UC Berkeley

This is a history of the idea of presence in modern music. Its opening hypothesis is that, whereas in nineteenth-century contexts the performed presence of music in concert halls inspired critics and scholars to write, during the twentieth century writing began to supersede performed music. My narrative follows a series of modernist composers who sought to intensify the presence of sound in their moment, yet who wound up creating what Jacques Derrida termed a “written being” (l’être écrit) of musical presence, a linguistic double or “written echo” that would henceforth play a central role in how Euro-American art music would be understood, created, and even experienced. I then examine the ethical valence of the composerly bid to produce presence. Each of these composers took cues or appropriated forms of expression from non-European others as they adopted what may be termed an ontological disposition toward sound, believing that sound has a deeper metaphysical reality than what had previously been conveyed in western music. Describing Erik Satie’s fascination with medieval Catholicism (Europe’s pre-modern other) and the unconscious states revealed in occult practices like hypnosis (Chapter One), Edgard Varèse’s creation of a fantasy-primitive Mayan soundscape in his 1933-4 composition, Ecuatorial (Chapter Two), Pierre Boulez’s endeavor to recreate in sonic form the spirit possession rituals that he witnessed during travels to Bahia (Chapter Three), and John Cage’s appropriations of “Eastern” ideas (Chapter Four), I approach these musicians in dialogue with contemporaneous French writers (such as Bergson, Bataille, and Artaud) in a narrative that extends from fin-de-siècle Paris to Derrida’s day. My main contention is that the idea of presence in twentieth century music was always a white mythology: a Euro-American ideal of sonic “purity” and autonomy that privileged “the West” over its others.