A queer phenomenology of furniture music: A case study of Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room (1969) as musical furniture

Abstract

Disciplinary background A. I am sitting in a room : a statement famously pronounced by the American experimental composer, Alvin Lucier (1931-2021). Perhaps we have not yet fully considered how the room, in some way, also sits with us. How did we come to take up the room in which we sit, how was the room already ready for our arrival, and what do we hear and/or listen to in these spaces? These are some of the questions regarding furniture music (music that is heard but not listened to) that are prompted by feminist scholar, Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology (Ahmed, 2006), which is not a phenomenology of queer experience (which is the philosophy of experience or consciousness as it relates to queerness), but rather, a queering of phenomenology. Like Gavin Lee (Lee, 2020), I foreground queer phenomenology as disorientation. Disciplinary background B. Inspired by