Music Is a Way of Listening

»Beauty is the movement of an anonymous dancer along the gangways of a subway station running to try and catch the next train,« a music teacher said in one of my very first lessons. This made me realize that artistic appreciation is solely a matter of choice.

I am a music inventor, a composer. I construct my works with sound, and after doing so I claim that sound has turned into music. In every step of the process I intend for the final result to be the music I want to experience myself as a listener. I tend to think that as composers this is the most honest and responsible way of working. After this process the spectator is free to decide if the result is music (art) or to dismiss it as noise. But this says more about the listener’s expectations than about the musical product itself. After all, we all listen and perceive differently, and the way we do so changes over time.

There is nothing to understand in music. Either we have an emotional or intellectual reaction to it or we don’t, but music is incapable of conveying any specific feelings or messages. However, sound permeates every corner of our existence. It is up to us to pay attention to or neglect it; but sound will never disappear, and its vibration (whether perceptible or not) affects us on a variety of conscious and unconscious levels.

Any sound can be music. In my work I try to find the musical potential of any object, and to unleash hidden sound worlds within traditional instruments. In the same way I enjoy exploring the musicality of non-traditionally trained musicians, and attempt to jeopardize the skills of experienced ones. In every new piece I try to ask myself what music and musicians could possibly be.

Music is a way of listening, and it is music because I declare it so. Everything can be a musical instrument and anyone can be a musician. There is nothing to understand in music, so this is never an excuse to dismiss it. Silence (an absolute absence of sound) doesn’t exist, and we can never escape sound. Noise is not music; music is sterilized noise.