
Benjamin Piekut, Ph.D.
Professor of Music
Cornell University
Born in 1975 in Camp Hill, Pa., USA
B.A. in Music from Hampshire College, M.A. in Composition from Mills College, M.Phil. and Ph.D. in Historical Musicology from Columbia University
Project
Sound Art: History in Search of a Concept
In this project, I examine questions of method in the historiography of sound art, arguing that existing scholarship has failed to define its object with clarity. Authors have emphasized sound art’s engagements with architecture, its sculptural qualities, its art-gallery context, or its basis in the material properties of sound, but in every case, they employ this or that framework without reflecting on the more fundamental question: How could sound art have been a choice or a possibility in the first place, even if it was one with many conflicting definitions? To what did it respond? I argue that sound art was a concept (not an art movement, technique, or medium) that emerged historically and socially around 1980. This concept, I will contend, came into shape in response to local pressures placed on the category of “music” across diverse artistic practices of the post-disciplinary avant-garde after 1960, including dance, sculpture, free jazz, and performance. In contrast to a prevailing critical narrative that represents sound art as an insurgent avant-garde counterposed to music, I view the consolidation of the concept to have been more closely related to culturally conservative initiatives of the 1980s, such as Jazz at Lincoln Center. I also examine this history of a modern aesthetic concept in relation to a contemporary artworld that is necessarily global, characterized by discrepant relationships to the histories of modernity and marked by variegated experiences of time. Instead of ignoring the circumstances of the concept’s appearance, as do many new accounts of sound art outside of Europe, I argue that provincializing these conditions permits a much wider, transnational account of the concept’s reformulations and effects.Recommended Reading
Piekut, Benjamin. Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits. University of California Press, 2011.
—. Henry Cow: The World Is a Problem. Duke University Press, 2019.
—. “The Vernacular Avant-garde: A Speculation / Tamara Levitz and Benjamin Piekut.” By Tamara Levitz. ASAP/Review, September 3, 2020. https://asapjournal.com/the-vernacular-avant-garde-a-speculation-tamara-levitz-and-benjamin-piekut/.
Publications from the Fellow Library
Piekut, Benjamin (New York, 2016)
The Oxford handbook of ... ; Volume 2 The Oxford handbook of critical improvisation studies ; Volume 2
Piekut, Benjamin (New York, 2016)
The Oxford handbook of ... ; Volume 1 The Oxford handbook of critical improvisation studies ; Volume 1
Piekut, Benjamin (New York, 2016)
The Oxford handbook of critical improvisation studies Critical improvisation studies