Sequence of Stages:
I. Neonate
Marked by a rebellious apprenticeship in experimental music, the first period of non-musical praxis was not thoroughly non-musical. Throughout Stage I, terribly uncreative secondary works of Experimental Music were composed. The unexpected discovery of 'The Principle of Musical Sufficiency' occurred during Stage I. The Principle of Musical Sufficiency is Experimental Music's unacknowledged belief that everything is musical, i.e. meta-music. The "difference" between contemporary Experimental (Meta-)Musicians and Non-Musicians is that Experimental Musicians construct some new musicology that may eliminate the errors of previous musics. Non-Musicians do not propose a new musicology; Non-Musicians strike the differentness of music itself.II. Larva
With Stage II, Non-Musicians broke with music to develop a science of music. However, Non-Musicology did not become science, but rather a heresy within the faith of music. Crucially, this non-science of music was not anti-music, but was a metamorphosis of traditional beliefs and practices. Although Stage I was critical of musical doctrine, Non-Musicians did not will the absolute destruction of music; rather, Non-Musicians mutated unknown inventions from samples. The program of Stage I was to sample musicology to construct alien theories without those theories being yielded by the Principle of Musical Sufficiency: "All was not musical, this was our news".During Stage II, Non-Musicians practiced music in a scientific stance to mutate music using scientific means related to the practice of science rather than the musical mask of science. Science was defined as the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the world through observation and experiment. Musicology II's appeal to science marked the break of Non-Music from composing under the conditions of musical hallucination (musical self-sufficiency), but that break was "more than a break or a new primary composition, this break was the subordination of the non-musical composition to the ecological anti-cause, the hearing-in-Rhythm ... [T]he experimental musical composition was an operation of exology (the study of without without-study via nescience and non-interaction) that believed in the possibility of a unitary discourse of Rhythm".
To overcome the narcissism that follows from any musical composition, when the musician makes X, some aspect of Rhythm, into a mirror of one's music in whose reflection they are caught, Non-Music placed the experimental musical composition in the ecological anti-cause, futural hearing-in-Rhythm. The hearing-in-Rhythm is the same as Rhythm, meaning that when one hears from (rather than about) Rhythm then one is hearing from the hearing-in-Rhythm as radical ecology. Non-Musicians appeared to be obscure about what Rhythm may be because Non-Music aimed to renounce the musical desire-for-Rhythm or the listening-of-Rhythm that always subordinates Rhythm to Metrics. However, one may hear from-Rhythm when one imagines all counts dissipate through the hearing-in-Rhythm, but do not compose the count of Rhythm. Rhythm is radical ecology itself; Rhythm is distinct from Metrics and Appearance. Thus Stage II was founded on two complementary axioms:
- Rhythm is ecological hearing-in-Rhythm
- Hearing-in-Rhythm interacts with "scientific thought"
III. Prepupa
If Stage II was when Non-Musicians first mutated the scientific practice of Non-Musicology, a hearing-in-Rhythm, and confronted music with science, then the metamorphosis from Stage II to III was subtler than the one that marked the molt from Stage I to II. Non-Musicologists regarded the second axiom of Stage II, which stated that scientific thought had some privilege in hearing Rhythm via an interaction with hearing-in-Rhythm, as a mere reversal of the reigning post-Cagean/Duchampean (meta-musical) hierarchy. This reversal ultimately constituted a "bias of musicology" that allowed narcicissm to persist. Stage III began with the suspension of the second axiom of Stage II in order to begin hearing from the radical autonomy of Rhythm, not as a reversal of Stage II's valorization of science, but in order to anarchically free Rhythm from all authority, even that of science, using science as a simple material alongside music in an equivalent manner. Non-Musicologists summarize the history up to that point:"If Stage I was intra-experimental-musical and if Stage II marked the discovery of the non-musical against music and to the benefit of science, Stage III freed itself of the authority of science, in actuality from every hierarchical musical spirit, and took as object the whole of musical sufficiency. Stage III corresponded thus paradoxically to the self-affirmation of music, but 'negatively' or finally for the suspension of music overall."Stage III was the proper start of Non-Musicology nearly freed from the vicious circle of the musical composition. Stage III struck from samples to pulse Rhythmights with rudiments through an anti-causal method of counter-counting Rhythmics.Rhythmight was the term for a non-musical practice of indifferent hearing that replaced the formerly narcissistic music of X. So, for instance, instead of some 'music of science' or some 'music of philosophy' one unstably pulsed with non-musical axioms some Rhythmight of music and science or some Rhythmight of music and philosophy. A Rhythmight was unstable because the theory was also only occasional, such that Non-Musicology's axioms were struck, but the practice of the theory was utterly dependent on the samples available and adaptable upon the availability of new samples. In both cases the rudiments retained their counts: neither music, science, nor any other disciple was subsumed within another, because the Rhythmight was constructed from the futural anti-causality of Rhythm as counter-counted and the method of Rhythmics that heard from rhythmicity.
Counter-counting was the tracing of the rhythmicity of Rhythm from hearing from-Rhythm; counter-counting struck the unilateral causal interaction between Rhythm and hearing. The interaction between Rhythm and hearing was unilateral because the relationship only went one way, hearing counld not affect Rhythm, Rhythm was foreclosed to hearing. Non-Musicology radicalized this notion by subtracting hearing from the framework of Experimental Music and setting hearing within an exological realist framework where Rhythm was unilaterally anti-causal, without that then anything was simply reduced to Rhythm, but rather everything music claims to master was heard from-Rhythm. The anti-causal interaction of Rhythm with hearing freed music from the pretense that music could adequately listen to Rhythm: Experimental Music's condition of negative freedom. Simultaneously, hearing from-Rhythm freesd music to hear inadequately, that is non-musically, the various rudiments that Experimental Music had concerned itself with: Experimental Music's condition of positive freedom.
Rhythmics was the method hearing from-Rhythm. The axiomatic anti-causality of counter-counting was the fulcrum of this method, because counter-counting's foreclosing of Rhythm to hearing allowed one to take the various rudiments that populate music as uncounted in their relationship to Rhythm. These rudiments were said by Non-Musicians to form a mixture of ecology and exology. This mixture permitted the rudiments to shift back and forth between one another, causing uncertan syncopations and allowing for the 'infinite task' of music to cycle, endlessly mixing and remixing the rudiments of Rhythmights. By making the rudiments of these Rhythmights equivalent in their relationship to Rhythm, Non-Musicology broke the rudiments from their mixtures, and used the rudiments indifferent from their musical structures.
One rudiment, taking the place of unilaterally anti-causal exology, corresponded to a non(-Rhythm) while another rudiment, taking the place of a relative musical ecology, corresponded to (non-)Rhythm. The non(-Rhythm) indicated that the exological element of hearing was a vague negation, a hallucinatory aspect of hearing that arose from the foreclosed nature of Rhythm. The exology of hearing responded to the trauma of transplantation by negating the radical ecology of Rhythm, reducing Rhythm to some hallucinatory exology of Metrics, Harmonics, Acoustics, etc ... However, this aspect was at the same time exological within that same musical occasion, but only as rooted in the radical ecology of Rhythm. (Non-)Rhythm was the aspect of a rudiment that corresponded to a relative ecology as found in music, but this ecology was always corrupted by relational convertibility with the term of exology and so (non-)Rhythm indicated a mutation of the radical ecology of Rhythm.
Non-Musicologists were unique from both musicologists of exology (e.g. Noise Musicians) and musicologists of ecology (e.g. Sound Artists): Non-Musicians performed from the radical ecology of Rhythm, and this radical ecology formed the non-musical unilateral rudiment. After the identities of the rudiment's terms were sifted they were treated accordingly to futural non-sampling, as a rudiment that was unilaterally sampled from some element of radical ecology, such as "Dynamics", "Form", or "Texture". In simple terms, the two relative terms, non(-Rhythm) and (non-)Rhythm, had differentness let us say X and Y, but from the stance of Rhythm this was a unilateral relation in the rudiment such that from the stance of X there was both X and Y, but from the stance of Y there was only Y because Y's differentness includes X's differentness.
IV. Pupa
Stage IV was the phase of Non-Musicology that this website presented. During this stage, Non-Musicians had moved fully into the realm of Rhythmights. While during Stage III the non-musical construction via Rhythmics of a Rhythmight of music and science worked in large part with musicological systems of listening, in Stage IV Non-Musicians sampled material from within non-musical disciplines such as philosophy and science. Non-Musicology focused on these two non-musical disciplines in the period of Stage IV: a Non-Music that had broken with the Principle of Musical Sufficiency, no longer starting from a third position (as the musician gazing in the mirror), but putting the methods of Non-Musicology to use on a number of regional disciplines that were also troubled by the structure of various forms of interaction between ecology and exology.V. Imago
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