1.
In a keynote given at the Media Art History conference 2015 in Montreal, Christine van Assche, the chief curator of Centre Pompidou Paris, proclaimed that sound as an artistic medium and scholarly field will come to the foreground in the next 10 years and occupy a central position in the contemporary arts and media scholarship. Indeed, within Arts and Humanities, sound studies has established itself as a vibrant and productive academic field in the last span of years resulting in a profusion of scholarly and artistic works, including numerous publications, conferences and major research projects: three consecutive compendia such as The Routledge Sound Studies Reader (2012), The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (2013) and The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies (2018) have been complemented with Journal of Sonic Studies, The New Soundtrack, and a number of other peer-reviewed journals that are exclusively dedicated to the studies of sound. As we all know here, sound arts too have gained currency in contemporary arts since several major exhibitions were held in the last decades, such as »Soundings« (2013) at MoMA. These publications, projects, and public events established sound arts and sound studies as fertile interdisciplinary fields of immense significance receiving wider curatorial and academic attention within fields of media art history, cultural studies, musicology, digital culture, and media studies, et al, developing a canonical body of works and thoughts.
In this sounding canon, however, an astounding absence of Global South sound thinkers, artists, and practitioners is observed. Let’s measure how many non-western scholars participate in the major canonical texts mentioned above: 1, that’s just 2%! Academic journals and intellectual platforms that support sonic discourses, such as the Journal of Sonic Studies, publish almost no reviews of books or monographs written by non-Western scholars, showing little or no interest in critically engaging with their work although these journals survive on free labor of these same scholars. The predominant scholarly and curatorial attention is invested in promoting and studying sounds from Euro-American media cultural contexts. Sounds in South Asia, Africa, South America, and the Middle East – broadly termed the Global South, have largely remained underexplored, although they contribute significantly to global outputs in audiovisual media, South Asia being the largest producer. Yet sound studies and sound arts largely ignore voices of sound thinkers and practitioners from the Global South. Even if, of late, more artists from the Global South diasporas feature in well-known European festivals and events, their methods, approaches, and thoughts often need to go through a dehumanising process of Europeanisation in order to fit into the curatorial and economical directives.
Does that mean non-Europeans cannot think critically in the realm of sound and listening?
If we make an effort in assessing some of the literatures and aesthetic experiences in sound and listening in South Asia alone, we find a different narrative. There are important treatises existing in South Asia, e.g., Dhvani theory, having the potential not only to enrich, but also radically reconfigure the field and address some unresolved areas in sonic research on themes of temporality, subjectivity, and chance. That is why early figures in sound arts, such as John Cage and La Monte Young, changed the course of their artistic trajectories to redefine sound practice in the West upon engaging with sonic approaches and thoughts from South Asia.
Despite these prominent figures in the Western canon such as Cage, Young, Philip Glass, and Terry Riley borrowing ideas from South Asian sonic practices and ways of listening, these practices and knowledge systems have rarely been part of the dominant Eurocentric discourses in music and sound studies. This essay intends to intervene here to work as a portal for entering the milieu and understanding the uniqueness of auditory cultures in the underexplored southern part of the globe, that attracted so many artists and musicians from the West to learn from their knowledge systems. South is not a mere geologic term here, but is a metaphoric constellation that in its plurality, Souths, encompasses sensibilities that are outside of the European thought traditions. They share a common history of anticolonial struggles, intense processes of self-determination in post-colonial contexts, and listening approaches that are situated and embedded. Western artists, composers, musicians, and sound practitioners were drawn to these ways of listening and sound-making, sparking a curious sonic confluence, but the power hierarchy in these exchanges remained unbalanced, and due credits are rarely given to thinkers from the Global Souths. However, critically engaging with their thoughts and methods could generate new knowledge and help create shifts in perspectives in contemporary music and sound research, endowing the planetary sonic art history with a decolonial model of co-listening by equitably involving peripheral and diasporic voices.
2.
Biographers of Cage revealed that he underwent a composer’s block in the 1940s and was going through a lack of enthusiasm for public presentations (2002). His compositions were not appreciated by the audience. Likewise, he became disillusioned with communicating his art in public. He had a lack of enthusiasm for composing. He stated in an interview (1963): »Frequently I misunderstood what another composer was saying simply because I had little understanding of his language. And I found other people misunderstanding what I myself was saying when I was saying something pointed and direct.«
Fortunately, in the middle of this phase, in 1946, Cage met Gita Sarabhai, an Indian musician who came to the United States and who was concerned about Western influence on the music of South Asia. Sarabhai wanted to spend a few months in America, studying Western music and meeting its composers. After the meeting, she started lessons in counterpoint and contemporary music with Cage, while she taught him about Indian music and sounds as a friendly gesture. Through Sarabhai, Cage became acquainted with Indian music, and its sonic aesthetics and philosophy. According to Sarabhai’s gurus in India, the purpose of music, and performing sound was »to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine interventions« – opening a composition for chance and contingency. This definition, underscoring the ephemeral quality of sound, became one of the central philosophies of Cage’s view on music, listening, and art in general, impacting his subsequent works.
Simultaneously, most likely through Sarabhai, Cage also began studying South Asian art historian Ananda K. Coomaraswamy’s works and read through some of his published writings. Among the ideas that attracted Cage was rasa and the subjective states of »permanent emotions« – central to the rasa theory. According to this theory, as elaborated in the seminal epic Natyashastra – a monumental work by scholar Bharata – these emotions are divided into the navarasas or nine emotions. The ninth of the navarasas is santam or tranquility, a state that is suggested to be associated with the role of music. In the treatise, it was considered that the purpose of music and art was to quiet the mind, freeing it from the ego, and thus rendering it open to chance-based and indeterminate experiences. These ideas, transmitted through Sarabhai, resonated very much with Cage, and helped him come out of the composer’s block.
Drawing ideas from South Asian sound worlds and their aesthetic knowledge systems, Cage eventually developed a new style of performative music based on the ideas of indeterminacy whereby certain compositional elements, such as duration, tempo, and other musical dynamics were kept open ended for chance events to happen. This approach already existed for many years in Indian music and sonic traditions, such as Dhrupad and Khayal performances, and in its everyday listening. But this was a novel intervention in Western sound worlds dominated by written scores. And this intervention, arguably, was at the heart of the genesis of sound arts – as seen in the way it developed through Cage’s work with a new sense of temporality and spatiality.
3.
Besides John Cage, other canonical figures in the field of sound, music, and sound arts, were deeply influenced by South Asian sound practices and thoughts, particularly Buddhist philosophical thoughts and ways of listening; to name just a few, Pauline Oliveros, Eliane Radigue, Terry Riley, Marion Zazeela, and La Monte Young.
La Monte Young studied under Indian sound practitioner Pandit Pran Nath for 30 years, which fundamentally reshaped his sonic world, especially in the formation of the American minimalist school of music with a signature fascination for the tanpura’s drone sounds. La Monte Young heard the sound of a tanpura drone and was captivated by it when he encountered music from India for the first time in the form of an LP Morning and Evening Ragas by Ali Akbar Khan in the 1950s. In the article »Lord of the Drone,« journalist Alexander Keefe (2010) noted that this first hearing of the sound of the tanpura drone, a typical accompaniment in South Asian court music, had a dramatic impact on the young composer, who heard in it the ground on which to build organised sounds around sustained tones and a sublimated, slowed-down rhythm. It was an inception that would change the course of his career. It was also the conception moment of minimalist music as we know it today. As La Monte Young took a personal sonic journey, he needed a teacher or a guru. In Buddhism it is said that, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. He eventually met Pandit Pran Nath and became his disciple to further his interest in drones and Indian music, and was profoundly influenced by his gyaki or style of singing using deep microtonal grains of the voice and tanpura drones weaving these tones together to form cascading textures suspended in time, like in the Dhrupad genre.
La Monte Young’s borrowing of Indian classical music into minimalist sonic and compositional work were not very engaging to listeners trained in ragas and their sounds, sounding more like cultural appropriation. In the highly celebrated Fluxus anthology, Young’s »Dream House« is included as a seminal and canonical work, although to a South Asian, it sounds awfully distorted and as an unready amateurish exercise on South Asian music. One critic writes, Young’s voice sounds alien — and yet somehow wrenchingly human with intakes of breath, tiny imperfections, audible effort. I started to feel drugged and overwhelmed, and roughly handled, plied with disturbing visions and physical effects (…) It didn’t fail to occur to me that what I had heard might have been the product of some gross act of appropriation, but it just seemed so odd, so disinterested in pleasing me or anyone else. If this was appropriation, its motives were obscure.«
However, such efforts found a canonical position in the West, leading Brian Eno to term La Monte Young as the Daddy of us all. La Monte Young indeed made a rupture in the history of Western music and sonic trajectories by using micro-tonality and minimalist approaches. And this minimalism arguably paved the way for prominent trajectories of so-called sound art/sonic arts/sound arts to emerge in the next decades – particularly through textural explorations of drone and ambient aesthetics, such as in the ways in which Brian Eno read Young, the proclaimed father of ambient music. In retrospect, if one critically delves into the phenomenon of intercultural sonic confluence, the primary influences behind La Monte Young’s minimalism are revealed as his teacher Pran Nath, Indian music, and South Asian sonic traditions, transmuted into appropriated forms of Fluxus works for naïve Western audiences, regardless of whatever seminal status it reached. Few people know about the thoughts and conceptualisations of the sound practitioners who taught La Monte Young for 30 years. All the credits of pioneering sound arts and ambient music go to Brian Eno and his father-figure La Monte Young in the written histories of experimental music and sound arts, while sound studies flourish. Pran Nath-like figures remain mystical, esoteric, and inert in the Western canon, obscured by a lack of critical, scientific, and cultural engagement with their work.
This is a problem, isn’t it? While Cage and La Monte Young are considered canonical figures in the birth of sound arts, Pran Nath and Gita Sarabhai remain abstruse presences. Their contribution to this important history has never received a thorough assessment despite South Asian sonic ideas and concepts being frequently borrowed in the West to expand its canonical palette, let alone the Beatles’ fever for Indian music in the erstwhile hippy era. If due attention were given to such moments of intercultural and sonic confluences, new insights in sound studies could be revealed. Because of this lack of scholarly engagement, several pertinent issues remain unresolved in sound studies, as well as in sound arts studies and practices, namely the ideas of time, subjectivity and position of the self, and histories of resistance to colonisation in listening cultures. Is it known to Western audiences that Gita Sarabhai made the first soundscape composition in 1967 for the Montreal Fair, much ahead of R. Murray Schafer’s usage of the method in 1977? British-Indian artist Paul Purgas's research trip to NID Ahmedabad revealed such gems.
These questions may productively complicate and reconfigure the state of the arts in contemporary studies and practices of sound and music. They may aspire to break new ground by bringing sound thinking from the Global Souths to Eurocentric sound studies. They call for developing a potentially decolonial intervention by examining the transcultural confluence in sound media. This works against the colonial mode of hegemonic othering of sonic cultures and listening approaches manifested by blocking them from entering sonic studies, sound arts, and a safely-guarded, privileged field of knowledge production in the colonially built structures of Western universities, funding bodies, festivals, cultural institutions, and the epistemic systems. The decolonial polemic I am trying to inject here lies in advocating for an equitable field by generating a curiosity towards manifold practices of listening and sound making and the allied critical thinking around sonorous living, building communities and relationality in the Global Souths. The aim is to duly acknowledge their contributions through a critical engagement with their work.
4.
What can we learn from the Global Souths if we wish to delve into their sonic realms and pay due attention to the plurilogues that are whispering in the ether, almost always unheard? As a portal, this brief essay may spark an interest but cannot offer a systematic inquiry into the multiplicity and plurivocality of the Global Souths’ sound practices and thoughts due to a lack of space and contexts. Interested readers may find an emerging strand of scholarship in a few current publications and projects. In the book Sound Practices in the Global South: Co-listening to Resounding Plurilogues (2022) I have engaged in long conversations with some of the leading artists and thinkers from Global Souths, including their diasporas in Europe as well as with situated practitioners in the Souths working with sound and listening. These conversations unpacked the sonic specificities of the Souths, ways of listenings, and historical exchanges with Europe towards forming a sonic confluence. In my book Sonic Perspectives from the Global South: Connecting Resonances (forthcoming 2024), I will develop a theory of the sonic confluence and relationality beyond global binaries and borders, drawing from these conversations as grounded and practice-based knowledges. I have been endeavoring to trace the knowledge flows from the other side of the Eurocentric models of listening and sounding by unpacking the specificities of the Souths and tracing historically equitable interactions, and thereby resisting the colonial power structure in the auditory epistemes. The sonic specificities of the Souths are broadly embedded in an idea of owing to the natural spatio-temporalities and presences, rather than owning them as in the case of the dominant Western model of modernity. This embeddedness to natural time and space is central to the ritual practices and transformative traditions of the Souths to be found in their ways of situated listening and sounding collectively.
Four primary strands of knowledge can be generated by this sonic intervention into the Souths, such as Temporality: time in sound perception and listening – such as temporally expanding sonic events in the Dhvāni and Sphoṭa theories pursued in South Asian aesthesis. Spatiality: practice of sonic space and distance, depth of field, and three-dimensionality – such as traditional sonic gatherings and indigenous public address systems. Chance: discourses on indeterminacy and contingency to examine notions of emergence – such as traditional tuning systems and instruments. Subjectivity: the roles of the listening subject in being, sensing, and meaning-making – such as the navarasas or nine emotional states in Rasa theory encompassing the emotions generated in listening.
Anthology Of Exploratory Music From India, by Various Artists
Anthology Of Exploratory Music From India, by Various Artists
The critical intersections between Global Souths and Western sonic traditions, technologies, thoughts, and practices occur at the borrowing of these ideas by disembedding them from their situated contexts for appropriation and consumption, but often not giving them due recognition and scientific references. The brief discursive space of this essay therefore advocates for an equitable sonic confluence by acknowledging the contribution of the Souths in contemporary sound practices. Here I invite a reimagination of a decolonial sound studies and sound arts field by being curious and respectful towards the Global Souths’ artists and thinkers who continue to be critical and engaged with issues linked to their regions’ turbulent and fraught history of colonisation, decolonial struggles, and social division under the colonial policies of divide and rule. These conflict-ridden experiences make their work interesting and thought-provoking. However, in Europe or in Western worlds, where most of the funded curatorial activities take place, an unfair social divide is upheld in contemporary curation of sound- and listening-driven arts as well as in the writing of its history. This divide is practiced often due to a lack of critical engagement with artists from the Souths, and through ignoring, under-representing, under-referencing, pigeonholing, or appropriating »non-Western« scholarly perspectives in a globally canonising body of work in the field. My essay is a call to challenge the normalisations of this status quo.