Weekly Colloquium – Wednesday, February 22: Tom Buckner
Posted in Events, Visiting Artists on Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012
This week our guest is Tom Buckner.
“For more than 40 years, baritone Thomas Buckner has dedicated himself to the world of new and improvised music. Buckner has collaborated with a host of new music composers including Robert Ashley, Noah Creshevsky, Tom Hamilton, Earl Howard, Matthias Kaul, Leroy Jenkins, Bun Ching Lam, Annea Lockwood, Roscoe Mitchell, Phill Niblock, Wadada Leo Smith, Chinary Ung, Christian Wolff and many others. He has made appearances at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Herbst Theatre, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Ostrava Days Festival, the Prague Spring Festival, and the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. Buckner is featured on over 40 recordings, including 6 of his own solo albums. His most recent solo recording “New Music for Baritone & Chamber Ensemble” includes works by Annea Lockwood, Tania Leon, and Petr Kotik.”
Feb. 22 4:30pm Rm 522 at 112 Michigan
Kyle Evans wins 2nd prize in Guthman competition | Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology
Posted in News on Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012
SAIC (MFA 2011) alum Kyle Evans wins 2nd prize with James Connolly in Guthman competition.
Inventor-composers from nine countries came to discuss their ideas and perform on their instruments. The ideas were evaluated for musicality, design and engineering by an expert panel including Atau Tanaka, media artist and researcher, Cyril Lance, chief engineer at electronic musical instrument manufacturer Moog Music, and Georgia Tech assistant professor of music Parag Chordia.
Second Prize ($3,000) James Connolly & Kyle Evans (USA) for Cracked Ray Tube,a synchronized audio/video experience generated by the interconnections and feedback between analog televisions and CRT computer monitors.
Call for Submissions for Artistic, Scientific, and Scholarly papers and presentations to The Global Composition Conference
Posted in Call for Works, Events, Opportunities on Sunday, February 12th, 2012
You are invited to submit your scholarly, scientific and/or artistic proposals on sound related topics and issues.
The Global Composition
Conference on Sound, Media and the Environment
Darmstadt/Media Campus Dieburg (Hochschule Darmstadt), July 25-28, 2012 (near Frankfurt Airport)
Info: http://www.the-global-composition-2012.org/index.html
Call: http://www.the-global-composition-2012.org/call.html
Deadline for submission: March 1, 2012
Notification: April 20, 2012
Proposals are invited for papers/posters, workshops, roundtable discussions, applied and artistic contributions, relating, but not limited to the conference’s main topics.
Suggested topics are:
* the idea of a collaborative and sustainable macro-soundscape or global composition
* sound design/soundscape design/soundscape creation
* influencing environmental sound – environmental sounds’ influences
* methods of perceiving/analyzing/creating/reconstructing soundscapes
* the role of technology and media in enhancing/obstructing sound(scape) awareness and critical listening
* (media) ecological approaches as the basis for listening cultures
* pedagogical aspects of listening
* media aeshetic/media cultural education and listening
* recent research on environmental sound, acoustic ecology and related issues
Please, send your abstracts for papers/posters, workshops, roundtable discussions etc. & proposals for compositions or other artistic contributions until March 1, 2012. All submissions will be anonymously reviewed by the conference’s committees.
Committee members: http://www.the-global-composition-2012.org/commitees.html
For the conference proceedings the finalized papers should be submitted by June 26, 2012.
Confirmed Keynote presenters are so far: Bill Fontana, R. Murray Schafer, Hildegard Westerkamp et al.
Providing a specially positioned “Next Generation”-thread, the conference is very interested, to create a forum for young scholars, scientists, artists as well as for students, and encourages them to send in their proposals.
Please note, that our venue is situated not far from Frankfurt airport in beautiful historic surroundings, providing not only the productive frame for an interesting conference, but also attractive landscapes, very good wine, culinary highlights, therefore good conditions for exchange and conviviality. All this makes, too, a central starting point for your summerbreak, be it locally, nationally or internationally.
We hope to welcome you in summer on our Media Campus Dieburg.
Best,
Sabine Breitsameter & Claudia Söller-Eckert
Conference Project Direction
Contact for general information: fabienne.rudolph@stud.h-da.de
The conference is supported by the “Understanding Canada”-programme/Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade and the Embassy of Canada Berlin, in collaboration with Darmstädter Ferienkurse/Darmstadt Summercourse, Cork Institute of Technology/School of Music, Ireland and endorsed by the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology.
Dept of Sound Spring 2012 Weekly Colloquium schedule
Posted in Current Grad Students, Events, Visiting Artists on Friday, February 10th, 2012
Department of Sound
Weekly Colloquium
Spring 2012
Wednesdays at 4:15. Room 522, 5th Floor 112 South Michigan unless noted
February 15:
February 22: Tom Buckner (singer, Robert Ashley Ensemble, etc.)
February 29: Bill Fontana phonography roundtable discussion (Leonardson)
March 7:
March 14: Jaap Blonk
March 21: (day before Spring Break – no Colloquium)
March 28:
April 4: Charlotte Hug
April 11: Peter Speer
April 18: Milad Mozari
April 25: Thanasis Kaproulias
May 2: (Crit Week – no Colloquium)
May 9:
Wet Paint 2012
Posted in Current Grad Students, Events on Monday, January 16th, 2012
SAIC MFAs Ethan Rose and Jonny Farrow will be featured in an exciting event at the ZhouB center this Friday.
SAIC Sound Art Theories Symposium 2011 – A Look Back (by Jonny Farrow)
Posted in Current Grad Students, Events on Friday, January 6th, 2012
Though it has been a minute or two since the end of the inaugural SAIC Sound Symposium (November 2011), I thought I would take some time to reflect back on the two days, make a few observations, and pose some questions that will hopefully spark some spirited debate with my sound department colleagues and anyone else who happens upon these lines.
It perhaps goes without saying (but I will say it anyway!) that a huge thanks is owed to Lou Mallozzi and his trusty main assistant for this event, Stephen Germana, as well as many other members of the sound department who volunteered to run and document the weekend, and those within SAIC’s administration who provided support for this event. It was truly a privilege to spend two days in the presence of so many scholars and artists who work in and through sound and who write and theorize about the plurality of practices found within the field.
And on this topic of plurality, I would add that if the two days of presentations proved anything, it is that there is still no definitive answer to the question, “What is sound art?” Not that this was the goal of the symposium, to define the field once and for all—in fact is was the opposite, to show the plurality of the field—but it always seems to be the 800 lb. gorilla in the room, this elusive definition of a very broad range of practices.
However, summaries and the desire to tie things up with a bow are inevitable and, of course, satisfying (when successful). And I do believe there was an attempt to umbrella (if I may ‘verb’ a noun) the practices and theories discussed over the weekend during the brief, final panel. Allen Weiss, during this summary on day two, suggested that since a symposium on the topic came to be, its existence proves that there is a discourse around sound art, and therefore, that it is indeed a field which has in fact already calcified. Then he quipped in a very lighthearted way—and I paraphrase—that this is why he has moved on to theorizing about food.
Also, I believe it was Salomé Voegelin (please correct me if I’m wrong) who said that even the idea of interdisciplinarity, on which sound art so heavily leans, has calcified. And, I think it is not a stretch to say that sound art and interdisciplinarity are two terms that are often found together. And anyway I would assert that if either concept has calcified (and I don’t believe either has), it did so long before this symposium.
But let me discuss for a moment what this term calcified might mean. It seemed to me that during the symposium it was being used in a negative sense, that calcified meant that the term sound art was somehow meaningless or obvious, that it was a fossil, a relic, and that it was time to move on to a new idea, or name, or category perhaps? So, an open-ended question:
How do we fashion a term that captures what working with sound outside of a musical context might be and should practitioners care?
I interpreted the use of the word calcification as a challenge to show that sound art is a useful term, and that the often-interdisciplinary nature of working with sound has not hardened into a brittle relic. If there is one thing I think most of us concerned with this idea can agree on is that sound art is hard to describe in a few words. So, what this tells me is that there is still a degree of fluidity.
Also it is my understanding that many music programs across the country are still reticent to move their curricula beyond serialism, which tells me that even a calcified version of sound art in the presence of staunch musical academia could possibly help to pry loose the tightness of even the most rusty musical bolts.
So, what do I (or if you’d like to join me, we) stand to gain from working with this term sound art?
Well, I think it’s rather obvious. I would argue that sound art is a purposely vague term that captures the plurality that exists in a loosely defined, messy (but not unprofessional) field. This is a product of sound itself, spilling out into the open where it is possibly uninvited, but must be given attention. As an art historical term, sound art does not seem to be one that has the support of many artists, or at least they find it problematic in one way or another.
The most cynical view of the term I have found comes from Max Neuhaus. In his short essay, “Sound Art?,” from 2000 (access through his website linked on his name above), which was published as an introduction to the exhibition “Volume: Bed of Sound,” at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, he posed the question about the term. He does not mince words. I quote:
It’s as if perfectly capable curators in the visual arts suddenly lose their equilibrium at the mention of the word sound. These same people who would all ridicule a new art form called, say, ‘Steel Art’ which was composed of steel sculpture combined with steel guitar music along with anything else with steel in it, somehow have no trouble at all swallowing ‘Sound Art’.
In art, the medium is not often the message.
If there is a valid reason for classifying and naming things in culture, certainly it is for the refinement of distinctions. Aesthetic experience lies in the area of fine distinctions, not the destruction of distinctions for promotion of activities with their least common denominator, in this case sound. Much of what has been called ‘Sound Art’ has not much to do with either sound or art.
With our now unbounded means to shape sound, there are, of course, an infinite number of possibilities to cultivate the vast potential of this medium in ways which do go beyond the limits of music and, in fact, to develop new art forms. When this becomes a reality, though, we will have to invent new words for them. ‘Sound Art’ has been consumed.
So what to make of Neuhaus’s assertion that, “’Sound Art’ has been consumed”? Is he really suggesting that we should throw the baby out with the bathwater?
First, sound art, however one defines it, is not and never has been a historical movement. I would assert that it is still an expanding field, and the fact that we now have a discourse around sound art simply means that we are trying to understand the boundaries of the field, not necessarily set them. You only have to look to those who are considered to be the creators of the field (Cage, Neuhaus, Fontana, Bertoia, Amacher, Lockwood, Lucier, Kubisch, et al) to understand that the group of practices that we now refer to as sound art has always been plural, moving across and through the disciplines of music composition, sculpture, conceptualism, material concerns, performance, science and other disciplines.
Second, in art circles, like it or not, the term now has a certain caché. It is a shorthand for the practices described at the symposium and certainly is broad enough a term to stretch across the ideas of the conceptualists, the phenomenologists, and the more music-based work that folks make, not to mention those artists and works that cut through and across all of the above. Maybe this broad use of the term does destroy fine aesthetic distinctions and promotes activities via a least common denominator as Neuhaus asserts.
But, who was he suggesting be excluded? Which practices?
My view is that the field is still too young even if you date it back to the Futurists—which puts it at around 100 years old—to make these kinds of distinctions. This would only serve to limit where we can go under this umbrella.
Do practitioners or theorists desire a new name?
If so, it seems that we would only be playing with semantics when we could be making art and real theory based on artistic production. In any case, coming up with a new name for this field or even parts of it seems like work for a later era.
So, am I advocating for my own right to continue to use the term?
Yes.
Why?
Well it may simply be that sound art, even with its caché, is still noise to both the museum and gallery establishment as well as noise in the staunch world of traditional and even experimental music. This would seem to me to be a good thing.
And, speaking of noise, this brings me to the ideas of Jacques Attali, where one can easily replace the word music in passages of his writing with the term sound art and come up with a very dynamic concept of how sound art can operate as a sort of probe into the possible. In his book Noise Attali says (and I bracket my substitution):
Music [Sound art] is prophecy. Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things; it is not only the image of things, but the transcending of the everyday, the herald of the future. (p. 11)
This Attali quote, referencing economics, brings me to my final observation about sound art and the SATS weekend.
It is true that choosing to call yourself a sound artist is a bit dangerous, particularly because you may well be damning yourself to a life of poverty. In other words, it is hard to make a living doing this kind of work. Like many musicians, we must be able to do something else (like teaching, bookkeeping, studio work, etc.) in order to support our addictions to the field of sound that we love so much.
So, when we use sound art in this economic realm of institutions, this is likely the most cynical (or perhaps practical?) move to define a space that deserves funding. And I say this without judgment, but Salomé Voegelin suggested as much in her presentation when she proposed that sound artists should try to align with music departments in the academy. She plainly argued that this move could lead to funding and jobs in the field and would certainly broaden ideas about music production, research and reception.
Even if this approach seems jaded on the surface, I believe her idea is one worth exploring. But this is not to suggest that there aren’t working models of sound studies that already exist. SAIC is a great example of how a sound program can work within an institutional framework, and it has done so for a very long time with much success.
But I would advocate for the continued expansion of sound art into various institutions. As long as established museums and galleries continue to privilege the eye, we must continue to work to expand our field. Of course, I am not arguing for the overthrow of visual art, nor am I suggesting some sort of predetermined, teleological goal for our work—a pinnacle being a large modern/contemporary museum—but simply for more devoted institutional space for sound artists.
At core, this is what I believe Voegelin was arguing for.
– Jonny Farrow, January 2012
Email: jfarro@saic.edu
www.jonnyfarrow.net
Farrow-SAIC Sound Symposium 2011
Sound is Art blog call for works
Posted in Call for Works, Opportunities on Friday, December 23rd, 2011
(referred by Eric Leonardson)
I am eager for a new exciting sounds to populate my growing blog, Sound is Art.
http://margaretnoble.net/soundisart
With 3000+ subscribers, it is a great place to share your work be heard! I hope to post recordings of your environment, sound art, home made instruments and other audio oddities. In particular, I am looking for the unique. There will be no compensation for these submissions but hopefully some satisfaction in sharing.
SOUND WORKS ARE PRESENTED IN THE FOLLOWING CATEGORIES
ARCHIVAL RECORDINGS: Old vinyl snippets and other bits of sound history
FIELD RECORDINGS: Recordings taken from the natural environment with minimal studio processing.
UNUSUAL INSTRUMENTS & GEAR: Recordings from unique electronic and acoustic instruments.
PERFORMANCE: Excerpts from live sound art performances.
PROCESS: Sound art compositions with interesting source material and studio processing.
SOUND ODDITIES: Uncategorized interesting sound phenomena.
To contribute please email me these three items:
1. A description, written in your email body, about the process, content and/or other details regarding the recording.
2. An mp3 sound clip.
3. A high quality jpeg (150 by 150 pixels) that is depictive of your sound(s) in some way. If you have supplemental photos, you can send those too (but extra images are not required).
Please email to: margaretnoble2000@yahoo.com
I will do my best to honor all submissions that fit the above criterion. Submit as many times as you like and please do not fret if I don’t get back to you right away, I will!
THANKS!!!!!!!!!!!!
Margaret Noble
Media Artist
http://margaretnoble.net
Weekly Colloquium – December 14 – Robby MacBain
Posted in Current Grad Students, Events on Monday, December 12th, 2011
Robby MacBain
Wednesday, December 14
4:30 pm
MacLean Center 112 S Michigan
Room 522
Waveforms
Posted in Current Grad Students, Events on Friday, December 9th, 2011
Friday, December 16th from 7-9pm
Outer Space 1474 N Milwaukee – 3rd floor
Performers include:
Eddie Breitweiser, Milad Mozari, Will Soderberg, Andy Ortmann, Andy Slater, and Erica Gressman (Mystreater).
Audio/Visual/Performance.
Programming for Performance class – live performances
Posted in Current Grad Students, Events on Friday, December 9th, 2011
On Wednesday, December 14, Shawn Decker’s Programming for Performance class will present a series of live performances in the Sensorium (MacLean Center 417) from 2 – 3:30 pm.
Performers include:
Quincy Bradford
Eddie Breitweiser
Milad Mozari
Madalyn Merkey
Sam Rolfes
David Rueter
Peter Speer
Chelsea Welch
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