“This has been the season of the concert hall. The one named after Walt Disney turned 10,” writes Mark Swed in Saturday’s (12/28) Los Angeles Times. Swed describes “this latest push to get music the heck out of Disney and every other concert hall … a remarkable phenomenon in 2013. This has been the year of sound art.… [In New York] the Museum of Modern Art opened its first sound art exhibition, ‘Soundings: A Contemporary Score.’ The first modern art presented at … the Cloisters [medieval galleries] … was a sound installation: ‘The Forty-Part Motet’ by Canadian artist Janet Cardiff…. San Francisco was also the site this past fall for Lisa Bielawa’s ‘Crissy Broadcast,’ … next to Golden Gate Bridge … for 800 musicians.… [At] the premiere of Christopher Cerrone’s ‘Invisible Cities’ at Union Station [in Los Angeles] … the audience heard the singers on headphones while piecing together the action throughout the waiting rooms during regular Amtrak evening hours…. The biggest lesson to be learned from sound art is that everything matters. You cannot shut your ears. What you see, what you smell, what you taste, what your sensation of hot or cold, how comfortable or uncomfortable you are affects how you listen.”
Posted January 2, 2014
