site-specific interventions for concert halls by Colin Tucker

spectatorship is not neutral presents new and recent installation works for concert halls by Colin Tucker. The installation 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 subject-position, the Spectator, is always-already relational, and specifically how the Spectator’s sensory capacity depends axiomatically upon the discursive 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 (and whiteness’s (re)production in and through concert music), 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 CMC’s Chalmers House space, as well as related performances and a live-streamed artist talk.

Venue: Canadian Music Centre
20 St. Joseph St.
Toronto, ON, M4Y 1J9

Tkaronto/Toronto, occupied land of the Wendat confederacy, Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation/Anishinaabe confederacy, and Haudenosaunee confederacy