TEMPO 71 (281) 39–52 © 2017 Cambridge University Press 39

doi:10.1017/S0040298217000432

MUSICAL FRAGILITY:
A PHENOMENOLOGICAL EXAMINATION
Nomi Epstein

Abstract: While fragility is typically defined as ‘the quality of being

easily broken or damaged’, within a musical framework the term
can be understood through a myriad of causal lenses. One must
consider what can be ‘broken’ or damaged’ in a musical context,
and secondly how this sense of impairment might present itself.
This article offers an extensive categorisation of musical fragility,
and a characterisation of it in its numerous forms across the
works of a broad range of composers. Through classification, a dis-
tinction between local and large-scale fragility emerges. A typology
of fragilities makes it possible both to identify them in works that
might not necessarily be considered fragile and to identify works
that use combinations of fragility types. This classification involves
ten types, with compositions from new and experimental acoustic
music offered as examples.

The sound of the piano decays.

It cannot be sustained. I let it loose time and again.
It appears by disappearing; starting to disappear just after the attack.
In disappearing it begins to live, to change.
The piano: an instrument, that allows me to hear how many ways sound
can disappear.
There seems to be no end to disappearance.
The sound of piano!
I can hear, how listening becomes the awareness of fading sound.1
Fragility is typically defined as the quality of being easily broken or
damaged.2 When something is fragile, one often imagines a physical
break within an object which is made of breakable material (perhaps
glass), one which may already have cracks in it, or a material which is
thin and can easily be misshapen. When one mails a package or letter
in the post which has bendables or breakables inside, it is stamped
with the word ‘FRAGILE’, large, in all caps, and usually in bright
red or orange providing a visual opposition to the material which
lies inside the mailer. But sound is not physically visible to the eye.

1
Eva-Maria Houben, Presence – Silence – Disappearance: Some thoughts on the perceptions
of ‘nearly nothing’. Edition Wandelweiser website, www.timescraper.de/_eva-maria-houben/
texts-e.html#Houben_Presence (accessed 25 February 2016).
2
Properties of fragility are often argued by philosophers in discussions of dispositions. In
particular, the focus has been on whether a disposition is causally relevant, i.e. whether
fragility is causally relevant to breaking. See Jennifer McKitrick, “Are Dispositions
Causally Relevant?”, Synthese 144, no. 3 (2005), pp. 357–71.

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 40 TEMPO

As Don Ihde writes, ‘No matter how hard I look, I cannot see the
wind, the invisible is the horizon of sight. An inquiry into the auditory
is also an inquiry into the invisible’,3 and so to imagine sound
being broken can require a metaphorical or philosophical approach.
Similarly, one can speak of psychological or emotional fragility
when one is seemingly on the edge of sanity, or when one’s stable
state is in threat of becoming unstable. Much discourse about political,
economic or religious dispositions may also be described as fragile,
when they can be (and sometimes are) broken, dismantled, or there
is a threat of such happenings.
To accept the idea that sonic fragility depicts a state in which break-
age is possible demands a simultaneous acceptance that – even if still
only figuratively or metaphorically – there is something in sound to
break or which can break. A fragile object or state lacks absolute sta-
bility and, by extension, so does a fragile sound or music. Stability in
sound may be established when a component seems as if it should or
will continue in some way, be it a more local element such as timbre,
or a more global element such as structure.4 Instability emerges
through a failure to reach or sustain stability. A possible break, or a
level of instability, within a sonic context can suggest that a compo-
nent decays, disappears, or is even eliminated. Ihde states,
Through the creation of music humans can manipulate the mysteries of being
and becoming, of actuality and potentiality, and through the vehicle of music
they can legislate the schedule of a phenomenon’s passage from its total
being to its absolute annihilation.5

Material, timbre, duration, structure and the presence of sound itself

can all be unstable or impermanent. Fragility, then, offers a sonic
experience where both the possibility of stability and the possibility
of its obliteration have been demonstrated.
Despite many works being described as fragile, such as those by
Morton Feldman, Luigi Nono and Salvatore Sciarrino, there has
been surprisingly little writing relating specific musical elements to
fragility, or asserting and defining musical or sonic fragility as legitim-
ate terms.6 One of the most detailed works defining/investigating
musical fragility comes in Oliver Thurley’s 2015 article ‘Disappearing
Sounds: Fragility in the Music of Jakob Ullman’, in which he analyses
Ullman’s Solo III and A Catalogue of Sounds demonstrating performative,
aural, structural, and notational forms of fragility found in these pieces.7

3
Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, second edition (Albany: SUNY
Press, 2007), p. 51.
4
However, a stable element does not need to be a constant.
5
Ihde, Listening and Voice, p. 223.
6
Instances of the term ‘fragility’ found in writings on music include Boutwell’s description
of the texture in Morton Feldman’s Four Instruments (Brett Boutwell, ‘“The Breathing of
Sound Itself”: Notation and Temporality in Feldman’s Music to 1970’, Contemporary
Music Review 32, no. 6 (2013), pp. 531–570); Harrison’s discussion on the work of Aldo
Clementi as ‘certain quality of fragility’ (Brynn Harrison, ‘The Tempo of Enclosed
Spaces: A Short, Personal Reflection on the Ensemble Music of Aldo Clementi’,
Contemporary Music Review 30, no. 3–4 (2011), pp. 269–274); and Frasch’s depiction of
the structural architecture of her piece the silence that reigns . . . as ‘too fragile to exist in
the physical world’. (Heather Frasch, the silence that reigns . . . (2011). Unpublished
Manuscript and Programme Note, https://heatherfrasch.wordpress.com/2012/09/29
(accessed 22 March 2017)). Although without reference to a specific piece, Schroeder’s art-
icle on ‘networked listening’ focuses on a discussion of the fragility of the performative
body and of the listening experience (see Franziska Schroeder, ‘Network[ed] Listening–
Towards a De-centering of Beings’, Contemporary Music Review 32, no. 2–3 (2013),
pp. 215–229).
7
Oliver Thurley, ‘Disappearing Sounds: Fragility in the Music of Jakob Ullman’, TEMPO 69
(2015), pp. 5–21.

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 MUSICAL FRAGILITY: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL EXAMINATION 41

What remains to be established is a more comprehensive and objective

categorisation of musical fragility, and a characterisation of it in
its numerous forms across a broad range of composers’ works.
Through classification, a distinction between local and large-scale fra-
gility emerges. A typology of fragilities makes it possible both to iden-
tify them in works that might not necessarily be considered fragile and
to identify works that use combinations of fragility types.
To introduce the discussion, it is first necessary to identify the
agents of fragility: who or what factors contribute(s) to and/or pro-
duce(s) fragility. The following five principal agents will lead this dis-
cussion: sound, material, performer, listener and composer. These
agents will be the precipitators, instigators and activators of fragility.
At times, multiple agents will contribute to musical fragility; at
times the fragility is more purely formed having a single agent.
I now begin a categorisation through which types of fragility, their
agents and their levels of concentration can be further scrutinised.8
This classification involves ten types, with compositions from new
and experimental acoustic music offered as examples. It is important
to keep in mind that many of the pieces involve more than one
form of fragility, and that fragility types are often interconnected.
Last, it must be asserted that a discussion of sonic fragility involves
both perceived fragility and actual fragility. In the examination that
follows many types of sonic fragility are profoundly reliant upon
the listener’s observation and experience.

1. PERFORMATIVE FRAGILITY; [local]

The most logical deduction of what can be broken in sound is the
presence of sound itself. Fragility can be the result of a performer
attempting to produce sound which may not speak, or using a tech-
nique that is particularly difficult to maintain because of conditions,
duration or context. The performer must accept that sound, or
sound quality, may suffer or stop at various moments without her
intention.
An example of performative fragility may be found when the com-
poser intentionally instructs the performer to use a technique that can,
but sometimes will not, speak in a sound event. This may be an
extremely slow and light bow drawn across a string producing a
sound slight in dynamic and barely present. Owing to the bowing
technique, sound will waver in and out of audibility.
Another type results when a performer attempts a technique
(regardless of dynamic level) that has within it the potential of failure.
Failure in this sense points to an inconsistency in type, character, or
colour of sound, where the performer faces the inability to produce
or sustain a sound quality. For example, a composer may instruct
the performer to sustain a scratch tone on a string instrument over
a prolonged period. The scratch tone is notated as sustaining however,
with certain bow angles/pressure the scratch may be less articulate or
may even momentarily cease. Another instance of this brand of fragil-
ity may come within a fast or moderately paced tempo where a wind
instrument moves from or into a difficult-to-speak multiphonic, which
requires more time to reveal itself fully. Fragility comes as a
by-product of a technique used for specific sound production.

8
Note that I will use the terms sonic fragility and musical fragility interchangeably.

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 42 TEMPO

2. MATERIAL FRAGILITY; instrument/performer; [local/global]

Material fragility occurs when the object or instrument used in sound
production is damaged in such a way that it can no longer successfully
carry out its function as sound-maker. This may be the result of cir-
cumstance, or environment (climate qualities such as dry, moist,
hot, cold) altering the way a performer connects to an instrument,
or the way an instrument reacts to this connection. An incapacitation
gives the performer less control of certain sounds or actions.
Material fragility may arise within a piece where the performer or
the instrument is somehow disabled, rendering the instrument or the
process of sound production difficult, limited, or impossible. In Kunsu
Shim’s Second Skin, sound is produced from ripping apart clothing and
garments.9 The instrument itself, a garment, is damaged by playing
itself, i.e. ripping it apart, leaving it at a certain point incapable of
being ripped any further, and therefore incapable of making anymore
sound. In his piece honey, for solo violin, Casey Anderson indicates that
the performer begins the piece by applying honey to the bow.10 After
each sonic gesture, the violinist applies more honey. The result in sound
realisation ranges from difficult to near impossible, where the sound
may become unrecognisable or cease altogether.
In Kunsu Shim’s Apart, everyday objects (pens, packs of gum,
toothpaste tubes, cassette tapes, heads of lettuce, radios) or instru-
ments, are taken ‘apart’ or disassembled, and each fragment laid out
on the floor in any geometric form.11 The objects are intentionally
damaged through the process of performing the piece, and, as Shim
adds, sounds ‘arise unexpectedly during execution, but are welcome’.12
The process of performing the piece actively destroys its own ability to
continue to be performed.
We may also consider the material’s inability to successfully make
sound owing to restrictions imposed upon the performer. Performer
material fragility arises when a composer’s instructions are such that
they intentionally restrict the abilities of the performer to either pro-
duce sound in a specific way or to produce any sound at all. The per-
former is made physically incapable of her role through instructions in
the score. Alwynne Pritchard’s Objects of Desire begins with the clari-
nettist repeatedly wrapping scarves around her instrument to the
point that the instrument becomes incapable of standard sound pro-
duction techniques. Pritchard’s instructions read:
[W]rap firmly around the clarinet bit at a time, after each wrapping from open
B flat, play one chromatic scale descending, leisurely pace, repeat wrap, then
play until clarinet completely swaddled, snug, unable to produce a sound.13

Later in the piece, a bandage is wrapped around the clarinet and cello
(as well as the two performers of these instruments), rendering them
‘impossible for them to play’. She adds, ‘bound frigid stopped’.14
For the past six years, Megan Beugger’s compositions have focused on
a particular type of performer fragility which she terms ‘constriction’.15
Within her practice, she deals with three different types of constriction:
that which is activated by another person, by oneself, and by one’s

9
Kunsu Shim, Second Skin (2012), Düsseldorf, Germany. Unpublished Manuscript.
10
Casey Anderson, honey (2015), Düsseldorf, Germany. Unpublished Manuscript.
11
Kunsu Shim, Apart (2000), Duisburg, Germany. Unpublished Manuscript.
12
Shim, Apart.
13
Alwynne Pritchard, Objects of Desire (2010), Berlin: Verlag Neue Musik.
14
Pritchard, Objects of Desire.
15
Megan Beugger, Daring Doris (2012). Unpublished Manuscript and Programme Note.

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 MUSICAL FRAGILITY: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL EXAMINATION 43

instrument.16 About her piece Daring Doris scored for cardboard trifold
with two players, she writes:
[A]ttempting to perform the action for these long durations causes the per-
former to fatigue, and while they attempt to produce the same sound through-
out the entire time bracket, the impossible physical nature of the act causes the
sound to break down and reflect the condition of the physical body.17
The composer’s intention is to restrict the sound maker’s ability
through bodily exhaustion.

3. ACOUSTIC FRAGILITY; orchestration/psychoacoustics; [local/

global]
‘Listening makes the invisible present in a way similar to the presence
of the mute in vision’.18 When one hears, the eardrum is picking up
vibrations from pressure waves in the air. The human ear is capable of
hearing frequencies between 16 Hz and 20 kHz and amplitude
between 0.05 dB and 130 dB.19 In those for whom loud sound has
been a major part of their experiential life, portions of their hearing
spectrum may be lost quite easily, and at a young age. Therefore,
music exists that is above and below human’s capacity to hear, but
it is also possible (indeed, probable) for audibility to be subjective,
in that sound may be simultaneously audible to some and inaudible
to others due to an individual’s hearing state. Hence, both objective
and subjective acoustic fragility are possible. One of the more seem-
ingly obvious attributes of a sonic fragility may arise as a result of a
low-level dynamic field. A piece may offer a moment of sound that
is barely ‘there’ or, equally, this dynamic level may be present
throughout the whole of a work. In either scenario, it is the proximity
to silence, the nearness to inaudibility that makes its existence ambigu-
ous and wavering.
Peter Ablinger speaks of acoustic fragility through discussing audi-
bility in his music. He writes,
My material is not sound.
My material is audibility.

While others work with sound

perhaps set a sound and than a pause
I set audibility then inaudibility.20
In Eva-Maria Houben’s pismo beach for percussion, piano and flute,
acoustic fragility exists on both a local and global level.21 The piece,
made up of quiet and sparse sonic events, calls for the percussionist
to play only two sound events. Both sound events are markedly sus-
tained, but are also ‘nearly inaudible’,22 During the piece, this nearly
inaudible percussion sound will be layered with aperiodic entries of
piano events, sometimes loud and sometimes quiet. In both cases,
the piano sound events render the percussion completely inaudible,
and although the audience may see the percussionist continue to
make sound, they may not hear this sound. Here, then, fragility is a
result of multiple instruments playing simultaneously, where the

16
Beugger, Daring Doris.
17
Beugger, Daring Doris.
18
Ihde, Listening and Voice, p. 51.
19
Pauline Oliveros, Sonic Meditations (Baltimore, MD: Smith Publications, 1974), p. xxii.
20
Peter Ablinger, English Texts, http://ablinger.mur.at/engl.html (accessed 20 February
2016).
21
Eva-Maria Houben, pismo beach (2007). Berlin: Edition Wandelweiser.
22
Houben, pismo beach.

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 44 TEMPO

sound of one instrument may make another disappear altogether.23

Further examples of orchestrational acoustic fragility might occur
when one sound produced at the same time as another generates a
third type of sound.
Similarly, psychoacoustic phenomena are emblematic of acoustic
fragility for their inconsistency. Some phenomena demonstrate fragil-
ity in their inability or difficulty to be strictly controlled, but also
because of the challenge of their detection. For both the trained
and untrained ear, discerning psychoacoustic phenomena can be an
arduous endeavouur. Often it requires an effort and a familiarity
with the prospect of its occurrence for one to perceive these effects:
‘Moments of awareness are not complete awareness, just as moments
of blindness are not completely blind’.24
Maryanne Amacher’s work and research was almost entirely
focused on psychoacoustic phenomena, specifically concentrating on
auditory distortion products, or otoacoustic emissions,25 a phenom-
enon in which, with certain conditions, the ears actually produce
and perceive other sounds, or as she phrased it ‘music streaming
out from their head, popping out of their ears, growing inside of
them and growing out of them meeting and converging with the
tones in the room’.26 Her 1999 album entitled Sound Characters:
Making the Third Ear features seven tracks, for example ‘Head
Rhythm 1’, which exemplify this phenomena.27
The work of the composer and visual artist Chiyoko Szlavnics
stems from her line drawings, free-hand horizontal lines which may
intercept, or interact with one another in their angles, intersections,
or close proximity.28 Her compositions often feature acoustic instru-
ments layered with sine tones; through a translation of her line drawings
into sound – sustained tones (often microtonal and with glissandi) –
what surfaces is beating, when two frequencies almost in unison pro-
duce pulsation. In Szlavnics’ works, the speed and regularity of beating
is unstable and consistently fluctuating because of the slowly moving
pitch glissandi which just slightly shifts the distance between tones.

4. STRUCTURAL FRAGILITY; energy/process; [global]

Describing ‘Modern Silence’, David Metzer discusses fragmentation as
a method of creating an ephemeral realm, or what I will refer to as
structural fragility, of silence, near-silence, and the possibility of
silence in Webern, Nono and Sciarrino.29 Structural fragility may
result from a work based on fragmentation and discontinuity where
the listener’s sense of directionality or directed energy is diverted.
This energy can be stimulated and immobilised by numerous and

23
In his Rauschen (white noise) series, Peter Ablinger explores this through varying levels of
white noise that sometimes eclipses the acoustic instruments’ sound, while at other times
equally shares the acoustic space, or shadows the instruments.
24
Agnes Martin, ‘Writings’, in Agnes Martin: Writings, ed. Dieter Schwarz (Stuttgart: Cantz,
1993), p. 31.
25
Maryanne Amacher, ‘Psychoacoustic Phenomenon in Musical Composition: Some
Features of a “Perceptual Geography”’. Arcana III: Musicians on Music, ed. John Zorn
(New York: Hips Road, 2008), pp. 9–24.
26
Amacher, Liner Notes to Sound Characters: Making the Third Ear. Tzadik, 1999.
27
Stefany Anne Golberg, ‘Sound Envisioned’, The Smart Set, http://thesmartset.com/art-
icle07111401/ (accessed 14 March 2016).
28
Chiyoko Szlavnics Website, www.chiyokoszlavnics.org/journey4.html (accessed 25
February 2016).
29
David Metzer, ‘Modern Silence’, The Journal of Musicology, 23 (2006), pp. 331–74.

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 MUSICAL FRAGILITY: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL EXAMINATION 45

layered musical elements, including phrasing, tempo, melodic contour

and so on.
In the following two examples, directionality is repeatedly established
and suddenly halted. In Bernhard Lang’s Differenz/Wiederholung Series,
and more specifically in Differenz/Wiederholung 1.2, fragments of music-
ally disparate gestures pass by one after another, each having been
repeated various numbers of times.30 In the score, each gesture is
marked with a repeat sign and the number of repetitions written
above, which in some cases is as little as twice and, elsewhere, up to
13 times. The gestures each embody a particular teleological impulse
and, when stuck in a looping pattern, subsequently expose a system,
or moving structure, breaking down. Eric Wubbles deploys this same
process in his This is This is This is, though intensified, since here
some fragments do not repeat at all, while others repeat up to 61 times.31
Structural fragility can also occur when the process or system that a
composer designs for a piece has the possibility of failing or breaking,
or coming near to this point. In the following examples, this fragility
arises from interactivity between performers. In Jürg Frey’s More Or
Less Normal, each performer begins the piece freely and at a different
section (of the 19 sections) of the piece.32 Each section, in its own
tempo, instructs the performer to play slow, pitched pulsations; some-
times the notes themselves are quite lengthy, and also appear with
long rests between pulsations. With each pulse at such a slow
tempo (tempi include crotchet = 40, crotchet = 42, crotchet = 48),
and with pulsations sometimes lasting up to 20 crotchet beats long,
a player’s sense of tempo will likely be influenced by the many
other layers of very slow pulsations sounding simultaneously.
Performers can fail at the process (rather than at a sound, as in per-
formative or material fragility) clearly laid out in the score, and the
composer is aware of this probability, leaving the listener with a fra-
gility of structure.
Similarly, Pauline Oliveros’s Sonic Meditation XVI initiates a proced-
ure that can be broken through the act of performing the work.33 In
the piece, participants are asked to sing any pitch as a long-tone (full
breath length). After listening to each other’s long-tones, they indi-
vidually identify the pitch centre of the group. Singers then adjust
their long-tone pitches with each subsequent long-tone being a step
(perhaps a microtonal step) closer to their understood pitch centre.
The exercise is completed when all participants are singing the
same pitch. The process can easily be fractured by way of different
participants imagining different pitch centres, and, hence adjusting
their long-tones towards these different endpoints. Likewise, perhaps
the long-tone that a participant is moving toward also changes in
pitch, and she can no longer use that note as a pitch movement
guide. The exercise can easily become a continuous shifting mass of
pitches where each voice moves toward an unfixed anchor.
In James Saunders’s choose who tells you what to do, performers are
given a set of instructions of sonic events which they will each speak
out loud during the performance.34 Throughout the piece, each player

30
Bernhard Lang, Differenz/Wiederholung (2002). Vienna: Zeitvertrieb. Available at www.
youtube.com/watch?v=AaBOZ8iOlbQ (accessed 23 February 2016).
31
Eric Wubbles, This is This is This is (2009–10), www.wubbelsmusic.com/pieces_Thisis.
html (accessed 19 February 2016).
32
Jürg Frey, More or Less Normal (2005–07). Berlin: Edition Wandelweiser.
33
Oliveros, Sonic Meditations.
34
James Saunders, Choose who tells you what to do (2014). Unpublished Manuscript.

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 46 TEMPO

acts as an instructor, speaking instructions at various times, and also as

a receiver of instructions, by choosing which player to listen to for
instruction. Because of the duality of roles, a performer can choose
to listen to a player who in turn does not instruct for a substantial
time, therefore making the first player silent for that period. This scen-
ario can also be more widespread enabling the sonic structure to break
easily. The threat of the piece becoming a long stretch of silence is
plausible at nearly any point in the performance of the piece.

5. NOTATIONAL FRAGILITY; [global]

Notational fragility concerns both the quality and permanence of a
score. Considering the score as object, it is easy to conceive of the
potential of it being damaged or broken: scores are generally notated
on paper, and paper is quite breakable. A score that may begin to
deteriorate, or whose notation may become difficult to decipher
over time, may grant the performer different abilities and levels of
ease in the performance experience. A score may become completely
illegible, incapable of accomplishing its purpose of transmitting infor-
mation to the performer. This impermanence, or fragility, though,
may be common to all paper scores.
The fragility in the work of the visual artist, Eva Hesse, is related to
the quality of materiality. Her works would disintegrate and decay
over time because of the delicate quality of the material, though,
this disintegration, Denise Birkhofer asserts, was unintentional.35
The artist did not create the works so that they would decay over
time, but the material the artist chose was simply not durable.
Unlike Hesse’s unintentional fragility of material, ephemeral scores
are similar to Tibetan Buddhist sand paintings, the construction of
which includes the intention of their impermanence. A score purpose-
fully designed by the composer to last for only a short time can be
found in Michael Baldwin’s Ephemeral Series.36 In Baldwin’s Ephemera
#6,37 ink, written on lamination pouches instead of paper, is smudged
on the score, first by the composer before it is given to the performer,
and then smudged and/or completely deteriorated by the performer
during the performance process. Baldwin writes, ‘[a] performance of
the score ends once the entire surface has been wiped away leaving
only the score’s ontological trace: title, name, and the location of
creation’.38
Argentinian composer Ellen C. Covito instructs the performer(s) to
find any notated score, or what she refers to as a ‘found score’39 and
glue its pages together before performance in Composed Improvisation
G.40 While performing, the player must rip her pages apart to read
the music. Due to this destructive procedure, parts of the notation
are rendered unclear or unreadable altogether.

35
Denise Birkhofer, ‘Eva Hesse and Mira Schendel: Voiding the Body – Embodying the
Void’, Woman’s Art Journal 31, no. 2 (2010), pp, 3–11, here p. 7.
36
Michael Baldwin, Reflections on Ephemerality and Notation in My Recent Work (Master’s
Research Thesis, University of Huddersfield, 2012).
37
Michael Baldwin, Ephemera #6 (2012). Unpublished Manuscript.
38
Baldwin, Reflections on Ephemerality, p. 6.
39
You Nakai and Elizabeth Hoffman, ‘The Music of Ellen C. Covito: An Interview with You
Nakai’, Perspectives of New Music 51, no. 1 (2013), pp. 5–20, here p. 8.
40
Ellen Covito, Composed Improvisation G (2014). Available at www.youtube.com/watch?
v=wvPFdPwRpow (accessed 14 March 2016).

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 MUSICAL FRAGILITY: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL EXAMINATION 47

6. PSYCHOLOGICAL FRAGILITY; performer; [global]

A work displaying psychological fragility explores the frailty and or
instability of a performer’s psychological state. One category of psy-
chological fragility can occur when the complexity or difficulty of a
composition makes the performer’s failure to fully realise the instruc-
tions of the score an integral part of the piece. In The Crutch of Memory,
Aaron Cassidy deconstructs the choreography involved in producing
sound on an instrument, in this case any non-fretted, bowed string
instrument.41 Typically, when realising a piece, a string player imme-
diately and automatically translates a notation of pitch/rhythm into a
choreography involving decisions of which string to play a note on
and with which finger, based on factors of context and colour. In
Cassidy’s work, choreography is given, but not the resulting sound.
Elements of choreography including string selection, finger spacing,
finger selection and hand position are stratified into three separate tab-
lature staves. For a player, the inputting of all of this information at
once is overwhelming, to say the least. One aspect that makes input-
ting the notation so difficult is that, unlike traditional musical notation,
there is ‘no hierarchy of importance specified between the staves or
parameters’.42 The performer concedes to the anxiety of this particu-
lar realisation, accepting that although she will attempt an accurate
performance, she will most likely fail at observing all of the simultan-
eous choreographic directions at a given time.
In Mieko Shiomi’s Mirror Piece No. 2, performers are instructed to
walk backwards across a stage scattered with instruments/objects
using only a hand mirror to aid in avoiding stepping on objects.43
Holding their mirrors as if they were a car’s rear view mirror, perfor-
mers cautiously traverse backwards across the stage, fearing that they
may fail at their goal and collide with a, perhaps very expensive,
instrument.
Another form of psychological fragility is realised through the char-
acterisations a composer may give to a performer. A performer’s char-
acter may be on the verge of mental stability, nearing a breakdown, or
showing unstable emotional output. Though vocal characterisation is
easiest to imagine, this unstable encounter can also be instrumental. A
perfect vocal example may be found in Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight
Songs for a Mad King, but other examples of vocal psychological fragil-
ity do abound. George Aperghis characterises the solo soprano’s role
in Shot in the Dark44 as a ‘fluctuating woman who slides from one state
of consciousness to another’,45 leading the ensemble in and out of a
number of different emotional manifestations, from loud, cacophon-
ous, and raucous, to still, slowly moving microtonal shifts alongside
her fits of whispers.

7. TEMPORAL FRAGILITY; performer/listener; [local/global]

A piece exploring temporal fragility uses time or durational expanses
to displace, disconnect or destabilise the perception of structure,

41
Aaron Cassidy, The Crutch of Memory (2004). Buffalo: Aaron Cassidy/ASCAP.
42
Mieko Kanno, ‘Prescriptive Notation: Limits and Challenges’, Contemporary Music Review
26 no. 2 (2007), p. 251.
43
Mieko Shiomi, Mirror Piece No. 2 (1966), in Fluxus Performance Workbook. Performance
Research e-publication, ed. K. Friedman, O. Smith, L. Sawchyn. (2002).
44
George Aperghis, Shot in the Dark (2011), https://vimeo.com/45924688 (accessed 12
February 2016).
45
Aperghis, Composer’s Notes: Shot in the Dark (2011), www.aperghis.com/etc./archives/
01-2016 (accessed 21 February 2016).

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 48 TEMPO

teleology or the sense of a unified piece. This can be within a local or

global level – an extremely slow movement within a piece, fleeting
sounds, or a consistent displacement of beat or attack point. It may
also be exemplified by a piece that is spread over a long period, so
long that the piece may no longer seem like a single object.
Manfred Werder’s stück 1998 is a 4000-page score whose entire per-
formance will ultimately take 533 hours and 20 minutes, though
never in one sitting, nor by the same group of performers.46 The
piece is performed in order, but in sections whose duration is decided
upon by each performance situation. The object of a single perform-
ance of stück 1998 is not to present a complete version of the piece, but
rather to become part of a collective of performances which spans
over multiple years involving many different performance venues,
personnel, and instrumentation. To enter into a performance session
of the piece is to join a performing history.47 The work is never heard
in full by a set of listeners, conveying a piece constructed to be broken
apart. The degree to which a listener can imagine each section heard
in a performance as part of a larger whole facilitates an assembling and
disassembling of a perceived fragility.
Another layer of temporal fragility becomes clear in Werder’s own
discussion of the piece, where he writes,
The absolute but empty structure of stück 1998 allows us to consider music to
essentially consist in its condition occurring in place: a musician touches a
sound source and at a time at a place produces a sound or not. This set lets
the precise condition of each situation, regarding our proposed structure,
occur as intrinsic reality of the situation. I propose this to be already enough:
the intrinsic reality of a situation.48
Werder’s example of temporal fragility also draws attention to the
ephemerality of the performance structure. A specific performance
moment, involving these players, this space, these listeners and these
conditions can never be repeated.
One Instrument, Series by Jürg Frey for solo performer, contains a list
of times within a day, at which to make sound.49 Each of the nine
short sound events is no more than five minutes in duration, and
the times between sound events range from five minutes to four
hours. Frey’s work exhibits vast amounts of silence in between shorter
instances of sound. While the sounds of the piece come and go over a
15-hour period of performance, so will its audience. Frey welcomes
the notion that the piece may not have an audience for any of its pre-
scribed sonic time points. The listener imagines the rest of the piece,
imagines the sounds and silence that have been made already, and are
yet to come. Temporal fragility divides the structure into seemingly
separate pieces and it is, again, the tension of the listener’s or the per-
former’s need to unite or separate the heard and imagined parts of the
piece that demonstrate fragility.

46
Manfred Werder, stück 1998 (1998). Berlin: Edition Wandelweiser. This is reminiscent of
John Cage’s Organ2/ASLSP for which the composer has left the instruction ‘as slow as pos-
sible’, and, hence, the piece’s duration, open to interpretation. It is currently in the midst of
a 639-year-long performance in Halberstadt, Germany.
47
The performer must contact the composer indicating the duration of the intended per-
formance to obtain the next pages of the score, and instruction to begin at the point in
the score where the last performance left off. Thus far sections have been performed
over 17 years, beginning in March 1999.
48
Werder, Note on stuck 1998 seiten 1–4000, http://manfred-werder-archives.blogspot.com/
2012/07/note-on-stuck-1998-seiten-1-4000.html (accessed 24 February 2016).
49
Jürg Frey, One Instrument, Series (1999). Berlin: Edition Wandelweiser.

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 MUSICAL FRAGILITY: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL EXAMINATION 49

8. TUNING FRAGILITY; [local/global]

Tuning fragility occurs where the pitch content shifts away from equal
temperament, the standard in Western music for over 250 years, in a
way that triggers a perceptual disconnect from what our ears are
accustomed to. Although microtonality is abundant across many
streams of twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, it can still hold
within it a sense of the breaking of scalar or tuning identity.
Musicologist and composer Pascale Criton’s works centre around
her interest in microtonality as a way of destabilising the listener’s per-
ception of scale. Dividing the scale into small microtonal increments,
she introduces material that obscures the listener’s ability to perceive a
change in pitch.50 Many of her compositions are for detuned string
instruments revealing this effect, as in Chaoscacci for solo cello,51
where the four strings of the cello are tuned so that they are 1/
16th tone apart from one another.
A secondary type of tuning fragility occurs when both equal tem-
pered and another tuning system are presented simultaneously exhi-
biting the tuning conflict between them. A clear example of this is
featured in Harry Partch’s ‘The Rose’ from his Seventeen Lyrics of Li
Po. This work employs a just intoned marimba and guitar, layered
with an equal tempered vocal line.52 The effect is a sort of bitonality
where two fields of comfort (or tunings) work consistently to unhinge
one another across the length of the song.

9. SPATIAL FRAGILITY; performer/listener; [global]

When a composer spatialises sounds in an acoustic work, questions of
sound directionality, placement and interaction are raised. Spatial fra-
gility can reveal itself both through the ways performers interact
across or throughout space, and in the ways sound interacts with
and reaches the listener.
Performers are directed to situate themselves so far from each
other that they cannot hear one another clearly, or at all, in Scott
Cazan’s Intercept.53 Two violinists start on opposite sides of a large
space (perhaps outdoors); their sounds are hardly audible to one
another.54 Each producing sound as they slowly walk towards one
another, they eventually become able to hear each other’s sounds.
Finally meeting in the middle of the space (before exchanging initial
places), each one is instructed to interact with the other’s pitch mater-
ial. Cazan uses spatial attributes to set up a context where both the
relationship between sounds and their relationships with the listener
are ambiguous. The sonic configuration establishes itself with one
set of relationships, which later collide and are transformed into a
new relationship. Only in hindsight, when the performers continue
past their midpoint meeting and return to their distanced starting
points, does it become clear that the ‘new’ relationship was only
temporary.

50
Pascale Criton, Biography (2007), www.pascalecriton.com/en/biography (accessed
Retrieved 15 March 2016).
51
Pascale Criton and Deborah Walker, Chaoscacci (2013). Unpublished Manuscript.
52
Harry Partch, (1930/33). ‘The Rose’ from 17 Lyrics of Li Po, available at www.youtube.
com/watch?v=kOwu-feB11k 9 (accessed 23 February 2016).
53
Scott Cazan, Intercept for two string players and sine tones (2015). Unpublished Manuscript.
54
Cazan, Intercept for two string players and sine tones, available at https://vimeo.com/
152230520 (accessed 2 March 2016).

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 50 TEMPO

Traditionally, an audience member encounters music while

remaining stationary and allowing sounds to approach her in whatever
ways they may do so, with reference to her distance and angle from
them. When a composition is designed so that a listener is unable to
take in all of its sound from one vantage point, we also observe spatial
fragility. In John Luther Adams’s outdoor work, Sila: The Breath of the
World, the listener is invited to move through the large ensemble,
often of 80 players, whose members are spread out over a large space.55
From different positions, some individual sound masses come into aural
perspective, while others become buried and inaudible.

10. MULTIDIMENSIONAL FRAGILITY; [global]

The underside of the leaf

Cool in shadow
Sublimely unemphatic
Smiling of innocence
The frailest stems
Quivering in light
Bend and break
In silence56

Within the categories of fragility outlined above, it is clear that

some areas embody a greater degree of fragility than others. Still,
other compositions adopt musical fragility as a more central element
where types of fragility and fragility agents are often joined to form a
multifaceted, layered or multidimensional fragility. In the following
musical works, properties of perception combine with temporal, per-
formative, structural and/or tuning fragility, interweaving local and
long-term forms. These works may also garner a more pronounced
sense of ambiguity with regard to the listener’s experience.
An appropriate visual equivalent to this kind of musical fragility can
be found in one of Agnes Martin’s abstract works, for example White
Stone.57 In this monochromatic work, the lines of Martin’s grid are
drawn freehand; she allows and embraces these imperfections.
Sometimes lines disappear, or are so faint, they just barely emerge:
their presence is ambiguous. The white background gently absorbs
a faint blue colour, or perhaps the other way around. In either case,
there is a sense that colour and line are fleeting, ephemeral, transient,
impermanent across the entire work. The chosen visual elements,
shapes, how they are placed, and their ambiguities combine to form
the effect.
One can imagine that, with many works demonstrating multidi-
mensional fragility, a semblance of life (in the music) may be hardly
detectable. Sonic energy may seem almost strenuously expressed. In
Chaya Czernowin’s Adiantum Capillus-Veneris (1) ‘Etude in fragility
for voice and breath’, the voice is used in its barest sense, at times
just varying levels of breath, and at others the quietest bit of pitch
articulated.58 It is as though the voice has hardly enough life in it to

55
John Luther Adams, Sila: The Breath of the World (2014), www.youtube.com/watch?
v=rUDjOyacZoU (accessed 10 February 2016).
56
Agnes Martin, Writings, ed. Dieter Schwarz (Ostfildern: Cantz, 1991), p. 15.
57
Agnes Martin. White Stone, www.guggenheim.org/artwork/2804 (accessed 22 February
2016).
58
Chaya Czernowin, Adiantum Capillus-Veneris (1) ‘Etude in fragility for voice and breath’
(2015), https://soundcloud.com/resonantbodies/jeff-gavett-czernowin-1 (accessed 23
February 2016).

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 MUSICAL FRAGILITY: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL EXAMINATION 51

produce pitch. The voice remains within an airy sound space and is
able only at a few moments to muster up the energy to enter into
a pitched sound space.
A composition which has an ongoing relationship to silence, still-
ness, and sparseness, Ryoko Akama’s acorn for a.pe.ri.od.ic, epitomises
spaciousness and quietness. Akama’s score exhibits a kind of nota-
tional fragility showing just a few words spread across each of its
ten pages, as if the fewer-than-200 words of the text score had been
cut up and spread out. Akama instructs the performers to play as if
‘inaudible’, or ‘audible’, ‘absent’, or ‘present’, one note each minute
of the 15-minute piece.59 She adds that, in one of these minutes,
the performer withholds from playing altogether. The sounds that
make up the piece should be ‘remote and delicate’, with the last
instruction stating ‘almost here, almost hear’.60
Catherine Lamb’s overlays transparent/opaque offers a combination
of temporal and tuning fragility. It explores a droned structure of sec-
tions containing slowly shifting microtonal/instrumental relationships.
The score depicts each section’s structure with a drawing of intersect-
ing arcs, each line representing a single instrument. In each section,
there is one instrument whose line is shown in bold depicting the sub-
tle emergence of one tone or microtonal relationship over others.61 A
listener’s experience of the work involves listening to what seems like
harmonic and orchestrational stasis, only to realise that, at various
points, these configurations are actually incrementally morphing, or
have already moved into new pitch and instrumental relationships.
Klaus Lang’s Der Weg des Prinzen I (Die Sieben Boten), too, demon-
strates multiple levels of fragility. The entire piece sounds as though it
is on the verge of breaking, the sound dying. In it, extremely quiet,
long-tones related microtonally among the seven instruments of the
ensemble are presented, some moving very slowly through glissando,
allowing for a sense of amorphous shifting.62 An elusive sonic land-
scape whose events are mostly masked, makes the listener almost
unaware of the changing densities.
Rebecca Saunders’ Stirrings Still shares similar elements to Lang’s in
that it involves a quiet landscape made up of microtonal relationships
between instruments. Additionally, the ambiguity of low-level
dynamic, unstable sound types and temporal fragility through masked
entries of multiphonics and displaced beats create a sense of floating
sound.63
Michael Pisaro’s Fade embraces the awareness of the ephemerality
of sound. In the piece, he asks the solo pianist to play slow pulsations
of a pitch, each pulse quieter than the last until the pulsation no longer
produces sound from the piano.64 The piece explores decay, or death
of sound, both locally, through the natural envelope of a piano attack,
and long-term where the pianist implements a decay by playing more
and more softly to the end of each pulsation set.

59
Ryoko Akama, acorn for a.pe.ri.od.ic (2015). Unpublished Manuscript.
60
Akama, acorn for a.pe.ri.od.ic.
61
Catherine Lamb, overlays, transparent/opaque (2013). Unpublished Manuscript.
62
Klaus Lang, Der Weg des Prinzen I (Die Sieben Boten) (1996). Vienna: Zeitvertrieb Edition
Partitur. Available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_vIiyumDh0 (accessed 22 February
2016).
63
Rebecca Saunders, Stirrings Still (2006). Recorded by Ensemble Musikfabrik on Stirrings
Still (Wergo, 6694 2).
64
Michael Pisaro, Fade (2000). Berlin: Edition Wandelweiser.

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 52 TEMPO

***
In concluding this inquiry into the many forms of sonic fragility and
their agents, we may begin considering music itself, or sound as an
entity, as fragile. Martin Knakkergaard asserts ‘Music is only present
in its transition, and the minute it is brought to a stop, it is gone’.65
Music is breakable as it exists while we hear it, while it is being trans-
mitted to us (outside of its living in our memory, or its being docu-
mented in recording), and while our ears input vibrations. But,
when vibrations cease, sound no longer exists. Like architect Brian
Chappel’s discussion of structures built, acknowledged and then dis-
mantled without leaving a trace of their original existence in his
Ephemeral Architecture,66 the physicality of sound is present only during
its sounding, and leaves no imprint, demonstrating a purely ephem-
eral state of existence. Music itself dies, always dies to some extent,
as sound will decay. It is merely a matter of when and/or how it
will die, and if this will happen during our individual experience of
it. Ihde writes, ‘[s]ilence is the unspoken background for sound’.67
In music, sounds come ‘from silence’ and will ‘return to’ silence.68
Finally, fragility also exists on a physical level within its sound
waves, as they themselves are capable of being transformed by
many exterior conditions.
The term fragility can often convey a sense of negativity. We
imagine that which might break or cease to be helpless and lack the
strength needed to continue. Strength is commonly regarded as a posi-
tive attribute, and one which we aspire to possess in our lives. The
artist Mira Schendel regarded something impermanent in her artistic
work as ‘throw away’, Droguinhas, something without import that
not only lacks endurance, but isn’t worth our effort to focus on.69
On the other hand, something fragile may instead be viewed as unique
and worthy of cherishing precisely for its constant state of near-death or its
approaching non-existence. In this way, we cannot ignore the blatant par-
allels between fragility (instability, impermanence, ephemerality) and our
existential experiences, our lives. Perhaps, then, a fragile entity needs
more care in one’s dealings with it, where there arises a sort of compassion
for and/or a responsibility to treat it gingerly. Within a sonic realm, fra-
gility may command a careful listening practice where one’s awareness
of the subtleties of sound’s precise quality, movement, relationships, pas-
sage and abilities to interact with us become significant markers. ‘The rich-
ness of sound is in its inherent instability, and the most unstable sounds are
those which approach silence. At the border between sound and silence
the ear is alive to change’,70 making the case that sonic fragility pulls
the listener into a unique and transformative listening experience. With
this view, fragility in sound can be interpreted as advantageous, and the
presupposed characterisation of weakness can be replaced with appreci-
ation for its rewarding perceptual possibilities.

65
Martin Knakkergaard, ‘The Music That’s Not There’, in The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality,
ed. Mark Grimshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 392.
66
Brian Chappel, Ephemeral Architecture: Towards a Definition (2004), www.scribd.com/doc/
44042590/Ephemeral-Architecture (accessed 27 February 2016).
67
Ihde, Listening and Voice, p. 233.
68
Ihde, Listening and Voice, p. 233.
69
Birkhofer, ‘Eva Hesse and Mira Schendel’, p. 7.
70
Michael Pisaro, Time’s Underground. (1997). Edition Wandelweiser. See www.timescraper.
de/_michael-pisaro/texts.html#Times_Underground (accessed 20 February 2016).

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