site-specific interventions for concert halls by Colin Tucker

Canadian Music Centre–Ontario

20 St. Joseph St., Toronto/Tkaronto/Dish with One Spoon Treaty Territory

April 23-26 and April 29-May 3

Open 10am-3pm daily

Toronto/Tkaronto— This spring, the Canadian Music Centre–Ontario presents spectatorship is not neutral, an installation featuring new and recent works for concert halls by Colin Tucker. The project focuses on marking the politics of often unmarked defaults of spectatorial concert (“classical”) music, particularly those of silent, seated, focal listening, and of organizing musical practice around closed, immaterial works.

Grounded in methods of Black and Indigenous studies, the installation investigates how the concert hall’s central position, the Spectator, is always already relational, and specifically how the Spectator’s sensory capacity depends axiomatically upon the displacement of the exteriority of sensation onto racially-marked figures of sensory incapacity. The featured works map how seemingly routine protocols of concert music are not easily separable from protocols of empire, as a necessary step towards a politicized dismantling of concert music. As the artist is read as white, the installation deliberately limits the scope of its critical inquiry to white positionality, while prioritizing methods of interrogating whiteness learned from Indigenous and Black studies.

Featuring works for print, images, audio, projection, piano, and more, the program features installations throughout the Canadian Music Center’s Chalmers House space in Tkaronto/Toronto, as well as a related live-streamed artist talk and performance (see details below).

For more information: https://colintucker.studio/events/not-neutral/