About the Book
This collection of essays studies how music of the twenty-first century resonates with sentiments of despondency and loss in the context of the multiple existential crises of the time: climate change, political violence, financial crises, racial inequities and technological acceleration.
Investigating musical expressions of absence across a wide variety of genres and philosophical approaches, the collection aims to stimulate an interdisciplinary conversation about music as an alternative mode of thinking at a time when established frames of reasoning are called into question.
Themed sections engage with the multiplicity of emergent meanings that absence alludes to, opening new lines of inquiry into how music enacts new forms of being in the world and creates pathways to better futures.
Table of Contents:
Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Absence and Music Thinking
Christine Dysers, Peter Edwards, Judith Lochhead
I. Residual Energies
1. The Texture of Memory: Quotation as Absent Presence in Caroline Shaw’s Gustave Le Gray
Mark Hutchinson
2. Presentifying Absence: Memorial Practices in Sample-based Music
Lorenzo Montefinese
3. Vaporwave, Hypnosis and the Mimetic Voice
Alec Wood
4. Voidgaze and Phantom Genres: Functions and Dysfunctions of Music Genres on Streaming Platforms
Mattia Merlini
II. Erasures
5. On the Absence of Female Singing: Law and Praxis in Iran
Payam Pilvar
6. Lacuna and Parergon in Late Vocal Works by Hans Joachim Hespos
Clare Lesser
7. Transitions into Absence: On the Musical Aesthetics of Disappearance
Jakob Maria Schermann
III. Precarities
8. The Lament, Loss and the Power of Speaking in Music
Peter Edwards
9. The Music of Trauma: Tracing the Real in Wang Xilin’s Piano Concerto Op. 56
Arturo Irisarri Izquierdo
10. Olga Neuwirth’s CoronAtion Cycle: Into the Void and Beyond
Martina Bratić
IV. Overload
11. Music for Uncertain Times: Excess, Loss and the Abyss
Christine Dysers
12. Absence, Non-Absence, Words and Music in Kurtág’s Fin de partie
Mark Berry
13. Listening Within the Absence: The Musical Potential of Noise in the Compositions of Peter Ablinger
Marina Sudo
V. Negative Space
14. The Ontoriography of Music in the Twenty-First Century: Absence and Identification
Samuel J. Wilson
15. ‘I Wish You Could Hear This’: Sonic Absence, Subjective Point-of-Audition and d/Deaf Sensoriality in Contemporary Television
Peter Adams
16. Spiritual and Aesthetic Spaces in Arvo Pärt’s Lamentate and Adam’s Lament
Kristina Socanski Celik
17. On the Airy Touch of Music: Sonic Thinking in Pandemic Times
Judith Lochhead
Works Cited
Contributors
Index
About the Author :
Christine Dysers is Assistant Professor of Music at Aalborg University. Her research focuses on music after 1989, with a particular emphasis on repetitive aesthetics and the notion of the uncanny. Christine holds a PhD in music from City, University of London and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA). In 2021, she was appointed as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar in the Department of Music at Columbia University. She has published in peer-reviewed journals such as Perspectives of New Music, Twentieth-Century Music, TEMPO, and Musik & Ästhetik and has contributed to collections across several musicological disciplines. She is the author of Critical Guides to Contemporary Composers: Bernhard Lang (Intellect, 2023). Peter Edwards is Professor of Musicology at the University of Oslo. He has published in journals including Music Analysis and Music & Letters, as well as in edited volumes, exploring topics at the intersection of music philosophy and aesthetics, music analysis, cultural studies and critical musicology. His work spans themes from musical slapstick to music and death, engaging with a wide array of contemporary musical expressions and compositional practices. His monograph György Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre: Postmodernism, Musico-Dramatic Form and the Grotesque (Routledge, 2016) examines Ligeti’s creative process, the sketches for the opera, and the significance of the opera in the wider context of modern and postmodern aesthetics. Peter is also a composer and guitarist. Judith Lochhead is Professor of Critical Music Studies at Stony Brook University, New York. Lochhead’s research focuses on music of the present from analytical, historical, critical, and ethnographic perspectives. Lochhead’s recent co-edited book is Sound and Affect: Voice, Music, World (Chicago, 2021), with Eduardo Mendieta and Stephen Decatur Smith. Some recent publications include: ‘Émilie du Châtelet, Kaija Saariaho and Heroes of the 21st Century,’ The Heroic in Music, eds. Beate Kutsche and Katherine Butler (Boydell and Brewer, 2022); ‘Multiplicities, Truth, Ethics: A Queering Analysis of Chaya Czernowin’s Anea Crystal’, Queer Music Theory, Gavin Lee, ed. (Oxford, 2023); ‘Timbre Realities: A Phenomenological Study of Liza Lim’s Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus’, Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music, de Souza, Steege, Wiskus, eds. (Oxford, 2023); ‘Canonic Machines’, Repetition and Progressive Variation in Gubaidulina’s Fourth String Quartet’, Jeffrey Swinkin, ed. (Oxford, 2025); and ‘Undisciplined’, SMT Colloquy, Music Theory Spectrum (2023).
Review :
The years since 2000 have seen innumerable catastrophes: 9/11, global warming, pandemics, invasions, the erosion of civil rights. Throughout these difficult times, composers have produced music that bears witness and gestures toward the possibility of hope. Music of Absence brings together essays that deal brilliantly with this new music.
Music of Absence offers a timely, even urgent set of accounts of music's engagement with the experience of sustained crisis in the twenty-first century. The expanded parameters of absence explored here go beyond silence to consider music and sound as their own form of sense-making—one that recognizes the limits of the residual belief that we can simply think our way out of crisis. While reckoning with precarity and trauma, this collection doesn't stop at diagnosis or critique. Instead, it ranges easily across genres, finding generative potential in absence, and above all, a medium for seeking connection: to each other, to history, to the environment, and to yet-unimagined, but possible futures.
This remarkable volume balances classical philosophical meditations on absence—from Aristotle to Byung-Chul Han—with the living realities of contemporary musical practice. Its essays move fluidly between metaphysics and embodied listening, revealing how sound itself can think through loss, memory, and renewal. I’m deeply honored that one of my own works was included in this dialogue—a rare experience of seeing one’s music situated within such a luminous framework of intellect, affect, and presence.
