Following the work of Australian saxophonist Jim Denley with the album Through Fire, Crevice and the Hidden Valley (2007), along with similar work by other musicians and performance artists, this week of sonorous encounters is part of a larger project circled around ways of making kin through musicking. As with Denley’s work, these encounters involved the dual process of hiking and discrete musical encounters. Making kin is a concept coined by feminist philosopher of science Donna Haraway (2016) to describe processes in which various critters — or the manifold earthly subjectivities — weave threads of kinship that are not familial, heteronormative, or borne on settler colonial logics. Processes of making kin not only take place between what she calls companion species (Haraway 2003) — people and dogs, for instance — but also lead to otherwise unusual and strange pairings (according to certain Western bourgeois norms, at least), and in her arousing methodology are necessary for planetary care and survival. Likewise, musicking, in music scholar Christopher Small’s (1998) view, is a relational practice of meaning formation, which, in the context of the encounters discussed here, involves in equal measure those who make certain sonorous gestures (performing or musicking-making bodies; typically humanly) and those who perceive these same gestures (listening bodies; also typically humanly). Note, then, that while I find Small’s initial conceptualisation of musicking to be a potent starting point, I am expanding its remit here beyond relational activities enacted between humanly subjectivities; and though such a development is not necessarily new within music scholarship, it is worth pointing out all the same. (Artistic researcher Stefan Östersjö (2008), for example, takes account of the agential import of musical instruments, which I find quite helpful in considering the ongoing, long-term relationship I have with my Selmer Series II alto saxophone.)
In the autoethnographic inquiry staged here, I consider not just the confluence of the otherwise insular activities of musicking and making kin, but more so how these two processes unfold as a single practice. While this practice may well have resonances with soundscape theory and art, my interest in this exposition lies with some of the epistemic and ethical concerns in question (and any explicit teasing out, then, of conceptual and performative intersections with the gamut of soundscape theories and methodologies will have to wait for another paper). Best intentions aside, what is at stake — for each participant, ethically and epistemologically — in such an endeavour?
The ways in which I practise and think about autoethnography, especially for this exposition, are entrenched in the insights of queer theory and critical posthumanism; I have been particularly inspired by the autoethnographic writing of performance scholars Stacy Holman Jones and Dan Harris (2019; and, related, Harris and Holman Jones 2019). Autoethnography in this queer-posthumanist sense becomes an embrace of the partiality and contextuality of experience, which resists any prioritisation of thinking, doing, and perceiving through the temerity of a ubiquitous self. This is a diffractive modality, in other words, as both Haraway (1988, 1997) and theoretical quantum physicist Karen Barad (2007) might suggest. I find a kinship of sorts with media scholar Poppy Wilde’s (2020) suggestion that what we might call posthuman autoethnography becomes a matter of consciously thinking-writing from within (and as part of) an always-entangled embodiment. For me, this involves a way of listening, the tenets of which bear no difference from those guiding the listening that I do in the midst of musicking, some of which I will develop in this exposition. I also begin to develop an approach that takes musical practice as autoethnography.
As a way of engaging with places with which I already have kinship, the site for the musicking was a rainforest-covered mountain on unceded Djiru Country on the east coast of Australia that is today known as Bicton Hill and is located roughly 30 kilometres from my hometown on unceded Gulngay Country. My childhood was spent snorkelling around and walking on nearby islands, and this is a place I have hiked along many times before this musicking. Drawing on what artistic researcher Vanessa Tomlinson (2019: 21) outlines as six categories of musicking that intersect with place and more-than-human subjectivities (‘recording the environment for use in compositions’, ‘listening to the environment to prepare for compositions’, ‘site-specific environmental performances’, ‘constructing an environment in which listening will occur’, ‘harnessing the environment to make sound’, and ‘using environmental data to make compositions’), this week-long engagement is a series of site-specific environmental encounters. Tomlinson (2019: 21) writes that when engaging in this largely improvisatory modality, the musician is ‘drawing attention to particularities unique to the site inclusive of resonance, ambience, and climate’, which emerge as ‘a dynamic experimental process’ and, as I will argue, might engender the possibility of kinship.
Given the hiking involved, I also deploy arts scholars Stephanie Springgay’s and Sarah E. Truman’s (2018) practice of more-than-human walking methodologies. Like Tomlinson’s site-specific environmental musicking, walking in more-than-human spaces draws attention to particularities, and is about being attuned to how these particularities affect my subjectivity — and in this case the musicking. To be clear, my saxophone was safely tucked away in its case and riding on my back during the hiking. But, as I will maintain throughout, this walking is an aspect of the musicking. Various sights and smells, for example, informed some of the music-making I decided upon with my saxophone, such that the hiking becomes as much a part of the musicking encounters as the discrete music-making itself.
Parts of my thinking remain incommunicable via written language, insofar as these facets are embodied and embedded in each of the encounters. I offer here to you, then — the reader and listener — both my written inquiry and excerpts from each sonorous encounter. These excerpts are little, fragile moments to bring you fleetingly into the fray of each of these musicking encounters, however inevitably perverted these may have become via audio-visual recording technology (an iPhone 12 and a Zoom H5 recorder). During each encounter, the recording technology was operated by a separate videographer of sorts, whom I think of as simply another critter intertwined in the musicking and the preceding hiking, as, in Small’s sense, the roadies or usher or piano tuner similarly play a meaningful role in the musical goings-on. (Indeed, I would invite us to consider the presence of the iPhone and the Zoom recorder in much the same fashion — that is, as technological bodies somehow involved in the musicking.) By this I mean that we might readily move away from the humanist trend of making a hard discrimination between nature (any of the more-than-human participants), on the one hand, and culture (the humanly videographer), on the other. Instead, we can conceive of each as potentially co-constituting an ‘audience’, or at least engendering listenerly and performerly (and other musicking) possibilities. This autoethnographic inquiry is directed towards the possibilities conditioned by the more-than-human critters.
Lastly, I won’t presume to impose any strict method on how the exposition is to be read and listened to, and suggest only a promiscuous non-method: as reader-listener, you may choose to read an account and then view the corresponding excerpt, or you might wish to view the excerpt first and then read my thinking — or you might even choose to engage with the two media in tandem, letting the recorded sounds infuse the words, and vice versa. Or you might decide to take up an altogether different reading-listening experiment.
A helicopter circles around in the distance, spraying pesticides on the banana plantation below. The late afternoon sunlight makes its way through gaps and openings in the canopy, and the air is thick and still. I am on the wrong side of the mountain to catch any of the breeze. Sprawled out below me, at the base of the mountain, is a community I know well, mangrove forests and beaches, and, beyond all that, the constellation of islands I visited and swam around as a child.
As I perch myself on the bench, I am cautious. This rainforest is known to me, though it is not readily familiar, and I am not necessarily familiar within it. It has been at least a year since I have visited. Walking along the track, my nose was variously struck with the acrid and heady smell of decomposing leaf matter, and my ears with the litany of sounds from critters who call this site home. These are sounds and smells I encounter fondly. Now at the top of the mountain, I am hesitant. Have the critters around me heard human-instrument music-making before, let alone a saxophonist who spends much of their time improvising in experimental and noise music groups? And while I know this rainforest, I have not made music in it before, or at least not with my saxophone; I do not know it through music-making with my saxophone. I feel unsure. I am out of touch with the critters and other matter around me. What should my first utterance with my saxophone be? Even though the bench I sit on supports me, it is uncomfortable.
As I close my eyes, I focus on the sounds of the cicadas around me. Unlike the scant screeching of cicadas where I live and work on the unceded land of the Turrbal and Yuggera People in Meanjin (Brisbane), the noise of their kin here is rough, but intricately tuned. For me, their constant din constitutes a plane on which the other sounds seem to emerge.
I make my first utterance with my saxophone, but our usually unfettered style is now reserved. The phrases are trite: extended, though stifled, trill-like figures. I am lost, and each sonic gesture I contribute with my saxophone is a question. How do I fit into this space? How do I touch, become woven into the space? And in what ways will I emerge on the plane produced by the cicadas? These questions are punctuated with pauses, moments to listen. Both the sonic questions and moments of pause are what Donna Haraway (2016) calls ‘visiting’, a practice of asking questions and offering radical propositions as part of our ongoing response-ability to the space we are in. This response-ability defines what feminist science studies scholar Astrid Schrader (2010), among others, would point to as the means through which my saxophone and I apprehend and respond to the space, more so than our ethical commitment to the space (that is, responsibility). (Though, of course, in being response-able we do not eschew being responsible.) Response-ability in going visiting requires us to be polite, which Haraway (2016: 127) suggests is ‘not so much a question of manners, but of epistemology and ontology, and of method alert to off-the-beaten-path practices’.
As clarinettist and philosopher David Rothenberg writes with regard to his own practice of what he calls interspecies improvisation: ‘First, learn to listen. […] Take it as an unknown musical world […]. If you’re ready to play, just play a little, try things out, announce your intention. Leave space, mostly space, plenty of silence, for the other species to admit you’ (2016: 506).
Visiting this rainforest through music-making entails putting aside any sort of epistemological hubris — or epistemic tendencies that pander to humanist notions of a neutral and omniscient gaze that is oftentimes distanced (see Haraway 1988) — to instead listen and be attentive (as Rothenberg suggests), to be curious about the sounds around me, and to offer curious propositions in return, propositions that become meaningful as they come into contact with other critters and sounds. This particular musical visiting resonates vibrantly with what Tomlinson (2019: 23) describes as ‘soundings’, which are the ‘activation[s] of a place or space that [are] both investigative — information seeking — and performative’. But while my saxophone and I are indeed performing certain sonic gestures, we are not activating the rainforest, for various gestures and movements (sonorous and otherwise) already abound; instead, we are response-able. This is a matter of listening with ongoing interest to the sounds made by the cicadas or far-off megapods (a kind of ground-dwelling bird) in this already active rainforest — sounds that are common to me, though can be easily forgotten — and of wondering about how these sounds matter. How do the sounds matter to me, in what ways do these sounds affect my music-making with my saxophone, and, in listening and being curious about these sounds, what others pass me by?
I focus my attention inward. I listen to myself and my saxophone. We turn to gestures that are well-worn in our music-making practice (multiphonics, growling, squawking): a way for me to ground myself through what Barad (2012) might call touching the otherness of my non-contemporaneous selves, as I wonder precariously on this bench. There is a sort of comfort to be found in this artistic reminiscence. And offering these sounds prompts further questions, such as how do these vibrations of air stir the curiosity of the critters around me, and what are the implications for their own music-making and epistemologies?
Rustling.
Skinks darted around me on the track, their criss-crossing paths prompting me to look down, to take notice of the ground as the background to my walking (see Ahmed 2006).
Rustling.
It was beginning to dry, and the gravel moved more easily underfoot. The ground is like the plane of cicadas on which I am situated. At first, it is simply a field that my movements emerge on, but as I continue to wonder-through-wandering, I am brought closer to other critters. So, perhaps the skinks make me take notice now, as I sit once more on the bench, of other sounds on the plane of cicadas.
Experimental composer and improvisor Pauline Oliveros (2010) proposes the possibility of quantum listening, which develops from her work on Deep Listening, and can certainly be understood as a way of being response-able. ‘Quantum listening’, writes Oliveros (2010: 74), ‘is listening in as many ways as possible simultaneously, while changing and being changed through the listening’. Quantum listening opens out onto a plane — for me, this is the plane of cicadas — on which subjectivities (the listener and the sound) touch, are response-able, and, through the intra-action, transform. Quantum listening is a process of visiting, in which each question emerges with another, and we (my saxophone and I) are always following these lines of flight. Through listening to the skinks, a new plane emerged and with it my response-ability deepened. I followed the line of flight by looking down; I was sensitive to the ground. And through listening to the skinks, my response-ability to the plane of cicadas has deepened.
Either way, it is this odd metre that my sonic experimentation with my saxophone responds to, an ongoing process of emergent subject formation that is somewhat co-determined by what music scholar Chris Stover (2016) refers to as musical-objects-as-bodies. Stover (2016) argues that sonic gestures — or musical-objects-as-bodies — undergo the same process of affecting and being affected by as the critters that produce and perceive these sounds. Perhaps, then, this is a question not put to the unknown critter, but to the sound. Within this positionality, I perceive the expression (not the critter or the conditions that make it utterable), and it is this musical-object-as-body that I am response-able to. Xwélmexw (Stó:lō/Skwah) sound studies scholar Dylan Robinson (2020) advocates for such a listening and, indeed, musicking positionality when he reasons that the relationality between listener and sound is an intersubjective one, in which we exercise an ethics of care towards the sound, while still upholding the ethical responsibility we hold with regard to the subjectivity that generates the sound.
The sonic movements from me and my saxophone are unexpected and uncharacteristic (a repeated two-note motif alternated with harsh trills), though certainly not unwanted: strange happenings and uncertainty are part of making kin. These gestures continue to be short, kernels of what-could-come-to-be or what-might-yet-be. Each is a potentiality, or what queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz (2009) would describe as an ephemeral and partial way of being on the plane of cicadas, in which transformative power resides.
The music-making of the cicadas becomes louder. And the phrases that my saxophone and I sketch become slightly longer and more expansive in range, and the timbre more rough. We begin to offer less silence, and more thoughts; and then just as quickly, we offer movements between multiphonics and high squeals, as we make our way back to uncertainty — but also to listening.
To be engaged in musicking on this plane is not to fully know the actions that it affords, for such a position would constitute an epistemological hubris that is both rooted in settler colonialist logic and antithetical to the practice of visiting. This transformative and unsure potentiality is a part of what artistic researchers Hannah Reardon-Smith, Louise Denson, and Vanessa Tomlinson (2020) call for in free improvisation as an ethics of collectiveness in an effort to eschew anthropocentric, white, cis-hetero-patriarchal norms. Partaking in musicking on the plane of cicadas, then, is to be always open to the sounds that travel close by and be response-able to these sounds, what Tomlinson (2019: 21) calls ‘tuning in’. Elsewhere, she describes ‘listening at the site of the performance, becoming aware of the presence of sound, the effort to make sound, and the layering of sound from drones, to intermittent sound’ (Tomlinson 2017: 9). So, as the buzzing-clicking (what I perceive to be a critter) moves around me, I follow with my saxophone. Or, perhaps, what I perceive as movement is other buzzing-clicking utterances (what I perceive to be other critters). Then again, it could certainly be both. I do not know, though. I only listen.
By now, the track — especially the sounds and odours — is becoming more familiar to me, but my music-making with my saxophone has become lost once again. Are the utterances we make mere imitations of the critters around us? I worry, as I attend to sounds and my music-making with my saxophone is affected by these sounds, that we are playing pretend, imposing on the sounds, critters, and other emergent subjectivities that co-constitute this rainforest. Is this really multispecies musicking, a practice that would engender what Haraway (2016) calls multispecies flourishing?
Drawing on the conceptual apparatus of philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, music scholar Louisa Collenberg (2021) interrogates such considerations in Rothenberg’s multi-critter music-making practice. Collenberg (2021: 228) argues that, in these situations, ‘Rothenberg and the animal form a rhizome, much like the wasp and the orchid, [sic] they engage in a mutual becoming-other via sound and rhythm’, and that through this instant of touch ‘[b]oth ways of producing music are deteritorialised from their original context and reterritorialised in the encounter, as a new territory emerges when human and nonhuman musicians find common ground by creating a common rhythm’ (2021: 229). My music-making with my saxophone certainly draws new lines of flight in this patch of rainforest, and much like Rothenberg when he was in a kind of duet with a humpback whale, I have perhaps ‘been driven by the encounter to wail in a whole new way’ (2016: 518). And yet I cannot necessarily say the same about the music-making of the other critters. For me, their ways of doing and of being response-able are an uncertainty entangled with questions of ethics and my own epistemic shortcomings. Are the friendly buzzer-clickers musicking with me or simply buzzing-clicking? Perhaps they are not friendly, but enacting utterances to defend their territory, their home. All the same, my music-making with my saxophone is in response to the sounds (the musical-objects-as-bodies co-constituting this space), and co-creates a dialogue, which, as Rothenberg quips, ‘can be difficult to understand but easy to appreciate’ (2016: 502).
At the very least, then, Collenberg’s suggestion of Rothenberg and the critters he sonically encounters finding a common rhythm, and the invocation of the wasp and orchid metaphor are ethically fraught, and her reading of his multispecies performances leave epistemological questions unanswered. First, and in a very literal sense, the story of which I am a part (or that of Rothenberg and a whale) forms only a fleeting encounter, whereas the becoming-other of the wasp and the orchid is a protracted process of lateral evolution — what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call involution. Second, the wasp-orchid rhizome is a mutuality, a blending of knowledges, and the unfolding of intra-active ways of being and doing. There is consent. Through this contact, a common rhythm (and common ground) emerges, and the wasp and the orchid are caught in a particular ongoing process of making kin. On the contrary, my listening and sense-making are situated and partial. So, while I might be able to theorise how the musical-objects-as-bodies affect my music-making and my response-ability to them, I cannot commit to any generalisations that the sonic gestures I enact with my saxophone have a mutual rhythm with the other critters. From my positionality, all I can suggest — and with any possible certitude — is that sonic expressions emerge and flow on what I perceive as a plane of cicadas (what for Collenberg is a common ground), but, given the situatedness and partiality of epistemology, how these expressions move, affect, and are responded to is somewhat bogged down in an unknowability, yet an always vibrant potentiality. ‘I desperately want to join in with the birds’, Rothenberg notes, ‘long before I have any idea what they are doing or why’ (2006: 218). Yet, this not-knowing ought not to be read as an express dismissal of certain ethical orientations. Instead, making kin through this site-specific environmental encounter is a matter of response-ability to the sounds, through asking questions and offering meaningful provocations.
I carefully move to the ground. The dirt is rough on the skin of my knees, but this is a welcome feeling and brings into sharp relief the discomfort I felt sitting on the bench. Kneeling is common in my practice. Here, on the floor of the rainforest, I catch an occasional whiff of the dirt — and the scent of the leaf litter. On the track, it is pervasive, but here the sunlight passes with more ease through the leaves and branches overhead, and the ground is parched, so the leaves have not had a chance to become damp. I open my eyes briefly and watch ants scurry through the mess of leaves. How does this so-called detritus affect the sounds my saxophone and I produce, and how do these sounds affect the leaves?
The leaves have caught my attention. My music-making with my saxophone shifts from the plane of cicadas and emerges on this plane of detritus; and I become lost yet again. As the bell of my saxophone arches towards the ground, I listen as our utterances resonate with dirt and gravel and leaves, as our utterances become-ground, become-detritus. High squealing and squawking ping and pirouette on the plane of detritus, while low sonorities seem to be ‘in tune’ with the ground, and it is the latter I become interested in. My saxophone and I begin producing halting-gliding passages in the lowest register. Here, all these resonances are more diffractive in this incidental trio for improvisor, saxophone, and rainforest floor. There is more intimacy on the plane of detritus. It is here on the ground where I begin to feel in touch with this rainforest.
The truck brings to mind the tenuous non/musicking boundary, a question of whether the groan of the truck as it reverberates through the leaves and the sounds of my footsteps are musicking. Perhaps. Who am I to say, with my particular perceptual and epistemological capacity, whether these sounds are musicking for local critters and other subjectivities (or at least perceived as particular sonic expressions)? Who am I to (fully) know what sort of complex musicking webs I emerge in (or become lost in) as I walk along? Perhaps, all I can know (or have an inkling of with my specific perceptual and epistemological capacity) is the inevitability of becoming lost — and the potent need to stay lost. Lost-ness in this case is about not knowing, and only asking questions — about being in response.
Becoming more response-able to the plane of cicadas, I notice subtle differences — and my listening deepens once again. There are two stacks of pitches co-mingling. As Oliveros (2015: 70) once asked about the sound of a motorcycle entangling with that of a building: ‘At what point did it become a chord rather than two separate sources?’ Quite possibly, the answer to such a question is not for us to know.
Yet, my noodling this morning is directed inwards, to the melodically disjointed passage my saxophone and I repeat and begin to explore in earnest, before invoking the trill-like figures we have been experimenting with all week; to the sound of excess breath rushing over the reed; to my stumbling as we fail to ‘hit’ the low notes, and how these aesthetic failures affect the next utterance, and the next, and so on and so forth. Perhaps, our music-making practice in this context bears no difference to our music-making practice in a dimly lit attic or in the crawl space of a friend’s house. Perhaps, squawking here is no different from squawking there. This is one of the questions I have been grappling with since first making sounds here with my saxophone.
This rainforest matters, though. Through the sonorous tapestry that becomes woven, I am response-able to the rainforest — to the sounds and smells I perceive — and the rainforest is response-able to my saxophone and me, yet in various ways that remain unknowable to me. I have listened in each of these site-specific environmental encounters as the cicadas have begun music-making louder and louder — and louder. Perhaps, they are response-able to the sounds I make with my saxophone, but I do not know how. As Rothenberg suggests, ‘[w]e don't fight each other for attention, but strive together for comprehension’ (2015: 222). Music-making in this rainforest is thus a matter of tuning in. It is a matter of listening-through-sounding. That is, it is a question of becoming lost and staying lost.
As I’m knelt here on the ground, then, my saxophone and I suddenly offer a string of musical events: two hasty ascents and a scrambling, all of which is inflected with growling; a single, mid-range note; an immediate drop to the lowest register, with harmonics interrupting as I shift my tongue down. Pause. Then: another low murmuring, punctuated by a high squeak as I move my bottom teeth to strike the reed; another high scrambling, with a harsh timbre; two more mid-range utterances. Longer pause.
This brief music-making marks a return to the questions I first asked, though now with more lucidity and awareness. How do ‘I’ — that is, my saxophone and I, our coming into relation, and the gestures we have been enacting together for over a decade — how do we fit into this space? How do we emerge on the plane of cicadas or the plane of detritus? Or, perhaps, the question I should ask is: How do we become lost and stay lost on these planes? Listening-through-sounding is a messy nexus of sounds. It is a matter of sounds (or musical-objects-as-bodies) making kin with other sounds (or musical-objects-as-bodies), and the ways in which we critters apprehend and are response-able to these burgeoning sonic kinships.
This ephemeral listening-through-sounding, though, brings with it questions of consent that I have underscored in each encounter. In what ways might my saxophone and I unwittingly cause anguish to local critters as we strive for the kind of comprehension that Rothenberg alludes to? Does a rhythm (whether common or not) emerge, as Collenberg suggests, and, if so, how does this impinge upon the local critters? Or how might they perceive such a rhythm? And even though we might operate outside heteronormative logics and at the edge of capitalist ones, might my saxophone and I still be perpetrating settler colonial violence? These are concerns that I continue to ruminate on, so they remain somewhat unanswered here.
The cassowary scat I’ve been stepping around for the past few days was almost gone; only the digested blue quandong berries remained. And I listen to the buzzing-clicking now as I walk along the track.
Buzz, click.
Pause…
I’m sitting again on the bench and listening-through-sounding again on the plane of cicadas…
Buzz, click.
Pause…
But my listening has changed. This sound has become familiar, has become a sort of companion (yet I maintain caution with using this term, given the unspoken ethical assumptions with which it is laden), so now the gestures from my saxophone and me remain at times longer. We are still cautious, but we are polite. And in our politeness, my saxophone and I stumble into a sort of ‘harmony’ with the buzzing-clicking, not so much in the way of stacking sounds, but in the sense of being intimate with the sound — we are in touch.
Buzz, click.
Pause…
Postlude
Back in Meanjin now, those gestures that have long been commonplace in my musical excursions with my saxophone (multiphonics, squealing, rough timbres, among other things) are still routine, and it was not long before we had picked up on old questions and conversations. Likewise, I have visited the mountain on multiple occasions since, sans saxophone. Walking, or sometimes running, up and down, I continue to become more response-able each time to the gossamer sounds threaded through (and the critters who utter them), in a way I was not before the sonic experimentations with my saxophone. And the smell of slowly rotting leaves — that fond memory of childhood — has become meaningful in a new way. So, sometimes my saxophone and I will listen to our past selves music-making on the rainforest floor and invite a few of those non-contemporaneous gestures in — but these moments are scarce. After all, the sounds and smells of a dive bar share little resemblance to those inhabiting a rainforest, and these, too, have little in common with the faint sound of cicadas being overcome by the road noise from a busy thoroughfare, which I am presently attuned to as I sit on the balcony that extends off my small apartment. How we music-make in these concrete boxes and emerge in provisional kinships is still a matter of response-ability within the space — of stumbling as we listen and being surprised by things never expected, though in ways different from when bent over on a rainforest floor, back filmed with sweat. There is no buzzing-clicking in a dive bar.
Funding
This research was made possible through a PhD programme at the Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University.
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