Untimely Glimpses of the Sound to come: Extra-Musical Inspirations of the Past in Contemporary Approaches of Sound

Mainly in the last decades of musical practice and theory there has been a progressive focus on sound as a perceptive phenomenon and experience. This affirmation may sound odd, as it is generally accepted that music is the art of sounds, though, a closer look at the history of western music would show that, since the ancient Greeks, it has been a systematisation of abstracted and selective elements of sound phenomena. However, the (hi)story is not so simple since there have been some rare untimely composers and artists with intuitions that anticipated or would inspire contemporary approaches to sound. In this presentation chapter we aim to meditate on sound as an intermediate notion and experience between the musical and the extra-musical with the help of three contemporary examples: Pierre Henry’s Futuristie (1975); Hugues Dufourt’s After Tiepolo spectral pieces (2005-2011); and Janet Cardiff’s appropriation of Tallis in The Forty Part Motet (2001).