On the evening of Monday, January 5, 1970, the musicians John Cage, Gordon Mumma, and David Tudor found themselves making sounds in the dark. The occasion was a performance of Canfield, one of three dances presented by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) in their season-opening program at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. As the dance progressed, Cage wandered into the audience and through various spaces in the theater with a battery of sound-making implements while Tudor and Mumma, seated at a control table piled with electronics, conversed with him over the public-address system.Footnote 1 The three musicians had been charged with determining the resonant frequency of the theater, a task laid out in a musical score by Pauline Oliveros titled In Memoriam: Nikola Tesla, Cosmic Engineer (1969). Conceived with the company's rigorous touring schedule in mind, the premise of this work is to investigate the unique acoustic qualities of each venue so as to be able to excite it into cacophonous vibration using electronic tone generators at the conclusion of the performance. As Oliveros explained, “If the search for the resonant frequency has been successful, then the frequency of the generators selected by the musicians can cause the performance space to add its squeaks, groans, and other resonance phenomena to the general sounds.”Footnote 2
For all of its novelties, this performance was emblematic of a longstanding preoccupation with resonance among experimental musicians. From the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, American experimental music was saturated with idiosyncratic investigations of resonance by a range of figures including Oliveros, Cage, Mumma, and Tudor, as well as Alvin Lucier, Robert Ashley, and others. Each work in this shared exploration seemed to call for increasingly complex technological arrangements to produce, amplify, sustain, and capture all manner of acoustic resonance for aesthetic appreciation. Nevertheless despite the proliferation of what has come to be known as “resonance aesthetics” during this period, the nature of this heterogeneous activity as a cultural formation confounds typical historical through-lines.Footnote 3 It cannot be fully grasped through the performance history of a single composition, yet is most legible in performance; it is rooted in the creation and circulation of specific technologies, yet dependent on none in particular. Likewise, it evades any account organized around a single musician, studio, institution, or location. Even style is an unreliable guide: While aesthetic affinities emerged from time to time, they were fleeting, haphazard, and highly decentralized.
Perhaps most curious of all is the fact that this exploration was taking place both during and between performances. For example, although individual realizations of Nikola Tesla modeled a kind of scientific inquiry into the acoustics of a particular venue, the work was also enmeshed within a network of epistemological activity that extended well beyond its own run of performances. In addition to the knowledge and skill Cage, Mumma, and Tudor cultivated over numerous realizations of Nikola Tesla as they toured with the MCDC, each musician was also involved in an extraordinary range of activities that might have influenced how they chose to realize Oliveros's composition, including circuit design, computer programming, installation work, instrument building, and performances employing novel configurations of diverse electronic equipment.Footnote 4 Through collaboration and conversation, these “hugging old band buddies” (as Mumma has characterized them) were building an epistemic enterprise—an informal research system driven not by a common cause, but rather by individual creative pursuits that freely careened in close proximity for over a decade.Footnote 5
Scholars have long been wary of claims that there is anything particularly scientific about experimental music—its name notwithstanding—frequently comparing its informality unfavorably with the rigor and empiricism of the individual scientific experiment. However, historian of science Hans-Jörg Rheinberger has long held that the fundamental working unit of scientific research is not the individual experiment, but what he terms the experimental system: The loose coherence of objects, instruments, and technologies through which research questions are materialized over time, and within which context individual experiments become meaningful.Footnote 6 I argue that Rheinberger's framework of the experimental system offers a compelling mechanism for understanding the experimentation that catalyzed the emergence of resonance aesthetics in American experimental music from about 1958 to 1973. By privileging the materiality of research activity, the experimental system illuminates moments and trajectories within, around, and between performances that might be overlooked in historical accounts organized around conventional musicological continuities, such as an individual composer, work, or performer. In addition to contextualizing the circulation of specific technologies between individuals and works, as a theoretical framework the experimental system is especially sensitive to how the same technology is used in different ways over time, from the earliest experimentations with a novel gadget to its integration into a new system as a familiar and reliable tool.
This process of circulation is never straightforward or preordained and often entails unforeseen intersections—what Rheinberger characterizes as “conjunctures”—between different experimental systems, resulting in ensembles of experimental systems and, on a larger scale, what he terms “experimental cultures.”Footnote 7 Through its own circuitous progress, the emergence of resonance aesthetics is best characterized not as an orderly sequence of well-defined experiments, but rather by the more nebulous qualities that Rheinberger associates with successful scientific research, including “instability, indeterminacy, serendipity, intuition, improvisation, and a measure of ‘fuzziness.’”Footnote 8 In this view, the individual researcher proceeds primarily through trial and error [tâtonnement], guided more definitively by their own skill and knowledge—their “virtuosity,” as Rheinberger has put it—than by the rational application of theory.Footnote 9 I argue that this characterization is an especially good fit for the development of resonance aesthetics by surveying a number of representative works, including In Memoriam: Nikola Tesla, Cosmic Engineer by Pauline Oliveros, and Rainforest (1968–73) by David Tudor. The framework of the experimental system is also an opportunity to re-evaluate the status of sound in experimental music as an object of epistemological inquiry, akin to what Rheinberger describes as an “epistemic thing.” Furthermore, in theorizing epistemic sound as both contextual and emergent, I re-evaluate musicians’ approaches to spontaneity and improvisation in musical performance.
Toward Experimentation
Despite its considerable prevalence in contemporaneous accounts of experimental musicians’ work, the scientific analogy has been vigorously contested in more recent reappraisals.Footnote 10 Frank X. Mauceri, for instance, has concluded that the purposes of the musical work itself seem to be inescapably “at odds with those of scientific methods.”Footnote 11 Along similar lines, William Brooks proposed that the scientific experiment is characterized by observations that can be tested, whereas post-Cagean experimental music is, in theory at least, concerned with observation alone.Footnote 12 Both Mauceri and Brooks contrast Cage's approach with the more overtly scientific undertakings by Lejaren Hiller in the 1950s and 1960s in testing the ability of the ILLIAC supercomputer to compose music.Footnote 13 Nevertheless both writers conclude that even aspects of Hiller's research cannot rightly be termed scientific because they fail to conform to the logical framework of the individual scientific experiment. Consequently, the origins of the term “experimental” as it pertains to music can be traced most directly not to the laboratory, but to Cage's famous definition of an experimental action as one whose outcome is unforeseen, first postulated in the late 1950s.Footnote 14
The unforeseen is also a preoccupation for Rheinberger throughout the historical examples that ground his theoretical framework. One of the most illustrative case studies of an experimental system is his account of mid-century cancer research undertaken at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. In 1945, a team of scientists began their research by focusing on the role of amino acids in protein synthesis, which they surmised were linked to cancer growth. Through numerous individual experiments spanning nearly two decades, each of which resulted in shifts in material focus, theoretical assumptions, and disciplinary boundaries, the scientists identified that protein synthesis could be characterized as a process of the transmission of genetic information.Footnote 15 The resulting knowledge, as Rheinberger points out, was not only “within a completely different conceptual horizon,” but also completely unforeseeable in the context of the original research framework.Footnote 16 Rheinberger also emphasizes the role of serendipity in guiding the course of the research system, describing how a substance initially regarded as a contaminant in one experiment was “transformed from a disturbance into an object of investigation” when it exhibited resistance against removal, and was subsequently used to decipher the genetic code in further investigations.Footnote 17 As Rheinberger explains, “experimental systems can be regarded as the structures that make it possible for such turns in the knowledge-gaining process to happen…to make it possible that those kinds of chance events can…lend themselves to being handled in an epistemically productive manner.”Footnote 18
In addition to Rheinberger, who has frequently commented on the parallels between scientific and artistic practices himself, a number of scholars have examined creative works, and even experimental music, through the lens of the experimental system.Footnote 19 For example, Virginia Anderson concludes her study of experimental music by Cornelius Cardew, Gavin Bryars, and other British composers by asserting that despite certain obvious distinctions, “scientific experimental systems and British experimental music systems differ little in their framework and activity of their methodology.”Footnote 20 Anderson likens the realization of indeterminate elements of experimental scores to the creative, improvisatory thinking that occupies scientists before the structure of their next experiment has taken shape—what the biologist François Jacob has termed “night science.”Footnote 21 Although Anderson acknowledges a similarity between the performance of experimental music and the experimental system with respect to their framework and activity, like Brooks and Mauceri—and rightly, in my view—she stops short of suggesting that their aims and results are commensurate. However if experimental music is taken to encompass not only individual performances, but also the activity in between, the epistemological implications become more central and more clearly defined.
For example, one of the earliest sites for the emergence of resonance aesthetics was Gordon Mumma and Robert Ashley's Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the late 1950s. However this studio was not really a place; Thom Holmes describes it as comprising “rooms set aside for electronic music equipment in each of their two homes” stocked with a shared pool of resources that included “about a half-dozen tape recorders between them, as well as oscillators, filters, mixers, and other audio processing circuits, many that they devised and built themselves.”Footnote 22 Mumma and Ashley performed together at sculptor Milton Cohen's local venue the Space Theater twice weekly for 7 years, during which time Mumma also came to know Oliveros and Tudor. By the time of Nikola Tesla in the late 1960s, Mumma, Oliveros, and Tudor had collaborated and performed together numerous times, and in so doing, exchanged a dizzying body of knowledge between them. For example, although Tudor suggested that it was Mumma who first introduced him to the possibilities of musical circuits,Footnote 23 Mumma holds up Tudor's late 1950s and early 1960s performances of works by Cage as “a considerable stimulus to experimentation in live-electronic music.”Footnote 24 Alvin Lucier has likewise posited that Tudor “invented the table of electronics that saved our lives in the Sixties.”Footnote 25 At the same time, Mumma notes that Tudor and Oliveros's performance of the latter's electroacoustic composition Applebox Double in 1965 inaugurated (or at least catalyzed) their shared interest in resonance, which would manifest in works like Nikola Tesla and Tudor's Rainforest years later.Footnote 26 The actual apple box used in this performance had made its first sonic appearance in an earlier work by Oliveros, Time Perspectives, which in turn formed at least part of the basis on which Tudor first sought out Oliveros to collaborate in 1963.Footnote 27 Furthermore, Adam Tinkle makes the case that, in a symmetrical twist, Mumma and Tudor's Pepsi Pavilion installation at the Osaka World's Fair in 1970—which could “self-sense, self-actuate, and morph its own resonance…with its embedded speakers and microphones”—could itself “be viewed in light of Oliveros's invitation to ‘cosmic engineering’” in Nikola Tesla the previous year.Footnote 28
This freewheeling, years-long sprawl is not necessarily the kind of formation that would typically be described as a “system,” a term that in many cases suggests a fixed, top-down structure. As it turns out, several writers, including Rheinberger himself, have questioned the extent to which the word “system” precisely captures the experimental arrangement he proposes. As the music theorist and philosopher Henk Borgdorff has pointed out:
In the historical and philosophical literature on science, the interest in experimental systems arose at the point where the theory-dominated view of scientific research began to make way for ideas centering on practice…Now practices generally manifest the same characteristics as Rheinberger's systems…One can therefore just as well speak of “experimental practices” as of “experimental systems,” not least because Rheinberger also applies his findings on experimental systems to academic practices outside the laboratory.Footnote 29
Borgdorff continues:
The term “experimental system” could give the impression of a fixed structure, whose elements relate with one another in clearly ordered, stable arrangements. In using this term, however, Rheinberger does not have a systems theory in mind…He is simply highlighting a loose coherence between the various elements of the experimental system (technical, epistemic, social, institutional elements).Footnote 30
Accordingly, in what follows the term “system” should be understood more accurately in contemporary parlance as a “practice” whose constituent elements are only loosely and temporarily linked through the intervention of the researcher. As Rheinberger and Michael Hagner write in a co-authored essay, “[t]he concept of experimental system appears to be justified only if a ‘system’ is allowed to encompass heterogeneous elements that can be recombined at any time; and, moreover, if it is seen as remaining open in the course of its history for discarding old components and for incorporating new ones.”Footnote 31 Consequently, understanding experimental music through Rheinberger's framework will require close attention to the objects at hand, and how their use by practitioners both binds the experimental system and drives it forward.
Epistemic Objects
Oliveros's score for Nikola Tesla, commissioned by Cunningham in 1968, employs no musical notation—just two typewritten pages of verbal instructions that roughly indicate how the search is to proceed. Oliveros composed the work with Cage, Mumma, and Tudor in mind (as they were the resident touring musicians with the MCDC), identifying the latter two by name in the score. Each performance is divided into three parts, beginning with a period of discussion among the musicians to plan their approach, followed by the execution of “simple practical experiments” throughout the theater.Footnote 32 The score provides for handheld acoustic sound-making objects including cap pistols, “a metal slide whistle for David” (Tudor was known for using whistles in performances of Cage's works since the early 1950s), and “a bugle for Gordon” (Mumma is known as a hornist as well as a technologist).Footnote 33 The score also specifies the use of audio equipment including microphones, tape recorders, playback devices, and an amplification system. As the musicians make test sounds and listen to their resonance, walkie-talkies or wireless microphones allow them to direct one another in different parts of the theater and share their discoveries. This process, which is audible to the audience during the entire performance through the public-address system, is inevitably marked by moments of improvisation, negotiation, disagreement, and uncertainty. In the recording of the work included in the Music for Merce compilation, in which MCDC administrator Jean Rigg joins Cage, Tudor, and Mumma as a performer, one hears numerous such moments.Footnote 34 For example, at one point Mumma describes to the others the instruments he has available; at another, Cage explains to Tudor the nature of a musical “tattoo” after asking Mumma to play one on his bugle. Still later, Rigg narrates her position to Tudor as she moves across the space with the slide whistle. Tudor listens, asking clarifying questions, and eventually asks Rigg to return to the center of the space and change the quality of the test sounds she is making.Footnote 35
The findings from this exploration are collated in the third part of the composition, in which the musicians estimate the resonant frequencies of the space and set amplified tone generators to those frequencies, causing the space to vibrate. Mumma describes the “earth-shaking” finale vividly:
The third section began in silence, from which an ambience of low-frequency sound emerged, tuned to the predominant resonances of the space. They gradually swelled in volume to a sea of oscillating pressure, analogous to Tesla's famous experiment in which a building was made to vibrate at its own resonant frequencies.Footnote 36
According to the logic of the individual experiment, if the wrong frequency were chosen, the space might not vibrate, or would vibrate less, and the performance would be unsuccessful. This is the logical framework in which both Mauceri and Brooks root their dismissals. Mauceri, for instance, describes as unscientific musical “experiments” that do not conform to a model of “theory testing and confirmation.”Footnote 37 Nevertheless even though Oliveros does not provide a direct means of confirmation in the score, the performance is unmistakably oriented toward the production of new knowledge.Footnote 38 Rheinberger explains that experimental systems are “designed to give unknown answers to questions that the experimenters themselves are not yet able clearly to ask.”Footnote 39 Simply put, they are “vehicles for materializing questions,” and this is precisely what Oliveros's composition achieves.Footnote 40 One can imagine sitting in the dark theater toward the end of the performance as a 25-foot-tall beam, standing upright, pans back and forth across the lip of the stage like a search light, illuminating the dancers upstage in narrow slices.Footnote 41 The musicians stop talking and return to the control table. There is silence, and the sound of the dancers’ feet becomes audible, followed by a vibration in the metal and wood of the floor, seats, and railings. Low sustained tones become audible and, gradually, louder. The metal rigging in the fly space clatters; fixtures buzz unidentifiably. The ear may be drawn to any number of these sounds to explore further—in another performance of Nikola Tesla, or as the basis for another composition altogether. Despite a lack of experimental confirmation, in some form or another, unexpected knowledge has emerged.
One of Rheinberger's central contributions has been problematizing the notion that the individual experiment, with its tight epistemological focus around a single question—a “sharp procedure for testing a sharp idea,” in his words—is particularly significant.Footnote 42 Where experiments are regarded as discrete, self-contained entities, the experimental system offers a framework that reaches outward to trace how the contours of a given performance are rooted in knowledge produced elsewhere. As the artistic researcher Michael Schwab has written, “experimental systems are designed to be open, so that the deployed knowledge results in ruptures from which unexpected new objects relevant to knowledge emerge, which Rheinberger calls ‘epistemic things.’”Footnote 43 Epistemic things are “hybrid objects” whose status is determined simultaneously by their materiality and their uncertain function within the system.Footnote 44 They can be contrasted with technical objects, which are familiar to the researcher and have a clear role in the system. As Borgdorff summarizes, if an epistemic object is what we “want to know,” technical objects are those “through which we can know.”Footnote 45
To the extent that the resonant qualities of the venue are the focus of the musicians’ inquiry in Nikola Tesla, it would seem that the venue, through its acoustic response and vibration, becomes a kind of epistemic object in each performance. By the same logic, the sound-making implements used for testing and the tone generators used in the third section are technical objects: Tools or instruments through which knowledge about something else can be ascertained. Nevertheless each object, over the preceding years, had become familiar to each musician through an open-ended process of experimentation. In his 1967 composition Hornpipe, Mumma had exhaustively explored the resonant characteristics of the French horn using microphones and amplification to generate an acoustical feedback loop with which to improvise. Tudor, likewise, explored experimental juxtapositions of a slide whistle with electronic sounds in his 1959 recording of Cage's Indeterminacy with the composer. Meanwhile in earlier works like the Mnemonics series, Oliveros had at first similarly approached electronic tone generation through the highly unconventional technique of heterodyning analog oscillators, in which two or more oscillators are set to frequencies beyond the range of human hearing and mixed together to produce what are known as difference or combination tones within the audible range. The subtlety and sophistication of this technique, as compared with the rather rudimentary use of oscillators in Nikola Tesla as a source of vibration, belies their shifting role—as with each of the instruments—from a genuine object of epistemic inquiry to a technical object that could be used, in turn, to reveal new epistemic objects, and materialize new questions.
The experimental system is characterized by a constant play between these two functions, a state that is well illustrated by the phenomenon of tinkering. Tinkering is defined by an intimate material engagement and trial-and-error approach that points beyond a particular task, such as a mechanical repair, and toward creative exploration. All of the musicians involved in resonance aesthetics were committed tinkerers, members of what Thom Holmes has called “the Radio Shack school of electronic music.”Footnote 46 This practice largely facilitated the intensely personal and idiosyncratic sonic results that came to be associated with individuals, rather than notations, in experimental music circles. It also aligns closely with Rheinberger's conception of the researcher. In order to truly tinker, one must exhibit technical skill, but must also be willing not to let the technical aspects overwhelm more creative exploration. As Rheinberger writes, productive experimentation is characterized by an “interaction between scientific object and technical conditions [that] is eminently nontechnical in its character. Scientists are, first and foremost, bricoleurs (tinkerers), not engineers.”Footnote 47 Instead of working systematically toward a solution to a well-defined problem, tinkering is characterized by an ongoing process of destabilization that produces moments of uncertainty, which in turn allow for the exchange of epistemic and technical functions among objects.
The Limits of Experimentation
As a rule, experimental systems tend to stabilize over the long term. In the sciences, this process occurs when a research system fails to produce new knowledge, and instead becomes focused around answering an increasingly narrow set of questions in more or less predictable fashion. Frequently, formerly productive research systems are integrated into new experimental research systems as stable sub-units. As Rheinberger writes, “There is a life cycle to experimental systems. They are brought into being as research devices, become transformed into kits, and finally are replaced.”Footnote 48 This cycle is illustrated by another work from the same period as Nikola Tesla: David Tudor's Rainforest, composed for another of Cunningham's dances in 1968.Footnote 49 Although Tudor created several versions of Rainforest, common to all is the use of an audio signal played into an object through a transducer, which causes the object to audibly vibrate. The overarching impetus seems to have been Tudor's desire to find “a means of making objects reveal their own resonant characteristics rather than using them as instruments to be played manually,” suggesting a strong affinity with Nikola Tesla, in which sound is also employed to reveal the resonant qualities of objects.Footnote 50 The first version of Rainforest was performed with Cunningham's dance RainForest, while later versions were used for Cunningham's Events and for live performance as concert works or sound installations. Since the 1970s, the group Composers Inside Electronics (CIE) has continued to present the work in various forms.
The sounds heard in Rainforest are dependent primarily on two factors: The acoustic characteristics of the object and the audio signal used to excite the object. The objects are not specified in any of the versions and, by design, vary widely with each performance. Examples of objects previously used include “a metal bedspring, a huge wine barrel, toilet floats, cast-iron wagon wheel rims, a stainless-steel milk container lid, lawn sprinklers, a copper still, a Styrofoam box, and a large metal cable.”Footnote 51 What distinguished the first three versions of Rainforest, however, were the types of sound sources used to excite the objects. Certain details regarding the different versions remain ambiguous, but according to CIE member Matt Rogalsky, sound sources to Rainforest I were limited to tone generators, Rainforest II used live vocal input, and Rainforest III used various taped sounds derived from a library assembled by Tudor and others.Footnote 52 Nevertheless even with the sound source stabilized, in performance new questions are inevitably materialized. As Rogalsky points out:
The use of contact microphones on the transduced speaker-objects…raises the question of exactly where the sonic identity of a Rainforest object is to be found; the (in)fidelity of Rainforest objects depends not only on the objects themselves, but also and as much on the frequency response of the object in each stage of transduction.Footnote 53
The ambiguity of the object's “sonic identity” recalls the contingency of the resonant qualities of the theater in Oliveros's composition. The multiplicity of variables and their attending uncertainty, like the questions that they raise, are not possible without the object. On the contrary, these questions are literally “materialized” through the objects of the system. At the same time, it is possible to trace these objects and their uses to earlier instances. Rainforest was based on ideas and circuitry Tudor had been developing since at least 1965, and almost certainly influenced by even earlier performances with Cage using contact microphones and other transducers to amplify quiet sounds. The most famous example is Cage's Cartridge Music (1960), in which a record player needle is removed from its cartridge and replaced with other materials with which to make (amplified) contact with assorted objects.Footnote 54 Just as Nikola Tesla employed familiar tools to new ends, Tudor's experience amplifying small sounds meant that a variety of transducers could now be integrated into his Rainforest setup as technical components and directed toward uncovering the resonant qualities of new objects of inquiry.
The instability of epistemic things is directly related to the functioning of the experimental system through a process that Rheinberger calls differential reproduction. As Rheinberger writes, “[i]n order to remain productive, experimental systems must be arranged and carried on in such a way that the generation of differences becomes the reproductive driving force of the whole machinery.”Footnote 55 For Rheinberger, these differences are inextricably linked with the production of knowledge, whether in a scientific or artistic context. For example, he explains that:
I have the impression that an artist like Cézanne, who painted hundreds of apples in his countless later still lifes, must have been caught in a kind of experimental system. It was all about tiny changes and iterations—doing it again and again and always with a small differential gesture. I am interested in the creation of differences through such processes of iteration, be it in the sciences or in the arts. Holding these small differences against each other produces knowledge effects.”Footnote 56
Both Rainforest and Nikola Tesla are designed so that new materials enter the system with each performance: New objects and sound sources in the former, and new spaces in the latter. In Rainforest, as Rogalsky observed, the means of transduction and amplification into, through, and from the objects are also points at which differences may be generated between performances. In fact, the work is defined by the perpetual rearrangement of these materials. As Rogalsky summarizes, Rainforest is above all “a musical practice based on constant modification and innovation.”Footnote 57 Yet I would argue that this process of differential reproduction is significantly attenuated in the fourth version of Rainforest, marking a shift in priorities from the production of new knowledge through difference toward the reproduction of specific kinds of sounds. Unlike the previous versions, Rainforest IV, completed in 1973, begins with a preliminary workshop in which various freely selected objects and sound sources are tested for musically interesting results.Footnote 58 This culminates in the public presentation of the objects as a sound installation. Tudor apparently utilized a highly systematic testing process in the workshops he led. As Cathy van Eck describes, Tudor would use a sine tone generator to test the resonant frequencies of an object, sweeping through the entire range of frequencies while listening for complex, nonlinear, and otherwise interesting responses.Footnote 59 CIE co-founder John Driscoll has led a number of workshops over the past few decades, and describes the process as follows:
The choice of sound materials is motivated by the unique set of resonant characteristics that each sculptural speaker [i.e. object] presents. After investigation, the composer creates material that will tease the speaker's resonant nodes into strong vibration, creating responses that are highly nonlinear. It is the equivalent of tickling someone—a little input at just the right spot creates great output.Footnote 60
The focus here moves beyond the “materialization” of questions, and toward useful, reproducible results. The participant works to achieve the best—that is, the most interesting—sonic results, and only upon the stabilization of the system is it presented to the public. This is not a differential reproduction, but a repetition ideally without difference, in which the desired sound whose arrival marked the end of the workshop phase can be reliably generated again. The object itself has gained “sharp contours” and transformed into a technical object.Footnote 61 This process illustrates Rheinberger's distinction between experimental systems that are oriented toward research and those that are oriented toward what he characterizes as technological ends. A research system remains open to the production of unknown things and new knowledge, whereas a technological system is characterized by a sharper point of inquiry, a complementary foreclosure of scope, and movement toward greater efficiency, stability, and reproducibility of results.Footnote 62 The two types of systems can be understood as occupying opposing positions on a spectrum, distinguished not by material, but rather by purpose and time. Consequently, the changes that took place between the first and fourth versions of Rainforest illustrate movement across this spectrum, from a research system to a technological system.
Experimental Virtuosity
The performances envisioned by Oliveros and Tudor illuminate a fundamental tension in the experimental music of the 1960s and 1970s. Performers were expected to produce the recognizable sounds of “experimental music,” while at the same time remaining nominally open to unexpected sonic results. Judy Lochhead was one of the first scholars to articulate this paradox by comparing recordings of indeterminate compositions by Tudor and Cage that exhibited similar sonic features.Footnote 63 More recently, analyses of realizations of works by composers such as Morton Feldman and Earle Brown have identified consistent sonic qualities that came to be regarded as crucial to the successful performance of experimental music, despite being unnotated.Footnote 64 As Lochhead has written, the experimental music community functioned collectively as a kind of “aesthetic arbiter” for a shared “sound ideal or style” that formed “a tacit backdrop for the composition and performance of music within this community.”Footnote 65 Although individual composers’ sonic preferences varied to some extent, what is clear is that performances of experimental music were rarely as open as they seemed to be on paper.
This conflict played out in a number of different ways. For example, practitioners frequently sought to emphasize the natural or autonomous quality of the sounds they produced—often framing the production of sound in performance as an act of discovery, rather than expression—even as they carved out distinctive aesthetic niches within the experimental music scene.Footnote 66 Similarly, many experimental musicians emphasized the spontaneous nature of their performances. In fact, the close personal friendships and shared experiences within the community may have perpetuated a sense of aesthetic serendipity that might have been better attributed to sonic preferences and standards of performance practice that were no less in force for being informal and primarily unspoken. For example, in his account of the rehearsals prior to the first concert performance of Rainforest with Tudor in 1969, Mumma stresses how little advance planning was actually needed. As he writes, “just before we started Tudor said to me: ‘We will end at the right time.’ Knowing one another as we did, that was all that was needed.”Footnote 67 To the extent that Mumma's remarks highlight the spontaneity of a particular performance, they underscore the importance of the musicians’ familiarity with one another over the long term in equal measure.
This familiarity frequently appeared in the guise of what is commonly described as the performers’ “musical personalities”: sonic qualities consistently associated with a particular performer. As Benjamin Piekut points out, musical personality was of paramount importance in MCDC performances during this era on account of the emergence of the “composer–performer,” whose work was increasingly defined by improvisation and a lack of reliance on notation.Footnote 68 Many of the musicians in the MCDC roster became associated with particular techniques, stylistic elements, and sonic qualities that were consistent between performances. For example, Mumma seems to allude to familiar qualities when he writes that, despite the lack of coordination with Tudor prior to the aforementioned performance of Rainforest, “for me the lyrical gentleness still predominated, even with Tudor's occasional celebrated sound-bursts.”Footnote 69 In this context, it is clear that Oliveros's inclusion of Mumma and Tudor's names in the score of Nikola Tesla, along with specific instruments appropriate to each, was intended as an invocation of their musical personalities aimed at securing a particular kind of musical result.Footnote 70
Nevertheless I would argue that personal identification with particular sonic preferences was not a violation of indeterminacy as practiced within the experimental music community: it was actually integral. For example, Piekut has described Cage and James Tenney's infamous performance of Atlas Eclipticalis (1961–62) and Winter Music (1957) with the New York Philharmonic in 1964 as an “improvisation” on the grounds that they were not aiming for the unforeseen, but rather a sonic ideal that was already quite familiar. As Piekut has written:
I would contend that Cage improvised at the mixing board because he (and Tenney) had lived with and in the sound-world of indeterminacy for many years. He knew how it usually sounded; he understood its peculiar rhythms, surprising interruptions, and stochastic texture. Indeed, he had created indeterminacy—controlled it and served as its primary discursive gatekeeper.Footnote 71
Beyond the characterization of his activity as improvisation, it is worth emphasizing that Cage could never have anticipated what ultimately took place in this performance, yet he unequivocally regarded it as a failure. I would propose that despite the undeniably unforeseen (and therefore indeterminate) nature of this performance, Cage was disappointed because he had failed to maintain the sonic standards of indeterminacy. In other words, despite his commitment to remaining open to any eventuality, Cage's conception of a successful performance of indeterminate music entailed the presence of certain stylistic features.
For all their differences, many performances of resonance aesthetics shared sonic and stylistic qualities as well. As Adam Tinkle has pointed out, the amplified conversation in Nikola Tesla can be traced back to Oliveros's experience with Robert Ashley's music, while the exploratory quality of the second part of the performance has a strong affinity with Alvin Lucier's Vespers (1969).Footnote 72 Further confluences can be discerned by analyzing recordings. For example, Gordon Mumma's recording of Hornpipe, a 1967 work for solo hornist and live electronics, exhibits many sonic qualities that can also be heard in Nikola Tesla.Footnote 73 The first half of the performance comprises short, improvisatory sounds the hornist makes while testing the acoustics of the venue (in this case, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University), and the second half is dominated by sustained electronic sounds. The gradual shift from fragmentary gestures of widely varying character to the drone-like texture of the electronics evokes not only Nikola Tesla. In fact, I regard the entire performance as an idealized expression of acoustic resonance, which is typically characterized by a brief, noisy onset and a longer, more consonant period of decay.
About halfway through the recording, Mumma plays a shrill, sustained tone using a double-reed in place of the horn's mouthpiece.Footnote 74 After 10 seconds, the electronics fade in for the first time, seemingly blending and harmonizing with Mumma. At first, the electronic timbre recalls the pure tones of an oscillator, like the ones Mumma would have used in the third section of Nikola Tesla. However, the texture quickly becomes more complex and inharmonic as the sound rises in volume like peals of feedback from an amplifier. Although there is no extant recording of Oliveros's “earth-shattering” finale, it is not much of a stretch to imagine that it might have sounded something like the climax of this recording of Hornpipe: a gradually rising flood of chaotic vibrations and raw, unpolished electronic sound.
Hornpipe is typical of works of resonance aesthetics in that the performer largely dictated the sonic content of the work through improvisation. It is also typical in that the technology employed was deeply familiar to its performer (Mumma had designed and assembled the electronics himself). For Rheinberger, a scientist's familiarity with their tools and instruments is a crucial prerequisite for the successful functioning of the experimental system. As he writes, “the more familiar a scientist is with his experimental set-up, the more effectively its inherent possibilities open up.”Footnote 75 This dynamic might appear paradoxical at first glance, as it would seem that experimental musicians’ familiarity with their setups would be more likely to constrain the possibilities than multiply them. For example, even though Mumma writes that Hornpipe “was improvised in response to the acoustical properties of each distinctive performance space,” he also relied on “diverse instrumental idioms and materials that I collected and prepared over the course of several years.”Footnote 76 As Mumma acknowledged a commitment to “specific kinds of sounds and theatrical effects” in his performances of Nikola Tesla—which occurred contemporaneously with his performances of Hornpipe, and which shared a similar open premise—it remains an open question as to how much each performance of Hornpipe actually varied.Footnote 77 Along similar lines, as Mumma, Cage, and Tudor became increasingly comfortable with their setup for Nikola Tesla while touring with Canfield, it seems likely that they would have become more efficient at reliably producing certain kinds of musical results, should they have desired.Footnote 78 Consequently, the openness of a composition like Nikola Tesla, in which performers are encouraged to record “particularly interesting” sounds and broadcast them over the public-address system (or the focus on “interesting” sounds in Rainforest, for that matter) actually reinforces whatever preexisting notions the musicians might hold regarding interesting sounds. In other words, the performers’ skill was predicated not only on their ability to produce interesting sounds, but also to recognize them.
This rethinking of skill as a performer was aligned with larger priorities within the experimental music network. Many experimental musicians sought to distinguish themselves from both mainstream musical practices and the European avant-garde through a skeptical reframing of technical skill or virtuosity. By the late 1960s, dismissals of conventional displays of virtuosic technique were commonplace for experimental musicians, especially in overtly improvisational contexts.Footnote 79 In the early 1970s, Michael Nyman wrote that the “apparently routine tasks” called for in some experimental works require a “heroic virtuosity on the part of the performer” that is “unsung” and “unnoticed.”Footnote 80 This understanding of virtuosity as encompassing skills that may not be culturally legible contrasts sharply with contemporary perspectives on virtuosity as a fundamentally social performance.Footnote 81 In a 1974 essay, Mumma writes that “everyone can be a virtuoso with the resources to which they have access,” elsewhere alluding the “unique virtuosities” of individuals.Footnote 82 In another text, Mumma muses of his work alongside Cage and Tudor with the MCDC that “our ‘virtuosity’ really showed after the performance, when we could strike the musical parts of the set and load it into the shipping containers in less than two hours.”Footnote 83 In Mumma's experience, the virtuosity of experimental music performance was not only “unsung” and “unnoticed,” it could also take place outside of the time of performance. It was also highly subjective—defined individually, rather than externally—a view that seems to accord with Cage's interest in performers’ “spirit,” and of what he called “spiritual virtuosity.”Footnote 84
For Rheinberger, virtuosity is synonymous with the skill cultivated by a researcher that permits the experimental system to generate new, unexpected knowledge. As Rheinberger puts it, emphasizing the embedded contradiction, “Formulated paradoxically, the more an experimental system is tied to the skill and experience of the researcher, the more independently it develops.”Footnote 85 More precisely, it is the experimental researcher's deep familiarity with the tools and objects of their system that allows them to introduce the differences through which new knowledge is produced. Consequently, familiarity engenders not increasing certainty of outcome, but rather the continued production of difference—and therefore, knowledge—albeit within increasingly precise bands. At least on the surface, this rapport between familiarity and uncertainty is incongruous with the way the experimental system of resonance aesthetics has been described so far, in which familiarity and skill seem to allow for greater control and focus, rather than unpredictability and difference. The case of Rainforest IV illustrates this dynamic clearly: To the extent that practitioners’ familiarity with the process means that specific musical results are prioritized over the possibility of the unexpected, it would seem that the research system is no longer in operation.
Nevertheless, the researcher's skill should not be mischaracterized. The experimental system is not sustained by one's ability to make certain things happen, but rather by the ability to let them happen, and, perhaps more importantly, to be able to recognize them when they do. As Rheinberger writes, experimentation “is a question of obtaining new knowledge, but precisely this knowledge cannot be achieved in the precise sense of the term, it can only happen. The virtuosity of the experimenter consists in perceiving the event—‘on the fringes of the expected discourse,’ as Dagognet says.”Footnote 86 In short, familiarity is exactly what allows the researcher to recognize what is unexpected in the system. This conclusion reinforces the fundamental purpose of the experimental system—namely that it is organized so as to permit the unexpected to occur—but also helps to redefine what “unexpected” might mean in the context of the experimental system of resonance aesthetics. Experimental musicians’ familiarity with their setups may not have always led them to new, unexpected sounds, but it did allow them to newly “discover” the familiar sounds of experimental music in novel electronic configurations. Whatever the nature and extent of these familiar sounds, accounts of both Nikola Tesla and Rainforest make clear that the performers were invested in certain sonic results, at least to some degree. The fact that the same sounds were revisited not only across multiple performances, but also in different works with different technological setups, suggests an almost theatrical conceit in which musicians reveal their virtuosity by drawing compelling sound from sources that were not only unexpected, but frequently also unexpectedly mundane.Footnote 87 From this perspective, once again taking up the scientific metaphor, the experimental sonic ideal actually functions less like an unforeseen discovery and more like a model substance, whose qualities and reactions are well known to researchers, and which is consequently used to calibrate or test other unfamiliar aspects of the research system. As I will illustrate below, it is the inevitable deviation from this ideal that ultimately aligns the activity of experimental music with the production of knowledge.
Epistemic Sound
If the experimental systems described above genuinely produce knowledge, as I argue that they do, it remains to be addressed how to characterize that knowledge, especially in comparison with the well-defined knowledge that results from an experiment. For example, with respect to a performance of Nikola Tesla, it must be acknowledged that theaters are complex spaces, encompassing multiple isolated acoustic areas and many different objects distributed in unpredictable ways, each of which has unique acoustic qualities of its own. Consequently, it is likely that a theater will vibrate at many different frequencies given sufficient amplification, especially in the relatively low range proposed by Oliveros (up to 100 cycles per second, corresponding to the sub-bass and bass ranges of human hearing). The choice of sound-making tools is also a source of unpredictability. Therefore, the knowledge produced through this process must be framed in terms of the variables at play: Something like, the theater vibrates in this way given these frequencies, this level of amplification, and such and such distribution of loudspeakers, bodies, and objects. The contingencies cascade and multiply the further one attempts to simplify the system in pursuit of the isolation of any individual variable.
Despite this complexity, what is clear is that Oliveros's composition, like Tudor's, embodies an epistemic process through which sound is put forward as a way of knowing about a space or object. The uncertain quality of this knowledge—propositional, embodied, or aesthetic—is immaterial: More significant than concrete answers is the materialization of further questions that keep the system in operation through differential reproduction. The confirmation yielded within the framework of the individual experiment reflects, by contrast, “the degeneration of an elementarily complex experimental situation,” an observation that lends weight to other Rheinbergian readings of artistic practice, such as Michael Schwab's interpretation of Marcel Duchamp's Three Standard Stoppages as an experimental system.Footnote 88 Schwab's argument emerges through a critique of Herbert Molderings’ characterization of Duchamp's work as a “pseudo-experiment.”Footnote 89 As Schwab writes, “by focusing on the status of the experiment,” Molderings’ interpretation “runs the risk of undoing at least part of Duchamp's epistemic enterprise,” while also “[failing] to perceive how the experimental system operates.”Footnote 90 The same critique could be extended to the readings of experimental music put forward by Brooks and Mauceri. By resisting the simplification characteristic of the individual experiment through a complex and indeterminate arrangement of materials, interactions, and procedures, Oliveros's composition shifts the production of knowledge away from a single moment of confirmation, and toward other unpredictable, unforeseen places and objects within the system. If Nikola Tesla is not an experiment, it is not because it tells us too little, as the critiques discussed earlier imply. On the contrary: If anything, it tells us too much.
The same thinking can be applied to Tudor's work. Let us imagine the trajectory of a transducer such as a contact microphone during the workshop preceding a public presentation of Rainforest IV. Picture a workshop participant sitting at a table in front of a sheet of aluminum and a tone generator, testing which of a handful of different contact microphones to use to connect the two. During one of these tests, a particularly idiosyncratic frequency response is observed, in which certain frequencies are passed through and others attenuated in a highly idiosyncratic pattern. After having tested several contact microphones using the same sound source with the metal sheet, it seems clear that this frequency response is a unique property of the microphone; consequently, the microphone comes to the foreground as an object of interest. The participant reaches across the table for another previously wired-up object and replaces an old contact microphone with this new one. The new sound is completely unlike either the sound of the old microphone or the sound of the metal sheet with the new microphone. The participant then considers whether to use a glue gun or a clamp. On the workbench cluttered with objects, it can become difficult to distinguish the technical from the epistemic quite quickly. In fact, Tudor's objects could be said to embody the epistemic and the technical simultaneously through the internal conflation of the sound source and the vibration of the object. More pressing than the isolation of these two functions—epistemic objects are inevitably hybrids of one sort or another—is the answer to another question that is especially significant within the realm of music: In this experimental system, what precisely is the role of sound?
Rheinberger has devoted great attention to the representation of knowledge in his scholarship, maintaining that epistemic objects hold the status of a trace: A Derridean form of generalized writing.Footnote 91 My aim in these final paragraphs is not to contribute any broader claim of my own, but rather to focus on the role of sound within the particular epistemological context of a sub-genre of experimental music. In short, I aim to examine the sense in which sound can be regarded as a way of knowing. This belief is latent (and frequently made explicit) in a wide range of mid-century experimental musics. For example, throughout her life, Oliveros was fond of observing that even in the ocular-centric North American culture in which she lived, it is the ear that tells the eye where to look. This seems like a particularly apt way of describing the activity of a performance of Nikola Tesla, in which the musicians are guided throughout the theater and its adjoining spaces by sound. In fact, at virtually every point at which there is some degree of indeterminacy in the performance, the next course of action is determined by the ear. The performance begins with an amplified conversation regarding the acoustics of the space, a conversation likely informed by the amplified sounds of the musicians’ own voices as they speak. This sonic knowledge informs the way the sound-making instruments are used during the exploration of the space, which, in turn, determines the sounds deemed most interesting for recording. In the final section, the frequency to which the tone generators will be set is contingent upon all that is heard in the preceding performance. As the musicians turn up the volume, two different sounds are heard to occur simultaneously: The vibration of the space, in all its unpredictable and exciting cacophony; and the sound of the tone generators, blasted at high amplification through the sound system, which excites these vibrations. Just as with Tudor's objects, sound appears concurrently in two guises: As a technology for hearing resonance or vibration, and in the audible resonance itself. The resonance, though nominally aesthetic, exhibits an epistemic quality insofar as the musicians hear it and, consciously or not, allow it to shape the future operation of the experimental system.
Just as the experimental system is driven by the emergence of epistemic objects, I propose that the experimentation that resulted in what came to be known as resonance aesthetics was oriented toward the production of epistemic sound. Epistemic sounds suggest new knowledge, or ways of knowing, interrupting the stability of the system and drawing attention to themselves, thereby extending the experimental system into the future. Through their very unexpectedness, they demand the musician's attention, and a reorientation of the system that places themselves at the center, albeit temporarily. Without such sounds and such moments, the activity of experimental music—from afternoons spent tinkering to evenings spent performing—would quickly dissipate. Epistemic sounds do not have a characteristic material or perceptual quality; they do not correlate with a certain range, loudness, or timbre. Like epistemic objects, they are defined by their function—whether or not they represent knowledge to their beholder—and in this way, exist only in relation to the researchers themselves.
Yet the fit is not a perfect one. So far I have not challenged the assumption that “unexpected” sounds are equivalent to “unfamiliar” ones. However, I would propose that what most vividly distinguishes this experimental system from Rheinberger's model is a peculiar correspondence between the familiar and the unexpected when it comes to sound. What truly interrupts and destabilizes the noisy, cacophonous sounds of a performance of Nikola Tesla—or Rainforest, or any work of resonance aesthetics—is not another new sound, but a familiar one that emerges unexpectedly from the din. Tudor was known for rarely intervening or interacting with his system once it was turned on.Footnote 92 How else to account for his extraordinary patience? We might venture that he was waiting for an aporic moment of serendipitous perception, or unexpected recognition.
Conclusion
Employing one of his favorite metaphors for scientific research, Rheinberger describes the experimental system as a “labyrinth, whose walls, in the course of being erected, in one and the same movement, blind and guide the experimenter.”Footnote 93 He adds that an analogous process guides creative experimentation as well, insofar as artists and musicians are guided by the subterranean tunnels and shafts of earlier work as they pursue the unknown. So far I have argued that many experimental musicians were not driven by a pursuit of unknown sounds per se, but rather by unprecedented means with which to achieve the sounds of a familiar aesthetic sound world. Although the experimental system describes much of the activity of experimental music, a final, signal difference can be illuminated through this metaphor of the labyrinth. The scientific researcher hopes to explore as deep within the labyrinth as possible, slowly moving forward while being both guided and increasingly directed by previous work. By contrast, experimental musicians find themselves within the labyrinth to begin with, and seek a way out. In other words, the uncertainties of performing (or rehearsing or tinkering, for that matter) cannot be regarded as an end goal, but rather as a deep point within a labyrinthine system of research from which musicians return, again and again, to the same sound world. The performance of works like Rainforest, Hornpipe, and Nikola Tesla thematize—we might even say dramatize—this return, from points of increasing depth and remoteness.
It is curious to note that Frederic Rzewski's 1967 experimental composition Spacecraft, comprising several pages of verbal instructions for guided improvisation, employs the same metaphor, plainly stating that “the object of the music-making is to escape from the labyrinth.”Footnote 94 Just as the researcher might return toward the entrance to pursue a new inquiry bifurcating from previous steps, the experimental musician ventures deeper in a subsequent performance or work only to make the return—the escape—more meaningful. Whether Rzewski's metaphor precisely matches the confluence I am describing between experimental music and the experimental system or not, he is nonetheless similarly sensitive to the existing sonic ideals that a “virtuosic” musician can draw from:
His mind is like a complicated organ with many keys: an “inspiration” key, a “composition” key, a “communication with God” key, a “Beethoven” key, a “Stockhausen” and a “Cage” key: one for every myth…. He knows that if one thing does not satisfy him he can immediately flip a switch and turn on something else. This is his virtuosity.Footnote 95
Rzewski goes on to suggest that the use of this virtuosity constitutes a kind of artistic failure: “he has done nothing to escape from his labyrinth.”Footnote 96 Although Rzewski was not directly involved in the mainstream of resonance aesthetics, he would have been a familiar figure nonetheless.Footnote 97 His critical perspective on virtuosity, meanwhile, once again raises the issue of the relationship between the experimenter's skill and the independence with which the experimental system develops. In experimental music, it seems that the independence of the system facilitates new starting points and paths of return from within the labyrinth, but not new exits. This observation, in turn, brings experimental music into dialogue with other musical cultures: The idea that it is aesthetically interesting to follow how a performer will plot a musical “return” from an uncertain starting point is a recurring theme in many traditions of improvised music.Footnote 98
This application of Rheinberger's model prompts a reconsideration of spontaneity in musical performance more generally. For example, many writers appear eager to characterize every facet of performance as an expression of individuals’ will and preparation, whether consciously or through frameworks such as embodied knowledge or distributed cognition. Yet it is possible to agree that the improviser is “always making choices,” as Vijay Iyer writes, without necessarily attributing everything that occurs in performance to musicians’ intentionality.Footnote 99 In fact, this point of view actually underestimates the spontaneity of performance by bracketing out the possibility of anything truly unexpected taking place, as if all possible contingencies were latent in (or between) the performers. The truth is, no musical performance ever proceeds entirely as intended: The slip of a finger may decisively guide an individual's actions, or an ensemble member's signal may be misinterpreted or missed altogether. What Rheinberger's approach illustrates is that like experimental researchers, performing musicians’ skill is not merely a matter of avoiding the unexpected to the extent possible through superior coordination or preparation, but of coping successfully when it inevitably intervenes—indeed, of thriving in it. In this context, accounting for spontaneity through networks of causation, intention, or interaction is beside the point. Just as sound takes on an epistemic character because the listener recognizes knowledge in it and not because of any intrinsic quality, the unexpected is entirely a function of individual perception.
At the same time, the musical context proposes further nuance to the contours of the experimental system. Virtuosic musicians—and especially improvisers—are highly skilled at establishing conditions congenial to the production of felicitous events, even if these events are genuinely spontaneous on an individual basis. However, in musical performance these conditions are frequently collaborative and socially mediated. If Rheinberger's vision of experimental virtuosity is centered around intimacy between the scientist and the materiality of their setup, musical performance proposes an arena for experimentation in which intimacy is conceived as both distributed and reciprocal. Consider the familiarity the members of a chamber ensemble might come to share over the course of a decade or two of playing together, or the sheer number of miniscule adjustments made in and between hundreds of rehearsals and performances. Each performer grapples with their own instrument, but also with their collaborators and their instruments who, though constantly present, nevertheless always remain just out of reach. It remains to be seen how the framework of the experimental system might be extended to sufficiently describe an analogous multiplicity within a collaborative experimental research setting.
Perhaps it is unsurprising that the practitioners of resonance aesthetics seemed to prefer that their own instruments dwell beyond their reach as well. Oliveros wrote that the space “performs in sympathy with the musicians,” while Tudor often expressed that his electronic systems appeared to take on a life of their own.Footnote 100 One might be tempted to see in these characterizations an echo of the Cagean experiment in which the composer represented himself as “a scientist who does nothing more than create the conditions in which the natural realm can speak for itself,” as Piekut puts it.Footnote 101 Nevertheless there is clearly an important role for performers to take on in mediating between the familiar and unfamiliar, even if their activities do not appear to be particularly skillful or expressive at first glance. As Mumma writes of Hornpipe, even though the “cybernetic console” seems to exhibit intelligence, it pales in comparison with the capacities of the hornist, whose musical choices “involve a history of vastly complex habits, performance virtuosity skills, and interactively responsive experiences.”Footnote 102 That Mumma, designer of Hornpipe's electronics, was also the only performer to ever realize the composition seems to clinch the argument.
Although Rheinberger has written that, in an experimental system, “the better one knows one's object, the subtler it resists one's wishes,” the performances and practices of resonance aesthetics make clear that the objects still resist.Footnote 103 By foregrounding this tension between the performer and the materiality of the system, Mumma, Tudor, and Oliveros avoided the essentializing and ventriloquizing tendencies of Cage's project. Cage got to know his system well enough that he could predict its results: It became a technology for hearing the voice of nature, at least as he understood it, and was soon discarded. Whereas Cage's works in the 1970s seemed to inaugurate a very different kind of research project, the material links of resonance aesthetics forged in the experimentation of the previous decade persist to the present in unexpected ways, especially in the discipline of sound art. The framework of the experimental system suggests one possible explanation for this longevity: The pursuit of the uniquely uncertain conditions under which epistemic sound could emerge continually extended the practice into the future. This trajectory seems to illustrate something fundamental about the pursuit of knowledge itself—namely that it is characterized not by increasing certainty, but rather by flux and doubt.
