Sound Pedagogy: Teaching listening since Cage

Abstract

This article proposes that teaching people how to listen is a central and underappreciated facet of post-Cagean experimental music and sound art. Under a new analytical framework that I call ‘sound pedagogy’, I trace a history of linguistic discourses about listening, from John Cage’s talking pieces to Fluxus text scores, Max Neuhaus’s soundwalks, R. Murray Schafer’s ear cleaning exercises and Pauline Oliveros’s Sonic Meditations. I show how all these artists attempt to transform auditory perception in the everyday life of the subject. A central debate here is whether this more ‘open’ listening should be viewed as a new, cultivated practice, or, more problematically, as a primordial condition to which we must return. Framed as a polemical antidote to our harmful auditory enculturation (which privileges Western art music and alienates us from potential auditory aesthesis in the lived space of daily life), these sound pedagogies are, as I will show, ripe for deconstruction and critique. Yet, more hopefully, they may also open up broader and more immediate forms of participation than Western art music has typically allowed.