| Summary: | In this project, I follow the intertwined trajectories of Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016) and David Tudor (1926–1996) to understand how the contemporary genre of “sound art” evolved out of experimental music in the postwar United States. Substantially expanding the scope of Oliveros and Tudor’s legacies, long understood in purely music-historical terms, I argue that their engagements with electronic media—including magnetic tape, do-it-yourself circuitry, and biomedical devices—dramatically shaped their approaches to composition, performance, and listening in the Sixties and Seventies, yielding spatialized and participatory relationships to sound that sat uncomfortably within music’s definitional limits. Through their technological experimentation, Oliveros and Tudor arrived at transformed understandings of what “liveness,” presence, and agency might mean in the context of electronics, and developed new models of embodied sonic experience that resonated with, and contributed to, postwar trends in installation and performance art. As I show, these models of practice carried Oliveros and Tudor into museum spaces circa 1980, exerting a noted influence among younger artists working with sound.
Existing accounts of Oliveros and Tudor have tended to compartmentalize their respective engagements with electronics, relegating this exploration to historically specific arcs of their careers; I argue, to the contrary, that a concern for electronic media and their practical affordances influenced the entirety of these artists’ developmental arcs between 1950 and 1980, serving to shape their philosophies of perception, corporeality, and sonic materiality. I further reposition Oliveros and Tudor relative to one another by emphasizing the significance of their friendship, repeat collaborations, and circuit of mutual influence, which scholarship to date has generally ignored. I intervene into an active yet fraught body of literature around sound art by demonstrating that this ill-defined field of practice did not issue from a coherent and unified point of historical origin but was rather constructed in piecemeal fashion from a variety of practices and commitments. Sound art emerged as musicians like Oliveros and Tudor situated themselves in new venues and collaborative networks, as curators and theorists worked to claim and capture their practices, and, most importantly, as mediation restructured the musical work’s associated protocols (of composition, performance, notation, and live presentation), and rewrote its very ontology, such that it could render problematic the boundaries between disciplines, beg new critical vocabularies, and broker its entry into the museum.
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