8 The Music of Deep Time
Sean Steele
Abstract
In this chapter I explore three musical works as a way to approach the concept of deep time through sound. Introduced by John McPhee in Basin and Range (1981), deep time refers to geological time spanning millions of years. I begin with a description of three musical performances: Jem Finer’s 1,000-year-long ambient work “Longplayer,” a 639-year-long performance of John Cage’s “As Slow as Possible,” and Brian Eno’s 2003 work Bell Studies for the Clock of the Long Now. I then unpack the concept of deep time and relate it to how these pieces stretch out the duration of musical sounds to offer a sonic metaphor for the vast panorama of deep time. Through the composition and performance of music that spans human generations, these pieces offer a musical expression of deep time. By extending the duration of sound beyond Western musical conventions and audience expectations, these pieces invite a process of defamiliarization with our conventional understanding of time.
In the second half of the chapter, I explore how experiences of defamiliarization can destabilize a Western colonial chronology of events encapsulated by the discipline of history. The geological origin of deep time invites a more holistic sense of time that draws in rocks, animals, and plants growing and changing across the planet. The length of these musical works expresses deep time by drawing both past and future generations into the idea of the finished piece, which invites us into a reckoning of our minuscule place in time. A reckoning with deep time suggested by these musical works offers a decolonizing practice of detaching from conventional conceptions of historical time to encourage reflections on vast time scales beyond the scope of human frameworks for constructing a chronology of events. Deep time includes an ever-shifting epic ecology that zooms out from a Western homocentric idea of history, inviting reflections on the permeable nature of even our most seemingly entrenched ideas.
Keywords: Musical performance; philosophy of music; deep time; history
I have always liked ethnomusicologist John Blacking’s definition of music as “humanely organized sound.”[1] Music is sound organized in sequences that are (typically) interesting and often pleasant to the human ear. As an artistic medium of expression, music exists in time. Music requires duration to be heard; the passage of time is bound up with the humanely organized sounds of music. Because music is sound organized by and for humans, the scale of most musical works resides in a human time frame. As Philip Alperson writes in his book on music and time, for most musical works, “the duration of individual tones can be easily measured by the listener.”[2]But what happens if the duration of the humanely organized sounds of music is stretched out far beyond ordinary limits? What if the performance of an entire piece of music takes longer than the span of an average human life to be perf