‘If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?’ Nina Sun Eidsheim opens her new book with this familiar, centuries-old aphorism but immediately asks us to push beyond the question. For a start, if you're anywhere near a falling tree you'll probably have more pressing concerns: the suddenly darkening sky, the dust stinging your eyes, the vibrations thumping through your body. Unless you're a musicologist, then, thinking about sound may miss the point entirely. Sensing Sound argues that music scholarship needs to keep looking well beyond the simple facts of sound towards the broader chain of actions and assumptions surrounding it, the ‘thick description’ as American anthropologist Clifford Geertz would put it. In other words, to look and listen not just for the falling tree or even the woods surrounding it but the entire ecology that led to its falling in the first place.
In recent decades musicology has been doing this. Authors as divergent as Jacques Attali, Susan McClary and Joseph Kerman have looked well beyond formalist analysis and the dominance of the written score to examine the complex influences and intersections of politics, gender and identity. Eidsheim not only continues this expansion but also nudges it towards the rapidly growing scholarship around sound, with its links to energies, vital materiality and the sensorium. Her great contribution is that she connects these two broad fields, still largely separated – one centred on music, the other more broadly on contemporary art – and does so with refreshing vigour, open-mindedness and originality.
Sensing Sound moves beyond musicology's tendency towards positivism in order to articulate a ‘vibrational theory of music … [and] an alternative analytical framework for that offered by the figure of sound’ (p. 9), suggesting that we understand music not as a collection of fixed ‘things’ (the work, the score; independent of the listener) but as material exchanges of vibration transferred between bodies. Such an exchange is not, however, to be thought of as a blank gesture but one encoded with the cultural logic of its subjects: the identities and intentions of composers, performers and listeners. Viewed through this framework, music cannot help but operate beyond the merely auditory and indeed already exists (both in intention and literally, in time) before its sound is even heard.
Eidsheim's vibrational theory further positions music as an action: ‘If sound and music have been reduced to static nouns’, the author states, ‘then the practice of vibration is a verb – regenerating its energy through material transmission and transduction within a continuous field’ (p. 156). This draws on the term ‘musicking’ established by the New Zealand musicologist Christopher Small in his 1998 book Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. According to his framework, a piano recital is not just a dialogue between composer and pianist, or a ménage à trois that shyly invites the listener; it is an active process, of ‘musicking’, within an expansive field of relations that implicates not only the three parties mentioned but also, for example, the piano tuner, the stagehand, the ticket seller and the casual passer-by.
Eidsheim's thesis of music as vibration, as action and as ‘thick event’ stretches across five chapters. The first four address four orthodoxies or assumptions within music: that sound's standard transmission is through the air; that space sits apart from compositional concerns; that sound can ever be stable and pre-determined; and that music starts and ends with sound and silence. After these four tenets have been examined and dismantled, the fifth chapter outlines Eidsheim's central concept in more depth, drawing together her earlier assertions and examples to draft a model of community building through singing and listening.
Eidsheim is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and she has also taught singing for over two decades. Voice, then, is her central focus here. Interestingly, her case studies sit mostly within the realm of contemporary opera, a genre rarely invited into the canon of sound studies literature. Of course, once you look past certain persistent traditional conventions its inclusion here makes sense: opera has always expanded outwards from ‘pure’ music into other domains – textual, choreographic, scenographic – and has consequently depended upon complex layers of collaboration and labour.
Sensing Sound focuses on four twenty-first-century operas as case studies, from solo to large-scale productions, the performances of most of which take place around Eidsheim's Los Angeles base. All are by living American artists and all but one are by women. Despite being designed to be ‘heard and conceptualized within the framework of Western classical music’ (p. 61), each work pushes outwards from this tradition. The opera-trained soprano and performance artist Juliana Snapper, for instance, frequently sings under water, challenging the idea that sound most commonly travels through the air whilst highlighting its absolute dependence on material properties for its transmission. Alba Fernanda Triana's Body Music (created in collaboration with Eidsheim), in contrast, treats the human body as the performance space, mapping and choreographing the way internal architectures orient the flow of air through their ever-shifting organic chambers. Eidsheim and Elodie Blanchard's Noisy Clothes experiment presents unsuspecting participants with costumes that are lined with hidden sound devices, requiring experiential, embodied play to effect sound in space rather than by relying upon a priori musical strategies.
Other works depend on specific locations to determine their outcome, relying on a parameter that remains intriguingly uncommon in such a distinctly acoustic art as Western composition. Meredith Monk's Songs Of Ascension (2008) for massed voices was initially conceived for performance in an extraordinary eight-storey circular staircase designed by installation artist Ann Hamilton; in subsequent performances, presented variously within concert halls, theatres and auditoriums, Monk ‘re-orchestrates’ the work to suit each new space. Given its starting points, its eventual remounting within the spiral interior of the Guggenheim Museum in New York was virtually guaranteed. Similarly, composer Christopher Cerrone designed his operatic telling of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities to be performed in Los Angeles’ lavish Union Station. The singers and dancers move among the general public whilst ticket buyers tune in on wireless headphones, establishing a visible yet inaudible theatre that denies any traditional sense of acoustics.
Depending on your perspective, certain assertions in Sensing Sound may seem self-evident. For instance, acoustic expectations are particularly rigid in classical music but recede somewhat in disciplines such as contemporary art. In Chapter Two Eidsheim outlines the historical impacts of sight lines, orchestra size, ticket sales and audience expectations upon concert hall standards. Just as the traditional symphony orchestra line-up crystallised a century ago, so did the spaces expected to house it. As Eidsheim recounts, when conductor Zubin Mehta was consulted on how the (then-unbuilt) Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles might best incorporate new music, he argued simply for a ‘good normal room acoustic’ (p. 64).
Such design inertia, however, tends to self-perpetuate in museum cultures. It becomes less of an issue in the expanded worlds of experimental music and contemporary art (not to mention the now venerable tradition of contemporary musicians performing in galleries) where almost all spaces have been corralled into action. In this context, the novelty of Cerrone's spatial innovation somewhat dissipates; of all public places, you are these days virtually guaranteed to find new music at train stations, whether played upon St Pancras station's apparently permanent street pianos or via the near ubiquity of orchestral flash mobs everywhere else.
Further, it could be argued that, as a component of the performing arts, music is already an art of action, choreography and movement and that it is only through a musicological (or an especially historically conscientious) lens that we might regard it as an object. Music already relates closely to dance, theatre or indeed action painting, as Eidsheim asserts in aligning music with Jackson Pollock's drip-painting innovations. Classical musicians might be accustomed to think of their art in terms of the static object, but even the (usually silent) score determines performative action and the (generally reproducible) recording relies on the dynamism of distribution and reception.
Eidsheim's key achievement, then, is to destabilise the musicological frames through which we perceive music as a sum of its fixed components (such as pitch, duration and aural fidelity) towards a broader understanding based on the shifting interplay of energies and contexts. This aligns the broad musicology project with recent innovations in sound studies forwarded by authors such as Steven Connor, Brandon LaBelle, Seth Kim-Cohen, Douglas Kahn and Frances Dyson (all referenced by Eidsheim). Through her particular focus on the voice, Eidsheim also helps us to understand contemporary opera through a much-expanded perspective that relies as much on space, choreography and materiality as on staging, costumes and libretto. In Sensing Sound Eidsheim challenges us to us to think beyond the ‘bounded and knowable’ realm of music with its ‘distinct beginning and end’ and instead to ‘see the same phenomenon as vibration and understand it in the terms of the energy in a body's mass and its transmission, transduction, and transformation through different materials’ (pp. 16–17). This is the perfect place from which to examine and experience music in the expanded field of twenty-first-century art and thought.
