Translation: Henry Cow, Rock, Improvisation, Experimental Music, and Sound Art

Dr. Benjamin Piekut (Professor, Cornell University, Author of Henry Cow: The World is a Problem) will give a special lecture.

Anyone interested is welcome to attend.
(Pre-registration is needed: the first 40 people can be accommodated)
Please register here. (Pre-registration has been closed (2024.08.18)

Date: Tuesday, September 3rd 2024, 1800-2000
Venue: GA Lecture Room (4F), TAKI PLAZA, Ueno Campus, Tokyo University of the Arts
Presenter: Dr. Bejamin Piekut (Peofessor, Cornell University)
Other speakers: Tadahiko Yokogawa (musician/ex-After Dinner), Katsushi Nakagawa (Associate Professor, Yokohama National University)
Moderator: Yoshitaka Mori (Professor, Tokyo University of the Arts)
Interpreter: Haruka Ueda

Organizer: Yoshitaka Mori Lab, Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts
Language: English/Japanese with consecutive interpretations

Translation: Henry Cow, Rock, Improvisation, Experimental Music, and Sound Art

Benjamin Piekut will talk about Henry Cow in relation to how they moved between the worlds of rock, improvised music, and contemporary composition, translating ideas from one area into another. He will then present his current project on the historiography of global sound art, and how aesthetic concepts get “translated” in local circumstances. Other speakers (Yokogawa and Nakagawa) will respond to his talk from the perspective of Henry Cow and Sound Art, respectively. Following these presentations, the discussion will be opened to the audience.

Benjamin Piekut

Professor in the Department of Music at Cornell University. He studies music and performance after 1960 and is currently researching the history of sound art. Benjamin Piekut studied music and philosophy at Hampshire College before pursuing his M.A. in composition at Mills College, where he studied with Alvin Curran and Pauline Oliveros. After a stint in the critical studies/experimental practices program at the University of California, San Diego, he completed his Ph.D. in historical musicology at Columbia University.

His first monograph, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and its Limits, was published in 2011 by the University of California Press. Situated at the intersection of free jazz, the Cagean avant-garde, Fluxus, radical politics, and popular music, the book portrays New York experimentalism in the 1960s as a series of conflicts, struggles, and exclusions. In 2019, he published Henry Cow: The World Is a Problem (Duke). A collective biography of the British rock band Henry Cow (1968–78), the book investigated how such vernacular musicians recast older questions of avant-garde politics in a space defined by the commodity form, the commercial marketplace, and an aural-tactile mode of reception and transmission.

He is the editor of Tomorrow is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies (University of Michigan Press, 2014), a collection of essays that explore new corners of experimental music history. He is also the co-editor, with George E. Lewis, of The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (2016), a two-volume set gathering authors from the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. In celebration of the John Cage centennial in 2012, he co-edited (with David Nicholls) a special issue of Contemporary Music Review. In 2020, he co-edited (with Julia Bryan-Wilson) a special issue of Third Text on Amateurism. 

Links

Benjamin Piekut: Networks, Materials, and Forms – YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqHG0NJh2r8

“Sound Against Music: The Musical Amateurs of the Judson Dance Generation,” TDR: The Drama Review, 2024. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/932475

“Instead of ’Sound Art,’ say ‘Undisciplined,’” interview by Bill Dietz, Overtoon, 2024. https://overtoon.org/podcasts/instead-of-sound-art-say/#episode-1755

From Poetry to Sound Art, through performance: A conversation with Peter Weibel | | Flash Art https://flash—art.com/2020/03/listening-in-1-benjamin-piekut-peter-weibel/

The Vernacular Avant-garde: A Speculation / Tamara Levitz and Benjamin Piekut – ASAP/J https://asapjournal.com/feature/the-vernacular-avant-garde-a-speculation-tamara-levitz-and-benjamin-piekut/

Acknowledgment

This event was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 24K03444, “Elucidating the Relationships between Music, Visual Arts, and Sound Art during the Emergences of Sound Art in Japan, Taiwan, and the Western.”