Name: Listen Club #23: Sound, Scores and Poetry
Start: 2025-04-16T19:00:00+01:00
Location: The Rose Hill

Listen Club #23: Sound, Scores and Poetry

Come join us for Listen Club #23! In this curation, Will Montgomery will explore the rich history of text-sound interaction in radical C20 and C21 soundworks, with a particular focus on poetic constellations of text and on the cross-talk between score and poem. He will address the emergence of the text score in the work of John Cage and New School alumnae associated with Fluxus in the late 1950s and early 1960s; the confluence of post-Cagean performance, scores and poetry in the work of the Wandelweiser collective in the late 2000s and early 2010s; field recording as a facet of composition; the erosion of the performer/ audience distinction in some realisations of text scores; the long-running collaboration between US poet Susan Howe and musician David Grubbs; walking and scores; and recent work by Matana Roberts, Moor Mother and Redell Olsen.
Will Montgomery is a Reader in contemporary poetry and poetics at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of Short Form American Poetry: The Modernist Tradition (Edinburgh, 2020) and The Poetry of Susan Howe: History, Theology, Authority (Palgrave, 2010). He co-edited (with Robert Hampson) Frank O’Hara Now: New Essays on the New York Poet (Liverpool UP, 2010) and (with Stephen Benson) Writing the Field Recording: Sound, Word, Environment (Edinburgh, 2018). He has published many articles on contemporary poetry. He has a long-standing involvement, as critic and practitioner, in contemporary experimental music and field recording. In recent years, he has worked with Emmanuelle Waeckerlé and numerous collaborators on the Walking in Air project.
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Listen Club is about listening together is in the same space, with the possibility of sharing impressions and casual discussion afterwards. Listen Club hopes to provide a counterpoint to the quick paced personal consumption of music with a more patient shared experience; a deep listen, together, in order to foster community.
A programme of unusual sound-works, soundscape composition, and music from the present and the past, is chosen by Sound Art Brighton artists and invited guests. Curators will guide the experience - briefly discussing the details of the selections and providing background on the music and artists chosen. We aim to present a variety of styles and listening experiences that may include long duration singular sound works to a series of work on a particular theme.
On average we will listen together for 45min to an hour, with time for discussion and conversation afterwards.