MaxNeuhaus

I have always been fascinated by people who make it big in one field and he decide to chuck that and do something else. A man makes a pile of money in designer watchbands, for example, and walks away from it to become a teacher, a rancher, or, wha’s more likely these days, a video artist. In Max Neuhaus’s case, the switch was more subtle but no less dramatic. A virtuoso percussionist with a master’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music, Neuhaus toured the United States and Europe in the mid-nineteen-sixties giving solo recitals of percussion works by Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, and other modernist composers. Along the way, he found himself becoming increasingly disenchanted with the whole idea of concert halls, performances, and virtuosity itself. In 1968, he quit performing. He cut a record for Columbia Masterworks that more or less summed up his concert work to date, put his two thousand pounds of percussion equipment in storage, and went out to become a maker of 'sound environments' in the world at large — places whose ambience is defined or altered by the electronic sound systems that he secretes within them. The best-known of these environments (although not many people are aware of it) is the narrow pedestrian island that separates Broadway from Seventh Avenue between Forty-fifth and Forty-sixth. If you walk briskly across, you can easily miss it, but if you stand there for a few moments you will hear, above the roar and screech of Times Square traffic, a deep, resonant, harmonic hum, something like the aftertone of a very large bell. It comes from a loudspeaker mounted in a hole underneath the steel grating, and it is a wonderfully satisfying sound.

Communion with sound has always been bound by time. Meaning in speech and music appers only as their sound events unfold word by word, phrase by phrase, from moment to moment.
My Place works share a different fundamental idea — that of removing sound from time and setting it, instead, in place.

I call a group of my sound works Moment or Time Pieces. They are artworks which take the form of communal sound signals. The basic idea of these works, though, is to form the sound signal with a silence rather than a sound.
The first full-scale realization, Time Piece Graz, was commissioned in 2003 by the Landesmuseum Joannem, Graz.

As a percussionist I had been directly involved in the gradual insertion of everyday sounds into the concert hall, from Russolo through Edgard Varese and finally to John Cage where live street sounds were brought directly into the hall. I saw these activities as a way of giving aesthetic credence to these sounds – something I was all for. I began to question the effectiveness of the method, though. Most members of the audience seemed more impressed with the scandal of 'ordinary' sounds placed in a 'sacred' place than with the sounds themselves, and few were able to carry the experience over to a new perspective on the sounds of their daily lives.
I became interested in going a step further. Why limit listening to the concert hall? Instead of bringing these sounds into the hall, why not simply take the audience outside?

In the 1980's I decided to take on the problem of redesigning the sounds of emergency-vehicle sirens. The project's focuses were to make sounds that were locatable in an urban environment so people would know what to do when they heard one, to allow two drivers of emergency vehicles to hear each other when their sirens were on so they wouldn't run into each other, and to make sounds we could live with – which would have authority without being authoritarian.

Auracle is a networked sound instrument, controlled by the voice. It is played and heard over the Internet. Anyone can use it by simply launching it in their web browser at www.auracle.org and creating sounds unaccompanied or with other participants in real time.
It grew out of an interest of mine in the potential of music-making with the lay public over networks. The first realization in this direction was Public Supply in 1966. It arrived whole, as a vision, to make a live sound collage with a general public telephoning in sounds to a New York radio station. Over the next decade, I gradually developed this concept with other realizations and finally in 1977 realized Radio Net, a two-hour nationwide radio event where ten thousand people played a cross-country instrument with their voices.

My initial activities as an artist were as a solo performer on large arrays of percussion instruments. At the age of fourteen, I decided that I wanted to be a musician. This took me on a journey which brought me to New York to study percussion in 1957, to the stage of Carnegie Hall as a solo percussionist in 1964, through a solo tour of European capitals in 1965, and finally to record my solo repertoire for Columbia Masterworks in 1968. At the age of twenty-eight, I decided to stop performing.

Water Whistle series

I realized these under-water aural topogra-phies in swimming pools heated to body tempe-rature. The audience listened to the work, which could only be heard underwater, by lying in the water on their backs, ears submerged, nose and mouth out.
They mark the beginning of my transition from working in concert halls to making site-specific sound works. The basis for this series was the exploration of the new sound world offered by our different sense of hearing in water.

The Passage works are situated in spaces where the physical movement of the listener through the space to reach a destination is inherent. They imply an active role on the part of listeners, who set a static sound structure into motion for themselves by passing through it. My first work with an aural topography, Drive In Music in 1967, falls within this vector.