The art of sound gets an audible (and visual) tribute at the Museum of Modern Art. A first of its kind in New York City, Soundings: A Contemporary Score is the museum’s first group exhibition to embrace sound as an artistic expression.

The exhibit features sound installations by 16 contemporary artists from around the globe. Amongst the highlights are Tristan Perich’s Microtonal Wall (2011) made up of 1,500 one-bit speakers, and Haroon Mirza’s Frame For A Painting (1972) — a shifting LED light installation that frames a Mondrian painting from the MoMA’s collection with a synced electronic soundtrack.

Curator Barbara London took Blouin Artinfo on a tour of the sound show to experience the symphony of these one-of-a-kind pieces.

photo 1fmediaproject.net

“The art of sound questions how and what we hear, and what we make of it,” the curator Barbara London writes in her catalog essay to the Modern show — which means the movement has purchase on a lot that matters. Perched in an office high above MoMA’s garden, where her exhibition will insert stealthy recordings of bells, Ms. London explained that artists are more than ever drawn to sound art, maybe because it sits on the exciting double cusp, as she said, of both music and gallery art. Her new show (or should we call it a “hear”?) reflects the “apogee,” as she put it, that sound art has now reached.

photo 1fmediaproject.net

Ms. London’s survey will include those recorded bells, by the American soundster Stephen Vitiello, as well as recordings made near Chernobyl by Jacob Kirkegaard, a Dane, and a grid of 1,500 small speakers, each playing a different tone, by the young New Yorker Tristan Perich. It will also feature the Glasgow-born Susan Philipsz, whom the larger art world has taken to heart.

At the Modern, Ms. Philipsz will be reprising a 2012 work from Germany’s Documenta, the twice-a-decade festival that is one of the world’s most prestigious artistic events. Her “Study for Strings” riffs on an orchestral piece composed in 1943 at the Theresienstadt concentration camp for musicians there. For her recording, Ms. Philipsz has redacted the parts for all the instruments except one cello and one viola, leaving plangent silences between those two players’ scattered notes — and, of course, evoking the erasure of musicians and artists by the Nazis.

“For the public, sound art it still a fairly new and also a very, very accessible medium,” said Tom Eccles, the curator of a new Philipsz commission this fall in New York. “On a very basic, basic level,” he added, “sound is one of our first experiences — in the uterus, in fact.”

photo feastofmusic.com

The works are on view at the MoMA’s third floor Special Exhibitions Gallery and other locations around the museum from now till November 3rd, 2013.

via nytimes.com, blouinartinfo.com.