Overtoon – Platform for Sound Practioners
presents

Instead of “sound art,” say: abrasion, a dirge,
willed from the other side of a leaky room,
undisciplined, celebrative, dangerous, always
emerging.
An 8-part Podcast by Bill Dietz
In conversation with Benjamin Piekut, Nikita Gale, Jennie C. Jones, Aurélie
Nyirabikali Lierman, Benjamin Piekut, Marina Rosenfeld, Lauren Tosswill, & HongKai Wang
https://overtoon.org/podcasts/instead-of-sound-art-say/

Episode 03: Benjamin Piekut
Released on March 20th, 2024

Audio TranscriptAudio Intro[Sounds of a cassette tape mechanism and tape hiss, followed by voices of all eightparticipants in the series uttering variations on the word “sound” and “sound art.”
More cassette tape sounds, followed by the voices of all eight participants
simultaneously saying the word “SOUND” in a loop. More cassette tape sounds,
followed by “male” and “female” computer voices read the complete title of theseries (“Instead of “sound art,” say: abrasion, a dirge, willed from the other side of aleaky room, undisciplined, celebrative, dangerous, always emerging.”) and the
Episode Number. Cassette tape sounds cut out.]

Conversation[Throughout the conversation there is series of unpredictably and frequently
shifting virtual audio backgrounds – atmospheres recorded by Bill Dietz & Bryce
Hackford including children playing outdoors, howling wind, a public bus trip, rain
and thunder, nature sounds with a distant saxophone, a quiet field, electrical buzz,
and an outdoor scene populated by cicadas.]Bill Dietz:

Before we set this up, I sent everyone the link to the Max
1
Neuhaus essay and this particular quote that I pulled out,
which I’ll just read, which is from 2000 actually, which is kindof late. Max says, "I think we need to question whether or notsound art constitutes a new art form. It’s as if perfectly capable
curators in the visual art suddenly lose their equilibrium at themention of the word sound. These same people who would all
ridicule a new art form called say, steel art, which wascomposed of steel sculpture combined with steel guitar music,
along with anything else with steel in it somehow have notrouble at all swallowing, sound art. In art, the medium is notoften the message. Much of what has been called sound art has
not much to do with either sound or art."
And I guess what I think with this quote and with him isclearly in the late seventies or whenever that sort of formal
origin moment for sound art is in New York or in Europe,
there was a certain need for the term at the time for certain
people [for the term]. I’m curious about that need and how

1“Sound Art?,” first published as an introduction to the exhibition, “Volume: Bed of Sound,”
P.S.1, New York, July 2000, https://www.max-neuhaus.estate/en/sound-works/sound-workstexts/sound-art (accessed March 20th, 2024)

Page 2 of 11that maybe also connects to the exceptionalizing discourses ad
conversations about sound in general, about, as Jonathan
Sterne would say, the audiovisual litany, et cetera, something
like that. Whether you see a direct link between those things orwhether that particular historical need at that moment camefrom something else.
Benjamin Piekut:

Yeah, I think it’s funny you bring up Jonathan Sterne because
he was just at Cornell last week, and in fact I said goodbye tohim less than 24 hours ago. We hosted him for a couple ofdays. So his work is always on my mind and even more solately. I mean, I think that Neuhaus is obviously pointing at
some problem or dissatisfaction with the term sound art that I
think it is shared by almost everyone who has anything to dowith sound art. Wouldn’t you say that’s true?

Bill Dietz:

Yeah.

Benjamin Piekut:

And I would repeat something that I think other people have
said, which is that one of the problems with the discourse
about sound art is that it’s never properly defined its object ofstudy or discussion or commentary and that results in a certain
incoherence of the discourse. Now, for me, and in my projectthat I’m working on right now, my questions are always one
step before in priority.
And in this case, that means: what has to happen in order forsound art, the concept, to be felt a need, as you put it reallywell in the late 1970s, to what does its appearance respond?
What set of conditions make it necessary for a certain group ofpeople in a certain context? And once that concept has
emerged or been articulated, and it’s not necessarily just theword, it’s a little bit more than that, but once it has been
articulated, it can become the site that hosts all of thesedisagreements we keep having. You know what I mean? And it
at least orders the discourse around a pole or something.
So to me, in trying to frame a project in the historiography ofsound art, I think of a history as a sequence of events that tells
a certain kind of narrative. And what I’ve come to realize isperhaps the most significant one of those events is thehistorical emergence of the concept itself, which then makes
possible commentary on previously unordered or differently

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ordered events from the 1920s, the 1950s, the 1960s. And thisis the same move that Lydia Goehr makes in the incredible
book, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, about thework concept around 1800. And her famous example, or her
famous question, "Did Bach create musical works?" And theanswer is essentially, yes he did, but only after 1800 after hehad been dead for 50 years.
Bill Dietz:

And there’s something great in that in connection withsomebody like Max Neuhaus or Maryanne Amacher David
Tudor who are people who were doing what has been
retroactively deemed sound art way before 1978 or wheneverthe Barbara London show at MoMA is. They’ve been doingthat for 15, 20 years at that time.

Benjamin Piekut:

Exactly. And I tend to think... I mean, my project at the
moment is to talk about that very fertile period, which hasbrought me back to it over and over and over again between
about 1960 and 1980 and try to understand all the different
ways that music as a category is being displaced. And yes, thatprocess reaches some kind of point where a new concept feels
necessary. Ultimately, as I have told you before, I think thatthat concept is necessary in order to corral a set ofdevelopments in the arts so that music can continue otherwise
untroubled, which is exactly what I think happened. And inthat sense, I regard sound art as historically a conservative
category and I think it still is in a way.

Bill Dietz:

There’s a wonderful quotation for Robert Ashley 2, I’m notexactly sure when it’s written, but about that moment on themusic split of what you’re describing, because in music history,
there’s a kind of return to the concert hall. It’s like "we’re2"But around 1970 there was a palpable turn toward conservatism in every aspect of American life
and, predictably, the artist led the way… Composers renounced the ‘theater’ of music of thenineteen-sixties. Steve Reich wrote a book saying as much, ‘We have to get back to reality.’ Thatmeant getting back to the five-line staff and what it meant. And it meant getting back to‘recitals.’ So, we still have recital halls. More, in fact. The postwar boom in higher education
produced hundreds, maybe thousands, of all-purpose recital halls in new colleges anduniversities. The Law is expressed in the architecture of the culture. It could be different."From“We need more music: Opera versus Recital,” in Outside of Time: Ideas about Music (Cologne:
MusikTexte, 2009), p. 146-148.

Page 4 of 11done with the avant-garde." Steve Reich goes back to theconcert hall, Philip Glass is doing his symphonies. There is thiskind of restoration moment sort of in tandem with that.
Benjamin Piekut:

And in the jazz field: Jazz at Lincoln Center. I mean, to comeback to Jonathan Sterne and all of his research, of course theperiod we’re just talking about with Amacher or Tudor, or in
my case, what I’ve been researching lately, the Judson dancers
who developed all these really interesting ideas and approaches
to sound without music (in my kind of contentious
formulation), to go beyond or to put that 20 year period in alonger history, we would need to go back to the sort ofmodern scientific isolation and institutionalization of a
research program around something called sound.
I think the lines are long and indirect, but the moment ofsound art’s conceptual emergence in the global north inEnglish around 1980 is nonetheless related to Helmholtz,
Edison, Bell Labs, psychoacoustics research around thetelephone industry, deaf research, stuff like that - theemergency acoustical society in the late twenties.
So we need to have all of that for there to be this great big
category known as sound, which had been known before, butaccording to somewhat different terms. And sure enough, it
eventually produces the need for an art of sound: that which
had previously been known as music, which had its own
science, musicology or whatever you want to call that.
You know, it’s interesting, something I found recently that I
wanted to mention is some pages of Yvonne Rainer’s notesfrom when she attended Richard Maxfields course electronic
music at The New School, and it was in the autumn of 1960.
He taught that course I think two or three times. In otherwords, he subbed for Cage, for Experimental Music, but thenhe also taught his own course on electronic music. And I
found notes in Rainer’s papers for either the whole course orwhatever number of lectures that she attended. And it looks
like the day one kind of overview had Maxfield enumerating
the properties of what he called or what Rainer notated as theusual definition of music as including rhythm, melody,harmony, tambour, form, dynamics. And then below that, heseemed to have said that his class would be studying somethingelse, not the usual definition of music and Rainer has notedthat as "the art of sound."Page 5 of 11

And then there are a series of equivalences where what used tobe called rhythm is now called duration, what used to becalled melody is now called the succession of tones. What used
to be called harmony is the vertical relationships of tones,right? So in this funny scrap of historical evidence, I think
we’re seeing, if not the beginnings, then some early moment
where artists are trying to think about what an art built on thescience of sound would look like, and the authorities that theydraw on are these people who have written textbooks on
acoustics.
Bill Dietz:

I don’t know if it’s really helpful or a good idea for theconversation, or if it’s too much because I think this is great ina very organic way, but would it even be meaningful or
possible or would it be too boring or reductive to just give atiny sketch of your project? Because I think we’re sort oftalking within it or next to it, and there is this much more
coherent project that you’re in the middle of.

Benjamin Piekut:

Well, the coherence remains to be determined, but no, it istrue. I’m always in the middle of it right now. No, the projectis short. It’s a short book, but it is trying to bemethodologically precise and its goal is to kind of define theterms upon which a history of sound art could be thought. So
it moves at a rather large scale, I guess. And it comes in threeparts.
The first is to clarify what it means to write a history ofaesthetic concepts, and that bounces a lot off of Lydia Goehr.
And the second part is concerned with taking seriously theidea that artists engage in conceptual work in the register ofpractice rather than the register of discourse. So I try to takeaccount of artists working in a lot of different forms in the
1960s and 70s who I think are working through the
implications of the displacement of a category like music, even
if they weren’t explicitly commenting on it in those terms.
And then the third part of the book zooms out and tries tounderstand the relationship between those local, and one
might even say provincial debates that culminate in theemergence of that concept known as sound art around 1980,
how we understand the relationship between that moment andthe broader global contemporary field that has structured
thinking in the history of contemporary visual art since 1965,

Page 6 of 11which is essentially a question about how we understand or
make sense of the simultaneity of multiple temporalities orrelationships to histories of capitalism and socialism in the lasta hundred years or whatever. So ultimately, that will lead me
to try to figure out how to talk about sound art outside of the
global North and what its relation is to the continuinghegemony of concepts that emerge in the global North forstructuring and orienting a global contemporary art market. In
a nutshell, that’s the project.
Bill Dietz:

No, that’s great.

Benjamin Piekut:

Let’s talk about the third area.

Bill Dietz:

Yeah, yeah. So one thing that I think also touches on thisnotion of sound vis-a-vis music in its kind of technicity or
scientific or something like this that I’ve been super interested
in, which is I think maybe all the more so the case in Europe, isthe proximity of sound art and media art and both being alsojoined in their reliance on public support, like public funding,big European institutions, specialist institutions. Not
necessarily a reliance on the art markets or on commercial
structures. And I guess what’s sort of funny to me in that is ifthat that maybe has something to do with an implicit or
explicit assumption about a value inherent in these kinds ofart, these kind of... Or that it’s somehow culturally useful,which is I think sort of a clunky way of putting it. But there’s
something funny in there about the complicated continuity
between the work concept and sound and some fundamental,
particularly European idea of what is valuable.

Benjamin Piekut:

Yeah, no, I agree completely. This gets at something that I’ve
been thinking about a lot lately, and even more so this week
just because of Jonathan Sterne’s visit. And that is therelationship between sound studies and sound art and I thinkthat there is a relationship, and it’s been very hard for me tofigure out what it is. I mean, I once told Jonathan the title of apaper that a student of mine wrote, and that title was, "IsSound Studies to Sound Art What Musicology was to Music?"
And he replied, "I hope not."But I think that ultimately I’ve come to realize that the

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relationship between those two formations has to do with taste
and now I’m coming around to the question of value and what
is valued in different discourses of art and how they’re
institutionalized and while there’s a special relationshipbetween sound studies and sound art in Europe, moreso thanin North America, because I think that in Europe in higher
education, it’s more likely for artist practitioners to be
producing these PhD thesis in some kind of critical practice as
well, which often relates to sound as a scientific field of study.
And I think my way into trying to understand that relationshipthrough the lens of taste came to me in making a little
contribution to a commemorative conference for Trevor Pinch,
the great scholar of science and technology studies, and thehistorian of the mode synthesizer, and my colleague and friend
who passed away recently. We had an event at Cornell in his
memory and honor, and I was thinking about Trevor’s
commitment to sound studies as a way of bracketing theaesthetic, the category of the aesthetic, that sound studies
would do stuff other than study music. However, Trevor as aperson was obsessed with music and loved music and devoted a
lot of his life to making music and talking about it andlistening to it.
And in thinking about sound studies as one of the quite latepost-war interdisciplines, that sent me back to one of the firstpost-war interdisciplines and that’s cultural studies. Stuart
Hall said in one of his many retrospective accounts of the
Birmingham Center, the founding of the Birmingham Centerof Cultural Studies, that one of their missions had been tounmask the presuppositions of humanist traditions that wereexistent at the time they were organized, as those humanities
were organized into disciplines in the late 19th century. Thatis, scholarly conversations completely determined by a very
distinct set of values about what makes good art good and why
you should appreciate it.
So they thought of cultural studies as a radical intervention
into that discourse of value, and its situatedness in colonial
modernity, in short. And clearly, a similar kind of critique ishappening in sound studies because music is not a welcoming
category, was not a welcoming category for someone of
Trevor’s generation with his musical interests in electronic
music and prog rock and stuff like that. So that kind of
repulsion of music and its histories is probably reflected in the

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flight from music and its institutions of predominantly
women. That’s where, to me, it’s the clearest, into some otherspace and that space being somehow organized around sound,I think.
Bill Dietz:

I really like this. And there’s something funny that I’ve sort ofhad my... I can’t think of the right phrase, but I’ve sort of been
half thinking with this Max Neuhaus article. That there’s
something maybe also a tiny bit reactionary in it, vis-a-vis what
you’re just saying about a flight from music as a sort ofhumanity, so to speak, whereas the rejection of sound art andits minorness or as a particularly material thing that might benecessary for others, there’s something actually kind of reallyconservative in that, there’s something in an embarrassment
about sound art being too body or too specific or not highenough or not good enough in a certain sense. And I think ofcourse, in practice, that’s not necessarily the case at all. I thinka lot of what Neuhaus was actually just talking about is badart, which is maybe a different question, but at the same time,
there’s something of a refuge of sound art that is maybe
interesting a little bit in the way that you’re talking about.
Also in the Barbara London show, I think in ‘79 or ‘80,
whenever that is, it’s all women.

Benjamin Piekut:

Yeah, right. I mean, I’m just thinking about the dancers again,
and Rainer and Forti and Steve Paxton and Deborah Hay andall these people. Let’s say just for argument’s sake, inside of
the aesthetic domain, one uses technique to avoid making badart. One applies good rules that will lead to good art, and that
may require the expertise of someone who’s trained in thoserules. And that’s what I say in this article I just finished on thissubject. That’s what a musician does who’s trained in the toolsof music to solve musical problems.
But for Rainer and the other dancers, the expert who applies
not expert knowledge and tools to help them solve problems is
not the musician solving problems of music, but the soundengineer solving problems about acoustics. How to get thesignal from a body mounted microphone to the loudspeakers
in 1965 when that’s actually not...without a wire, when that is
not an easy problem to solve. So yeah, I think this just goesback to what we’re saying about the instability of evaluation
and which kind of authority can be brought to assist.

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Bill Dietz:

Well, and one funny thing, again with Neuhaus and vis-a-vis
this, and also in relation to the question about financial value,is that Neuhaus is maybe the only sound practitioner who
really made it in the art world, who had the support of Dia andhad major financial success, and so in a certain sense, thestandard of value there is actually quite specific: it’s of art in
the fancy art world sense.

Benjamin Piekut:That’s a really good point. I had never really considered that. I
mean, the question of what kind of institutions should hostsound art or foster it or support it or interrogate it, I mean, I
think that’s a really interesting one, and it’s not... As ahistorian, I have less to add to that conversation about thecontemporary moment. I suspect that it’s really going to bepeople like you who are defining the terms of thatconversation through whatever institutional means you will
have.

Bill Dietz:

I don’t know. I mean for me, the big question in terms of thecontext for hosting this conversation even, is sort of like how
to build an institution, a real institution, around thesequestions, rather than some kind of defined notion. Like how
to build these kind of open questions into the structure of thething.

Benjamin Piekut:

This is again where maybe the adjacent situation of soundstudies could be illustrative. Sound studies has not yet made ascholarly society. Yes, there’s a couple of journals, and there’s
one specifically called Sound Studies and others that areclearly pitched in that direction. However, for the most part,sound studies remains a rather unordered and undisciplined
area where people meet from other disciplines andinterdisciplines, it’s never quite acquired disciplinarity. And
that might be one of its strengths. The endorsement of thescholar happens elsewhere in their home discipline ofanthropology or in music studies or in communications. You
know what I mean? It doesn’t do any endorsing itself. And I
wonder if that provides some model of thinking about what an
institution does inside the space of sound art and in relation tocommercial galleries and museums and that whole set ofstructures.

Bill Dietz:

No, that’s great. And somehow, I think to consciously
articulate it this way seems important because sometimes somePage 10 of 11

of the limitations of both sound studies and sound art are thatthat sort of undisciplined state is less a conscious choice than akind of consequence of other things...
Benjamin Piekut:

Yes, no, absolutely. Yes.

Bill Dietz:

But to really affirm that in full awareness is really...

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