From Music & Cosmicity to Sound & Interiority

Instructor: Jim Schrub Date & Time: March 26, April 2, 9, May 14 09:00-11:30 ET.

DESCRIPTION: On the 25th of February, 2019, Tom Goskar published the first article of a series asking this question: what is curating sound? The article tackled the practices and difficulties of curating sound today, addressing the scarcity of research on that specific topic. And scarce it is: the Sound Art Curating Conference took place in 2014; a book was published online on sound curating by the Leonardo Electronic Almanac in 2018, Curating Sound. And in 2021, the Saas-Fee Institute of Art held a series of conferences on the topic of Curating Noise: Reverberations and the Polyvocal. The scarcity of the literature on the topic should be approached as a symptom, not of the absence of a problem, but of the difficulty questioning sound curation as a practice, for the following reasons.

First, sound and music are often the sides of a main visual course, of secondary importance. Second, the claimed connection between curating and knowledge confronts sound curation to a totally different scholarship than that of the history of visual and performance arts, that is, musicology and ethnomusicology. Third, music and noise are performed during gigs, where people and their bodies are moved in a very different way than the stillness and discipline of spectators’ bodies during exhibitions – curiously, one may reckon that managing to integrate music and sonic creation in exhibitions also happened through the abandonment of the notion of music, recuperating the critical interrogation of the concept since the beginning of the 20th century. We’ll investigate the movements of music and sound theories. Some movements are parallel to others, but the main movement transforms music from being an adequate means of describing the laws of the natural world (God’s creation) through various occult correspondence theory, to being an adequate means of describing (1) the social world and (2) the future, this corresponds to the sonic episteme (James, 2019); of (3) tuning to the world from another level of experience, this corresponds to the aesthetic and socio-anthropological theories of music.

These three elements are parallel to technical transformations of our equipment for accessing to music and sound, recording music and sound, and broadcasting music and sound. As sound and technology met and merged, it challenged the site and object dependence of curation and exhibitions that music and sound art carry (London, 2018).

This investigation will help us get a clearer grasp of the challenges music curation as a pedagogical and artistic act faces, which supposes either that one manages to craft a historical and musical objects (if they have to fit this description to be curatable – that is, amenable to curating acts and activities), and question the relevance of the concepts in which it is embedded (immersion, interiority, to name a few – Schrimshaw, 2018).

IMAGE: Carsten Nicolai, The syn chron space, 2004

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.