“It’s Intimate, and It’s Not Mine…”

When pondering sonic and musical practices, I always go to makers to find theorizing-through-work. Artist, composer, and musician Camille Norment offers a body of work that’s very helpful in thinking through listening. For example, in experiencing the complexity of her “Plexus” (Dia Arts Foundation, Dia: Chelsea, New York City, 2022) and “Gyre” (Festspillene i Bergen, Bergen Kunsthall, Norway, 2023), I was ignited to develop a listening methodology I call “Prepositional Listening.”¹ In my mind’s ear, I put myself in a specific position in relation to the sound. For example, I ask myself: What does this given sound feel and sound like if I am placed right in front of it, am far away and facing away from it, have my feet planted on it, or am crawling inside it? This simple game shows us the ways listeners produce what they hear.

The impetus to “Prepositional Listening” and my conversations with Norment about sound over the last two years have related to her sculptural sound works, but I have also long been interested in her live performance work. We recently had the opportunity to talk about her composition Sounds for New Seeds (2023), also a commission for Festspillene i Bergen, which is also set to be performed this year at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.²

Before Norment described the piece itself, she reflected on the presentation format she creates against.

“The conventional audience-performer format maintains a hierarchical power dynamic. Here, there is a kind of a truth that is given to everyone at once, and ‘ideally’ everyone should receive and experience it the same way. The architecture of the performance spaces is typically structured to try to adhere to that as much as possible acoustically, to try to create a situation in which as many people as possible will have the same experience or similar (acoustic) experience. There is a control over the musical message, and emphasis on the homogeny of its deliverance and reception.”³

To counter the illusion of a specific composed sound which audiences can come and receive, Norment constructs a piece that immediately shows it as an impossibility.

“For Sounds for New Seeds, I’ve plotted the musicians in several rings within and around the audience, which are facing each other in groups that form a circle, like traditions of participatory gathering. Because everyone sits closer to or further away from different instruments at the same time, no one has the same audio experience of the performance. Someone might have a trombone right behind them, and another person might hear the intimate scratching of the bow against the cello strings. Someone else might be sitting next to the vocalist and listening to them breathe.”

To me, Sounds for New Seeds beautifully illustrates what is always already the case but so difficult to notice: the specificity of each encounter with sound. As Norment puts it: “Together, the audience has these individual experiences that are coming together and collectively creating a whole.” In other words, no single audience member hears the correct sound. Each holds only one version of the whole, and only a collective can start to sum its complexity together.

While there are very strong cultural, music-practice, and academic norms regarding correct and good listening, neither composers nor performers can control what listeners experience. Once the energy-making entity has released the vibrations, their journey takes them through different materials, including the particularities of audience members’ receptive apparatus. At the moment each audience member senses—which includes hearing—the sound, it is transduced through their body. About that moment, Norment reflects that

“seeds are planted in audiences’ minds as a result of the simultaneity of their collective and intimate experience. Expanding the typical subjective experience, each audience member goes away with something different—a slightly different part of or perspective on the story. That is what I think is very magical, because I don’t know where these seeds are being planted. You know what’s happening, but everyone is having a different orientation, a different view, a different sound.”

Norment continues, “for almost an hour, that becomes your life. You have a certain kind of intimacy with that very particular sonic arrangement.” While noting that this is the condition of all sonic performances, she explains that “when you are so close to a performing body throughout a performance—a voice here, and another instrument over there—they become part of you… that’s planted in someone’s memory. So, who knows what’s going to sprout from that?”

“It's intimate, and it's not mine anymore,” Norment reflects towards the end of our conversation. While we both think a lot about, and indeed sometimes struggle with, how to describe sounds with words,⁴ after spending an hour discussing different aspects of Sounds for New Seeds, Norment’s sharing parts of the score, rehearsal process, and performance was not a retelling. I felt it. For an hour, Sounds for New Seeds had played in Norment’s mouth, in her gestures, in my eyes and ears—in our exchange. In other words, it played out in and between our individual prepositional specificities. For that one hour, it had been her life and my life, and something that otherwise would not have been.

Nina Sun Eidsheim (she/her) is a music theorist, singer, and Professor of Musicology at UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.

Camille Norment (she/her) is an Oslo-based multimedia artist working in music composition, sound art, installation, sculpture, drawing, and performance.