Essay for The New Trade By Michael J.

Schumacher SOUND ART I rst heard the term Sound Art in 1998 or 99, about three years after I'd opened Studio Five Beekman, a gallery for presenting electronic music located near City Hall in New York. A visitor informed me that he was a "Sound Artist" and explained that he didn't like calling himself a composer because it made people think of Beethoven. I agreed that this was also my experience, and began to contemplate using the term for myself, since it might have the effect of opening minds to the sounds I was making, and I wouldn't need to explain what made them music: "Well, it's not music, it's Sound Art!" The point of Studio Five Beekman had been to create a public listening space for advanced music. By attending to certain details: dimming the lights, using high quality playback systems, isolating the room sonically and, perhaps most importantly, utilizing an architectural buffer zone (the vestibule) between the outside world and the gallery proper, the visitor was subtly prepared to participate in that revelatory moment in which, directly upon stepping into the exhibition, the work would "make sense" (a moment not unlike Yves Klein's "after-silence" in the way it placed the listener suddenly in a deeply attentive perceptual state). These details, the careful conuence of the visual, tactile, temporal and sonic, tuned the experience so that the senses functioned in a manner complementary to the work being presented. It didn't always work. Once, at Diapason, a gallery that I founded in 2001 with the help of Liz and Kirk Radke, I had invited a journalist from a local radio station. She came accompanied by a friend; the exhibition was a quiet, subtle sound installation by Amnon Wolman, "just sound" emitted by loudspeakers. I watched them enter the space, look around, then wander about for a few minutes. Then the friend began to shout and dance. He even began undressing, and ended up in his underwear, lying on the oor, howling. After awhile the reporter approached me and asked, "What are we supposed to be looking at?" I'd heard of "Klangkunst" when I stayed in Berlin in 1992-3; I knew Bernhard Leitner's work and that of Rolf Julius, Robin Menard and Christina Kubisch, but Sound Art seemed like a broader idea, cruder, it even felt in some ways opportunistic. It encompassed a variety of approaches stemming from diverse backgrounds and training. To some extent it had the sense of an anti-term, a not-something: not music. And yet the results, the work, often sounded remarkably music-like, at least to someone for whom music wasn't conned to I-IV-V-I, if ones experience included, for example, the music of La Monte Young (who calls himself a composer), who once described how he had actually seen the sound of one of his Dream House installations, waves of air molecules become visible through their sheer will to be acknowledged as real. Another artist conded in me that her impression was that there was more money in Sound Art, that modern music was a nancial dead end but framed as Art it had the potential to morph into something with "aura", something collectable. This statement

also interested me, and I discovered that La Monte Young, Steve Reich and Philip Glass were all supported in their early careers by art patrons, giving concerts at galleries and lofts to audiences that were perhaps more appreciative than the typical music-going public. This got me thinking about the relationship between space and music, particularly about musical form and how it "responds", through the composer's intuition, to the space of audition. From about 1800 to well into the 1950s and beyond, the concert hall and its smaller offshoots had steadily become the paradigm for listening, in the process creating mental spaces that informed the experience of listening even outside the concert hall itself. Radio and, later, the home stereo, replicated this mental attitude, positioning the listener as observer and the performer as actor. At its foundation, the experience remained dramatic, theatrical. Music, in turn, formed itself in drama's image, arc form carried the listener along, as developing motives functioned as characters with dramatic, often epic, trajectories. Of course nobody cares about concert halls anymore they've become the museums of music my feeling, my theory, is that their predominance led, via reaction, to the current interest in the correlation between sound, architecture and the subject that is the dening focus of Sound Art. For every musical form, and by this I mean structure, there exists a corresponding space that ts it like a glove. This can be an imagined (virtual) space, it can be mobile, it can evolve. The specic danger with the concert hall that persists even today, is the belief that it is generic and malleable, that it suits any kind of music; not just the symphonic and virtuosic solo and concerto repertoire it spawned and cultivated, but also the intimate string quartets or song cycles that came from the salons, or the music of southern blues singers, Hungarian folk ensembles and Tuvan throat singers (all of which have appeared at Carnegie Hall). Worse is the sense that the concert hall legitimizes the music that is presented there, makes it "great". In fact it's simply an early form of mass marketing, the means available at the time to reach a growing new economic class, a marketing tool for the new publishing industry. What's the point of speaking about space and Sound Art in the context of The New Trade, which is all about the technology behind the music? The key term is "perception": the "sense of fracture in the perception of musical instruments that this exhibition promotes" is analogous to the way that Sound Art deals with space; shifting it to the perceptual foreground marked a new epoch in music-making and coincided with the technological kaboom! of the 20th century. SPACE "You've got to be alone with music." Cesare Pavese, Among Women Only My favorite space to listen is the personal, intimate space of the home studio or living environment. For the creator, the home studio has signaled a liberation from objectivity, one can now submerge oneself in a completely subjective process and expect the listener to join in (given enough "back story"). Jandek's work expresses this intimate space, is almost unthinkable without the home recording studio. Beyond his musical

gifts, his talent is the way his imagery, his method of distribution and, paradoxically, his insistence on anonymity involve us in his intrinsically personal experience. In addition to Jandek's work, those of Erik Satie, Charlemagne Palestine and William Basinski emerge out of this idea of the intimate space, though in different ways. Palestine's musical work, though often huge sounding, positions me in the salon intimate yet formal where he's a bit the "bull in the china shop", the provocateur. His ability both to shock and to lure you in dissipates in large concert halls. Basinski's Disintegrating Loops does almost the opposite, starting small, precious, the work radiates outward to encompass an outsized narrative. In his Musique d'ameublement, Erik Satie prophesied "ambient" music, which (at least originally) played on the idea of the solitary listener within public spaces, the private moment of connection with a sound that is offered almost like a pleasing aroma to enhance a space's atmosphere. Ambient deals interestingly with music's pervasive nature; by being repetitive/boring it allows the mind to stop listening; during gaps, in conversation or attention, it's there to re-connect to. Why, in listening to music (as opposed to watching a video), has there been such a resistance to surround sound? Part of the answer is technological, that 5.1 in the home never measures up to its promise, its virtual reality compromised by shoddy setups and uncooperative room acoustics. Also to blame are the record companies, that chose to release "re-mastered" concert versions of mega-bands, with crowd noise lling out the rear channels, rather than commissioning new music specically for the format. But partly also is the conceptual leap necessary for the listener to embrace surround without a visual paradigm to accompany it. The failure of DVD-A indicates that we still want the concert hall experience; when sound comes from the rear it triggers a primitive ght or ight response, its an indication of a dangerous situation. At the very least it makes us uncomfortable. Film uses this effectively, almost all the sounds from the rear are meant to startle or feel creepy. Shut down the perceptual rear channel and youre in a comfort zone, able to give your full attention to the story being told. TECHNOLOGY 1. To people who dismiss modern music as too technological, not "human" enough, I retort: our modern technologies have produced barely a wrinkle in the psyche compared to the changes wrought by pen and paper, printing, the organ keyboard, the concert hall. 2. The keyboard invented western music from Bach to Brahms. It organized space so as to suggest Harmony-with-a-capital-H; previously, the vocal, wind and string instruments and the technology of music notation had only been able to bring about counterpoint and gured bass. Even the lute, some with two dozen strings, failed to produce Harmony-with-a-capital-H; its spatial layout and relation to the body of the player, though suggestive of strumming, does not provide the repeating visual pattern of the keyboard, the regular recurrence of the octave, that magical interval that permitted music in the rst place.

Both the Ondes Martenot and the Theremin are iconic symbols of the glissando, which signaled the breakdown of the ladder-tone scale and the transformation of Harmonywith-a-capital-H into the Sound Object-with-a-capital-SO. Notice, by the way, that the Moog synthesizer, which used an organ keyboard, was the instrument of choice for the retro-hit Switched-on Bach. 3. Technology is shaped by, and shapes space. The boom box announced and articulated outdoor space, its sonic compass, both xed and mobile, was an impressive tool for empowerment for African-American youth in the 1980s. You could argue that this mobility brought hip-hop culture into the mainstream, so many people witnessed impromptu concerts on the streets during this period. 4. Compare the mystery of Alvin Luciers Music on a Long Thin Wire with the magic of the Theremin. The materials of Music on a Long Thin Wire are basic, what an inventor might use to model an idea. The description of the piece's construction is surprising and demonstrates a bit of audacity; I was delighted to read that the ends of the wires connect directly to an amplier. The Theremin magically transforms movement into kinetic energy, Music on a Long Thin Wire unveils, discovers, unleashes the diapason of the long wire all its possible energies and their combinations called forth by the modulating sine tone. 5. I love the juxtaposition of the various technologies of re/production on display, the way they call to mind the listening spaces appropriate to the music each gave rise to: the "lo-" grunge of Black Dice, performed in (preferably packed) clubs, Excepter's street space, the personal space of Disintegrating Loops and the touching and sad "legacy" space of the Theremin and Ondes Martenot. The exhibiting of Lou Reeds Metal Machine Music reminds me of Andy Warhol: the Marshall amp half-stacks, iconic symbols of rock, reproduced (like Marilyns) with different colored guitars. I hear a little of Morton Feldman in Sei Miguel's work, another kind of space. I remember discussions my friends and I had back in the 90s regarding the relationship between the relatively sudden increase in interest in Feldman's work and the emergence of the compact disc as a technology of reproduction. Both the increased dynamic range and especially the long playing times available suited Feldman's music, and we wondered if, without the CD, his music would have ever reached the people it did.

TIME Think of chance as a time-based phenomenon, referring to the difference of one moment from another and the strange possibility of meaning that occurs out of this differentiation. Chance creates meaning by calling our attention to simultaneities. To consciously decrease the grid of time is to increase the likelihood of meaningful coincidence, of the mind's recognition of the relationship between two events that happen to meet at a particular moment. Listening with appreciation to a work of John Cage's such as the Concerto for Piano or

Atlas Eclipticalis, one realizes that any deeply felt artistic experience depends on this chance aspect and is therefore time-based. To wax metaphysical for a moment, I would almost say that the more "profound" the sensation, the more congruence in the moment, the more diverse strands of meaning merge in it, the more it "resonates". We are forever changing, everything is ceaselessly changing, so the value of these inexplicable moments is not in their rarity but in the rarity of our awareness of them. What Sound Art reveals is that all musical experience, even in this era of recorded media, depends on this temporal congruence of disparate activities and thoughts, both within and outside the listener, to be profound. This is expressed beautifully by Disintegration Loops: everything about the piece and Basinski's description (the latter provides a necessary narrative for what would have been a relatively mundane piece of "process" art) is fragile, ephemeral. The tapes themselves, the dust falling off them, Basinski's memories ("I discovered somepieces I had forgotten about"), the "pastoral American" past the music on the tapes represented, the witnessing of the act of disintegration itself (the rarity of this), the "clinging chords" that are left, fragilely, on the tapes, the apparently indestructible World Trade Center towers and the instant of their destruction and, in retrospect, the small moment in time during which our vulnerability united us, that so quickly vanished in the governments crude, deaf response. This awareness of the fragility of the moment and how we engender meaning through our perception of the relationships between disparate things is, for me, the ultimate import of "The New Trade".