Music as Diegesis

“Future mankind will develop a power of imagination, independent of identifying continuously how sounds are bowed, plucked, blown or struck. The sound is the medium, not the jumping jacks on stage . . . it is a precondition that electronic music and musique concrète are created with fantasy.” Karlheinz Stockhausen

The best music is vividly evocative. It goes beyond pushing certain enjoyable buttons (for example, a bass drop or a harmonic cadence) and creates a diegesis in your mind’s eye. Music can conjure up landscapes, memories, premonitions, sensations, characters, climates, and so on—which affects how it resonates with us. This, at least, isn’t an esoteric notion in the slightest. People wouldn’t make Youtube compilations like “A playlist for a 19th century villain scheming against his enemies” if they didn’t feel so. But that’s not to say it’s ubiquitous. Plenty of listeners don’t imagine this stuff much or at all, and musicians can get so caught up in the technical workings of music that they forget to listen in this manner. 

Foregrounding these evocative qualities—paying close attention to them so as to feel them more intensely—constitutes a distinct way of hearing, one that I’ll refer to as “music as diegesis”. Of course, part of the magic of music’s evocativeness lies in how you never know exactly what a given work is going to make you think of and feel before you actually hear it. But without tethering ourselves to a reductive definition, perhaps we can flesh out what “music as diegesis” is a bit further. We can do this by considering the question: what is it not?

The most obvious answer is the formalist notion of absolute music. This viewpoint posits engagement with music as a game of rote classification of various sequences and combinations of frequencies as inherently beautiful or ugly. Absolute music has many highly intelligent proponents, including my old philosophy advisor and even the iconic poet, novelist, musician, and London underworld explorer Woops. But despite these lofty endorsements I find it so absurd on an intuitive level that I won’t discuss it any further… not even past the blatant strawman I just offered.

The other competing way of hearing, and the one that I’m more interested in due to its greater prevalence, posits that we should interpret music as performance. The gist of this viewpoint is that music’s inextricably tied to the “real life” personality, appearance, actions, and circumstances of its performers and/or creators. The person making the sounds you’re hearing is reciting an intensely personal monologue about their life. Playing the violin is a substitute for spilling to your therapist. If the music is a recording created by a bedroom producer, we ought to picture said producer tearfully holding down synth keys and joyfully pushing faders as we listen. Unlike absolute music, this usually isn’t a consciously formulated position—it’s an unexamined assumption. At worst, this way of hearing constitutes a failure of imagination, a refusal to raise one’s mind from the prosaic underpinnings that allow the listening experience to occur.

man, i love music so much!

But these ways of hearing are not truly incompatible so much as they are different levels of the experience, levels between which we can constantly move as we listen. In 1972, the pioneering musique concrète composer Ivo Malec described this process (as it relates to his music) as follows:

In order to understand this piece, it [is] possible to follow two paths, quite different if not divergent. The first one relies on an imagery whose roots I would gladly trace back to Lautréamont's "deserted swamps" and "emanations" and to which I would add boiling lands, wet forests, volcanic landscapes and all kinds of entrails. The other path is that of the realities of a studio where, like a craftsman, the composer manipulates, stretches and releases with his fingers a (magnetic) tape, facing the ears of a (magnetic) head, trying to find the narrow door for the "real" sound to pass through. The rest - is mere work, stewardship . . . the second [path] precedes the first one, whilst the first one transcends the second one.

We’re still not yet in esoteric territory. Allusion to these parallel levels of listening even appears in the lyrics of Enya’s song “Orinoco Flow”, the origins of which are as follows:

In the song, Enya shouts out both Dickins (“We can steer, we can near with Rob Dickins at the wheel”) and her engineer Ross Cullum (“We can sigh, say goodbye, to Ross and his dependencies”). “Orinoco was the name of the studio,” said Dickins, “and I think they saw me as the captain of the ship.”

Both artists acknowledge in their own ways not just the multiple levels, but also that diegesis in some way transcends performance. The former says so himself, and in the latter's song the evocation of sailing to faraway places takes precedence, while the references to studio personnel are fleeting winks.

Why does music as diegesis transcend the other two ways of hearing mentioned? I think the answer’s that it opens up an infinity of listening experiences. "Absolute" and "performance" are more limited in that they force your mind within specific bounds: you can’t acknowledge extramusical associations that might actually enrich your experience of music under the former, and, again, you’re limited to extramusical associations gleaned from the performance (or your mental reconstruction of the performance) under the latter. When we're transported into the music, none of these imposed barriers hold. 

Although we can listen to any music through each of the lenses we’ve discussed, sometimes it’s possible to infer from external clues if a musician—perhaps unconsciously—favors the same listening lens as you. This can be helpful for explaining why, given two apparently similar artists, one’s music hits whereas the other’s falls flat.

Consider the big four of IDM. Squarepusher’s tendency to overdub uproarious applause onto tracks that were created without a live audience present indicates that he favors the lens of music as performance. Aphex Twin’s exasperation at this in a Soundcloud comment—“he added crowd noise etc to the recording, wtf!”—gives the impression that he either dislikes this lens or just has taste. Autechre’s tradition of holding live shows in complete darkness intentionally diverts attention away from the performance, revealing an affinity for either absolute music or music as diegesis. Boards of Canada’s track titles often seem like phrases pulled from a secret story… so it’s obvious where their heads are.

Looking for clues in this manner, we’re reminded of techno's historical connection to music as diegesis. Cybotron wasn’t just a band name, it was the name of “a super-sprite . . . [with] certain powers on the game-grid that a regular sprite didn’t have”. Underground Resistance didn’t just put out EPs, they presented themselves as rebel soldiers in an interplanetary conflict. Drexciyans were, by Kodwo Eshuh’s estimation, “water breathing, aquatically mutated descendants, webbed mutants of the Black Atlantic, amphibians adapted for the ocean's abyssal plains, a phylum disconnected from the aliens who adapted to land”. These imagination-prompts do not amount to a refusal to engage with the real world so much as a refusal to be tied down to it. A look at Rik Davis’ Youtube channel will give you a great glimpse of the spirit that techno was founded on.