Nature

This essay explores ways in which a notion of “weak nature” drawn from certain strains of recent philosophy (especially works by Adrian Johnston and Leonard Lawlor) might be mobilized in critical engagements with contemporary and historical writings on music and sound. To thematize nature’s weakness in this context means to understand ecological phenomena as rooted in contingency, transience, non-identity, and non-presence. Through readings of texts by Timothy Morton, Charles O. Nussbaum, Gary Tomlinson, and G. W. F. Hegel, this essay shows how philosophical thought on music often works to deny or foreclose nature’s weakness, rooting accounts of musical experience or music history (including music’s deep evolutionary history) in visions of nature as consistent, gapless, and present. This same inquiry, however, suggests that musical thought that gives fuller rein to nature’s inconsistency can do greater justice to the spectra of difference that range across the many phenomena of musicking.