ABSTRACT
Like recent posthumanist writing on digital culture and new media, Simon Emmerson’s evocative chapter in this book can be understood in part as problematising the assumption of a radical dualism between humans and machines (or media). Citing the anthropologist Tim Ingold, Emmerson advocates an overcoming of dualistic thought and argues that ‘living’ is a behaviour manifest in the co-evolution of human or organism and environment. With reference to Iannis Xenakis and Murray Schafer, Emmerson magnifies these ideas on to the plane of music and sonic art, such that the musician can be reconceived as “a kind of shaman”: as one who does not so much represent the world as reveal and (re-)animate it. 1 At the same time he considers a shift in what the term ‘live’ has meant in regard to musical performance; noting that it used to refer to experiences of music that are “embodied and essentially human”, Emmerson proposes instead a model of ‘living presence’ in musical performance, one that incorporates the relations between musicians and technologies.
