Shaking Music Intuitions by Othernessing the Wilderness

Music performed in natural spaces (i.e., wilderness) using digital technologies and/or acoustic instruments has proliferated within the artistic communities. But performing music in a wilderness space raises two interesting problems. Firstly, we need to embrace nature as an object or a subject. While it seems that many contemporary discourses are based on the idea that humans and nature are one and the same, we are faced with other discourses that appeal to a change in our collective way of life to attenuate human’s impact on the environment, thus, separating ourselves from nature. Secondly, nature and music don’t seem to relate in any fundamental way although the theme of nature has a long tradition in music as an inspiration, as a scenario, and, more recently, as source of digital data (e.g., biosensors) and as an interface (e.g., plants). Musicking means to take part in a musical performance, embracing the multiplicity of the experience, thus, establishing a large set of relationships with the surrounding space. But musicking in the wilderness is sinuous because nature is silent and blind about us, therefore, blurring the formation of an intersubjective relationship and, consequently, an ontological channel for otherness. Otherness represents the possibility of listening to the Music of the other, to misalign our intuitions, to connect with others but also to acknowledge the feeling of togetherness. Otherness might be a precondition for togetherness. Togetherness, here understood as the transcending musical experience of becoming a voice in the wilderness and not merely an instrument playing music in the wild, might be the state of mind which allows my accumulated and stable intuitions about Music to be shaken and, afterwards, rubbed against the conscious traces left over from such a musical experience.