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Dewar, Andrew Raffo . "Handmade Sounds: The Sonic Arts Union and American Technoculture," Music Department, Wesleyan University, 2009. Advisor: Prof. Mark Slobin
This dissertation explores the history and technological aesthetics of the
Sonic Arts Union (SAU), a seminal electronic music group formed in the
United States in 1966 by composers Robert Ashley, David Behrman, Alvin
Lucier and Gordon Mumma.
Chapter 1, an overview of the cultural milieu from which the group’s work
emerged, interrogates their position in an American experimentalist
tradition and questions the maintenance of some of the existing
historiographical bounds on this subject.
The SAU’s use, abuse, construction and recontextualization of technical
objects and their role in the formation of a new musical genre, live
electronic music, is the subject of Chapter 2. This chapter establishes the
roots of the SAU’s handmade electronic instruments in a post-WWII American
“tinkering” tradition whose more popular forms include activities such as
ham radio culture and drag racing. The chapter also considers “folk”
qualities and ideas of technological utopianism that may run through their
work.
Chapter 3 is a sustained engagement with Alvin Lucier’s composition for
amplified brainwaves, Music for Solo Performer (1965).
A thick descriptive reading of one composition from each SAU composer is the
focus of Chapter 4. Works discussed include Robert Ashley’s The Wolfman
(1964), David Behrman’s Wave Train (1966), Alvin Lucier’s Vespers (1967) and
Gordon Mumma’s Hornpipe (1967). Each piece is viewed in terms of its
engagement and incorporation of the performance site into the work, its
operational properties as a cybernetic system, its utilization of
technology, and its application of acoustic and structural feedback.
In foregrounding the Sonic Arts Union’s exploration of the physical
properties of electronic circuitry, I illustrate how they applied a
tinkering impulse emanating from their specific historical and cultural
location for a subversive form of techno-aesthetic play, and highlight the
significance of the social construction of technical objects to the study of
electronic music history.
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