"Stockhausen is a motherfucker" -Miles Davis.

Rhythm: The relationships between points in time defined by sonic events.

Harmony: The relationships between two or more sounds occurring simultaneously.

Melody: The relationships between two or more sounds occurring in succession.

Color: The relationships between frequencies perceived as a single sound.

These expanded definitions allow for aesthetic comparisons between the most varied kinds of music.

David Hanner:

"Listening Room, written in Northern Cyprus in October 2002, was premiered by the Ensemble Aventure in December of the same year in Bludenz, Austria.

"The main challenge for the players lies in the fact that each of the twelve musicians plays from the full score, that the score has no bar lines, and that even a conductor is not required to realize it ... The musicians are given extensive responsibility in recreating this 'imaginary landscape' through listening carefully to their sounding environment. They are also given back some freedom to control and shape their own sounding events, just like any soloist would do -- and in fact, every musician loves to do, but too often does not have the time, given the reality of living in impatient times."

Listening Room

from Invisible Cities (1972) by Italo Calvino (1923-1985)

"You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours."

"Or the question it asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx."

from Harriet via Kenneth Goldsmith:

Bök next showed an image of Steve McCaffery’s “William Tell: A Novel,” which is simply a lower case “i” with a colon atop of it instead of a dot. He recalled the story of William Tell and then conflated it with the William Tell episode of William S. Burroughs, where he shot his wife dead playing William Tell. Bök examined the linguistic implications of “the mark,” in terms of self-expression, in relation to a target, as well as a graphic manner of mark making. And then he further extended these metaphors to examine the tension between literatures “will” and how much a work of literature “tells.”

Bök divided writing into four categories:

A. Cognitive Writing: works that embody, as values, both intentionality and expressiveness. These works are both self-conscious and self-assertive. Their authors exert control over both what they “will” in the text and what they “tell” in the text.
B. Automatic Writing: Works that embody, as values, less intentionality and more expressiveness. These works are not self-conscious, but self-assertive. Their authors exert control, not over what they “will” in the text, but only over what they “tell” in the text.
C. Mannerist Writing: Works that embody, as values, more intentionality and less expressiveness. These works are self-conscious, but not self-assertive. Their authors exert control over what they “will” in the poem, but not over what they “tell” in the poem.
D. Aleatoric Writing: Works that embody, as values, no intentionality and no expressiveness. These works are neither self-conscious nor self-assertive. Their authors forfeit control, both over what they “will” in the text and over what they “tell” in the text, doing so in order to maximize the discrepancy between what the Self might intend and what the Text might convey.
Bök claimed that these four categories: Cognitive, automatic, mannerist, aleatoric—this “quadrivium” of literature exhausts every means of permuting the relationship between intentionality and expressiveness.
He concluded by stating: “If conceptual literature has already explored each concept of writing beyond the “cognitive,” perhaps, such literature must now imagine unthought varieties of writing beyond these four categories in order to imagine a new way of playing ‘William Tell.’”