Msica analtica.

Minimal y Noise
In some quarters of academia, aesthetics is a dirty word. It calls to mind
aspects of Western intellectual history that some feel are best left abandoned,
such as ivory-tower professors who spout theories about the good and
the beautiful without having had much contact with either. For skeptics,
aesthetics is synonymous with ungrounded theorizing about the value of
artworks. Th e discipline seems unforgivably suspect because so many works
of aesthetics over the years have considered a small subset of artworks, inevitably
residing in the Western canon, as standard bearers for the quality of
art made anywhere, by anyone, and at any time. While claiming to be an
objective measure of what it is that artworks do, aesthetic theory seems
irreconcilably ideological, an instrument for reinforcing the values and prejudices
that have kept a few artists and art consumers in comfort, while
making sure that many more artworks and artistic practices lurk in obscurity
and comparative poverty.
Aesthetics is, then, an unpopular pastime, although a few brave souls
still write aesthetic theory (Danto 1997 ; Kraut 2007 ; Kuspit 2004 ; Levinson
2006 ). Many other scholars have critiqued aesthetics by means of cultural
studies and sociology, disciplines that start not with theories about artistic
merit but rather with empirical data concerning artistic practice. Cultural
studies and sociology seem methodologically sound because they rely on
ethnography and case studies, techniques that presume to minimize the
authors prejudices about a subject and empower practitioners and spectators
to speak for themselves. With multicultural, feminist, gay and lesbian,
and postcolonial studies continuing to fl ourish and generate torrents of ethnographically based
scholarship, aesthetics cannot help but appear outdated,
if not objectionable.
Still, a few recent examples of music scholarship have undertaken
the daunting task of rehabilitating aesthetics to square it with sociology and
cultural studies. Davies ( 2005 ), Kivy ( 2003 ), and Levinson ( 2008 ) have published
studies of the philosophy of Western art music. Hamilton ( 2007 ) and
Scruton ( 1997 ) have also written aesthetics of music, focusing on Western
art music but also considering popular and experimental genres to a limited
extent. Butler ( 2006 ) explores electronic dance music (EDM) in a text
that functions simultaneously as a music-theory analysis and an aesthetics.
Hesmondhalgh ( 2007 ) combines aesthetics with informant testimonies in
his writings on popular music reception. Kronengolds work (2005; 2008)
examines several popular-music genres of the 1970s and 1980s in terms that
are explicitly taken from aesthetic theory. Th is short list does not include the
numerous works of musicology and music analysis that address aesthetics
but do so without using the word. Any critical writing that seeks to explain
what art is, why we produce it, and what distinguishes art from nonart is
aesthetics, and thus, in a sense, musicology by defi nition is a project of aesthetics.
My book presents an aesthetic theory of experimental electronic music
since 1980 and does so with an awareness of both the risks and the potential
gains of such a pursuit. Let me state at the outset that this book is not a history
or ethnography of electronic music, although I try whenever possible to
use testimonies from artists, listeners, and critics in electronic-music communities.
Th ere are several good histories of electronic music, including
those by Chadabe ( 1997 ), Holmes ( 2002 ), Manning ( 2004 ), Prendergast
( 2000 ), Shapiro ( 2000 ), and Toop ( 1995 ; 2004 ). Th is book also does not purport
to be a technical discussion of the processes for generating electronic
music, a subject that Roads (1996; 2001) has covered thoroughly. Instead,
Listening through the Noise off ers an aesthetic theory of recent electronic
music, a theory that acknowledges the interconnectedness of aesthetics with

culture and society. But given all of the bad press that aesthetics has received,
what insights can an aesthetics of electronic music provide that a straightforward
sociology of electronic music cannot?
SCOPE
Sociologies of cultural expression tend to report and document behavior
rather than interpret it. Some of the questions sociological research attempts
to answer are: How do participants (i.e., musicians and listeners) derive
pleasure and meaning from their music? How do participants acquire and share knowledge about
their music? As such, the sociological method
focuses on participants rather than observers. An aesthetics, on the other
hand, involves more subjective intervention. An aesthetic theorist must
interpret forms of expression to yield insights that might not necessarily be
apparent to participants. Th e questions that this book attempts to answer
include those basic to philosophy, questions that sociology would not necessarily
be best equipped to tackle: What is electronic music? What about it is
experimental? What distinguishes it from nonelectronic music? What is
specifi c to electronic music that is absent in other artistic practices and
media? Th ese are not the sorts of subjects that usually drive the discourse of
electronic-music communities, because participants tend to assume that the
reasons for creating and enjoying their art are self-evident. Electronic musicians
have little time for contemplating why their music is ontologically different
from nonelectronic music; they may well be more interested in the
traits that make a particular work unique in and of itself.