SONIC ARCHITECTS
LECTURE: Black Studies in Experimental Modalities in Contemporary Music.
ESSAY EXCERPT:
THE SOUND WAS ALREADY THERE
Black Sound Art, Experimental Continuums, and the Problem of the Archive
I. The History I Was Given
I came to this research through a history that, at first, appeared remarkably complete. It was possible to begin with Luigi Russolo’s 1913 manifesto The Art of Noises and its proposition that industrial modernity had expanded the audible world beyond the inherited orchestral palette; to move through musique concrète, magnetic tape, electronic composition, John Cage’s re-organizations of silence, chance, and environmental sound; to follow David Tudor’s movement from pianist toward electronic performer and system-builder; to arrive at Fluxus, Experiments in Art and Technology, Max Neuhaus’s sound installations, and Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening.[1]
It remains an extraordinary history. I do not want to diminish it in order to make another one visible. What unsettled me was that I could move through nearly the entire lineage without being required to encounter a sustained African American or African-diasporic experimental lineage. That absence became harder to accept the more I understood what this canonical history claimed to describe. It was not simply a history of one European compositional school. It had become a history of the twentieth-century expansion of sound itself: noise, improvisation, electronics, embodiment, spatialization, recording, multimedia, altered scores, technological interfaces, new kinds of performance, and changing relationships between listener and environment. Yet throughout the same decades Black artists were radically reorganizing those same materials.
As I went looking, I did not find an empty space waiting to be corrected. I found vastly more; composers, improvisers, percussionists, poets, engineers, electronic musicians, performance artists, producers, publishers, collectives, software designers, instrument builders, installation artists, multimedia practitioners, DJs, researchers, and artists whose work repeatedly exceeded the categories under which it had been catalogued. Some lived primarily in histories of jazz. Some in histories of Black Arts. Some in contemporary composition. Some in poetry. Some in visual art. Some in clubs. Some in computer-music laboratories. Some in independent record cultures. Some in university music departments. Some in community spaces. Some survived through records and oral testimony more readily than through art-historical writing. Occasionally they were already inside the canonical experimental-art story and still remained peripheral to its retelling.
The problem I had perceived as absence began to look more like a problem of connection, classification, and historiography. The question was no longer simply ‘where are the Black sound artists?’ It became: What would the history of sound itself look like if Black sonic experimentation were treated not as an adjacent musical history or a set of influences, but as one of the forces through which the expanded field of sound became thinkable? This is not a claim that Black people “invented sound art,” nor an attempt to rename every radical Black musician as a sound artist. The proposition is more precise. Many of the boundaries separating music history, sound-art history, performance history, technological history, Black studies, and media art are themselves historical constructions. Once those boundaries become porous, practices previously held apart begin to form another map.
The distinction between an absence of practice and a failure of classification is one of the central propositions behind the Black Sound Artist Index. [2] The Index now contains 200 artists across two completed volumes, with a third volume already in development. At that scale, it no longer behaves simply as a recommendation series. Two hundred artists do not constitute a genre; They demonstrate density. They reveal a field varied enough to require its own subdivisions, histories, disagreements, and methods of study. The Index began, which began as discovery has now become a way of asking history differently.
c/o Philip P. Harper