In Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories, Alan Licht attempts the near-impossible task of explicating his subject. Neither movement nor medium, and often indistinguishable from experimental music, sound art is a postwar phenomenon — an artistic sibling to the nebulous genres of installation, video, and performance art, which meld elements of music, theatre, film, and visual mediums into immersive experiences.

For the book's introduction, influential indie-rock producer Jim O'Rourke asked three artists — Annea Lockwood, Max Neuhaus, and Christian Marclay — to propose their own definitions. Lockwood, an experimental composer, acknowledges a pragmatic need for the term "sound art" to differentiate audio installations from musical compositions, while Neuhaus and Marclay dismiss the term outright. Coming to the rescue, O'Rourke echoes philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto's institutional theory of art, declaring that "sound art belongs in an exhibition situation rather than a performance situation." Though this is a serviceable explanation, it's notable that Licht is unable to tell the history of sound art without recounting a simultaneous history of music.

Licht covers an enormous array of artists in the book's two sections, "Environment and Soundscapes" and "Sound and the Art World." Figures range from wacky late modernists such as Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, and John Cage (and Cage's many acolytes) to contemporary art-school rockers Black Dice and Fischerspooner, as well as mercurial artists-cum-musicians like Marclay and Rodney Graham. An enclosed CD features six exemplary works, including contributions from French painter Jean Dubuffet and emerging artist Steve Roden. Many museum-goers may recognize these as archetypal sound art — assorted ambient noises are strung together like music to create an auditory environment that is neither arbitrary nor expressly musical.

Alongside the wild diversity of projects presented in the book's many images and artist biographies, Licht — who, himself, is a conceptual artist and minimalist composer — subtly implies that delimiting sound art risks short-changing those who don't work within the confines of a single discipline. So, when his inability to fit postmodern art and music practices into a neat (modernist) box makes for, at times, a frustrating read, think of it as a happy consequence of our era, reflecting the variety of paths available to contemporary artists and musicians.

-H.G. Masters