Musical Listening as Construction of Commonness
The Idealist musical tradition associates the act of listening to and immersion into the singular univers of musical works, each conceived as a monad in which every element of reality has its own representation: listening means diving in a form of interiority that has is a world in itself. The consequence of such a listening habit is a relative deafness to one’s immediate environment. Certain actual forms of auditive addiction, drawing on consumerist productivity, push this deafness to caricature like levels. This might explain why so many present artists, especially those working on sonic and acoustic ecologies, tend to reverse perspectives and to think the act of listening as a way to interact with the world. This often happens through the disappearance of the work while the process itself takes precedence, and by refocusing one’s action on the very act of listening. This reversal is not only an aesthetic choice, it also is a political one: it puts forth the idea that listening is a construction of commonness.