The birds are singing a Spring song outside my window right now. It is mid-February in New York and the temperature is a balmy 60F(16C). The uncanny presence of bird song at this time of year conjures up its absence in previous years, along with a sonic memory of the silence of gently falling snow. I remember back to April 2020, recalling the eerie silence of quarantine life. The uncanny absence of urban sounds during those pandemic times conjured up a past of sound-full experience, along with a longing for a future sonic fullness. Hearing one conjure the other, absence and presence cohabit our sensuous engagements with a sounding world. My paper considers the reflexivity of sonic absence and presence during musical encounters, focusing on the affective ephemera of absence. I approach the question of musical absence by considering four recent pieces that were created during the pandemic years (2020-2022). These are: Sylvie Courvoisier and Mary Halvorson, “Gates and Passes” from Searching For The Disappeared Hour, 2021; Nick Dunston, Kalia Vandever, DoYeon Kim, “Inhale-Exhale” from Spider Season, 2022; Ken Ueno, Like Starlings in Winter, 2022; and Jlin, “Rabbit Hole” from Embryo, 2021. Creating during times and experiences of absence, these musicians crafted music that produces the affective ephemera of absence in sonically distinct ways. My paper explores how these four works may be understood as sonic witness to absence and how our habits—our regimens—of listening in the 21st century may have been transformed by the affective ephemera of sonic absence.
Judith Lochhead is Professor of Music History & Theory, Stony Brook University. She is a music theorist and musicologist whose work focuses on recent musical practices of primarily North America and Europe. Lochhead has articles appearing in such English-language journals as Music Theory Spectrum, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music Theory Online, Theory and Practice, In Theory Only, Perspectives of New Music, Intégral, Indiana Theory Review, and others. Lochhead also has articles in several edited collections, including inTheOxford Handbook on Spectral Music and The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination. Book-length publications include: Reconceiving Structure: New Tools in Music Theory and Analysis (Routledge, 2015); Music’s Immanent Future: Beyond Past and Present, co-edited with Sally Macarthur and Jennifer Shaw (Ashgate 2016); Sound and Affect: Sound, Music, World, edited by Judith Lochhead, Eduardo Mendieta, and Stephen Decatur Smith (University of Chicago Press 2021); and Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, co-edited by Judith Lochhead and Joseph Auner (Routledge 2001).
Lochhead’s current projects include: “Émilie du Châtelet, Kaija Saariaho and Heroes of the 21st Century,” The Heroic in Music from Medieval; Festschrift for Leo Treitler, special volume of Musical Quarterly, co-edited by Judith Lochhead and Vera Micznik; “The Performer’s Listener: An Aesthetic of Possibility,” Thinking Music: Praxis and Aesthetics, Special Issue of Continental Thought and Theory: A Journal of Intellectual Freedom; “Timbre’s Realities: A Phenomenological Study of Liza Lim’s Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus,” forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music, eds, Steege, Wiskus, De Souza. (under contract with Oxford); “Situational Multiplicities: A Queering analysis of Chaya Czernowin’s Anea Crystal” to appear in Queering Music Theory, ed. Gavin Lee (under contract with Oxford).