Non-Musicology

Experimental music counts as music by relating musical with non-musical. In such cases, the musician wills a relation of the non-musical to a formalism that governs the musical. Such musical compositions reflexively reform music for the benefit of music itself. This practice re-activates musical traditions. Through such reflexivity, experimental music is already meta-musical. An experimental musicological composition is circular in that it already presupposes itself in whatever phenomenon or set of phenomenon it articulates. This loop guarantees that everything is potentially musical, and ensures the world remains music’s mirror that breeds infinite musicological interpretation. Experimental musicology’s reflexive self-sufficiency means that the musical practice of experimental music is not really a theoretical practice but rather an empirical activity whose claim to theoretical legitimacy is only ever assured through its performance. Thus, experimental music is a game, the rules of which are always effectively guaranteed by virtue of the operation through which their stipulation is enacted.

Experimental non-musicology abstracts musicological compositions in order to foster the non-relations of the musical with the non-musical. Such musically disinterested heresy acts as a refusal of any definition of music rooted in an appeal to the authority of musical tradition. This heretical practice doesn’t negate, but suspends tradition via indifference and establishes a musically disinterested description of music’s identity. This disinterested identification of music results in a non-musical use of music: a use of music that remains constitutively foreign to the norms and aims of governing the properly musical practice of music. Non-music is a theoretical practice of music proceeding by way of transcendental axioms and producing theorems which are musicologically uninterpretable. ‘Uninterpretable’ because non-music is constitutively unintelligible to musicians.

By positing rhythm as already-performed, as performed-without-performance, the non-musicologist operationalizes the non-musical contingency of performativity. The non-musicologist releases the identity (without synthesis or unity) of theory and practice by converting their compositional co-constitution into non-relation whereby the subject performatively unilateralizes the dyadic synthesis of saying and doing. Thus, the non-musicologist unleashes the radically nondualistic performative character of theory as well as the rigorously cognitive character of practice. Non-music is at once a theoretical practice and a performative theory.

There is nothing necessary about non-music. There is no obligation for the experimental musician to switch from the musical to the non-musical posture. Non-musical preoccupations cannot be used to lend music an aura of necessity. Thus, from a musical perspective, the non-musical practice of music is neither necessary nor inevitable. Non-music frees listening from every end. By curtailing musicology’s specular narcissism, non-musicology un-tethers listening from every musicological telos.

taken from here