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i understand what you attribute to the experience, but the experience itself is anything but objective.
beethoven's ninth (and the third, which i actually like more, despite what i am about to say) is (are?) the earliest musical experiences i can remember having--my father was obsessed with them--when my parents divorced, recordings of these symphonies were among the debris left behind, so i listened to them on my various shitty playback devices over and over again. even as a little kid. well before i knew anything about music, then, these particular pieces were both overdetermined for me and also held no surprises. but eventually, something changed.
i dont remember when.
but i do know what changed was the relationship i could have to either of these pieces and that the motor of it was repetition. repetition erased the overdetermination these pieces once had for me. repetition collapsed the space of projection. repetition made them from lovely environments into maps of interesting spaces to maps of spaces i knew so well i no longer looked very much to maps of spaces i just didnt want to go to any more because they were always the same always the same no matter what they were always the same.
so the recorded objects have a certain objectivity to them in that the features will follow each other in the same way every time. different versions will vary the speed of repetition, the size of the orchestra, attacks, phrasing, dynamics--but it is always jiggling features of the same map.
so even from this, it is obvious that the relation to these sonic objects (recordings) is anything but objective.
and it is the logic that underpins them that i am asking about, that i do not understand--not that i dont know about it---i do, trust me---but i dont understand how that place is inhabited by other folk.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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