In 2011, the German composer Eva-Maria Houben (a longstanding member of the Wandelweiser composers collective) released an album entitled druids and questions on the Edition Wandelweiser label. The CD contains a single hour-long track consisting of recorded organ sounds (played by the composer) together with other sounds, arranged and superimposed – it is described on the sleeve as ‘electro-acoustic music with recorded organ sounds’. Also on the sleeve are references to two other works of art. When one opens the cover panel one sees on the left the text ‘Listening to Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question’, while on the right are the concluding lines of a poem by Emily Dickinson: ‘Yet a Druidic Difference / Enhances Nature now’. We are invited to consider three different approaches to material, its deployment and differentiation, each of which raises interesting questions about scale and about boundaries. The multivalence of the word ‘field’ might indicate a way of approaching the issues raised by following Houben's suggestion and considering these three works in relation to one another.

In a remarkable aesthetic manifesto cum analytical essay cum prose poem, written to accompany his 1966 recording Unit Structures, pianist Cecil Taylor begins with ‘an opening field of question, how large it ought or ought not to be’. Size is closely related to boundedness, and boundedness appears to be central to many of the various ways the word ‘field’ has been construed. Often seen as something unbounded and hence all-pervasive, a field was defined in physics by Richard Feynman as ‘any physical quantity which takes on different values at different points in space’. Charles Olson's claim that ‘composition by field’ – a poetics limited only by the breath and the edge of the page – is cognate with an ‘open’ way of working looms large in much contemporary poetics as well as writing on post-Cagean sonic practices. This openness is combined with an absence of hierarchy, or at least with a ‘flat’ sort of hierarchy, and both openness and flatness are generally taken to be opposed to manipulation and didacticism, to leave room for the listener or reader to explore as they see fit.