Xenophonia: Sound, Futurity, and Outer Space in the age of Extremes

Abstract

This dissertation explores a range of twentieth-century musical practices which have been culturally coded as reflecting, evoking, or instantiating an impossible category of sound: “the music of the future,” “the sounds of outer space,” or the folding of one into the other. Dubbing that subcategory “xenophonic,” I investigate the strange set of associations this music has accrued and the puzzling discursive formations it has animated. In particular, I emphasize its semiotic malleability: despite the category itself circumscribing a kind of conceptual common essence, its sonic expression is anything but aesthetically specific, encompassing an array of stylistically disparate works and genres. That variability alerts us to the obvious: as we have no idea what the music of Martians might sound like, or how songs might shape up in the next century, such things are projections of personal ambitions, political anxieties, and perceptions of alterity. In other words, the xenophonic is the very definition of a floating signifier. The chapters proceed in loose chronological order, spanning what historian Eric Hobsbawm has referred to the “Age of Extremes,” or the short twentieth century: 1914-1991. The first chapter discusses the present-day reception of Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie; here, an interpretive trope which links the soundworld of the Symphonie to science fiction soundtracks has flourished. I discuss the significance of that cross-contextual hearing and investigate its sonic and stylistic grounding, concluding that pop-cultural media is a critical frame through which many listeners will engage with concert works of the Western canon. The second chapter considers a range of souvenir records from the Seattle World’s Fair (1962), seeking to determine what future was being sold at the Century 21 Exposition. An investigation of those records reveals that they are complicated objects, historically, materially, and aesthetically, and resist straightforward interpretation; in particular, the strange case of Attilio Mineo conducts Man in Space with Sounds, with its authorial and affective ambiguities, offers a cautionary tale in historicizing conceptions of the future. The third chapter addresses the heterogenous musical styles that have been considered “Afrofuturist,” heeding George Lewis’s call to uncover what “sound [can] tell us about the Afrofuture.” That heterogeneity invites reflection on the relationship between sounds, technologies, images, and ideas, and the coalescence of those into genres and categories; accordingly, I conclude by asking, contra Lewis, what the Afrofuture can tell us about sound. Finally, in the concluding chapter, I analyze sonifications of Kepler’s Harmony of the World, suggesting that even in this limit case—where scientific aspirations and appeals to an objective “space music” are most transparent—the resultant music evidences personal and contingent interpretations of Kepler’s text, just as Kepler’s text was a personal and contingent interpretation of the cosmos. Beyond xenophonia, several subsidiary themes are interwoven throughout these chapters: for example, the relationship of sound technologies to musical expression, the historical baggage and cultural resonances such technologies are freighted with, and the uneasy jostling of “high” and “low” artistic spheres throughout the last century. Linking them all, however, is a meditation on the particularity of listening and the importance of attending to difference: if something as ever-present as outer space can enliven such varied responses in sound, and the simple fact of the future occasions recursive philosophical fractures, then what of the impulse to determine what music can “mean”?