Null Point: To give your letters cgaracter

Thursday March 3, 2022, 8PM EST

Virtual

Free, registraion required

Musical research group Null Point (Ethan Hayden, Megan Kyle, and Colin Tucker) aims to open lines of interchange between experimental music and contemporary art. In this virtual performance program, Null Point will take two exhibitions at UB Anderson Gallery, bpNichol: Love Letters, and Greg Bordowitz: Tetragrammaton as their point of inspiration in an intersection of poetry, visual art, and music.

Null Point is a musical research group founded in 2014 and based on Seneca/Haudenosaunee territories (so-called Buffalo, NY). Aiming to open lines of interchange between experimental music and contemporary art, the group utilizes musical techniques to investigate spatial politics, and engages politicized conceptual strategies to interrogate formal and institutional defaults of Western Art Music and its afterlives. Proceeding otherwise to Western Art Music’s division of labor between disinterested spectatorship, transparent notation, and compliant performance, Null Point investigates new approaches to concert presentation as well as event formats such as installation and workshop, as well as participatory and location-based music. Since the onset of the covid-19 pandemic, Null Point has produced online events with similar critical attention to platform-centered internet’s normative procedures.

An artist-run organization, Null Point researches new approaches to composition/notation, performance, listening, facilitation, and curation, with members moving flexibly between these roles. In addition to performing compositions of its members, the group presents work by emerging artists as well as neglected radical experimental music scores of the 1960s and 70s. By design, Null Point presents events in a range of institutional settings: arts institutions (Artpark, Constellation Chicago, Fridman Gallery, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Squeaky Wheel, Visual Studies Workshop), community organizations (WASH Project, Old First Ward Community Association, Cincinnati Public Library), universities (Dartmouth College, DePauw University, Princeton University), and architectural repurposing projects (Silo City, echo Art Fair at Buffalo Gear and Axle Plant), with funding from Art Bridges Foundation, New Music USA, the arts councils of NY and Toronto, and numerous universities.

Ethan Hayden is a composer, performer, and author based in America's Rust Belt. His acoustic, electronic, and vocal music has been performed at conferences, festivals, and DIY spaces around the world. He received his MA and Ph.D. in Composition from the University at Buffalo, and also holds undergraduate degrees in Composition and Theory from the University of North Texas. His principal composition teachers include Cort Lippe, Jeffrey Stadelman, Joseph Klein, Andrew May, and David Bithell. He currently teaches sound synthesis and electroacoustic composition at Buffalo State College.

Also active as a performer, Ethan regularly presents new and experimental works for voice, trombone, and electronics. He is the associate director of Wooden Cities, a Buffalo-based contemporary music ensemble, and the technical director of Null Point, an initiative for new sound art in WNY. He runs the independent record label, Infrasonic Press, and is the author of Sigur Rós's ( ), published as part of Bloomsbury's 33⅓ series.

Buffalo-based oboist Megan Kyle performs as a soloist, improviser, chamber musician, and orchestral musician, with a particular interest in resonances between early and recent music. She is fascinated by expressive extremes and unexpected acoustic phenomena on the oboe, experimenting with defamiliarizing or "glitching" the instrument through microtonality, multiphonics, timbral variation, and noise.

Kyle performs and creates material with new music ensemble Wooden Cities, musical research group Null Point, voice/oboe duo Senso di Voce, and oboe/piano/violin/cello quartet The Evolution of the Arm. Recent recordings include WORK with Wooden Cities and Sounds Like with The Evolution of the Arm, both released by Infrasonic Press. She performs as a substitute with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, and Charleston Symphony Orchestra, and has appeared as a soloist at the New York Electroacoustic Music Festival. In addition to SUNY at Buffalo, Kyle teaches oboe and English horn at Houghton College and SUNY Geneseo, and performs as a member of the Geneseo Wind Quintet.

Kyle holds a Master of Music in Oboe Performance from DePaul University (2013), as well as a BM in Oboe Performance and BA in English from Oberlin Conservatory and College (2011). Her principal teachers have been Eugene Izotov, Robert Walters, Alex Klein, and Louis Rosenblatt.

Colin Tucker is a musician, curator and writer who lives on occupied lands of the Seneca nation known colonially as Buffalo, NY. In his work he investigates intersections between experimental music, contemporary art, and decolonial study

Recent curatorial projects include interpretations of Fluxus water-focused scores through environmental justice frameworks and site-specific investigations of the concert hall as a socio-ecological space. As a composer and writer Tucker is presently at work on a book of intertwined event scores and essays which excavates racial politics of concert music spectatorship through analytics of radical Black thought.