Photo: Ivan Weiss

When I was going to school for classical music … I had about a month to get … my reading together. But I still learn by ear a lot faster. I can feel what I need to do. You can’t write out all those subtleties. I have to hear it, and then take it inside. I have to have the sound in my head, and then go for that.

Chapter nine of “Big, Bent Ears” considers what it means when the most reliable part of a musical performance isn’t the instruments or the score or even the musicians themselves, but their intuition. I don’t mean aptitude or talent; I mean that unknowable knowledge, that abstract certitude that the path you’re headed down is right. Our case study is the three-person percussion ensemble of  Tyondai Braxton’s HIVE project. Braxton’s minimal instructions—“Be still. Don’t look around. Just play.”—leave ample space for his percussionists to be shaped and guided by sound.

Read the latest chapter here, and catch up on the rest of the series:

• Chapter One, There Are No Words
• Chapter Two, Borderline Religious
• Chapter Three, Nazoranai, a Documentary
• Chapter Four, In Search of Lost Time in Knoxville
• Chapter Five, Alien Observers
• Chapter Six, Treatise on the Veil
• Chapter Seven, Anatomy of a Sequence
• Chapter Eight, Surrender to the Situation, Part 1

Nicole Rudick is managing editor of The Paris Review.