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On the evening of Monday, January 5, 1970, the musicians John Cage, Gordon Mumma, and David Tudor found themselves making sounds in the dark. The occasion was a performance of Canfield, one of three dances presented by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) in their season-opening program at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. As the dance progressed, Cage wandered into the audience and through various spaces in the theater with a battery of sound-making implements while Tudor and Mumma, seated at a control table piled with electronics, conversed with him over the public-address system.1 The three musicians had been charged with determining the resonant frequency of the theater, a task laid out in a musical score by Pauline Oliveros titled In Memoriam: Nikola Tesla, Cosmic Engineer (1969). Conceived with the company's rigorous touring schedule in mind, the premise of this work is to investigate the unique acoustic qualities of each venue so as to be able to excite it into cacophonous vibration using electronic tone generators at the conclusion of the performance. As Oliveros explained, “If the search for the resonant frequency has been successful, then the frequency of the generators selected by the musicians can cause the performance space to add its squeaks, groans, and other resonance phenomena to the general sounds.”2
For all of its novelties, this performance was emblematic of a longstanding preoccupation with resonance among experimental musicians. From the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, American experimental music was saturated with idiosyncratic investigations of resonance by a range of figures including Oliveros, Cage, Mumma, and Tudor, as well as Alvin Lucier, Robert Ashley, and others. Each work in this shared exploration seemed to call for increasingly complex technological arrangements to produce, amplify, sustain, and capture all manner of acoustic resonance for aesthetic appreciation. Nevertheless despite the proliferation of what has come to be known as “resonance aesthetics” during this period, the nature of this heterogeneous activity as a cultural formation confounds typical historical through-lines.3 It cannot be fully grasped through the performance history of a single composition, yet is most legible in performance; it is rooted in the creation and circulation of specific technologies, yet dependent on none in particular. Likewise, it evades any account organized around...