http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/artleisure/music-whitney.html
January 9, 2000
It's Sound, It's Art, and Some Call It Music
By KYLE GANN
WHEN the performance art genre appeared in the 1970's,
the
playwright and novelist William Hogeland commented
cynically,
"We already have a performance art: it's called
'theater.' " One
could similarly dismiss the term "sound art" as just a vaguely
glorified name
for weird music. And yet "sound art" has served as a useful
historical
euphemism, a safe harbor for works too outr for the
ever-conservative
classical music world.
Now the Whitney Museum, as part of its
"American Century" exhibition, has put
together a sound art exhibition of recordings,
running Tuesday though next Sunday.
Curated by Stephen Vitiello, the show is titled
"I Am Sitting in a Room: Sound Works by
American Artists 1950-2000," named in part
for one of the most accessible electronic
music works ever made.
The work in question is a 1971 audio tape
piece by Alvin Lucier consisting of the
composer reading a text that begins: "I am
sitting in a room different from the one you
are in now. I am recording the sound of my
speaking voice, and I am going to play it back
into the room again and again until the
resonant frequencies of the room reinforce
themselves so that any semblance of my
speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm,
is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are
the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by
speech . . . "
Like a mantra, those sentences return again and again,
gradually blurring
with each repetition until all you hear is a potently ringing
wash of sound
that is, actually, the room being played like a musical
instrument.
Popular even among people who have no other interest in
experimental
music (Mimi Johnson, who produced the recording, calls it
"Alvin's 'Bolero'
"), "I Am Sitting in a Room" is a classic of sound art if
anything is. The
term seems to connote the activity of working directly in
sound, without
musical notation or interpretive musicians as intermediaries.
Thus one
category of sound art is audio works made by people with no
training in
music, such as visual artists; the exhibition includes sound
works by the
sculptor Bruce Nauman and the conceptual artist Vito Acconci,
whose
creepily sexual text recordings deserve more notice from
musicians anyway.
There are also works by superbly skilled musicians but made
outside
traditional musical processes: Steve Reich's pioneering
phase-shifting piece
"Come Out" will be familiar to many listeners, but fewer will
have heard
Terry Riley's hypnotic "Mescalin Mix," dating from 1961, which
is the very
first tape-loop piece and arguably the first minimalist piece
as well.
Most sound art, then, tends to be electronic, though some is
vocal- or
text-oriented. In this latter category fall most of the works
by Fluxus, the
loose-knit group of conceptual artists and composers gathered
under that
surreal umbrella in the 1960's by George Maciunas. Next
Sunday's program
in particular is dotted with Fluxus figures like Alison
Knowles, Philip
Corner, George Brecht and Dick Higgins, whose "Danger Music
No. 17"
consists of himself screaming as loud and long as possible.
Since 1991 Mr.
Vitiello has worked as an assistant to Nam June Paik, a former
Fluxus
composer who evolved into video work, and his familiarity with
the crazy
Fluxus repertory is formidable.
Other sound art works are more conventional in their sound
sources but are
simply meant to be heard in recorded rather than live format.
One such
included in the exhibition is an hourlong tape by the
eccentric pianist Glenn
Gould called "The Idea of North," a radio piece of oral
history based on
recorded interviews about Canadian identity, which Gould
scored as a
musical work for radio. Another is a tongue-in-cheek,
jazz-accompanied
spiel by the 1950's radio personality Ken Nordine, a guided
visit to a
museum of sounds.
More radical in this context is the inclusion of a series of
field recordings by
Bob Bielecki and Connie Kieltykya, featuring ambient aural
phenomena like
radios and dogs heard over waves at a lake. Honoring Mr.
Bielecki is a real
coup for the exhibition, for as one of New York's most
creative recording
engineers, he was involved in about a third of the works inn
the show.
"When I met La Monte Young," Mr. Vitiello explains, "I
mentioned that he
and I shared the same sound person, Bob Bielecki. Young
grabbed me and
said, 'You realize Bob is a genius.' "
What one will not hear at the Whitney are
intricately-determined works
considered classics of that forbiddingly intellectual genre
"electronic music,"
like Milton Babbitt's "Philomel," Morton Subotnick's "Silver
Apples of the
Moon" or even the early pioneering tape works of Otto Luening.
Instead, we
have a rare, 86-minute spoken text recording of John Cage;
Laurie
Anderson's early works from the 1970's; a 1975 guitar-feedback
piece called
"Metal Machine Music" by Lou Reed, impressive in its rich
textures, and a
new work by the quintessentially postmodern vinyl collagist DJ
Spooky. The
show will also include recordings of a few peculiar anomalies
of relatively
conventional performed music, like a movement from Glenn
Branca's
Symphony No. 1 for electric guitars, an excerpt from Meredith
Monk's
solo-voice performance piece "Our Lady of Late" and even
Philip Glass's
entire, 206-minute "Music in 12 Parts," played by his
ensemble.
In a word, and perhaps appropriately for the Whitney Museum,
the "I Am
Sitting in a Room" exhibition promises to be a look at
late-20th-century
music from the visual-art point of view. Nothing wrong with
that -- it is
certainly a rich and interesting point of view, and a
refreshing change from
the new-music world's frequently solipsistic view of itself.
Like most of the
lay public, practitioners of the visual arts don't care much
about the
technical analysis of music, but they are more receptive than
most musicians
to imagination and unconventionality.
Mr. Vitiello himself is a guitarist and sampler composer who
has performed
with Pauline Oliveros and the cellist Marie Frances Uitti, but
until recent
years most of his work consisted of sound scores for film and
video. He
excluded most studio-made tape works because, he says, "I
wanted pieces
that had more to do with performance than composition, works
made to be
performed. A lot of it is people moving away from the written
score."
One refreshing aspect of the sound program is that, except for
a slight bulge
in the Fluxus area, it isn't skewed toward any particular part
of its 50-year
domain (though Mr. Vitiello admits a paucity of works from the
1950's, a
particularly barren decade for music). Younger composers are
generously
mixed in among the classics, including the San Francisco
performance artist
Pamela Z, the electronic performer Laetitia Sonami and Nic
Collins, a
Lucier protg now working in Chicago but formerly active in New
York's
downtown scene. New Yorkers may want to note the natural-sound
collage
by Jim O'Rourke, who is getting credit lately for rejuvenating
Chicago's
improvisation and electronic scenes.
HE program offers almost 100 recordings -- some rare,
some
commercially available, some not heard publicly for
decades -- of
works by American composers made between 1952 and 1999.
The
recordings will run in the Kaufman Astoria Studio Film and
Video Gallery,
on the Whitney's second floor, every day from noon to 5:30
p.m., and to
7:30 p.m. on Thursday. For those who might balk at spending
five hours a
day listening to recordings, the gallery is being rearranged
to make it easy
for listeners to come and go during the five-and-a-half-hour
programs
without disturbing other audience members. Lights will be kept
low, chairs
will be fewer and less densely spaced than for video
screenings. Mr. Vitiello
opted against including video/ music or film/music works,
however, because
of a feeling that, in our highly visual culture, we already
pay too little
attention to sound for its own sake.
Still, there will be a couple of performance components, one
during Annea
Lockwood's "Sound Map of the Hudson River," a two-hour
recording of
rushing water collaged from several points along the Hudson;
plus a possible
presentation by Maryanne Amacher, one of the most original
sound-installation composers, who is rarely heard because her
works take up
entire buildings. Downtown, the Knitting Factory will present
a festival
related to the exhibition, the New York Festival of Electronic
Composers
and Improvisers, from Jan. 18 to 23. The festival opens with
some of the
same people featured in the Whitney exhibition -- Pauline
Oliveros, Tony
Conrad, plus the excluded Mr. Subotnick -- before veering into
the usual
free improvisation and noise bands: Elliott Sharp's Tectonics,
Suicide, Pan
Sonic, DJ Food and so on.
When listeners rebelled in the 1920's against calling Edgard
Varse's
compositions "music," he offered the term "organized sound"
instead.
"Sound art" has similarly given radical composers room to
breathe; some
granting organizations, like the Guggenheim Foundation, have
created a
sound art category for composers not conservative enough to
win music
prizes. But as digital technology continues to invade all
aspects of music
making, the line between "music" and "sound art" is already
blurring, and
unlikely to hold: the Knitting Factory's mixed line-up
suggests as much.
While the Whitney's "I Am Sitting in a Room" exhibition won't
be
everyone's idea of what late-20th-century music was about, it
is appropriate
to open the 21st century with a creatively revisionist view of
its predecessor;
soon, all new music may be sound art. Bypassing the moribund
high-modernist tradition, the Whitney is offering a view of
music not only
likely to be engagingly controversial, but also full of
possibilities for
21st-century response.
Kyle Gann teaches music at Bard College and writes about new
music for
The Village Voice.
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
carol starr
taos, new mexico, usa
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
