Instrument builders, composers, and performers have long operated in adjacent but separate spheres. Many contemporary music practices have proven these contradictions false, by overtrowing boundaries of discipline and function. These artistic practices understand that to design a new resonating body is to open new compositional possibilities, and that certain musics become thinkable only after the instrument exists that can carry them. During the studio symposium ‘The hardware store as a compositional tool’, we explore the act of instrument building as a compositional act, a practice in which the decisions made in the workshop are as musically significant as those made at the writing desk or the mixing board.

For this studio symposium, we have invited Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn and Hannah Todt. Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn is a performer, sound artist, and scholar working around the edges of installation, improvisation, composition, and craft. He has been building traditional, experimental, and invented instruments for decades and currently presents concerts and installations with a series of hybrid acoustic instruments developed and constructed over the last five years. Hannah Todt is a visual artist and musician based in Vienna and Brussels. Through sound, performance, and sculpture, she reflects on the relationships between human and non-human bodies, as well as on the social conditions of knowledge production. Her practice is deeply informed by collaborative methods grounded in listening and exchange, and by an attentiveness to subtle shifts in function that both reveal information and refer to the validity and mutability of meaning.

JOIN
May 21, 15:00-17:00h
NS16
free entrance, r.s.v.p.