Learning to listen : the construction of listening in electroacoustic music discourse

Abstract

The short history of electroacoustic music is a history that, in many ways, shares in and benefits from the Eurocentric and androcentric grand narratives of centuries of Western music. Yet, paradoxically, it operates on the margins of music because it directly challenges common sense approaches to music that privilege melody and harmonic progression while also treating these as ubiquitous and universally applicable. Traditional aural training (in an institutional setting), I argue, disciplines listeners in ways that alter their receptive capacity for electroacoustic music. Electroacoustic music values different kinds of sonic objects and, according to its discourse, requires music-specific training, thus further perpetuating its marginalisation and hindering its accessibility. Music-specific training methods are prolific and, due to the diffuse and emergent nature of the field, there are no widely agreed upon methods of training. Listening is, therefore, constructed within the discourse as being fundamentally problematic. This thesis examines the construction of listening in electroacoustic music discourse. It asks questions surrounding the impact of discourse on the ways in which we learn to listen to music, and considers how it is that discourse itself might teach us how to listen. The dissertation, part-historiography, part-ethnography and part-discourse analysis, draws on the analytical processes offered by French theorist Michel Foucault (specifically his conceptions of discourse, discipline and power) in order to interrogate the discursive field of electroacoustic music with particular interest in the ways in which ideas of listening are affected, represented, constructed and produced. With attention to the gendered nature of the field of electroacoustic music, and through the productive capacities of power, I conclude by imagining how non-normative listening subjects can self-fashion through an aesthetics of listening.

Date of Award	2016
Original language	English