Archive for the ‘sun ra’ Category
>Making Sense
>In my work on Sun Ra, I’ve been trying to get at the relationship between performer and audience and finding myself falling short on vocabulary:
“Noise music, or as it is sometimes called, “antimusic” (Szwed 229), increases the gap between hearing and listening – listening which is partly a selective experience, one in which we often build, or at least trace, definitive narratives of sound that we can follow. Noise often disrupts this need for a musical story. Edgard Varèse conceives noise music as “the movement of sound-masses, of shifting planes…taking the place of the linear counterpoint…moving at different speeds and at different angles” (Varèse 17). Mark Slouka’s estimation of noise places gaps, or “the stuff between the notes” (Slouka 40) as paramount, the moments that aren’t specific points of auditory location. Both are interested in messinesses and silences. But are we as listeners so invested in making sense of what we hear that we won’t listen to unwhole music as it is?
For me, this is always why disability and queer theory has seemed to resonate with noise music and some jazz music. Lennard Davis’s landmark piece on disability “Enforcing Normalcy” perfectly dissects how we are prone to fill in aesthetic gaps instead of processing the object as it exists.
helloweimarrepublic 