David Grubbs: Sound in Multidisciplinary Collaboration

David Grubbs explores the challenges and demands that composers and musicians encounter when working collaboratively in hybrid practices. Drawing upon his experience of collaborating with figures such as poet Susan Howe and artists Anthony McCall and Angela Bulloch, Grubbs looks back to the electronic music alliance of John Cage, David Tudor, Maryanne Amacher, and other artists of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. As music composition today finds itself operating within a matrix of multidisciplinary performance, video installation, and interactive media, it is compelled to facilitate novel inquiries into co-authorship, improvisation, genre, and distributed creativity.

David Grubbs is Distinguished Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. At Brooklyn College, he also teaches in the MFA programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) and Creative Writing. Grubbs holds a BA in English from Georgetown University, and an MA and a PhD in English from the University of Chicago. He is the author of "Good night the pleasure was ours" (2022), "The Voice in the Headphones" (2020), "Now that the audience is assembled" (2018), and "Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording" (2014), all published by Duke University Press. He has also co-authored the artists’ books "Projectile" (with Reto Geiser and John Sparagana, Drag City, 2021) and "Simultaneous Soloists" (with Anthony McCall, Pioneer Works, 2019). His criticism has appeared in numerous publications, including Texte zur Kunst, Frieze, The Wire, Bookforum, Tin House, and Conjunctions. A founding member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, Grubbs has released fourteen solo albums and appeared on more than 200 commercially released recordings. His installation and performance work has been presented at, among others, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, Tate Modern, and Centre Pompidou. Grubbs is a grant recipient in Music/Sound from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and a member of the board of directors of the nonprofit curatorial platform and publisher Blank Forms. This fall he is a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.