To counter the pessimistic question of where music is heading, I would aver that it goes nowhere: it resides right there in the dimensional warp between your hands and your head, between the act of consuming and the act of listening. I can testify to how my deeper understanding of music has come from two types of moments. The first is an unpredictable encounter with a song whose materiality — its texture, its configuring, its apparition — overwhelms my attempt to dissect its contents. The second is when someone else turns me on to a song, not by intimidation, oneupmanship or neurotic insistence, but because they somehow manage to point out something they experienced deep within the song which I then attempt to register. In this latter case, I try to not listen for myself, but through an alternative self which can navigate the music better than I. In film scoring, one’s personal taste is a deadly liability. Film scoring entails dealing with psychological sensations and effects which go well past any sense of ethical stability and well-being. Film scores thus enable a promiscuous listening which I find liberating: I feel I’ve gone beyond myself into something more interesting than my pithy sense of taste.

 

Philip brophy in the wire on listening and role of turning people on through alternative selves