This article is part of the museum's special section about how museums strive to offer visitors even more to see, do, and feel.
Flute music was, you know, good flute music. But for the audience that fell silent at the kickoff event for the Art of Noise exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in February, the breathtaking scales were just part of the experience.
The colorful costumes of the flute player (by the way, it was Andre 3000) was also a valuable experience. The crisp speakers were an experience, and so was the smoke machine. Then, two lasers pass through a glass of water balanced on top of a traffic cone on center stage – Andre 3000 has previously announced an increased interest in traffic cones. -That was an experience.
Music is music. But music is also about the things that surround it.
From May 4th to August 18th, SFMOMA will illustrate this truism with an exhibition of visual and technical artifacts plucked from music's lower orbit. The Art of Noise is comprised of more than 800 works, including early listening devices, cutting-edge speakers, and iconic album covers, loosely grouped under the heading of design. In addition, he has four sound installations that generate their own artistic noises. However, the real theme of this program may be our relationship with music itself.
Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, “The White Album,'' Coltrane Live at Birdland: They themselves are nothing more than air molecules vibrating across our eardrums. Music becomes sacred in part through the material culture it inspires.
And just as music shapes design, think jazz album covers and metal album covers. Design also encodes the way we listen to music. Xerox's old punk show flyers had information on how to absorb those songs. The iconic advertisement for Maxell's cassette tapes contained hidden signals about the spirit of rock.
The show starts with a funny moment. Listening to music has never been this easy and you can ignore it. Easily accessible digitally to virtually any recording has paradoxically diminished our connection to it all. I've been immersed in one precious cassette for months, and when I know that the rewind button is ringing deep in my memory at my fingertips, it's gone!
But what has passed is an invitation to reflection: to appreciate how we got here and to imagine what lies ahead.
The encounter between art and music
“Art is a way of decorating space; music is a way of decorating time,” Jean-Michel Basquiat is quoted as saying. But sometimes art adorns music. Nowhere was this more stunningly vivid than in the heyday of San Francisco's psychedelic rock posters.
Four bright walls of these wild lithographs are collected here, a small shrine to a brain-melting era. Borrowed from Art Nouveau, Acid Trip, and more, posters existed to communicate news of upcoming concerts. Like the space-age stereos and vintage headphones elsewhere in this exhibition, they were a delivery technology. Concert promoters like Bill Graham ask artists to promote upcoming Grateful Dead shows, and a week later, voila! As an ad, it was difficult to read because the squares were filtered, and even harder to miss.
“Musicians were turning up their amps so loud that their eardrums were blown out,” rock poster artist Victor Moscoso once said in an interview. “I did the same thing with the eyeballs.”
Like the Golden Gate Bridge, '60s rock posters became overrepresented in the city's imagination. But like the Golden Gate, this building also allows for a closer look. There are nuances to these fancy squiggles, and unexpected variety from poster to poster. And when you see hundreds of pieces swirling cheeks in every color imaginable, something bigger comes into focus. It was a moment when music was filling American cities week after week with unique new artistic genres.
feel the energy
A few years ago, while Devon Turnbull was making a name for himself with his popular streetwear line Nom de Guerre, he started noticing a problem. His first love was music. But his new iPod in my pocket made it easy for me to listen to him.
“I wasn't having the kind of meaningful musical experiences I had when I was younger. I wanted a deeper connection,” Turnbull said in a phone interview.
Turnbull, who trained as an audio engineer, set out to create a new kind of sound system that might rekindle that connection. Working under the name Ojas and sourcing obscure components from Japan to create brutalist-style amplifiers and speakers, he quickly gained a cult following, but not for their flawless fidelity. was.
“The way I design audio systems is not the way most high-end audio manufacturers do it,” he said. “I'm designing equipment that provides more emotional content, not necessarily better specs.”
In the “HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 2'' created for the exhibition, visitors can immerse themselves in the moving content. This small space, housed in its own gallery, has an austere, spaceship-like feel, but then a stream of vinyl and reel-to-reel picks from a variety of genres rolls in, each one unusually deep and natural. I can hear you aiming for listening. As Turnbull said, it feels like the musicians' “energy is actually in the room.”
“It's almost like he's making speakers more than ears,” said Joseph Becker, SFMOMA's associate curator of architecture and design and curator of “The Art of Noise.”
endless song
It was in the early '80s that music and design collided and struck a chord with Jesper Kouthoofd. The young Swede was witnessing the civilizational leap forward that was the Sony Walkman and its ability to make the music he loved portable. Suddenly, improbably, Kraftwerk was able to ride the bus with him to school.
Almost half a century later, Kuthoeft makes a living shocking others with his music and design. The consumer electronics company he co-founded, Teenage Engineering, makes futuristic synthesizers, speakers, and other audio equipment. A few years ago, the group introduced “Choir,” his set of eight speakers in the shape of wooden dolls that form a kind of algorithmically programmed chorus. The dolls on display in his small media gallery here sing songs from a variety of genres, from barbershop to baroque. The robot choir also listens to his own music via his Bluetooth and uses contrapuntal melodies to devise original improvisations bar by bar.
“In old Sweden, everyone had an organ in their house instead of a TV,” Koothoeft said by phone. “The church organ is my favorite instrument, like the voice of God. It's a lot like my second favorite choir.”
Koothoot added that every religion has its own unique soundscape. This soundscape may even evoke a strange religion in itself.
sound on sound
Literally, on the museum's second-floor outdoor landing stands a piece that stands out from the rest. A small grove of tree-like sculptures stands out against the backdrop of Natoma Street, a narrow mix of high-rises and low-rise office buildings. As we approach these colorful metal tubes, it becomes clear that they are speakers and are talking to us.
Or maybe they're talking to us. From a collection of local field recordings, including church bells, foghorns, and cable car rattles, Japanese artist and musician Yuri Suzuki was commissioned to compose a remix soundtrack of San Francisco itself. (Her purpose-built sound-sculpting heads are reminiscent of the city's pioneering sound art theater, the Audium.) The piece uses artificial intelligence to comb through a database of sound recordings with similar waveforms. , blending them into evolving patterns.
Is the urban soundscape music? Wait, what exactly is music? You can ponder these questions, or you can just sit and listen in the fresh air. A pastiche of city sounds (cars, voices, random clatters) blends with actual city sounds (cars, voices, random clatters) right over your shoulder, creating a meditative sense of direction. Loss abounds in “Arborhythm.”
So you listen closer. If this is the final result, if this is the final result of the entire exhibition, it will certainly be in harmony.