Abstract
In the first two decades of the second millennium, music played an important role in the work of the philosopher Timothy Morton. As the culmination of their thinking about musical materials that started with Ecology Without Nature (2007), their book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013) proposed that 20th-century contemporary composers started to treat musical instruments radically differently from composers of earlier generations. These composers were no longer using instruments as 'materials-for (human production)' but rather used them in a way that made the listener attend to the instrument's 'thing’-ness and 'non-human'-ness. Within musicology, there is a related discussion taking place about the level of attention paid to the physicality of musical instruments when listening to music (in particular, Western instrumental art music). Andy Hamilton has, partly in response to the work of contemporary composers, formulated a 'two-fold thesis' as an improvement of Roger Scruton's anti-physicalist 'acousmatic thesis'. As Morton's work is divorced from and uninformed about these discussions, and as musicologists have not yet engaged with Morton's work, my goal with the first half of this text is to bridge that gap and assess and situate Morton’s ideas in relation to the musicological field. In the second part of the text, I am drawing a connection between Morton's aesthetics and the important 'thing-centered' art movement Mono-ha primarily in order to investigate another aspect of Morton's writings: its connection to Buddhism. Morton was a student of Tsoknyi Rinpoche, and since some of the work of Tsoknyi Rinpoche's brothers Mingyur Rinpoche and Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche has been quite extensively dealt with in my other texts, and as this is a tradition I myself have received some instruction in, it will be possible to assess Morton's OOO-informed musical aeasthetics from within this Buddhist framework.
The era of OOO
In hindsight, it seems as if Morton’s active involvement with the Björk retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the spring of 2015 marked the definitive high point in the establishment of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) as the 'trendiest' contemporary contribution to aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Leading up to this public endorsement of OOO in commercial, popular culture, Morton had previously been visible outside of academia by working closely with the Danish contemporary artist superstar Olafur Eliasson. Besides Morton, OOO’s instigator Graham Harman was around this time also active in the art world and was frequently invited to speak at museums and art centers. Between 2011 and 2016, it felt as if OOO was everywhere in the art scene. Since then, this movement has steadily decreased its influence and is no longer as visible as it once was.
One reason for OOO's popularity might have been that its philosophical focus was on things and objects. This made it an accessible ontology–everyone experiences and handles objects every day. Even when writing about something as 'immaterial' as music, Morton was primarily interested in its 'materiality'—most notably physical objects like the musical instruments themselves. Another reason for Morton's popularity in the art world seems to me to have been the way a deep interest in and serious engagement with popular culture and art was present in their work. In terms of music, examples of popular music like EDM, rave music, drone music, and My Bloody Valentine (their favorite band) abounded in their books and blog posts. These examples were used to explicate important points about Morton's theories of OOO (2013b). This as well made their writings accessible. Besides popular music, Morton also discussed art music such as the music of Keith Rowe (and free improvisation in general), John Cage, and La Monte Young. Morton's analysis of the music of Cage and La Monte Young will in particular be analyzed below.
A third reason for the popularity of Morton's OOO seems to me to have been its environmental focus. Morton's work in OOO always had a focus on human's relationship to the environment and to nature. This made their work very topical. Morton analyzed how certain ways of engaging with objects could make it possible or impossible to relate constructively to the environmental catastrophe. In the first book that deals with music, Ecology Without Nature, Morton's conclusion was fairly straightforward: as long as we think of 'Nature' in a dualistic relationship to 'non-Nature', we will be stuck in a Romantic dualism that will hinder us, as a culture, from finding a constructive way of relating to the current environmental catastrophe. In this book, Morton analyzed how this dualism expresses itself in aesthetics and also, perhaps more importantly, suggests how aesthetics can undo this dualism–a topic that becomes more fully explored in the later book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013).
Relation to musicology
Despite this popularity, few writers from the world of musicology and music theory responded to or even noticed Morton's ideas about OOO and music at the time of the peak of its popularity. This is especially surprising since Morton's writing about music can easily be situated within musicological discussions about virtuality and materiality. Joseph Nechvatal (2014) was rightfully surprised to find Morton’s concepts making their way into a publication about music around this time, Seth Kim-Cohen’s book Against Ambience (2013), but should perhaps not have been so surprised in this very case as Kim-Cohen is not a 'traditional' musicologist but a music philosopher who is very much paying attention to the art world. Except for this instance of engagement, Morton's work was, despite its relevance to the field of music, absent in music theory and musicology around this time.
Perhaps a reason for this is that Morton's discussions were often too general and lacking in concrete musical examples for musicologists to take note of them. Considering that not a single one of the books Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (2007), The Ecological Thought (2010), Realist Magic (2013), and Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013) failed to mention La Monte Young (and all except Realist Magic discusses Young’s music to some degree), Young's music is never carefully described or engaged in detail, and Morton, even in the most recent of these publications, included factual errors, such as claiming that La Monte Young was a student of John Cage. (Young attending some of Cage's "Experimental Composition" classes at The New School in the late fifties is not, I would argue, a reason to describe Young as a 'student' of Cage.) This kind of superficial and sweeping attitude to both the music and its historical facts and a seeming unawareness of discussions taking place within musicology that might have been related to their work were factors that I take to have led to the failure to inspire musicologists to take Morton's ideas seriously.
Ambient poetics, mediality, and materiality
Ecology Without Nature is to my understanding to first of Morton's publications that introduces discussions about music that we can relate to the musicological discussion about materiality and virtuality. Ecology Without Nature provides, among other things, a survey of techniques (tropes, literary and rhetorical devices) that so-called 'ecological' or 'environmental' art makes use of. The book is primarily written about literature but it also touches upon visual art (Mark Rothko, Andy Goldsworthy) and music (Keith Rowe, John Cage, La Monte Young). An important concept in which musical examples are important is Morton’s category of a type of ecomimesis called ambient poetics (which also is the concept that Kim-Cohen takes up in the aforementioned book). When art tries to conjure up or bring to life the atmosphere (the ambiance) surrounding the artwork itself, it is performing ambient poetics. In so doing, Morton (2007) writes, "ambient poetics seeks to undermine the normal distinction between background and foreground" (38). Music in which the surrounding ambient sounds somehow become 'activated' by the sounds that the performers make is music that performs ambient poetics.
The feature of ambient poetics that most prominently involves a discussion of music is what Morton calls 'the medial'. Morton writes that "[w]hen ecomimesis points out the environment, it performs a medial function, either at the level of content or at the level of form. Contact becomes content." (2007, 37). Besides pointing out the environment, the medial statement can also be self-reflexive–it can point to itself:
"One of the media that medial statements can point out is the very medium of the voice or of writing itself. Since the sound of music is available via the medium of, say, a violin, then a medial musical passage would make us aware of the “violin-ness” of the sound—its timbre." (2007, 38)
Somewhat frustratingly, Morton does not give any concrete examples of the types of passages for the violin that would make us aware of its violin-ness. Both the Toccatina by Helmut Lachenmann and the caprices by Paganini can, for example, be said to, in very different ways, reveal the 'violin-ness' of the violin—Paganini by drawing upon a range of idiomatic techniques (chords, arpeggios, harmonics, left-hand pizzicati) in a virtuosic fashion, and Lachenmann by revealing that the sound of the violin is made from the friction between a bow and a string attached to a resonating body. In later publications, it becomes clear that Morton considers the approach by Lachenmann the more medial of the two because it is the approach that makes audible the instrument's 'physicality' by for example isolating the noise from the pitch when for example playing tonlos bowing directly on the instrument's body.
Among the books discussed in this essay, Ecology Without Nature contains the least number of normative statements about what kind of art Morton considers to be helpful in fostering a new 'ecological awareness'. Morton is, in fact, generally pessimistic of ambient poetics' chances of accomplishing its implied aim of abolishing the divide between nature/culture, inside/outside, and subject/object, and argues that most instances of ambient poetics rather end up reinforcing these barriers. In the following book, The Ecological Thought, however, Morton argues more explicitly that if an aesthetic practice is to call itself "environmental", it "must deeply explore materiality" (2010, 107). The discussion of the 'medial statement' for the violin can then, as we will see below, be read as an early description of an example of an aesthetic practice that 'deeply' explores materiality since the 'contact' that becomes 'content' in this case is precisely the materiality of the instrument.
Already in Ecology Without Nature, Morton is making sure that this insistence on materiality is not, when applied to music, conflated with Acoustic Ecology’s disdain for the 'schizophonic' listening experiences where the listener is not in immediate contact with the real sound source (i.e. electronic acousmatic music). To deeply explore materiality does not have to mean that only acoustic music performed live on instruments in front of an audience is 'environmental'. Morton calls Acoustic Ecology a form of Romanticism that longs "for an organic world of face-to-face contact in which the sound of things corresponds to the way they appear to the senses and to a certain concept of the natural" (2007, 42). In The Ecological Thought, Morton explicitly argues against such a valorization of the local and material. Morton emphasizes the importance of dislocation as a feature of the desired ecological awareness they envision for the future. Rather than the valorization of location that we see in the work of Næss, Heidegger, and Acoustic Ecology thinkers, it is more important to recognize the dreamlike and illusory quality of reality than to reify 'places'. Morton takes sides with the electronic music composer Fransisco Lopez, known for blindfolding his audience while situating them in extremely immersive—one might say escapist—sound worlds. Lopez is known for his aversion toward Acoustic Ecology, and Morton writes how Lopez is against it not 'even though' but precisely because Lopez himself is an ecologist (2010b). Morton makes clear that their emphasis on dislocation does not come from some kind of futuristic, digital stance of post-naturalism or post-humanism, but rather finds its resonance amongst shamans and Tibetan Buddhists (2010, 27). I will have more to say about this Buddhist connection later in this text.
From The Ecological Thought, we learn that truly environmentally friendly art must explore materiality in some deep way, and from Ecology without Nature, we know that many attempts to undo the distinction between work and ambiance by drawing attention to the 'art object' by way of ecomimesis are futile. The final book considered here, Hyperobjects, is finally giving us some concrete musical examples of the type of art that is medial and explores materiality in the 'right' way.
In Hyperobjects, Morton represents the practices of some 20th-century composers as very different from composers of previous generations. In their work, the instruments are no longer 'materials-for' (human production), but rather the compositions of these composers make the listener attend to the musical instruments in and of themselves rather than functioning merely as means. Rather than expressing their feelings and ideologies with musical instruments, composers started to be sensitive to the agentive powers of the instruments themselves:
"Gradually the inside of the piano freed itself from embodying the inner life of the human being, and started to resonate with its own wooden hollowness" (2013, 165).
An important early step was John Cage’s prepared piano. Cage did not, according to Morton, write sounds to voice his inner being, but rather he gave sounds their own anarchic autonomy. Another example is La Monte Young:
"Instead of coming up with a new tune, Young decided to work directly with tuning… This is the music of attunement, not of stories" (2013, 166).
When listening to Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano, "we are hearing the piano as object, as open to its nonhumanness as is possible for humans to facilitate" (2013, 166). In fact, the piece is "a deliberate attunement to a nonhuman" (2013, 166). This is clearly building upon the idea of the 'medial statement' for the violin mentioned in Ecology without Nature, but imbuing it with more importance. It is not simply pointing to itself, but this self-reflexive act leads us to be attuned to the instrument's nonhumanness. This is what it means to deeply explore materiality. We can easily see why OOO would favor such listening experiences. This philosophical movement is all about the 'non-human turn'. To become less anthropocentric and more sensitive to things around us (sensitive to 'the call of things' as Jane Bannett, another OOO-type philosopher, calls it) is important for many philosophers of OOO. The following passage from Morton is worth quoting at length:
"So the Age of Asymmetry is not a return to animism as such, but rather animism sous rature (under erasure). It’s called the Age of Asymmetry because within human understanding humans and nonhumans face one another equally matched. But this equality is not like the Classical Acceleration era of the Anthropocene. The feeling is rather of the nonhuman out of control, withdrawn from total human access. We have even stopped calling nonhumans “materials.” We know very well that they are not just materials-for (human production). We have stopped calling humans Spirit. Sure, humans have infinite inner space. But so do nonhumans. So does that piano note at the end of “A Day in the Life.” So the Age of Asymmetry is also like the Romantic phase, because we have not lost the sense of inner space. This feeling of inner space has only expanded, since we now glimpse it in nonhumans. Some even find it in other “higher” primates, some in all sentient beings, and some (the real weirdos such as myself) in all beings whatsoever: eraser, black hole singularity, ceramic knife, molasses, slug." (2013, 172)
Here, the nonhumanness of objects is shown to not be dead matter but something that is not extramental. The "inner space" of the subject is "expanded" to now be in everything. As the ramifications of this argument will take us straight into Buddhist philosophies of Mind-Only and One Mind, I will return to it below. It is important to mention already here because it gesticulates toward a reason why an exploration of materiality is important. As will be emphasized in greater detail below, it is not about the material in and of itself but rather a nonhumanness and otherness that is deeply connected to sentience.
Two objections
From these readings of Morton’s texts, I imagine two objections to arise that I want to address.
Firstly, when Morton writes that La Monte's music is "the music of attunement, not of stories" (2013, 166), Morton is effectively making the assumption that we have to strip 'storytelling' away from music in order for us to attend to the 'object-ness' of its sounds/instruments. The question then becomes if musical attention is mutually exclusive in this regard that we cannot attend to both 'materiality' and narrativity at once.
Secondly, has music not always been about its materiality? Was music not hailed as 'pure' by modernist art theorists (e.g. Clement Greenberg) because it was non-referential and 'true' to its medium? I will begin by addressing the second objection and circle back through it to give an answer to the first objection.
The acousmatic thesis
When Kim-Cohen writes his manifesto for 'non-cochlear' art, he argues explicitly against a perceived consensus that wants music to be non-referential and only concerned with sound— completely devoid of the political and institutional content that Kim-Cohen seeks in sound art. Kim-Cohen writes that
"music has always functioned according to Greenbergian precepts. As a practice, music is positively obsessed with its media specificity. Only music included, as a part of its discursive vocabulary, a term for the foreign matter threatening always to infect it: 'the extramusical'." (2009, 39)
The 'extramusical' can refer both to how things like sung texts and written program notes can pollute the purity of musical experience, but also to how the music creates a virtual world in which things outside of it are 'extramusical'–even the musical instruments used to create the virtual world. In Greenberg’s modernist art theory, the material or 'medium' always included physical things such as canvas and oil. Within Common Practice period theorists, however, the 'material' rarely included the musical instruments themselves. What was considered to be 'musical materials' were instead things much more abstract, such as melodies, harmonies, chords, or Hanslick's 'tonally moving forms'. Andy Hamilton describes this consensus in the following way:
"There is a persisting tendency within music aesthetics and musical thought in general to say that musical sound is not really the sound of anything—at least not anything material. Music, the most abstract of the arts, is divorced from the material world. [...] Hence the acousmatic thesis [...]: that to hear sounds as music involves divorcing them from the worldly source or cause of their production." (2009, 147)
The term "acousmatic thesis" is used by Hamilton to specifically describe the account of music listening given by Roger Scruton as well as the wider 'tendency' in musical thought that Scruton's work is an instance of. On Scruton's account, musical sounds are explained to be heard as 'pure events' without any 'bridges to the physical world' (2009, 26). This kind of account is not just an abstract theory borne out of reasoning. It is, I would like to argue, the expression of a practice of listening. It is not primarily an epistemology of musical experience but a phenomenology. In other words, it is not something that arose exclusively amongst intellectuals such as Scruton when theorizing about music. Music was thought of as 'divorced from the material world' and its basic material was considered to be abstract chords and tones precisely because this described a feature of the dominant mode of listening employed when listening to the paradigmatic examples of Western classical music, such as symphonic music. When listening to this music, the phenomenologist Don Ihde accurately describes how the music creates its own virtual world devoid of its physicality. The moment we start paying attention to the physicality of the instruments, the virtuality is broken. For example, if the musician in the Romantic symphony makes an unintended noise, the virtual illusion breaks apart, and if some other experience disturbs us during a drone concert, we might get 'thrown out' of the music back into ‘reality’. Ihde describes that
"the flight of music into ecstasy is quickly lost if the instrument intrudes as in the case of having to listen to the beginner whose violin squeaks and squawks instead of sound in its own smooth tonality." (Ihde 1990, 99)
This smooth tonality makes Ihde "not even primarily hear the symphony as the sounds of the instruments", but "this ecstasy is … the occasion for an illusory phenomenon, the temptation toward the notion of a pure or disembodied sound." (Ihde 1990, 99)
Albert S. Bregman in turn describes how this 'acousmatic ideal' has led composers of the 20th century (and indeed many composers today) to treat instruments as mere sound-sources, almost like colors on a painter's palette:
"Now instruments have become generators of components of the timbre, and the orchestral timbre arises out of a fusion of these components. They act more like the individual oscillators in an electronic music studio." (1990, 489)
Scruton extends this listening practice as universally true for all 'Musical' listening; it is indeed what makes listening 'Musical' in the first place. On this account, to hear sounds as music is to divorce them from the source or cause of their production. This might be a controversial idea only if we read it (as Scruton intends it to be read) as a theory defining what constitutes any musical listening as 'Musical', and Hamilton is certainly correct to critique this. But if we instead read Scruton’s theory as a phenomenological description of a practice of listening (a practice of listening that Scruton takes to be paradigmatic, and which we too, as will be argued below, might want to agree with), we see that it is very congruent with the description above by the phenomenologist Ihde.
Two-fold thesis
The 'acousmatic ideal' has in recent times increasingly been put into question by musicologists. In recent decades, musicologists have turned their attention from 'text' (the score) to aspects of performance, social contexts, and embodiment—all of which seem to have rendered Scruton's anti-physical theory obsolete. Hamilton lists various arguments against the anti-physicalism of Scruton, all of which arise "from the fundamental fact that music is an art of performance" (Hamilton 2009, 167). By drawing upon the work in the visual field by Richard Wollheim, Hamilton formulates a two-fold thesis as a corrective to Scruton’s ‘acousmatic thesis’. This two-fold thesis recognizes music’s ability to make us hear-in the 'tonally moving forms' in the music in the same way as we are 'seeing-in' a landscape in a landscape painting. Yet, at the same time, we are also aesthetically enjoying the 'physical marks'. In the case of painting, these marks refer to the paint on the canvas and the painterly style. In the case of music, the marks refer to the physicality and materiality of instruments (and in an extended meaning to also include their performers). Scruton does not deny that we hear or pay some, albeit peripheral, attention to how the sounds are made, but he denies them musical meaningfulness. Proposed as a correction to Scruton's theory, Hamilton's two-fold thesis states that listening to music involves both non-acousmatic and acousmatic experiences and that both are genuinely musically meaningful parameters.
This begs the question: does just because scholars have made this 'turn' from 'score' to 'performance' and from the 'virtual' to the 'embodied' indicate that the habits of listeners have also changed? Is it not interesting that Hamilton has been provoked to formulate his correction to Scruton by encounters with the contemporary music he so often cites (Lachnemann, Cage, and Harvey)? Scruton, who is much more conservative in his tastes, did not need to account for that music in his 'acousmatic thesis' (Hamilton 2009). Perhaps one can say that there is a historical perspective lacking in Hamilton’s text when he, just like Scruton, believes that one explanatory model can be valid for all music. Instead of replacing Scruton's theory, a better approach would be to introduce a historical perspective into modes of listening and to recognize that different kinds of music call for different modes of listening. In describing a few modern pieces, Scruton’s analysis would be insufficient. A paradigmatic example could be Pierluigi Billone’s Mani. Gonxha (2011) for a percussionist playing two Tibetan 'singing bowls'. The embodied, theatrical, and ritualistic aspect of the performance is key to understanding the meaning of this piece, and merely attending to the 'virtual', disembodied 'tonally moving forms' (i.e. the acousmatic sound) that result from a performance would be to miss the point completely. In describing this piece, Hamilton's corrective moves us much closer to accurately describing the listener’s experience. In describing a Romantic symphony, however, the analysis of Scruton would be sufficient, while Hamilton’s added emphasis would be superfluous with regard to what the adequate mode of listening to this music really is like.
There is, however, one way in which Hamilton's theory could apply to a multitude of modes of listening, and that has to do with explaining why live performances are more satisfactory than recordings. Scruton's theory of sounds as 'virtual' and music being 'disembodied' have a hard time explaining why hearing Cage's violin solo One^6 is richer when heard performed in the same room as we are. Hamilton's point is that this added 'richness' cannot be separated from the 'music'. Hamilton has here pointed out a weak spot in Scruton's theory that has to be solved somehow, but I do not know if this ahistorical and musically universal 'two-fold thesis' does that.
In contrast to these theories, there is a historical perspective underlying Morton’s work. For Scruton and the listening practice that he endorses, hearing the piano primarily as an object would mean not hearing it as music–it would mean listening to it in a mundane, instrumental way marked by conceptuality. For Scruton, the instrument is what delivers the Music (with a capital M). In the listening practice that Morton describes, the relationship is reversed; the music (for example, the score) is what delivers the instrument. Crucially, this different mode of listening does not just come about from nowhere, or because of yet another 'turn' in academia, but is brought about by the creation of new music by avant-garde composers. This new music is, according to Morton, characterized by a desire from the composers to conduct a deeper exploration of materiality. The composers of this music are no longer using instruments as 'materials-for' the production of virtual worlds, or, as Bregman described it above, as anonymous components of an orchestral timbre. With this perspective in mind, we can say that Morton is on to something when describing that listeners had not really paid attention to the piano as an object before being invited by contemporary composers to do so. This insistence on the historical development of composition and modes of listening should be counted as an important contribution that we can take from Morton's work into the musicological discussion. If Cage’s and La Monte Young’s piano pieces were the first pieces to invite such listening is, however, something that can be further debated.
Hearing sounds or instruments
Taking into account my own listening experiences of Cage's music for prepared piano that Morton describes, I would like the pose the following question: is the mode of listening to Cage's prepared piano really so different from the listening practice that Scruton elucidates? A piece like Billone's Mani. Gonxha is indeed distorted by Scruton's explanation, and while it is true that Cage's prepared piano and Lachenmann's music bring us a heightened awareness of the physicality of the production of sound by making tones more 'noisy', complex, and indeterminate, we must honestly ask ourselves: do we really hear the objects that produce the sounds in the sounds themselves? Scruton's main claim about sounds is that they "cannot be related easily to their causes by the perceiving ear, and are not imprinted, in the manner of visual images, with either the contours of the location of the things that produce them" (2009, 28). Scruton explains, I believe accurately, that
"[t]he physical events that cause my auditory perceptions are not represented within my auditory field, so a description of the intentional object is not a description of the physical events. The auditory field, unlike the visual field, does not depict its cause." (Scruton 2009, 26)
This is what Scruton means with sounds as 'pure events' that exist in a 'virtual world', and I believe Scruton's phenomenology here is accurate, especially in moments of musical attunement (Stimmung) which are nondual in character and marked by aesthetic detachment: these moments are not about us as individuals trying to get something from the world. In musical attunement, sounds are neither heard as 'out there' nor as solely 'in here' (Wallrup 2012). In fact, Hamilton's corrective to Scruton's view would on this view amount to imbuing 'mere sounds' with conceptual categorizations that are not present in the sounds themselves. This is in accordance with Dharmakīrtian epistemology: what appears in consciousness is a non-conceptual mere sound and this mere sound does not have a trace of externality in it. The subsequent conceptual categorization transforms the perception of sound into something that has a 'material cause' in the form of a 'physical object'. This is not a musical listening but a practical, intention-driven listening. This is to create a form of artificial dualism that hinders the direct and non-dual engagement with sound that characterizes musical attunements. This point is also found in Vasubandhu's claim in the Abhidharmakośa that the cause of a sound of a bell–"the sound of bell due to contact with a hand" (Gold 2015, 107)–is not something perceived but only something "settled through inference [amumāna]" (Gold 2015, 107). Hearing the 'material cause' or 'physical object' in a sound in is no longer to engage in direct perception but to impose conceptuality onto the experience.
Morton's disdain for Acoustic Ecology's anti-schizophonic Romanticism as well as Morton's siding with the 'dislocationist' aesthetics of Lopez would be hard to unify with an aesthetics that is about affirming and reifying actual physical objects through sound. The call to explore materiality can thus not be interpreted to be about 'making us hear the actual physical objects that produce sound as posited in a naive realist world-view', even though Morton's own words sometimes make it seem like that. The call to explore materiality has to be interpreted to be about exploring sound itself, not instruments. Sounds themselves are, just like Scruton beautifully illustrates in a metaphor with strong Buddhist overtones, like rainbows. They have no 'simple location' and have transparent edges. This is also how I interpret Vimalakīrti's description that when we "hear sounds as if they were echoes" (Thurman 1976, 26), we hear them as they truly are. And what they truly are is divorced from any material cause, just like an echo itself is not the sound of any direct object. Calling this 'an exploration of materiality' can be misleading if we only think that 'material' means actual physical stuff. 'Material' here just means the building blocks of musical perception, which are empty, virtual, nondual sounds.
Music without representation: another two-fold thesis
According to Morton, one of the ways in which contemporary composers made listeners pay attention to sounds themselves was by eliminating ‘story-telling’ (2013, 166). Such a statement assumes that musical attention is mutually exclusive; story-telling and close attention to materiality cannot exist concurrently. If we decide to agree or not with such an assumption will be dependent on what exactly we mean by 'story-telling' and what we mean by close attention to materiality. By investigating the most ‘extreme’ form of musical 'story-telling', musical representation, we might be able to draw some conclusions.
A different, more literal, musical application of Wollheim’s ‘seeing-in’ than Hamilton’s can be found in the work of Giorgio Biancorosso. In Biancorosso’s usage, ‘hearing-in’ refers to musical representation. In an illuminating passage, Biancorosso writes how the theme music for the movie Jaws stops functioning as representational music if we pay too much attention to its physicality or materiality. In other words, if we pay too much attention to the sounds of the musical instruments, or any other musical parameter, we no longer hear the shark in the music. “To hear the shark in the music”, Biancorosso writes, “is essentially, then, a process of disambiguation underpinned by selective attention. This is not to say that alternative aspects of the music go unperceived; rather, our attention is fixed firmly on what the music represents (its ‘recognitional’ aspect)—the ‘shark’—rather than on its formal (or ‘configurational’) aspect—the motive qua motive” (2010, 315-316). In a clarifying footnote, he expands that:
“the substitution of a stream of musical sounds for the agency of the shark ensures that some awareness of the medium will always be lurking beneath the threshold of our attention. But by the same token one could also argue that rather than calling attention to the medium, the deployment of music heightens the impression of an unseen presence, stressing as it were the absence of the image, and further driving attention away from the sonic medium as such” (Biancorosso 2010, 326).
If it is the soundtrack to Jaws that Morton considers to be paradigmatic of music that embodies 'story-telling', then the examples and analysis provided by Biancorosso corroborate Morton's thesis that we have to strip music away from 'story-telling' in order for us to attend to the object-ness of the sounds of its instruments. It is only when there is nothing to hear-in and the listeners are left with the bare surface level that they can pay complete attention to the materiality itself; contact becomes content, as Morton says. Most instances of musical 'story-telling' are, however, not as 'extreme' as the musical representation in Jaws, and one can imagine that in these other instances, the demand for mutual exclusivity is weakened. One can even make arguments for some level of narrativity present even in the abstract and non-representational examples used by Morton, such as La Monte Young's The Well-Tuned Piano in which the poetic subtitles that are given to movements, such as Ancestral Lake region, perhaps suggest a less 'pure' vision of musical expression on La Monte's part than what Morton imagines. I would even argue that in a lot of art that we find meaningful, we seldom exclusively pay attention to the 'materiality' of the art. There are almost always some ways in which art also allows for leaps of the imagination beyond the audible. This is true even of minimalist artists such as that of Agnes Martin, as Tiffany Bell beautifully comments:
"[For Martin,] nature remained a constant point of reference. Although she continuously denied that her work represented landscape and mostly stopped using titles that evoked natural imagery, she continued to use metaphors from nature to describe the experience of seeing her work and the feelings she wished to convey. Most beautifully, she compared the experience of looking at ther work to watching clouds and never seeing any the same, or viewing waves of the sea, continuously breaking on the shore always the same but always different. In her art, a contrast between material presence and the suggestion of something other - a memory or feeling - is always present." (Bell 2017, 29)
In traditional Japanese flower arrangements and rock-and-sand gardens (karesansui), we find that a focus on the sensuous quality of appearances can effectively be coupled with the suggestion of something beyond the directly perceived. The arrangements of flowers and rocks suggest larger and more distant images–vast scenes of rivers and mountains. The preface to the kadō manual Ikenobō Sen’ō kuden describes that
“with a little water and a short branch, one can represent a spectacular scene with many rivers and mountains, a beautiful scene of eternal changes amid the ephemeral." (Shirane 2012, 100).
In Japanese, this quality is conveyed with the term mitate (見立). Haruo Shirane explains that
"mitate, which means something like "to see X as Y," does not refer to the replication of a distant object or landscape so much as its evocation through one or more physical features, such as a figuration of rocks and sand. The kare-sansui could thus suggest a specific or general distant landscape while appearing natural in its configuration." (2012, 96-97)
As Shirane argues, the presence of mitate does not mean that an aesthetic quality of zōka, or ego-less naturalism, can not be present simultaneously. The distant image is there at the very same time as the arrangement appears natural. We can, however, bring to mind situations in which the representative or narrative aspect of the art takes over and becomes the sole focus of attention. Dùshùn (杜順), the first patriarch of the Huáyán school, described the process in which the shì (事)—the particular phenomena—can hide the lǐ (理)—the universal principle of emptiness. Although emptiness is the nature of all things, phenomena can take on shapes that hide this. It is similar to only seeing the landscape in a landscape painting and not even realizing the material that has been used to paint it, or when a sculpture of a human becomes so realistic that we only see the human and not the material. In music, this happens when narrativity and strong metaphors cause what Biancorosso referred to as a 'process of disambiguation underpinned by selective attention'. If the music becomes too heavily symbolic, metaphoric, or narrative, we end up with a situation as in the soundtrack to Jaws where we, in order to hear the shark, must ignore the music's 'material' presence.
As an answer to our previous question if musical attention is mutually exclusive to the extent that we cannot attend to both 'materiality' and narrativity at once, we can perhaps say that while it is possible to create situations of mutual exclusivity between symbol and phenomena, this is not necessarily the case. I would even suggest that it is only in extreme cases that this is so. What I mean to suggest by evoking the art of Agnes Martin and the traditional arts of kadō and karesansui is that there are artworks where a material presence and evocative suggestions of forms can co-exist in highly stimulating ways. Indeed, this stimulating interplay between what exists and what is imagined is what makes much art valuable. But there is an important distinction to be made here: hearing the shark in Jaws comes about because the mind mistakenly thinks there is some kind of 'depth' behind phenomena–something to be 'read into' phenomena. It is about mistakenly trying to penetrate behind surfaces. The kind of evocations that happen in Martin's artworks and flower arrangements are not like this. Here, the playful imagination is allowed to operate precisely from the insight that surfaces are the only thing to phenomena. It is not about trying to penetrate phenomena but about using the phenomena as springboards for leaps of the imagination.
Modes of listening and one mind
Having addressed our two initial objections, we have seen how it is possible to relate the work of Morton to current discussions within musicology. Not only is it possible to relate, but Morton's insistence on the historicity of modes of listening and how these modes are contingent upon the techniques used by composers complements the work of Scruton and Hamilton, whose approaches are more ahistorical. The types of hearing that Morton describes are afforded by specific musical performances of specific constellations of sounds. In Cage’s prepared piano pieces and Young's The Well-Tuned Piano, it is, according to Morton, the unique compositional articulation of sounds that makes it possible for the listener to enact musical modes of listening in which the piano sounds 'in themselves'–the music's 'materiality'–is given close attention. Since compositions and modes of listening change over time, the way listeners enact materiality changes. No model to explain all modes of listening (such as an acousmatic thesis or a two-fold thesis) is therefore valid across all historical and societal changes.
More than just introducing a historical perspective from which one can analyze the act of listening to the materiality of music, Morton argues for how this listening has societal and soteriological implications. For Morton, new modes of listening are necessary to achieve the goal of overcoming anthropocentrism. In order to appreciate how modes of listening relate to this soteriological goal, it is important to emphasize that what Morton intends with listening to mere materiality and to music that lacks the kind of 'hearing-in' that characterizes symbolic music is not a mode of listening that lacks in absorption. For Morton, this focus on materiality invites an immersive feeling. It should, therefore, not be confused with what Michael Fried would have called a 'theatrical' mode of perception.
In Fried’s famous pair of 'absorption' and 'theatricality', the 'theatricality' of minimal art does not invite 'absorption' or something like 'hearing-in' but instead effectively distances the beholder precisely because it is 'just an object'. The art object becomes an object like any other object that subjects encounter in a dualistic world. What Morton describes is rather a sense of immediate intimacy with materials and a deliberate attunement, a Stimmung, to the 'non-humanness' of the objects themselves. The audience is not 'absorbed' in the escapist way that characterizes some art where the audience is transported to a virtual world but they nonetheless are nondually attuned to another form of presence.
This interpretation is different than one possibly made when first encountering OOO. From the outset, OOO might seem to propose a reification of objects, which would not be possible to harmonize with the anti-essentialism and anti-objectification of the Buddhist thought that Morton draws upon when articulating how the goal of overcoming anthropocentrism feels. Thinking of Morton's aesthetics as involving a conceptualization of sounds as objects is to misconstrue the phenomenology of the kind of experience that Morton has in mind with their OOO aesthetics. It is not about reifying sounds into objects with labels but about bringing attention away from the composer's will to the 'will' of the non-human sounds–to recognize the distribution of agency and dependent origination. There are no selves or essences but only mere relationality.
Morton, as we saw above, develops the idea of dependent origination when writing that the "inner space" of the subject is "expanded" so that it is now "in all beings whatsoever: eraser, black hole singularity, ceramic knife, molasses, slug." (Morton 2013, 172). This is markedly one step further than when Latour in the nineties called for philosophers to recognize the distributed agency of actions–the fact that actions involve "a coalescence of human and nonhuman elements" and, therefore, "the responsibility for action must be shared among them" (Latour 1999, 180-182). It is also one step further than when the editors of Material and Nonhuman Agency (2008) wrote that the clay of the potter's wheel is just as much "a functionally co-substantial component of the intentional character of the potting experience" (2008, xiv) as the potter. Both of these are examples of OOO-adjacent movements to recognize nonhuman agency, but none of them go as far as Morton in considering everything to be of one mind.
When Morton writes that what we conventionally think of as the "inner space" of a subject expands to all beings and objects, Morton does not endorse a monistic ontology but points to how everything is relational and nothing is extramental. Similarly, when the Buddhist poet Saigyō wrote of the entire natural world as awakened, he did not mean that the objects of the natural world are comprised of unlimited awakened 'souls' nor that all of these souls are but part of a singular great sentience, but rather that everything is part of an interdependent system in which the distinction between 'alive' and 'dead' matter is meaningless. As LaFleur (1974) explains, Saigyō treats the phenomena of nature–the objects around us–as if they themselves are the Tathāgata. By forgetting himself and immersing himself in their non-humanness, Saigyō is in direct contact with what in the Chinese Buddhist tradition is sometimes referred to as the 'one mind':
"Saigyō found what was religiously meaningful to him when he was encompassed by a willow tree, when he felt united with the moon, when he yielded his life to the sky, when he gave over the remains of his body to the safekeeping of a pine tree, and when his heart and mind were "taken" by the blossoms of spring. The action involved is always one of giving, yielding, and surrendering—as if it is the Absolute to which he is giving himself." (LaFleur 1974, 237)
From this perspective, Morton does not talk about 'objects' because these exist intrinsically as substantial things but talks about objects as a way of pointing to this indeterminate field of emptiness where sentience is distributed beyond the sphere of what we conventionally think of as the domain of sentience. Saigyō's blossoms of spring, pine trees, and the moon can be called 'objects'. Yet, the phenomenology of the attunement to these does not bear a single trace of any conceptuality or reification of 'objects'. Likewise, for Morton, it is not about reifying objects but about surrendering oneself to them and, in so doing, attuning oneself not to intrinsic objects but to the field of emptiness.
OOO and Mono-ha
What I here interpret Morton to have in mind with their aesthetics of Object-Oriented-Ontology has similarities to the experiences described by Lee Ufan in his artistic use of objects. At the beginning of his career, Lee was closely associated with the art movement Mono-ha, often translated into English as the "School of Things". Both Morton and Lee, in other words, come from thing-centered movements. However, in neither case, as we will see below in the case of Lee, is the purpose of the movement about reifying things or objects. Since Lee, in his writings, is more explicit in articulating the non-object focus of his artistic movement, his work will elucidate what I interpret Morton to have in mind with their OOO-aesthetics.
The works of the Mono-ha often consist of clearly recognizable things, most often pre-existing natural or industrial objects, placed directly on the floor in a gallery space or an outdoor exhibition area. Yoshitake (2012) writes:
“Collectively, Mono-ha represents a tendency to present transient arrangements of natural and industrial materials—such as charcoal, cotton, dirt, Japanese paper, stones, wood, glass, light bulbs, and steel plates—directly on the floor or ground and interacting with their architectural spaces or outdoor sites.” (2012, 1)
Encountering these installations means encountering material stuff in an unmediated way; the material is not used to build symbolic structures but is presented as raw material. In Lee’s sculptures, untreated natural stones, glass, and industrial steel plates are three of the most commonly recognized materials. But if we think that this art is about raw objects, we are just as mistaken as when believing that OOO is about objects. The so-called "school of things" is actually very little concerned with the things themselves.
In describing his usage of stones, Lee explains that he "turned to stones because of their otherness and their connection to the outside world, which is not identical with the self" and that "they strongly suggest unlimited externality" (2018, 74). In other words, it was not a fascination with stones in and of themselves that led Lee to use them in his sculptures, but rather the way they managed to point to something beyond themselves–something 'metaphysical'. Lee explains this in terms of a renewed relationship between externality–or 'over-there-ness'–and internality–or 'here-ness'. The goal was to, through objects, transcend subject-object dichotomy.
In a 1970 roundtable conversation for the art magazine Bijutsu techō that centered around an elucidation of the term mono (things), the artists of Mono-ha clearly asserted what the purpose of their art was, and one of their goals was explicitly to not locate the artwork in the physicality or object-ness of the objects. The list as summarized by Yoshitake (2012, 4) reads:
"1) the explicit rejection of creation and individuality, which the artists associated as part of a broad artistic category known as "Non-Art" (非芸術 Hi-geijutsu);
2) an attempt to locate the work not in its objective form as a physical object (物 butsu), a tactile material (物質 busshitsu), or a found object (オブジェ obuje = objet), but in the structures through which things reveal their existence;
3) affective sensations arising from charged "encounters" (出会い deai);
4) the liberation from intentions, methods, or concepts in order to reveal the essential state of things; and
5) one’s intimate contact with the world through shigusa (仕草), an interactive act that dissolves the subject and object as distinct entities."
As clearly expressed here, Mono-ha art is more about the space around things and that which reveals things rather than about the objects themselves. It is about the essential 'state' or 'nature' of things rather than particular physical objects. The objects are carefully presented in the gallery space so that all elements interact in a particular way to make possible revelatory ways of seeing that are different from our mundane way of seeing–ultimately providing the visitors with disclosures of being and emptiness. As a viewer, I would say that it is a certain feeling of spaciousness, infinity, and groundlessness that is relished when encountering these works; it is not about 'looking' at certain 'objects'. Yoshitake writes:
“This interaction comprises a central formative principle that presents all elements (subject, material, and site) as inseparable and nonhierarchical, bringing about a key condition to open and be opened by the work” (2012, 1).
Lee writes of his work that it eliminates "everydayness and arouses fresh perception" (Lee 2018, 72). In my interpretation, 'everydayness' here means what in Yogacāra philosophy is known as the conceptualized nature (parikalpita-svabhāva), and the 'fresh perception' means an intimation of the perfected nature (pariniṣpanna-svabhāva). The Mono-ha artists hold that art should attune the audience to a state of mind where the subject-object structure of ordinary life is temporarily suspended. The artworks achieve this not by acts of 'artistic (individualistic) expression' or by focusing on the sensuality of the objects but rather by focusing on the relations and gaps between objects/spaces, figures/grounds, subjects/objects. It is "an attempt to locate the work not in its objective form, but in the structures through which things reveal their existence" (Yoshitake 2012, 37). By drawing attention to the relationality of perceived and perceiver and the dependent nature of figures and grounds, the art puts the viewer in touch with the indeterminate and ambiguous field of dependent origination, or the dependent nature (paratantrasvabhāva):
"What goes from "here" to "over there" and comes from "over there" to "here" meets at the artwork, which opens up as an ambiguous place. This situation is the source of what the word Mono-ha means." (Lee 2018, 238)
In Yogacāra philosophy, the perfected nature is precisely the experience of the dependent nature without the conceptualized nature. This mode of being is not achieved by the artist trying to say something symbolically or narratively with the materials. At the same time, structuring the objects so that affective 'encounters' with the artwork take place is something that the Mono-ha artists realized facilitates this pre-dualistic mode to reveal itself in an epiphanic manner. These affectively charged encounters, however, are completely non-symbolic.
Mono-ha and Morton’s OOO aesthetics are neither about objects as they relate to ordinary, conceptual life, but equally important to emphasize is that they not are about getting access to an object in its 'pure' state uncontaminated by our subjectivities. The artists of the Mono-ha use the materials in themselves, but this does not mean that the art is about either reifying or revealing this materiality. The perfected nature should not be misinterpreted as some 'pure' way of perceiving objects. When Lee draws upon the Kantian term of Ding as sich to describe the content of artistic revelations ("[c]ontemporary art culminates in revelatory things, what Kant called the thing in itself (Ding an sich) [2018, 86]), I do not interpret him to mean perceiving objects in some kind of purified state. Part of the reason for this is that for Kant, even though he sometimes wrote as if every object was an appearance of some Ding as sich, such a theory is incompatible with Kant’s theory of knowledge and one must therefore, as Scruton argues, "consider the thing-in-itself to be a nonentity" (2001, 57). The revelations that Lee gesticulates towards that art induces are not about having some kind of 'unfiltered' 'pure' experience of an 'essential' object through an (unrealizable) perspectivelessness (i.e., a revelation of a realist thing). No such Ding as sich exists.
Equally important to stress is that the "revelatory things" that Lee has in mind are also not about seeing perceptions only as intransitive appearances (vijñaptimātra, or a Vorstellungen as Kant would call it)—the appearance that is not the appearance of anything. Just as the Yogācārins did not posit that 'everything is merely perceptions' (vijñaptimātra) as some kind of ontological claim about reality, so too does not the work of Mono-ha attempt to affirm any ontological idealism. Dan Lusthaus makes an important point when writing about how vijñaptimātra is for the Yogācārins "an epistemic caution, not an ontological pronouncement" (2002, 6). The soteriological goal is much further reaching than merely seeing everything as perceptions. It is a goal they share with the Mono-ha artists as I understand them: to examine the very causes which produce the impulses to "attribute some status or another to the 'objects' we cognize and experience" (Lusthaus 2002, 26) with an aim towards erasing these impulses. The usage of vijñaptimātra "is thus hermeneutical and soteric, since its aim is the rupture and definitive overcoming of cognitive closure [vijñaptimātra], not its reification" (2002, 26) This point is also made by Siderits (2007):
"The dependent [paratantra(svabhāva)] is what is left when we strip away from the imagined [parikalpita(svabhāva)] what is wrongly imputed through our use of concepts and the subject-object dichotomy. But to the extent that we are thinking of it at all – even if only as the non-dual flow of impressions-only – we are still conceptualizing it. So if, as the Mahāyāna sūtras seem to hold, conceptual proliferation (prapañca) is the most fundamental expression of ignorance, then there remains something to be stripped away from the dependent. Thus we arrive at the perfected mode of taking our experience, which is just pure seeing without any attempt at conceptualization or interpretation. Now this is also empty, but only of itself as an interpretation. That is, this mode of cognition is devoid of all concepts, and so is empty of being of the nature of the perfected. About it nothing can be said or thought, it is just pure immediacy" (Siderits 2007, 178).
The revelation that art induces must, therefore, be geared toward recognizing that such a fundamental groundlessness is beyond the existence and non-existence of not only things but also perceptions. In an evocative passage about the encounter with the steel structures of Richard Serra, Lee again draws upon Kant when writing that "a person standing in their presence is overwhelmed by a sense of strangeness and brute silence. Is the act of seeing finally transformed into an encounter with a mysterious Ding an sich?" (2018, 105). As anyone in the presence of Serra's large steel structures can testify, the 'thing in itself' that Lee suggests that we encounter can not refer to any of these three things: the actual steel, the object made out of steel, and our 'mere perceptions' of it. The sublime feeling that arises is instead due to the presencing of some unspeakable groundlessness, perhaps what Siderits calls 'pure immediacy'. Lee calls this a "world of silent otherness" (2018, 105), presumably because we can not make any kind of determinate judgment about it–there is nothing that can be said about it. Serra's large steel structures are prototypical of the objects Morton describes as unhuman. They offer nonconceptual immediate encounters and attunements to unhuman otherness. Since this otherness is not objectified, Morton's aesthetics derived from Object Oriented Ontology does not lead to Object Oriented Listening, but rather the opposite: Objectless Listening.
Mono-ha is thus ultimately about breaking the conceptualized nature and revealing the world with something closer to the perfected nature as explained by the Yogācāra philosophers. In his text "Beyond Being and Nothingness: On Sekine Nobuo", Lee explicitly draws upon Buddhist soteriology as an explanatory framework. In this text about Sekine Nobuo's 1968 piece Phase—Mother Earth, Lee writes that Sekine creates a structure that enables objects to be perceived as nondual and nonconceptual emptiness. Through Sekine’s artistic act of making the 1968 piece Phase—Mother Earth, objects were "transmogrified into dharmakāya" (2011, 112). The dharmākāya refers to the unconditioned, space-like, nature or reality, which is the same as the nature of awakening. In other words, Sekine transformed ordinary material into the nature of reality–transformed conventional truth into ultimate truth. Gyurme Dorje (2006, 452) describes the dharmakāya as:
“the ultimate nature or essence of the enlightened mind, which is uncreated (skye-med), free from the limits of conceptual elaboration (spros-pa'i mtha'-bral), empty of inherent existence (rang-bzhin-gyis stong-pa), naturally radiant, beyond duality and spacious like the sky" (2006, 452).
Later in life, Lee would denounce any connection to Buddhism. In an interview with Sook-Kyung Lee, Lee said that "I don’t know either Zen or Buddhism very well. Those terms actually contribute to the misunderstanding of my work" (2014). This rejection of Buddhism should, however, be read as a response to the insistent caricature of Lee's art as being "Zen" by Western critics, maybe especially as Lee's later sculptures started to resemble the stone and rock gardens of Zen temples. The 'idea' of Zen functioned like a filter that made people misunderstand Lee's art, and for this reason, Lee felt the need to reject the connection. This does not, however, mean that the connection is not there.
Normative aesthetics
While a deeper exploration of the phenomenology of art experiences as explained by Lee Ufan will have to be left for another time, I wanted to draw upon Lee here as one example of how one can read Morton’s OOO-aesthetics as being in tune with the 'Tibetan Buddhists' that Morton indicates. John Cage’s intention with the prepared piano was not, according to this interpretation of Morton, to reify the piano as sich, but to open up our experience for otherness and non-humanness in a way that ultimately gives rise to the kind of experiences that feels freed from the imagined nature. Talking about 'objects' is, to Morton, then not about reifying these because they essentially exist, but is merely a way of drawing attention to the empty sphere of relationality–to what some Buddhists variably speak of as the dharmadhātu, the one mind, or the essence of awakened mind–the dharmakāya.
Morton's aesthetics is already normative before this Buddhist connection is spelled out. It is not just merely descriptive but regards what kind of consciousnesses should be cultivated for the future flourishing of sentient life. Morton's philosophical approach to music is thus not too different from the project of a thinker like Adorno. They are similar in that they both argue for how compositions and the resultant modes of listening and acts of cognition can either keep us listeners stuck in our old habits and volitional formations or lead us onward to 'enlightenment' (although what they define as 'enlightenment' and which kind of music that would lead us there could not be more different). But we should also bring to mind the words of Tia DeNora when she warns us that:
"While music may be, seems to be, or is, interlinked to ‘social’ matters—patterns of cognition, styles of action, ideologies, institutional arrangements—these should not be presumed. Rather, their mechanisms of operation need to be demonstrated. If this demonstration cannot be achieved, then analysis may blend into academic fantasy and the music–society nexus rendered ‘visionary’ rather than ‘visible.’ " (DeNora 2000, 4)
In this text, I have not attempted to demonstrate the validity of Morton’s ideas but have tried to account for my interpretation of them. Speaking from my personal experience, I do not know if Cage's pieces for prepared piano truly embody the qualities that Morton seeks from art. Yes, the timbre is variegated and not just homogenous, which draws attention to the unique timbre of sounds, but the music is full of narrativity, expression, and gestures to the extent that, as Dùshùn described it, the shì hides the lǐ. In my opinion, it is rather the Number Pieces by Cage that I think better fits Morton's theory and that has the potential to attune listeners to the qualities Morton seeks from art, something I explore more closely in the texts Notes after listening to one of John Cage's Number Pieces and Cage's Ordinariness.
Morton's contribution is, however, still valuable even without the kind of demonstration that deNora calls for. The reason for this is that by simply arguing that how we listen to musical instruments has far-reaching societal and soteriological implications, Morton's work is reminding us of something that seems to be getting less and less attention within music studies. It reminds us how important modes of listening can be, even in their most subtle details concerning foci of attention, in shaping human minds and, therefore, not treating the subject lightly. The perhaps innocent debate between Hamilton and Scruton concerning whether or not the physicality of sound is part of musical listening suddenly becomes a debate with far greater gravity and importance. It relates not only to a minor detail about how to think about musical experiences and which way of describing them is the most 'accurate' but becomes a discussion of which way of listening is more skillful and leads to wiser humanity.
