ESTHESIC BECOMING AND ACTUALIZED WORK: An Artist’s Statement [2015] — II. General Aesthetic Principles
This post is part of a series which will make up the dissertation I wrote alongside a portfolio to complete my PhD in 2015. It is exactly that: an attempt at an account of where I was two years ago, and many things have changed. Still, it might be useful in understanding how and why I write music.
Read the Preface here.
Read Chapter 1 here.
Read Chapter 3 here.
Read Chapter 4 here.
See the bibliography here.
Find my work here, here, and here.
Thinking of Chernoff’s (and others’) descriptions of music as revelatory of a certain practice, I focused on two approaches to my work: one exegetic and one poietic. Exegetic, as though approached by a musicologist or music theorist. This had been my practice for years: what meanings and possible interpretations does my music put into the world? In 2011, though, during a rough creative patch, I shifted my thinking: exegesis aside, what do I want to hear? If I could pen music that I could hear right now, regardless of outside expectations, what would it be? My thinking began to shift from exegesis to esthesis, that of rudimentary sensation rather than interpretation. Perhaps more vitally, in composing my ‘desired listening,’ exegesis encompassed esthesis such that, at some level, rudimentary sensation was my desired exegetic content.
This roughly follows Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s framework — expounding on concepts developed by Paul Valéry and Jean Molino — in his theory of a semiotics of music. Nattiez locates the musical work in the ‘trace’ which is the result of the poietic construction of a producer (artist), or of the esthesic construction of a receiver (audience). Rather than positing the artwork as a means of ‘communication’ from producer through to receiver, as displayed in this diagram:
“Producer” — — — → Message — — — → Receiver 1
Nattiez describes the poietic and esthesic processes as each constructing the work from their own origins:
Poietic Process
Producer — — — → TraceEsthesic Process
Trace ← — — — Receiver 2
For Nattiez, in addition to being “the result of a complex process of creation (the poietic process),” the trace “is also the point of departure for a complex process of reception (the esthesic process) that reconstructs a ‘message.’”3 As listeners engaged in esthesis, therefore, it might be said that “we do not ‘receive’ a ‘message’s’ meaning. . . but rather construct meaning, in the course of an actual perceptual process.”4
This is to say in so many words that part of the process of composing, to me, began to be an imagining of this esthesic process: what sensations would I want my poietic trace to engender in myself in esthesis? What imagined esthesis could I bring in to the world that had been lacking? Where, in my work, is the listening subject located within my preferred space?5
I am led away from exegesis toward esthesis. Perhaps ironically then, one of my chief guides has been phenomenologist Martin Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in which he posits art as an unveiling of subjective truth; that “in the work of art the truth of beings has set itself to work.”6 Upon reading that essay (and others like it), I knew that there had certainly been times in aural esthesis that I felt “truth setting itself to work” in me. My task as a thinker on my own music and practice since 2011 has largely been an unpacking of my most compelling esthesic experiences in an attempt to recreate them in composition, and in a manner which I find so far lacking in the world around me. I describe my method of setting about that ‘truth’ (for myself as a listener) that I am after in four ways.
A. Transparency / Anti-Deception
In the 1964 essay “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag dismantles the notion that the truth of an artwork is in the interpretation of its content. For Sontag, interpretation is a poverty of experience, one that assumes the artwork itself is somehow insufficient for experience and must point somewhere besides itself. “The interpreter says, Look, don’t you see that X is really — or, really means — A? That Y is really B? That Z is really C?”7 She traces interpretation to the Enlightenment, when old myths needed to have an ‘interpretation’ extracted from them in order to reacquire a usefulness for rationalistic minds — crudely, replacing their magic with logic. Attending to the artwork’s form (as separate from its interpretative “content”) was, for Sontag, a truer experience of the work. “Ideally,” she argues, “we can elude the interpreters in another way, by making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be. . . just what it is.”8
The ideas in this essay arose in my consciousness alongside three musical works: “Gut Feeling,” by Devo, In Memoriam Jon Higgins by Alvin Lucier, and Les Sonneries de la Rose + Croix by Erik Satie. Each follows a process that is laid bare at the earliest possible point: in “Gut Feeling,” a I-¨III-¨VI-IV-¨VII chord cycle that gradually gains volume and BPM; in Higgins, a slowly-sweeping upward sine-wave glissando, pierced at regular intervals by a steady bass clarinet pitch, giving a predictable pattern of beating; and in Sonneries a bare, repeating form of “chords → melody → chords with melody,” or “melody → chords → melody with chords.”9 The specifically formal aspects of these pieces are so apparent — and so closed off to variation — that consideration does not enter into the listening experience. Anticipation — the wrapping what has come into an awaiting of what may come — is still crucial, but this awaiting is completely satisfied. The music seemed, in these cases, to be happening to me in time.
I began to remove wonder and curiosity from my work’s attempted esthesis. At no point in my work did I make what was going to happen transparent, but I did wish to make what was happening utterly so. Questions of how a sound is produced, or where a sound comes from, detract from my intended affect. I approached musical form as though it were not developmental or teleological but accumulative, like snowfall on a stationary object. For me this made the work “just what it was”: each event gaining intensity in view of its precedent, but denying the emergence of a gestalt. I conjoined form and meter in search of a music that consisted only of “beginnings” (I will discuss this in more technical detail below). My goal was a music with that direct address, music that conceals nothing about itself from a listener, either sonically or interpretatively (this is a rare instance of a personal moral goal being directly mappable onto an aesthetic one).
This transparency is apparent in each work in this portfolio, and plays a role in realizing each of the subsequent traits as well. In these pieces, transparency is generally a function of timbre and texture: timbres used are clear, constant, and idiomatic to the instrument (idiomatic to the purpose of the instrument’s construction — more on this below). The textures herein are nearly always a bare, methodical presentation of one or two instruments playing in rhythmic unison. The materials for the cumulative later sections of the pieces are also often laid out, one-by-one, in order, at the beginning, as if displaying the tools and raw materials with which the pieces will ultimately be built. The vast majority of instrumental sounds utilized are “pure” related to the intended timbre of the instrument at construction. If, as Edward Cone wrote, the composer creates a persona in the music, which addresses a listener directly, I hope for my address to be eye-to-eye, and absent of mystique or coyness.10
B. Physicality
In Memoriam Jon Higgins also provided me an example of wholly physical New Music. All sound waves touch us, of course, but those with a low enough frequency to be felt in the air are a different phenomenon entirely. Lucier also attained this low frequency through beating and difference tones, and hearing his music live gave me a direct address far more tangible than one of timbre, texture, or form. Sontag’s elegant last sentence is, “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”11 To call Lucier’s music sexual might take a leap of the imagination, but its tactile quality requires no interpretation. It happens to me.
The most tangibly physical excerpt of my portfolio is movement [c] of push 4 cut 2 bell (endless endless) for two amplified vibraphones. Figure 1 shows the first page of this movement, which consists entirely of the rhythm and dyad displayed. The D4 and E4 on the sine-tone-like vibraphone create a palpable beating (penetrating without being piercing), the character of which changes slightly — and plainly — with tempo changes, dynamic changes, and amplification changes. At this volume I feel surrounded by the physicality of the beating (and of each note), which not only articulates the physical reality of the hall, but connects me to all the physical objects around me, so that I feel immersed, and warmed.
Obviously my thinking here is influenced by that more famous of Lucier’s works, I am sitting in a room, in which Lucier uses the decay inherent to analog recording to articulate the resonant frequencies of whatever room the performer happens to occupy. In a blog post for a Harvard seminar on sound studies, I teased out some of the implications of these works:
As I become more acquainted with each of the examples I have laid out so far, what strikes me is how unclear, in acoustics, the boundaries between sound and space, transmitter and receiver, signal and noise, and, most unsettlingly, self and environment are.12
The “warmth” I feel with tangibly physical sound is the warmth of being connected to objects around me in a sympathetic way. I believe that the experience of a low-level household appliance noise (that of a refrigerator, perhaps) — turning off while you are sitting there, having been consciously unaware that it was ever on, but now that it is off it is as if all color has drained from the room and all blood from your body — I have said that that is one of the most intense musical experiences I can name. The affect appears in two pieces here, to be sure the two pieces which name actual appliances in their titles: aspirapolvere [Italian for ‘vacuum cleaner’], sega, spettro, tenere, possedere and bind me, take me, amplifier, humidifier. Figure 2 shows the opening of aspirapolvere. In addition to the aforementioned “laying out of raw materials and tools” present here, the accordion (like a faraway saw, which is indicated in the score) taps into the feeling of background radiation. Later, after having accumulated pitches with the guitar (Figure 3), and eventually with the hum of the disconnected amplifier, the background radiation sustains, and vanishes with the piece.
amplifier, humidifier was at the time of this writing unpremiered, so I simply shared part of its program note:
bind me, take me, amplifier, humidifier is about heartening backgrounds: the background radiations of existence, both aural and psychological, against which I live, subconsciously buoyed by their referential baseline, only noticing them when they’re gone, a noticing which manifests as desperation, longing, and an awe at the dutiful devotion with which their work is carried out.
“Dutiful devotion” also evokes transparency: a transparency of one’s task at hand, and that one’s task at hand could transparently be the purpose of one’s momentary existence.
C. Estrangement
Rather than attempt the wonder of true novelty in my work, I focused on an abnormal treatment of familiar instrumental sounds and materials, in a manner akin to the “estrangement effect” discussed at length by Bertolt Brecht. Shortened as “V-effekt” or “A-effect,” it was vital for Brecht in focusing an audience on a play’s relation to the conditions and systems of their everyday lives by encouraging them to view everyday things as alien.13 Brecht writes, “The A-effect consists in turning the object of which one is to be made aware, to which one’s attention is to be drawn, from something ordinary, familiar, immediately accessible, into something peculiar, striking and unexpected.”14 I mapped this onto timbral, melodic, and rhythmic thinking as a way of estrangement classical instruments and sounds without creating curiosity about how the sounds are achieved. Brecht, ever fascinated with Galileo, wrote:
for who mistrusts what he is used to? To transform himself from general passive acceptance to a corresponding state of suspicious inquiry, [an observer] would need to develop that detached eye with which the great Galileo observed a swinging chandelier. He was amazed by this pendulum motion, as if he had not expected it and could not understand its occurring, and this enabled him to come on the rules by which it was governed. Here is the outlook, disconcerting but fruitful, which the theatre must provoke with its representations of human social life. It must amaze its public, and this can be achieved by a technique of alienating the familiar.15
This was, for Brecht, an elegant approach to art as political education. Creating new worlds in art was less important than de-familiarizing the familiar as a way of learning more about it, as a means of creating a more politically conscious populace.
Musically, estrangement manifests in my work via the repetition, sustain, and cataloguing of timbres “familiar” to an instrument and, occasionally, in notes and rhythms “familiar” to classical music. In a sense, this is how the “laying out of materials and tools” functions as well, estrangement material out of context to give it a new look in context. In some pieces, repetition accomplishes this in the manner of a person repeating a word to herself until it sounds foreign.
for *current* resonance opens with the piano toggling between a C major chord and B-flat major chord (Figure 4). The two chords have an ambiguous tonal relationship, and the see-sawing nudges that relationship away from tonal progressivity. I designed the stark, strange tempo changes so that just when one starts to settle into a familiar musical situation, the whole surroundings shift at once, as in a dream. Untitled (Figure 5) works similarly with a pseudo-tonal melody, repeated more and more slowly, so that by the end each note takes the time of a phrase, and the graininess of all string playing, easily hidden in swifter music, comes to the fore.
Where Brecht was explicitly concerned with theatre’s relationship to “human social life” as it related to Marxist politics, my interest is in estrangement as a means of presenting musical material, and as a fruitful practice in everyday life and thought. It is also a manner of creating a particular kind of compelling affect: although surely it is a quality of all art that one both “knows and does not know” whence it comes, estrangement achieves this differently by making both the knowing and not knowing an equal part of conscious experience. While listening to a sonata, I may “know” the sounds of the instruments and the tonal logic, while “not knowing” how the form will play out or all the secrets to its construction. As a trained music listener, however, I concentrate on the latter while shunting the former to a sub-conscious stratum. To take musical instruments and materials as sources for estrangement, however, effects a constant play in esthesis. One is never sure whether one knows or does not know, and so focusing on either sensation is impossible. This heightens intensity, and also “binds” the listener (again, as myself) to the work via a constant strain for recognition. This “binding” and “constant straining” inform my next two esthesic goals.
D. Submission / Masochism / Self
In the previous section I used terms like “bound” and “straining” to describe esthesis, and they betray a mode of thought in which I conceive of aesthetic goals in terms of my desired embodiment in listening. In researching a paper on affects of “anti-syncopation” — fleeting examples of a soloist playing directly and only on the beat — I theorized whether someone playing in this manner was subjugating or submitting to the ever-present beat. My reading on meter in this context led me to a more generalized idea of what I experienced in listening generally.
Christopher Hasty, in his exhaustive study Meter as Rhythm, rejects the characterization of meter as “law” and rhythm as “freedom.” Following Victor Zuckerkandl, who wrote of meter and rhythm as “synthesis of law and freedom,” Hasty writes, “it is not rhythm despite meter, but, on the contrary, rhythm from meter, rhythm fed by the forces dammed up in meter,” that of meter and rhythm “there should be no opposition and no contradiction.”16 Zuckerkandl frames meter as an experience of time, as a kind of anticipation; that in meter he “experience[s] futurity as that toward which the present is directed and always remains directed.”17 Meter is not, then, an abstract framework, implanted a priori in our listening, upon which rhythm manipulates us. For Hasty, it is “a process in which the determinacy of the past is molded to the demands of the emerging novelty of the present.”18
Hasty puts forth a theory of meter as “projection,” or perhaps of projective potential implied by an original duration. The experience of meter is, roughly, the experience of beginnings followed by continuances of the durational potential projected from that beginning:
I will say that a potential duration for [a] second event is projected. . . this duration is potential rather than actual. When there is an actual duration. . . that emerges as a reproduction of the first event’s duration, I will say that the projected potential has been realized.19
Here the experiences of beginnings and continuations are directly related to the experiences of present and past. Hasty writes that “being present involves both the determinacy of having begun and the indeterminacy of becoming.”20 He quotes Albert North Whitehead: “. . .every experience involves a becoming, that becoming means that something becomes, and that what becomes involves repetition transformed into novel immediacy.”21
To put it crudely, beat becomes meter as this presentness, this becoming, wears off. Meter is ‘settled into.’ For meter not to be settled into, the durational potential must be projected, but never realized. A listener, when truly present, is ‘caught up’ between “the determinacy of having begun and the indeterminacy of becoming”: between determinacy and indeterminacy, as though between a Brechtian familiarity and unfamiliarity. Far from a steady beat being law to syncopation’s freedom, I found myself exalted by being caught up. In pursuing this affect I needed to separate the becoming of a beat from the determinacy of metric feeling: I wanted to sustain Whitehead’s novel immediacy for as long as possible, preserving the “caught up-ness.” I wanted this becoming of beat without it ever becoming groove.22 Projection, “throwing forth,” anticipation, and beginning factor into nearly every durational decision I make, including longer durations such as those in Untitled and aspirapolvere. The distinction between beat and groove, however, is illustrated most clearly in for *current* resonance and push 4 cut 2 bell (endless endless).
The middle section of for *current* resonance (Figure 6) effects pure tempo. The tempo changes slightly enough so that the listener feels in the same world, but the same world in which everything has changed. I work to sustain the anticipation of an explanation — a “settling into” a familiar meter — as long as possible. One cannot simply sustain a tempo interminably: if familiarity does not set in, boredom will. I use the same technique in the opening movement (as well as in the aforementioned movement [c]) of push 4 cut 2 bell, only adding the “freeze” pedal (Figure 7): the most basic variation on the reiterations is that absolute sustain, the durations of which I also alter according to my feeling of “beginning.” If the repetition pushes the listener, the sustain pulls, hopefully intensifying the degree to which one is present, or “caught up.”
* * *
Whether or not a listener is, when truly present, “submitting” to the musical impulse is the subject of Fred Maus’ 2000 essay “The Disciplined Subject of Musical Analysis.” Maus examines Edward Cone’s book The Composer’s Voice, particularly Cone’s claims that listeners submit themselves to the “domination” of “persona,” which is located in some combination of the composer’s will and the performers’ actions:
The listener is dominated by, and also identifies with, the persona, seeming to maintain relations of subordination and identification simultaneously. Listeners are, on Cone’s account, at once subjected to control that comes from outside, and empowered by taking on that control as though it were their own.23
Maus uses much of the article to suggest that analysis and score-reading — particularly that emphasized in an essay by Allan Forte — is a thinly veiled means of removing oneself from a subordinated position and attempting to dominate the music right back. In further investigating Cone’s account, however, Maus teases out some of the implicitly erotic language in Cone’s conception of listening:
let’s begin by remembering embodiment: in sexual activities, bodies interact, and so one might ask how the bodies of listeners affect these analogies. . . Cone’s account identifies a particular bodily experience — an inhibited or “sublimated” desire for movement, linked to submission — as a constituent of sophisticated musical love.24
The persona, embodied in the notated music and the actions of the performers, dominates the musical sounds and the listeners. Holding still, and knowing she is not allowed to make any sounds, the listener submits to the persona’s will, accepting the distinction between the roles of the active, willful persona and passive, receptive listener. At the same time, while the listener is inhabited and dominated by the persona, she also identifies with the persona’s power and activity.25
Familiarity and unfamiliarity, determinacy and indeterminacy, identification and submission. Music that creates an inability to settle one of of these poles has the listener rapt. As a listener I must expose a true vulnerability in my attendance to an artwork to be rapt this way, and as a composer I want to make music that can precipitate this vulnerability.
Maus swiftly “nudges” Cone’s account into explicitly sadomasochistic language. While risqué, this move is actually quite necessary in order to emphasize this music-listener relationship as a consensual one, and, most importantly, one in which the listener preserves all agency. Maus cites numerous examples of important literature on BDSM, but for my formulation of the listening vulnerability, I think of reading Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, and feeling the exhilaration of, again, being “caught-between,” in this case perhaps being caught between fear and desire. Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Venus, though more literary and thus more abstract than the texts invoked by Maus, mapped more directly onto my own musical aesthetic goals. Deleuze crucially posits the torturer as dependent on the victim, rather than the other way around. The torturer may only speak with the language of the victim. Where sadism is a rule of law, masochism is a rule of contracts:
The masochist appears to be bound by real chains, but in fact he is bound by his word alone. The masochistic contract implies not only the victim’s consent, but his ability to persuade, and his pedagogical and judicial efforts to train his torturer.26
The ability to consent to one’s dominated fate was crucial for Maus as well.27 Deleuze reiterates that pain is not the end the masochist has in mind; rather pain is a means of organization of a specific schedule for the distribution of pleasure. Masochism is an organization of pleasurable time, or more specifically, of sexual time. Much like with the “futurity” so crucial to concepts of meter for Zuckerkandl and later Hasty, Deleuze unpacks Freud’s pleasure principle, in this context, as a repetition that similarly organizes time:
[Repetition] is at once repetition of before, during, and after, that is to say it is a constitution in time of the past, the present, and even the future. From a transcendental viewpoint, past, present and future are constituted in time simultaneously, even though, from the natural standpoint, there is between them a quantitative difference, the past following upon the present upon the future. . . We saw that repetition came before the pleasure principle as the unconditioned condition of the principle. If we not return to experience, we find that the order is reversed, and repetition subordinated to the principle; it is now at the service of pleasure. . .28
This repetition is a repetition of a state of anticipation, of presentness, of waiting:
Formally speaking, masochism is a state of waiting; the masochist experiences waiting in its pure form. . . For at the same time as pain fulfills what is expected, it becomes possible for pleasure to fulfill what is awaited. The masochist waits for pleasure as something that is bound to be late, and expects pain as the condition that will finally ensure (both physically and morally) the advent of pleasure.29
Vulnerable openness is my goal as a listener; waiting is vulnerability. Vulnerability contains a trust and a consent to let an experience overtake or overwhelm. It is in the above-described versions of a state of suspension (as in: the temporary prevention of something from continuing, as distinct from suspense) that I attempt to evoke a Heideggerian unveiling. In listening, and in creating situations for this listening, I attempt to unveil a truth of self.
The state of vulnerable openness is the state in which I hope to receive the “background radiation” described above: that of household appliances dutifully giving resonant bedding to my life, and that warmth that I hope parts of my music can provide. I might also relate vulnerable openness to hooks’ “radical openness.” Radical, vulnerable openness cannot be directed. Radical, vulnerable openness cannot be hegemonic.
For Jean-Luc Nancy, “to listen is to be straining toward a possible meaning, and consequently one that is not immediately accessible.”30 I wish to allow myself to be suspended so that I may be opened, so that I may listen inward through that opening. For Nancy, this comes close as possible to self-knowledge:
it is a question of going back to, or opening oneself up to, the resonance of being, or to being as resonance. “Silence” in fact must here be understood not as a privation but as an arrangement of resonance: a little–or even exactly…–as when in a perfect condition of silence you hear your own body resonate, your own breath, your heart and all its resounding cave.31
For Nancy our bodies and our selves are primarily sites of resonance, the split consciousness divided into one that yells into an echoing cave after the other, using our primitive capacity for sonar to find her way:
A self is nothing other than a form or function of a referral: a self is made of a relationship to self, or of a presence to self, which is nothing other than the mutual referral between a perceptible individuation and an intelligible identity. . . this referral itself would have to be infinite, and the point or occurrence of a subject in the substantial sense would have never taken place except in the referral, thus in spacing and resonance, at the very most as the dimensionless point of the re- of this resonance: the repetition where the sound is amplified and spreads, as well as the turning back where the echo is made by making itself heard. A subject feels: that is his characteristic and his definition. This means that he hears (himself), sees (himself), touches (himself), tastes (himself), and so on, and that he thinks himself or represents himself, approaches himself and strays from himself, and thus always feels himself feeling a “self” that escapes or hides as long as it resounds elsewhere as it does in itself, in a world and in the other.32
Finally, apart from the aforementioned influences, I found great inspiration in disco music, especially that of Chic. In the breakdown section of “Good Times,” beginning at 3:15 and ending at 6:00 (!), every instrument save for the drums is removed from the texture at once, and added back in one-by-one. Each added instrument gets a full 16 bars before another layer is added. Nothing new is being added, the process is completely transparent. Add to this the incessant, driving, four-on-the-floor drums and the dancing subject is both pushed forward (by the beat) and suspended (by the lack of wonder or curiosity about the process or the future, turning one only back into oneself). In this way a lack of futurity accomplishes the same as an incessant presentness. For Walter Hughes, this aspect of disco unveils the self as a re-creation, located in a suspension between points:
a disciplinary, regulatory discourse that paradoxically permits, even creates a form of freedom. . . the beat deprives us of our will. Dancing becomes a form of submission. . . The destruction and re-creation of the self must be performed. . . not by the self itself but by some power above and beyond it. . . The power of disco to re-create the self lies in the always implicit parallel between the beat and desire.”33
I hope my music can fill a similar hole in an intimate concert hall, for a listener, such as myself, who wishes to “sublimate [their] desires for physical activity” in their “chosen style of imaginative submission.”34
—
1 Nattiez, p. 16.
2 Ibid., p. 17.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., p. 12.
5 When describing desired listening experiences in this text, I will continually refer to how the music affects me, rather than an imaginary (or worse, imaginarily objective) listener. To refer to the imagined listener as “one” or “they” presumes a false objectivity, and an impossible placing of myself in another’s shoes. I describe esthesis from the first person only to be as accurate as possible about my compositional process. In an online response to a New Music Box article which claimed composers should gear music more toward their audience, I contended that “Any attempt a composer may make to recreate the experience of another in his thought maps the composer’s experience onto a non-existent, imagined other that is always already a reflection of the composer.” (Power).
6 Heidegger, p. 162.
7 Sontag, p. 5.
8 Ibid., p. 11.
9 Devo. Lucier. Satie.
10 See Cone 1974; this work is also discussed in more detail below.
11 Sontag, p. 14.
12 Power 2013.
13 These two ways of shortening come from the original German Verfremdungseffekt and its original translation to “Alienation Effect.” Being that Brecht was a prominent Marxist, it became desirable to differentiate between Verfremdung and the Entfremdung of Marx’s “Alienation of Labor”; hence, “Estrangement Effect.”
14 Brecht, p. 143.
15 Ibid., p. 192.
16 Zuckerkandl, p. 160. Hasty, p. 5.
17 Zuckerkandl, p. 233.
18 Hasty, p. 168 (italics mine).
19 Ibid., p. 84.
20 Ibid., p. 73.
21 Whitehead, Process and Reality, pp. 136–137, quoted in Hasty, p. 66.
22 This was hammered home in a lesson with my teacher, Chaya Czernowin, who called a section of a draft “post-minimal,” and I knew something had to be done.
23 Maus, p. 25.
24 Ibid., p. 34.
25 Ibid., p. 35.
26 Deleuze, p. 75.
27 He quotes Suzanne Cusick, who writes of “the choice I cherish, which is to attend or not, to let the music ‘do it’ to me (which the musics I love can only do if I have paid the most careful, intense, co-creative attention). . . or not.” (Quoted in Maus, p. 38.)
28 Deleuze, p. 115.
29 Ibid., p. 71.
30 Nancy, p. 6.
31 Ibid., p. 21.
32 Ibid., pp. 21–22.
33 Hughes, pp. 148–150.
34 Maus (and Cone quoted in Maus), pp. 34–35.