Listening to art differently

The Sound of Thinking: A Listener’s Companion to Conceptual Music, a new book by Craig Dworkin, has a chapter “Ut Pictura Musica” about art and music that led me to some great music that is related to my Listening to Art project (now a halfway through its six-year hiatus). Links go to Bandcamp releases. Chamber Works (2020) is several works composed by Luiz Henrique Yudo and performed by Apartment House; one is “The Donald Judd Harmonies.” Dworkin says these “are based on the artist’s multicolored metal wall sculptures from the mid to late 1980s: equal horizontal extensions (in contrast to the earlier vertical stacks for which Judd is best known) in which the uninflected, industrial forms in objective mathematical series are animated by the apparently subjective decoration of bright, motley colors on the surface of the austere steel boxes.” Life Without Machines (2020) by Sylvain Chateau, who uses Barnett Newman’s series The Stations of the Cross as visual scores. Dworkin says, “If…