Public Programs on Music and Art
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2009-2016
Since 2009 I have helped create educational programs at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum around the relationship between music and visual arts. The first was an artist- led tour of the Kandinsky exhibition that ran in 2009/10 in the main rotunda of the museum. The program, Eye-to-Eye: Kandinsky, involved leading a tour around the paintings on exhibit with a portable stereo, talking about Kandinsky’s relationship to music and synaesthesia. During the tour I played music, had the audience engage in a group musical improvisation around one of Kandinsky’s paintings, and spoke of my relationship to the work as a composer. Taking as a point-of-departure the conceit that Kandinsky was a musician trapped in the body of a painter, I led a discussion around the problem of artistic genre and the role of the artist in contemporary society.
The second program, Bright Field: Music and Modernism, was a lecture/concert accompanying The Great Upheaval, a show of painting and sculpture from the years 1910-1918. I gave a public lecture on the relationship between art and music during this period, focusing on the Second Viennese School, the musical Impressionists, and Futurism. After the lecture I programmed a concert in the rotunda featuring the piano trio Typical Music, who played selections of concert music by Debussy, Webern, Scriabin, and Kodály.
The third program, Composing With Patterns: Music at mid-Century, looked at the relationship between the mid-century abstraction of artists such as Rothko, Rauschenberg, Pollock, and Calder with their musical counterparts in the New York School of Cage, Feldman, and Brown, and the European post-war modernist composers Stockhausen, Boulez, and Xenakis. Presented as a lecture/concert, the performance featured twelve musicians in the Guggenheim rotunda performing mid-century avant- garde music for an audience.
The fourth, Around the Circle, looked at musical abstraction as a theme since 1900. Presented as a lecture in the tower galleries at the museum in dialogue with an exhibition of early abstract painting from the Guggenheim’s collection, the lecture touched on impressionism, surrealism, Futurism, and other schools that transcended form to touch both the visual arts and music.
The fifth, Creamcheese, consisted of a restaging of the eponymous Dusseldorf nightclub in the Guggenheim rotunda in the context of psychedelia, Krautrock, and the artists in the Zero movement. The performance consisted of two acts: an analogue synthesizer duet by myself and Zach Layton, followed by a performance by Oneida, both featuring the visuals of Brock Monroe and his colleagues in the Joshua Light Show. A pre-concert lecture by Tiziana Caianiello on the importance of Creamcheese to the Zero group contextualized the performance with the incredible exhibition in the rotunda.
The most recent program, Optical Sound, considered the work of Lazlo Moholy-Nagy in the context of contemporary A/V performance, using Moholy-Nagy’s “opto-acoustic alphabet” of the ways in which sound and light interplay as a prompt for discussion and performance. The show featured live A/V sets by David Linton and Thomas Dexter in the theater, and a live performance by Marina Rosenfeld and Greg Fox in the rotunda, along with a multichannel presentation of Hungarian electroacoustic music.
