The Masterwork is Haunted

by Null Point

Multimedia site-specific installation confronting concert and gallery institutions

June 23rd – Installation opens 7:00pm, Performance at 8:00pm

Torn Space Theater – 612 Fillmore Ave. Buffalo

Get Tickets

Buffalo music research group Null Point premieres a program at Torn Space that brings together new works with innovative realizations of 1960s experimental music scores. In dialogue with contemporary art (conceptual art, institutional critique, appropriation art) and with insurgent scholarship (critical race study, decolonial study), these performances politicize and trouble default protocols and infrastructures of concert music. From the proscenium to seated, silent listening to notions of a reproducible, autonomous Masterwork, concert music’s norms have come to regulate a wide range of activity in performing arts and auditory culture worldwide.

Through strategies drawn from both performing and gallery arts, Null Point’s program features a site-specific installation in the Adam Mickiewicz Library and Dramatic Circle, followed by a performance (with participatory elements) and a Q & A with the artists. The featured pieces politicize and challenge hallowed principles foundational to concert music—Spectator, Work, Feeling, Harmony—and instead offer strategies for mapping relations embedded in these principles, strategies that refuse compartmentalizations such as aesthetic/political and metropole/colony. Through a variety of technologies (musical instruments, objects, audiovisual media, language, etc.) and formats, the event inhabits spectatorial architecture in a variety of ambivalent ways, annotating and defamiliarizing this architecture as an initial step towards imagining music radically otherwise.