The Noise of Art

Alex Ross, classical music critic for the New Yorker, recently published a chronicle of twentieth-century music called The Rest is Noise. The book made several bestseller lists and was nominated for a National Book Circle Award. Mr. Ross has appeared on numerous TV shows, even bantering with Stephen Colbert about the foibles of Karlheinz Stockhausen on Comedy Central. Earlier overviews of the twentieth-century classical avant-garde were penned by Paul Griffiths and H.H. Stuckenschmidt, yet both were deemed specialty books intended for a small audience. Ross’s book is bigger in scope and more generous in tone; it makes clear the connections between politics, history, and music that are remarkably of interest to a general readership. Ross hits all the high notes– Strauss, Mahler, Schoenberg, Debussy, Stravinsky, Ellington, Ives, Sibelius, Shostakovich, Boulez, Britten, Cage, Messiaen, Ligeti, Reich, and Adams, to name a few–and strings the whole story together in a compelling way that could only happen from the perspective of the twenty-first century. But Ross tells a twentieth-century story and one that is, in many ways, finished.
 
The Rest is Noise sticks to the narrative of what happened inside the concert hall, but there was an awful lot of music and sound that eschewed formal classical presentation, opting instead for the art gallery, the airwaves, or outdoors in nature. Much of this activity, time-based and ephemeral, either went undocumented or was written about in art magazines, obscure journals, or fanzines. When recordings were made, they were generally released on limited-edition LPs or cassettes that were passed hand-to-hand to members of an inside coterie. Over the years, various attempts have been made by university or small presses to gather aspects of these scenes between the covers of a book, most notably Michael Nyman’s Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, Douglas Kahn’s Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, Robin James’s Cassette Mythos, and Dan Lander and Micah Lexier’s Sound By Artists. But like the proverbial blind man and the elephant, each book was able to describe only a portion of the unwieldy practice that has come to be known as sound art.
 
The term “sound art” was coined by Dan Lander in the mid-1980s and stood as shorthand for much of what happened outside the concert hall. Brian Eno proposed that sound art’s ideal situation was “a place poised between a club, a gallery, a church, a square, and a park, and sharing aspects of all of these” (Licht 210). The number of disciplines that fell under this rubric can get obscure and exhaustive: fluxus, minimalism, futurism, new music, transmission arts, sounds by artists, performance art, sound sculpture, turntablism, various strains of improv, no wave, sound poetry, aleatory works, process works, and cassette networks. These are just a few ways of working that have been lumped together as “sound art.” While not everyone agrees exactly what sound art is, there is a general concurrence that the godfathers of the movement include F.T. Marinetti, John Cage, and Marcel Duchamp; current prominent practitioners are Max Neuhaus, Christian Marclay, Christiana Kubisch, and Stephen Vitiello. Alan Licht’s Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories is the first attempt to tame the beast. From the outset, Licht works under one very clear assumption: that for it to be sound art, it must “belong in an exhibition situation rather than in a performance situation” (14). He adds two correlatives: 1) sound art is non-narrative, and 2) sound art “rarely attempts to create a portrait or capture the soul of a human being, or express something about the interaction of human beings” (14). Often, though, these precepts don’t hold up: Licht cites numerous examples of sound art that do, in fact, strongly reflect aspects of the humanism he adamantly denies. He also describes a number of compelling performance-based as well as narrative works. While Licht’s desire to make these assumptions is understandable, it’s clear that he is too much in love with his subject to adhere to them closely. Instead of an ideological narrowing of the field, the book explodes with one rich example after another, giving us an enthusiastic no-holds barred survey of the field. And that’s how this book is best taken. Like Ross, Licht provides the key to an extraordinarily rich terrain in well-organized categories and clearly articulated examples; in that way, this book is destined to be the most comprehensive overview of sound art for years to come. Licht leaves theory and opinion to others, which is a good thing: his knowledge of the breadth of the field is astonishing, pulling together examples ranging from visual arts to filmic sound design into a cohesive–but happily messy–story.
 
The book begins by introducing methods that several early twentieth-century artists used to unhinge sound from the concert hall. These include Kurt Weill’s call for a non-narrative, image-based “absolute radio” and Dziga Vertov’s prospects for a radically disjointed concept of sound and imagine in cinema. The most significant break with tradition comes with the invention of magnetic tape and the rise of Musique concrete following the Second World War. Music is no longer a thing to be notated and performed; rather, the studio replaces the rehearsal space, and one listens at home rather than at the concert hall. By the mid-1960s, even Glenn Gould stopped live performances because he felt that records would make his presence obsolete.
 
Once the significance of the concert hall was irrevocably altered, all sorts of possibilities opened up: nature sounds, electronic sounds, city sounds, and so forth became part of the discourse. Luigi Russolo’s 1913 “Art of Noises” manifesto states: “We have had enough of [Beethoven et al.] and we delight much more in . . . the noise of trams, of automobile engines, of carriages, of brawling crowds” (77), opening up music to the sounds of industry and to mechanical noise. After World War II, artists flee the studio: Olivier Messian takes to the fields to transcribe birdsong and John Cage incorporates the sounds of everyday life into his compositions. But, Licht warns, “it’s important to note, however, that for all the boundary pushing, it’s significant that Cage, Wolff, and Stockhausen are still thinking in terms of a performed concert with an audience, not music as a free-standing installation that would attract visitors” (75). It takes another decade or two–well into the 1960s–to get to that “free-standing installation,” by which time contemporaneous movements in visual art become as much of an influence on sound art as does musical discourse. Licht gives numerous examples of sound artists who, during the 1960s and the following decades, literally took their practice outdoors and let the elements of nature perform on them. One of the most fascinating was Gordon Monahan’s Aeolian Piano, which consisted of several fifty-foot piano wires strung between two wooden bridges and played by the wind. The artist David Dunn synthesized electronic tones in the range and rhythm of a mockingbird and then played the recording to a live mockingbird, all the while recording its sympathetic responses. More well-known figures like La Monte Young and John Cale went the urban route, inspired by telephone wires and hums of power generators, the outcome of which inspired both Young’s Theater of Eternal Music and Cale’s work with The Velvet Underground.
 
The second half of the book wrestles with the complex relationship between sound and the art world: What to do with artists who make sounds? Is it art? Is it music? Licht examines both the production and reception of these works and his answer is inconclusive: its beauty, he feels, is its resistance to categorization. Riding a delicate line between disciplines, it’s both music and art. But there are obstacles. In a recent exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Philadelphia, sound artist Christian Marclay curated a group show called “Ensemble.” In the gallery’s vast hall, he placed dozens of objects created by visual artists that made sound, all turned on and going at the same time, resulting in a fabulous cacophony. During an informal gallery talk, Marclay discussed the itinerant nature of these works. He claimed that in a group exhibition, artworks that make noise are frowned upon, not only by the other artists in the show, but by the gallery workers who are forced to live day in and day out with these sounds. Marclay’s stated intention was to put them all in the same room turned up to a loud volume and let them scream, proud to be loud. Marclay, generally held up as a poster boy for the genre of sound art, refuses to couch his own practice in either discipline: one night he is attending an opening of his sound-invoking objects in a museum, the next he is DJ-ing those same sounds in a nightclub.
 
Licht carefully traces the intertwined histories of art and sound, beginning with Kandinsky’s admiration of Schoenbergian theories, moving to the hard-to-pin-down multimedia works of Andy Warhol, finally through the New York School and into the present. What emerges is a richly detailed tapestry in which categorical imperatives begin to crumble. What emerges, instead, is a celebration of possibility. Painting, surprisingly, plays a big role in sound art. What is the difference between painting and sound? The conceptual artist Brian O’Doherety seems to have an idea: “The composer’s surface is an illusion into which he puts something real–sound. The painter’s surface is something real from which he then creates an illusion” (Licht 136). Painting and sound are rarely spoken of in the same sentence but, in fact, have a history of influencing each other, most notably in the downtown New York scene of the 1950s, where Abstract Expressionist methods of painting heavily influenced the New York School of composers such as Earle Brown, John Cage, and Morton Feldman. Licht tells us that during the twentieth century, many visual artists were making musical compositions on the side. Marcel Duchamp, for instance, created a number of aleatory compositions for voice, piano, and orchestra. The stuff of myth, none were ever performed during his lifetime. (They since have been recorded and are occasionally performed.) Kurt Schwitters wrote a number of sound poems, most famously his Ursonate (1922-32), yet in the enormous Catalogue raisonné of his works, no mention is made of this activity. (After Schwitters’s death, tapes of him performing his Ursonate surfaced, and today there are dozens of versions of it.) Art Brut pioneer Jean Dubuffet’s musical explorations, on the other hand, were known by a wider audience. Using a number of unconventional instruments, electronics treatments, and pitches, Dubuffet gave license for a number of new musical ideas to the next generation. Many of these ideas found their way into the sounds of the Fluxus movement in the 1960s.
 
In 1961, John Cage published Silence, whose interdisciplinary approach opened the floodgates for experimentation. From Fluxus to Conceptualism, from Judson Church to Happenings, almost every innovative art movement of the 1960s–be it in theater, music, dance, art, or literature–claimed to be driven by Silence. Joan La Barbara says, “its initial impact on me was a shock of recognition; its calming effect made me feel that I was not alone in the universe” (Goldsmith 126). Nor has the book’s influence lessened as time has gone on. Robin Rimbaud a.k.a. Scanner claimed Silence to be
 

a catalyst, a liberation of a teenage mind, possibilities, engaging with sound on another level, concrete text, nomadic ideas shifting and shaping a juvenile imagination. The value of ideas in themselves, hermetic thoughts to engage the mind, concepts embossed that have never left me. I still regularly re-read extracts at random from this invaluable tome.
 

(126)

While Cage is given a cursory treatment by Ross–who chooses to focus on Boulez or Stockhausen instead–he is the protagonist of this story.

 
By the 1970s, sound had touched every aspect of the art world and art had touched every aspect of the sound world. Licht covers this fertile period starting with the performances of Laurie Anderson and the recordings of painter and filmmaker Jack Goldstein. The story moves on to the art world-produced LPs of Philip Glass and Charlemange Palestine (Glass was such an unknown at the time that only tiny gallery-based labels would put his stuff out). And when experimental artists enter the rock world, heady times occur: curator Diego Cortez features in the Mudd Club bands made up of art world denizens Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, James White, Sonic Youth, and DNA. In the 1980s, more crossover occurs: Jean-Michel Basquiat produces hip hop records and David Wojnarowicz performs in a punk band. By the 1990s, you’ve got musician Kim Gordon and visual artist Jutta Koether collaborating on paintings one night and performing music together the next. And it’s not just happening in New York: a bunch of former RISD art students form the Fort Thunder collective in Providence, which fuses visual art, theater, performance, and rock ‘n’ roll. The roster of unusual figures mentioned includes Captain Beefheart, Yoko Ono, Roxy Music, Mayo Thompson, The Red Krayola, Art & Language, the Raincoats, Albert Oehlen, Martin Kippenberger, Julian Schnabel, Rodney Graham, and Fischerspooner. Along the way, we encounter other questions: What is sound sculpture? Licht takes a stab: “it is not instrument-making but sculpture that is made with an inherent sound-producing facility in mind” (199). Examples of sound sculpture described and shown in photographs include Harry Bertoia’s beautiful wind-driven metal sculptures, Robert Rutman’s homemade steel cello, and Yoshi Wada’s room-sized bagpipes.
 
In the 1960s and 1970s, the rise of video art challenged some lingering notions of cinema’s sense of narrativity and sound. Licht says,
 

just as music broke from the concert hall setting towards the end of the twentieth century, single-channel video installation likewise took the moving image, which before had to be experienced in a theater setting at a specific time, and made it a continuous attraction, that could be dropped in on at any time during gallery hours . . . Just as many sound artists do not have a background in music, many video artists do not have a background in film.
 

(204)

Examples of videos that have strong soundtracks include works by Bruce Nauman, Bill Viola, and Gary Hill. These works question the video/sound art divide. Licht extends this question to Hollywood, citing Walter Murch’s audio work on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation as a work of sound art. In recent high-profile museum exhibitions featuring sound art, many works lack a visual presence. Why are these works housed in a museum? Didn’t Glenn Gould’s prophecy come true? Wouldn’t it be better enjoyed in the comfort of one’s home on a good stereo? The answer is yes and no. When placed in the museum setting, many works maintain an historical continuity to traditions such as minimalism in the visual arts. Lines of speakers reference the sculptures of Donald Judd; wires strewn across the museum floor and walls are reminiscent of the gridded paintings of Agnes Martin or the scattered pieces of a 1960s Barry Le Va’s sculpture.

 
Licht concludes by making his key point: “Between categories is a defining characteristic of sound art, its creators historically coming to the form from different disciplines and often continuing to work in music and/or different media” (210). How different this is from the main figures in Alex Ross’s book, all of whom came from the academy and stayed planted firmly in the music world. Unlike the straight lines of the classical music world, sound art is a messy business, with borders bleeding into one another, often created by people who have no training in what they’re doing. The field of sound art feels completely contemporary, alive, truly embodying the word “experimental.” This book, then, is a roadmap to where sound is headed in our century: beyond music, between categories.