5 Years of Tutorial Diversions
Performing Listening with Bill Dietz
After a century of artists' experimentation with sonic materials and at a moment when the means sonic manipulation and distribution are more readily available than ever before, what else can we do with music? For the past ten years, Bill Dietz has been working through various methods of composing listening itself, without sound. Imagined as indetermining interventions into our everyday experience of the sonic (at home, via headphones, etc), Dietz's series of Tutorial Diversions (20092014) are models for dynamic, spatial listenings that can be applied to any sounds whatsoever. In advance of Edition Solitude's March 2015 release of a monograph collecting the performance materials of eight Tutorial Diversions, Dietz will present a survey of these works, never before presented in Italy. Attendees are asked to bring an audio file of their choice to serve as material for listening performance. At the end of the evening, the listener generated playlist will be made available for home performance.
Bill Dietz, born in 1983 in Bisbee, Arizona, studied composition at the New England Conservatory of Music and Cultural Studies at the University of Minnesota. He has lived and worked in Berlin since 2003, initially as a student and assistant of Peter Ablinger. Since 2007 he is the artistic director of Ensemble Zwischentöne, and is currently the CoChair of Music/Sound in Bard College's Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. From sounding the facade of Le Corbusier's Unité d'habitation in Marseille to orchestrating echoes across city blocks in Manhattan to projecting sonified architectural models onto audiences, Dietz’s work examines the genealogy of the concert and the performance of listening. His broad engagement with sound’s sociality in artistic, curatorial, and theoretical work has brought him to festivals such as MaerzMusik, through museums such as the Hamburger Bahnhof, to podiums at academic symposia such as the International Congress for Music Research, and into the pages of magazines such as Performance Research Journal and the catalogue of the 2014 Whitney Biennial. In 2011 he was the recipient of a working fellowship at the Künstlerhaus Lukas in Ahrenshoop and a residency fellowship from the Goethe Institute in New York; from 2012 to 2013 he was a resident fellow of the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart; in 2013 he was artist in residence of the Cité radieuse in Marseille, as well as gmem centre national de la création musicale.
http://tutorialdiversions.org/
