Wiardgroup

At 08:20 PM 12/15/2008, Grant Richter wrote:
>You know I have been thinking for a long time now, that calling it 
>"electronic music" has
>really been a one ton anchor around the neck of electronic sound.
>[snip -- no need to re-quote it all]

Gustavo Matamoros is a Miami-based "composer" (more on that term in a 
second) who has run iSAW and the Subtropics festival for about 20 
years. Subtropics is an almost annual series of music/sound events 
(http://subtropics.org/, see also http://isaw.info/) that has 
featured people like John Cage, Gino Robair, and David Dunn, among 
many others. What I really want to mention here, though, is that 
Gustavo has wrestled with questions like "What do you do? Is that 
music? What the...?" for a long time. ;-)

Well, Gustavo's business card now bills him as an "An Artist Working 
with Sound". That's not a bad label, IMHO. How do you describe 
something like the installation he did on the grounds of Vizcaya 
(http://www.musiconabudget.com/)? It was certainly not "music" (in 
the conventional sense, at least). Yet, it was "composed" in that a 
lot of planning and building and testing went into it.

Are the terms "sound art" and "sound artist" are too pretentious? The 
word "art" carries a lot of baggage, after all.

Synthesizers are used in conventional music, to make self-running 
aleatoric patches ("bug music"?), and for a whole spectrum of things 
in-between those endpoints (assuming that those are the endpoints). 
So, I don't think there is one term that applies to all our efforts, anyway.

John