Riley Zhou L&S Arts & Humanities
Sonic Negation: Reassessing Musical Autonomy From Adorno to Lachenmann
My research theorizes musical negation as a site of resistance under late capitalism, drawing on Adorno’s aesthetics and compositions by Lachenmann, Webern, Czernowin, and Schumann, etc. as genealogies of refusal. In dialogue with Adorno’s negation, Derrida’s différance, Deleuze’s deterritorialization, and Fred Moten’s fugitivity, I explore how sound resists not merely through dissonance but via its structural withdrawal from representation, legibility, and capitalist time. Lachenmann’s musique concrète instrumentale disarticulates conventional listening, enacting what Adorno called “expressionless art”—yet today, such gestures risk aesthetic capture by algorithmic platforms. Rather than seeking resistance in negation alone, I interrogate how musical form, circulation, and temporality produce zones of opacity and non-equivalence. By theorizing experimental music as a site of fractured mediation—where autonomy is neither purity nor transcendence but an immanent struggle—this project reconsiders sonic materialism as a mode of political intensity, staging new alignments between critical theory, post-tonal aesthetics, and the infrastructures of listening.
Message To Sponsor
Thank you for supporting a project that asks whether sound can still resist being smoothed out, packaged, and streamed into the background of an age composed by noise and commodity fetishism. The opportunity to sit down with difficult music, to think through harmonies, to pursue theories and directions that sound might take is rare and much-appreciated. Your support makes space for this kind of slow, attentive work—and I’m truly grateful.