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Re: [microsound] sound art / music
well put, andrew. you delineated a lot of my own thinking in a nicely
direct and clear way. for me, discovering John Cage back in the late
60's was formative - having been both an artist and musician since
before i can remember, i had struggled for years to create contexts
for them to co-exist. (i guess i'm something of a synaesthete.) Cage
broke those boundaries for me, and i ended up getting my master's in
multimedia back in the late 70's, when that term meant "performance/
installation/video/sound/whatever". it didn't hurt that i was
studying at Rutgers University in New Jersey, known affectionately as
the "Fluxus Rest Home", the teaching staff being populated by a
number of distinguished Fluxus artists such as Bob Watts, Geoff
Hendricks, Dan Goode and Phil Corner, all of whom played a role in
showing me a path that wound around all of the obstructions of
classifications.
cheers
b
On Oct 22, 2008, at 2:31 PM, Andrew Benson wrote:
For me, the distinction is so much about context and the intention
of the maker and audience expectation. For example, I come from a
fine arts background and have studied the formal aspects of sound
in great detail and experimented with sonification in various forms
for several years, and use that knowledge to create performative
and installation works of sound (as well as other media). I don't
use the term 'music' to describe my work because to call it music
would be to draw attention away from the site-specificity, the
physical relationships involved in the performance, the context of
the sound, and other aspects that are integral parts of my artistic
intentions. While there may be certain features of my work that
engage musicality, I have no interest in producing music proper.
There are audience expectations and critical foundations that have
been established for the reception of music over centuries, and I
simply don't think that it is necessary to force sound art to be
music or for music to be sound art. They of course share a common
history, a common set of tools, a lot of common practitioners and
exchange, and nobody can deny the importance of sound artists
understanding music as another type of organized sound, but the
critique and reception of each is different. However vague the
distinction may seem, it is important to respect the specific
context that an artist works within as being part of our experience
and expectations of their work. That said, I don't think anyone is
interesting in drawing a thick black line between the two
practices, as exchange between the two can only foster higher-
quality and more thoughtful work in each. Anyways, I am happy to
see this topic discussed as part of the microsound discourse, and
look forward to more thoughtful discussion on the matter. As an
educator, I find that posing these types of questions to students
is a useful way to draw out underlying preconceptions and biases
about the use of sound.
Best,
Andrew Benson
Hello All,
So, I have a basic -- and perhaps naïve -- question for the
group: what is
the difference between sound art and music?
Kim's remark about microsound being a philosophical position
within sound
art sparked this question for me. I'm pretty sure there's no
absolute
distinction we can make, but I'm ignorant about what the common
distinctions
are.
Thanks for any help,
-greg
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bruce tovsky
www.skeletonhome.com
"Reality is whatever refuses to go away when I stop believing in it.."
Philip K. Dick