Samuel Beckett and Sonic Art

The intermedial nature of Beckett’s corpus, and his innovative engagement with avant garde media––to the extent that his later prose and dramatic work compromise and transgress boundaries of genre and discipline––are significant determining factors that explain Beckett’s position as a key figure, and a vital force, for contemporary artists in the expanded field of visual and aural culture. Drawing on Umberto Eco’s “The Poetics of the Open Work” I argue that Beckett’s writing forms an opera aperta or “open” score for the compositional and performance strategies of contemporary sonic art, and that his engagement with sound and acts of listening complicates the relational and phenomenological interaction between bodies, objects and space which finds it most sustained exploration in contemporary sound art.