what do you hear?

Musing on Brian Eno's "Generating and Organizing Variety in the Arts" today, an essay written in 1976 which is included in the excellent anthology, "Auditory Culture." Packed full of interesting ideas, including a description of the hierarchal structuring of traditional orchestras, suggesting a panoptic organization of power.
Above all Eno here is interested in examining possible processes through which to achieve musical goals that fall within a range of outcomes as opposed to a specifically prescribed end, resulting in a degree of unpredictability (but not randomness), authenticity (but a different sense of authority). Such musical events retain their identity despite the unique nature of each individual performance.
These processes challenge the notions of composition and composer, as individual musicians (and perhaps even the listener) are implicated in this approach to the creation of sound. This strikes me as a sort of musical proto-hypertextuality from the musician's standpoint, as sound (and meaning) are arrived at through individual choices within a network of relations. Systems may be closed (choice from a delimited range of values) or open (incorporating improvisatory elements). But unlike hypertext, here the creative experience is being experienced simultaneously amongst the many, rather than by the individual.