schumacher, michael the new trade

8/22/2019 Schumacher, Michael the New Trade

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Essay for The New Trade

By Michael J. Schumacher

SOUND ART

I first heard the term Sound Art in 1998 or 99, about three years after I'd openedStudio Five Beekman, a gallery for presenting electronic music located near City Hall inNew York. A visitor informed me that he was a "Sound Artist" and explained that hedidn't like calling himself a composer because it made people think of Beethoven. Iagreed that this was also my experience, and began to contemplate using the term formyself, since it might have the effect of opening minds to the sounds I was making, andI 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 foradvanced music. By attending to certain details: dimming the lights, using highquality playback systems, isolating the room sonically and, perhaps most importantly,

utilizing an architectural buffer zone (the vestibule) between the outside world and thegallery proper, the visitor was subtly prepared to participate in that revelatory moment inwhich, directly upon stepping into the exhibition, the work would "make sense" (amoment not unlike Yves Klein's "after-silence" in the way it placed the listener suddenlyin a deeply attentive perceptual state). These details, the careful confluence of the visual,tactile, temporal and sonic, tuned the experience so that the senses functioned in amanner complementary to the work being presented.

It didn't always work. Once, at Diapason, a gallery that I founded in 2001 with the helpof Liz and Kirk Radke, I had invited a journalist from a local radio station. She cameaccompanied 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, lookaround, then wander about for a few minutes. Then the friend began to shout anddance. He even began undressing, and ended up in his underwear, lying on the floor,howling. After awhile the reporter approached me and asked, "What are we supposed tobe looking at?"

I'd heard of "Klangkunst" when I stayed in Berlin in 1992-3; I knew Bernhard Leitner'swork and that of Rolf Julius, Robin Menard and Christina Kubisch, but Sound Artseemed like a broader idea, cruder, it even felt in some ways opportunistic. Itencompassed 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 forwhom music wasn't confined to I-IV-V-I, if ones experience included, for example, themusic of La Monte Young (who calls himself a composer), who once described howhe had actually seen the sound of one of his Dream House installations, waves of airmolecules become visible through their sheer will to be acknowledged as real.

Another artist confided in me that her impression was that there was more money inSound Art, that modern music was a financial dead end but framed as Art it had thepotential to morph into something with "aura", something collectable. This statement


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also interested me, and I discovered that La Monte Young, Steve Reich and Philip Glasswere all supported in their early careers by art patrons, giving concerts at galleries andlofts to audiences that were perhaps more appreciative than the typical music-goingpublic. 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 forlistening, in the process creating mental spaces that informed the experience oflistening even outside the concert hall itself. Radio and, later, the home stereo,replicated this mental attitude, positioning the listener as observer and the performer asactor. At its foundation, the experience remained dramatic, theatrical. Music, in turn,formed itself in drama's image, arc form carried the listener along, as developingmotives functioned as characters with dramatic, often epic, trajectories.

Of course nobody cares about concert halls anymore they've become the museums ofmusic 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 thedefining focus of Sound Art. For every musical form, and by this I mean structure, thereexists a corresponding space that fits it like a glove. This can be an imagined (virtual)space, it can be mobile, it can evolve. The specific danger with the concert hall thatpersists even today, is the belief that it is generic and malleable, that it suits any kind ofmusic; not just the symphonic and virtuosic solo and concerto repertoire it spawnedand cultivated, but also the intimate string quartets or song cycles that came from thesalons, or the music of southern blues singers, Hungarian folk ensembles and Tuvanthroat singers (all of which have appeared at Carnegie Hall). Worse is the sense that theconcert hall legitimizes the music that is presented there, makes it "great". In fact it'ssimply 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 NewTrade, 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 thisexhibition promotes" is analogous to the way that Sound Art deals with space; shiftingit to the perceptual foreground marked a new epoch in music-making and coincidedwith 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 livingenvironment. For the creator, the home studio has signaled a liberation from objectivity,one can now submerge oneself in a completely subjective process and expect thelistener to join in (given enough "back story"). Jandek's work expresses this intimatespace, is almost unthinkable without the home recording studio. Beyond his musical


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gifts, his talent is the way his imagery, his method of distribution and, paradoxically, hisinsistence on anonymity involve us in his intrinsically personal experience. In additionto Jandek's work, those of Erik Satie, Charlemagne Palestine and William Basinskiemerge out of this idea of the intimate space, though in different ways. Palestine'smusical 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 toshock and to lure you in dissipates in large concert halls. Basinski's DisintegratingLoops does almost the opposite, starting small, precious, the work radiates outward toencompass an outsized narrative. In his Musique d'ameublement, Erik Satie prophesied"ambient" music, which (at least originally) played on the idea of the solitary listenerwithin public spaces, the private moment of connection with a sound that is offeredalmost like a pleasing aroma to enhance a space's atmosphere. Ambient dealsinterestingly with music's pervasive nature; by being repetitive/boring it allows the mindto 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 homenever measures up to its promise, its virtual reality compromised by shoddy setupsand uncooperative room acoustics. Also to blame are the record companies, thatchose to release "re-mastered" concert versions of mega-bands, with crowd noisefilling out the rear channels, rather than commissioning new music specifically for theformat. But partly also is the conceptual leap necessary for the listener to embracesurround without a visual paradigm to accompany it. The failure of DVD-A indicatesthat we still want the concert hall experience; when sound comes from the rear ittriggers a primitive fight or flight response, its an indication of a dangerous situation.At the very least it makes us uncomfortable. Film uses this effectively, almost all thesounds 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 storybeing told.

TECHNOLOGY

1. To people who dismiss modern music as too technological, not "human" enough, Iretort: our modern technologies have produced barely a wrinkle in the psyche comparedto the changes wrought by pen and paper, printing, the organ keyboard, the concerthall.

2. The keyboard invented western music from Bach to Brahms. It organized space so asto suggest Harmony-with-a-capital-H; previously, the vocal, wind and stringinstruments and the technology of music notation had only been able to bring aboutcounterpoint and figured bass. Even the lute, some with two dozen strings, failed toproduce Harmony-with-a-capital-H; its spatial layout and relation to the body of theplayer, though suggestive of strumming, does not provide the repeating visual patternof the keyboard, the regular recurrence of the octave, that magical interval that permittedmusic in the first place.


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Both the Ondes Martenot and the Theremin are iconic symbols of theglissando, whichsignaled the breakdown of the ladder-tone scale and the transformation of Harmony-with-a-capital-H into the Sound Object-with-a-capital-SO. Notice, by the way, that theMoog synthesizer, which used an organ keyboard, was the instrument of choice for theretro-hit Switched-on Bach.

3. Technology is shaped by, and shapes space. The boom box announced andarticulated outdoor space, its sonic compass, both fixed and mobile, was an impressivetool for empowerment for African-American youth in the 1980s. You could argue thatthis mobility brought hip-hop culture into the mainstream, so many people witnessedimpromptu concerts on the streets during this period.

4. Compare themysteryof Alvin Luciers Music on a Long Thin Wire with themagic ofthe Theremin. The materials of Music on a Long Thin Wire are basic, what an inventormight use to model an idea. The description of the piece's construction is surprisingand demonstrates a bit of audacity; I was delighted to read that the ends of the wires

connect directly to an amplifier. The Theremin magically transforms movement intokinetic energy, Music on a Long Thin Wire unveils, discovers, unleashes the diapason ofthe long wire all its possible energies and their combinations called forth by themodulating sine tone.

5. I love the juxtaposition of the various technologies of re/production on display, theway they call to mind the listening spaces appropriate to the music each gave rise to:the "lo-fi" grunge of Black Dice, performed in (preferably packed) clubs, Excepter's streetspace, the personal space of Disintegrating Loops and the touching and sad "legacy"space of the Theremin and Ondes Martenot. The exhibiting of Lou Reeds MetalMachine 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 ofMorton Feldman in Sei Miguel's work, another kind of space. I remember discussionsmy friends and I had back in the 90s regarding the relationship between the relativelysudden increase in interest in Feldman's work and the emergence of the compact discas a technology of reproduction. Both the increased dynamic range and especially thelong playing times available suited Feldman's music, and we wondered if, without theCD, his music would have ever reached the people it did.

TIME

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


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Atlas Eclipticalis, one realizes that any deeply felt artistic experience depends on thischance aspect and is therefore time-based. To wax metaphysical for a moment, I wouldalmost say that the more "profound" the sensation, the more congruence in themoment, the more diverse strands of meaning merge in it, the more it "resonates". Weare 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 recordedmedia, depends on this temporal congruence of disparate activities and thoughts, bothwithin and outside the listener, to be profound.This is expressed beautifully by Disintegration Loops: everything about the piece andBasinski's description (the latter provides a necessary narrative for what would havebeen a relatively mundane piece of "process" art) is fragile, ephemeral. The tapesthemselves, the dust falling off them, Basinski's memories ("I discovered somepieces Ihad 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 Centertowers and the instant of their destruction and, in retrospect, the small moment in timeduring which our vulnerability united us, that so quickly vanished in the governmentscrude, deaf response.

This awareness of the fragility of the moment and how we engender meaning throughour perception of the relationships between disparate things is, for me, the ultimateimport of "The New Trade".

schumacher, michael the new trade

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