Max Neuhaus

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Max Neuhaus
Max Neuhaus in Stommeln-Pulheim, Germany discussing "Time Piece Stommeln" 2007
Max Neuhaus in Stommeln-Pulheim, Germany discussing "Time Piece Stommeln" 2007
Background information
Born 1939
Genre(s) Avant-garde, experimental
Occupation(s) Public Art, Sound Art, Sound installation
Years active 1957 – Present
Website www.max-neuhaus.info

Max Neuhaus (b.1939 in Beaumont, Texas) was a percussionist and interpreter of contemporary music in the 1960s who moved on to pioneer artistic activities with sound. He has created numerous sound works (including sound installations) that have extended sound as an autonomous medium into the domain of contemporary art.

In the early sixties, Neuhaus performed as a percussion soloist on concert tours throughout the United States with Pierre Boulez (1962-63) and Karlheinz Stockhausen[1] (1963-64). In 1964 and 1965 he presented solo recitals at Carnegie Hall in New York City and in European capitals.[1] The world of the percussionist is one focused on sound timbre; Neuhaus traveled with one thousand kilos of percussion instruments to perform his solo repertoire. He extended this palette of sound color by inventing several early electro-acoustic instruments. His solo album recorded for Columbia Masterworks in 1968[2] stands as one of the first examples of what is now called live electronic music.

Neuhaus went on to pioneer artistic activities outside conventional cultural contexts and began to realize sound works anonymously in public places, developing art forms of his own. Utilizing his sense of sound and people's reactions to it gained after fourteen years as a musician, he began to make sound works which were neither music nor events and coined the term 'sound installation' to describe them. In these works without beginning or end, the sounds were placed in space rather than in time. Starting from the premise that our sense of place depends on what we hear, as well as on what we see, he utilized a given social and aural context as a foundation to build a new perception of place with sound. With the realization of these non-visual artworks for museums in America and Europe, he became the first to extend sound as an autonomous medium into the field of contemporary art.[2]

He has continued his activities in music with his Networks or Broadcast Works, virtual architectures which act as forums open to anyone for the evolution of new musics. In the first Public Supply in 1966, he combined a radio station with the telephone network and created a two-way public aural space twenty miles in diameter encompassing New York City, where any inhabitant could join a live dialogue with sound by making a phone call. Later, in 1977 with Radio Net, he formed a nationwide network with 190 radio stations. The current project, Auracle, constructs a twenty-four hour a day global entity for live interaction with sound over the Internet.

In his Moment works,[3] a series of large scale sound works for whole communities, he utilizes the cessation of sound to create a periodic sense of silence throughout the community, both marking time and creating reflective moments. The most recent of these is a commission from the Dia Art Foundation for the Dia:Beacon Museum in Beacon, New York.[4]

Over the last four decades, he has created a large number of sound works for various environments, including permanent works in the United States (Times Square in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago) and Europe (CAPC Musée d'Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France; the AOK Building, Kassel, Germany; the Castello di Rivoli, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Italy; and the Kunsthaus Graz, Austria), along with numerous short-term works in museums and exhibitions (the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Clocktower in New York City; ARC, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Centre National d'Art Contemporain, Grenoble, France; the Kunsthalle Basel and the Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; Documenta 6 and 9, Kassel, Germany; and the Venice Biennale, Italy), and numerous one-person exhibitions of his drawings.

His interests are diverse. He designs the sound generation and projection systems which realize his work, himself. He has originated new concepts of aural urban design, and utilized his knowledge of sound technology and the psychology of sound to design a more humane and safer set of sounds for emergency vehicles. He has begun a ten-volume series of retrospective books on his oeuvre with the publication of Max Neuhaus: Sound Works, vols. I-III (Ostfildern-Stuttgart: Cantz, 1994).

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[edit] References

  1. ^ Karlheinz Stockhausen "Zyklus": "When Neuhaus first started to play this piece there were only three percussionists in the world who could play it. Stockhausen's idea was that a performer would play the piece spontaneously, making its complex decisions on the fly. No one played it this way; it was too difficult. Everyone wrote out his own version of the score and played from it. Coming from the world of jazz Neuhaus decided he wanted to take up the challenge of playing it spontaneously. At that time percussionists generally played only one instrument at a time. Playing twenty one simultaneously was unheard of. Neuhaus quickly realized that the only way to do it, in fact, was to think of all them together as just one instrument, one multi-surfaced bank of timbre. Neuhaus decided to travel to Europe and go to Darmstadt where Stockhausen was teaching. He wanted to talk to him about the piece. Stockhausen was interested in the idea that the twenty one instruments had to be physically formed into one instrument and that so much work had been done already. So he offered Neuhaus the big opportunity to perform 'Zyklus' on the first American tour. Stockhausen came over to New York to hear Neuhaus play, but he wasn't satisfied with the improvisation version. It was too long. Neuhaus was determined to teach himself how to do it for this tour. He had another six months. He got down to seven minutes; and he was still improvising, not writing it out. He was ready to play that piece, and played it like nobody had ever heard it before." http://ssl.adhost.com/jazzloft/baskets/pos.cfm?CD=6790
  2. ^ Max Neuhaus: Time Piece Beacon Essay

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Persondata
NAME Neuhaus, Max
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION Artist, Musician, Composer, philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH 1939
PLACE OF BIRTH
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH