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Sound Pedagogy: Teaching listening since Cage

Adam Tinkle

Organised Sound / Volume 20 / Special Issue 02 / August 2015, pp 222 - 230DOI: 10.1017/S1355771815000102, Published online: 07 July 2015

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1355771815000102

How to cite this article:Adam Tinkle (2015). Sound Pedagogy: Teaching listening since Cage. Organised Sound, 20, pp 222-230 doi:10.1017/S1355771815000102

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Sound Pedagogy: Teaching listeningsince Cage

ADAM TINKLE

Skidmore College, 815 N Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866Email: atinkle@skidmore.edu

This article proposes that teaching people how to listen isa central and underappreciated facet of post-Cageanexperimental music and sound art. Under a new analyticalframework that I call ‘sound pedagogy’, I trace a history oflinguistic discourses about listening, from John Cage’s talkingpieces to Fluxus text scores, Max Neuhaus’s soundwalks,R. Murray Schafer’s ear cleaning exercises and PaulineOliveros’s Sonic Meditations. I show how all these artistsattempt to transform auditory perception in the everyday lifeof the subject. A central debate here is whether this more ‘open’listening should be viewed as a new, cultivated practice, or,more problematically, as a primordial condition to which wemust return. Framed as a polemical antidote to our harmfulauditory enculturation (which privilegesWestern art music andalienates us from potential auditory aesthesis in the lived spaceof daily life), these sound pedagogies are, as I will show, ripefor deconstruction and critique. Yet, more hopefully, theymay also open up broader and more immediate forms ofparticipation than Western art music has typically allowed.

1. SOUND PEDAGOGY: TEACHINGLISTENING SINCE CAGE

In this article, I propose a new analytical frame forunderstanding the aims and effects of some importantworks of post-Cagean experimental music and soundart. I show how telling, or teaching, audiences how tolisten is central to works by John Cage, George Brecht,La Monte Young, Max Neuhaus, R. Murray Schaferand Pauline Oliveros. Probing this pedagogicalapproach to listening in the sonic arts, this articleuncovers its surprising resonances with ‘participation’as figured by the visual arts; with critical pedagogy;and even with ‘music appreciation’ of the Westerncanon. Pedagogy in the sonic arts is riddled withproductive tensions: silent observation versus inclusivesound-making; linguistic explanation versus non-linguistic ‘pure sound’; the optimal state of ‘openears’ as a new, vanguard practice requiring cultivation,or as an underlying primordial condition to which weare exhorted to get back.

Little attention has been paid to the disparity in therole and status of pedagogy between music and soundart. Pedagogy is plainly constitutive of art musics;Booth and Kuhn (1990: 418) categorically define artmusics by the formal enculturation they require and

produce. By contrast, pedagogy’s role in sound arthas been occluded, hardly examined, and mostconspicuous in its absence; Alan Licht’s (2007: 135–55,200–10) genealogy of sound art centres the work ofnumerous artists who, he notes, are untrained in music.In a similar vein, Cage’s ‘musicalisation of auralityitself’ (Kahn 2001: 102) seems at first to promise a kindof democratisation and deschooling (Illich 1971):1

work in this tradition echoes and reproduces a politi-cised break with the plainly hierarchical pedagogicalnorms of art musics, which demand (and produce)sufficiently enculturated, ‘music literate’ performersand audiences. This article argues that sonic artistssince Cage have critiqued music’s normalising andhierarchical pedagogies, but simultaneously offeredtheir own strikingly ambitious counter-pedagogies,often addressing listening not only within an aestheticframe, but in the very life of the subject.

I begin my genealogy of pedagogy in sonic art withCage’s 4'33". It is often held that 4'33" articulated aredefinition of music: any sound you hear can beaestheticised and subjectively reframed as music. Inone reading, this means that 4'33" changes not only theacceptable content but also the very ontology of music,positing that the listeners’ own perception, not thecomposer’s design, is the locus of musical aesthesis(Licht 2007: 12). For an audience member suitablyprepared, while waiting and ultimately failing to hearthe expected piano performance, 4'33" could be thegateway to a revelation that music is everywhere. Farfrom silence, what the audience hears is the totality ofcontingent environmental sound surrounding them,yet these sounds are newly reframed. Their ears primedfor attentive concert hall listening, they hear insteadthe music in the sounds of lived space and time. It is themode or habitus of the listener’s listening, then, thatdetermines whether a sound is music or not.

Following this logic, listeners, not musicians, produce‘music’. For Cage, sounds need not be organised by

1I reference Illich’s term here, though Paolo Freire’s work couldequally apply. My analogy here is to critical pedagogy’s core mission(thus gliding guiltily above the field’s rich internal contestations): thecampaign to critique externally imposed knowledge, values andhierarchies, ultimately supplanting them with ‘emic’, indigenous orindividually generated knowledge.

Organised Sound 20(2): 222–230 © Cambridge University Press, 2015. doi:10.1017/S1355771815000102

a musician; they need only be organised perceptuallythrough intentional listening. Thus, everyone is capableof ‘producing’ music and any instance of listening canproduce an art experience. In a single philosophicalmanoeuvre, Cagean listening thus opens up new vistasfor participatory, inclusive and immediate engagementwith sound-as-art – anyone can do/make it at any time.Yet it remains an open question whether a

performance of 4'33" could succeed in redefining musicfor any particular listener, especially one who comes tothe performance uninitiated. One who already acceptsthe dicta of Cagean listening hardly needs to attend aperformance of 4'33" to hear the potential music allaround them, but for someone who does not alreadyagree, the contingent environmental sounds of agiven 4'33" performance may be literally inaudible,(un)consciously ignored as background noise.Presumably, it was audience members who felt thisway, who failed to hear 4'33" asmusic, who caused thescandal around the piece’s premier (Gann 2010: 5–7).Thus, 4’33” might not accomplish on its own a changein listening. Yet it remains important for inaugurating– and symbolising – a long tradition of sonic artiststrying to teach people how to listen. This tradition, ofcomposers trying to convince their publics to listendifferently, is the tradition I call ‘sound pedagogy’, thesubject of this article.I would suggest that – precisely because 4'33" may

fail to convince its audience – Cage and likemindedartists also produced linguistic discourses, which wouldmore directly instruct listeners on how to changetheir listening. For sound art collective Ultra-red, suchuses of language are best thought of as ‘protocols fororganised listening’, which give ‘priority totransforming auditory perception’ (Ultra-red 2012: 2).I call such uses of language sound pedagogy. Some areplainly pedagogical in that they are part of aninstructional programme, but all are pedagogical in abroader sense: they aim at (trans)forming perceptionand, ultimately, subjectivity. That is, these artistsaspire or claim to affect the listener beyond the domainof art, such that their everyday sonic experience,and perhaps even their conduct and cognition, arepermanently transformed.Sound pedagogy resonates with critical pedagogy

discourses: both claim to offer anti-repressive knowl-edge, a means towards liberation from entrenchedsystems of knowledge/power. Situating itself as analternative to the straitjacketed norms of a dominantEurocentric music culture, sound pedagogy promises tofree your listening from an artificial and harmful set ofprejudices about which sounds are worthy of (aesthetic)attention. Moreover, these listening experiences, artistsinsist, are accessible to all, certainly irrespective of pastmusical experience. In thus addressing a putativelyuniversal faculty of listening, sound pedagogy functionsas a critique of the narrow and parochial public address

of art musics – with the Western classics presumablysquarely in the crosshairs – that assume and require ararefied cultural competence to be understood (let aloneto be composed and performed).

So what were the dominant currents of musicpedagogy against which sound pedagogy defined itselfas the liberatory alternative? In the Unite States, thedominant approach has been ‘music appreciation’, apedagogy designed to enculturate listeners enmasse intothe codes underlying Western art music and to providemoral uplift through experience and exegesis of ‘theclassics’ (Hund 2014: 260–2). This emphasis on ahistorical tradition defined as ‘ours’ (i.e. the culturalpatrimony of Europeans and their descendants) remainsan influential one (cf. El Sistema and the programmes ithas inspired). Where music appreciation posits thedesirability of such uplifting (Western classical) musicalenculturation, sound pedagogy posits instead the uni-versality and preferability of listening to all sound aspotentially aesthetic/musical. By locating a preferableaesthetic experience in the sounds of everyday life,sound pedagogy permits the de-emphasis and denigra-tion of conventional Western musical training, with itslong apprenticeship from novice instrumentalist tocreative musician, as unnecessary and perhaps sociallypernicious. It is in this way that a pedagogical sonic artmight open up possibilities for broader and moreimmediate participation than Western art music.

Despite the aesthetic gulf (and the sometimeantipathy) between experimental musicians and thedefenders of the Western canon, music appreciation andsound pedagogy actually share deep structural com-monalities. Both aim to shape and transform listenersand listening. Both do so primarily through linguisticdiscourses that nevertheless point beyond language togive priority to non-linguistic sonic experiences. Bothaim to help people, perhaps even to improve them. Butwhere ‘music appreciation’ ideology identifies bothmusic training and music listening as forms of uplift orbildung, sound pedagogies tend to regard our musicalenculturation and learned habits as interfering with anauthentic and immediate experience of the soundingworld. We require an ‘ear-cleaning’ (Schafer 1967: 1), aset of ‘happy new ears’ cut loose of cultural baggage andtrained habit (Cage 1967: 30). Thus, as I will show, someartists frame their practice as a kind of deprogramming,an attempt to remove harmful enculturation. This claim,influential as it has been, is ripe for deconstruction:protocols for organised listening are themselves a formof enculturation.

Thus, this article will unfold a tension at the heart ofsound pedagogy. On the one hand, artists positlisteners’ universal capacity to ‘make music’ out of anyheard sound. On the other hand, the same listenersneed an ‘ear cleaning’ intervention to transform andimprove auditory perception. In other words, we allcould attend to the full range of sounds, on the basis of

Sound Pedagogy: Teaching listening since Cage 223

our human sensory capabilities, with hardly a need forartists, but in order to hear with ‘clean ears’, we need tobe subjected to some artist-initiated ‘protocol fororganised listening’. With the help of some (admittedlyslippery) algebraic substitution, the paradox becomesyet more grinding: on the sole basis of our nature,we can all produce culture/aesthesis, yet in order toget our listening back to this untampered-with natural,we need to take a lesson from a bearer of aestheticculture.

What follows is a critical history of those ‘lessons’.Brecht, Young, Neuhaus and Cage offer an implicitpedagogy through text-driven artworks whose verbaldiscourses plainly address the audience and request achange in listening behaviour. These works presageand set the terms for Oliveros and Schafer’s later, moreexplicitly instructional sound pedagogies. Along theway, I want to suggest that, unlike Western art music’spedagogical norms, which sharply divide legitimateworks and performances from the activities of ama-teurs in their course of learning, sound pedagogies canoffer a lean alternative whereby teaching experimentalsonic art is a form of simply doing it.

2. LECTURES ON LISTENING

In the 1950s, during the same years he crystallisestheories of indeterminacy and non-intentional sound,Cage begins turning lectures into music. By manip-ulating the durations of each spoken utterance intextual works such as Lecture on Nothing, 45' for aSpeaker and Indeterminacy according to the samechance procedures he was applying to other soundmaterial, he was able to position linguistic discoursein and even as music. These texts are mainly aboutCage’s own musical aesthetics and ethics – effectivelytransforming the preconcert talk into the concert. Inwhat can seem an almost desperate bid to fuse formand content, process and presentation, Cage made surehis audiences heard his compositional method simul-taneous with its explanation and justification. Cagesays as much in the first paragraph of the ‘Forward’ toSilence: ‘I have employed in [these texts] means ofcomposing analogous to my composing means in thefield of music. My intention has been, often, to saywhat I had to say in a way that would exemplify it; thatwould, conceivably, permit the listener to experiencewhat I had to say rather than just hear about it’ (Cage1961: ix). Accordingly, especially when performedsimultaneously with Cage’s other musical composi-tions, these texts describe, advocate and enact theCagean sound ethos of interruption, disruption anddisjuncture: ‘A cough or a baby crying will not/ruin agood piece of modern music’ (Cage 1961: 161) he saysin 45’ for a Speaker, a work from 1954 which can besuperimposed with four of Cage’s other timed worksfrom the same period (Fetterman 1996: 206). In fact,

such coughs and cries might actually comprise a ‘goodpiece of modern music’ in a realisation of 4'33", if youknow how to listen. But in order to alter listeners’perceptions such that these sounds become audible aspart of 4’33” (and not as mere interruptions of it), Cageneeded to teach people a different way to listen. This isprecisely what, I am arguing, Cage’s lecture pieces seekto do: ‘All you can/do is/suddenly listen/in the sameway/that, when you catch a cold/all you can do is/suddenly/sneeze’ (Cage 1961: 148). The suddenness ofthe sneeze or of the baby’s cry, its unrelatedness tofuture and past, its dissolution of any coherence intemporal structure, its absolute contingency, these arethe features that Cage tells us our listening shouldaspire to. More precisely – ‘all you can do’ – Cage tellsus that our listening is inexorably and already anunwilled biological imperative, a sudden sneeze. Such‘sudden listening’ is, not coincidentally, the exactopposite of what Rose Subotnik called ‘structurallistening’. This mode of listening, taught in musicappreciation classrooms and allied with the prestige ofthe Western classics, suggests that listeners can extractmeaning through attention to this music’s internaldevelopment and variation over time (Subotnik 1995:148–56).

Literally forswearing such inherited codes of listeningand norms of value within his compositions, Cageshoehorns disparate functions into his talking pieces:polemic against the Western music canon, exhortationto changed listening, and explanation with simulta-neous realisation of a compositional process. His effortsto unify compositional process with a verbal discoursethat makes that process plain would enormously influ-ence later sound and conceptual artists, as well as theJudson Dance Theatre, where it was common to nar-rate actions while executing them (Kotz 2001: 61, 74).Works that strive for such unification are almostinherently didactic, explaining themselves to obviate theneed for an external explanation. They attempt to showor teach their audience what is being done while, orbetter, through doing it.2 Even Cage’s ‘I Have Nothingto Say and I am Saying it’ can be read as a (blatantlypedagogical) reductio ad absurdum of the very ontologyof musical ‘utterance’, insisting, as Cage often did, onthe ultimate meaninglessness, the absence of semanticcontent, in all music (Cage 1961: 51).3 So, while he

2See, for example, Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting In a Room (1969) andRobert Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (1961).3Here, Cage expounds a position obviously at odds with dominantunderstandings of musical communication. That music commu-nicates somethingwas a widely held verity from at least the Romanticera (Subotnik 1995: 151), though how it communicates is disputed,primarily within the field of musical semiotics. Relativist ethnomu-sicological and postmodern critiques (e.g. Becker 1993) have rightlyqualified a conventional semiotic understanding of music: listenerscan only ‘decode’ the composer’s meanings if they share a system ofcodes; one project of music appreciation is to teach audiences thesecodes. But Cage’s critique seems to go deeper; recognising the habi-tus of listening as the ground or guarantor of all musical experience,

224 Adam Tinkle

locates (ultimately meaningless) musical aesthesis in theear of the beholder, he simultaneously talks audiences’ears off in advocating his ideas and music. Thus, thelanguage of explanation and argumentation stepsin where music’s (inability to produce) semanticcontent fails.So, by creating works that seek to explain them-

selves, and by arguing that listening is, like a sneeze, anuncultivated, unwilled, almost biological universal,Cage’s sound pedagogy promotes a kind of culturaldeprogramming. If we do as Cage suggests, we will letsounds ‘be themselves’ and listen without preference,hierarchy or attempt to extract structural relations ormeanings. But how do we come to listen in that man-ner? Perhaps not, as I have argued, by just heading tothe concert hall and hearing, unprimed, a performanceof 4’33”. If Cage’s rise from scandal-causing ‘bad boy’to his institutional ratification and the 1961 publica-tion of Silence is anything to go by, a much moreeffective way to spread the Cagean dictum is to talkabout it. Yet, there is an irony in Cage’s lecturing onhow to listen non-preferentially: in order to attain thisdeprogrammed, anarchic, non-hierarchical listening,we need to be schooled.

3. TEXT SCORES THAT TEACH

While techniques for listening to music are part andparcel of any form of music education or musicappreciation, the discourses I call ‘sound pedagogy’offer techniques for listening in general, often promis-ing some benefit to the listener in everyday life. Cageoften describes the emancipatory payoff of more open,less prejudicial listening. Once we realise that ‘nothingis accomplished by writing… hearing… [or] playing apiece of music’, not only are ‘our ears … now inexcellent condition’, but, he claims, ‘we wake up to thevery life that we are living’ (Cage 1961: xii, 49). Doesnot the promise of a transformation to ‘the very life’(an ‘awakening’, as in a conversion narrative) echo thepersonal uplift promised by advocates of bildung, as in‘music appreciation’? In contrast to his polemic againstconventional expectations about what Western artmusic can do to and for you, Cage says that somethingmomentous in the life of the subject is actually‘accomplished’ through an acceptance of his favouredmode of listening. Thus, Cage not only refutes musicappreciation’s power to uplift and transform, heactually proposes that his sound pedagogy is capableof what music appreciation had claimed for itself;

he negates the content of music appreciation, butreproduces its structure.

The younger artists to whom I now turn followedCage in talking specifically about cleansing/renewingactions directed at the ears. But while audition itself isthe primary site or problem at which these artists directtheir pedagogy, all assert and expect that an alteredaudition will have broader ramifications for the life ofthe subject. Questioning the strict audience–performerbinary of concert hall performance, they suggest thatchanged listening should engender more active, inclu-sive relationships. Thus, the discursive/linguistic prac-tices I call sound pedagogy – telling people when, where,how and why to listen – are their pivot point out of thenormative social and spatial relations of the concert halland into interdisciplinary art practices (acoustic design,soundwalks, sonic meditations, event scores) whichmight fit more comfortably under the ‘sound art’umbrella. I turn to these now as a way of exploring thediversity of pedagogical strategies yoked to Americanexperimental music’s ‘ear cleaning’ mission. For, attimes, all these artists do appear to become missionariesfor the credo and cause of deeper/better/cleaner listen-ing. Certainly Cage’s efforts to bring his own wordsabout music into his music sometimes resulted in a kindof self-referential, heightened sermonising, a verbalmusic that comes with its own illustrative sound effects.But where, in the 1950s, Cage proselytised from thestage, later sonic artists would try to win converts byengaging them in experiences that concert halls couldnot contain. Perhaps in sympathy with the growth ofmass social and political movements – the call for‘participatory democracy’ was a major plank of theepochal SDS Port Huron Statement (Hayden 1962) –sonic art in the 1960s developed new modes of partici-pation that increasingly called the congregation out oftheir pews.

This pivot of sound pedagogy out of the concert hallbegins in the context of the ‘Experimental Composition’course Cage taught at the New School for SocialResearch. Cage urged students in that class, mostuntutored in musical notation, to write simple instruc-tions as scores, proposing, in effect, that anyone,regardless of musical background, could compose.4

Moreover, these scores can be read as passing on asimilar participatory injunction to the reader: just asanyone can compose such works, anyone can realisethem. Brecht, later a Fluxus mainstay, attended Cage’scourse beginning in 1958 and, in 1959, composed DripMusic, a text score which reads, ‘A source of water andan empty vessel are arranged so that the water falls intothe vessel.’ If realised by performers on a concert stage,this work might fit within a Cagean tradition of chance-based musical compositions, though, of course, it does

(F'note continued)he invents a new habitus of listening to make that experience aswidely accessible as possible. I take his ‘musicalisation of aurality’,which seems to grant all meaning-making authority to the listener, tobe symptomatic of his wider resistance both to the assumption thatmusic is properly semiotic and to the project of normalising thesemiotic codes, as in mainstream music education.

4The course was ‘open to those with or without musical training’(Kuhn 2014).

Sound Pedagogy: Teaching listening since Cage 225

not rely on music-trained performers (Kotz 2001:55–73). However, Brecht claimed he did not care if anyof his event scores were realised; he wrote that his eventscores are ‘like little enlightenments I wanted tocommunicate tomy friends whowould knowwhat to dowith them’. Thus, the piece can stand as a kind ofcommunicative or teacherly text independent of ‘music’.Given that Brecht’s scores were often actually mailed tofriends before ever being performed (Johnson 2008:A33), they seem to be as much epistolary literature asthey are musical notation, direct mailers with a trans-missable insight designed to change how the recipienthears. In short, irrespective of realisation, the text scoreitself is a pedagogical intervention about listening.

An even clearer example of the discursive-pedagogicalquality of event scores is La Monte Young’sComposition 1960 #15: ‘This piece is a little whirlpool outin the middle of the ocean’ (Young 1963). Like Brecht’s,this event score is a performative speech act in the presenttense; Young’s words enact a conceptual performancethat occurs inside themind. Like other instances of soundpedagogy, Composition 1960 #15 transparently aims toalter and broaden one’s auditory percept. It directsreaders to strain their listening beyond its normalobjects, in this case towards the literally inaudible andinaccessible. Brecht is more concerned with audiblesounds carelessly ignored, with ‘ensuring that the detailsof everyday life… stop going unnoticed’ (Johnson 2008:A33).DripMusic, whether read or heard in performance,attunes listeners to the quotidian sounds that practicallysurround them; the piece is probably being realisedsomewhere in your home right now. Brecht’s insistentdouble negative (‘stop going unnoticed’) suggests aserious and consequential injunction; he wants to‘ensure’, not invite, us to correct our errors of omission inperception and life. Thus, the Fluxus listening ‘event’ isnot just a ‘post-studio’ art-making practice that aims toinclude the stuff of everyday life; it is always alreadya pedagogical event that attempts to reshape the life ofthe subject.

Closely linked to the staging of whirlpool or drip asan ‘event’ – potentially classable as a musical work,but equally a pedagogical attunement and a self-contained linguistic performative utterance – is thepractice that has come to be known as the ‘sound-walk’, now a mainstay of sound art, invented in 1966by Max Neuhaus. As Neuhaus describes the initialinspiration:

I had been directly involved in the gradual insertion ofeveryday sounds into the concert hall, [playing the musicof] John Cage where live street sounds were broughtdirectly into the hall. I saw these activities as a way ofgiving aesthetic credence to these sounds – something Iwas all for. I began to question the effectiveness of themethod, though. Most members of the audience seemedmore impressed with the scandal of ‘ordinary’ soundsplaced in a ‘sacred’ place than with the sounds themselves,

and few were able to carry the experience over to a newperspective on the sounds of their daily lives. (Neuhaus1990: 1; emphasis mine)

In response, Neuhaus created a work calledLISTEN, his ‘first independent work as an artist’. Hedescribes a first ‘performance’ of the work, in which he‘rubber-stamped LISTEN on each person’s hand andbegan walking with them’ through the streets of NewYork, past interesting environmental sounds he hadpre-selected. LISTENmight, at a raw perceptual level,sound similar to an outdoor performance of 4'33" – inboth works, the heard sounds will be contingent onwhatever is happening in a particular location duringthe piece’s duration. Yet in most other senses LISTENis quite different: it articulates a direct demand where4'33" just assumes audiences will listen. LISTEN thusreplaces the Cagean (pre)concert talk with a hand-stamp. LISTEN sidesteps the question of whetherthese sounds are or are not ‘music’, and simply askspeople to attend to them, obviating the need for aCagean polemic about what music is.

Both the event score and the soundwalk have beenclaimed by visual art theory as ‘post-studio’ practices,but, as direct extensions of Cage’s compositional cri-tique of Western music appreciation and structurallistening, they are also plainly contributions to musicaltheory and practice. Like Cage’s lectures-as-music, theevent score and the soundwalk function simulta-neously as pedagogical intervention, communicativetext and audible sonic artwork. Neuhaus, abandoningpercussion performance, becomes instead a performerof listening, elevating audition above sound-making ina striking normative inversion that, as will becomeclear below, is also the central feature of R. MurraySchafer’s sound pedagogy.

Despite Neuhaus’s desire to give ‘aesthetic credence’to environmental sounds, he does not frame listeningas a purely aesthetic experience. The soundwalk isalso a teaching moment whose effects ramify intoeveryday life:

After a while I began to do these works as ‘LectureDemonstrations’; the rubber stamp was the lecture andthe walk the demonstration. I would ask the audience at aconcert or lecture to collect outside the hall, stamp theirhands and lead them through their everyday environment.Saying nothing, I would simply concentrate on listening,and start walking. At first, they would be a little embar-rassed, of course, but the focus was generally contagious.The group would proceed silently, and by the time wereturned to the hall many had found a new way to listenfor themselves. (Neuhaus 1990: 1)

Yet in asserting that his ‘Lecture Demonstrations’ thussucceeded, Neuhaus glosses the contradictorycontent of this pedagogical encounter. How and why isfocus ‘contagious’ here? Might the presence of the sonic

226 Adam Tinkle

professional and his performance-of-listening, leadingby example, be the real ‘lecture’? And is Neuhaus reallyaccurate in saying that those won over by the piece’spedagogy learned to listen ‘for themselves’? If they hadnot already learned how before taking part in thesoundwalk, participants certainly did not learn to listenby themselves. Common sense holds that the soundwalk,and its author,Neuhaus, are actually doing the teaching,yet Neuhaus seems to want to efface his role and insist(in an echo of the critical pedagogy tradition) that nopedagogical authority is needed, that the student is thetrue teacher.Thus far, I have traced a gradual economising of

language over the historical genesis of these listening-centred works, from the linguistic excess of 45' forSpeaker to the one-sentence scores of Fluxus toNeuhaus’s single-word handstamp. Across this trajec-tory, there is a productive tension between listeningand language: these artists wanted to change howpeople listened, and the best tool they knew to directlyaddress and convince was language. Yet they stronglyprioritised non-linguistic sound – contingent, environ-mental, and ignored sound, perhaps even ‘pure sound’.Perhaps the apotheosis and logical conclusion here isthe unannounced, unmarked sound installations ofMax Neuhaus. In his series of Time Pieces, a sustainedsound blends unnoticed with the ordinary ambienceand acoustic of the space where it is installed. Then, onthe hour, the installation’s sound abruptly ceases,leaving in its place an abrupt silence that cannot escapenotice, an apt illustration of Cage’s ‘all you can do issuddenly listen’ (1961: 148). Here, Neuhaus discoversthe rare situation in which an experience of sound,unmediated by language, creates a lesson, even arevelation, about the nature of audition, attention andlistening. Could this be an example of sound pedagogywithout language?In teaching a lesson about listening in general (i.e. in

daily life) without recourse to language, as well as intheir rigorous economy andmaterial purity, Neuhaus’sTime Pieces represents a sort of ne plus ultra insound art. Indeed, they could be regarded as retooled,perfected realisations of 4'33" that further liberateCagean listening ethics from the expectationsattendant upon musical performance. Consisting, likeCage’s score, of a series of ‘tacets’, the Time Piecesrequire no concert hall staging and no learned habits ofconcert behaviour to ‘reframe’ the contingent soundsof the environment and thus to teach hearers to listento their own everyday listening.

4. COMPOSERS IN THE CLASSROOM

R. Murray Schafer and Pauline Oliveros have usedCage’s lectures on listening as a different sort ofjumping off point. In their explicitly pedagogical

activities, as teachers in workshop and classroom set-tings and as authors of widely known texts that instructinitiates on how to improve their listening, both com-posers have maintained their faith in language as amedium to educate the ear. Both have remained closelyassociated with music, but have also built new dis-ciplines and institutions that address sound and lis-tening in wider aesthetic and socially instrumentalcontexts.

In his A Sound Education: 100 Exercises in Listeningand Soundmaking, Schafer reformulates for classroomteachers much of the polemic of his influential TheTuning of the World (1977). Following on that book’sbroad consideration of the soundscape, ‘the total fieldof sounds wherever we are’ (Schafer 1992: 8), A SoundEducation offers a classroom method for youngstudents to better engage with sound both as listenersand as makers. Most of the book aims to increase the‘effectiveness’ of listening, and, as the book goes on,to teach new approaches to soundmaking (Schafer1992: 7). Indeed, as a graduated pedagogical method inwhich mastery of each exercise is the prerequisite forthe next, and in which listening is the prerequisite forsound-making, the book has structural similaritiesto a ‘learn-to-play’ method for a musical instrument.Strikingly, however, Schafer repeatedly devalues thesound-making side of this listener/maker binary;mastery of this ‘method’ thus diverges from anyconventional notion of musical competence.

Indeed, Schafer’s equivocal view of students’ sound-making underscores Douglas Kahn’s point about Cage’sproject of noise abatement: the search for silencemeans silencing someone (Kahn 2001: 161–74). This ispossibly the most uncomfortable gulf separatingSchaferian sound education frommore traditional musicpedagogies. Learning about sound, from Schafer’sperspective, often seems to mean learning not to makeany. Schafer is nearly halfway through his book beforehe reaches exercise 43 of A Sound Education, the first toconcern sound-making: ‘In the next set of exercises wewill use our voices. Only by uttering (outering) sound canwe demonstrate that our perception has been completeand accurate’ (Schafer 1992: 63). Perception here haspriority and primacy; far from evincing creative expres-sion, sound-making here is a mere assessment of whetherthe ‘Ear Cleaning’ exercises preceding it have succeededin improving perception. Because Schafer regardsperception as nearly impossible to perfect, he wants all ofus to spend a good long time poised in silent listeningbefore opening our mouths:

DECLARE A MORATORIUM ON SPEECH FOR –

HOURS … A twenty-four hour moratorium would bedesirable, though in most cases is probably impractical.Many world philosophies and religions recommendperiods of silence and contemplation to counteract thehaste and confusion of our lives. I recommend it as ameans of achieving clairaudience. Ultimately all listening

Sound Pedagogy: Teaching listening since Cage 227

experiences move us towards contemplation and a respectfor silence. (Schafer 1992: 36)

Assertions like this last one are not only queasily con-trolling, they are logically circular: being quiet makes uslisten; listening makes us want to be quiet. Perhaps thiscould become a virtuous cycle, but it is still onethat evidently needs to be put into motion by anauthoritative wisdom teacher. On this point, Schafer’ssound education comes to closely, and perversely,resemble traditional Western music education: studentsrequire a long apprenticeship of being told how tolisten, before they may participate meaningfully in, oreven properly understand, sonic art and reality.

An even more problematic politics clouds Schafer’sproject when he moves from an aesthetic to a sociallyinstrumental view of sound. InThe Tuning of theWorld,he reframes Cagean listening in expansively politicalterms. For Schafer, 4’33” ‘treat[s] the world as a mac-rocosmic musical composition’ whose ‘orchestration isa musician’s business’ (Schafer 1977: 5). Yet, because hesees the modern soundscape, with its constantly esca-lating noise levels, in dangerous, almost eschatologicalterms – ‘There is growing evidence that modern civili-sationmay be deafening itself with noise’ – the called for‘orchestration’ must, by and large, consist of silencing:‘The prevention of sound may well be as important asits production. It may be that we already have toomanysounds in the world for them all to be heard to advan-tage’ (Schafer 1992: 9). Moreover, ‘The world’ssoundscape has reached an apex of vulgarity in ourtime, and many experts have predicted universal deaf-ness as the ultimate consequence’ (Schafer 1992: 3).Since this grave situation calls for immediate interven-tion on grounds of public health, Schafer’s prescriptionof sound education is not just a gateway to a certainpost-Cagean aesthetic experience; it is a stringent pre-requisite for responsible citizenship.

Though the relative prominence of listening oversound-making in the 100 Exercises seems at first toconsign the ‘sound educated’ largely to contemplativeobservation, Schafer means this training to prepare theway for socially instrumental ‘acoustic design’:

The way to improve the world’s soundscape is quite sim-ple. We must learn how to listen. It seems to be a habit wehave forgotten... After we have developed some criticalacumen, we may go on to larger projects with socialimplications so that others may be influenced by ourexperiences. (Schafer 1992: 11)

This learning-to-listen is always framed as resensitisa-tion, a recovery of ‘a lost unity in the past’ (Gardner2010), and not merely in his conjuring of ‘firstsoundscapes’ that tribal/ancient peoples hear/d or evenin his underlying valorisation of endangered sounds-capes requiring preservation. More narrowly, it is hisdeclinist narrative of a modern decay in listening itselfthat fails to convince. On what factual basis can

Schafer assert that ‘we’ have ‘forgotten’ how to listen,especially since he so frequently cites Cage’s 4’33” asopening the space of possibility for his own work?Why, when he obviously recognises the centrality ofthis (then) recent aesthetic breakthrough, does he insiston a narrative of returning to listening’s past, ratherthan recognising his brand of pan-aural attention andorientation towards soundscape as representative of anew mode of listening?

Like Schafer’s 100 Exercises, many of PaulineOliveros’s compositions offer instruction in organisedlistening and sound-making. Though framed in heroeuvre not as exercises per se, but as text scores, theseworks were developed in the context of Oliveros’sclasses and workshops, which (then as now) typicallywelcome participants irrespective of musical back-ground. Moreover, the initial genesis of her text scoreswas in a pedagogical setting. Tasked with teaching acourse on ‘The Nature of Music’ for a heterogeneousgroup of non-musicians at the University of Cali-fornia, San Diego, Oliveros had to confront the spectreof music appreciation head on; this was the course thatthis new and pedagogically innovative institutionoffered instead of a music appreciation course which,at most other schools, certainly would have focused onWestern classics. By contrast, Oliveros’s course on the‘nature’ of music confronted and opposed ethnocentricbeliefs about European music’s supposed superiority,primarily through a pedagogy rooted in post-Cageanaurality, emphasising environmental listening, fieldrecording and sound-making with everyday objects(all of which remain central to her teaching today). So,while she too explicitly frames her sound pedagogy as astripping away of harmful Eurocentric enculturation,she avoids Schafer’s declinist historiography andinverts his noise-equals-pollution stance, equating andeliding biological and technological sounds in hermusic, teaching, and writing.5 Yet Oliveros’s sound-pedagogical writings and scores and subsequent DeepListening pedagogy are otherwise much related toSchaferian ‘sound education’, guiding the novice tolisten more deeply and attentively to the world; whereNeuhaus merely says ‘LISTEN’, Oliveros and Schaferstrive to unpack exactly how.

Similarly, when she asserts that both novices andtrained musicians come equally prepared to realise herSonic Meditations or learn her Deep Listening prac-tice, she insists on sound pedagogy’s autonomy fromthe domain of music. Where ‘readiness’ to performmusic is ordinarily modulated by differences in culturalcompetence and experience, in the Sonic Meditations,as in much of Oliveros’s work, ‘No special skills arenecessary. Any persons who are willing to committhemselves can participate’ (1974: 1). Many of

5See her oft-anthologised ‘Some Sound Observations’ (Oliveros1984: 23–4).

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Oliveros’s scores and pedagogical interventionsbegin with verbal protocols for organised listening(often framed as ‘listening meditations’) which, like4'33", LISTEN, or Schaferian ear cleanings, initiallyminimise the sonic presence of self in order to betterhear contingent environmental sound. Yet Oliverosdiverges, and implicitly answers Kahn’s silence-entails-silencing thesis, by granting a more centralrole to personal, expressive and improvisatorysound-making, which emerges directly from suchlistening.If aforementioned works by Cage, Neuhaus and

Young are ‘audience participation’ pieces (the listenersare ‘making’ the music, inside their percept, by listen-ing) in a rather conceptual sense, and are revealed to betacitly ‘pedagogical’ only under deconstructive closereading, Oliveros’s music has long been both partici-patory and pedagogical in a more direct sense. Thoughher Sonic Meditations were initially made, performed,and taught in the context of academic courses andworkshops for (potentially) novice pupils, she soonbegan presenting audience-participatory versions ofthese scores in public concerts (Oliveros 2014).6

Thus, Oliveros presages and intersects the aims ofcontemporary participatory art: to forge the audienceas a self-conscious collective through mutual interac-tion; to respect and value what non-artists can do; tobreak down the conceptual binary and practicalboundary between artists and non-artists.Though, like Cage, she starts with an assumption of a

universally shared listening faculty buried underneathenculturation, Oliveros makes a different conclusionabout what it means to free the listening body from itsenculturative chains, a conclusion based in a differentconceptualisation of the very limits of listening itself. Byemphasising the importance of listening to the soundsinside (in dreams, the inner mental voice, imaginedsounds) as well as outside us, Oliveros’s dissentingnotion of listening comes here to counter-intuitivelyoverlap with and ultimately include intentional, creative,participatory sound-producing activities such asvocalising.7 In a paradigmatic such work, one of hermost famous and oft-performed text scores, ‘TeachYourself to Fly’, the score instructs ‘any number ofpersons’ in a standard protocol for organised listening,beginning with ‘observing your own breathing’.Breathing, like the body sounds Cage famously heard inthe anechoic chamber, is one of the signs/sounds of

presence that is a precondition for listening and a guar-antor that there is no such thing as silence. But ratherthan quieting listeners’ bodies to let in as much con-tingent environmental sound as possible (as one wouldlikely do in a realisation of 4'33", LISTEN or mostof Schafer’s exercises), Oliveros finds value in andbuilds her piece out of a different kind of nature: theinner, somatic ‘human nature’. The piece exhortsparticipants to attention (‘always be an observer’), buthere observation does not preclude sound-making.Continuous with the unstoppable breath, and emerginggently from it, is the voice: ‘allow your vocal cords tovibrate in any mode that occurs naturally’ (Oliveros1974: 1). A realisation of ‘Teach Yourself to Fly’, thusbegins as, but ultimately exceeds, an instance ofcontemplative individual perception. Oliveros finds aparticipatory chorus of singers (the ur-sound of partici-patory art, the ur-participation in music) at the heart ofthe Cagean project.

5. CONCLUSION

Throughout this article, I have read varied ‘protocolsfor organised listening’ as (inherently problematic,universalism-tending) critiques of culturally embeddedmusical listening. Such protocols are regarded as hav-ing ‘ear cleaning’ power, the capacity to reverse harmto the subject inflicted by musical enculturation. Mycore intervention here is to argue that these protocolsare themselves forms of enculturation, into and not outof a mode of listening. As with Neuhaus’s assertionthat his audience ‘learned to listen for themselves’(despite the fact that he, the artist, had given the ‘lec-ture/demonstration’) Oliveros’s title – ‘Teach Yourselfto Fly’ – suggests that participants are the ones doingthe (self-) teaching, an assertion in logical tension withthe obvious pedagogical role played by her text. Suchauthentic learning-to-listen for/to/by oneself, a tacitalternative to ‘music appreciation’ or any enculturativeknowledge imposed from without, has been the statedor implicit goal for the artists discussed throughout thisarticle. Yet, as long as artists are the ones specifying theprotocols for listening, acting as ‘sound pedagogues’,such self-teaching is an endlessly deferred horizon.This is not to say, however, that sound pedagogycannot deliver on its promise of a more participatory,horizontal and democratic interaction thanmost formsof music pedagogy. Listening to the ‘everyday’ soundsof lived space does seem to bend our ear towards whatis held in common, across lines of culture, educationand background, in an attempt – whether strategic ornaïve – to minimise the effects of such interpersonaldifferences.

From the 1980s, artists such as Oliveros, HildegardWesterkamp, and Steven Feld have guided sound artaway from such problematic universalism by explicitlymarking their own listening as perspectivally embedded,

6See Oliveros 1979, a documentation of one such audience-participatory realisation.7Kahn (2001: 190) suggests Cage saw inner voices as ‘quasi-sounds… antithetical to Cagean listening by being in competition withsounds themselves’. Oliveros (2014) strenuously disagrees, regardinginner voices and other imagined sounds as among the most impor-tant of heard sounds. The implications of Oliveros’s redefinition oflistening are fascinating and broad: though musicians routinely referto listening as ineluctably part of playing, it is unusual to regardsound-making as potentially constitutive of listening.

Sound Pedagogy: Teaching listening since Cage 229

emphasising the implications of ‘earwitnessing’ from aparticular subject position. And, with Ultra-red’s 2012‘Five Protocols for Organised Listening’, a post-structural theorisation of listening has finally arrived:‘Listening is never natural. It requires and generatesliteracy’ (Ultra-red 2012: 4). Just as traditional musiceducation aims primarily to make a person ‘literate’ inthe sign system of Western art music, sound pedagogyembeds us in practices of listening that, like language,are culturally contingent and constrain what can beheard or understood. Rather than speaking of ‘cleaning’or ‘opening’ our ears, metaphors that invoke the mod-ernist myth of the zero degree ‘underneath’ culture, weshould follow contemporary sound studies in identifyingplurally constructed cultures of listening. Ceding itsclaims to neutrality, admitting that it both requires andgenerates literacy, would the practice of post-Cageanlistening be any less radical, or worthwhile?

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