From the In-Between: Portfolio of Original Compositions and Commentary

Listening and hearing are often used as two distinct terms that describe aural sense. The former often implies a choice, the focussing of attention towards a sound at the expense of the clarity of others. The latter, on the other hand, constitutes what is more passively encountered. Authors such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Michel Serres, and Gaston Bachelard implicitly outline thresholds between listening and hearing, whether that be what sense itself is capable of, how bodies listen, or the imagined sounds of reverie. Common to these accounts is the notion that language somehow limits listening. Practitioners such as Joanna Bailie, Bryn Harrison, and Pauline Oliveros, too, play with these sorts of liminalities, through entangling various musical parameters, structuring pieces to play with memory, or directly asking listeners to attempt to use their ears in new ways. However, there seem to be differences in how such apparently similar aural limits are engaged with between texts and compositional works: language might describe states that are not possible in practice, but sense presents scenarios evasive of textual description. My research addresses this lacuna by positing a reading of aural limits and their possibilities that is developed through an amalgamation of both this theory and practice.

In chapter one, I propose a philosophical groundwork for the project based on Jean-Luc Nancy’s Listening (2007) which is examined through a portfolio of works which fall under three themes. In chapter two, I discuss my use of heartbeats as sites of listening and hearing. This mode of listening focuses attention inwards, but through this direction internal resonances are altered, the relationalities of which, I contend, in part comprise the listening body. This practice is different, too, when hearts are used to coordinate groups of musicians rather than just soloists. The third chapter outlines the invocation of Hekate as the basis for a method of listening that is itself constantly altering instances of renegotiation: a requirement to change registers constantly between those which are unquestionably grounded and tangible, and those which evade both of these adjectives but are not their straightforward opposites. In the final chapter, I discuss space in my work, noting how notions of insides and outsides persist, but also operate beyond (or within) each other’s apparent metaphorical limitations. I suggest that the listening body might be considered a sort of enclosure, the boundaries of which oscillate between the real and imaginary as a result of the dialogue of internal and external: the site of listening necessarily cannot take place in the centre of this chamber, as to attempt to do so would make, I argue, the centre a rim. As such, this project argues that the essentially intangible limits to listening within both sense and language are in resonance between and beyond each other, despite having no spatialities themselves. This is to say that the two are indispensable from each other, residing within and propagating each other’s margins. Sometimes (the limits of) the two might be discernible from each other but other times they might not, such that they need not appear in a duo, and a sense of a dialectic resides but is never clear and can never resolve.