On Attending A Live Performance of Max Richter’s In a Landscape: A Close Listening

This monograph constitutes a response to Max Richter's performance of his latest album, In a Landscape, at the Southbank Centre on November 8th, 2024. Though this sound event could perfunctorily be characterized as a string quintet recital, in reality, it defied any mono-significatory classification, in keeping with Roland Barthes' (1977) famous opening to his essay, "The Grain of the Voice," when he writes, "How then, does language manage, when it must interpret music? Alas, very badly it seems" (p. 250). However, as his fellow countryman, Vladimir Jankélévitch (2003) notes when reflecting on this ineffability of music: "There will be things to be said (or sung) about the ineffable until the end of time" (p.72). It is in this spirit that this paper will attempt to explore the implications that the aesthetic features of this acoustic event have on broader discourse concerning the listening subject and the musical object (though even these distinctions frequently spill into one another throughout its course). Hopefully, in the process, this analysis can provide fruitful fodder for future creative and intellectual endeavors by performer-scholars. 

Implications on the listening subject

In a move antithetical to the attitude Milton Babbit (2011) famously expressed in 1958, when he defended "the unprecedented divergence between contemporary serious music and its listeners" (p. 48), Richter's harmonic, orchestrational, and formal idioms are perfectly poised to entice listeners who might not be well-versed in the sonic shibboleths of classical music. This dynamic was brought into relief throughout this concert in the music itself and through the audience's demographic makeup, which at least appeared to skew significantly younger than most classical concerts. If granted, both phenomena raise questions about whether Richter sacrifices what Babbit (2011) describes as "a vast extension of the methods of other musics, derived from a considered and extensive knowledge of their dynamic principles" (p. 50) on the altar of commercial viability. While there might be some validity to this critique, it is this author’s position that, on the whole, this is not the case, as Richter strikes a remarkable balance between a simple and easily palatable foreground in his music and vast complexity on a musicological level for those interested in considering it. In this way, Richter's music confounds the dynamic Babbit (2011) notes when writing, "Why should the layman be other than bored and puzzled by what he is unable to understand, music or anything else?" (p. 51), in that, regardless of one's capacity to identify some of the musical features that will be outlined here, performances such as the one under discussion still make for incredibly compelling aesthetic experiences.  

Even for someone familiar with the ways contemporary classical music typically plays with traditional phrase structure and thematic treatment, it is easy to get lost in In a Landscape’s form, as it employs a postminimalist repetitive variation to adhere together, rather than the usual crusis-anacrusis ebb-and flow that traditionally indicates the statement of a distinct musical thought on the level of phrase. However, because of the music's intense use of repetition, the listener is still left with a strong sense of musical intelligibility, albeit one that results in a kind of dissociation. This dissociation due to repetition is still effective musically, though, partly because the harmonic content of Richter's music is typically quite agreeable to most listeners with its heavy use of diatonicism. As Carolyn Abbate (1991) notes, some degree of dissociation from the aesthetic object is also normative when she writes, "We tend to assume that performed art must engage us every second… nonetheless, most performed art casts up passages during which the listener's attention is no longer captured by either the material or the performance" (p. 61). As a result, the music's penchant to inspire this is really just a matter of degree rather than kind.

In this sense, In a Landscape serves as an equalizer of the listening subject, in that both listeners accustomed to the harmonic and formal grammar of classical music and those who might otherwise "check out" when listening to the genre must process his music similarly. In this way, the music's form is almost like an extended compositional technique – one that acts through time and affects the listening subject's very perception of it. Though not necessarily radically new, as this is one of the hallmarks of much minimalist music, leaning into this kind of "musical dissociation" as an extended technique opens up a whole dimension of practical applications for composers, giving new meaning to one of the ways Abbate (1991) characterizes music: as "a sign through time" (p. 17). Practically, one of the effects of its application is to heighten moments of musical contrast when they do occur, thereby surprising listeners all the more.  

The relative simplicity of In a Landscape's harmonic language is echoed in another one of its musical features: the lack of obvious technical impositions on its performers. Throughout the piece, the string players only perform melodic lines that are monophonic, arco, and relatively staid compared to what their respective instruments are technically capable of executing. This effect results in the antithesis of what Abbate (1991) calls the "presence of the performer," or what happens when the musician becomes "the sole center of the listener's attention" by rendering themselves into a "voice-object" (p. 10). Abbate explicitly writes of this in the context of operatic performers, but this writer sees no obvious reason why this dynamic could not be extended to instrumentalists as well, given that instrumental music was, and, according to what Arnie Cox (2001) calls the “mimetic hypothesis,” still can be, thought of as mimetic of vocal music (p. 195).

Paradoxically, Richter's de-centering of the performer in this way may actually be an attempt to give them greater expressive freedom, as they are then able to focus more on subtle shadings of timbre and beauty of tone, which, while undoubtedly important, are often subordinate to technical proficiency. This shift towards what would supposedly amount to sparse notated material serves as a kind of antithesis of the New Complexity aesthetic, which, according to Grove Music Online, is "a complex, multi-layered interplay of evolutionary processes occurring simultaneously within every dimension of the musical material" that "necessarily pushe(s) the prescriptive capacity of traditional staff notation to its limits, with a hitherto unprecedented detailing of articulation" (Fox, 2001). It is also one of the fullest realizations of what Charles Rosen (2012) notes as composers' tendency over the last two hundred years to see tone color as an essential feature of a musical composition when he writes, "Starting with Debussy and continuing with Boulez, indeed, tone color— balance ­ and equilibrium of sound, pedaling, quality of staccato and legato— sometimes ­even outweighs the element of pitch in importance" (p. 31). Like the potential further exploitation of musical dissociation alluded to earlier, this compositional feature is rife for further exploration, with perhaps its fullest realization being a largely aleatoric score that merely represents a kind of "tonal color map."

Richter is not alone in today's musical community with his attempt to replace pitch variance and other explicit displays of virtuosity with simplicity and expressivity while still conveying novel musical ideas. The similarly accomplished American composer David Lang similarly strives for this in much of his music; doing so perhaps most explicitly in his "Simple Song #3," written for the film Youth (Lang, 2016). However, in this instance, the "presence of the performer" is instead quite overwhelming, likely because the music in question features a more traditional homophonic texture, broader dynamic and tessitural shifts on the level of phrase and overall structure, more traditional phrase demarcation, and more overt thematic variation. Regardless, in this film, the dynamic of musical simplicity as a virtue is even directly alluded to in the dialogue that ensues when Michael Caine's character, Fred Ballinger, comes across a boy playing this piece – an exchange that is also characterized by a straightforwardness and profundity that is reflective of the subject matter: "BOY My teacher makes me play (this song), he says it's a perfect piece to start with. FRED BALLINGER He's right. Because it's simple. BOY But it's not merely simple. FRED BALLINGER It's not? BOY No, it's also really beautiful" (Sorrentino, 2015, p. 28).

This lack of musical foregrounding due to In a Landscape's obscured phrase structure, thematic repetition, harmonic simplicity, and de-centering of the melodic line perhaps even gives the impression of hearing a metaphorical Schenknerian ursatz, which Adele Katz (1985) sums up as "the elemental structure out of which the composition evolves" (p. 80). In other words, despite it being a fully fleshed-out composition with a concomitant aesthetic identity, one feels as if they are only hearing the vestiges of all that is characteristic of the Western musical canon, much as one hears its nascent form in plainchant, with its primordial versions of cadential flourishes, which initially served as "melodic embellishment to relieve the monotony and to articulate import of the text," which would have otherwise been recited on an "uninflected monodrone" (Bailey, 1976, p. 463), to name just one such feature. Though plainchant similarly has an aesthetic identity, it can also leave the modern listener wanting for a more articulated musical foreground due to its lack of accompaniment and relatively conscribed range (though this is simultaneously one of the genre's great beauties). In its parallels to this feature of plainchant, Richter's In a Landscape positions itself as a kind of new "zukunftsmusik;" an antipode to classical music's origins, which, with its similar sparsity of foreground, fulfills Wagner's (1873) proclamation in his eponymous letter that "The poet's greatness is mostly to be measured by what he leaves unsaid, letting us breathe in silence to ourselves the thing unspeakable" (p. 47). (This aesthetic proclivity may even be why Wagner felt possessed to write an opera about minnesingers, given their music was characterized by similarly monophonic musical textures.)

Because this lack of overt musical identity coupled with repetition causes the listener’s attention to drift more than occasionally in the concertgoing experience, Richter’s music in this concert also takes on an incidental dimension. This dimension reaches its zenith in his album Sleep, which is the most-streamed classical record of all time, according to Deutsche Grammophon (Ross, 2023). Its success demonstrates that there may very well be a causal link between this dissociation his music can inspire and its commercial success, as this album is explicitly meant to lull the listener to sleep. It is worth mentioning that this paper is not putting normative weight behind this link -- it merely raises interesting questions about the liminal ontology of his music. In this vein, it is also worth exploring how Richter’s commerciality may not just be attributable to his ability to equalize the listening subjects of his music; it may similarly be because he manages to equalize many musical objects in his work, which enables him to appeal to broader audiences. One of the starkest ways he does so is by transcending genre -- a transcendence that mirrors another kind that is a central theme in his work, which he began the concert by explaining to the audience: the necessity of reaching across political boundaries for the common good of humanity.

Implications on the musical object

Aside from being a classical recital for string quintet and keyboards/synthesizer, this sound event was arguably also a pop concert, through Richter’s (2024) use of electronic dance music in the movement “Only Silent Words,” his inclusion of a light instillation and fog machine in the concert’s stage design, and his decision to score a mash-up of “On the Nature of Daylight” and “This Bitter Earth” for an R&B singer (Richter, 2020) (for which this concert served as the live premiere). It could also, at times, be described as a soundwalk, given Richter’s interpolation of his various “Life Studies” between movements (Richter, 2024), featuring found sounds and synthesizer accompaniment – an interface of technology, ordering, and sound evocative of Pierre Schaeffer’s (1948) musique concrete, exemplified in his famous “Étude aux chemins de fer.”

This equalization of musical objects in the instance of genre is mirrored in another one of Richter’s musical features that has similarities to popular music: the ubiquity of speakers in live performances of his music. In order to be audible above the synthesizer he played in this concert, all of the musicians on stage had to have microphones attached to their instruments, with their resulting inputs filtered through a sound system. As Andrew Eisenberg (2015) notes, “the electroacoustic loudspeaker… effect(s) a ‘sonic dominance…’ that envelops and invades the body, dissolving the subject,” resulting in “a direct, spaceless connection between a sound and its internal reception” (p. 193), which amounts to an equalization of both listening subject and musical object. This dissolution of the subject had a profound emotional impact on the audience, as there was audible crying at several points throughout the concert – an emotional outburst that this writer was not immune from experiencing, albeit at a performance the following month at the Royal Ballet of Richter’s work, MADDADDAM, which had an identical sonic setup with its use of speakers and electroacoustic sounds. Many conversations also erupted amongst the audience members during the intermission of the concert under discussion about the permeating quality of this sound event. One member was specifically overheard as saying, “You could really feel the sound inside you,” which evokes what Jankélévitch (2003) translates as one of Plato’s observations on music in general: that “it penetrates to the center of the soul… and gains possession of the soul in the most energetic fashion” (p. 1).  

The permeating quality of the soundscape described here was compounded by Richter's decision to score In a Landscape for a string quintet comprised of two violins, a viola, and two celli, as opposed to the usual three-violin makeup, as the added bass lent a further physical dimension to the sound with its vibratory effect. Additionally, with the aid of the speakers, the ensemble was able to sustain longer and louder crescendos than are physically possible when playing purely acoustic instruments, resulting in the aforementioned experience of "sonic dominance." For reference, perhaps the closest a musician has gotten in recording to the effect achieved in this concert is Marcel Dupré's account of his re-composition of Bach's (1959) Fantasia, BWV 572. In it, Dupré sustains a crescendo for over nine minutes, starting at the 1:45 mark, similarly quasi-artificially -- though with the aid of organ stops rather than speakers. This unprecedentedly protracted dynamic contrast contributes to the performance's "enveloping" nature, as does Dupré's harmonic palate, for he superimposes contrapuntal line upon contrapuntal line until reaching the piece's climax with what sounds like a chord that contains every note of the chromatic scale – in other words, a dissolution of the harmonic musical object.

It is worth noting here that Richter’s supplementation of the act of dynamic increase with technology raises the question of whether something gets lost timbrally with the artificial aid of technology to achieve this. After all, turning to another mid-century recording: who could be begrudged for refusing to trade the sounds of the brass and strings straining against what the comparatively primitive recording equipment was technically capable of perceiving in Wilhelm Furtwängler’s justly famed opening crescendo in his 1953 account of Schumann’s (1851) Symphony No. 4: IV. Langsam? There is a reason why it stands as a reference recording and shining example of the orchestral crescendo for many, despite the ubiquity of modern recordings whose decibel level may be increased with less interference from overmodulation but whose other indices of volume, such as degree/steadiness of dynamic contrast or reverberation levels, do not compare. This paper does not propose to provide an answer to the question of whether something significant is lost in using technology to aid in the creation of aesthetic content essential to a work of classical music, such as dynamic change or tone color, as, unsurprisingly, upon listening to the aforementioned Dupré recording, the supplemented crescendo in this concert was quite thrilling; it merely wants to posit the question.

It also bears mentioning that, as J.Q. Davies demonstrates in the penultima chapter of his book, Romantic Anatomies of Performance, "sonic dominance" is certainly not the only way to create the musically penetrating effect that Eisenberg or Jankélévitch describe. Davies spends the chapter in question discussing the different technical approaches of Gilbert-Louis Duprez in his employment of the "voix sombre," famously first promulgated by him during his delivery of "Asil héréditaire" from Guillaume Tell (Davies, 2014, p. 125), with Adolphe Nourrit's use of the "voix mixte;" i.e., a falsetto blended with the chest voice to give the illusion of timbral continuity in the falsetto's range (Davies, 2014, p. 141). Not only did the former's overwhelming volume spell the early ruin of his career, but it also resulted, by his own admission, in "sacrificing the fine and delicate nuances that permit a variety of effects" (Davies, 2014, pp. 125-126), which result in the kind of intense emotional reaction Nourrit was famous for inspiring (Davies, 2014, p. 143). Whereas Nourrit's use of the voix mixte, while not as sonically dominant by nature of its falsetto-predicated register configuration, was a instead manifestation of "soft power" that, in its ability to cut to the core of the listener emotionally, engendered feelings of "common cause and common humanity" (Davies, 2014, p. 147) so powerful that it played an essential role in giving rise to democracy's modern iteration during the French Revolution (Davies, 2014, p. 141). Luckily, posterity has the voice of Victor Capoul (Godard, 1905), who was just one generation removed from Nourrit and who was unabashed in employing the voix mixte to beautiful effect in his recording of the Berceuse from Godard's Jocelyn. The possibility of his high notes representing a genuine expression of Nouritt’s technique is even alluded to by Davies (2014) when he writes that in Paris, the dominance of chest voice in the head range was "resisted… by those who sang with many voices at the same time" (p. 139) – i.e., by those who preserved falsetto functionality alongside their chest voices.

While on the subject of the falsetto, turning back to the dynamic of musical object equalization in this concert -- because the sounds emanating from all of the instruments on stage were being fed through speakers, it became difficult at times to discern whether the instrumentalists were performing all the string sounds being heard or whether there was occasional supplementation with pre-recorded string playing. This obfuscation resulted in a kind of sonic diffusion, creating the effect of "sound without space, vibrating everywhere and nowhere. The idea is otherworldly, belonging to the realms of religion, mysticism, and aesthetics" (Eisenberg, 2015, p. 193). In this way, like with its similarities to plainchant enumerated earlier, this sonic event was very evocative of a Christian mass, as the placement of the chorus in a knave away from view was likely originally an attempt on the part of the church to recreate the ethereal, unlocalized voice of the "otherworldly" that this quote describes. Martha Feldman posits this was also a timbral quality that was prized in Catholic church music at least into the 19th century when she notes the singer Emma Calvé's impression upon hearing a kind of "superfalsetto" emanate from one of her teachers, the famous church castrato, Domenico Mustafá. Feldman (2015) writes, "Calvé glosses it as 'heavenly' and genders Mustafà's voice as something amphibious—'angelic, neither masculine nor yet feminine'" (p. 124). This ethereal quality is perhaps most evident in Calvé's recording of "Ma Lisette" (Traditional), in which she attempts to emulate this kind of production, as her final note has a "disembodied" timbre to it – both in the aforementioned angelic sense, but also because it literally sounds like the locus of the sound shifts to somewhere more removed from the recording horn than the preceding note.

According to Abbate (1991), when referencing Theodor Adorno’s work, this desire to similarly hide the “means of production” of sound was also the impetus for Wagner’s desire to obscure Bayreuth’s orchestra pit (p. 13). Though, as she also notes, “Wagner “never ‘hid’ (his) singers – so it is hard to claim that his operas… attempt to avoid the spectacle of vocal labor” (Abbate, 1991, pp. 13-14). Aside from the implications it has on this effect of “sonic diffusion,” decisions like this are also significant in that Richter similarly mirrored Wagner’s decision to subsume this concert’s stage design in his artistic vision with his aforementioned inclusion of a light feature, which constituted yet another blurring of genre – this time extended all the way to medium. Despite merely constituting a single, giant, luminescent strip in the middle of the stage that changed color and vibrancy, this light feature also added a profoundly confounding element to the concert’s ontology.

One of the central goals of Carolyn Abbate’s (1991) second chapter of Unsung Voices, titled “What the Sorcerer Said,” is to demonstrate that, despite Eduard Hanslick’s (1986) belief that “music’s representational capability is satisfactorily defined when we assert that it can signify not the particular object of a feeling, but rather the feeling itself” (p. 11), Paul Dukas’ tone poem, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” can “establish a discursive distance, a strong signal constructing the object’s voice” endowed with “a narrative color” (p. 32), which in fact does represent a discreet object, rather than just a feeling. In a similar move, it is arguable that, with merely the indices of “absolute music” and a light instillation on stage, Richter was able in this concert to create a dialogue between the two that at times carried a kind of semantic or narrative content much like Abbate argues Dukas’ music does.

Similar to the beginning of the film Leviathan, made by Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography lab, the viewer’s mind in this concert was forced to experience the ordered interplay of sound without logos and intentionally organized visual stimuli without any obvious clues as to their greater context or how they map onto discrete phenomena in the visual world (Castaing-Taylor et al., 2012). As a result, the listener/viewer was forced to remain in a predicative limbo for an extended period of time, in which their brain attempted to map a kind of “phenomenal event series” (Abbate, 1991, p. 47) onto what it perceived from its palimpsests, much like Italo Calvino’s monarch in “A King Listens.” Calvino (2009) perfectly encapsulates this experience when he writes, “While your palace remains unknown to you and unknowable, you can try to reconstruct it bit by bit… giving form to the void in which the sounds spread… Does some story link one sound to another? You cannot help looking for a meaning” (pp. 42-43). Though this writer cannot speak for everyone in the audience, the way Richter managed this left the impression of something being articulated to the listener/viewer, despite one’s inability to wholly grasp it due to lack of predicative context. What results is an interplay of imagination and understanding that is a novel realization of what Immanuel Kant described as the central dynamic of the aesthetic experience in his Critique of Judgement (Williams, 2022, p. 43).

While on the subject of predicative limbo/hermeneutic ambiguity, this paper will finally turn to the second half of the concert under discussion, in which Richter performed excerpts from his Blue Notebooks collection. For these excerpts, Tilda Swinton made a guest appearance as the narrator, reprising her role in the original album's recording (Richter, 2018), and the movements in which she featured were, for this writer at least, among the most moving parts of the concert. However, this raises interesting ontological questions about the nature of the resulting experience. As a recitation of prose accompanied by piano and found sounds, was the pleasure it inspired fundamentally musical? After all, the difference between this kind of piece and a more straightforward song ultimately reduces to just a very slight difference in features like voiced/unvoiced ratios and the average range of pitch or dynamics (Cook, 1999, p. 195) in Swinton's delivery -- subtle differences in vocal fold vibration that should not, in theory, make an enormous ontological difference. Or was it mainly prosaic/poetic? Determining if this is the case is also largely contingent on whether what Barthes (1977) calls the "geno-song" (i.e., the timbre and the language's acoustic contour) of Tilda Swinton's voice created the aesthetic pleasure here or if it was attributable to her "pheno-song" (the musical and linguistic thought behind something) (p. 251-252). Though perhaps surprising, to answer these questions, it may be fruitful to turn to the work of Louise Meintjes on ululation in the global south.

According to Meintjes (2019), “Ululation is a performance in itself,” but it also “builds a relationship to the performance to which it responds and with which it overlaps. Perhaps it is something akin to signifyin(g)” (p. 63). Ululation is actually not alone in bucking this dichotomy, for as Steven Feld notes in his 4th Lecture on Acoustemology, “Hearing Heat,” the act of signification in the Bosavi language also has an aesthetic dimension. In observing one of its speakers, he notes that, in the process of singing the language, she “languages about sound while sounding about language” by using its linguistic contour to interact with the “relational music conservatory of the rainforest” in her musical/semantic improvisations (Feld, 2024, p. 119). As such, both confound the binary of the semantic and musical that permeates so much of Western discourse, including the aforementioned writings from Hanslick to Barthes. Rather, ululation, Bosavi music, and this performance by Swinton, are simultaneously both and neither purely prosaic nor musical – perhaps the ultimate equalization of musical objects, resulting in a unification of pheno-and-geno-song.

Its ontological liminality is also not the only similarity Swinton’s performance has with ululation. Returning to the invocation of Emma Calvé’s “superfalsetto” to characterize the sonic diffusion present in this performance, a gendered dimension similarly characterizes both phenomena. Meintjes (2019) describes ululation as a “gendered feature of gnoma” (p. 63) (gnoma being the musical tradition she observes it in) that is similarly shared with “Billions of women in the global South” (p. 67). Furthermore, “Ululation’s defining technique is the oscillation of the tongue, using vocables rather than sung text” (p. 64). It also “begins with a rapid onset— that ­ is, a quick rise to the main sustained pitch— and tails off variously at the end of the breath” (Meintjes, 2019, p. 68). Many of these characteristics are equally emblematic of Calvé’s delivery of the final note in the referenced recording, with her employment of it on a melisma and her use of portamento to arrive at the main pitch, followed by a diminuendo. The materialist similarities of these two accounts also make perfect sense, as both techniques require strong engagement of the falsetto/head voice – the register that is most characteristic of the female singing voice. It is worth noting too the striking parallels in the fact that “Specific ululations also voice specific biographies and specific violent politics” (Meinjes, 2019, p. 65), which, as Martha Feldman (2021) notes in “Fugitive Voices,” is reflected in many instances of the falsetto in performance, as it can be perceived as “a register of pain that is also a redemptive unleashing;” one that it also subject of “problematic gendering” (p. 15). In fact, Davies (2014) notes that this “problematic gendering” was experienced frequently by Nourrit, whose virility was often assailed in the press (p. 124). This association of the falsetto with pain also makes it even more significant that Calvé learned her “superfalsetto” from Mustafá, as it would therefore stem from an act of violence enacted upon a body – in this instance, Mustafá’s castration.

Conclusion

Finally, this paper turns to what all this means for artist-scholars going forward. Returning to the theme of “reaching across boundaries” that, as previously stated, Richter sees as essential to his work: Daniel Chua notes during his 2022 address to the International Musicological Society that, in the 21st century, the musical community “need(s) to pose more fundamental, more consequential, more ambitious questions that force us to work together in ensemble to solve bigger issues that cannot be tackled alone.” (Though he says this in the context of advocating for less of an emphasis on the “single-authored monograph” in the musicological community, which is not what this paper is arguing for.) In addition to being in dialogue with music’s past and future, many of its various genres, and the different permutations of its ontological categories, Richter’s music in this concert provides a model for this kind of collaboration in the musical community. Take, for instance, just the multifarious artistic voices coalescing in the composition of “On the nature of daylight / This bitter earth.” Of course, there is Richter’s, but there are also its constituent performers, including the R&B singer Celeste, Martin Scorcese’s, whose idea it was to originally mash up the two pieces for inclusion in Shutter Island, as well as Dinah Washington’s, whose recording of “This bitter earth” served as the vocal track for its initial iteration. If the visual component is to be deemed essential to its aesthetic content, which this paper has argued is the case, Max Richter’s partner, the visual artist Yulia Mahr, is also undoubtedly a significant artistic voice at play in this confluence of visions -- a confluence uniquely made possible by novel use of 21st-century technologies, whether that be the lighting installation, the audio layering technologies responsible for the song’s first iteration, or the microphones that facilitate this trans-genre collaboration, given Celeste’s idiomatic vocal delivery, which, because of its raspiness, would not be audible above the other instruments in the Royal Festival Hall without technological aid (to say nothing of the continued effect of sonic diffusion and dominance that the speakers facilitate, as discussed throughout this paper).

This paper has similarly attempted to model the kind of trans-disciplinary approach that Chua describes in its references to film, ethnomusicology, recording history, Western classical music theory, literature, and semiotics, to name just some of the disciples touched upon to illuminate the significance of this sound event. The other musical features of the performance under discussion, such as its commercial viability and the reasons for this, the ways it goes about the process of musical signification, as well as how its textures are in dialogue with and transgress on the norms established by the history of classical music similarly constitute fruitful ground for practical application in further musical composition. Hopefully, this paper has also demonstrated that investigations into these various domains can inspire further excitement in the current state of classical music composition, even for those who might not gravitate towards the avant-garde – one that, particularly given the various subject-and-object dissolutions achieved through the aid of technology outlined here, mirrors the process that Calvino’s (2009) King undergoes when he surrenders obsessive predication and steps into the world for the first time: “And surely you are also here… in the teeming noises that rise on all sides, in the buzz of the electric current… Somewhere, in a fold of the earth, the city is reawakening… Now a noise, a rumble, a roar occupies all space, absorbs all sighs, calls, sobs…” (p. 64).

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Richter, M. (2018). The Blue Notebooks [Recorded by Max Richter & Tilda Swinton]. On The Blue Notebooks (15 Years). Deutsche Grammophon. (Original work published 2004). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAx5KeJ_5-s 

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