# Becoming a sound artist: analytic and creative perspectives: Video

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2018/02/09/becoming-a-sound-artist-analytic-and-creative-perspectives-video/
- Published: 2018-02-09T10:22:25+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**Recently, in a Harvard graduate seminar with visiting composer-scholar George 
Lewis, the eminent professor asked me pointedly if I considered myself a “sound 
artist.” Finding myself put on the spot in a room mostly populated with white male
colleagues who were New Music composers, I paused and wondered whether I had the
right to identify that way. **

Despite having exploded many conventions through my precarious membership in New
York’s improvised/creative music scene, and through my shift from identifying as
a “mrudangam artist” to calling myself an “improviser,” and even, begrudgingly, 
a “composer” — somehow “sound artist” seemed a bit far-fetched. As I sat in the 
seminar, buckling under the pressure of how my colleagues probably defined sound
art, Prof. Lewis gently urged me to ask: How would it change things if I did call
myself a sound artist? Rather than imposing the limitations of sound art as a genre,
he was inviting me to reframe my existing aesthetic intentions, assumptions, and
practices by focusing on sound.

Sound art and its offshoots have their own unspoken codes and politics of membership,
which is partly what Prof. Lewis was trying to expose in that teaching moment. However,
for now I’ll leave aside these pragmatic obstacles — while remaining keenly aware
that the question of who gets to be a sound artist is not too distant from the question
of who gets to be an artist, and what counts as art. For my own analytic and creative
curiosity, I would like to strip sound art down to its fundamentals: an offering
of resonance or vibration, in the context of a community that might find something
familiar, of aesthetic value, or socially cohesive, in the gestures and sonorities
presented.

![](https://soundstudies.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/meenas-dream.jpg?w=640&h=269&
fit=479%2C269)

I have spent most of my musical life wondering how the sounds I produce intersect
with specific vectors of social belonging. The sounds emanating from my primary 
instrument — the mrudangam, a South Indian drum — are situated within a complex 
lattice of social difference, resonating within and across communities as disparate
as the predominantly privileged-caste audiences of Chennai’s elite Karnatik sabha-
s and the cosmopolitan connoisseurs who show up to find a home in New York City’s
myriad intercultural and experimental music spaces. The sounds I produce are also
inflected by the multivalent referentiality of my own socially situated body — as
a queer, privileged-caste, Indian-American woman — simultaneously slicing through
and answering to sonic environments organized around particular notions of rigor,
virtuosity, and beauty.

For me, what began as a creative path rooted in the mimesis of an artistic lineage
eventually settled in a versatile expressive voice, shaped by a decade of aesthetic(
and ethical) nomadism. From my vantage point as a female percussionist in the South
Asian diaspora, I have always been aware of the cracks in the veneer of tradition
and other normative structures, and perhaps this fueled my musical vagrancy. Over
time, my sound has accumulated the resonances of Karnatik music, ‘jazz’ drumming,
bharatanatyam footwork, and Afro-Cuban rhythms, among others.

![](https://soundstudies.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/rajna-2.jpg?w=479&h=359&fit
=640%2C640)

**The author performing with Vijay Iyer, Graham Haynes, and Marcus Gilmore. The 
Stone, NYC. July 2013.**

Certainly, this convergence of sonic layers is mediated by the rich specificity 
of interpersonal relationships and positionalities within larger networks. Power
and positionality mediate the shape, audibility, and versatility of sounds as they
become coupled with the implied (or actual) encounter of socially situated bodies.
Yet, sounds somehow continue to exist in excess of the mechanisms and bodies that
attempt to explain, produce, and contain them: idiom, tradition, space, culture,
nation, race, gender, and sexuality. Therein lies their potency and mystery, and
I intend to briefly explore the sensation of sonic excess in the hopes of honing
a more sensitive analytic and creative perspective.

I am yet to become comfortable thinking in terms of sound, due to the longtime privileging
of structure and technique in my musical upbringing. However, this is beginning 
to unravel as I am forced to _deal with_ sound, particularly the sound of what Patrice
Pavis and Jason Stanyek have called the “intercorporeal” aspect of intercultural
performance. The predominantly improvised sounds that resonate through my mrudangam
often emerge on the edge of my dynamic embodied consciousness, arranging themselves
chaotically in real-time, interacting with others’ emergent soundings and sensory
yearnings. Some of it may be mediated by parallel perceptual and idiomatic forms,
but achieving a core interactive flow involves a fundamental immersion in _sound_.

**_Mat Maneri, feat. Rajna and Anjna Swaminathan_**

**_Tongues Series, curated by Amirtha Kidambi_**

**_ISSUE Project Room — June 18, 2016_**

For instance, take this impromptu piece presented by violist Mat Maneri, violinist
Anjna Swaminathan (my sister), and me in 2016. It took place in the wonderfully 
resonant vaulted space of ISSUE Project Room, in front of an unsuspecting audience
that had convened to hear the back-to-back juxtaposition of two improvisational “
tongues” — a set of Maneri’s rich microtonal experiments, followed by a Karnatik
concert of voice, violin, and mrudangam. However, this impromptu ludic exchange 
of sonic offerings — particularly Maneri’s incredible, chameleon-like ability to
confound the sounds of Karnatik ornamentations with his own microtonal reflections—
guided attention away from comparison and toward the sounds as they bounced eerily
around the resonant architecture. Faced with the technically daunting Karnatik repertoire
that Anjna and I were to play subsequently with vocalist Ashvin Bhogendra, the echoes
of our interstitial collaboration allowed us to reorient ourselves and breathe a
little easier.

From an analytic perspective, it is irresponsible to distill these sounds, to capture
and conceptualize them as distinct from the bodies, histories, and discourses that
participate in their co-creation and interpretation. Yet, riddled as they are with
generations of power asymmetries and complex emotions, it is clear that these resonances
have a secret life of their own. As musicians, we are not often given the opportunity
to explore these clandestine, almost Baudelairean, correspondences, except perhaps
when we discover them by accident. For instance, sonic ambiguities like those spun
during the trio encounter play on sonic excess to spur new ways of listening and
relating, with a direct ethical impact on the ensuing music.

![](https://soundstudies.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/open-city.jpg?w=479&h=319&fit
=640%2C640)

**Performing in Vijay Iyer’s large ensemble project, “Open City,” named after Teju
Cole’s award-winning novel. October 2013.**

John Blacking’s definition of all music as “humanly organized sound” is perhaps 
an early articulation of this idea, although the word ‘organized’ contains a bias
toward formal structure and stability. To be sure, organizing principles always 
exist at the local level of socially situated perception and expression, which Nina
Sun Eidsheim calls the ‘figure of sound.’ However, the kind of sound art I’m proposing
revels in excess, or as Eidsheim puts it — “not only aurality, but also tactile,
spatial, physical, material, and vibrational sensations [that] are at the core of
all music” (5). We can even turn to how Jacques Attali poetically describes composition—
as “a labor on sounds, without a grammar, without a directing thought, a pretext
for festival, in search of thoughts,” a practice wherein “rhythms and sounds are
the supreme mode of relation between bodies once the screens of the symbolic, usage
and exchange are shattered,” one that neither marks nor produces the body, but allows
for “taking pleasure in it” (143). By focusing on the multi-sensory, pleasurable
valences of sound, and on the ways in which sonic excess allows for new patterns
of coexistence, we can outline a ‘sound art’ practice and analytic that aren’t circumscribed
by Western institutional definitions and technological/perceptual biases.

Thinking in this way about sound and vibration helps to eradicate the mind-body 
problem that continues to plague certain areas of music studies and music making.
Sound forms an elusive common denominator that doesn’t rely heavily on colonial 
taxonomies of form or hierarchical theories of art. It even accounts for the subversive
or incommensurable resonances that tend to emerge at the unstable threshold between
so-called ‘producers’ and ‘receivers’ of music. After all, sound is in the ear of
the beholder, and social asymmetries are embedded in the way we hear and listen.
Through the notion of vibration, we are further attuned to the visceral space in
which it reverberates, and the ways in which its echoes live on in the bodies of
those who experience it.

![](https://soundstudies.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/rajna.jpg?w=200&h=300&fit=200%
2C300&resize=200%2C300)

**Performing at the Banff International Workshop for Jazz and Creative Music. June
2013. Photo credit: Don Lee, Image courtesy of author.**

Finally, there is the other definition of _sound _in English, which indicates a 
level of trust and holism. Taking this path to becoming ‘sound artist’ focuses attention
on the _artist_. I don’t intend to focus on the ‘chops’ conventional to a field 
of aesthetic practice. Rather, I am interested in the more obscure meaning: a ‘sound
artist’ as one that_ ethically occupies space as an artist_.

How might this emerging sound art, as analytic and creative practice, work to interrogate
the very ethics and politics of _art_, while succumbing to the contingency and volatile
excess of sound? I don’t claim to hold the answers, but if we are in any way _sounding
out_ against the grain of dominant modalities, then at some level we must attend
seriously to sound: in its excess, as it overwhelms bodies and spaces, and as it
stretches the realm of the known.

![](https://soundstudies.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/bv08orxcyaaxe1p.jpg?w=640)

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