I’ve found it to be good practice to not think too much about how individual readers or listeners will experience some piece of work I’ve made. But on the whole, it’s hard to avoid. Work of any kind is not complete until it reaches what the tech folk call the end user. And it’s good to learn about the many reactions a potential audience can have to an attempt at art.
I made the above short sound piece recently, which I call Pulse Project: After James Tenney, more as an experiment than an intentional piece of music (though some might consider it one), and shared it with a few people I respect and admire. I got very different reactions. This didn’t surprise me. As the fiction writer Garth Greenwell (Substack: To a Green Thought) observes so eloquently in this reflection on having one’s work reviewed by critics, those different reactions are OK. They are to be expected. And respected.
I remember one music piece I shared a while back that seemed to upset someone — a friend who found the terse, persistent quality of the piece frustrating. Much of the music I make is derived from an affinity to drone — sonic, as in ragas, not as in surveillance — and for some that conjures anxiety or even an intimation of madness, while for others it evokes peace and calm. I can’t predict what it will do to whom, and that isn’t really my business. If I am to keep making things, I can’t pause too long to worry about it. But engaging with and seeking to understand these different reactions, if you have the time and energy, seems worthwhile to me.
Below are some passages of something I wrote (with some edits and additions) in response to one sympathetic listener of Pulse Project: After James Tenney. I think this listener might have assumed that I knew what I was doing, in a formal sense, when I made it, that I made it intentionally — but I didn’t. I was a little embarrassed, because our culture (not my friend, his response was warm and curious) can often discourage or shame us for presuming to make art when we are “not qualified.” But I got over that fast. Otherwise, I wouldn’t make anything.
What I said in reply, which I will post in some form here, is really just an admission of my ignorance about formal music making and my artistic output more generally, and my determination to do it anyway. Reading my own words again, I found they also told me something useful about the way I work, and they might be useful to you:
Dear ——,
I am having trouble finding words to describe something I do to express a feeling that is beyond words, or something I do to escape them. Because I get tired of words. I am steeped in them all day, every day and so some mornings spent exclusively playing with sound and making it are an enormous relief to me. Those mornings are a form of recovery from the stress involved in always trying to be articulate and clear. To be rock-solid, comprehensive and right. Maybe that’s therapy and not art. But musicologists collect work songs, too. The sound is a primal expression and I give it just as much validity as I do my words, no matter how easy or hard it is to produce. This one was pretty easy and I see that as a virtue.
It's really interesting to hear this through your ears. I think you know I don't have any real formal understanding of what I'm doing. I just do it. It is pure sense and sensory response. I fiddle with something — in this case an organ sound from Garage Band. In fiddling I hear a sound and it captures my attention. All I did after that was play with the knobs on the interface while I held down the two notes of a third all the way through. ... That moment of hearing the sound — what do you call it? — when you "prick up your ears" like a dog or an animal in the wild — and get hooked by the quality or texture. The startle response, which is what is produced by our bodies in response to a sound, gives way to something else — “this sound is not a threat,” it says — and we relax into curiosity, attentiveness, pleasure. A hypnotic state. I guess that's what Keats experienced when he heard that nightingale. That sound, I imagine, "set him off" to write a poem that we still read today.
So in a sense, Pulse Project is not so much a thing in itself that I intentionally created but a response to a sound that came my way and that I liked. I did not do anything but allow the sound to persist and then slightly messed with it, downshifting and upshifting it a bit, to bring it to different sonorities and spaces, without actually abandoning the original sound (and also adding a cushion of horns drifting in and out). Is that a “composition”? Probably not in the sense that most of us think of it.
I think almost all of what I produce is like that. I'm responding to something that moves me and after the first iteration of the response, there is some time spent tweaking and polishing it, but not too much as it must not be overworked and have the spontaneous life squeezed out of it. So my relationship to the piece is emotional and sensory but not (at least intentionally) formal or technical. I'm a "primitivist," I guess, in this sense and I don't embrace that by choice, either. My lack of formal knowledge and training renders me this way and I just work with it. I can only really speak to the emotional origin of it, not the technical approach.
Of course I also subtitled it "After James Tenney" — maybe presumptuous but this was also a factor in my responding to that organ sound. I connected it to my experience of listening very deeply to Tenney's “Postal Pieces” which you introduced to me …. Wow. I never get tired of it. “Cellogram” was the one that I thought of here, but mainly I think it was “Swell Piece #3.” To me “Postal Pieces” is one of the most experientially profound works I've ever listened to in what I suppose we must call the "avant garde."
One conceptual idea about the piece that I did have after making it was that it seemed to me to be an expression of “just consciousness.” The sound of merely being, maybe the hum of the machine of which we are all parts. But — possibly relevant fact — I also have tinnitus. And it is pretty pronounced at times, and so just being in silence for me often means being in the presence of ringing or rushing sounds, pulsing and vibrations of various sorts. These sounds are basically an aspect of my consciousness now, but I was also interested in this feeling of downshifting, in an unpredictable way. In those parts where the growl of the sound comes down in attack leaving a purer tone and lower volume I was gesturing toward this experience of being in a room where a machine is humming for a long time and then cuts out and a calm overtakes you and you realize you are at last now in an actual relative silence. Like when I'm having an attack of tinnitus and it just abruptly stops. That relief. It is a feeling of peace to me, and I hope a bit of it is there, and you experienced that piece, too.
Listen to the real thing: SWELL PIECE # 3 by James Tenney
What Do You Make of This Sound?