Sorry to say, I am just back online after a three-day computer catastrophe, so what I'm adding below responds to entries that came in a few pages back.

To pick up on some of the discussion regarding durational time versus spatial time, or musical versus spatial sound: I think that it’s an interesting idea to put Feldman’s later work in a "sound art" historical trajectory, and fruitful for someone inventing or tracing a new history of sound art. Feldman's String Quartet II, for example, is so mysterious that it’s tempting to look for more than simply a complex, inspired permutation of traditional musical material in it, something "nonmusical" or "beyond musical." But what exactly would this mean? That when it came to composing the actual notes, the composer was in some way naive in throwing certain instruments and pitches together? In organizing his sounds in time? When I actually listen to the music, I don’t think his ideas can really be understood outside of the context of music; they constitute, if anything, an expansion of the musical language to embrace a next level of reality—sound, time, space, history, memory . . . I find both his writings and the music itself indicate a radically close, concrete embrace—not at all a rejection—of time and sound as the essential building components of music, no matter how that notion is expressed.

From Satie to Stockhausen to Maryanne Amacher, extreme duration as well as conscious consideration of space, rooms, architecture (in Amacher’s case, arguably, the architecture of the body) have added up to expansions of the field of musical composition—and, I would argue, recuperations of ideas from the visual and other arts into the fold of musical composition. (Feldman was famously connected to and inspired by visual artists, like Philip Guston.) Even Feldman’s remarks about scale and the "thing"-ness of his works confirm to me my feeling that the separation into camps of spatial and musical concerns is kind of a specious argument. I can’t find this key distinction between time pulsed and time experienced as duration, at least as far as it applies to music or even any quasi-musical undertaking. Both concepts, if they can even be separated, are inherent to the way I believe we experience any music and are simultaneous aspects of that experience, even as we attempt to make one or the other explicitly manifest in a work.

So instead of the notion of Feldman’s work contributing to a history of "freeing sound from music" that Christoph articulates, I experience the opposite: that in a great deal of groundbreaking twentieth-century music there was an attempt to radically reintegrate sound into music. And its maybe here that the tape experiments and electronic and instrumental inventions and plain old formal, compositional innovations that make the musical history of that century so extraordinary all begin to be possible—in the liberation of music from the idealized and the abstract, from the written as opposed to the sonic. When you look at it this way, the loss of primacy of the score—and also the independent development of the score as a performance element—make sense as manifestations of the desire for sound to matter in music.

Perhaps sound art can be distinct from music only as long as the content of the sound is taken into account (not a very Cagean approach, I admit). Janet Cardiff’s narrative works mentioned earlier, for instance, could easily be considered to be using musical criteria; but it would be silly to ignore the artist’s obvious other interests. Part of the problem is that the history of music includes and involves so much . . . and the definition of sound art, as it stands for the moment, always seems to include something exclusionary.

To change topics slightly, I wanted to check something written in the New York Times over the weekend in a review of Morton Subotnik’s concert of new and "historical" works at Merkin Hall on Thursday night. In "From a Sound Explorer, Serenades for Laptop" (4/24/04), Kelefah Sanneh notes, I think in the spirit of admiration, that the composer’s "formerly alien sounds"—"flickering drones, pinging tonal clusters"—are now "everywhere," including on J-Kwon and the Trackboyz’s new album Hood Hop on So So Def/Arista records. How great that the reviewer has heard both! I think acknowledging the spill of this (electronic, avant-garde) history into other domains is a good development—one maybe made possible, or more likely anyway, by the unusual energy and attention on experimental sound and contemporary music from the culture in general at this moment.

Sanneh also comments, on Subotnik’s work Until Spring from the '70s, that what "Mr. Subotnik has called ‘regularly pulsed material’ . . . listeners . . . may know [by] another term for this theoretical construct: a beat." Maybe, in this same spirit of diffusion and transformation, eventually we’ll also have other words for "pinging tonal clusters" and "flickering drones"?

Over the course of our discussion, I've periodically made various claims about the nature and essence of sound art, focusing on the centrality of sound-itself, distinguishing sound from music, etc. A number of contributors have (rightly, I think) warned about making such firm distinctions and definitions and have insisted on the very mobile boundaries and definitions of the terms "music," "sound," "sound art," "time," etc.

As a committed Nietzschean (!), I generally try to stay away from Platonizing definitions (definitions in terms of essences and natures). But I think there's another way to take these sorts of claims. You can take them as heuristic definitions that say something like "What if we take x to mean/be this or that?" Of course, such definitions are always going to fail, at some point; but they might open interesting perspectives.

For example, one can always expand "music" to cover "sound art" (as, I think, Neuhaus, and maybe even Marina, asks us to do). But might it not be fruitful or interesting to think of "sound art" as something else, as doing something else, as departing from the history of music in interesting and important ways?

"Sound art" itself is such a heuristic term. It's probably silly to look for some essence of sound art. And (pace Neuhaus, Kelley, and Graham), we could go the thoroughly antiessentialist route and say that "sound art" is just sound of any sort that shows up in contexts usually devoted to visual art.

For my part, it seems to me that some kind of middle ground is important. I think it's helpful and interesting to see some part of the history of twentieth-century music, for example, as part of a prehistory of sound art and to distinguish, for heuristic purposes, "music" from "sound," "time" from "duration," etc. Of course, the proof is in the pudding: in what such distinctions allow you to hear, see, think, and do.

I think that, without such heuristic distinctions and definitions, you'll be stuck with a slack, anything-goes attitude toward what you're trying to investigate, or with accepting someone else's choices about what music, sound, etc., are. I think it's better to offer up a set of distinctions/definitions and see where they take you.

So, for my part, I applaud Kelley's desire to challenge a curatorial practice that includes, within the domain of "sound art," something that he finds problematic. But, in the way that he wants to carve up the pie, I find a host of problematic motives and oppositions: America, critical, avant-garde, macho, punk rock, lo-fi, etc., versus European, commercial, functionalist, feminized, high-tech, etc.

We've been focusing on present and past sound-art practices and discourses. But what of the future of sound art? Where would you like to see sound-art practice, discourse, and curation go? What practices would you like to see supported and fostered? Are there practices and modes of discourse that are no longer interesting or viable? Should the term be sustained, or is it, as Neuhaus says, "consumed"? Is there a need for the kind of art-historical and -critical study of sound art that Stephen has called for and that David and others have worried about? In short, where is sound art going, and where should it go?

Stockholm 21.38

On quite a few occasions I have shaped various works according to what media they have faced. A sound installation outdoors in central Stockholm was, of course, formatted for this place; but the CD that was released some time after had a different shape. I think formatting will be an issue in the future. Artists know that any concept can be modulated for the occasion. The artist can be invited to a poetry festival, a biennial for visual arts, an electronic-music festival, etc., and the same concept can be used. The artist only needs to adopt the limitations of the specific discipline. This goes along with the general contemporary ideas of infiltration—the method used nowadays instead of the failure of direct confrontation.

I would also like to say that there is a vast quantity of yet-to-be-discovered "sound installations" in the world. Sound-art historians have a massive body of work in front of them. The history of sound is rewritten constantly. David, in your new book Haunted Weather there is sentence that says the sounds in the world are increasing. Maybe this is why there's a major focus on sound art now, or maybe this is wrong. Maybe we just have to look into the past. A couple of days ago I visited the mayor crypt in the Cheops pyramid in Giza. The operating sounds here were fantastic. A soft rumbling low frequency drone combined with higher-pitched combinations of between 500 and 1000 Hz tones were constantly sweeping the rather small room. I haven't heard anything so beautiful in a long time. Where did they come from? Probably from air that travels around inside the structure combined with vibrations due to the delicacy of the architecture. I highly recommend it. Maybe the past has a lot to tell us about the future—perhaps it has to be reinvented.

Talk about a new thread: Carl Michael's description of this beautiful crypt drone is wonderful! I am always hopeful that sound installations will open people's ears to similarly wonderful listenings. (In my case, the city just tore up the street in front of our house, and the metal plates they've left to cover the holes temporarily sound like large gamelan gongs every time someone drives over them this morning with their car!)

I think the idea of shaping works is an interesting one—where a piece becomes specific to something other than site (the challenge is to keep the integrity intact).

As we all seem to be moving around so much, and our works are consequently having a temporary existence in different spaces and contexts, I suppose it is inevitable that these things will continue to influence the future of both making and exhibiting. I've always thought about my installation works that can be formatted to work as CDs as sort of portable installations that can be set up in someone's private space and exist beyond exhibition dates and spaces.

As Christoph asks what is the future of this stuff, I think portability is definitely something that will continue to be explored. Sound art is one of the only art forms that can be presented over the radio or sent out into the world as cheap multiples in the same ways as books. Personally I'd like to see sound art integrated into things where it is simply viewed as artwork—where the novelty of the fact that it is audio wears thin in terms of that alone justifying its value. (Once the novelty wears off, perhaps the thing itself will not be defined any clearer; but curatorial decisions will be made from a different place, and I think some of the problems Mike Kelley was having will resolve themselves in a way that is in line with the rest of the art world's choices: some good, some sketchy, but a DJ in an art space might just be allowed to be a DJ again). In some respects it would be nice to see this discussion of "what sound art is" fall away from the thing just as the discussions of things like "Is painting dead?" seem finally to have vanished. I don't want to end up overprotective of a kind of sound-art territory. We've each followed a somewhat personal historical path in this discussion; and we all know it has a rich and cross-disciplined history that should allow the fact that the art is singing to be no big deal.

It would be nice to see things like Neuhaus's Times Square piece happening all over the world, where big steel objects in public spaces are replaced by things that people might not notice at first, but might be ripe for discovery in the way that someone can enter a crypt and think, "I haven't heard anything so beautiful in a long time."

As far as what the future holds, I think that Carl Michael von Hausswolff is right that there is a large body of historical work yet to be examined and that, as it becomes more known through reissues and archives like UbuWeb (www.ubu.com), it will start to have more of an impact on current sound-art practices. My feeling is that things will become even more varied and mixed in the manner that Steve Roden mentioned early on, and that a classic, "sound only" sound art of the type Christoph mentions will be one pole—perhaps a very important pole—against which continuing practices will be judged. It may become a touchstone for the larger field of sound art in somewhat the same manner as Minimalism has for contemporary art. Perhaps the early work of Terry Fox or Vito Acconci will undergo genealogical revision in the way that Robert Smithson does in the work of Renée Green or Sam Durant. It is certain to keep appearing on CDs.

An interesting thread in what Michael and Steve and Marina have mentioned: this idea of the "objecthood" of sound. Going back to the technology-based discussion early on, it's interesting to note, I think, that the software used to make so many of these works has made sound so much more visible. It has a graphic interface, whether it be a sound wave that an artist zooms in on and manipulates or a set of MAX patch "objects" that an artist draws into a map. There is something more visual about approaching the task of working with sound than there was earlier on in its history. Something as invisible and ephemeral and porous as sound has become such an "object" that it can be looked at, turned around, and prodded from all sides.

Although sound art's links to (and overlaps with) music and music history are clear, I am coming from an art-world and curatorial perspective. So my leaning is to find ways for sound art to be in closer dialogue with visual art. I hope to see the immense dexterity of sound being explored to greater and greater extents in the coming years. By dexterity, I mean the many different forms it can take and contexts it can inhabit. I hope to see more places like Diapason gallery presenting sound-as-sound and how it shapes itself around space, across multiple speakers or sound sources. But, with no less urgency, I also hope to see sound works in exhibitions that are not about sound — shows about abstraction (Agnes Martin and Bernhard Günter?), about decay (Anya Gallaccio and William Basinski?), about language (Mel Bochner and Gregory Whitehead?), about the politics of borders (Emily Jacir and Minerva Cuevas pirate radio? or Ultra-red?), about generative structures (Sol LeWitt and Michael Schumacher?). What about a single-artist museum retrospective (with catalogue!) of the art-historically significant sound installations by, say, Christina Kubisch?

This plays into what Neuhaus writes about in his call to "dissolve" the term "sound art" as something that is somehow a category apart from "art." It also relates to what Steve says about an end to the "What is sound art?" question, just like the "Is painting dead?" question has fallen off. Sound can perhaps be less of a territory whose sanctity and separateness (or non-) from music we discuss in conferences and dinner conversations, and be thought of more generally as a language that articulates an aesthetic response to the world and shapes the history of art and ideas, alongside painting/sculpture.

David mentions that a good portion of the sound-art community has a limited knowledge of visual art (and certainly vice versa!). This can hopefully change in the future. Exhibitions about sound within the art context; exhibitions not about sound that include sound works; published projects like the En/Of series that Steve mentions; not only more sound-art books but better art-history books that incoporate sound works and point to common pursuits and conceptual starting points; radio stations run by art museums; inventive solutions to the question of "collecting" sound works; etc., etc. . . . There are many ways forward, it seems.