When Violins Were Trees: Resistance, Memory, and Performance in the Preparatory Experiments for Landscape Quartet, a Contemporary Environmental Sound Art Project

When Violins Were Trees: Resistance, Memory, andPerformance in the Preparatory Experiments for LandscapeQuartet, a Contemporary Environmental Sound Art Project.

Bennett Hogg

abstract

For many years now I have been working with the idea thatviolins were once trees. From naïve early electroacousticexperiments designed to find “naturalistic” sounds in extended violin techniques, through a series of free improvisation projects, I have finally arrived at what I think of as the beginnings of a critical ecological practice with violins out in the natural environment. Dragging violins along paths, floating them in rivers, allowing rain to fall on them, and recording the results with small microphones hidden inside the bodies, I work in a participative way with the affordances of the environment, the instrument, and my own personal skills and memories. Conventional “soundscape” compositions and theories of acoustic ecology can, I argue, be seen to be neither particularly acoustic, nor particularly ecosystemic. Much environmental sound art ends up being simply representation, albeit in a sonic form. Against this, I argue for participation, a refusal to hide the presence of the artist, and a resisting against the idea of merely imposing an artistic and/or aesthetic vision onto the surface of an ecosystem.

key words: environmental sound art; soundscape; site-specific art; phenomenology; improvisation; memory

It’s the 11th of August, 2010. I am wearing headphones,

and kneeling in the leaf litter and undergrowth beneath

tall beech and sycamore trees in a narrow stretch of

woodland known as The South Plant’n (plantation) about a

mile to the South of Seaton Delaval Hall, part of the

Delaval Estate of Lord Hastings. My father’s family have

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been tenant farmers on this estate and in its immediate

vicinity since at least 1732, my father and brother still

farm there, though on farms some distance further to the

North of the Hall. My mother’s father was a gamekeeper on

the estate, as well as a celebrated local rat catcher (or

Rodent Control Officer, in the vocabulary of the local

council at the time). It’s blustery and overcast, and

through the pair of small DPA460 microphones taped to the

inside of a cheap school violin, I can hear the distant

sound of the reversing alarm on some sort of farm

machinery, and the encroaching steady drone of a

passenger jet swinging over from the North Sea on the

flight path that cuts over the Delaval Estate en route to

Newcastle International Airport. I am momentarily

irritated by these noises, having spent twenty years

recording electroacoustic source sounds under studio

condition designed to capture sounds separated from their

acoustic environment, but I have to resolve these

mechanical intrusions as being constitutive elements of

the South Plant’n’s quotidian soundscape. The microphones

inside the violin are connected via long XLR cables to a

Zoom H4 handheld recorder, whose input I am monitoring on

headphones. The cables snake along a short stretch of

rough path through the undergrowth, intertwined with a

slightly shorter length of strong, white washing line,

tied to the tailpiece of the violin in such a way that

should the violin become stuck in anything as it is

dragged along the path the washing line will pull taut

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before the XLR cables do, hopefully preventing the (not

inexpensive) microphones from being wrenched out of the

instrument and damaged (see fig. 1).

Some weeks earlier Berlin-based flautist and improviser

Sabine Vogel and I had made some recordings on the

Northumbrian coast near to the village of Howick, with

the same DPA microphones inside one of her flutes. We

were collecting sounds for an installation project, and

as an experiment Sabine didn’t blow into the flutes but

used them like physical filters – or maybe resonators -

for the wind and sea sounds, the microphones inside the

flutes transmitting the changes in the microacoustic of

the flute’s inside as different fingerings sounded a

series of changing formants filtered from the broad-band

noise of the surrounding sonic environment. The results

were arresting, in particular the uncanny combination of

immensity (the sea) and intimacy (the tiny inner acoustic

of the flute, the proximity of fingertips covering and

uncovering holes). Listening to the environment of the

South Plant’n from, as it were, inside my violin, had a

similar sound quality, distant sounds, the “large” sound

of the open air, enormous machines passing overhead,

resonating inside an acoustic space that could never be

experienced without the aid of these tiny microphones,1 a

close, intimate sonic signature seeming to contain the

sounds of a world with which it was itself,

paradoxically, surrounded.2

3

A violin, though, does not afford the same kinds of

interaction with an environment as a flute. The impetus

to explore ways in which I might engage with the

environment through the violin came instead from two

ideas that have fascinated me for more than twenty years,

and which have been involved in the genesis of a number

of my electroacoustic compositions and improvised

performances. The first is that the violin used to be

part of a tree, was a living thing, something recorded in

various poetic forms on the wooden bodies of lutes,

harpsichords, and virginals (though not, to the best of

my knowledge, violins) along the lines of:

Viva fui in silvisSum dura occisSecuri dum vixi tacuiMortua dulce cano

I was alive in the forestI was cut by the cruel axeIn life I was silentIn death I sweetly sing[inscription on an Elizabethan lute (Webley 2006,unpaginated)]

The second fascination with the violin has been an

insight into the ways in which it can serve as a sort of

sensor, a measuring device for the seismic activity of

embodied human consciousness,3 especially in

improvisation, where it is the means to actualise in

sound the physical and emotive responses to a music that

emerges only through group improvisation.

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I feel myself reacting emotionally andphysiologically to the improvisations ofothers in a group, an experience which I thenexternalize through playing the violin. . . .It seems, at first sight, as though the violinis nothing more than a screen onto which Iproject my instinctive, physical reactions toincoming sounds in directly felt physicalgestures. . . . I used to enjoy thinking ofthe violin as a scientific measuring device, aseismograph of my inner state, something likea weather station tracing the tinyfluctuations in my body’s chaotic systems. Alie detector might be just as appropriate anexample, particularly when the violin showsthat I was faking it, that I didn’t reallymean what I played, or wasn’t listening (Hogg2011, 87).4

The project I have begun to describe here springs, then,

from a desire to creatively explore and reanimate

relations between violin and tree – is it possible that

something is recorded in the very fabric of the violin,

as it were, that might afford this? – and to explore, at

the same time, ways to exploit this “instrumental” (in

the scientific sense) aspect of the violin. The project

plays with this instrumentality, deriving performance

from the procedures of measurement, whilst at the same

time destabilising measurement’s scientific pretentions

through presenting it as performance.5

I had already conceived of dragging a violin over

terrain, and recording the sounds produced with

microphones inside the instrument, in order to create

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something like a sonic trace of landscape, a measurement

of slopes, materials, speeds, when I came across the

following quote by the Cornish painter Peter Lanyon.

Lanyon, a gliding enthusiast, writes “The thermal itself

is a current of hot air . . . It is invisible and can

only be apprehended by an instrument such as a glider”

(Tate Gallery website). Lanyon has become an important

influence on my own environmentally-based sound art of

late, someone who, in the words of his biographer Chris

Stephens, “rejected the hitherto paradigmatic single

viewpoint in favour of a multi-directional, experiential

depiction of a place” (Stephens 2000, 19). As will become

more and more apparent throughout the following, this

position suggests several productive avenues for

exploration, both practically, in terms of sound art

practice, but also philosophically. Lanyon maintained

that his paintings were neither

“. . . abstract, nor are they landscape. Theyuse abstraction as a method and landscapeexperience as a source. . . . They areconcerned with environment rather than view,and with air rather than sky” (Lanyon quotedin Stephens 2000, 18).6

A visual artist, such as Lanyon, who in his painting and

thinking was aware of and actively sought to challenge

the “hitherto paradigmatic” viewpoints structuring

conceptualisations of landscape and place affords a

productive orientation to the issues of making sound art

that addresses itself to landscape. It is arguable that

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our experience of sound, and of music more specifically,

is strongly overwritten with the logic of the visual –

or, more specifically, by the cultural modalities in

which the visual has been appropriated as the dominant

mode for attentiveness; critique of these cultural

modalities in the domain of the visual arts can thus

serve to alert the sound artist to ways in which his or

her practice is also subject to received ideologies about

place and experience.7 Though we hear sound as it comes at

us from all directions, our vision is strongly directed.8

One prime site at which this overwriting takes place is,

of course, the concert, in which the source of the music

is from the front, often framed like a window or painting

by some from of proscenium, and socially organised

through rows of listeners facing the same direction. As

an example of what Foucault might call the ‘swarming of

disciplinarity’ this organisation of the sonic can be

seen to structure stereophony, the dominant modality of

music recording of the last fifty years, in which the

paired loudspeakers reproduce the concert listening

environment. Beyond this, the notion of directed and

attentive listening per se, deployed for aesthetic

purposes, can also be seen to be socially structured

according to this same visual organisation.

Lanyon’s approach attempts, within the domain of the

visual, to challenge painting’s “hitherto paradigmatic

single viewpoint” in favour of an experiential and

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involved account of being in and moving through a

landscape; in Lanyon’s approach to landscape painting

there is, therefore, a more or less explicit project to

rethink those cultural modalities of the visual that had

become dominant second nature. In the large painting

Porthleven (1950-51), for example, “[h]e made numerous

drawings . . . from different places in the town, so that

the outcome is not the intensified image of a single view

but an interleaving of numerous views” (Causey 2006, 88).

For Lanyon this is more than a straightforward modernist

play with cubist multiplicity, surrealist collage, or

cinematic montage. Stephens argues, on the evidence of

Lanyon’s own writing on his work as well as things

implicit in his sketches, assemblages, and finished

paintings, that Lanyon was actively aware of contemporary

philosophical positions, suggesting that in particular

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological understanding of “the

perceptual body and its environment [that are] bound into

a single structure” is strongly resonant with Lanyon’s

own practices and ideas (Stephens 2000, 100). For

Merleau-Ponty “[t]he body is our general medium for

having a world”, and bodily action is deployed as a means

to posit around itself biological and cultural worlds

(Merleau-Ponty 1962, 146).9 Bodily action is, of course,

temporal as well as three-dimensional, and Lanyon’s work,

since his earlier work under the tutelage of Ben

Nicholson in the late 1930s, had been “concerned with the

idea of how to be an abstract artist and still give a

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sense of what it is to be a person moving around in the

world” (Causey 2006, 30). Stephens sees in this approach

to landscape painting “with reference to all four

dimensions” that “Lanyon is enacting a process of self-

definition”. More than just the temporality of the

artist’s experience of moving through and exploring the

landscape, the temporal dimension in Lanyon’s work also

admits “the historical experience of the place and its

people. . . . for him, landscape forms were invested with

a memory, almost, of the human body”. Stephens continues:

Through a process of embodiment – thelandscape’s embodiment of its human historyand its perception in terms of the human body– Lanyon’s painting is constructed as ahumanist project, a connecting with otherhuman beings, even if – especially if – theyare of past generations (Stephens 2000, 101).10

This situates Lanyon – and others – in the position of

what Neil Evernden terms “resident” as opposed to

‘tourist’.

The tourist can grasp only the superficialitiesof a landscape, whereas a resident reacts towhat has occurred. He sees a landscape not onlyas a collection of physical forms, but as theevidence of what has occurred there. . . . Theresident is, in short, a part of the place(Evernden 1996 [1978], 99).

Evernden’s “resident” and Lanyon’s phenomenologically

engaged artist, then, map onto one another, insofar as

both deal with a conception of place that includes

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temporality as the durational aspect of the experience of

the place, paralleled by a second temporality that is

historical in nature.

A part of the place

The rough path in The South Plant’n along which the

microphone cables connecting my violin to the H4 recorder

were stretched is one that I walked countless times with

my grandfather as he went about his business of

gamekeeping. Near to where I knelt in the debris of the

woodland floor were the remains of simple chicken-wire

pens in which he’d raised pheasants for the estate shoot,

some of which I’d helped to build – banging in nails,

holding posts steady - forty years earlier. What had

become immediately clear from the very rough experiments

I’d tried with dragging my violin through undergrowth a

few weeks earlier was the perhaps rather obvious fact

that there needed to be a reason for choosing a

particular place to work in. An artist does not select

subjects at random, but choses subjects that have meaning

for him (even though the nature of what is meaningful may

range from the picturesque-that-will-sell through to the

obsessive fixation on a particular spot for deep personal

reasons, Ivon Hitchens later work, for example). Lanyon’s

work was deeply connected with and motivated by the

experience of places in his personal life story and,

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frequently, his Cornish identity (Causey 2006; Stephens

2000). Though the already mentioned fascination with a

soundscape that was immense and intimate at the same time

was engaging, the gestural and timbral results of

dragging the violin through “any old bit of landscape”

ended up as an unremarkable series of often distorted

thumps and bumps. The decision to begin my experiments in

earnest on a path through woodlands that I’d walked with

my grandfather arose from reflecting on the action of

dragging the violin at Howick with Sabine. Here are some

notes I made around that time:

Landscape – string quartet – 29th July 2010

- it’s a kind of drawing onto the landscape as much as arecording- placing mic or camera distances landscape. drawing theinstruments, in both senses – drawing through and drawingwith – leaves a trace – a kind of “wound”.

Dragging the violin makes a path, or finds an already

existent path. Paths are as much recordings as are .wav

files.11 “The imagination cannot help but pursue a line in

the land – onwards in space, but also backwards in time

to the histories of a route and its previous followers”

(Macfarlane 2012, 15). What if the violin, qua scientific

instrument, not only measures and traces, but also

replays, like the stylus of a phonograph,12 the path

serving as the recorded groove? To record – from the

Latin recordare – is to remember. I remember my grandfather

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in drawing my violin along a path that still records

where I walked with him as a child.

Paths connect. This is their first duty andtheir chief reason for being. They relateplaces in a literal sense, and by extensionthey relate people. . . . I have walked pathsfor years, and for years I have read aboutthem. The literature of wayfaring is long,existing as poems, songs, stories, treatisesand route guides, maps, novels and essays. Thecompact between writing and walking is almostas old as literature – a walk is only a stepaway from a story, and every path tells (ibid,17-18, emphasis in original).

At first I had simply walked the path, dragging my

violin, and listening to the thumps and rattles it made.

Not very interesting. No deep recorded inscriptions

revealed there. But, as with the phonograph, establishing

the right speed is crucial, and to my ears the most

interesting results came from a painstakingly slow

pulling of the violin where the different sound qualities

of the various materials – stones, earth, twigs, grasses,

bramble thorns, dry leaves – had time to sound. I found

myself savouring all of the different scratches, scrapes,

and contact sounds and, very soon finding myself drawn

into a microcosmic performance world where tensions in

the string that built up where the violin was momentarily

entangled in undergrowth, or had to surmount a rock or

broken branch across the path, were registered as a

perceptible straining gesture in the sound, the release

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of tension in the string and the sudden change in the

quality of the sound binding together in a secondary

gesture consequent to the initial tension/strain. The

snagging of one of the violin strings against a thorn

could be immediately felt as an increase in tension in

the clothes line, so that the raucous “twang” pizzicato

on its release felt deeply satisfying. Experiencing this

kind of resistance is probably the root of its

thematization in my current work.

It is important to note that this was all speculative, a

conceptual approach arrived at after some very elementary

experiments, with little real idea as to what the sonic

or experiential results would be. Having established that

the most interesting results came from a very slow speed

I decided to try to make a series of drags along exactly

the same section of path, and to make each drag last for

exactly eleven minutes, the length of time that the first

experiment that had produced sonically interesting

results had taken.

<caption> violin and Zoom H4 set up for controlled dragsalong path in South Plant’n, near Seaton Delaval Hall,11th August 2010.

At the end of this process I made some notes in myfieldwork book:

– sense of resistance on the pulling string – also the difficulty of keepingsteady speed – sim. to violin bowing, in fact.

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Also – it’s very responsive at slow speeds – just like with violin bowing.

Interestingly, and unexpectedly, the specific resistance

encountered in dragging the violin along the path through

undergrowth revisited and rehearsed some of the

resistance encountered in first trying to play the violin

as a schoolboy; the difficulty of getting it right, and

the magic of discovery when “it works”.

* * * * * * * ** * * * * * *

Resistant Materials

The physical resistance which a material offers to the

flow of energy is probably the main way in which musical

sound has been generated prior to the invention of

electronic means of sound production. A sounding guitar

string, the piercing sound of a piccolo trumpet, the

unstable pitch of a descant recorder in the hands of a

child, the rich vibrato of a bowed cello, all depend upon

resistances of one sort of another to the input of

energy, a finger plucking, air forced through tight lips,

breath passing over a fipple, the movement of horsehair

across a string. Resistance, then, lies at the very

origins of just about every musical sound. This kind of

resistance, of materials to energy, things to action,

objects to movement, animate bodies to external forces,

is, in Lakoff and Johnson’s theorisation of the embodied

mind, of primary importance in the development of human

consciousness. Primary metaphor is the term they use to

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mark “conventional mental imagery from sensorimotor

domains [that is] used for domains of subjective

experience” such as “when we conceptualize understanding

an idea (subjective experience) in terms of grasping an

object (sensorimotor experince)” (Lakoff and Johnson

1999, 45).13 The term “resistance”, then, is itself a

primary metaphor deriving from formative physical and

psychic encouters with the world, affording copious

pluralities of redeployment and adaptation.

Within the first couple of pages of his paradigm-shifting

book Musicking, Christopher Small reminds us of something

we weren’t conscious that we already knew; that “[t]here

is no such thing as music” (Small 1998, 2). The first

time I read that sentence it struck me that I had never

thought this idea before, and that I nevertheless

recognised it as though it were a memory. As should

become clear I have no strong enthusiasm for sustaining a

distinction between mind and body but I like to think

that Small names something new to the linguistic part of

my mind, but already known by my musical body. Small’s

destabilising of the notion that music is a noun,

proposing instead that it is better thought of as a verb,

offers us an opportunity to destabilise other

terminologies that might be productive. However, to

insist that music is solely a verb, an action, places it

very determinately within the realm of immanence,

something that, however rich the social interconnections

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it affords, nevertheless comes “from within”. The

transcendental status of the object that might be

deployed to check the potential for humanistic excess

becomes polarised into something that is thereby excluded

from the debate. A more productive strategy seems to be

to develop the insight that Small has so convincingly

made but to reintroduce the object into the discourse in

order that the contest is not one that can be resolved on

the side of subject or object, verb or noun. For me, the

most productive aspect of Small’s reformulation of the

ontology of music is its destabilising effect rather than

the resolution of an inevitable problem.

Resistance in music is not wholly reflective or

considered, neither is it wholly objectified; it is,

rather, an immediate and embodied relation between

actions and worlds that are mutually constitutive. In

Merleau-Ponty’s celebrated example, to know what honey

feels like is to feel the honey with the fingers but also

to feel the fingers, “Honey is a particular way the world

has of acting on me and my body” (Merleau-Ponty 2004,

73); the knowledge gained cannot be philosophically

reduced to a transcendent quality of the object touched,

nor can it be exhausted as a purely immanent quality. For

Merleau-Ponty, the answer to the philosophical and

cognitive dilemma of subject and object lies in a refusal

to remain bound by this epistemological binary.

Perception is understood to precede the split of the

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immanent knowledge of the subject inside of itself, and

the transcendent existence of the object outside of the

subject. At the centre of this relation is the

phenomenon, co-determined by the inextricable

interdetermination of subject and object that only emerge

reflectively, after the event, so to speak. Neither known

nor knowing, not resolved onto one side or other of the

immanence-transcendence split, “in its richness and

multi-determinability [the phenomenon lends itself] to

subsumption under a plurality of categories and to

placement within a plurality of practical horizons and

theoretical contexts. It is this richness of meaning that

underlies Merleau-Ponty’s thesis of the intrinsic

ambiguity of phenomena . . .” (Dillon 1998, 53).

Just as a phenomenology of music ought to beware of

coming down on one side or the other of the noun-verb

debate so the same ought to apply to “resistance”. Is

resistance a thing or an action? Should we better talk

about “resisting” and not “resistance”? Perhaps according

to one set of political imperatives we should, resisting

the reification that goes along with the noun form in

favour of the activist verb. Yet this would be to miss

some of the essential grounds of resistance itself which

is determined as much by the encountering of a body with

objects and forces that are not it as it is by a cognitive

position. The resistance of the object might be subsumed

under its verb form, in which the object “resists”, an

17

“imagined agency”, perhaps. But can an agency that is

imagined really be agency? Is it not just puerile

anthropomorphism? Or would it be better to say that

resolving these questions is actually of far less

consequence than engaging with the most productive aspect

of the debate, which is the very ambiguity of

resistance/resisting? For Merleau-Ponty the ambiguity of

the phenomenon opens up a potential for understanding

that exceeds the knowing subject and the known object,

similarly, in my against-the-grain critique of musicking

it is the ambiguity of music/musicking rather than its

decidability one way or the other that is perhaps the

most productive way of engaging with the issue. For

resistance, then, the undecidability of its location and

the polysemous consequences of its interconnectedness

with the world afford a thinking about its role in

musical creativity that cannot be reduced to any thing,

neither can it be left simply to political, or to

creative, action. Resistance, like the phenomenon, is

simultaneously formative of and experienced by the

subject. Resistance in its ambiguity and its

multiplicity, is a powerful mechanism through which

cognition is inextricably related to embodiment.14

* * * * *

* * *

resistance and memory

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As I have already suggested there is, for me, something

both atavistic and animistic in the very material of the

violin that means taking it into a forest has with it an

always already sense of a return. There is no innocence

in the act of treating a violin as a piece of once living

wood; all wood was, by definition, once living – that

this particular wood now takes the form of a violin is

significant at a number of levels. The “return”, for

example, actives a cultural resistance in terms of what

some would see as the mistreatment of this carefully

crafted and culturally valued object (even if it is just

a £40 school violin); there is, here, a violent (if

ultimately inconsequential) nature-culture clash, with

its own sets of resistances. Less immediately evident,

though, is a poetics and, arguably, a pragmatics; the

violin is culturally predisposed to recovering memories,

to reanimating recorded material. It is the tool that

transforms the person into a violinist who knows how to

play, the means by which recollection of melodies is

actuated, and – like other musical instruments in myth

and legend - an uncanny object inhabited by the ghosts of

the dead (Hogg 2012, 223-225).15 Alongside its mnemonic

function inside particular cultural practices there is

also its own “memory” of having once been a tree – though

this “memory” is also partly projection on my part,

something akin to imagined agency mentioned elsewhere in

this volume. When this coincides with the experience of

hearing and feeling the direct and unambiguous feedback

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between my actions pulling the washing line and the

confirmation of these actions at the qualitative register

of the sound, something very close to a primary

experience is encountered. Imaginatively predisposed to

experience my actions as an uncovering of lost data,

there is something in the brute physical resistances

experienced in the South Plant’n that puts the violin

outside of its generally-accepted cultural field of

knowledge. It is not treated as a violin, yet the violin’s

sonic signature – the metalic resonance of the strings,

its woodenness, the microacoustic of the inside of the

body – remains. But though this phenomenon is emergent in

the here-and-now of my present life-world, it also runs

in parallel with acts of remembrance (for my grandfather

walking his path, for my original discovery of the violin

as a sounding instrument, for the tree it once was). As I

noted earlier, the first results were unsatisfying and an

extremely slow speed of dragging was needed to generate

anything remotely distinctive as far as sound goes. What

was “replayed”, though, was something gestural that came

through as bowing, as I noted down at the time, not simply

dragging a lump of wood.16 There is, thus, another level

at which the violin deployed as an instrument of memory

in this situation functions, not to supernaturally

revivify memories inscribed into the place, nor to give

voice to the silent-when-living, singing-in-death tree,

but a remembering of bowing that arrives simultaneous

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with and inside of what would seem to be an entirely new

experience – dragging a violin along a path in a forest.

This sense of bowing is even more marked when floating

the violin on a river. The movement is less impeded than

when dragging through undergrowth, and quite an

extraordinary sense of interaction and involvement

becomes apparent. There are three main states of

interaction with the river; holding the violin steady and

hearing the incidental details of the water flowing

around and over it; pulling the violin against the

current, in which case there is a remarkable degree of

control to be had over the intensity and density of sonic

events; allowing the violin to float at its own speed on

a slack cord, which, in the absence of any resistance

between violin and river is near to silence. Imagined

agency resurfaces, this time the agency of the river

itself. The violin becomes an instrument for exploring

river; different currents, different depths, waves

scooping out spaces below the violin (giving a sudden

deep resonance), turbulence, all affect the sound

generated, but the river does not remain constant,

swerving around where the violin is floating, shape-

shifting and swirling in response to my physical presence

in the water, to the extent that on occasion I find

myself “chasing” a particular sound, even though that

sound is not actually “there” but being made through the

interaction of river, violin, and myself.

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Uncovering an ecosystemic knowledge

“Seeing always happens in a meta-position, away from the

seen, however close. And this distance enables a

detachment and objectivity that presents itself as truth”

(Voegelin 2010, xii). This is the “truth” of post-

Enlightenment science, in which an externally existing

reality is believed to be fully perceived by empirical

observation that claims objective detachment from the

distortions ascribed to the subjective position. The

traditional painter effectively disappears into the

viewpoint of the viewer through rendering the external

“truth” of the visual world, a manifestation in the

aesthetic register of a similar disappearing to that of

what Donna Haraway has called the “modest_witness” of

scientific observation, the observer who in

performatively effacing their own subject position

presents their sense data as objective fact (Haraway

1998; Cranny-Francis 2006). That the former

disappearance is testimony to the artist’s mastery of

perspective and representation, and the latter testifies

to the “modesty” of the scientific observer is less

significant as a differentiation as it is a mark of the

epistemological common ground of aesthetics and science.

Although the aesthetic in Western culture cannot be

restricted to the visual per se, it nevertheless seems to

be organised according to a kind of objectification that

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is more characteristic of the visual than the auditory.

Denis Cosgrove, for example, in his seminal work on

landscape, underlines this when he writes that “To speak

of landscape beauty or quality is to adopt the role of

observer rather than participant” (Cosgrove 1985, 18); in

other words, aestheticisation of landscape is grounded in

objectification and distancing. Tim Morton writes that

“The aesthetic is also a product of distance: of human

beings from nature, of subjects from objects, of mind

from matter” (Morton 2007, 24). Concert listening,

stereophony, and what I have argued is the visually-

structured nature of “attentive” listening in general can

be understood as attributes of a cultural logic of the

aesthetic that is organised by separation and

objectification whose dominant modality is a visuality

conceptualised as more autonomous from the other senses,

and which thereby marginalises a more intersensorial

embodiment of experience, and a more participative,

phenomenological engagement of consciousness organised

along auditory principles.17 The critical responses to

this view of the aesthetic illuminate, from different

directions, something they all identify in the West – the

dominance of a visually organised epistemology. The fact

that multiple, and in many respects incompatible,

perspectives have addressed themselves to this dominance

suggest that it is not an issue that is simply

constructed by a particular critical position but is

something that the culture more generally is actively

23

engaged with.18 It may be that, given the restrictions on

how and where we have historically presented audio works,

degrees of visual domination are inevitable, and insofar

as these are part of establishing an intersensoriality,

they are to be welcomed. However, what concerns me here

is less the nature of established cultural modes, and

more the way in which they have conditioned our approach

to the creative process and the materials of that

process.

If, for Voegelin, seeing “always happens in a meta-

position” hearing does not;

there is no place where I am not simultaneouswith the heard. . . . a philosophy of soundart must have at its core the principle ofsharing time and space with the object orevent under consideration. It is aphilosophical project that necessitates aninvolved participation, rather than enables adetached viewing position (Voegelin 2010,xii). . . . the auditory is generated in thelistening practice” (Voegelin 2010, 5).

Rather than being distanced and objectified, listening and

sound offer, for Voegelin, a serious phenomenological

alternative to the dominance of the visual.

Merleau-Ponty talks about his world ofperception in visual terms. The sensibility ofhis perception however is not that ofvision. . . . it is sonic perception, which isfree of the visual stranglehold on knowledgeand experience. Sound does not describe butproduces the object/phenomenon under

24

consideration. It shares nothing of thetoalizing ability of the visual. . . . Thesonic reality is intersubjective in that itdoes not exist without my being in it and I inturn only exist in my complicity with it(Voegelin 2010, 10).

Like Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological subject, “The

subject in sound is . . . the lived and concrete

experience that constitutes the world as sonic life-world

and the subject reciprocally generated within it.

Objectivity and subjectivity are partners rather than

adversaries in such a conception . . . constituted

through each other without abandoning their own purpose”

(Voegelin, p. 15). We are implicit in our own sound

worlds; we generate sound as well as perceiving it, and

we therefore hear ourselves in the world in a way that we

generally do not see ourselves.19 The silent, non-

participative, uni-directional attention of concert

listening, and its derivatives, goes against the

multidirectionality of our sound worlds. Besides this,

listening, in our normal mode of perception, demands

bodily reaction – we jump at a loud sound, tap our feet

in rhythm, turn to look because of something heard behind

us. from the position of aurality our senses are

intermodal, not separated out, and very closely

imbricated with motion and muscular reaction. This is one

reason why the dominance of one sense over the others is

so problematic – though vision and hearing complement one

another, an over-dominance of visuality leaves nothing to

25

the sonic that is of the sonic. Replacing visual dominance

with auditory dominance would be to miss the point; the

problem with visual dominance in Western culture is the

manner in which it organises the other senses according

to its own logic, which we might characterise as

objectifying and exclusionary. The sonic, at least in

Voegelin’s understanding of it, is much more open to

intermodality, to participation, to intersubjectivity,

and it is this aspect of the auditory that resonates most

strongly with my experience in the South Plant’n.

I want to take Voegelin’s position and run with it, as it

were, because it theorises the bones of what might be

termed an ecosystemic approach, an approach that opens up

the possibility for an environmentally situated sound art

that does not simply repeat the visually-organised logic

of representation, on loudspeakers. The Tim Morton quote

above about how the aesthetic involves a distancing “of

human beings from nature, of subjects from objects, of

mind from matter”, continues, “Is it not rather

suspiciously anti-ecological?” (Morton 2007, 24). It is

on this objectifying, anti-ecological aspect of the

aesthetic-scientistic complex that I will now focus.

Morton notes that

The word environment still haunts us, becausein a society that took care of itssurroundings in a more comprehensive sense,our idea of environment would have withered

26

away. . . . Society would be so involved intaking care of ‘it’ that it would no longer bea case of some ‘thing’ that surrounds us, thatenvirons us and differs from us. . . . In asociety that fully acknowledged that we werealways already involved in our world, therewould be no need to point it out” (Morton2007, 141, italics in original).

Perhaps, as outlined already given the history of the

social consumption of sound/music and indeed the history

of our textually inscribed and transcribed, and thus

essentially visual intellectual practices, the

organisation of the sonic in keeping with modes derived

from the ocular is partly inevitable, but just as

anthropology, geography, and art criticism have shifted

the understanding of landscape through an examination of

its ideological and epistemological underpinnings, we

ought to be looking for the ramifications of these shifts

on the notion of the “soundscape”?

The term “soundscape” is derived from landscape, and in

general shares with landscape the logic of specular

framing; the stereo sound field organising a frontally-

oriented relationship between listener and sound derived

historically from concert practices. It would be a

mistake though to imagine that simply replacing stereo

with multitrack or binaural recordings, or presenting

work in surround sound performances/installations would

be an end to this issue; such a move would in fact do

virtually nothing to address the central philosophical

27

and ideological tenets. The issue is not spatiality but

participation, not directionality but involvement, and it

is addressed by resisting the split between subject and

object, culture and nature. One could make a perfect

recording of a forest in thirty-two channels and

redistribute this material on the same number of

loudspeakers, reproducing the experience of being in the

forest very closely, and yet it would still be an

objectification, a representation, a function of a

listening subject who remains silent and attentive, not a

listener who is a constitutive part of the soundscape

they experience. If something is to be truly sonic and

ecosystemic, soundscape or acoustic ecology, it cannot

conceal the presence of the artist. Mike Pearson, for

example states that “Landscape is part of us, just as we

are part of it . . . But this embodiment is not

inscription but rather incorporation. Landscape has no

pre-existing form that is then inscribed with human

activity: both being and environment are mutually

emergent; continuously brought into being together”

(Pearson 2006, 12). There is much here that is resonant

with Voegelin’s figuration of Merleau-Ponty’s

phenomenology as sonic. There is also something similar

in play when Causey writes how “Lanyon’s objective was

not to separate subject and things seen . . . but to move

around so that his presence could not be identified

either as a fixed point within, or distinguished from,

the landscape. His intention is not to be ‘controlling’

28

but to be an embodied presence in a landscape that is

itself a more extensive body” (Causey, p. 146). Such an

embodied presence, one where the body, self, and

environment are interrelated is, according to Mel

Gooding, a characteristic of “Modernist artists [who] do

not see themselves as representing the world, but rather

as reporting and recording from within it” (Gooding 2002,

10).

In and of itself, though, this repositioning might be of

as little effect in shifting underlying ideological

assumptions as playing soundscape works in surround sound

were it not for the fact that “. . . dynamic strategies

of inter-relation with the natural world replace static

representations of the world. As in much of what became

historically identified as ‘conceptual art’, the objects

of this new art are documents of record, reports on

procedures” (Gooding 2002, 17). However, this is also an

art that cannot be reduced to its objects. Richard Long

exemplifies this when, in an interview, he states that

“The knowledge of my actions in whatever form, is the

art. My art is the essence of my experience, not a

representation of it” (Long 2007, 26). Though Long

documents his walks with photographs, and in writing, and

leaves sculptural rearrangements of environmental matter

behind him on occasion, the essence of what he does is in

what he does, not what is made from it; there is no

aestheticising distance between the art and the

29

experience, and the art cannot be exhausted through a

simply representational epistemology, something, as we

have already seen, that was touched upon and worked

through in a different medium by Lanyon. Though

documentation and objects have value insofar as they are

parts of an art practice, the weight is shifted away from

an art practice in which ultimate value lies in the

object produced – the totalizing logic of the visual,

let’s say - in favour of one in which the artist’s

experience comes to ground the value of the practice.

Shifts in the artistic understanding of landscape away

from a single, vanishing-point perspective representing

how the world is “supposed” to be (Johnson 1996, 9)

towards an experiential, temporalized, and participative

understanding then, map onto a phenomenological approach

that can itself be mapped onto a particularly sonic

organisation, where the sonic, in this sense, is less

culturally distanced from an intersensoriality than the

visual is.

In the light of these shifts, it seems appropriate to

reconsider the idea of soundscape, especially in the

light of the arguments presented so far that problematize

the extent to which the sonic can be unproblematically

subsumed within the logic of the visual.20 For many years

now I have tried to find ways to integrate my fascination

with and love of the natural world with my creative work.

Lying behind this is my family background in farming, and

30

the hundreds of hours spent with my grandfather the

gamekeeper. The problem in all of my attempts was

representation; I was listening like a member of an

audience, not like an improviser – both are forms of

attentive listening, but one responds in silence, the

other in sounding. There was an emphasis on rendering

some ecological message in the work, but no attention to

what an ecosystemic work or process might really be.

Rather than bringing home pristine lumps of the world (in

the form of environmental sound recordings) I needed to

be taking things to the world – going into it with my

knowledge, skills, ideas, and technologies, working in

and with the world, not collecting abstractions destined

only to be used in representations. It was by dragging my

violin through the woods, and floating it on the river

that I learned that an ecosystemic art would be

participative, inclusive, and involved. It would mean

listening like a participant in the “soundscape”, like an

improviser not the member of an audience,

unecosystemically separated from the sound world by

cultural practices grounded in the aesthetic. This is why

I found Lanyon’s work so very resonant, discovering it as

I did around the same time that I began exploring the

possibilities of working with my violin out in the

environment, and becoming a part of that environment.

Making environmental sound art would be a process of

learning through resistance and discovery rather than

31

looking for something that was somehow already “out

there” that “needed” representing.

Tim Morton calls the cultural phenomenon that had been

obstructing my work ecomimesis. In his words, ecomimesis

“wants to go beyond the aesthetic dimension altogether”,

it wants to give the illusion that it is “coming clean

about something ‘really’ occurring, definitively

‘outside’ the text”, a textual ploy that is “both

authentic and authenticating” (Morton 2007, 31). But

although “Ecomimesis is an authenticating device” (Morton

2007, 33) it is a delusional authenticity. The ecomimetic

trap lies in the fact that the more a writer tries to

present the environment as “really occurring”, the more

this becomes writing, not the thing written about: “It

cannot achieve escape velocity from writing itself. The

more the narrator evokes a surrounding world, the more

the reader consumes a potentially interminable stream of

opaque scribbles, figures, and tropes” (Morton 2007, 30).

The political and ethical problem of ecomimesis is that

it “is not necessarily on the side of nature” (Morton

2007, 34). “Putting something called Nature on a pedestal

and admiring it from afar does for the environment what

patriarchy does for the figure of Woman” (Morton 2007,

5). The distancing of the aesthetic here begins to show

its ideological seams. “Ecomimesis is a pressure point,

crystallizing a vast and complex ideological network of

beliefs, practices, and processes in and around the idea

32

of the natural world. . . . For ecological criticism to

be properly critical, it must get a purchase on

ecomimesis” (Morton 2007, 33). For my own practice this

critical purchase began in choosing to work in “Nature”,

taking up an ecosystemic approach to the working process

as a way to resist the ecomimetic tendencies of producing

work with “Nature”; not trying to “render”21 the natural

through the cultural. No Representation without

Participation.

When ecomimesis renders an environment, it isimplicitly saying: ‘This environment is real;do not think that there is an aestheticframework here’. All signals that we are in aconstructed realm have been minimized (Morton2007, 35).

Ecomimesis, and the unspoken ideological ground that it

marks, is, I think, a feature of much environmental sound

art, and as with writing, the escape velocity needed to

escape the ecomimetic is enormous.22 With Lanyon, I think

we have an art practice that is less ecomimetic, and more

properly ecosystemic than some, concerned as it is with

recording intersubjective experience in an environment,

not representing environment as an object.23 The same may

be said of Long, and others, and it is something like

this that my own environmentally situated work strives

for. Central to this is my background in free

improvisation, in which you only know what you’ve made

when you’ve made it – resonant, for me, with Lanyon’s

observation that figures appeared in his paintings that

33

he did not put there (Causey 2006, 87). This aspect of

improvisation, of “not knowing until . . .”, seems to me

of central importance in any work that strives to be

participative and ecosystemic, and which is thereby

organised according to a phenomenological understanding

of being. Wayne J. Froman identifies a phenomenological

dimension to mid-twentieth century “action painting”24

that further points to an implicitly ecosystemic

strategy, ecosystemic in the sense of a participative

interrelatedness that refuses the separation of subject

and object, whether in the interests of aesthetics or

scientific method. Rather than “a prior image [being]

rendered on a canvas by the artist, or where the artist

paints towards the goal of an image engendered on the

canvas” action painting is “where the artist comes to the

canvas as a site for acting, so that the painting

displays the event that takes place when the artist

paints, rather than conceal this event in favour of an

extracted segment of a self-contained world apprehended

as picture” (Froman 1996, 343). The canvas as a “site for

acting” foregrounds temporality and process in ways that

relate quite closely to musical free improvisation.

Talking about de Kooning’s approach to painting, Froman

notes that “features of the painting that appear in the

course of painting it are no longer apprehended as

elements in a configuration that is taking shape, but

rather are temporary resolutions of strains or tensions

in the painter’s perceptual field, resolutions that give

34

way to other strains or tensions” (Froman 1996, 345).

This “temporary resolution” of resistive energies is

strongly suggestive of improvisation, where in-the-moment

action indefinitely defers the presentation of a complete

musical object until that object, if it can be so called,

has been made. Kneeling in the leaf litter of the South

Plant’n I knew where I was, and I knew what conscious

memories I had of the place. It was not by chance that I

had brought a violin and recording device with me, but I

had no actual idea what I would be making. I did not go

with the expectation that I would rediscover bowing – had

I taken a bow with me, I might not have made such a

rediscovery.

The absence of a preconceived image in Froman’s account

of action painting means that there can be no hiding of

the artist behind representation. There is no concealing

of the fact that what we see are the actions of an artist

that roam across the canvas rather than being organised

from the single privileged viewpoint of traditional

perspective. If action painting thereby emphasises the

artist as an actor in the artwork, how much more so would

it be inimical to exclude or conceal the artist in a

sound work, particularly one that depends on

improvisation and reaction to the concrete affordances of

a particular situation?

The aesthetic subject in sound is defined bythis fact of interaction with the auditory

35

world. He is placed in the midst of itsmateriality, complicit with its production.The sounds of his footsteps are part of theauditory city he produces in his movementsthrough it. His subject position is differentfrom the viewing self, whose body is at adistance from the seen. The listener isentwined with the heard. His sense of theworld and of himself is constituted in thisbond (Voegelin 2010, 5).

If we are to take seriously an alternative approach to

landscape/soundscape by being neither “a fixed point

within, or distinguished from, the landscape”, we cannot

represent ourselves by an invisible and inaudible

“hearpoint” – a microphone pointed at the world.

Picking up the vibrations of a materialuniverse and recording them with high fidelity– inevitably ignores the subject, and thuscannot fully come to terms with an ecologythat may manifest itself in beings who arealso persons – including, perhaps, those otherbeings we designate as animals (Morton 2007,4)

We need to be participants in the soundscape/sound world,

acting out the necessity of an ecosystemics of

interrelatedness and interaction, a refusal to hide the

creative process behind the screen of representation of a

separate external reality, be that visual, sonic, or

audiovisual. We need to refuse the ecomimetic because it

keeps the world at a distance, it keeps the world under

the domination of cognitive modalities based on

exteriorisation, on perspectival constructs derived

36

solely from a visual ordering of the world that is in

fact culturally contingent, not a perceptual given.

“Environmental art makes us aware of our ears, just as

much as it makes us aware of the atmosphere”, and, like

phenomenology, for which “[t]he linkage of perceiver and

perceived is a predominant theme” it thereby “nudges us

out of the vulgar Cartesianism” (Morton 2007, 44). If the

work I have been doing with violins in the environment

models, as I hope it does, an ecosystemic approach to

being in the world as an artist, it aspires to be an

enactive ecology of “interrelation” rather than the older

model of “preservation”, exemplified in the setting up of

nature reserves and National Parks which, though an

important response to the ecological crisis as it emerged

in the fifties and sixties, is an unsustainable solution

in the long run.

Conclusion: resistance returns

Although the propriceptive and physiological aspects, as

well as the cultural situation of the various violin

interactions with the environment described here are very

different to “normal” violin playing, what these

different actions forcibly reinforce is a sort of “deep”

gestural familiarity.25 This is experienced not only in

physical action, but also in the gestural attributes

conveyed through the sounds produced.26 At the very start

of learning the violin there were resistances,

37

difficulties, seemingly impossible acts of co-ordination

whose traces remain as organising and orienting

phenomena, deeply internalised, in competent adult violin

playing. In stepping outside of learned violin playing,

rejecting its inherent habits and assimilated

resistances, but retaining the violin, what I encounter

are gesturally similar experiences. My embodied

consciousness finds gestures it already knows in actions

it has never done before, replays memories in the body’s

interaction with the instrument that it didn’t know it

had recorded, hears familiar spectromorphologies that, in

terms of their specific details, have never occurred

before; in this way resistance against the known

rediscovers the primary resistances that ground the known.

There is something similar to this in Robert Macfarlane’s

account of “the transformative consequences of the foot-

pilgrimage, which returns the traveller to his origins

and turns the mind back upon itself, leaving the pilgrim

both ostensibly unchanged and profoundly redirected”

(Macfarlane 2012, 278). This is not nostalgic by virtue

of its revisiting the past, nor is it ecomimetic by

virtue of its being staged in “the natural environment”;

it is, rather, cultural action in a specific place and at

a specific time. Like Froman’s action painting and contra

ecomimesis there’s no representation of an exterior or

intended reality, no rendering. The relation to the

environment is an action that in another environment

would be a different action, not simply the same action

38

in a different place. Though I am denied familiar

techniques of expresion and interaction learned and

incorporated into my improvisational idiolect over thirty

years, I relearn the difference between how (which is an

action to engage in) and what (which is an object to be

presented); “how to do something” rather than “what to

do”.

Action painting records an event that took place;

Lanyon’s “landscapes” evidence his experience of, and his

historic knowledge of, place, paths and (hi)stories; the

violin as phonographic stylus running through the groove

made by historical human interaction with the

environment: these practices and ideas bind memory,

recording, and artistic making together, foregrounding an

alliance to invention more than to creation as a model of

artistic practice, invention as in-venere, a “coming upon”

things. This is not “original” but “originary”,

“invention” rather than “creation” as the model for

making, a perspective which is itself a rediscovery and a

more sobering one than capitalistic, individual “genius”.

As Derrida has charted in ‘Psyche: Invention of the

Other’, invention as opposed to creation challenges to

the notions of originality-origins and novelty tied to

post-Enlightenment secular humanism and post-Feudal

ideologies of intellectual property and its commercial

value, but does so by initially referring back to an

older epistemological regime, yet without simply

39

returning to that regime (Derrida 2007, 23-26 and passim).

Though Derrida would baulk at the term “originary”, this

model might make it possible to propose a trace of the

ways that many of the artistic and social avant-gardes,

especially in the first half of the 20th Century, tended

to include the sense of a return to something prior to

the advent of longue duree modernity as rediscovery of

“real” origins lost through centuries of rationalism;

primitivism, neo-classicism, the atavistic claims made in

the name of “new nations” through various folkloristic

and nationalistic movements across the arts,

medievalism/Gothicism, the Arts and Crafts movement’s

return to a pre-industrial Golden Age in the name of an

up-to-the-minute design aesthetic, and so forth.27

In the experience I have gained through the experiments

dragging and floating and submerging the violin

resistance is a key point of orientation around which

origins and primary experiences return into a practice.

This is not a modernist rejection of origins in name of

progress, neither is it a modernist, oppositional sense

of resistance, the mode through which the oppositions

that characterise alteritous binarisms encounter one

another. Such an agonistic resistance seems incapable of

escaping a particularly restrictive, historically-

specific sense of modernism. Breaking rules need not be

oppositional, per se; in the violin project resistance is

its own antithesis, rediscovering itself, coming upon

40

itself again, not sublating into something higher. The

phenomenological resistance, the experiential resistances

that organise primary metaphor, are plural and

interrelated, mutual and many-sided. It seems especially

appropriate that an environmentally-situated project

should draw so strongly on phenomenological thinking. As

Iain Thomson writes,

. . . the anti-environmental assumptions mostfrequently singled out are mind/world dualismand the fact/value divide, and thephenomenological tradition has been workingfor over a century to help us think beneathand beyond these conceptual dichotomies thatare otherwise entrenched in our habits ofthought. Mind/world dualism and the fact/valuedivide seem obvious when one is theorizingfrom within the modern tradition . . . butphenomenologists argue that these conceptualdichotomies fundamentally mischaracterize ourordinary experience” (Thompson 2009, 446).

For Thomson

Eco-phenomenology is inspired and guided by theidea that uprooting and replacing some ofmodern philosophy’s deeply entrenched butenvironmentally destructive ethical andmetaphysical presuppositions can help us tocombat environmental devastation at itsconceptual roots (Thompson 2009, 445 – italicsin original).

There are alternative conceptual roots to these

“environmentally destructive ethical and metaphysical

presuppositions”. There is the physical resistance

41

between body, instrument, and world that does not

separate but acts as a medium for encounter, orientation,

learning, and mutual emergence. There is the resistance

that enculturation affords, whose tough residues –

themselves arrived at through physical and cognitive

resistance - are probably one of the essential conditions

for the construction of meaning.There is critique,

evaluation, and dissent at work throughout the thinking

and the practice of the violin project, but what I hope

comes through is a sense that these are parts of a practice, a

doing of work not just a holding of, and a holding on to,

positions that structure and legislate for a practice. The

project is multiply oriented around resistance – a

resistance against norms and practices, but which

acknowledges the crucial role these norms and practices

play; things to be involved with, to incorporate, to work

through, not things to simply reject. Key to this is the

discovery that a resistance to norms can recover the

primary resistances from which those norms have

developed, an experiential recycling and transformation

that offers a more ecosystemically coherent strategy for

making than the disposable culture of novelty.

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Pearson, M. (2006). “In Comes I”: Performance, Memory, and Landscape. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.

Ramadan, T. (2012). The Quest for Meaning: Developing a Philosophy of Pluralism. London: Penguin (reprint edition).

Shepherd, J. (1991). Music as Social Text. Cambridge: Polity.

Small, C. (1998). Musicking: The Meaning of Performing and Listening. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Smalley, D. (1986). Spectromorphology and Structuring Processes. In Simon Emmerson (Ed.), The Language of Electroacoustic Music (pp. 61-93). Basingstoke and London: TheMacmillan Press Ltd.

Stephens, C. (2000). Peter Lanyon: At the Edge of Landscape. London: 21 Publishing.

Tate Gallery website. Thermal by Peter Lanyon. http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/lanyon-thermal-t00375(accessed 18:27, Monday 22nd October 2012)

Thomson, I. (2009). Environmental Philosophy. In Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (Eds.), A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism (pp. 445-463). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Varela, F. J., Thompson, E, and Rosch, E. (1993). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press.

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1 Peter Milne, the nineteenth-century Scottish fiddler, composer, and opium addict may have been the first man to know the inside of a fiddle before the advent of microphones. He was “that fond o' my fiddle, I could sit inside it and look oot" (Hunter 1979, xxviii)2 Such a seemingly paradoxical “intimate immensity” is, for Bachelard, source and subject of a daydreaming that draws imagination and space into an extended sense of environment. Though Bachelard’s ideas did not directly affect my choice of instrument or microphones, there is nevertheless a very productive resonance for me between my experience in the field and his writing (see Bachelard 1994, 183-210).3 In keeping with current thinking on the nature of consciousness, this includes, of course, the unconscious aspects of consciousness (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 10-13).4 This is not, of course, restricted to the violin specifically but this is my personal experience. I have taken part in discussions at conferences on music and technology in which the piano in jazz improvisation is represented as a sonification device, for example (Music and Machines V, unrecorded discussions with Dr. Paul Vickers, Northumbria University December 2005.5 Key in any critique of the pretensions of objectivity is Donna Haraway’s construction of“the modest witness” who buys validation of their truth claims by absenting themself – and their supposed subjective bias – from the data (Haraway 1997). For an excellent deconstruction of the grounds of such objectivity, deploying Haraway’s ideas see Cranny-Francis 2006. 6 For a detailed account of how this approach was worked through in a specific painting, Porthleven of 1950-51, see Stephens 2000, 73-80.7 Brandon LaBelle, for example, raises the issue, in relation to Irit Rogoff’s critique ofsite-specific arts practice, of those “certain assumptions as to what place is” that havelong historical and epistemological roots (LaBelle 2007, 199 and 211-215).8 The terminology here suggests a rather more radical than intended separation of sight and sound as perceptual modes, insofar as sight comes over as active (directed) and hearing as passive (sound comes at us). Though it is not my intention to over-essentialise the differences these subliminal nuances of meaning are nevertheless culturally highly current, and so drawing critical attention to them while also letting them lie seems the best strategy at this stage in my argument.9 “Sometimes it is restricted to the actions necessary for the conservation of life, and accordingly it posits around us a biological world; at other times, elaborating upon these primary actions and moving from their literal to a figurative meaning, it manifeststhrough them a core of new significance: this is true of motor habits [sic] such as dancing. Sometimes, finally, the meaning aimed at cannot be achieved by the body's natural means; it must then build itself an instrument, and it projects thereby around itself a cultural world” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 146).10 Stephens quotes him in an interview with Lionel Maskin, in which Lanyon said, “perhaps this hedge that I’m walking along many other people’s shoulders of generations have actually been, they’ve actually touched these hedges they’re man made and they have a physical proportion to man” (“An Unfamiliar Land: Interview with Lionel Maskin”, 1962, Tate Gallery Archive 211AB, quoted in Stephens 2000, 100).11 “The eye is enticed by a path, and the mind’s eye also. The imagination cannot help butpursue a line in the land – onwards in space, but also backwards in time to the historiesof a route and its previous followers” (Macfarlane 2012, 15). “Paths connect. This is their first duty and their chief reason for being. They relate places in a literal sense,and by extension they relate people” (ibid, 17). “I have walked paths for years, and for years I have read about them. The literature of wayfaring is long, existing as poems, songs, stories, treatises and route guides, maps, novels and essays. The compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature – a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells” (ibid, 18, emphasis in original). 12 As Lisa Gitelman points out, Edison’s original invention was classified by the US Patent Office in the category of “measuring devices” (Gitelman, 1999, 98).13 See Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 45-59 for a full explanation of this.

14 The extent to which resistance marks the experiential limits of an embodied and emergent consciousness has congruency with several models of the nature of consciousness;Lakoff and Johnson 1999 (primary metaphor), Merleau-Ponty 1962 and Dillon 1997 (the phenomenological primacy of perception), and Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1993 (enactive consciousness). Though these different perspectives are not, of course, the same things they do seem to afford a constellating together of ideas that are more mutually congruentwith one another, and mutally illuminating, than some more oppositional constellations ofthought that have tended to characterise critical writing over the past century or so.15 “[The violin] becomes a mnemic technology when . . . I cannot remember a tune unless I have the instrument in my hands, or when I find myself playing a tune in a folk session that I don’t remember knowing but can nevertheless play” (Hogg 2012, 223). Mythological instruments such as Pan’s pipes in which the Nymph Syrinx, transformed into a reed, is bound; the voice of the murdered sister returning when the harp or fiddle made with her bones and hair is played in the Scottish-Danish ballad “The Twa Sisters”; or the dead girl who sings through a flute made from one of her bones in Mahler’s Das Klagende Lied, itself based on the Brothers Grimm Der singende Knochen (The Singing Bone). See Hogg 2012, 223-225).16 In fact this was very close to improvisation, at least to begin with. –contingent and learning on the job, as it were, finding physical and sonicresonances with past experience but reacting contingently and in the moment withalmost instinctive movement. However, it soon seemed that I could see the pathqua groove qua recording qua score, and therefore could stage resistances, layingout the path with obstacles that, in earlier experiments, I had found to makeinteresting sounds. In many respects this connected to musico-theoretical andtechnical resistances encountered in so-called “normal” playing from writtenmusic. Though conceptually retrogressive in some respects, this insight pointsup my already shifting perspective, away from a pristine “nature-over-there”position towards something more intersubjective and interactional.17 Attali’s analysis of the social economy of music in which Representing marksone of the objectifying cultural consequences of Enlightenment epistemologyalongside the superceding of fuedalism by capitalism, and Repeating redraws andunderlines those aspects of Representing that objectify/commodify would be analternative model that reinforces these epistemological consequences for musicalculture. Indeed, his opening paragraph challenges the hegemony of the visual asbeing a misapprehension: “For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has triedto look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not forthe beholding. It is fro hearing. It is not legible, but audible” (Attali 1996,3). 18 For example Lacan’s notion of “the ego’s era” as explicated by Thereza Brennan (Brennan1993, 30-45 and passim), Martin Jay (Jay 1993), Walter J. Ong (Ong 1982 passim), John Shepherd (Shepherd 1991, 19-35), Salome Voegelin (2010, 3-40), Jacques Attali (Attali 1996, 3-20).19 one additional reason why the Imaginary order is so problematic when it comes to dominate.20 Another critical evaluation of the term soundscape has been made by Tim Ingold which, although concerned with a quite different perspective on the issue, adds a significant voice to positions that query the suitability of the term to account for the phenomenological experience of being and perceiving “in” sound (Ingold 2007).21 For Morton “rendering” (Morton 2007, 35-36) is one of the six elements – along with themedial, the timbral, the Aeolian, tone, and the re-mark - that characterise the “ambient poetics” of ecomimesis (see Morton 2007, 29-54).

22 This is an extremely complex situation, however, which the scope of the present essay does not permit me to expand upon. In brief, though, just because a sound work uses environmental sound does not necessarily make it engage with soundscape or acoustic ecology, and similarly much effective soundscape work deploys sounds that were recorded in the studio, or synthesised. On the one hand, as some would claim, soundscape and acoustic ecology are about trying to get to the essence of a particular environment, against which Brandon LaBelle’s reading of the work of Hildegard Westerkamp, in particular, reveals the value of the dislocation of sounds from their place (LaBelle 2007, 207-215), itself the philosophical outline of an implicitly aestheticizing move that differently shifts the environmental away from the ecosystemic. That this aestheticizing move through a distancing from “the world” is a central and persistent feature of sonic arts that engage with the sounds of “the world” is borne out by Russolo, in his Arte dei Rumori, where he rejects imitative representations of the world, something Kahn identifiesas being “in keeping with the conventions of Western art music of the time” (Kahn 2001, 10).23 Lanyon’s refusal, for example, to essentialise Nature (geology) in relation to Culture (tin and kaolin mining), or to value an a priori idea of the beautiful (what would now be called NIMBY conservatism) over the pragmatic needs of local people (making a living fromthe land grounded in centuries of traditional use), underlines this important aspect of his approach to his art (see Stephens 2000, 81-96 passim; Causey 2006, 75-97, 113-134, 143-145 and 152-175 passim). 24 In very broad terms the positions of Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg on mid-century American abstraction outline two often antagonistic philosophical and epistemological responses to the same artistic practices. For Greenberg it is “abstract expressionism” (though his early essay on the subject, “American-Type Painting” of 1955 hints at some discomfort with the term, see http://www.theartstory.org/critics-greenberg-rosenberg.htm) emphasising the formal qualities of the finished painting, whereas for Rosenberg the practice is foregrounded in the term “action painting”. 25 By “deep” I do not intend to imply any given, inherent, or atavistic familiarity, not aChomskian, Levi-Straussian, or even Jungian “depth”, but rather a depth that is ingrainedthrough being learned and chosen.26 See Smalley 1986 on gesture, surrogacy, and spectromorphology.27 The conventional assessment of Dada performance sees the antics in the Cabaret Voltaireas resisting those bourgeois and nationalistic norms on which the First World War was predicated and tolerated, an attribute that was no doubt there, and which would be formulated into surrealist doctrine – épater le bourgeoisie. But this resistance can also be seen as a return to the play, irrationality, dressing up (Ball’s cardboard suits, Janco’smasks), and nonsense rhymes (Ball, Tzara, Huelsenbeck) of a pre-War childishness, not in the pursuit of nostalgia (that would be straightforward sentimentality) but to revisit those vigorous, life-affirming, wild things of the child’s existence which could be valuably deployed in the present grown-up insanity. Resistance as rediscovery; Dada performance as involuntary memory, Proust’s term for the memory that is “an immediate, total and delicious deflagration” first aroused by the famous madeleine dipped in tea, as opposed to conventional voluntary memory, “the uniform memory of intelligence” that “presents the past in monochrome” (Beckett 1970, 32). Resonant with this is the position with respect to the past of another twentieth-century avantgardiste; “The painter Pablo Picasso used to say how difficult it was to ‘become young again’ because he was so eager to rediscover a carefree creativeness – and finally outgrow his precocious mastery of forms and colours” (Ramadan 2012, 2). In my reading, such an outgrowing would be a rediscovery and reinvention of the “carefree creativeness” that made possible the “precocious mastery” in the first place.