From the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, American experimental musicians like Pauline Oliveros, David Tudor, and Gordon Mumma employed complex and idiosyncratic technological systems to produce and capture acoustic resonance for aesthetic appreciation. Although this shared exploration exhibited many of the hallmarks of a genuine research project, scholars of experimental music have long been wary of claims that there is anything particularly scientific about this music, frequently comparing its informality unfavorably with the rigor and empiricism of the individual scientific experiment. However, historian of science Hans-Jörg Rheinberger has long held that the fundamental working unit of scientific research is not the individual experiment, but what he terms the experimental system: The loose coherence of objects, instruments, and technologies through which research questions are materialized over time. I argue that Rheinberger's framework of the experimental system offers a compelling way of understanding the experimentation that catalyzed the emergence of what has come to be known as “resonance aesthetics” in American experimental music. By focusing on the material links of musicians’ activities, the experimental system illuminates how knowledge was produced and circulated within and between vastly different musical performances. Rheinberger's characterization of successful research also informs a more nuanced conception of virtuosity in experimental music. Finally, this framework is an opportunity to re-evaluate the status of sound as an object of epistemological inquiry, akin to what Rheinberger describes as an “epistemic thing.” In theorizing epistemic sound as both contextual and emergent, I re-evaluate musicians’ approaches to spontaneity and improvisation in musical performance.

compositional spaces have long been used to illustrate structural relationships within and between musical works. However, despite robust scholarship employing spaces to depict the possibilities available to composers, space-based analytical methods have rarely been used to study the performance of music. Through case studies drawn from improvised and notated music, this article introduces the questions and methodologies by which analogous spaces for performance, which the author terms performance spaces, may be generated and analyzed. The author also considers the unique properties of hybrid spaces that combine the tools of discrete mathematics, such as graphs, with distance-based metrics.

Most accounts of Earle Brown’s open form compositions focus on the notated qualities of individual events in the score. However, the conductor’s role in ensuring continuity and formal coherence within a performance is rarely acknowledged. In this article, I analyze recordings of three performances of Brown conducting his composition Novara (1962), two with the Virtuoso Ensemble in 1966 and one with a group of Dutch musicians in 1974. The conductor’s interventions in each performance embody a range of strategies used to suggest structural function and organize the time of performance. The multiplicity of musical processes in play within—and between—performances in turn suggests a parallel with Jonathan Kramer’s concept of multiply-directed linear time.

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In this study, I evaluate the sonic possibilities of John Cage’sFour2(1990) by comparing existing performances of the piece with alternate renditions generated computationally and by hand specifically for this analysis.Four2, one of Cage’s Number Pieces,is fully determinate with respect to pitch, instrumentation and overall duration, but affords the performer the flexibility to choose the durations of specific sounds through time-bracket notation. The differences in the musical results between various performances, both real and virtual, prompt a discussion of the performance practices of the piece both as outlined by Cage and as understood by scholars and performers. Accompanying this text is a computer program with which readers can edit and play back their own interpretations ofFour2.