CFP: Music and Sound in Negative Aesthetics and Metaphysics: East and West

Negative aesthetics has developed through two seemingly disparate discourses. The first, speaks of emotion, affect and value: the ways we experience aesthetic displeasure, disgust, or disapproval, and how we categorise these experiences as ugly, annoying, boring, nonsensical, simply bad, or even sinister and evil. The second, understands negativity in the sense of a lack, as absence, privation, shock, or inversion, variously and contradictorily presented as emptiness, silence, dissonance, or noise. For this edited volume, we seek contributions from musicologists, ethnomusicologists, sound studies researchers, and philosophers on how music or sound can be (or has been) positioned between understandings of aesthetic negativity and metaphysical notions of the negative, in both Western and Eastern thought.

The pessimist philosopher Emil Cioran asserted that music (Bach’s in particular) was ‘the only argument proving the creation of the universe cannot be regarded as a complete failure’. In a comparable though distinct manner, Xunzi praised music as a ritual of joy able to cultivate an otherwise evil humanity. In both instances, music negated negative worldviews – the aesthetic running against a metaphysical norm. Other philosophers, however, have considered music (or, at least, certain types of music) negatively – a dissonant disruption of an otherwise harmonious universe (Plato, Confucius). Still others take music to manifest, mediate, or mimic the unbridled chaos or absolute nothingness lying beyond our illusory senses (Schopenhauer).

In each instance, music is evaluated aesthetically but via some metaphysical viewpoint, with negativity working on either side of this aesthetic/metaphysic divide. Of course, music can also itself be negated as sound, silence, or noise, while negation operates within music, as with dissonance or atonality. Often, composers and musicians have provided metaphysically-laden justifications for their poietic practices, with negation becoming an especially prominent concern in the avant-garde after John Cage, traversing figures as diverse as Henry Flynt and Merzbow.

The editors are especially eager for authors to examine the overlap, interplay, counterpoint, contrast, or commonality between aural conceptions of the negative in East and West (or the many 'Easts' and 'Wests'), noting a prevalence of concepts in Eastern aesthetics (e.g. chonggao (崇高), dan (淡), ma (間), wabi sabi (侘寂), mono no aware (物の哀れ)) and metaphysics (e.g. kōng (空), kǔ (苦), wu/mu (無)) that touch on negativity. Contributions addressing other philosophical or musical traditions are, however, also more than welcome. 

In addition to the topics hinted at above, contributors might wish to take the following questions as prompts for exploring how music or sound relate to aesthetic and metaphysical conceptions of negativity:

·   How has music or sound been understood by philosophers as negative? How is music or sound understood in cynic, pessimist, or nihilist philosophies, in relation to dialectical negation, or in theories of nothingness and lack.

·   What metaphysical connotations lie behind the negative emotions music may evoke? What role has music and metaphysics played in the histories of negative emotions?

·   How might negative aesthetic concepts or aesthetic categories which sublate or confuse the negative intersect with music and metaphysics? Similarly, how does music or sound relate to metaphysical or aesthetic terms which address liminal states between something and nothing?

·   What links exist between music, sound, or silence and negative theologies, religious conceptions of negation or nothingness, or the rituals and practices associated with these concepts and worldviews?

·   Which composers, musicians, or sound artists have most thoroughly and originally explored negative aesthetics in music and sound? Do their ideas interact with metaphysical conceptions of negativity?

Although interdisciplinary scholarship is strongly encouraged, contributions should remain focused on aesthetic concerns and how they relate to metaphysical, ontological, or cosmological worldviews. Abstract proposals for chapters (in English) should be sent to:

[email protected] by 31 January 2026

Abstract length: 250-300 words, plus 50 word biography, including name, association (where relevant) and email address.