluptuous music would be an art of bringing the various musical elements to their most palpably hyperacute expression. Shouldn’t so many interesting musical ideas out there be taken to their most voluptuous manifestation? Wasn’t Hegel always hypothesizing the sensuality of the idea? The voluptuousness of music would be much more than the loudening of music, it is the making flesh of the ideas of music, which is in so many ways an intellectual art at core, as it should be, though it does not end there. And there is a dimension of godly voluminousness that has not been sufficiently explored, not even in e.g. Mahler. Or maybe contemporary orchestras simply flatten and compress Mahler? You don’t really feel the intensity and ecstatic thrill that comes with that artistic imposition on the ear; it comes across more like an illustration of that intensity. But who knows what Mahler would have composed were he not limited. Maybe Mahler was a big failure, and was pursuing something far more resplendent than was possible with the means available to him. At any rate, if the dynamic range is not really artistically expanded, music is operating in a lower-dimensional state. We are literally compressing music’s dynamic range, and so our perception is compressed in turn. Perhaps that’s all contemporary ears are able to handle?

To my ears, music of all genres, but especially “new” music, are currently sounding very thin, very effete. And who could be surprised, with new music subsisting as it does on a diet of paltry timbral scraps and 20th century leftovers from the proverbial Music Ascetic’s Cookbook. Music today could stand to be fattened up a bit. Mangia! Upon encountering a more voluptuous music, wherever that may chance to occur, nearly everything else may seem two-dimensional, like a suggestion or illustration of what music could be. We all know, too, that there is an expansive openness that happens when music is played with more voluminousness — lower register tones have wavelengths that are very long, such waves need the space to unfurl in order to truly be experienced, while high tones beam in glorious acoustical rays. There’s a certain voluptuousness required to make tone unfold in this way, and there is an openness to it when done well.

Will composers someday resonate the listening faculty, and allow tone to acoustically flourish? Who might gaze into Apollo’s effulgent musical sun, a pulsing sonic radiation, in the hopes of transforming their listening faculties? What proverbial ear will grow bold enough to experience the radiance of harmony that emanates as if from a continuously giving “golden center”, aquiver with acoustical energy? And what music makers will resonate themselves with that source? The task remains for music makers to create something beautiful enough so that listeners don't feel compelled to reach for the earplugs when such beauty grows big and strong, coming out into the open, exuberantly “stepping out open doors”, as Amacher said of Beethoven. Can a gloria even be written until then? Can artists in our era actually show us what it might feel like to come to the brink of annihilation, what a beautiful transfiguration might feel like, instead of an ugly disfiguration? Again, what we really fear in loud music is not the loudness, but the ugliness. If music is indeed ever to become Godly, music makers must develop a better aesthetic feeling for the voluptuousness of tone. 

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Richard Pousette-Dart. Golden Center
, 1964
Oil on linen. 60 x 56 in.