ABSTRACT
Matter seems to be the solid ground on which we stand. In the European art music tradition, it provides the sturdy enclosures of the concert hall and the opera house, and the objects and beings – instruments, musical technologies, and persons – that reside within them. An immaterial music floats above this ground – the musical work an object on display – and is sounded within these walls. This chapter also develops in the context of materialist thinking currently burgeoning within thinking about music specifically. Georgina Born has considered how identities are constructed musically and mediated materially. The chapter contributes a discussion on what musical and sonic practices offer by way of performed investigations of a distinctly ‘problematic materiality’ – which emerges urgently as a characteristic of recent modernity.
