Exploring Human-Instrument Relationships in Classical Music: From Idealist Aesthetics to Post-Humanist Perspectives on a Significant, Sounding Other

This article aims to investigate and challenge common understandings of sound and sound-making in the context of classical music. It first illuminates how the idealist aesthetics that have regulated classical music practice for centuries have led to viewing musicians and their instruments as mostly ‘passive’ transmitters of a transcendent artform. Building on this, I propose that classical music and its practice can be understood in new ways by employing post-humanist and new materialist approaches. By introducing the notion of the significant, sounding other, I draw attention to the relevance of situated, embodied human-instrument relationships in the ongoing existence of this music and its tradition. I argue that the significant, sounding other can help us to open up long-standing ideas of Werktreue in classical music: it highlights the complexity and agency of human-instrument relationships in shaping the sounds of this music’s tradition, rendering visible to the often-overlooked affective and physical dimensions of their engagement. Consequently, this recognition raises new potentialities for the existence and evolution of classical music and its tradition, including for example novel approaches to higher music education.