Re: the Boulez anniversary: "This article examines the lessons that Pierre Boulez learned about sound from Antonin Artaud, suggesting that Boulez's ideas about musical writing (écriture) took shape as the composer imagined and appropriated forms of non-European expression."
re: the Boulez anniversary, look up PB's longtime friend and correspondent André Schaeffner, who founded and directed a department at the Musée de l'Homme and participated in multiple "object"-"music"-plundering expeditions in Africa
fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3...
I don't think PB's casual and widespread appropriation (among other aspects of his work) is particularly separable from AS's outright plunder.
AS participated in this expedition which looted 3500 "objects": fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission...
re: the Boulez anniversary, look up PB's longtime friend and correspondent André Schaeffner, who founded and directed a department at the Musée de l'Homme and participated in multiple "object"-"music"-plundering expeditions in Africa
fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3...
Fossil fuel companies should be forced to pay the public trillions in damages for the costs of their planetary arson. Instead they are trying to shut down one of the most important and storied environmental groups in the world. It's shameless - and it's not over. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
This is a corporate attempt to put an end to climate protest and *particularly* to Indigenous led climate protest. Massive 1A assault. Pretty shocking that our little outlet was one of maybe 3 or 4 that had a reporter there every day of the trial (one of the others was a fake newspaper 🙃)
They are coming for every university, if you think you’re safe because it hasn’t been yours yet I don’t know what to tell you. Join AAUP, refuse to comply, organize your colleagues
3rd image is a visual realization of "before Taste," featuring a montage of 1) a word from Wilhelm Wackenroder's (still) influential allegory that defines transcendent art music over-against the figure of a mechanized, Orientalized saint, and 2) Eugene Lami's image of concert music spectators.
Looking forward to realizing and sharing my pieces with new (to me) folks next Thursday in Seattle. Thanks to Aaron Michael Butler for playing and hosting!
#ClassicalMusic #Aesthetics #ConcertHall #Artwashing #ContemporaryArt #InstitutionalCritique
In short, I have found that the denial of reality upheld through a brash lack of criticality makes hegemonic museums, to use Umberto Eco’s expression, “closed texts.” As such, they become limited, self-contained worlds that legitimize their own narratives. The ability to ignore histories of conquest and parasitism sustains the ruling class that profits from that violence. Erasing and concealing reality forecloses widespread critique and potential political action against past and current extraction. The myth of neutrality, which permeates other industries, such as journalism and science, mediates how people understand not just hegemonic museums but, more importantly, the world at large. Through distracting and deluding, it contributes to a network of obscuring forces that prevent people from understanding how power operates.
Also relevant (from Autry's essay in
Mallory, Seidenstein, Burke, Jackson, Kéla, eds. _Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch
Atlantic Slave Trade : Curating Histories, Envisioning Futures._ (Boston: BRILL, 2025)). (And @arunadsouza.bsky.social you came up in the Q&A, natch.)
Performance: Feeling as Capacity/ Feeling as Relation, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle, March 20, 2025 Talk: "Primitivism and the Racialization of Sensation in David Tudor’s Rainforest series," Society for American Music, Tacoma, March 22, 2025 Virtual Talk: "'Like an empty glass, nothing but wheat:' John Cage’s Chance Systems and/as White Possessive Logics," Composing (with) Systems, University of Sheffield, England, March 27, 2025
Sharing new work in Seattle-Tacoma and (virtually) in England this month
Photo on the right features my installation piece "before the spectator's capacity," a site-specific intervention in gallery and performing arts spaces around similar issues.
"Art History and Apocalypse: A Decolonial Re-Orientation:" on the unthought yet deep influence of Spanish conquist-adors' writings on Immanuel Kant's aesthetics, and what this means for a decolonial reckoning with the Aesthetic College Art Association Feb. 13, 2025, 11am
Presenting at @caavisual next week in Lenapehoking/"NYC" on apocalyptic c0l0nizing logics deeply embedded in Aesthetic philosophy and practice, as a step towards a decolonial dismantling of the Aesthetic and a closer aligning of art pedagogy and practice with decolonial social movements.
Presenting artwork & talks in Tkaronto and Lenapehoking over the next few weeks. For details and links, visit my website.
Writing today about Kant's extensive debt to the writings of Spanish Conquistadors, and what that means for decolonial approaches to all modern Western artistic disciplines. I'll be presenting this writing at the College Art Association conference in "NYC"/Lenapehoking on February 13.
Next week in Tkaronto. Features my piece "in the wake of the santa maria," presented for the first time in a video version.
Tkaronto: I will be presenting prose and an installation from my book in progress on the politics of sensation in the concert hall Feb 6, 12noon, Luella Massey Playhouse.
Delighted to be contributing to this exhibition at York University, curated by Aftab Mirzaei. Runs Feb. 3-7; opening reception is Wednesday, Feb. 5, 5-7pm.
Dismantling the whiteness of concert music: a reading list. Now updated, with new sections on policing, media, musical instruments, and tuning.
Null Point's 2023 publication is now updated, with sections on new topics.
Feel free to copy and paste into your syllabus; but study should be followed up by action to change infrastructures (certain texts on the list take up what this might entail).
L|nk |n comments.
Wildfire in Los Angeles
Holy cow. Just woke up to this view from mid-Wilshire looking downtown
New text. 2024 was a Significant Anniversary of composer Charles Ives. I trace how this could have been an occasion for decolonial, abolitionist reckoning with a problematic figure, and yet US settler music institutions instead doubled down on an anti-Black, colonial status quo.
Currently finishing a short piece about this. Drops tomorrow on my website.
Null Point has published “De-normalizing ‘Wide Open Spaces:’ Notes Towards a Decolonial Performance Practice”
Written by @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social, it concerns their realization of Yoko Ono’s “Hide Piece,” from Rust Belt Artists Against Gen*cide.
nullpointseries.wordpress.com/words/de-nor...
