2021
The live mixing and transmission of remote radio signals was also crucial to Max Neuhaus’s transition from music to sound installation. A celebrated avant-garde (p. 75) percussionist, Neuhaus began to tire of the ‘onus of entertainment’ that surrounded musical performance and sought alternative contexts for the artistic presentation of sound. Among his early projects, Public Supply (1966) invited listeners to contribute sounds by phoning the public radio station WBAI, where he mixed ten channels of audio and broad cast it over the New York City airwaves. The same year, Neuhaus’s exit from music was neatly figured in his project LISTEN, which paid homage to 4’33” while bursting its spa tial and temporal frames. In various iterations of the project, Neuhaus invited audience members to meet at a concert venue, stamped their hands with the word ‘listen’, and silently led them outside on a walk through power plants, highway underpasses, and city neighborhoods.
In the years that followed, Neuhaus began to produce what he was the first to call ‘sound installations’, continuous fields of sound—generally complex drones—that shaped and coloured their chosen sites. This shift of interest from temporally bounded works towardsite-specific works, he thought, connected his work more fully with sculpture and the vi sual arts than music, ‘because the visual arts, in the plastic sense, have dealt with space. Sculptors define and transform spaces. I create, transform, and change spaces by addingsound. This spatial concept is one which music doesn’t include; music is supposed to be completely transportable’ (Neuhaus, 1994c, p. 42).
These remarks echo Rousseau’s claim that the proper purview of the visual arts is space, while that of music is time. Indeed, Neuhaus frequently distinguished sound installation from music via the opposition between space and time. In a programme note from 1974, he wrote: ‘Traditionally composers have located the elements of a composition in time. One idea which I am interested in is locating them, instead, in space, and letting the lis tener place them in his own time’ (Neuhaus, 1994b, p. 34).9 Two decades later, Neuhaus echoed this idea in the 1994 introduction to his collection of Place Works. ‘Communion with sound has always been bound by time’, he wrote. ‘The works collected in this volume share a different fundamental idea—that of removing sound from time, and setting it, in stead, in place’ (Neuhaus, 1994a). In 2002, reflecting on his permanent sound installa tions, Neuhaus told an interviewer: ‘The important idea about this kind of work is that it’s not music. It doesn’t exist in time. I’ve taken sound out of time and made it into an entity’ (quoted in Zuckerman, 2002).
What should we make of these claims? Are we to believe that Neuhaus’s installations do not exist in time or have been withdrawn from time? Surely nothing escapes time’s inces sant flow and alterity, least of all something so fundamentally ephemeral as sound, the very physical definition of which involves temporality: pressure differences in a given medium over time. To be precise, what Neuhaus’s installations reveal is not the differ ence between time and timelessness, or the difference between time and space, but a dif ference we have already encountered: the difference between two conceptions of time. In his work as a sound artist, Neuhaus dispensed with the musical time-object, a bounded entity with an internal structure, marked by beginning, middle, and end, with points of climax or rest. Instead, his installations explore sonic duration, the very temporal flow of sound.10 Take, for example, his most well-known sound installation, Times Square (1977–), an unmarked field of sound (p. 76) emerging from a subway vent on a pedestrian island in the middle of Manhattan. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for decades and counting, the piece has broadcast a continuous electronic drone.11 Of course the listener’s position, the ambient sounds in the neighborhood, the time of day, and oth er physical factors ensure that the piece is never the same, forming an open system that changes with the world around it in a manner similar to Cage’s 4’33”, of which it is a sort of unlimited extension. Indeed, the title of Neuhaus’s piece is not incidental, not purely a designation of its spatial location. We might read it as ‘time’s square’, that is, as a zone that marks temporal passage, difference, and change. Where Cage’s piece delimits a seg ment of time and attracts ambient sound through silence, Neuhaus’s installation demar cates a region of space and solicits environmental noises through a sonic continuum of in definite duration.
Time is more directly at issue in another series of works Neuhaus pursued from the early 1980s until his death in 2009—what he called Time Pieces or Moment Works. Neuhaus was always attracted to the sound of bells, which he used to model the electronic sounds of several installations.12 The Time Pieces go further, exploring the social and temporal functions of bell ringing. The four such works Neuhaus installed from 1989 through 2007 sound at regular intervals, marking hours or half hours. Thus they would seem simply to affirm the banal homogeneity of clock time. Yet these works are more temporally com plex. Where installations such as Times Square reveal temporal continuity and passage, the Time Pieces mark the discontinuous time of the event and the difference between or dinary moments and remarkable or singular ones.13 In modern towns and cities, bells toll merely to mark the hours of the day. But the traditional role of the bell was not only to in dicate these ordinary, regular times but also to mark privileged moments: births, deaths, marriages, danger, bad weather, and so on. Such events constituted singularities in the ordinary flow of time, remarkable moments of change where what followed differed fun damentally from what preceded. Peals of bells thus referred not to the abstract, indiffer ent time of scientific measure but to social and communal rhythms and to events that syn copate those rhythms.
Neuhaus’s Time Pieces engage both these conceptions of time at once. Sounding on the hour or half-hour, they function as clocks. But they do this in a peculiar way: by reversing and stretching the signal envelope of the bell stroke. The ordinary bell stroke begins with a loud attack and then slowly decays. By contrast, the sounds in Neuhaus’s installations emerge from the silence via a slow crescendo that gradually increases in volume until it’s clearly audible to the attentive listener. At peak intensity, the sound abruptly ceases, leav ing what the artist calls an ‘aural afterimage’ that lingers in the memory, enabling the lis tener momentarily to seize sound in its virtual state (absent but present, inaudible but au dible) and time in its passage (present and past, actual and virtual). Like Cage’s 4’33”, Neuhaus’s Time Pieces create aural vacuums into which ambient sound floods in. For a moment after Neuhaus’s sounds cease, nearby noises (voices, birds, wind, traffic) that had been masked by the ringing drone are suddenly amplified until eventually settling down to their ordinary levels.
https://faculty.hampshire.edu/ccox/Cox.Sound%20Art%20and%20Time.pdf