SOUND IN MIND AND BODY

CLASSICAL MUSIC MAKES ITS DEBUT AS INSTALLATION ART

The internet offers a vast installation space for sound art, which the Liverpool Philharmonic solemnised last week with its concert in Second Life. Sitara Nieves explains how sound art makes the audience part of the performance ...

From our arts blog, MOREOVER

When the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic gave a concert in Second Life last week, critical reaction was so-so. “It’s sort of like listening to the radio and watching a puppet show, and the puppet show is not synched to the radio,” said the New York Times. But the event was a brilliant publicity stunt--and, looked at the right way, an artistic milestone. Classical music was making its formal debut as sound art.

Sound art is a fairly ambiguous term, describing a wide swath of compositions generally heard in art galleries or online. It includes noise machines, the captured sounds of birds chirping, carefully composed musical scores, and clips from films reorganized to create a conversation. There have long been internal squabbles over whether sound art should fall into the category of art or music or something else entirely.

It’s easy to immediately understand why people balk at describing sound art as music. For example, a Rachmaninov sonata is composed quite differently from, say, sound artist Bill Fontana's collected sounds of the Brooklyn Bridge’s oscillating steel grids.

A sound artist does not need to be able to read a score, know what an eighth note is, or understand the difference between bass clef and treble--though some, like Bill Fontana, do have formal training as composers). He or she merely needs to be able to collect sound--from other composers or from the surrounding environment--and fiddle with machinery to create a new aural composition.

That’s not particularly damning: many modern forms of music, like rap, also don’t require a knowledge of music theory. The primary distinction between sound art and traditional music is not how the music is composed but how an audience listens. And this is what made the Philharmonic’s Second Life debut transformative.

Sound art is most often heard in vast installation spaces (including the Internet), where the listener controls the experience by moving through a physical environment that reflects, enhances, or distracts from the auditory input. Sound artists like Stephen Vitiello have noted that sound art is, in fact, more concerned with space than time, insisting that an audience can get something valuable out of a composition whether they stay for 60 seconds or 60 minutes.

That concept is anathema to the listening rules of classical music, where the music is understood as the sum of its movements. The audience at a traditional concert has a static relationship to sound. They quietly sit for a discrete amount of time, immersed in a bath of sound waves, as physically passive receivers of music.

Sound art is not quite so static, and this is why the Philharmonic’s performance was more installation than classical performance. During the Second Life concert, avatars listened while removing their clothing, gyrating in the aisles, conversing with other concert-goers, or reading newspapers. As in all installation art, part of the point for the Second Life show was that the audience and its antics were an integral part of the performance, changing the way that the music was heard and experienced.

This may not be the entire future of classical music, though all of this would have likely pleased composer Edgard Varese, who in the early 1900s advocated a new space-focused approach to composing and listening to music. He said that, “Music, which should pulsate with life, needs new means of expression, and science alone can infuse it with youthful vigor.”

Varese may not have anticipated that youthful vigor would translate into attention deficit disordered cartoon characters dancing naked to Ravel in virtual aisles. This is a distasteful way to listen to Ravel, if you still live and listen in your First Life. For classical music lovers, it may at least be comforting to view a Second Life concert as installation art instead of desecration, a new form of music that, if we’re lucky, won’t entirely replace the old.