Creating a small series of pieces, that explore metaphysical aesthetics in music, while grounding the lyrical content of the music in the local, is a roundabout way of describing the project that I am doing so far. The North-East of England is the particular location that I am basing the music and lyrics of the pieces on. Speaking to people and experiencing the place is key to constructing this narrative; allowing snippets of witness-like testimonies and atmosphere to be combined with music. This brings these perspectives into a collective transcendental state; a transcendental intersubjectivity, made from people and place. The listener will hopefully be able to connect with the piece, and then connect this experience to experience in the world. Using multiple perspectives in an aesthetic context allows the voices to be heard in a different way, where feeling, or empathy, is considered.* When I say empathy, I do not mean it in the common use of the term, I mean it in the context of one person understanding another, through feeling, showing intersubjectivity. The very fact that music exists is evidence of intersubjectivity, relying on subjective empathy.
*Husserl’s phenomenology considers this.
Creating an idea of collective ‘truth’ is key to projects like forensic architecture. One of the founders of the group Eyal Weizman infers that now we must rely on collective truth, from humans and their surrounding environment, when trying to assemble any form of ‘truth’. Using multiple ‘sensors’ for the basis of the piece (human experience, sound recordings of the environment, written descriptions of the place) allow a picture to be created of the local. Anthropocentric dialogues are also disturbed by giving importance to the sounds of the environment that the people live in. Aesthetics being the ‘science of the senses’ (Hegel, On Art, Religion, Philosophy (London, Harper Torch Books, 1970) p.22), it makes sense to use multiple ‘sensors’ to create the piece. Structures and harmony can be based on repetition and focusing in on the sensations created by place. Aesthetics allows us to understand these sensations created by the environment and the effect that this will have on people’s experience of living in an area. Of course, compositional touches will be added, to cater to ideas of the aesthetic ‘whole’, the surface of the piece matching the so-called ‘soul’. Even reminiscent sensations of the environment of the city, for example, can change the way someone thinks and feels about that given environment. (This is an idea from Hegelian aesthetics).
Composing the North East 