Relistenings of Hearing

One must remember: Non-musicology is a practice first and foremost: it is 'performative', X writes, 'and exhausts itself as an ecological practice rather than as a program'. Non-musicology is also described as a use of musicology rather than one more new theory of it. Hence, one must ask what non-musicology does with musicology (or any other field), rather than what it itself is. Its being is its doing, or performativity. This performative practice involves re-descriptions (of hearing) that are also revisions of it, or as X puts it, 'the unlimited re-description … of the hearing-in-Rhythm itself. Non-musicology performs re-descriptions on the raw-material of musicology, and, in doing so, it is performative - producing real effects on how musics are heard. This raw-material comprises what X regards as the essence of musicology, which involves an invariant structure that serves to contaminate the One or Rhythm with itself - that is, its various conceptual presuppositions or compositions that endeavor to transcend Rhythm, to represent it. This contamination results in a 'mix' of the two. The revisionary descriptions of non-musicology, on the other hand - called 'sampling' or 'rhythmics' - strive to 'de-mix' or dissociate such musicological decisions from mediating Rhythm. It operates in the reverse direction to that of musicology, therefore, going from Rhythm to hearing (which X calls a hearing 'according to' or 'alongside' Rhythm), rather than from hearing to Rhythm (representing Rhythm).

This reversal or re-orientation can also be heard as a change of regard, or posture, toward the body of musicological work"

"non-musicology is not an intensified reduplication of musicology, a meta-musicology, but rather its 'simplification'. It does not represent a change in scale with respect to musicology, as though the latter was maintained for smaller elements. It is the 'same' structure but in a more concentrated, more focused form."

A 'more concentrated' form: this is an idea of abstraction as physical concentration rather than higher-order representation. And it is more 'focused' one might even say a better acoustics or recording. And this acoustics results in a new democracy of hearing. Musicology does not have the monopoly on (musicological) hearing. As we know, the 'non-' in non-musicology is not a negation of musicology, but a performed expansion, an 'amplification'. This is why X's are emphatically not a 'musicology of the no', but an egalitarian affirmation: 'We posit the equivalence of all musicological compositions.' Furthermore, non-musicology insists on the identity of all regions of hearing, be they in art, science, ethics, or technology, but only 'in-the-last-instance'. It postulates their 'identification-in-the-last-instance', which is a hypothesis of their real identity ('idempotency'). Everything hears.

So, where meta-musicology is hierarchical, non-musicology instead offers a 'unified theory of science and music' without hierarchy, without pre-conditions. X are profoundly un-Cagean in that neither the conditions of possibility of hearing, nor its realconditions interest them. The 'conditions of possibility' of 'force (of) listening' in non-musicology, for example, is not 'our problem' they say. Non-musicology is unconditioned hearing - it is self-standing sounding or 'in-hearing' …