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Logo for DRAM, formally the Database of Recorded American Music www.dramonline.org

But one also would have expected him to acknowledge the potential embodied by the record as a medium of communication across geographical distances, to say nothing of time. Cage was an exceptional, tireless correspondent and a cheerfully committed internationalist who maintained a vast network of contacts. This is the person whose second collection of writings, A Year from Monday, was dedicated "To us and all those who hate us, that the U.S.A. may become just another part of the world, no more, no less."2 Records may not change, but they do travel. The record allows for the distribution of organized as well as disorganized sound. And the record is the medium where the dichotomies of musician/non-musician and professional/amateur lose force.

Why approach experimental or avant-garde music of the 1960s through its hostility towards being represented as a sound recording? Because when this work is experienced today, it is most often encountered in the form of a recording. With the recent establishment of online archives, a vastly larger number of these recordings have suddenly been made available. The ease of access to recordings of this period has never been greater, and the cost of accessing them never less. For a genre of music whose work was initially encountered almost exclusively in performance, the ways in which listeners encounter experimental music has changed radically.

Thus the task emerges to articulate the conceptual distance between the creation of this music in the 1960s and its consumption in the present. For composers and musicians whose work was not released until decades later, the landscape of avant-garde music available in recorded form would be unrecognizable. Very little of this music initially circulated in the form of commercially released recordings. There were exceptions, notably two series of LPs produced by Cage's composer colleagues and sometime collaborators Earle Brown (the Contemporary Sound Series) and David Behrman (Columbia Records' Music of Our Time series). When asked about experimental music on record in the 1960s, composer Tony Conrad reached back across the decades and provided valuable context:

LPs or 45s or whatever were so removed from my worldview in the early Sixties that they were almost irrelevant.... It was almost a miracle, in that sense, to find that an actual LP of Stockhausen came on the market. Or that an LP of Ali Akbar Khan came on the market. Today that seems very quaint, but at that time it was really fascinating.3

Avant-garde musicians and composers in the 1960s allowed recordings to be made, but in case after case described these recordings as unsatisfactory, fundamentally incomplete documents aesthetically at odds with the works they are said to represent. The majority of recordings of 1960s experimental music currently in circulation were first made available as archival releases, surfacing years or decades after their date of recording. The first small waves of these archival releases appeared on LPs in the 1970s and 1980s. A much greater flow of releases occurred in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s owing to the economics of CDs that were inexpensive to produce and sold for a higher list price than LPs. In the 1990s, nearly every genre of music saw the introduction of reissue labels specializing in repackaged and remastered releases of out-of-print recordings. This fueled increased interest in unreleased archival recordings. Avant-garde music of the 1960s proved to be a particularly rich, varied, under-explored, and underexploited trove that yielded material for CD releases.

In 2011 the flood of records and other physical media into and out of Texas has abated to a trickle. With the precipitous decline in CD sales in the first decade of the new century, the primary means by which people in Texas—and everywhere else— encounter recordings of experimental and avant-garde music has been through online resources. Physical media such as LPs and CDs are turning out to have accounted for only a portion of the work of this period that now circulates as recordings. Access to the music generally takes one of several forms: online archives, authorized or not, organized around a particular artist, an institution, or the vision of one or more curators; blogs that are usually the work of a single individual and more informal but often substantial in terms of the amount of recordings posted; and fi le sharing that occurs with little or no contextualizing apparatus. The main point to emphasize is that through online sources, recordings of experimental music from the 1960s—which was itself so hostile to the form of the recording—are more broadly accessible than ever before.

Online archives are a diverse crowd, and there are multiple criteria by which they can be sorted. Certain questions emerge when attempting a taxonomy of online resources in the time of their emergence. Does the site seek permission from copyright holders for the works that it contains? Does it charge for access? Is its content streamed or downloaded? How focused or how diffuse are the organizing principles of the site as a collection? Does it contain work that has not previously been available? Is it connected to an institution, record label, particular artist, venue, radio station, or a performance series?

DRAM (www.dramonline.org), formerly the Database of Recorded American Music, but now representing an international collection, has its roots in an ambitious, far-sighted series of LP releases that appeared on New World Records. Founded in 1975 under the name Recorded Anthology of American Music, the project was to mark the American Bicentennial with a 100-LP anthology, with scholarly liner notes, of a diverse range of American musics that had not necessarily found footing in the commercial marketplace. The Rockefeller Foundation provided a $4,000,000 grant, which resulted in a series of more than 100 albums distributed gratis to approximately 7,000 libraries nationally and internationally. New World Records continues to the present day and has released more than 350 albums, representing more than 600 composers, although it has long since pulled back from its ecumenical mission of representing a vast diversity of American music. In recent years, its strong suit has been recordings of works by composers forming a broad lineage of North American experimentalism. Its recent projects have included recordings of works by Ben Johnston, James Tenney, Alvin Curran, and many others. Notable are the ten-CD Music for Merce, with previously unreleased works for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company by John Cage, Christian Wolff, Takehisa Kosugi, and others, and a five-CD boxed set of primarily unreleased recordings from Ann Arbor, Michigan's ONCE Festival with works by composers including Robert Ashley, Pauline Oliveros, and Gordon Mumma.4

Despite shifting the focus of its mission towards contemporary composition, New World's profile remains linked to the impressive Bicentennial bang with which it came into existence. Making a range of non-commercial music available to the widest possible audience continues to be central to DRAM's mission. DRAM's project director Lisa Kahlden has explained that for many years prior to working on this resource she had been familiar with New World Records because they were in the collection of her local public library in Hardin County, Kentucky.5 Library holdings of New World titles were the way that many individuals, particularly in smaller towns, were first able to hear recordings of music by composers such as Henry Cowell, Harry Partch, and Cecil Taylor.

Take the records out of Texas, or Kentucky, and no one will hear Harry Partch.

Because of declining CD sales in the late 1990s as well as the realization that music would increasingly be accessed online, New World Records's founder Herman Krawitz began to envision a way for the company to reinvent itself in a manner consistent with its original mission. New World had already gone online in 1995, offering downloads of their liner notes as PDFs. In 2000, the Database of Recorded American Music was started with $50,000 in seed money from the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation and a matching grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Server space initially came from the New York University Libraries, and the Mellon Foundation has continued to increase its financial support for the project. DRAM proposes to help "academic institutions to free up storage space, reduce collection costs and labor, ensure against damage or loss and increase accessibility to materials."6 From its conception, it aimed "to provide search facilities that go beyond artist/title searching to enable fi ner-grained searching (for example, the ability to distinguish between a particular artist as a composer and the same artist as a performer in searching for works)."7

The first task that DRAM set for itself was to compile a database of copyright holders for the works represented by New World Records's releases. This proved a considerable task, and one made that much more difficult by primitive text-conversion tools and the reluctance of many artists and publishers to see work made accessible online. It was four years into the project before DRAM had sufficiently streamlined rights clearance— and the ground beneath everyone's feet had shifted—such that the Harry Fox Agency would participate in discussions about the project.

DRAM steadily expanded by working with the catalogues of record labels that specialize in new music and jazz. They currently maintain works from approximately twenty-five record labels, totaling around 40,000 tracks. More importantly, the list of labels runs the gamut from larger, more established music companies, many of whose titles are no longer in print (New World, Mode Records, Lovely Music, CRI) to comparatively newer, small labels, whose works even when in print circulate in rarefi ed distribution channels (Edition Wandelweiser, Cold Blue Music, Firehouse 12).

DRAM has approximately 150 university libraries as subscribers, meaning that students, staff, and faculty at those schools ideally have access to the DRAM online archive. In its current form, DRAM streams audio; none of its works are available for download. Individual subscriptions are likely to become available in the future, but Kahlden describes her dream version of the project as one in which funding sources would make DRAM available free of charge, and not reliant upon subscriptions. As she remarks, "That would be the ultimate achievement of this project, bringing it full-circle with New World."8

UbuWeb (www.ubu.com), poet Kenneth Goldsmith's "clearinghouse for the avant-garde," presents a very different model. Launched in 1996, UbuWeb is a sprawling, free online archive containing thousands of PDF, MP3, and Flash fi les representing works of concrete poetry, literary criticism, sound art, experimental music, artists' films, found objects, lectures, and more, with no permissions sought. A recent posting by Goldsmith leaves no ambiguity; it is entitled "If We Had to Ask For Permission, We Wouldn't Exist: An Open Letter."9 If artists want their work removed, it is done without objection. Currently UbuWeb is hosted through partnerships with the University of Pennsylvania's PennSound, SUNY Buffalo's Electronic Poetry Center, West Virginia University's Center for Literary Computing, and the Jersey City, New Jersey-based freeform radio pioneer WFMU.

UbuWeb began with Goldsmith posting out-of-print, difficult-to-locate works of concrete poetry. The lack of remuneration for the work of most poets became a touchstone for UbuWeb, the obverse of a business model. As Goldsmith explains in his 2001 manifesto, "UbuWeb Wants to Be Free":

Essentially a gift economy, poetry is the perfect space to practice utopian politics. Freed from profi t-making constraints or cumbersome fabrication considerations, information can literally ‘be free': on UbuWeb, we give it away. We publish in full color for pennies. We receive submissions Monday morning and publish them Monday afternoon.10

In his 2005 essay, "If It Doesn't Exist on the Internet, It Doesn't Exist," Goldsmith sounds as if he's on the campaign trail, and opens with a quotation from an email that he received in May 2000 from an UbuWeb user named Meredith: "i really enjoyed your site. it made me think about different cultures other than the ones i experience daily living in a small texas town." Take the records out of . . . actually, it sounds like a lot of these records never made it to Texas in the fi rst place. As Goldsmith notes, "I can't imagine that much of UbuWeb's materials are available in Meredith's local library."11

Because of its elegant design and the size of its collection, its vast number of users, its support from institutions such as the University of Pennsylvania's PennSound, and the art, literature, and music luminaries who have been tapped to offer an "UbuWeb Featured Resources" list, UbuWeb strikes many as professional. But it's worth noting the extent to which it can be described in terms of amateurism and ephemerality.

In the fall of 2010, UbuWeb was briefly put out of business by a hacker. Unlike online sources that only stream content, Ubu allows its users to download its fi les. UbuWeb makes no promises about its future, and the point seems to be that desired fi les should be downloaded and saved—and not be presumed to fl oat in the data cloud in perpetuity. After UbuWeb was hacked, a thread appeared on the Frameworks list, an online discussion group related to experimental cinema. The majority of postings were sympathetic to Ubu, but not all of them. Goldsmith responded with "An Open Letter to the Frameworks Community," in which he reiterated, "Ubu doesn't touch money. We don't make a cent. We don't accept grants or donations. Nor do we—or shall we ever—sell anything on the site."12 The fact that no money changes hands with UbuWeb has always been Goldsmith's primary argument vis-à-vis the fact that UbuWeb doesn't seek clearances with copyright holders; what is new in this open letter is his emphasis on the project's amateurism:

We know that UbuWeb is not very good. In terms of films, the selection is random and the quality is often poor. The accompanying text to the fi lms can be crummy, mostly poached from whatever is available around the net. . . . Ubu is a provocation to your community to go ahead and do it right, do it better, to render Ubu obsolete.13

Goldsmith has a point. Much of UbuWeb's contents come from whatever he or one of UbuWeb's contributors—the term is informal—have been able to get their hands on. It lacks the fine-grained searchability that is one of DRAM's strengths. Free is hard to argue with, and the result is that UbuWeb has been tremendously successful in disseminating work to a global community of users, more so than most sites that clear permissions and often require subscriptions.

Kenneth Goldsmith has referred to himself as an "amateur archivist." What logic is there in referring to entities such as DRAM or UbuWeb as "archives"? The same question could be asked of the Free Music Archive or the Open Minds radio show archive on archive.org or WFMU or any of the rapidly expanding number of venues and performance series that are posting recordings of their concerts online.

In the chapter "The Historical a priori and the Archive," from The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), Michel Foucault describes the archive as fundamentally separate from the discourse of the present. In Foucault's words, the archive is "a privileged region: at once close to us, and different from our present existence, it is the border of time that surrounds our presence, which overhangs it, and which indicates its otherness; it is that which, outside ourselves, delimits us."14

Adhering to Foucault's fundamental distinction—that the archive is separate from the present, that the archive defines the discourse of the present through being distinct from the present—it would seem inapt to speak of any of these examples as archives. They contain recent works, often by living artists. Many are only minimally related to institutions, and usually through tactical alliances for the use of elements such as server space. Our relationship to "archive" is less and less constitutive of boundaries between past and present, or between inside and outside.

Just as online collections of recordings are diminishing the distinction between archive and record company, they also participate in the shift that we see the term "archive" undergoing. Borrowing Walter Benjamin's formulation about photography—namely, that the decisive question is not whether photography counts as art but rather what the practice of photography does to the category of art—the issue is not whether proliferating online archives count as archives, but rather what these collections, and the unprecedented access to them, does to the category of the archive.15

With digital technology, the temporal focus of the category of "archive" is shifting to include the present. When a person backs up digital files to an external source, that person is archiving data. It is as if unspoken concerns about the longevity of data storage demands terminology that reassures the user. The term "to archive" itself is a promise of longevity, an invocation of the future. But we really don't know how long digital fi les will survive.

Stepping back, the issues raised by online archives that include experimental music show how far we have traveled from a period in which experimental music was notable primarily for its insistence on the experience of duration, on the experience of space as activated by performance, and on the unrepeatability of gestures and sounds. Given emerging listening practices, the ongoing conversation about experimental music must take into account the effects of the mediation of recorded sound. We're a long way from where this music began.

Notes

• 1 John Cage, "Lecture on Nothing," in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967), 126.
• 2 See John Cage, A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings (Middletown, Ct.: Wesleyan University Press, 1969).
• 3 Tony Conrad, interview with the author, Brooklyn, NY, 13 March 2009. An edited version of this interview appeared in David Grubbs, "Always at the End," Frieze no. 124 (June–August 2009): 142–47.
• 4 See Music for Merce (New World Records 80712-2, 10 CDs) and Music from the ONCE Festival 1961-1966(New World Records 80567-2, 5 CDs).
• 5 Lisa Kahlden, interview with the author, New York City, 10 August 2010.
• 6 "Mission Statement and History," DRAM, http://www.dramonline.org/page/mission-statement(accessed 23 February 2011).
• 7 Jerome McDonough, "The Database of Recorded American Music," Connect: Information Technology at NYU(Fall 2002): 6.
• 8 Lisa Kahlden, interview with the author.
• 9 Kenneth Goldsmith, "An Open Letter to the Frameworks Community," UbuWeb,http://www.ubu.com/resources/frameworks.html (accessed 4 February 2011).
• 10 Kenneth Goldsmith, "UbuWeb Wants to Be Free," http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/ubuweb.html(accessed 3 March 2011).
• 11 Kenneth Goldsmith, "If It Doesn't Exist on the Internet, It Doesn't Exist,"http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/if_it_doesnt_exist.html (accessed 3 March 2011).
• 12 Goldsmith, "An Open Letter."
• 13 Ibid.
• 14 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Alan Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 130.
• 15 Walter Benjamin, "A Short History of Photography," trans. Stanley Mitchell, Screen 13 (Spring 1972): 5–26.