ABSTRACT
The concepts of sense and understanding are altered, without however disappearing, where the objectification of sense – and the determinacy of understanding that results from it – is repressed or deliberately avoided. The listener no longer experiences the music's sense as resulting from sense-objectification, but as meaning set free. Sense in intentionally 'senseless' music is to be found in the unconditional immediacy in listening and perception – unconditional and immediate in the sense that the understanding of sense resulting from form has been repressed and eliminated, a development which emerged out of the systematization of atonality. Art is always presented in a frame – even where, as in John Cage 'silent piece' the material content is the all-sound of life itself – and this frame separates what is presented from real life. The frame makes what is separated into a counterpart other, an object of attention which demands understanding.
