CURATED LIBRARIES

A Sound Art Bookshelf

Since Edgard Varèse defined music as “organized sound” in the first half of the twentieth century--paving the way for musique concrète and the experiments of John Cage--it has been possible to approach acoustic phenomena as one would any tangible material, that is, to arrange or distort sound without considerations of melody, harmony or the classical composition. The term “sound art” arose in the U.S. in the 1980s, to describe the work of a number of artists who had made purely sound-based art alongside other kinds of practices, and has since occupied an ambiguous interzone between the “cultures” of art and music. The artists/musicians below pursue a primarily sound-derived or sound-oriented art; some of them, such as Christian Marclay and Brandon LaBelle, are among the first generation of artists to work exclusively in this fertile ground.

Christian Marclay guest curated the ICA Philadelphia's 2007 exhibition Ensemble, a group show of works that make sound.

I've always used found objects, images and sounds, and collaged them together, and tried to create something new and different with what was available. To be totally original and start from scratch always seemed futile.

Christian Marclay