Just Beyond Listening: Essays of Sonic Encounter - Michael C. Heller. Oakland: University of California Press, 2024
by Marcel Cobussen
To be honest, when I received the review copy of Just Beyond Listening: Essays of Sonic Encounter I expected a book in which listening to sound in the most general sense would be addressed, rethought, or reflected upon. However, although renowned sound scholars/artists such as Raymond Murray Schafer, Douglas Kahn, Pauline Oliveros, Ana Maria Ochoa Gaultier are (briefly) mentioned, Heller’s book is primarily a musicological study with only occasional and rather basic references to sound studies discourses as propagated by The Journal of Sonic Studies.
Having said this, the first paragraphs of Heller’s Introduction do in fact deal with everyday listening experiences, in this case around Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral, filled with a mixture of chirping songbirds, tolling bells, and the chatter of multiple languages. These paragraphs then immediately take the reader to the core issue of this book: Heller calls his experience in Paris a “sonic encounter,” defined as “an affective interaction between an observer and a sound” (p. 3). However, in one fell swoop he also connects this to the main title of his work, “just beyond listening,” because, he states, sonic encounters cannot be reduced to the sounds attended to during such listening experiences alone. Said otherwise, listening is always more than “mere” listening, as it may include input from other senses, memories, pre-listening discourses, expectations, musical training, and historical and cultural positionalities (p. 3). Although this idea is in itself not uninteresting, it is also not very remarkable, and it will most probably not contribute significantly to what most music and sound studies scholars already know, either implicitly or explicitly.
The three parts that follow the Introduction – “Loudness and Silence,” “Textual Interference,” and “Death and Deadness” – can be regarded as elaborations on Heller’s main idea, although often in a rather implicit way, offering multiple illustrations of this idea rather than a deeper or broader reflection and nuancing. This despite the fact that the individual chapters cover a broad range of sonic encounters. Chapter 2, for example, deals with John Cage’s experiences in the anechoic chamber. Insightfully, Heller critically comments on Cage’s rather limited report on his actual stay in this silent space; he emphasizes hearing one higher and one lower sound, thereby, according to Heller, avoiding a deeper reflection on silence, silences as a form of affective encounter. As Heller writes, if Cage would have reflected more on silence itself, it would have become “not an opportunity to foreground unintentional sounds but a moment when we confront the challenge of engaging with (and perhaps embracing) absence” (p. 55). For me this was by far the most interesting chapter, although, as stated before, Heller doesn’t really explain how his observations could connect to the central idea of going beyond mere listening.
Three texts in which the idea of sonic encounters as extending beyond mere listening better comes into its own, are Chapters 4, 5 and 6. In Chapter 4 Heller summarizes the discussion around the pros and cons of supertitles in opera performances, which he presents as “pivotal questions about what happens when a new input enters a performance space and alters existing ecologies of sensation, perception, and attention” (p. 87). If supertitles provide an audience with a greater understanding of the plot, and if omitting supertitles leads to a more affective relation with the music itself, Heller concludes that, in any case, in opera affect and meaning are always already folded together and/or rub against one another (p. 105).
Heller’s investigation of a composer’s archive (whose name is not disclosed) in Chapter 5 led him to reconsider their musical legacy, demonstrating that access to more information about the (personal) background of an artist has a more or less direct effect on the way one might listen to their music. In Heller’s words, having had access to this archive “reminds me repeatedly about the blurry lines separating the realms of affect (sonic/musical, material, empathetic) and discourse (textual, factual, narrative)” (p. 136).
Chapter 6 takes the reader to Heller’s work as a tour guide in Louis Armstrong’s house – now a museum. The chapter is written as a tour: each subchapter deals with a different part of the house, starting with a (sound)walk from the subway station at 103rd Street–Corona Plaza to the house/museum. In each room clips of Louis and Lucille Armstrong’s voices – and sometimes Louis’ music – are played and thus “recombined with space, room sound, and script text, to create a more deeply immersive encounter of haunting” (p. 157). Being confronted with these voices in the everyday environment of Armstrong’s home has an enormous impact on the visitors: “The power of the clips is not generated only by their sound but by the totality of your experiences leading up to their carefully crafted deployment. Your vision, your sense of smell, your body in space – all of these feed into the way that sound is experienced” (p. 179).
Other chapters in the book deal with noise (mostly considered as loudness or non-linguistic meaning), with Wadada Leo Smith’s use of silence (when is silence silence, that is, non-music, and when does it become part of the music?), and with what Heller calls “tape death” (the loss, deterioration or destruction of recorded sound, in this case Elvis Presley’s earliest recordings on Sun Records).
I would like to end by mentioning two things that specifically caught my attention while reading Just Beyond Listening. First, I constantly had the impression that I was reading a reworked version of a PhD dissertation (of course, this is not in itself a disqualification!). Each chapter begins with a kind of prelude, teaser, or prologue, after which Heller writes extensively about what he will do in that chapter. Each chapter ends with a conclusion in which he again summarizes what he has done. All this makes the book unnecessarily didactic or schoolish, and brings up the question whether it is primarily written for freshman year students. Second, I found it remarkable that there is no overall conclusion, no final chapter in which the idea of sonic encounters is theoretically reconsidered, for example by making concrete connections between each chapter. However, perhaps a kind of conclusion can already be found in the beginning of the book: “Affective encounter arises in the space of ‘in-betweenness,’ in forces that move into and through a range of corporeal and non-corporeal realms: aural and haptic, subjective and social, conceptual and embodied” (p. 14). Once again, certainly not an uninteresting observation, however nothing new for either musicologists or sound studies scholars.
