COMING UP!

Chance Encounters with John Cage: CURATORIAL COMPOSING with ED McKEON

Thursday, May 21, 3–4pm ET

Free, on Zoom

Join us for a discussion on "curatorial composing," focusing on works by John Cage, Heiner Goebbels, Pauline Oliveros, and others.

“Curatorial composing” is curatorial producer and researcher Ed McKeon’s term for the way John Cage shifts attention from musical works to musical encounters, and the consequences that follow. Rather than follow the hierarchical flow of composer, then performer, then listener, curatorial composition distributes the responsibility from that model to a situation in which all are equally present and responsible for the meaning of an encounter. This means that these compositions are neither anchored in historical time nor suited to “Historically Informed Performance” in the sense of a reconstruction.

These pieces (and we as listener-observers) are always undergoing change. Curatorial composing is post-canonic. It invites us to experience and understand historical time and historical significance differently.

Exemplified in many ways by Cage, this approach means that musical composition need no longer be limited to organizing sound, but can extend to text, typography, movement, visual elements ,etc. Contrary to visual art histories in which visual art loses its “medium specificity” to become “post-conceptual,” Cage shows that music can occur in and across any medium.

Cage was not alone in this. We’ll chat about the work of Heiner Goebbels, and perhaps as well about Pauline Oliveros and Jani Christou, among others. Curatorial composing marks a shift in historical ontology, and of how we might understand historical time (and the relation of "history" and "temporality").

Save the Date

Cagecircle: Composition for an Exhibition

June 27–July 31

Stevenson Library, Bard College (1 Library Road, Annandale on Hudson, NY)

Opening Event on June 27: a free, immersive performance of Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing” along with “Extended Lullaby”—1pm