In Book II, section 33 of The Elements of Harmony, Aristoxenus makes it clear that "musical cognition" or synesis is fundamental to musical practice. Just as a DJ coodinates two space-times in order to "beatmatch" disparate compositional units--manually accelerating and decelerating the sounds of one record through one (headphoned) ear while monitoring the the shared space created by the sounds already emitting from the loudspeaker or over the airwaves with the other--Aristoxenus' musician must hear and "judge the magnitudes of the intervals" while "contemplating the function of the notes" with the intellect. At the same time, unlike the "geometrician" who "makes no use of his faculty of sense-perception" the musician must cultivate a synesis that involves juggling "permanent" and "changeable" elements at once. "For the student of musical science," in other words, accuracy of sense-perception is a fundamental requirement.

Turning to mind-body relations in La Monte Young's Dream House installations, it is fruitful to consider Aristoxenus' synesis as a site of  Althusserian interpellation, a site where artists and technicians alike are already exploring the rhetorical and semiotic connections between composer and performer. Classics scholar D. Levins keenly identifies Macran's diverse translations of synesis (as "musical cognition" and "sensuous cognition" etc). This insight informs this analysis of the musical minimalism, born out of the Fluxus movement, that took up and interpreted some of Cage's ideas about fundamental compositional units (which were first formalized by Aristoxenus) in their own particular way. Aristoxenus says that...

read from the Elementa Harmonika, here.

Book I.4 "from what point of view"?

170-1, 182,5 compression, synesis and "digital" singing

who were the Harmonikoi? katapuknosis assemblage

Eratocles: failed to investigate simple intervals first

Lasus of Hermione: coined the term mousike

the school of Epigonus: a teacher and artist, had a 40-stringed zither named after him.

Simos

the "other Pythagoras": the tripod, 3 differently tuned kitharas on a revolving base.

"it is usual in geometrical constructions to use such a phrase as "let this be a straight line'; but one must not be content with such language of assumption in the case of intervals. The geometrician makes no use of his faculty of sense-perception" (page 189).

La Monte Young's most famous composition was simply an exhortative command line that read, draw a straight line and follow it. The implications of this challenge to performance and listening almost read like an allegory in the saga and emergence of the listener as the driving force behind musical enterprise in our times.