Depending on Timbre
Anthony Gritten · Contemporary Music Review · 2017
This essay contributes to a phenomenological reduction of the operation of timbre within sound. The focus is largely on musical sounds, though the analysis situates these within a larger anthropological context: human listening. In this respect, the analysis assumes a largely Cageian attitude. The essay builds upon the phenomenologies of listening and timbre sketched by Jean-Luc Nancy and Jean-François Lyotard. It is argued that timbre affords, not just a mechanism for musical activity or aesthetic understanding, but a means by which sustainable links arise between theoretical and practical cognition. For listening is homo sapiens’ most important survival sense, and timbre is thus central to our engagement with the world.