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Scott Black: Nothing is accomplished by writing a piece of music. Nothing is accomplished by hearing a piece of music. Nothing is accomplished by playing a piece of music. Our ears are now in excellent condition. Welcome to the Virtual Jewel Box Podcast of the Tanner Humanities Center.

I am Scott Black, director of the Tanner Humanities Center, and today I am joined by Craig Dworkin, who prefers to have no introduction. Craig is the author of The Sound of Thinking: A Listener’s Companion to Conceptual Music, forthcoming imminently from the University of Chicago Press. I'm delighted to welcome Craig.

Hi, Craig.

Craig Dworkin: Thanks, Scott. I'm happy to be here.

Scott Black: I've been waiting for this book for a long time. We've been talking about it, and it's about to come out. It's very exciting. It's a fascinating project. I don't know what conceptual music is. We have been referring to this as “the music book” for years, but I don't know if that's what it is.

Is this a book about music?

Craig Dworkin: No, but I like the term music because I hope that gives readers or listeners pause and makes them think for a minute: Wait a minute. What do I mean by music? I'm a nominalist, so I don't think there is any such thing as Music—with a capital M—which doesn't mean our definitions aren't rigorous or based on things we can define for ourselves. It doesn't mean it's a frivolous category.

The available term would’ve been sound art, and that would've been easy. It wouldn't have made anyone think about things. But by insisting on music, I want people to think about some of these works and say to themselves, “Wait a minute, that's not music.” And then maybe think to themselves, “Well… what is music?”

Scott Black: So we've jumped way ahead—my fault. You've written a new book. An unusual book, a wonderful book. The Sound of Thinking: A Listener’s Companion to Conceptual Music. You call it a source book. It is a series of studies organized alphabetically—strange, sometimes difficult sound art; pieces of music; programmatic music; non-expressive music; uncreative music. Although one of the things you say is that this is not a book about creativity. It's about finding creativity in unusual places.

So maybe give us a broad outline of the project—how it’s conceived, how it proceeds through the book. It's not meant to be read cover to cover linearly.

Craig Dworkin: I use “source book” to signal that it's not a conventional monograph. I'm not making sequential or cumulative arguments. There's not a through-line argument. I'm not making—don’t tell my editor this—I'm not making big claims beyond wanting to say: I think there's more to music than we tend to listen for.

And I think that if people give themselves permission and give themselves time and keep their minds open to all kinds of contexts—literary contexts, art-world contexts, sculptural contexts, philosophical contexts—you don't need to be some expert musicologist to gain a lot from music that seems maybe rare or obscure or specialist in its unpopularity.

Scott Black: Usually when we think about music, we think about it in romantic terms—the expression of an individual. We imagine a person writing something or singing something or performing something that expresses their thought, feeling, subjectivity, deep emotion. If we're feeling very romantic.

Just to give people a sort of intro to this project: these are organized sounds that don’t work like that. They refuse, as someone you quote says, the lyrical subjectivity that we usually associate with authorship of music.

Craig Dworkin: Yes—what the poet Charles Olson called the “lyrical interference” of the ego. Trying to rid art of that very 19th-century sense of creativity that we have.

And the figure for me—this won't be a reference for everyone, but for those of a certain age who remember Sesame Street—there’s a recurrent skit where a Beethoven figure is trying to write a Mozart tune and can't get the last note and bangs his head on the piano trying to find the right music for his intense feelings. Everything here is the opposite of that moment. It's not about finding the right note; it's not about conveying some inner experience.

Rather, it's about finding external structures—finding the right structure, the right procedure, the right connection, the right system—that can play itself out in some realm that I want to insist on calling musical.

Scott Black: We'll get to that strange definition of music—which I fully accept—but I have peculiar interests in sound as well. So: if we're not dragging out our subjectivity through notes to express ourselves, what are the procedures these creators or programmers or planners—as Eno calls them—use to create their music? Give us a small sample.

Craig Dworkin: One example would be György Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes, each wound to a different tension and let run simultaneously to create a complex, shifting, evolving narrative polyrhythm as they wind down at different rates.

Another example would be Enrique Udo’s realization that the dots of braille could have a musical staff laid over them, and suddenly what would be haptic raised dots for certain readers become note-heads. All you have to do is type out whatever you're going to type in braille, and suddenly you have a musical composition notated for you.

Another example—key for the book—are people who sonify data. Johannes Kreidler, who took stock-market data and fed it live into a computer music-making app. People who take chessboards and chess games and use the board as a pitch-time graph to automate sequences of sounds that are determined, but not predictable. You don't know what's going to come out, but you know what you've put in.

And then you listen.

And I think the other part of the 19th-century cliché—besides that Beethoven figure anguished and trying to get just the right note on paper—is the privilege we have, when we think casually about music, of focusing on pitch. Harmony and melody as the key aspects of music. But there are all kinds of sound qualities besides pitch—timbre, texture, rhythmic relations. These works insist those other aspects don’t need to be subordinated to pitch. They can come to the fore on their own.

Scott Black: Cage has a famous, wonderful line about letting sounds be themselves, and I think Cage is—if not giving direct permission—at least at the fountainhead of some of these people, creating a permission structure to explore sound in full dimension. Ambient sound can count as music. Chance operations can create music. Machines, as you say, fed with what we traditionally think of as non-musical systems, can produce organized sound that you and I might call music.

Craig Dworkin: Yes. And I think Cage—even if he doesn't give direct permission—creates the field in which we can start to think more broadly about music. His double deconstruction of sound and silence: that silence could be musical, and that there is no such thing as silence. And then noise and music not having the tight distinction we sometimes give them.

Once you've opened music to noise, and once you've opened music to silence, you've created a lot of space. And the people I'm looking at in this book really push that space.

Scott Black: At the beginning I was reading a passage from Cage himself, and this is something I love about Cage: whatever the music is, whatever the sounds are, the project is largely to attune your ear. These works help us attune ourselves to the world in some way. So I'm curious about the tuning aspect—the tuning of your ear, your sense of yourself in the world. Are you operating in the same way when you listen to this?

Craig Dworkin: I kind of want to ask you that question. I think you have a better sense of that relation between the self and the world.

Scott Black: Oh, I don't have a sense of the relation between myself and the world at all, by definition. But one of the provocative things about the examples you discuss is: when you first hear some of these pieces, you're thinking, What the heck is going on here? Why am I doing this? What's the point?

In many cases, there are fascinating conceptual projects or problems, which are wonderful to think about. But the experience of hearing them—if you're going to insist on calling this music—has to be part of the question. Why are we doing this? Not just for an interesting thought experiment.

For example: it's very cool to find out what a star chart sounds like if you create staves around the constellations. But why would one want to hear this? I actually listen to stuff that makes my wife slam the door and say, “Turn that stuff off,” all the time. So I'm sympathetic to the experience of hearing strange things that then organize themselves in ways you didn't expect. That's exciting to me.

So that’s my answer to tuning your ear. Maybe it’s detuning your ear.

Craig Dworkin: That makes good sense. Part of it, for me, is getting toward that definition of music. The combination of the physical experience of listening with the attention that makes it a cognitive experience.

Maybe starting with: Why the hell would someone do this? Why the hell am I sitting here listening to this? And I hope part of what I've shown is that you don't need too much time to realize there's often more going on than you initially think. More connections than you expect.

It's the same reason you might read difficult philosophy: it’s not easy, it makes your head hurt. Or rock climbing: it’s not easy, it makes your fingers hurt. But these experiences enrich how we think about things—how we think about our bodies in the world. And I presume that enriching experience is somehow worthwhile. That’s debatable.

Scott Black: It's a matter of taste—and it’s interesting, because taste is one of the things this book is adamantly notinterested in.

Craig Dworkin: Yes. This was a stumbling block with some readers for the press. I'm not making a case that this is the best music or that all of it is good. Some of it is amazingly good—it's as good as stuff gets. But the book is descriptive, not evaluative.

People may say, “I'd rather listen to Beethoven.” Yes—fine. That’s not the point.

It’s a source book. I want it to be a resource for further listening. My listening is not the end point. I want people to listen further, to say, “Not this one,” but “That reminds me of something else,” and go there with an open ear, patience, and a willingness to give something a chance—even when the description sounds like it’s telling you not to.

Scott Black: I love that. This is a form of criticism that is descriptive—giving you ways to approach something non-evaluatively. Not making meaning out of it, but showing how you might start to understand it. Then it's up to you to complete the project—to develop your own ways of hearing, to build your own source book of things that satisfy your curiosity.

Pleasure is another thing this is not necessarily about. It might bring you difficulty and pain—which might themselves be pleasurable.

Craig Dworkin: Yes. And you touched on two goals of the book.

One is simply to expand our sense of what has been composed and proposed musically. The canon—even unofficially—gets very narrow. If you turn on a classical radio station, 50% of the time you might hear Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending. And the rest is a pretty narrow range. We forget how wide the horizon can be. It changes your sense of what counts as “difficult,” “atonal,” “long.” Some pieces in the book, if performed, would outlast the universe. Suddenly Mahler seems very fleet.

The second is: I'm not a musicologist. I'm bringing an attention to language as a literary critic. A lot of language attaches itself to purely musical works—titles, program notes, instructions—and that language is often slighted. I try to magnify it and see what work it's doing.

Scott Black: That gets us to the other side of the conceptual music piece: the conceptual. You’ve written extensively about conceptual poetry—uncreative writing. There’s a phrase from Sol LeWitt in the book that I absolutely love: “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” The idea → machine → art.

Craig Dworkin: Yes, I love that concise statement. The machine part speaks to what we discussed earlier: having a system that runs its course and seeing the result.

The idea or concept is the site of creativity—not finding the right note for Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. Instead it's: What data set might I sonify, and why? That’s the creative act.

And then the art itself often gets slighted. Many of these works seem like they have loglines: you could just read the concept and not listen. One of the things I’ve insisted on is actually listening—actually hearing what is produced, even when the concept seems more important.

Scott Black: So let me ask for a couple of your favorites. What's something in this book you think is good—great—even pleasurable? And what's something that's just really interesting? Give us a few examples.

Craig Dworkin: Let me give an example that surprised me. I thought it would be torture to listen through. There's a work by Tom Johnson—the touchstone figure of experimental music—called The Chord Catalog from the mid-80s, which enumerates all 8,000-plus chords in an octave on the piano.

Andrés Jiménez and Steven Sharp restaged this piece for the Roland 808 synthesizer, using all the voices—bass drum, snare drum, tom-toms, hi-hat, etc. They did all the rhythmic permutations: 65,000-some permutations. It takes two CDs. I thought it would be excruciating. But the progression of determined yet unpredictable temporal and rhythmic changes—the speed of percussive waves—I found hypnotic. I finished the second CD and wanted to listen again.

Another example is the album Blue by Mostly Other People Do the Killing—best name in all of jazz—in which they spent months practicing to replicate Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue note for note, to create a recording like a forgery: something indistinguishable from the original. The slight differences are surprisingly disorienting. The drum comes in just not quite right. It's very emotional, upsetting, exciting. It elicits an altered state you normally get from substances other than CDs.

Scott Black: That’s fascinating. The idea of the perfect cover is terrific. Very Boulezian.

Craig Dworkin: Right. And again, many pieces initially seem like, “Well that's not music.” Cage’s 4'33": you sit still and listen for a few minutes. Not as taxing as sitting through a symphony. It's just four minutes. Or “play the notes exactly as written”—in the theology of Western classical music, that’s completely orthodox. But do it in this context, and suddenly it seems challenging, wrong. That's fantastic.

Scott Black: And it's an example of how the idea becomes an experience—which is what art is.

Craig Dworkin: Yes: the machine that makes the art. The concept: play this album exactly right. Then see what happens. It's always going to be surprising. It's always an experience, rather than just recognizing the concept.

Scott Black: Can I ask you about a couple of my favorites? They're from toward the end of the book. It's organized alphabetically, starting with “Alphabet”—very clever—but at the end you get to Steve Reich in the chapter called “Y Axis.” Could you tell us a little about this experiment? I’m a huge Reich fan.

Craig Dworkin: I think of Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music (1968). Reich hangs microphones from the ceiling on their cables above speakers. Performers pull them back and let them go. As they swing and pass over the speakers, they generate feedback—they honk and whoop in computable but not exactly predictable rhythms, depending on how far back and when each was released.

It creates fantastic polyrhythms. You’re not listening for pitch or harmony but for texture of electronic feedback—the sound you normally try to eliminate. Here it constitutes the music itself.

And one detail I love: in the score, Reich says the musicians should sit down and listen with the audience. That blurs social relations—who music is for, who it's by, what it means to produce sounds you then listen to along with everyone else.

Scott Black: It's a wonderful piece. The polyrhythms are fabulous. And you and I are young enough to have grown up with noise—with Sonic Youth, with Throbbing Gristle—so it's not shocking to us. But it is fascinating to think about what is usually excluded as constituting your sonic experience. And as pendulums, it's literally the sound of the world turning.

Craig Dworkin: It's physics. You're hearing Newtonian physics made audible. And in the same way Cage recognized that you could use a phonograph cartridge to make music rather than play music, here the microphones that would record a performance are the instruments themselves. And if you hear a recording of Pendulum Music, you're hearing yet more microphones recording the microphones that are swinging.

It opens onto more than you'd expect from two, three, or four microphones, which is what the score calls for.

Scott Black: So we need about a dozen stereos playing this, and then record that, and then record that—

Craig Dworkin: And then record that. Yes.

Scott Black: One last thing. You mentioned the social relations that are part of music. That's one of the claims for this being music: it's mediated socially; there's a performance aspect; it wants listeners. That’s part of it.

I want to expand that to the very last section, “Zone.” It's fascinating because it’s about time, about war, about a peculiarity of a post-conflict situation realized densely and beautifully through sound.

Craig Dworkin: Yes. This is an amazing piece by Tao Sambolec, which listens in on one of the audible effects of a dispute in 2018 between Serbia and Kosovo. The details are baroque and contested, but essentially there were political struggles around the energy companies generating and distributing electricity in the Balkan grid. As some companies withheld power, there was a drop in the mean electrical frequency of the phase-locked network in Europe.

All of Europe is on the same grid. So this local conflict caused a tiny change in the hertz of the entire electrical wiring of Europe. It was eventually resolved. The Swiss, of course, noticed it. The variation is microscopic.

Scott Black: How small?

Craig Dworkin: About 0.004 hertz. Barely audible.

Sambolec places two sound generators in a gallery space: one at the proper frequency, and one at the slightly dropped frequency. Because the dispute was about territory, slight movement around the gallery changes what you're hearing. You’re hearing one of the sounds of war.

We think of the sounds of war as explosions and airplanes and screams. But there is also a 0.004-hertz discrepancy.

We don't think of the electrical grid as a musical instrument. But it is. In Europe it's 50 hertz; in the U.S. it's 60. Frequency is sound. Sambolec recognizes: the frequency is music. It's ready-made. Let's hear it.

And it's strange and palpable to shift your head slightly and feel something in your brain.

Scott Black: That is so cool. Whatever art is, it should show us something we haven't recognized—some aspect of experience. This does that in the most literal sense: an attunement to the world around us, to things we haven’t even thought to think about.

If people want your book, that's easy to find—University of Chicago Press will publish it momentarily. But if people want to hear this stuff, is there a resource? Or do they have to do what you’ve made a habit of—scouring the internet for obscure sounds and obscure outlets that will sell you this stuff?

Craig Dworkin: Follow leads where you can. They’re short-lived dolphins, so I don't even know if some will be online when people look. But there are concert series—Music We Want to Hear, for instance—that have YouTube recordings available for the moment.

But I think you don't have to look far to find other people who are also looking for this. For me, that's what constitutes music rather than just sound—the social network around it. The received definition of music is “organized sound.” I really like Ultra-red’s definition: “organized listening.”

Find those other listeners and how they are organizing themselves around works. That’s part of the adventure.

Scott Black: That's great. And as people who preceded the internet, the pleasure of strange music was the hunt, the sharing, the mail-order catalogs in the back of local zines.

Craig Dworkin: Exactly.

Scott Black: You can live that life again, because the easy accessibility is boring.

Craig, this has been totally great. I'm really looking forward to seeing the book in print and reading it—not straight through, but skipping around properly. Thanks so much for coming on and talking with us today.

Craig Dworkin: Thanks, Scott.

Scott Black: You've been listening to the Virtual Jewel Box Podcast of the Tanner Humanities Center. Our music is not conceptual music—it's Jelly Roll Morton's Perfect Rag. Thanks for joining us.