The Twyla Tharp Ballet We Nearly Lost

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American Ballet Theatre, Anna Kisselgoff, Bach Partita, ballet, Broadway, choreography, dance, dance notation, David Byrne, David H. Koch Theater, Jascha Heifetz, Kevin McKenzie, Lincoln Center, New York, Nine Sinatra Songs, Push Comes to Shove, Robert La Fosse, score, Susan Jones, Susan Reiter, TDF Stages, tempo, The Catherine Wheel, The New York Times, Twyla Tharp, video

Scene from Bach Partita

A new ballet requires weeks of intensive rehearsal in order to reach the stage, and if it’s not properly taken care of, it can become extremely difficult to revive. In fact, if it isn’t performed for a substantial period of time, and if the dancers on whom it was made start to lose their muscle memory of the choreography, then the piece can slip away altogether.

Last fall, American Ballet Theatre rescued an important piece from that oblivion. Twyla Tharp’s rigorously beautiful Bach Partita had been made for the company in 1983, performed no more than ten times through 1985, and then vanished.

Thanks to the dedication of Susan Jones, a longtime and indispensable ballet mistress with the company – who was in the studio as Tharp’s assistant as the ballet was created thirty years earlier – Bach Partita came back to the stage. It was danced with astonishing commitment and panache by a new generation of dancers.

New Yorkers now have another chance to see this nearly-lost sensation. After playing Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater last year, it has returned to the space this month as part of ABT’s fall season in New York.

Back in 1981, the versatile and ever-surprising Tharp was on quite a roll with her own company. The Catherine Wheel, set to an original David Byrne score, played Broadway that year, and in 1982 she had a huge success with the sensuously elegant Nine Sinatra Songs. For her return to ABT (where she’d created the exuberant and witty Push Comes to Shove, a huge hit in 1976), Tharp chose a thirty-minute Bach score and choreographed fiercely complex, purely classical choreography for a cast of thirty-six.

New York Times critic Anna Kisselgoff’s delivered an enthusiastic review: “Miss Tharp thinks amazingly big here in every sense of the word,” she wrote. “For the first time, she has attempted a true neoclassical ballet whose movement is rooted in ballet’s academic code rather than her own modern-dance idiom with incorporation of ballet steps.” She later described the piece as “a treasure house of dance invention for those fascinated by formal intricacy and experiments with movement.”

Recalling Bach Partita, Jones says, “I think it was really Bach that drove her. She has her point of view about the music and how it should be played, how it’s meant to be. She was really challenging the dancers. I think that the hardest thing for them – aside from absorbing Twyla’s style and getting it into their bodies – was the speed she required. It was choreographed to a Heifetz recording that is just faster than the speed of light!” [The ballet is always performed with a live violinist.]

The original cast included three principal couples, seven soloist couples, and an ensemble of sixteen women. “Twyla was developing her relationship with ABT and was discovering more things about the classical vocabulary,” recalls Robert La Fosse, who was the youngest of the six principals. “She was pushing the balletic partnering to new limits and challenging us with movements that changed directions constantly.”

Jones, who rehearses many Tharp dances, often staging them for various companies, is passionate about this one. “I feel it’s one of her best pieces. The fact that it’s Bach, and that it’s all of these dancers dancing their hearts out to this one violinist who’s making this incredible sound – I think it’s exhilarating. I didn’t think this ballet would ever go away.”

The challenge of finding a violinist who could play the score superbly at the tempi Tharp required was one reason the ballet slipped out of repertory. Programming demands – ABT devotes most of its performances to full-evening, narrative ballets – and other company considerations also played a role.

But Jones always kept it in mind. She recalls a 1996 dinner with Tharp when they discussed what it would take to get Bach Partita back on stage. Little did Jones realize, when about fifteen years later that became an actual possibility, how complicated the process would be.

No visual documentation of decent quality was available to help jog Jones’ memory. There was a black-and-white performance videotape, but it was overexposed. “At center stage, there was detail that was missing from the steps that I knew was there,” she says. “It was a process of seeing the root step and dusting off the cobwebs.” A studio rehearsal videotape was filmed a week before the premiere, but afterward Tharp made some pivotal changes in the distribution of the roles.

Over the years, Jones would urge Kevin McKenzie, ABT’s artistic director, to commit to a revival of the ballet. Considerable rehearsal time would be required, however, and casting the many demanding roles would be a challenge.

On her own, Jones began preparing. “Around 2011, I thought I would just start looking at these tapes. In whatever free time I had, I started notating and trying to reconstruct the ballet. And I did that for two years.”

Finally, last year, ABT had a longer-than-usual rehearsal period, substantial enough for Jones to delve into re-staging the work for the dancers of today. Tharp herself was present at rehearsals regularly for four of the six weeks. “She was really involved in the coaching. She knew that it needed that,” Jones says.

La Fosse was in the audience last November at the Koch to witness the rebirth of Bach Partita. “The new cast at ABT is superb,” he says. “They have a better grasp at the technical aspects of her style. It was like seeing a whole new ballet unfold in front of my eyes. So many moments stay in my memory. I can’t wait to see it again.”

For Jones, seeing the ballet come to life again was “incredible, really phenomenal.” But now that it’s back in repertory, her focus is on keeping it in top shape. “Now that they’ve gotten it in their blood, now it’s my job to make sure that the edge is there, and that they don’t let it become generic movement,” she says. “It has to reflect Twyla’s style. It’s part of the life of any ballet. You have to keep it fresh and keep the spontaneity there.”

Susan Reiter – TDF Stages

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The Walk to Fisterra

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5.1 surround sound, acoustics, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Appalachian Trail, Barcelona, BIS, cello, Crouching Tiger Concerto, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Dane Johansen, El Camino de Santiago, Elliott Carter, Escher String Quartet, Fairbanks, Fisterra, Greg Stepanich, Joel Krosnick, Kickstarter, luthier, Mahler, Mendelssohn, Musilia, New York, Pablo Casals, Palm Beach ArtsPaper, Paris Conservatoire, Santiago de Compostela, Stefan Valcuha, Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello, Swedish, Tan Dun, The Cleveland Institute of Music, The Juilliard School, The Walk to Fisterra, Vasque, video, violin, violoncello

The end of the earth

One of Dane Johansen’s paternal ancestors helped oversee the transition of Alaska from czarist Russia to the United States in the late nineteenth century, and having grown up in Fairbanks as a sixth-generation resident of the Last Frontier, Johansen has been looking for a way to marry his love and knowledge of the outdoors with his career as a cellist.

He appears to have found it. This week, Johansen sets out on the Camino de Santiago, the six-hundred-mile trail in northern Spain traveled for centuries by pilgrims heading to city of Santiago de Compostela, and a road which was used for millennia before that as a path to the Fisterra peninsula, which ancient humans thought of as the literal end of the earth.

But he isn’t going as a religious pilgrim, nor is he in it just for the exercise. He’ll be bringing his cello with him – in a special extra-light, carbon-fiber case – as he walks the trail, and will stop in thirty-six churches along the way for the chief purpose of his walk: performing the six Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello (BWV 1007-12) of J. S. Bach, probably the nearest thing cellists have to a sacred text.

By the end of his trip, called “The Walk to Fisterra,” at the end of June, he’ll have played each of the suites eighteen times, in the home country of Pablo Casals, the cellist who rediscovered these great three-hundred-year-old pieces in a Barcelona music shop more than a century ago and did more than anyone else to establish them in their proper place as bulwarks of the literature.

“For all cellists, the Bach cello suites are sort of a lifelong quest, or at least for any cellist who chooses to take that path. When I play Bach’s music, it’s definitely the closest I get musically to some kind of meditation or prayer-like state,” Johansen said, speaking from his home in New York. “It’s such a personal thing, playing Bach’s music. Developing an interpretation is something that happens really slowly and very naturally, because you just play them and play them and play them, and they reveal more and more of their secrets to you.”

Johansen’s trip is about sixty-five percent funded on Kickstarter (the deadline is the thirteenth), and Johansen is still working to raise more money for the expedition. He’ll be accompanied by six other people – a producer, production assistant, two videographers and two audio engineers – who will be filming his journey and recording the music for future release as a documentary and a record.

“We’ve planned thirty-six concerts along the way, and they will all be recorded in 5.1 surround sound. And we’re hoping that the recording will help listeners experience the spaces as well,” he said. “If you’re listening to the recording later, you’ll feel as though you’re in that particular venue. And with the film aspect of this project, when you hear this music in the film, you’ll be looking at the space that you’re hearing, and so you’ll kind of be transported there visually and sonically.”

Johansen, the son of a civil engineer and a violin teacher, studied in his high school and undergraduate years at The Cleveland Institute of Music, following that with a year and a half at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris, and finally getting his master’s and a performer’s certificate at The Juilliard School, where he now teaches as an assistant to the eminent American cellist Joel Krosnick and in the school’s pre-college division.

Johansen is also the cellist in the young Escher String Quartet, which will be releasing discs this year of the complete Mendelssohn quartets (on BIS, the Swedish label), and the four quartets of the Mahler acolyte Alexander von Zemlinsky (on Naxos).

On his own, Johansen performed Elliott Carter’s Cello Concerto for his Lincoln Center debut in 2008, and in 2011, gave the New York premiere of the Crouching Tiger Concerto compiled by Chinese composer Tan Dun from his score for the 2000 Ang Lee film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In addition to his global appearances with the Escher String Quartet, he has performed in elite series such as the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Marlboro Music Festival of Vermont.

Johansen said he first came up with the idea for the walk in 2008, thinking he would walk the trail with his cello by himself. He had gotten the inspiration from a composer friend who had walked the Appalachian Trail and had written a good deal of music while on the journey.

But the Appalachian Trail is largely wilderness, and while that was fine for the solitary occupation of composing, Johansen wanted to make a Bach journey on a more populated route. Taking the Camino de Santiago not only puts him in the same steps as the pilgrims who began using it in earnest in the early twelfth century, it also allows him to reach out to any number of contemporaries who happen to be there, and not only the young musicians from four Spanish conservatories with whom he’ll be doing some educational outreach on the trip.

“Everybody who walks the Camino walks that route with their own story and for their own reasons,” said Johansen, who will turn thirty in June while he’s on the road. “And I think that this music will help elevate their experience. Whatever their reason for walking the Camino, I think that there will be people sharing that experience with me that will be happier for the music, and who will enjoy their experience more for the music,” he said.

Johansen, who has been breaking in his Vasque hiking boots for the past few weeks, will be staying each night of the six-week journey in one of the many refugios on the path, though he added that some members of the production team may have to stay elsewhere from time to time for technical duties such as data downloads. His cello case, made by Germany’s Musilia, is a special reflective white to keep the heat to a minimum for his custom cello, built for him in 2011 by the New York-based luthier Stefan Valcuha.

Johansen said the origin of the Bach suites themselves are as shrouded in mystery as the pre-pilgrimage Camino. Most scholars believe the music to have been written before 1720, but the original manuscript is lost, and while the first five suites were written for the cello, the sixth one was written for a related five-string instrument of uncertain specificity. That doesn’t change the power of the music, which Johansen says he never tires of.

“When people ask me what my desert island book of music would be, it’s always the Bach suites because I never get tired of them,” he said. “I play them every day – not all of them every day – but I play Bach’s music every day, and I never get sick of it.”

His current favorite of the suites is the fifth one (BWV 1011), and he says the sarabandes of each of the suites are their spiritual centers.

“What he’s writing is at once really complex but also very simple . . . I like to try to figure out what was the idea that Bach was playing with in this movement. It seems to me that most of the movements have kind of a central concept that he must have been playing with. It could be something as simple as up and down, or stop and start, or push and pull.

“So I like to approach them in that way: What could he have been thinking with this material? What is this about?” he said. “I really don’t try to make them my own, because just by playing them, they’re my own . . . Every time I play them, I experience them as a new thing, like it’s the first time, and that’s something really special, something I don’t experience with any other composer or any other canon of music.”

Bringing something of that artistic journey to a completely new audience is vital not only for the Camino walk, but for being a performer in general, he said.

“I think as an artist when you’re taking on any kind of project, you have to make sure that your focus is outward, and that you’re trying to do something good for the world with your project,” Johansen said. “It’s ridiculous to say that an artistic project is not about the artist, because it’s impossible. You’re not going to have a meaningful product, or a meaningful experience, if someone hasn’t invested all of themselves.

“But the focus of all that energy can’t be inward. It has to be outward, and for me, that’s sharing this music with as many people as I can.”

Greg Stepanich – Palm Beach ArtsPaper

As Cultures Intersect

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bass track, Beijing, Bruckner, cello, conservatory, David Johnston, Fuling, Google, Home Depot, Hong Kong, impresario, International Artist of the Year, Jindong Cai, John Baird, Lang Lang, luthier, Mamma Mia!, Mao Zedong, Michael Jackson, Mozart, Nathan Vanderklippe, National Arts Centre Orchestra, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Ni Sha, Peter Hessler, piano, Pinchas Zukerman, pipa, popular music, Rhapsody in Red – How Western Classical Music Became Chinese, ringtone, River Town, Shanghai, Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, Shi Shuai, Stanford University, symphony, Symphony no. 5 in E minor, Taylor Swift, The Globe and Mail, The Juilliard School, video, violin, Violin Concerto no. 3 in G Major, Wagner, Wray Armstrong, Wu, Yang Xiao Lin, Yangtze, Youku, YouTube

Shi Shuai

Shi Shuai is the face of classical music’s most promising new frontier: a young and gifted violinist, born in Shanghai and trained by some of the West’s most prominent musicians who is eager to return to China to perform and teach in a burgeoning symphony scene. And Fuling, the pretty outpost of 1.2-million at the nexus of the Yangtze and Wu Rivers, has the trappings of a new home for Mozart and Bach. Like dozens of smaller Chinese cities, it boasts a gleaming grand theater that just opened this year and has, in its initial season, brought Canada’s National Arts Centre (NAC) orchestra to perform.

The future of classical music, many have grown fond of saying, is in China – and Ms. Shi’s arrival in Fuling with the NAC seems emblematic of the new sound echoing here. Classical music was banned during Mao’s time. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that it was allowed back in, and it has exploded in recent years, winning converts and attracting students. But the real test lies in smaller centers, such as Fuling, and Ms. Shi is keen to put her talent and passion on display.

“I don’t have a good voice to sing,” she says. “Violin is like my voice, to sing out what I’m feeling.”

But if Fuling is the future, it’s one where the quiet concluding bars to the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony no. 5 in E minor must compete with the loud chirping of a bird ringtone. As numerous others, as Google and Home Depot, have discovered, exporting Western commerce and culture to China is often not as easy as it seems. The potential of a middle class burgeoning among 1.3-billion new customers continues to thrill, but the work of attracting interest is filled with pitfalls.

The orchestra was recently in China as part of a broader Canadian campaign that included visits from Governor-General David Johnston and Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird. While the NAC works to build a potentially lucrative long-term music relationship with China, Ottawa is hoping cultural diplomacy can help smooth relations still frayed from years of neglect and, more recently, the tension over Chinese buying up Canada’s oil sands.

Partway into Mozart’s Violin Concerto no. 3 in G Major, music director Pinchas Zukerman turns to face the noisy burbling of the crowd and vigorously points his finger to his lips; later, Ms. Shi stands up to ask for quiet in Chinese. Nearly all of the theater’s 1,038 seats have been filled, thanks in part to local authorities that bought up numerous tickets and handed them out for free, but not all the patrons are captivated.

In a place where many are hearing this music for the first time, orchestral music occupies no sacred space, no tradition of reverent listening. Classical music has arrived in a cultural market furiously trying out new things. The NAC orchestra sits on the Fuling Grand Theatre schedule somewhere between Mamma Mia! and a Michael Jackson tribute show. The symphony opens not to its own music but to the thundering bass track of a video ad for the theater’s coming shows, with bare chests and thrusting pelvises flashing on the bright screens.

This, then, is orchestra in one tiny part of China outside the major centers, in a place where it must compete for the ears of 19-year-old Ni Sha – Lisa, she calls herself – an English student whose tastes run to blues, country and her current favorite, Taylor Swift.

“I don’t think everybody here can understand this concert, including me,” she says, as a swelling crowd and she gather outside the theater high on the banks of the Yangtze. “But I really want to know.”

When Peace Corps volunteer Peter Hessler, author of River Town, came to Fuling in 1996, it had been a half-century since an American had lived in an isolated place still reached primarily by boat. Today, it’s a quick drive down a four-lane highway. The end to isolation has brought visible change, in shiny new apartment towers and roadside advertisements for a residential complex called, in English, “Hot Springs City.” Less visible is the curiosity it has sparked about a broader world people are now more able to explore.

“Before this theater opened its doors we had almost no contact with Western music,” says Yang Xiao Lin, 43, a realtor who has come to hear the orchestra. High-speed Internet and Youku, a Chinese equivalent to YouTube, have given people a chance to sample orchestral music ahead of its arrival, and Ms. Yang likes what she has heard. Not only is the NAC concert a chance to taste what she calls “high-rank joy” – status music, in other words – but she finds something spiritual in it. “The cello is so deep,” she says.

That appeal – status and sound – has won classical music growing numbers of converts in China, where it had already gained a small foothold pre-Mao, with the Shanghai Symphony opening its doors in 1879. Nine conservatories are now pumping out graduates. Many of their teachers are foreigners or foreign-trained Chinese. Beijing now has at least ten professional symphony orchestras.

The numbers of young Chinese people studying piano and violin far exceed the population of Canada. Some of the top luthiers on Earth draw out rich tones from Chinese woods; earlier this month, Shenyang, China-born pianist Lang Lang was named International Artist of the Year. Even The Julliard School is planning a new location not far from Beijing amid hopes that Chinese ears will prove more hungry for symphonic sound than those in North America, which have left orchestras facing bankruptcy and salary cuts.

But it’s far from clear whether symphonies will truly find a home in China. Even in Beijing, “the National Centre for the Performing Arts after five years is doing roughly half as many international well-known orchestras as they were at the beginning,” says Wray Armstrong, a well-connected, Beijing-based impresario.

Classical music is, in some ways, an expression of a culture foreign to China. “I don’t know if China can save Bruckner or Wagner,” says Jindong Cai, the director of orchestra studies at Stanford University and author of Rhapsody in Red – How Western Classical Music Became Chinese.

There may, however, be a future for symphony with an Asian lilt. The Chinese pipa has found its way into symphony performances in major North American and Australian concert halls, while Chinese composers are experimenting with new orchestral sounds. There’s even an argument that it is no more difficult to lure Chinese audiences to Mozart than to Michael Jackson as both are unfamiliar.

That doesn’t make it easy. The raucous concert in Fuling is “proof that we’re a long way from bringing Western culture to the hinterlands” of China, Mr. Zukerman said. “And the hinterlands are what makes a country. It’s not Shanghai, and it’s not Hong Kong.”

Still, even in Fuling some see an innate appeal in symphony. Ms. Yang, the realtor, emerged from the concert bearing a broad smile. It was, she said, “really, shockingly good. Sometimes it sounds like a young girl is telling a love story gently, and sometimes it feels like you’re in a deep forest.” Her husband, however, thought it could use a slight tweak. “It would be better,” he said, “if they could add a few more Chinese characteristics.”

Nathan Vanderklippe – The Globe and Mail

The Cello 2.0

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aliphatic polyurethanes, Bayer MaterialScience, blank canvas, cello, Cello 2.0, coating, color, Düsseldorf, electric cello, ergonomics, fingerboard, integrated technology, intonation, K 2013, LED, light-emitting diode, lighting effects, metronome, neck, optical effects, piano, polycarbonate, polymer, polyurethane, projector, resin, saxophone, video, violoncello

Cello 2.0

A design innovation recently displayed at K 2013, the world’s largest plastics trade show in Düsseldorf, Germany, is a prototype for a cello that only remotely recalls the classic lines of the seventeenth-century violoncello.

The German polymer giant Bayer MaterialScience has fashioned the futuristic instrument from transparent, lightweight cast resin. The company’s aim was to encourage aspiring musicians to take up the cello by making what is normally a rather cumbersome instrument easier to play and carry and to entice accomplished musicians by creating a cello body that acts as a blank canvas for a range of optical effects using integrated technology.

Bayer MaterialScience assembled a team of designers and lighting specialists to create the ergonomic cello, canvassing both professional and amateur musicians for clues on how to innovate. They found that music students wanted color signals to let them know when they were out of tune or to flash like a metronome to help them keep time; professionals mused about incorporating lighting effects and video into live performances.

The design starts with a more-or-less standard electric cello neck and fingerboard into which sound and optical technology is built, from LED lighting to mini video projectors that can display photos, graphics or video on the transparent surface of the cello. The slimmed-down cello belly is then formed from a lightweight material based on aliphatic polyurethanes.

The company imagines applying the technology used to make Cello 2.0 to the future design of keyboard, plucked and wind instruments. It has already helped build break-resistant saxophones made from a colored polycarbonate blend, as well as high-gloss polyurethane piano coatings.

– Bayer MaterialScience

Art Installations Made of Sound

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Anne Strauss, auction, Barbara London, barracks, bell, Berlin, Caleb Kelly, cello, chapel, Chernobyl, Christian Marclay, Christie's, color, computer, cyberspace, David Bowie, Day Is Done, Documenta, Ethan Sklar, Forty Part Motet, funeral, Glasgow, Governors Island, horn, Jacob Kirkegaard, Janet Cardiff, John Cage, loudspeaker, Manhattan, Metropolitan Museum of Art, motet, MP3, Museum of Modern Art, National Socialists, New York, Op Art, painting, performance art, photography, pitch, podcast, poetry, sculpture, Seth Kim-Cohen, ship's horn, siren, Sotheby's, sound art, Soundings: A Contemporary Score, Spem in Alium, Spotify, Stephen Vitiello, Study for Strings, Susan Philipsz, Tanya Bonakda, Taps, television, The Cloisters, Theresienstadt, Thomas Tallis, Tom Eccles, Tristan Perich, trumpet, uterus, video, viola

Janet Cardiff sound installations

Note the sound of your computer’s fan amid distant sirens. Hear your spouse in the next room, playing the Bowie channel on Spotify while chatting on the phone with your mother-in-law. Farther off, a TV is tuned to the news and a stereo plays Bach, while a mouse skitters inside a wall.

And know that every one of those sounds can now be the subject of art, just as every vision we see and imagine, from fruit in a bowl to the color of light to melting clocks, has been grist for painting and sculpture and photos. Sound art has been on the rise for a decade or two, but it may have at last hit the mainstream: On Saturday, the Museum of Modern Art [opened] its first full sonic survey, “Soundings: A Contemporary Score,” while two major sound installations are to go up in New York in the fall.

“The art of sound questions how and what we hear, and what we make of it,” the curator Barbara London writes in her catalog essay to the Modern show – which means the movement has purchase on a lot that matters. Perched in an office high above MoMA’s garden, where her exhibition will insert stealthy recordings of bells, Ms. London explained that artists are more than ever drawn to sound art, maybe because it sits on the exciting double cusp, as she said, of both music and gallery art. Her new show (or should we call it a “hear”?) reflects the “apogee,” as she put it, that sound art has now reached.

Ms. London’s survey will include those recorded bells, by the American soundster Stephen Vitiello, as well as recordings made near Chernobyl by Jacob Kirkegaard, a Dane, and a grid of 1,500 small speakers, each playing a different tone, by the young New Yorker Tristan Perich. It will also feature the Glasgow-born Susan Philipsz, whom the larger art world has taken to heart.

At the Modern, Ms. Philipsz will be reprising a 2012 work from Germany’s Documenta, the twice-a-decade festival that is one of the world’s most prestigious artistic events. Her Study for Strings riffs on an orchestral piece composed in 1943 at the Theresienstadt concentration camp for musicians there. For her recording, Ms. Philipsz has redacted the parts for all the instruments except one cello and one viola, leaving plangent silences between those two players’ scattered notes – and, of course, evoking the erasure of musicians and artists by the Nazis.

“For the public, sound art it still a fairly new and also a very, very accessible medium,” said Tom Eccles, the curator of a new Philipsz commission this fall in New York. “On a very basic, basic level,” he added, “sound is one of our first experiences – in the uterus, in fact.”

Ms. Philipsz’s new piece, called Day Is Done, will be the first permanent work of contemporary art on Governors Island, a former military site just south of Manhattan whose public spaces are being revamped with a budget so far of $75 million. Ms. Philipsz is mounting four old-fashioned “trumpet” speakers – the kind you’d see in an old ballpark – across the facade of a sprawling old barracks, and for an hour every evening, they will broadcast the notes of the bugle call Taps. The tones of the ghostly melody will pass from speaker to speaker, fanning out across the island’s open spaces.

At a test run one cold day in the spring, the piece evoked the era when Taps would have been played daily on the island, while it also triggered thoughts of military funerals and loss of life. (On 11 September 2001, those on the island were able to see the collapse of the twin towers.)

Day Is Done also evokes New York’s maritime presence. Visiting from her home in Berlin for the test run, Ms. Philipsz said that after the recording had played on site for the first time, “we thought it was still on.” She added: “But it was the sound of a ship’s horn. We were so happy.”

Mr. Eccles pointed out that with a piece like Day Is Done, “you don’t have to recognize it as art, immediately” – meaning that any knee-jerk resistance to contemporary art is less likely to kick in. “A sound work allows you to do something quite complex that might be unacceptable in another medium,” he said.

That could be because of the role MP3s and podcasts now play in our lives and because of our new comfort with the immaterial world of pure data, which makes immaterial sound art seem less esoteric. Sound waves floating through air may not seem any more exotic than information flowing through cyberspace.

There’s yet another ambitious sound piece about to open in New York. On 10 September 2013, the Metropolitan Museum will present Forty Part Motet, an installation by the Canadian Janet Cardiff that may be one of the best works, in any medium, of the last decades and the first work in sound at the Metropolitan. A piece like Ms. Cardiff’s “opens people’s eyes to a different art form that they wouldn’t expect to see at the Met,” said Anne Strauss, the project’s curator. “It’s something we can provide more easily, than, say, performance art.”

We were meeting far uptown in Manhattan, in a twelfth-century chapel at the heart of the Met’s Cloisters branch, now celebrating its seventy-fifth year as a home for medieval art. The forty speakers of Cardiff’s piece will be installed in a ring in that chapel, each one transmitting the sound of a single musical part from the choral extravaganza Spem in Alium, composed around 1570 by Thomas Tallis. Ms. Cardiff’s piece manages to take one of the most imposing masterpieces of Western music and reduce it to modest human elements. As you sidle up to any one speaker, the single voice you hear seems frail and at sea, and that stands in touching contrast to the grand effect that comes when you stand in the work’s center and hear all forty parts combined. Wherever Forty Part Motet gets installed, a visitor or two often leaves in tears.

The market has noticed sound art’s achievements. “I kind of resigned myself that I would never make any money,” Ms. Philipsz said. In fact, she’s now doing fine. She sold all three copies of her first installation at Tanya Bonakdar, the New York gallery that took her on in 2007. According to the gallery director, Ethan Sklar, her piece in the show at the Modern, also in an edition of three, is priced at almost $150,000. Mr. Sklar spoke of the appeal of Ms. Philipsz’s art to “collectors and institutions who are looking for the strongest and most challenging work.”

It also doesn’t hurt, he pointed out, that there are fewer headaches in storing and shipping a Philipsz data disc than some massive sculptural piece, although her sound fills space just as impressively: “You can have an epic work that comes down to a box.”

But it is still early days in the marketing of sound art. Both the auction houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s say that they have not sold a single sonic work, whereas they’ve begun to get good prices for major videos. Sound art’s vaguely unworldly air may actually increase its appeal.

“It’s not really commodified at this moment, which makes it approachable,” Ms. London said. “All of these works have a poetry, and a fleetingness.”

The mainstream’s embrace of sound art may mask something peculiar: that even as the field reaches new heights, it’s also in crisis. Art-trained figures like Ms. Philipsz and Ms. Cardiff, who build work around the sounds that we care most about – and who resist the whole idea of a coherent genre called “sound art” – are up against a sonic old guard, sometimes including younger figures, that one artist has referred to as the “honk-tweet” school.

Aligned with experimental music rather than visual art, the honk-tweeters are interested in strange beeps and buzzings for their own sakes. They craft what the sound artist, theorist and blogger Seth Kim-Cohen refers to as purely cochlear, rather than fully mindful, sound art.

In June, Mr. Kim-Cohen chided the survey at the Modern for including such work, which he described as the sonic equivalent of Op Art, a movement in painting “that does not demand (or merit) serious critical response,” as he has written. “Surely,” he blogged, “if the (visual) art world is now willing to embrace sound, it should do so according to the same criteria of quality and engagement that it demands of other media.”

Caleb Kelly, a scholar who recently published a book called Sound, compiling a range of essays on the art form, said he believes that pieces like Ms. Cardiff’s Motet, or the riffs on Hollywood soundtracks by the Swiss art star Christian Marclay, will still matter in a century, whereas today’s honk-tweeters (“dial twiddlers,” Ms. Philipsz calls them) will likely disappear, if they keep doing retreads of John Cage’s postwar innovations.

Sound artists like to point out that while you can close your eyes to an image you hate, you can’t close your ears to a noise. That gives them power but also puts them at risk. If a honk or a tweet does no more than annoy, visitors will vote with their feet.

Blake Gopnik – The New York Times