Re: the Boulez anniversary: "This article examines the lessons that Pierre Boulez learned about sound from Antonin Artaud, suggesting that Boulez's ideas about musical writing (écriture) took shape as the composer imagined and appropriated forms of non-European expression."

re: the Boulez anniversary, look up PB's longtime friend and correspondent André Schaeffner, who founded and directed a department at the Musée de l'Homme and participated in multiple "object"-"music"-plundering expeditions in Africa fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3...

re: the Boulez anniversary, look up PB's longtime friend and correspondent André Schaeffner, who founded and directed a department at the Musée de l'Homme and participated in multiple "object"-"music"-plundering expeditions in Africa fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3...

Fossil fuel companies should be forced to pay the public trillions in damages for the costs of their planetary arson. Instead they are trying to shut down one of the most important and storied environmental groups in the world. It's shameless - and it's not over. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

This is a corporate attempt to put an end to climate protest and *particularly* to Indigenous led climate protest. Massive 1A assault. Pretty shocking that our little outlet was one of maybe 3 or 4 that had a reporter there every day of the trial (one of the others was a fake newspaper 🙃)

They are coming for every university, if you think you’re safe because it hasn’t been yours yet I don’t know what to tell you. Join AAUP, refuse to comply, organize your colleagues

Looking forward to realizing and sharing my pieces with new (to me) folks next Thursday in Seattle. Thanks to Aaron Michael Butler for playing and hosting! #ClassicalMusic #Aesthetics #ConcertHall #Artwashing #ContemporaryArt #InstitutionalCritique

Also relevant (from Autry's essay in Mallory, Seidenstein, Burke, Jackson, Kéla, eds. _Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Atlantic Slave Trade : Curating Histories, Envisioning Futures._ (Boston: BRILL, 2025)). (And @arunadsouza.bsky.social you came up in the Q&A, natch.)

Sharing new work in Seattle-Tacoma and (virtually) in England this month

Presenting at @caavisual next week in Lenapehoking/"NYC" on apocalyptic c0l0nizing logics deeply embedded in Aesthetic philosophy and practice, as a step towards a decolonial dismantling of the Aesthetic and a closer aligning of art pedagogy and practice with decolonial social movements.

Presenting artwork & talks in Tkaronto and Lenapehoking over the next few weeks. For details and links, visit my website.

Writing today about Kant's extensive debt to the writings of Spanish Conquistadors, and what that means for decolonial approaches to all modern Western artistic disciplines. I'll be presenting this writing at the College Art Association conference in "NYC"/Lenapehoking on February 13.

Next week in Tkaronto. Features my piece "in the wake of the santa maria," presented for the first time in a video version.

Tkaronto: I will be presenting prose and an installation from my book in progress on the politics of sensation in the concert hall Feb 6, 12noon, Luella Massey Playhouse.

Delighted to be contributing to this exhibition at York University, curated by Aftab Mirzaei. Runs Feb. 3-7; opening reception is Wednesday, Feb. 5, 5-7pm.

Events coming up in Lenapehoking ("NYC"), "Seattle," and Tkaronto/Toronto-area.

Null Point's 2023 publication is now updated, with sections on new topics. Feel free to copy and paste into your syllabus; but study should be followed up by action to change infrastructures (certain texts on the list take up what this might entail). L|nk |n comments.

Holy cow. Just woke up to this view from mid-Wilshire looking downtown

New text. 2024 was a Significant Anniversary of composer Charles Ives. I trace how this could have been an occasion for decolonial, abolitionist reckoning with a problematic figure, and yet US settler music institutions instead doubled down on an anti-Black, colonial status quo.

Currently finishing a short piece about this. Drops tomorrow on my website.

Null Point has published “De-normalizing ‘Wide Open Spaces:’ Notes Towards a Decolonial Performance Practice” Written by @colintuckerstudio.bsky.social, it concerns their realization of Yoko Ono’s “Hide Piece,” from Rust Belt Artists Against Gen*cide. nullpointseries.wordpress.com/words/de-nor...

It is "Messiah season" and, yet again, there is a deafening silence from presenters on the composer's investments in human trafficking. In this 2023 piece, I argued that these investments were inseparable from "purely musical" aspects of the composer's work. colintucker.studio/projects/bef...

I might write something about this. But the overwhelming institutional silence on this needs to be marked in and of itself.

Despite Charles Ives's explicit misogyny, anti-Indigenous rhetoric, and anti-Blackness (he participated in minstrel shows), I have yet to see anything resembling a critical take on his work or discourse during this anniversary year. (Please let me know if I'm overlooking something).

New essay available: nullpointseries.wordpress.com/words/de-nor...

Lorraine O'Grady lifted me up with her intellect, her wit, her nerve. This assignment came at a point in my life when I needed it and didn't even know. She was a blessing. I am saddened to know Lorraine has passed, and I am endlessly grateful to her. She lit flames that will never go out. 🖤

Published a year ago and sadly still relevant...

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As I argue in detail in my new essay, Americana art music's institutional history indexes how large/legacy (settler) concert music institutions have been chronically unable to even notice the colonialism-imperialism being enacted right in front of their own eyes/ears.

New essay out, which is both a critique and proposal for a critical & otherwise performance practice. Please share widely with concert music networks, especially those on occupied Turtle Island. For the record, I am happy to chat with anyone (formally or informally) who will engage in good faith.

New essay out today on reckoning with settler imperial logics in Americana art music through critical performance practice grounded in Indigenous & decolonial studies analytics; I also reflect on how this project relates to present-day struggles against the Zionist outpost of US empire

This is a really valuable tool to evaluate environmental cancer risk, block-by-block in the USA. If you're looking to buy a home, check the address first.

Drops Monday: new essay introducing the broader project of which this track is a part. Through a grounding in Indigenous studies, the essay locates how colonial dispossession is foundational to Americana art music, and proposes a decolonial performance practice for/against this music.

After a decade of empty reconciliation talk, we're still pretty much in the same place, except now facing a fascist backlash to all things progressive

On NDAs in the Canadian Arts Sector: "With countless examples of unjust experiences, wrongful dismissals, and the weaponization of confidentiality language, we are grieving the incredible loss of potential for what our art world could accomplish and grow into" blackflash.ca/silencing-in...

Axiomatic to Indigenous critical theory (as I read it): all fashionings of (occupied) Indigenous Land have a constitutive relation to sovereign Indigenous Nations. If taken seriously, this principle radically destabilizes the underlying terms of existing settler artistic production.

"By 1913, virtually all of the ivory imported to the US from Africa was manufactured into pianos, and two thirds of that ivory came from the Congo." -Sean Murray, "Pianos, Ivory, and Empire" ...Yet complete silence from art music institutions about this history & its present-day legacies...

A line in the sand which I have found useful: in a work, field, institution, etc., are the analytics of specific anti-oppressive fields of knowledge (Black, decolonial, trans, disability, etc.) meaningfully thinkable or are they unthinkable? (On the (un)thinkable, I find MR Trouillot useful).

Peak liberal settler colonialism

Recent audio and text project of mine, marking settler colonial power in canonical Americana music, via a Yoko Ono score and Indigenous critical theory. A related project drops next week.

Recent audio and text project of mine, marking settler colonial power in canonical Americana music, via a Yoko Ono score and Indigenous critical theory. A related project drops next week.

Link here: colintucker.studio/writing/posi...

As part of introducing myself on here, I want to share a recent piece of writing about positionality in artistic production. I challenge a certain common-sense around this matter, which I argue actually entrenches existing white supremacy.

👇

Check your block lists carefully. Some of them are being used to silence activists and scholars (esp POC).