LOOK & LISTEN CONFERENCE
Currently, the Look & Listen conference is on hiatus. If you would like to submit a paper for consideration, please do feel free to send it to us at the address below.

Any topics related to the intersections of music and visual art are welcome (topics may include, but are not limited to: aesthetics, critical theory, history, cultural studies, reception theory, perception).

Presentation length should be 20-25 minutes, followed by a brief question and answer period.

Please submit proposals of no more than 300 words to:

Sean Carson
conference@lookandlisten.org

Email submissions can be in the body of a message or as an attached document. Please include all relevant contact information. Requests for further information about the conference may also be directed to the above email address.


PAST CONFERENCES

2005 CONFERENCE (scroll down)

The Look & Listen Festival Conference

Saturday, April 16, 2005
1:00pm - 4:00pm
New York University
24 Waverly Place, Room 220
New York, NY

Conference attendance is free and open to the public.

The Look and Listen Festival presented our second annual conference on Saturday, April 16 in New York City. The conference featuured an invited lecture by Princeton University Professor Martin Scherzinger on "Ocular Hearing: How Geometric Visualization Opens Aural Perspectives in an African Music," There were four exciting presentations selected by the conference committee from this year's many proposals. This event is sponsored by the Look & Listen Festival and graduate students of the NYU FAS Music Department.

For more information, or to ask questions, please contact Sean Carson, at: conference@lookandlisten.org


ABSTRACTS

Sean Griffin

"The Performative as a Physcial and Visual Experience"

For 9 years, I have worked with Artist Catherine Sullivan in creating interdisciplinary performances in museums and theaters through Europe and the US. The works, featured in the Whitney Biennial, Volksbühne for Art Forum Berlin, the UCLA Hammer Museum, the Lyon Biennial, and the Mini-Matrix series at the Berkeley Museum of Art, take up the performative as a physical and visual experience.

We have developed strategies for bringing different kind of artists together. In the Volkesbühne manifestation, we took materials from artists Ron Athey, Mike Kelley, Vera Mater, Marek Cichucki, and wove them into a re-interpretation of a 1964 Fluxus performance by Joseph Beuys. Generating and employing concepts like "Basic Rhythm Patters", "Triplicities", and other musical regimentation strategies, we've created a mode of interdisciplinary connection, a flexible language bringing aesthetic principles together to tease out differences and find common threads.

I will present footage from rehearsals as well as documentation from the Art Forum Berlin Volksbühne, Lyon Biennial, and the Whitney Biennial performances.

Holly Watkins

"Kiefer, Rihm, and Henze: Confronting the German Past"

Since the early 1970s, the work of artist Anselm Kiefer has attracted considerable attention for the way it deliberately engages with taboo Germanic imagery. From photographs that show Kiefer performing the Nazi salute to paintings that invoke Wagner's operas and the immense spaces of fascist architecture, Kiefer's work deftly blends German self-examination and mourning with a provocative reliance on representational techniques of questionable moral substance. Though hardly a straightforward "return" to the past, Kiefer's oeuvre has been understood as belonging to a neo-expressionist movement that reintroduced traditional pictorial elements into an artistic practice dominated by abstraction. Similarly, composers who rejected the structural rigor and anti-emotional stance of serialism often looked to past models in order to develop a newly communicative music.

While no composer has wrestled as exclusively as Kiefer with a tainted Germanic legacy (favorite neo-expressionist models include the Austrian Jews Mahler and Schoenberg and the Hungarian Bartók), works by Wolfgang Rihm and Hans Werner Henze nonetheless revive certain Germanic formal and expressive paradigms. Yet there has been very little discussion of the degree to which these works become entangled in a Kieferesque dialectic of repudiation and rehabilitation. Focusing on Rihm's String Quartet no. 3 (1976), whose title "Im Innersten" evokes the privileged interiority attributed to German music since Beethoven, and Henze's self-described "German" Symphony no. 7 (1984), I show how these works employ conventional lamenting figures to perform a deracinated mourning - raising the question of who or what is being mourned - while destabilizing the very language used to express such mourning.

Kathy Biddick

"Separate and Equal: Compositional Chance Procedures in the Collaborations of John Cage and Merce Cunningham"

The work of composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham blurred the boundaries between artistic disciplines and demonstrated that music and dance could co-exist in the same space and time while retaining separate and individual identities. These collaborations, along with the help of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, created a collage composed of the choreography, music, lighting design, stage design, and costume design. Each element was prepared individually and then came together randomly, often for the first time during the live performance. These autonomous sensory experiences mirrored the many simultaneous sensory events of daily life.

This paper explores the ways in which chance procedures structured the elements of music and movement as applied by John Cage and Merce Cunningham during their many years of artistic collaboration. By using compositional chance procedures, Cage and Cunningham were able to create pieces with no single focus or hierarchy of any kind. Both Cage and Cunningham valued equality: Cage attempted to produce quality of all sounds, and Cunningham strived for an equality of all movement and space. Moreover, the use of chance procedures eliminated the traditional cause and effect relationship of dance being done to the music. This is demonstrated in pieces such as Solo Suite in Space and Time (1953) and Variations V (1965), which relies on the movement of the dancers to trigger the sound system used by the musicians.

Andrew Scott

"Sonny Greenwich's Guitar Cubism: How Greenwich 'sees' his improvisations as Paul Klee inspired diagrams."

This paper explores jazz guitarist Sonny Greenwich's 1994 improvised composition "Sonics II." Recorded "live off the floor" in a Montreal studio, "Sonics II" was unrehearsed and spontaneously composed. Accordingly, the piece provides a valuable portal through which to examine both Greenwich's improvisational and compositional skills. My goal in this paper is to explore Greenwich's comments about his own music, and marry them to the transcription. Specifically, the parallels Greenwich draws between his musical style and visual shapes intrigues me. Greenwich cites numerous influences when discussing his music. However, Cubism, and more specifically, the work of Swiss painter Paul Klee is mentioned regularly. "The solo structures of my playing were based on an interpretation of the work of cubist artist Paul Klee, where I saw the fretboard in diagrams," writes Greenwich in the liner notes to his 1993 release "Standard Idioms."

I argue that Greenwich's fretboard diagrams act as a surrogate music theory for the guitarist. Instead of thinking key, tonality and harmonic movement, Greenwich has mentally linked visual shapes on the instrument to sonic gesture. Accordingly, his diagrams are both metric: they reference and convey information which informs Greenwich's improvisations, and formulaic: they suggest a framework of pitches which Greenwich can use, avoid, surround or approach through any number of malleable trajectories. "With me it is what the chord looks like, you know, how the chord looks," he explains. Through transcription, analysis and ethnography, I argue that Greenwich's diagrams can ! be viewed as a "complex of habits and associations" that trigger mental and musical processes in the guitarist and "enable [him] to compose at high speed" (Treitler 356). Using the phenomenological/ethnomusicological work of Harris Berger (1999), I argue that how Greenwich "sees" his improvisations as Paul Klee-inspired shapes and patterns on the guitar, is indeed a valid musical practice, offering a rarely discussed alternative improvisatory approach.


View abstracts from the 2004 Conference.