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welcome to the 2011 Look & Listen Festival, our landmark 10th anniversary season and our second time in the wonderful setting of the Chelsea Art Museum. In honor of the occasion 10we have increased our number of concerts from three to four and share these added ways to celebrate this milestone: • Commemorative visual art and music essays from Laurie Fendrich, Peter Plagens, and Bruce Hodges • Special video tribute from So Percussion • Silent Auction • Champagne & Chocolate post-concert reception on Saturday evening • 10th anniversary tee shirts We are also honored that the entire run of four concerts in this special season will be recorded for broadcast on WQXR’s Q2, New York’s home for new music! www.wqxr.org/q2 Thank you for joining us! Top David Del Tredici and Marc Peloquin perform at Gary Snyder Project Space at the 2009 Festival. Middle eighth blackbird warms up before a 2005 concert at Robert Miller Gallery Bottom Steve Mackey and Fred Sherry at the 2003 Festi- val at Art In General Top Panel Discussion with William Wegman, Carla Khilstedt, and Lisa Bielawa, hosted by John Schaefer at the Robert Miller Gallery in 2006 Middle Nancy Davidson, Steve Riech, and Fred Sherry on a 2006 panel discussion at Robert Miller Gallery Bottom So Percussion and Percussion Discussion team up at the 2006 Festival at Robert Miller Gallery A Decade of Delight Laurie Fendrich and Peter Plagens are painters who are married and live and work in New York. Plagens, by Laurie Fendrich and Peter Plagens whose book on Bruce Nauman is forthcoming from Phaidon in 2012, was the former art critic for News- week Magazine. He writes frequently for Art in America and other publications. His most recent exhibition, A retrospective glance over the decade of the Look & Listen Festival reveals an astonishing in January 2011, was at Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York. Fendrich is a professor of fine arts at Hofstra depth and breadth of offerings in contemporary music at a variety of art venues, as well as University. Her twenty-year retrospective of paintings and drawings opened this past fall at the Williamson Art Gallery at Scripps College, in Claremont, California. She is represented by Gary Snyder Project Space in NY. a variety of lively symposia made up of artists, art critics, composers, and musicians. Each spring, for the past decade, the Festival welcomed performances by such composers and performers as Steve Reich, John Corigliano, Meredith Monk, eighth blackbird, So Percussion, A Decade of Listening, Looking, and That Ampersand and Ethel. Audiences have listened to brilliant contemporary music while pondering the art of by Bruce Hodges artists ranging from Tim Hawkinson to Beatrice Mandleman, in such galleries as Ace, Robert Miller, Betty Cunningham, and the Gary Snyder Project Space. In 2002, the Look & Listen Festival broke new ground with contemporary music concerts in some of New York’s most prestigious art galleries, and actively encouraged audience mem- So, it would be tempting to mark the tenth anniversary simply by synopsizing all that has bers to combine their listening with the eclectic offerings on& the walls. But in an unofficial nod happened and offering deserved kudos to everyone who has made Look & Listen a reality. to John Cage (perhaps), neither the concerts nor the art were planned with the other in mind. Yet this occasion should also prompt us to return to the original (in both senses of that word) Cage’s famously disjunctive approach to the aural and visual often meant that one never quite premise of the festival—founding director David Gordon’s idea that serious new music (which knew what to expect, either in the brain’s process of assimilation, or in the way that it as- is to say, new serious music), presented in a setting of contemporary art, offers people the sembled the results. But as it turned out, more often than not, exhilaration was in store. chance to experience contemporary art and music in way that merges sights and sounds into evenings of double delights. Midway through Look & Listen’s ten years, I still recall the 2006 concert with So Percussion 10 hammering out David Lang’s the so-called laws of nature—the final section played on flower Those drawn to contemporary art, and those drawn to contemporary music, are not neces- pots and crockery—while gazing at The Pace Gallery’s portraits by Alex Katz. Somehow sarily the same audience. Yet they have much in common. Both share a longing for art that Lang’s timbral fireworks gave Katz’s sophisticated habitués more three-dimensional person- reflects contemporary experiences. Both are alert to the unexpected and surprising in art, and alities, as if they were additional—if mute—members of the live audience. Conversely, Katz’s are hungry for the thrill that comes from new art. rows of deadpan onlookers made Lang’s percussive chorus shriek even louder. That same year at Robert Miller Gallery, the dark, David Lynch-esque environments of Australian photog- Sixty years ago, the idea that new music and new art were natural partners hardly needed rapher Bill Henson gave a more sinister cast to Osvaldo Golijov’s Last Round, performed by iterating. In the 1950s, avant-garde artists regularly hosted music events in their studios, and the Biava and Daedalus String Quartets. But if one chose to focus more on the art, Golijov’s that haunting music you hear behind the images of Jackson Pollock in the short documen- explosiveness lent Henson’s mysterious landscapes an undercurrent of anxiety, even violence. tary, Pollock Painting, is Morton Feldman’s. Those responsive to art and music belonged to a single, small, tight-knit, avant-garde art community. In Lower Manhattan, for example, mem- Do we need to look at something while listening? Frankly, I hope for most people, the answer bers of the art community found it perfectly natural to move from an opening for an abstract is a resounding “no.” Today’s culture continually demands that both senses be engaged si- expressionist painter at the Tanager Gallery on Tenth Street to a John Cage performance at multaneously, reflecting the grip of film and television, as well as an insistence on multitasking Carnegie Hall. (even when ill-advised). But the fact is: we’re always visually evaluating, even if no formal art During the 1960s, new art forms other than painting and sculpture rose up—including, es- is on display. Even a pristine audiophile laboratory like Carnegie Hall—where music still holds pecially, performance-art pieces, such as the famous Robert-Rauschenberg/Billy-Kluver-led court over optical stimuli—nevertheless has creamy walls, scarlet upholstery and gilt trim, Experimements in Art and Technology collaboration, Nine Evenings in 1966, and video instal- which inevitably affect impressions of what is heard. Serendipitous confluences of what we lation art pieces. During the subsequent decades, art and artists made their ways increasingly hear and what we see can mesh—or clash—with intriguing results. In the past decade, Look out of isolated and private studios into the real world and onto, as it were, the street. But & Listen has zeroed in on that sometimes harmonious, sometimes gently chaotic relationship. rather paradoxically, audiences for contemporary art and music drifted apart. The “pluralism” How valuable a conjunction can be: that that took hold in the visual arts (i.e., everything from photorealist painting to earthworks in tiny ampersand – a locus of meaning – the desert could make equal claims to being avant-garde) did not lead as much as one might might be the most important part of the think to visual artists developing much interest in the explorations going on in contemporary Festival’s name. music. Nor did the new developments in music translate into musicians and composers de- Bruce Hodges is North American Editor for veloping any particular openness to contemporary art. MusicWeb International, based in London, and writes a monthly column on recordings for The Look & Listen Festival reestablishes that connection, and provides a context in which The Juilliard Journal. His blog, Monotonous contemporary composers, musicians and artists, and their audiences, can delight in one Forest, focuses on music and art, and he has another’s endeavors. More profoundly, Look & Listen extends a greater tradition, transcend- also written for Lincoln Center, Playbill, ing the modern and contemporary, and reaching back to the Renaissance, where music and artcritical.com and others. art were seen as sister arts. Art and music audiences in New York are fortunate to have the Festival among us. With enthusiasm, support, and perhaps a little bit of luck, Look & Listen Festival founder David Gordon and will be with us for at least another decade to come. composer Suzanne Farrin at the 2003 Festival at Art in General. So Percussion 10th Anniversary Video Tribute listened to thusly. Microsonophones (a family of instruments) allow the player the luxury of privacy (even in a crowded room), with the commensurate benefits–you JASON TREUTING Life is good when you are at a Look & Listen concert can play whatever you’d like without suffering the judgement of others. Have at it! It’s sonic fingerpainting. The word “musician” is too often used discourage people We are happy to celebrate Look and Listen’s 10th Birthday with all of you from participating in their birthright as soundmakers. Be a soundmaker with tonight! In one form or another, we’ve been involved since the beginning a Microsonophone. and it has been amazing to see the festival grow. We’ve played loud things and soft things and huge percussion set-ups crammed into Recognized as a multi-instrumentalist, singer, composer and instrument designer, Mark Stewart has been heard around the world performing old and new music.

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