Art Music Uncomposed features critical interrogations of the legacies of Western Art Music. Even while Western Art Music’s hegemony is waning, its default protocols and infrastructures continue to exert influence across performing arts, popular music, audio, film, and more. Through performances, installations, interventions, talks, and more, this program interrogates Western Art Music’s hallowed and yet often unexamined defaults such as Work, Composer, and Spectator, as well as its ways of organizing listening, performance, presentation, criticism, architecture, and more. Taking place on the grounds of the iconic Kleinhans Music Hall since 2021, the events take this setting as an opportunity to foreground the everyday spatial practice of a field often otherwise taken to be an exemplar of transcendence. Through commissions of new works together with new approaches to radical 1960s experimental music scores and canonical classical scores, the program aims to facilitate historically unprecedented interchanges between music and institutional critique.
A brief curatorial statement about the series is here.
Documentation of selected works:
Yoko Ono, Hide Piece (text quotes from Donald Jay Grout, A Short History of Opera (1947), quoted here)
Yoko Ono, Touch Piece (with quote from The Biopolitics of Feeling by Kyla Schuller)
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Colin Tucker, the alibi of animacy for found musical expression mark and performances
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additional documentation coming soon…
Null Point 