Colloquium: Sound Art – Music

In October 2012, Thomas Gardner and Salomé Voegelin hosted a colloquium, entitled Sound Art and Music: historical continuum and mimetic fissures1, at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. This colloquium dealt with a current debate concerning the relationship between sound art and music and focused on the precept that sound art and music evolve in a shared world and that the joint navigation of this common terrain would allow for new creative approaches to be taken and new critical insights to be established on how we produce, listen and engage in works with sound.
This colloquium was motivated by the lack of a joint critical framework for sound art and music and was inspired by their persistent separation: the politics of their disciplinary boundaries; the aesthetic expectations that maintain them, tradition, economics and education; as well as the practicalities of their transgression. It framed a discussion, critique and debate around the relationship between sound art and music from different vantage points: exploring aesthetic, commercial, technological, as well as emotional and ritualistic reasons to keep them separate or to build a continuum within their practice and theorisation. The main objective was to ignite a discourse between sound art and music, to provoke and propose languages and strategies that would enable artists, musicians, curators and scholars as well as a general audience to negotiate joint listening in this territory.

The invited participants were: Simon Emmerson, Allen S. Weiss, Cathy Lane, Volkmar Klien, Leigh Landy, Claudia Molitor, Aura Satz, Angus Carlyle, Nye Parry, John Wynne, Peter Cusack, John Drever, Robert Worby, Michael Young, Anna Gritz, David Toop, Kathy Hinde, Seth Ayyez, Stephen Preston, Ed Baxter, Justin Yang, Helen Frosi, Max Eastley, and Salomé Voegelin and Thomas Gardner. They all agreed to spend a day together, debating the possibilities and significance of sound art’s association with music.

This book proposes to open the closed colloquium setting to a wider audience through the publication of a decisive range of the material that defined the event. This includes the pre-prepared provocations that initiated the three parts of the colloquium; the transcriptions of the debates as they ensued on the day, documenting the challenging, rich and at times argumentative discussion that ensued; and the responses produced after the event to reflect on the transcribed material and to elaborate on specific points raised during the discussions. This three-part structure is post scripted with an essay by Kate Lacey, working as an outsider, not identifying herself as a musician or sound artist, and not present on the day, she observes the proceedings and engages with their content in a current reflection.

Gardner, T. and Salomé Voegelin (eds), Colloquium: Sound Art – Music, UK: ZeroBooks, Sept. 2016.