SubStance

Music has long been a problematic topic in the field of aesthetics. Though at first it seems the most distinguishable art form, try as one might to discover music’s essence, the investigation will always depend on evidence of musicality that bleeds into related terms like harmony, rhythm, coherence and resonance. Under scrutiny, music dissolves into a net of distinctions. Neither silence nor noise nor mere sound, music is sound marked, qualified, stereotyped, somehow distinctive, and thus communicative. Music research presents practical challenges as well. While a scholar discussing a painting or sculpture might include a reproduction in the paper, aside from the conventional notation and staff of the musical score, music eludes this kind of mimetic capture, and for the foreseeable future conferences papers will be read and not sung. Beset by semantic dispersion and aniconicity, the “suchness” of music is everywhere in dispute.

Both ubiquitous and evanescent, unlike the object-oriented arts of painting or sculpture, music consists of passing sensible intensities, which, though subjective and ephemeral, interweave us with others to form biopolitical assemblages: the audience, the crowd, the market, the mob, the species. Though various disciplines develop their own partial, peer-ratified object of scrutiny, their own claim on the flesh of music, in this new millennium there is a great need for scholars of music who can move across the various disciplinary boundaries, for the aesthetic and commercial stakes of music have never been higher, nor more vexed.

In Sound Ideas: Music, Machine and Experience, Aden Evens writes lucidly on matters of great complexity, exploring music as sound with a well-chosen interdisciplinary toolbox of acoustics, musicology, computer science, performance studies, aesthetics, critical theory and continental philosophy. Evens’s interdisciplinary analysis addresses music in its irreducible complexity, as the objectively measurable motions of waves and [End Page 132] as a subjective experience, as ever-transient sounds of performance and as messages encoded for transmission through increasingly sophisticated communication devices. Instead of a singular quest for the ontological fundament of music, Evens examines music’s materiality through the various practices by which people and music relate. By shedding the deadweight of bygone perspectives and avoiding the hermeneutical quicksand pocking the musical landscape, Evens has written a valuable guidebook to the musical terrain of the new millennium.

Evens establishes the interdisciplinary approach of his volume from the outset. While musicology remains mostly “centered on European art music” and often focuses on the musical score, “cultural studies examines music in a culture and so emphasizes cultural artifacts and cultural dynamics in its study” (ix–x). Unfortunately, both disciplines have problems approaching “the material specificity of music; neither discipline attends enough to music as sound” (x). Ethnomusicology arguably does a better job at scrutinizing musical performance and experience in its rich particularity, but there are irreversible global changes taking place in the production, distribution and consumption of music that studies embedded in specific locales cannot address.

What is needed is an equally tactile approach that can incorporate scientific studies of sound with assessments of the technological, cultural and mass-market developments that are transforming music across the globe. The approach Evens adopts appears at once novel and inevitable. The volume is divided into four chapters, which Evens refers to variously as “case studies” and as “movements.” His first move is to eschew the essentializing project of defining music as such. Instead, Evens adopts a phenomenological approach, one that “takes as its primary object human experience, the experience of music” (x). While the experience of music varies greatly across individuals by acculturation and training, in this diversity lies the strength of the phenomenological approach.

Each chapter incorporates a phenomenological account of a particular kind of musical agent, such as the listener, the composer, the engineer and the “musician at work” (xv). These are not presented as thin roles, or as stick-figures on which to hang the relevant topics. Rather, Evens makes clear how much tacit knowledge goes into training these sensibilities. In Evens’s hands, phenomenology is less a methodological epoche that brackets...