An Electric Collaboration
Electronic Music in the Multimedia Works of
Neil Leonard and Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons
From CEIARTE Journal
March 2020
Abstract
This article surveys the electronic music compositions I made for collaborations with Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons on 38 multimedia works over a period of three decades. The article clarifies my contributions and surveys the length and breadth of our collaborations. The use of music composition, sound design, field recordings, loudspeakers integrated with sculpture, and processional music is detailed through the discussion of key works. Sound is considered an essential element in our installation and performance works where the audience is actually inside the artwork itself; their chatter is replaced by listening, and their movement through the galleries is influenced by the sights and sounds of musicians. An appendix lists all of our works, along with collaborators, curators, and venues.
Keywords: contemporary art, multimedia, electronic music, sound installation, sound art
Introduction
This article surveys the electronic music compositions I made for collaborations with Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons on 32 multimedia works over a period of three decades. The article clarifies my contributions, surveys the length and breadth of our collaborations, and calls for greater attention to the role of sound in these works. I have included sections on my artistic background, the development of our artistic collaboration, changes in themes and materials we used, and the reception of the collaborations. The comments are not meant to be complete, but rather to provide starting points for further discussion.
The collaborations are divided into two categories: 1) Single commission works (1988-2010) where Magda received acommission, created the concept, and asked me to create the sound. 2) Co-commissioned works (2010-2017), where wereceived the commission, developed the concept, and completed the work as a team. Appendix A lists all of our works, along with collaborators, curators, and venues.
Background
I began working as a professional musician during my teen years in Philadelphia, where I performed with musicians who recorded with everyone from John Coltrane and Weather Report to Sun Ra, including Robin Eubanks, Victor Baily, Odean Pope, and Lex Humphries. Jazz studies with Pat Hollenbeck, Jackie Byard, and George Russell at New England Conservatory introduced me to composition, arranging, and music for film.
I began programming computers in 1983, at the moment when digital instruments and microcomputers become affordable and revolutionized all aspects of music. I sought insights from composers/programmers who defined new ways to work with computers, including Amnon Wolman, George Lewis, Ron Kuivila, Charles Dodge, and Emile Tobenfeld (Dr. T). By 1986, I was invited to a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada, where Daniel Scheidt and I created software for a networked computer system that generated music in real-time, based on visitors’ movement in the gallery.
My interdisciplinary collaborations took off in 1984 when I began working at the Massachusetts College of Art. AtMass Art, I provided sound for video, installation, and performances with Tony Oursler, Saul Levine, and Sam Durant. In 1988, I created music and sound design for Relatives, a 45-minute performance by Tony Oursler and Constance deJong that was presented by the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), the Whitney Biennale (1989), and The Kitchen, NYC. Having grown up painting and drawing, I was thrilled to be at Mass Art and to find ways to combine my passion for visual and aural art.
I first traveled to Cuba in 1986 and 1987 to study music. On these trips, I played with percussionist Guillermo Barreto (who famously sight read the Stan Kenton book when the Kenton orchestra played Havana in the 1950’s and drummer Buddy Rich became ill), Orlando "Cachaíto" López (bassist in the Buena Vista Social Club film), Emiliano Salvador, and musicians from the Grammy-winning ensemble, Irakere. I exchanged recordings with Juan Blanco, Cuba’s first composer of electronic music. I heard the music of Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, Sandy Pérez, Feliciano Arango, and Oriente Lopez, all of whom I later invited to perform at documenta 14 and in processional performances for the 55thVenice Biennale, the 11th Bienal de Havana, and at the Guggenheim Museum, the Smithsonian National PortraitGallery, and the Queens Museum of Art.
Early Film and Video
My foundation in composition, performance, digital media, artistic collaboration, and the U.S./Cuba cultural exchange created traction with Magda from our very first collaboration and helped us establish her practice in time-based art.
In 1988, I was the Assistant Director of the Computer Art Center at Massachusetts College of Art (Mass Art). That same year, Magda came to Mass Art for post-grad studies. Mutual friends spoke to her about my experiences playing with musicians in Cuba and collaborations with media at performance artists at Mass Art, which prompted her to ask me to compose music for her first film, Rito de Iniciación. The film was Magda’s homework for a Super 8 film class with professor Saul Levine. One day, Magda found me in the hallway outside my office and asked me to look at her storyboard for the film. Magda explained that she was specifically interested in the Yoruba chants to West African orishas, or deities, Yemaya and Cohen, whom, in the most general sense, are saints of sexuality and fertility (Canson, 2014; Jeffries, 2017). Magda’s grandmother, an Afrocuban priestess, named Yemaya and Ochun as Magda’s guardian orishas, calling her a “daughter” of both Yemaya and Ochun. Magda’s tension with this prophecy resonated throughout her narrative. I welcomed this opportunity to create my first electroacoustic filmscore and work with Magda for the first time.
Within this first project, the essential traits of my collaborator became evident. Magda was 100% confident in her vision. The visual aspects of projects were often outlined in exquisite detail. Her primary focus was on autobiographical work, exploring aspects of her culture and family that she missed while visiting the United States. She was enthusiastic to embrace new media and confident that her rigorous training as a painter and teacher of aesthetics would help her overcome any obstacles that presented while working in a new medium. Magda also intuited that I knew enough of her culture to collaborate on an Afrocuban biographical narrative. She was willing to trust me to make sounds, giving me minimal guidance on the music I created.
She trusted me to work through the drafting process, and only engaged in discussion about the works when I was confident I was close to a final draft.
Rito de Iniciación is our interpretation of an Afrocuban Yoruba initiation ritual. To my knowledge, when Magda made the film, she had never seen such a ritual. The film speaks of the power of transformation what one might feel during initiation, without meaning to represent the authentic ritual. Typically, the ritual involves days, if not months of preparation; the guiding priest or priestess uses a set of religious objects, offering of food and sacrifice of animals to the orishas. In Magda’s abstracted version of the ritual, there is no priest or priestess, no collection of sacred objects, offerings of food.
I responded to Magda’s themes of Afrocuban religious ritual as an electronic music composer. My goal was to create sound that was compatible with Magda’s images and narrative, without attempting to recreate authentic Cuban music. I drew on Cuban influences alongside United States musicians, namely the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Jimi Hendrix to create a filmscore that compliments the sense of wonder, fear, and spiritual awakening portrayed in film.
The score includes processed recordings of the chant to Yemaya, as sung by Merceditas Valdes. Valdes was the vocal soloist at the first conference of Afrocuban culture organized by Fernando Ortiz at the University of Havana in 1937. I knew Valdes through her husband, Guillermo Barreto, who gave me her recordings on my second trip to Cuba in 1987. Valdes’s chant was edited, processed, and combined with samples of my own. I wrote a computer program for theApple IIe computer to stochastically mix samples to create the library of sounds used in the film. I assembled the finalcomposition and synced it to the picture using a borrowed variable speed 4-track cassette player and the Super 8 film editor.
Rito de Iniciación was presented at Spring in Veradero, the IV International Electroacoustic Music Festival in Veradero, Cuba; Centro Wifredo Lam in Havana, Cuba; the Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada; and at the Collective for LivingCinema, New York. This early piece has maintained its significance for Magda; as recently as 2018, she returned to the music of Initiation Rite/Sacred Bath, using it for the performance Llego FeFa.Remedios II, at Colby College.
The success of Rito de Iniciacion led to a commission from the Western Front, Vancouver to produce InitiationRite/Sacred Bath. The single-channel video is sometimes referred to as Baño Sagrado or Rite of Initiation II.
By the time we completed Rito de Iniciacion, Magda and I were living together in Boston. The next year, I moved to Havana to continue our relationship. While I was living with Magda in Cuba (1989-90), a group of musicians petitioned the Ministry of Culture on my behalf, and I was requested to teach electronic music in Havana. This group included Juan Blanco, Leo Brower (Director of the National Symphony), Juan Formell (Los Van Van), Chucho Valdes (Irakere), Adalberto Alvarez, Oriente Lopez (Afrocuba/Silvio Rodriguez), and Roberto Valera. As a result, the Ministry of Culture offered me a job teaching at the Laboratorio Nacional de Musciá Electroacustica. My students in Havana included Ileana Pérez-Velazquez, Juan Piñera Oriente Lopez, and Miguel Nuñez (Pablo Milanes). Contact with these musicians inspired new ideas for electronic sound design and for combinations of jazz and electronic music infused with Cuban influences.
The soundtrack comprised abstract electronic sound, percussive grooves, a Cuban chant played on violin, improvisations on a Mexican clay flute and Indian cowbell, and Magda’s intermittent voice. Percussionist ErnestoRodriguez recorded Cuban bata rhythms on my drum machine. I wrote a computer program to analyze Ernesto’s rhythms using a Markov algorithm, then created variation in real-time. The algorithmic percussion was used in the filmand in concert.
While the video’s title Initiation Rite/Sacred Bath invokes the theme of religious ritual, the film centers on Magda’sreflections on our year living together in Havana, establishing an interracial marriage, and Magda’s process of immigrating to the U.S.. One three-and-a-half-minute section features Magda and I drawing lines with blood from ourfingers, our feet walking in a spiral, and Magda’s photo of me on Niquero Beach (where Castro returned to Cuba in1953). Magda’s spoken text highlights Cuban’s difficulty in accepting a combined interracial and international marriage. Slights from officials in the Ministry of Culture and peers in response to our marriage can be heard in the video: “What business does she have bringing that Yankee here”; “That little black shit.” Magda speaks these quotes in her own voice in the film.
The music for Initiation Rite/Sacred Bath was performed under the title Sacred Bath at festivals in the U.S., Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Russia, and Sacred Bath was included on Timaeus, my first solo CD. George Russell, composer ofCubano Be, Cubano Bop (1948) for Dizzy Gillespie and Cuban drummer Chano Pozo provided this quote for the CD: “If anyone can 'in-soulmate' the computer in a manner which integrates it beautifully and subtly with the heart and soulof the human artist, that person is Neil Leonard, and this CD is the realization of this worthy goal” (Leonard, 2001).
Installation (1994-2000)
Between 1994-2000 we completed our first four mixed-media installations focusing on Magda’s relationship to her family in Cuba. For these pieces, I created soundscapes using abstract electronic sound, foley sound, and voice. Overall, the sound is subtler than the previous filmscores and avoids the use of percussion. For the installations, we began working without synchronizing image and sound, akin to the methodology of choreographer Merced Cunningham and composer John Cage. The Herbalist Tools (1994) and History of People Who Were Not Heroes: ATown Portrait (1994) used audio-cassette tape loops that played in the gallery. Spoken Softly with Mama (1998) usedtwo audio-cassette loops for quadraphonic sound and Meanwhile the Girls Were Playing (2000), commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, used two asynchronous audio programs played from video recorders for quadraphonic sound diffusion.
Installation (2000-2008)
Between 1990-2000, quite a bit was in flux for both Magda and myself. Magda immigrated to the US in 1990. Our son Arcadio was born in 1993. I presented new music for interactive music systems at the inaugural concert of the International Computer Music Convention (1990), my work was featured on the cover of Computer Music Journal (MIT Press), and I produced Timeaus, my first solo CD. I began teaching sound art and electronic music at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and then moved to Berklee College of Music. In 2000, I completed a Masters Music in Jazz Composition at New England Conservatory. I hit my stride with composition and became less interested in collaborating on Magda’s work that focused on her personal narrative. I also began to use the works with Magda as vehicles to create music that would serve the installations optimally and stand on their own in concert settings.
Our next two collaborations, Interiorita o Luna Sulla Colina (Interiority or Hillsided Moon) (2003) and Mil ManerasPara Decir Adios (2003), were mixed media works utilizing video, sound, and sculpture. In a break from Magda’s typical thematic choices, the piece focused on celestial, bucolic, and abstract images.
Interiorità o Luna Sulla Collina is a permanent outdoor installation experienced at night at the private outdoor sculpture collection, Marrana di Montemarcello, La Spezia, Italy. The piece is nested in a bucolic enclave facing the marblecaves of Carrara across the Ligurian valley. Interiorità o Luna Sulla Collina comprises a large moon-like orb, illuminated with inscriptions of a text by Peruvian poet César Vallejo. Smaller orbs surround the moon, projecting amplified sound and displaying video. Prior to creating this piece, Magda and I visited the Etruscan necropolis inTarquinia. My music was inspired by frescos depicting the Etruscan vision of the eternal afterlife, complete with seductive dancers and musicians playing flutes and lyres.
The composition Interiority comprises five vignettes featuring electronic sound, acoustic guitar, and voice. Guitarmelodies are complemented by abstract and ambient electronic sounds. Vallejo’s poem is spoken in Italian by BenedettiPiantella Simeonidis and in Spanish by Magda.
The composition Mil Maneras opens with a thick cluster of electronic sound, void of melody and rhythm, followed by a melodic and hypnotic guitar groove. Mil Maneras was featured by the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Norway (2003), and later expanded and renamed Threads of Memory for the Dak’Art Biennale de L’Art Africain Contemporain, Senegal(2004).
The music created for these works was directly impacted by my two years of study at the conservatory. The use of classical guitar and fully notated, or through-composed, scores was a result of studies at the conservatory. The entirety of the music for Interiorita o Luna Sulla Colina and Mil Maneras Para Decir Adios were included on my CD, MilManeras (2014). Oren Fader, a leading classical guitarist, played for the CD release concert at Spectrum NYC. MilManeras was awarded Cubadisco Record of the Year (2015).
Single-Commission Performance (2006-2008)
In 2006, we presented our first performance Mojitos, Habilitation and Crocodiles Tears at Galleria Pack, Milan, Italy. I played the opening with percussionist Ernesto Rodriguez and electronic musician Gadi Sassoon. Magda’s performance began when she appeared, balancing a tray of mojitos above her shoulder and reading a prepared text. She proceeded to smash the tray against the ground, turning service into protest; she then cued Arcadio to read a text he wrote and the band to play as she danced, surrounded by the band and audience on the outdoor patio of the Gallery. This performance was pivotal to our practice. As I invited additional musicians to play with me Magda, not to be outdone, raised her game in playful ways. Instead of presenting herself in a vigil-like presence, as she did in Boston in the 1990s, she now spoke and broke glasses or plates, unlike the organizers and musicians who followed a scripted performance. For me, adding additional performers was as natural as assembling and leading a band. I suspect that my capacity to work with large ensembles helped usher in Magda’s new interest in expanding the dramatic impact of her performance, as she eventually added costumes and additional performers to enhance the visual aspect of our performances.
Our second performance My Mother Told Me I Am Chinese (2008), was presented at Magda's opening at the Davis Museum and Cultural Center, at Wellesley College, MA. For this presentation, I performed a live remix of sounds used in Magda's installation of the same name. The sculpture comprises hand-painted Chinese porcelain, custom Plexiglas shelving that also serves as a video screen and stereo sound. I did not invite other musicians, and Magda presented herself stationary, without speaking, while I improvised an electronic sound piece.
Co-Commissioned Works (2010-2017)
During the first two decades of our collaboration, I mainly stepped in to support and develop Magda’s commissions, rather than initiate co-commissioned/co-envisioned works together. The shared, co-envisioned Bar Romeo project in 2006 gave me a taste of the kind of collaboration that I was becoming interested in exploring.
In 2006, we moved to Padova, Italy so I could teach a class in installation at the University of Padova. Early in our stay, I came across Bar Romeo, a bar in the center of town where a group of friends frequently gathered in the late afternoon to sing local tavern songs and conduct each other with prosecco glasses. The most spirited afternoons were when Gianni, a local tailor led his butcher friends in song, despite the smocks they donned, fresh with the blood of butchered horses. He told me that this amateur group had been singing together since elementary school. None of my Italian friends knew of the bar, and I took many of them. On one of these subsequent trips Magda and I asked Gianni if we could video the singers, and he enthusiastically replied, “We will make an opera!”
The collaboration with the bar choir led to Bar Romeo (2006) a single-channel video with computer-processed sound. While this work was created during a period where Magda accepted commissions as a solo or lead artist, this video anticipated the later shift to co-commissioned work. Bar Romeo is an early illustration of how Magda and I developed ideas together. As two artists living together, we went to galleries, exhibition openings, concerts, and gatherings of artists together. We talked about art constantly. In our travels, we searched together for new ideas for future artworks. Our ongoing discussions were mutually beneficial, and we influenced each other in important ways.
Bar Romeo was presented alongside our performance Mojitos, Habilitation and Crocodiles Tears and the video Madonna Pellegrina at Galleria Pack in Milan. Madonna Pellegrina took its name from our neighborhood in Padua. I filmed and edited the video according to Magda’s direction and composed an electroacoustic soundtrack based on recordings of southern Italian framers and religious music, used with permission of Italy’s Discoteca di Stado (National Sound Archive).
Around 2008, Magda and I redefined the terms of our collaboration. Our first work had been made when Magda was a student or when Magda had just immigrated to the United States and she became a mother. During those years, I was mainly concerned with helping Magda start a new life in a new country, and strategizing a thirty-year collaboration did not cross my mind. By 2010, the mission of helping Magda launch her career in the United States was complete, and our son Arcadio was now 17 years old. We reached the point where a more professional collaboration felt like a healthy re-negotiation.
At this point, I was only interested in creating work we could call “ours,” so I told Magda that I would only collaborate on works for which we were both commissioned, in which we developed the concept together, where sounds and visual components were equally prominent, and for which we were contracted as an artistic duo that received equal credit.
This transition took constant adjustment to work, and it was not always smooth. Visual artists tend to create work alone in their studio and tend to refer to their work as “mine.” Musicians often develop their work within bands and thus refer to the work at “ours.” But the new relationship allowed me to help shape our works from inception and expand themes beyond Magda’s biography. I created larger ensembles and explored new ways of integrating electronic music, sound design, and sound spatialization.
Our first work as an artistic duo was showcased in Havana, at Casa las Americas and within the exhibitions 11th Bienal de Habana and Detras del Muro.[1] Working as a team, within Cuba, we found new ways to integrate sound as a key element in our social commentary and expand our practice beyond Magda’s biographical narrative.
The multimedia installation 53+1=54+1=55.Letter of the Year (2013) for the 55th Venice Biennial was our mostambitious work in terms of integrating the audio into the actual sculpture. The work was presented in the NationalMuseum of Archeology, Piazza San Marco, as part of the exhibition La Perversion de lo Clasico: Anarquia de losRelatos, curated by Jorge Fernandez and Giacomo Zaza, for the Republic of Cuba Pavilion.
The installation comprises 180 birdcages housing 55 small video monitors and 18 miniature speakers. Letter of the Yearfills the museum’s Gallery of the Emperors, a room of marble busts of Roman emperors. At first impression, the room sounds like a tower of babble. Cuban street criers, or pregoneros wander in and out of the gallery accompanied byelectronic sounds. The chatter of softer pedestrian voices clustered in the center reconstructs the dialogue betweenCuban residents and their family members who live abroad. The sound composition utilizes 18 asynchronous audio loops: 6 tracks playing the Pregonero voices, and 12 tracks of pedestrian chatter.
Letter of the Year’s antiphonal soundscape is inspired by Cuban street sounds and the compositional innovations carriedout in Basilica San Marco, next door, where sixteenth-century composers, such as Adrian Willaert and Giovanni Gabrieli, began scoring placement of instruments and choir in their work, a first for Western composers. Theinstallation was accompanied by the frequent toll of large bells sounding in the Campanile of San Marco.
The sound for Letter of the Year was adapted for my installation True Bread (Pan Verdadero) (2013), presented at the Stephan Stoyanov Gallery, the MIT Media Lab, and the Boston Cyberarts Gallery. New York Times critic Holland Cotter described the piece as “a haunting, rhythmic, chantlike score, secular spiritual music for a New World” (Cotter, 2013).
Alchemy of the Soul is an installation comprising of cast glass, blown glass, a glass running fountain, and a 10-channel composition utilizing my saxophone and field recordings, as well as songs by a Grammy-winning Rumba group, Los Muñequitos de Matanzas. The piece was commissioned and purchased by the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA.
The composition is organized in vignettes, each one featuring a sequence of three elements: 1) the sound of water, 2) a song by Los Muñequitos, 3) the reverberation of my saxophone in an acoustical test chamber at the University of Porto, Portugal. Five pairs of speakers flank the rectangular gallery like columns. The sounds of waves, dripping rum, the songs of dock workers, and the saxophone move from the front to the back speakers, drawing visitors into the installation. Writer Nancy Pick’s exhibition catalog commentary records my comments about the effect of this collaboration: “’Magda’s colorful, luminescent sculpture evokes the presence of the people who worked in the sugar factories and rum distilleries,’ said Leonard, who teaches at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, where he is Artistic Director of the Interdisciplinary Arts Institute. ‘Adding voices gives the work another dimension, one it wouldn’t have if the installation were silent. In this context, silence is almost like a tomb. But we want to give the sense that the work is breathing’” (Pick, 2016). The commission included funds to create new recordings made in Cuba with the most celebrated folkloric musicians. Combining their songs, saxophone, and field recordings created a broader sonic palette compared to earlier works. This was also the first piece where the entire score is based on a sense of slow exhalation of my saxophone and long pauses between breaths. These new strategies became part of later pieces for our collaboration, including works for documenta 14. This was my way of encouraging people to slow down when they entered the space, almost synchronizing their breath with the slower-than-real-life breath of the piece.
I created the installation Canto de Muelle (Song of the Docks) (2006) for the freight elevator, used as an entrance to Alchemy of the Soul. The Alchemy of the Soul exhibition began as a jointly commissioned installation. When the museum then proposed a more extensive exhibition including a number of Magda’s 2D works, I proposed this sound installation to balance out my presence in the exhibition.
Canto de Muelle comprises a 45-RPM vinyl disc, turntable, speaker, sugar sacks, and an elevator attendant to play the record. The 45-RPM disk was made in collaboration with Raphael Navarro, ex-stevedore and lead singer for the Los Muñequitos. As Nancy Pick explains in the exhibition catalog, “Leonard also wanted his elevator piece to evoke the 1950s, the era when Navarro’s band, Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, first formed. To set the scene for the exhibition, he hit upon the idea of placing a vintage turntable in the elevator with a vinyl 45-rpm record. Side A would be played on the way up, and Side B on the way down. Each trip (the freight elevator being enormous and slow) would last about two minutes” (Pick). The piece plays with the ephemerality of audio playback technology that is archaic, slow to operate, disturbed by the motion of the elevator.
Side B ends with El Yerbero (The Herbalist) by Juan Mesa. In the song, a boy excitedly tells his mother that he hears the herb-Pregonero hawking his cures:
Ponasi yo traigo, Señora,
Rompe saragüey para los brotes,
Vetiver para el que no ve.
Firebush I bring to the Señora,
Devil weed for rashes,
Vetiver for those who cannot see.
The use of this recorded performance is a nod to Mozart’s opera Don Giovani. In the ballroom scene of Don Giovani, Act I, three songs are heard simultaneously by three distinct ensembles. Opera characters hear two ballroom ensembles on stage. We, Mozart’s public, hear a third ensemble in the orchestra pit that plays for us, but the dramatic characters do not hear it. Similarly, in Canto de Muelle, there are multiple songs that we hear simultaneously. Navarro sings a song of a boy telling his mother of a singing street crier. At the same time, pregoneros wander past Navarro’s door selling their goods. The boy in the song only hears El Yerbero, while we hear Navarro’s song and the pregonero’s chant outside his home.
Magda and I created at total of nine processional performances presented by the 55th Venice Biennale, the Guggenheim Museum, the 11th Havana Bienial, the 3rd Bienal de Bahia, the Queens Museum of Art, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. I sought to incorporate electronic music in Habla Madre (2014) and Identified (2016).
Habla Madre premiered in the rotunda of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art as part of the multi-artist showcase, “Carrie Mae Weems LIVE: Past Tense/Future Perfect,” celebrating Weems’s three-decade retrospective. Weems and I discussed using electronic sound, but with limited set-up time, we decided that it would be more efficient and visual to have an acoustic ensemble imitate electronic instruments.
The performance began with three Cuban batá drummers playing outside the museum and leading Magda into the central atrium, where I performed on bass clarinet along with one flute, three trombones, a euphonium, a French horn, and two tubas. The score performed a chant to the Yoruba saint Yemaya played so slow that each note required a full breath to perform. With each musician playing asynchronously, the song’s harmony and rhythm was obscured, and the sustained notes filled the atrium in what Weems called an “ocean of sound.” Drummers and winds then proceeded to the 2nd floor gallery where Weems’s work was displayed for a woodwind-batá finale.
As with Mojitos, Habilitation and Crocodiles Tears, Magda was eager to break the aesthetic restriction; she purchased goldfish on the way to the museum to pour into the Guggenheim’s central fountain. Using the main atrium as a stage and surrounded by an ensemble of New York’s top chamber, jazz, and Cuban musicians, Magda entered dressed in the shape of the Guggenheim, created with an Alvin Ailey Dance Theater costume designer.
In the case of Habla Madre, after the performance, as documentation of the piece displaced the real-time experience of the work, the dress became the iconic memory and a picture-perfect press photo. The music, which provided the psychological tone of our work, required too much time to absorb, included too many voices, and was too difficult to record to preserve the sense of sound in that particular space. After Letter of the Year, Habla Madre, and later Identified, museums became interested in acquiring Magda’s costumes for exhibition by themselves, detaching visual elements from the multidisciplinary nature of these performances where the audience is actually inside the artwork itself; their chatter is replaced by listening, and their movement through the galleries is influenced by the sights and sounds of musicians.
Identified (2016) for the Identify series at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery was our most ambitious performance. It was also our only performance that was not a special event added to the inauguration of an exhibition, and planning for Identified was more extensive than prior performances. Consistent with our new direction, Magda and I were contracted as a team and worked together to define a theme for the performance, draft a project proposal and a logistical plan. I was present at all meetings and conference calls with curators, and I collated our thoughts into the written proposal and logistical schedule.
Our proposal for Identified indicated the fundamental role music played in our vision for this work: “The work acknowledges musician, artist, and everyday people who are missing from the museum’s historical collections through a processional performance that establishes new connections between the sound of Civil War era brass bands, New Orleans jazz, and Cuban sacred music” (Leonard, 2016). This idea points to our new direction where performance practices from both the United States and Cuba took center stage together and provided space for multiple voices to co-exist.
Consistent with the Smithsonian’s stated interest in restorative representation of marginalized people, I acknowledged my musical mentors from Philadelphia to Havana, who rather than just being named, were actually contracted to perform with us. This was my turn to play with the trope that Magda introduced in our earlier collaborations, such as History of People Who Were Not Heroes. For that piece, Magda’s acknowledged her heroes in Cuba; in this performance staged in my home, we would honor my heroes by name, which for me, was an act of re-balancing the focus of our work.
As the public followed Magda and the sound, they encountered distinct ensembles playing in three sites: a seven-piece combo featuring myself and multi-Grammy winning composer/trumpeter Terence Blanchard, played in the spectacular Kogod Couryard; the jazz band of the Duke Ellington School for the Arts flanking a spiral stairway to the 2nd floor, creating a column of sound; an eight-piece Afrocuban folkloric ensemble performing ritual music in the 3rd floor gallery where President Lincoln received guests for his inaugural banquet. Magda and I carefully prepared the choreography for all over a number of site visits.
As Magda saw the scope of my musical planning for Identified, including Blanchard (who later became the first African-American composer to be featured by the Metropolitan Opera in New York), she expanded her half of the program to match. Magda added her own group of Ellington School students, additional performance artists, and a new costume created by the same Alvin Ailey Dance Theater designer who worked with us previously. Much of Magda’s plans might have evolved anyway, but in general, as we transitioned to an artistic duo, Magda’s plans became competitive, which was aesthetically fruitful for us both.
In 2017, Magdalena and I created Matanzas Sound Map and Bar Matanzas for documenta 14. This project, more than others, depended on music, not by my design but due to the practicality of the music ideas. The original proposal for documenta was to present Alchemy of the Soul, a piece with large fragile glass elements that would cost over $200,000 to crate, ship, and install. Additionally, Magda hoped to provide 100 days of public event programming, including dozens of artists and curators for Bar Matanzas. Late in the planning stages, these ideas were dropped due to size and costs. documenta director Adam Szymczyk gave a green light to more contained ideas focusing on sound and video projection.
Matanzas Sound Map (2017) is a mixed-media installation that explores the sonic landscape of Matanzas, from the harbor neighborhoods where iconic musical forms were born to remote estuaries where one imagines Cuba as it sounded before human intervention. The installation creates an aural cartography made in collaboration with sugar growers, musicians, musicologists and scientists. The installation comprises 10-channel of audio composition and projected video; Magda added cast glass, blown glass, handmade paper, coconut tree bark, coconuts shells, and stone to the original proposal. documenta 14 curator Monika Szewczyk said that this was the only installation in the show that had unsynchronized music and video.
The composition is organized into a series of vignettes. Each vignette sequences: 1) field recordings made in the province on Matanzas, 2) chants by Raphael Navarro and a group of musicians from Los Muñequitos of Matanzas, recorded with their collaboration for the installation, and 3) a montage of processed saxophone sounds.
Environmental recordings were recorded in Ciénega Zapata (Bay of Pigs), a 4162-square-kilometer biosphere where insects and birds seem to own the land and sing a collective song of the Americas. Urban voices were recorded around Calle Medio, the main boulevard in the city of Matanzas, where one hears the cathartic thunderclap of dominos as residents passionately compete on Sunday morning. This recording memorializes the theatrical sound of street criers canvasing the town before global business arrives from abroad to organize all advertising in alignment with foreign marketing campaigns.
I created electronic sounds to convey the quiet and power I felt listening in Ciénega Zapata, Alava (once the island’s largest plantation) and Calle Medio. I recorded in Robert Rauschenberg’s 80’x40’ studio in Captiva, Florida, where the reverberation of my saxophone influenced the sense of breathing and pacing for the installation. Overdubbed electronic improvisations expand the harmonic timbreal palette of the piece. The resulting 10-channel sound piece uses multiple mono, stereo, Ambisonic (360-degree) sound diffusion.
Bar Matanzas (2017), presented in Kassel, Germany, was a pavilion of our design to host public performances and artist talks in a casual setting. The Kulturzentrum Schlachthof, a community center largely patronized by members of the local Turkish community, agreed to host us as their own bar was undergoing construction. A few months before opening, it was clear that Magda’s roster of dozens of artists and curators was not going to be funded. I suggested the use of a house band instead of lots of talks by artists and curators. I also convinced Magda that we only needed to program the first ten nights of documenta. In the end, Magda and I performed alone on opening night while we waited for Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, the house band, to solve visa issues. The next day, I picked up Los Muñequitos in Cologne and we drove straight from the airport to the Bar in Kassel to launch nine evenings of performances.
By day, visitors to the bar drank beer and mojitos on outdoor tables or in the pavilion, surrounded by Magda’s translucent paintings and the video from Matanzas Sound Map. By night, I performed with Los Muñequitos, combining live electronic music performance with rumba and Cuban music rooted in the Yoruba, Calabar, and Congo ritual chants. On some evenings, composer/engineer Nasos Vinos added a live remix of field recordings from Matanzas Sound Map. Concerts culminated in the band and visitors joining in the center of the pavilion, singing, playing, and dancing into the night. Upon his first visit to the pavilion, Adam Szymczyk declared the project “beyond fantastic.”
Conclusion
Since 2018, Magda and I have created work independently. The prevailing image in Magda’s work continues to be that of herself and/or her autobiographical narrative. I felt that in order for my work to evolve, it was best that I focus on broader themes and look for new ways integrate sound in multimedia collaborations.
I’ve brought the insights and methods developed by working with Magda to new large scale multimedia pieces including: Lavender Ruins (2018), a fog/sound installation with Fujiko Nakaya; Sounding the Cloud (2018), After Irma(2019), a multimedia concert featuring my music and video along with percussionists Roman Díaz and Sandy Pérez; Sonance for the Precession (2018), a quadraphonic sound installation for the Hopkins Observatory at Williams College Museum of Art; and Shadows and Sonance (2018), a 52-speaker, 6-video screen installation with F. Pierce Warnecke for the ISM-Hexadome at MassMoCA.
Throughout our collaboration, Magda and I complemented and challenged each other. The work is stronger than what we contributed individually. For every piece, I experimented with new ways of combining sonic and visuals ideas, and after thirty years, my practice had grown in ways that I never could have imagined. The collaboration has prepared me to look forward to new pieces and future collaborations that fully attend to the importance of sound in multi-media practice.
Acknowledgements
This text was written at the request of Centro de Experimentación e Investigación en Artes Electrónicas - CEIARTE (Electronic Arts Experimentation and Research Center) of the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero - UNTREF, Buenos Aires, Argentina. The author wishes to thank the museums, galleries and photographers who supplied photographs of the works of art for this article. Every attempt has been made to determine the complete information on photography.
Resources for Select Works
Sacred Bath
Leonard, N. (2001). Timeaus [CD]. Cedar Hill Records.
53+1=54+1=55.Letter of the Year
Campos-Pons, Maria Magdalena and Neil Leonard. (2013). FeFa. Artists’ Prospectus for the Nation, http://www.artistsincontextprospectus.org/2013/07/23/maria-magdalena-campos-pons-neil-leonard/
Paravisini-Gebert, L. (2013). Gatherings: Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons and the Art of Recovery. Hemispheric Institute, https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/emisferica-121-caribbean-rasanblaj/12-1-review-essays/e121-review-campos-pons.html
Dubinsky, K. 2016. Cuba Beyond the Beach: Stories of Life in Havana. Canada, Between the Lines.
True Bread
Cotter, H. (2013, September 26). María Magdalena and Neil Leonard. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/27/arts/design/maria-magdalena-campos-pons-and-neil-leonard.html
Gopnik, Blake. (2017). Neil Leonard at Stephan Stoyanov is the Daily Pic by Blake Gopnik. The Daily Beast, https://www.thedailybeast.com/neil-leonard-at-stephan-stoyanov-is-the-daily-pic-by-blake-gopnik
Leonard, N. (2015). True Bread: The Sounds of Change in Cuba. Leonardo Music Journal, 25, 95-96. https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/LMJ_a_00945
Leonard, N. (2018, September 11). Sonic Cartography. NewMusicBox. https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/sonic-cartography/
Santana, A. 1973. Práctica del Exceso. Spain: Aduana Vieja
Alchemy of the Soul
Antiques. (2014, January 10). Talking Past and Present. Antiques, the Magazine. https://www.themagazineantiques.com/article/talking-past-and-present-at-the-peabody-essex-museum
Hagan, Debbie. (2016, March 25). A Multisensory Trip to Cuba’s Dark, Sugar-Filled Past. Hyperallergic. https://hyperallergic.com/285413/a-multisensory-trip-to-cubas-dark-sugar-filled-past/
Pick, N. (2016). Cuba Distilled. Peabody Essex Museum. http://alchemy.pem.org/cuba_distilled/
Shea, Andrea (2016, January 14). Rum, Rumba, Slaves and Ghosts: A New Art Installation Evokes the Cuban Sugar Industry. [radio broadcast story.] https://www.wbur.org/artery/2016/01/14/cuban-sugar-pem
Habla Madre
Kirsh, Andrea. (2014, May 1). “Carrie Mae Weems LIVE: Past Tense/Future Perfect” at the Guggenheim. Artblog, https://www.theartblog.org/2014/05/carrie-mae-weems-live-past-tensefuture-perfect-at-the-guggenheim/
Matanzas Sound Map
Leonard, N. and Campos-Pons, M. (2017). Listening to Matanzas. documenta14,https://www.documenta14.de/en/notes-and-works/9331/listening-to-matanzas
Leonard, N. (2018, September 11). Sonic Cartography II: Questions of Scale. NewMusicBox,https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/sonic-cartography-ii-questions-of-scale/
Szewczyk, Monika. (2017). Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons and Neil Leonard. documenta14.https://www.documenta14.de/en/artists/13498/maria-magdalena-campos-pons-and-neil-leonard
References
Campos-Pons, Maria Magdalena and Neil Leonard. (2013). FeFa. Artists’ Prospectus for the Nation, http://www.artistsincontextprospectus.org/2013/07/23/maria-magdalena-campos-pons-neil-leonard
Canson, P. (2014). Emona. Encyclopedia Britannica. Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Yemonja
Cotter, H. (2013, September 26). María Magdalena and Neil Leonard. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/27/arts/design/maria-magdalena-campos-pons-and-neil-leonard.html
Jeffries, B. (2017). Oshun. Encyclopedia Britannica. Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Oshun
Leonard, N. (2001) [CD endorsement]. In Timeaus [CD]. Cedar Hill Records.
Leonard, N. (2016). IDENTIFIED at the Smithsonian Institute National Portrait Gallery. NeilLeonard.comhttps://www.neilleonard.com/post/2017/07/10/identified-at-the-smithsonian-institute-national-portrait-gallery
Pick, N. (2016). Cuba Distilled. Peabody Essex Museum. http://alchemy.pem.org/cuba_distilled/
Appendix A
Dual Commission Works
(commission, concept, and execution co-credited to Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons and Neil Leonard)
1. Bar Matanzas (2017)
Pavilion by Campos-Pons and Leonard
Interior design: backlit paintings on textile, furniture by Clara Porset; single-channel video with 2-channel video score comprising Leonard’s alto saxophone, Cuban field recordings, and voices by Los Muñequitos de Matanzas
Live Performance: ten performances by Leonard with Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, Phill Niblock, Amnon Wolman, and Ali Moraly
Curated by Adam Szymczyk and Monika Szewczyk
Presented by documenta 14, Kassel, Germany
2. Matanzas Sound Map (2017)
Installation by Campos-Pons and Leonard: 10-channel composition comprising Leonard’s alto saxophone, Cuban field recordings, and voices by Los Muñequitos de Matanzas; cast glass, blown glass, handmade paper, coconut tree bark, coconuts shells, and calea stone
Duration: approx. 16:00
Curated by Adam Szymczyk and Monika Szewczyk
Presented by documenta 14, Athens, Greece
3. Matanzas (2017)
Video by Campos-Pons and Leonard
Images by Campos-Pons and Leonard: shot at the Robert Rauschenberg Residency, Captiva, Florida
Sound: 2-channel video score comprising Leonard’s alto saxophone, Cuban field recordings, and voices by Los Muñequitos de Matanzas
Video editing: Leonard
Duration: approx. 6:00
Curated by Katherine Liberovskaya
Premiered by Screen Compositions 13, Experimental Intermedia Studio, NYC, NY
4. Identified (2016)
Performance by Campos-Pons and Leonard
Sound for ensembles in discreet galleries:
Kogod Couryard: saxophone, trumpet, keyboard, 3 congas
Spiral stairway from 1st to 2rd floor: jazz orchestra
3rd floor gallery: 3 vocalists, 3 bata, 1 percussionist
Performance/spoken word: Campos-Pons, Monifa Love, Dell Hamilton, and Helina Metaferia
Music: Leonard, soprano and alto saxophones, electronics, composition
Terence Blanchard, trumpet
Oriente Lopez, percussion/flute/piano
Rámon Garcia “Sandy" Pérez, percussion, voice
Lázaro Cárdenas Batel, percussion, voice
Vanessa Lindberg, voice
Oscar Rousseaux, percussion, voice
Randy Rosso, percussion, voice
Ernesto Gattel, percussion
Frank “Squirrel” Williams, percussionist
Duke Ellington School Jazz Band directed by Ike Daniels
Duration: approx. 40:00
Curated by Dorothy Moss
Commissioned by Smithsonian Institute National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.
5. Alchemy of the Soul (2016)
Installation by Campos-Pons and Leonard: cast glass, blown glass, glass running fountain; 10-channel composition comprising Leonard’s saxophone, Cuban field recordings, and chants by Los Muñequitos de Matanzas
Duration: approx. 11:00
Curated by Josh Basseches
Commissioned and purchased by Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA
6. Agridulce (Bittersweet) (2016)
Performance by: Campos-Pons, performance
Dell Hamilton, performance
Leonard, soprano and alto saxophones, composition
Oriente Lopez, keyboard, percussion
Rámon Garcia “Sandy" Pérez, percussion, voice
Ernesto Díaz, percussion (January 9)
Yusnier Sanchez Bustamante, percussion (January, 21)
Vanessa Lindberg, voice
Duration: approx.15:00
Curated by Josh Basseches
Commissioned by Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA
7. Conversando (2014)
Processional performance by Campos-Pons and Leonard
Sound: Leonard with Brazilian folkloric musicians
Curated by Ana Pato
Commissioned by the 3ª Bienal da Bahia
Duration: approx. 30:00
8. Habla Madre (2014)
Processional performance by Campos-Pons and Leonard
Performance/spoken word: Campos-Pons and Natasha Diggs
Music: Leonard, bass clarinet, composition
Jen Baker, trombone
Monique Buzzarté, trombone
Dick Griffin, trombone
Kiane Zawadi, euphonium
Elena Kakaliaguo - French horn
Jay Rozen, tuba
Joseph Daley, tuba
Oriente Lopez, percussion, flute
Roman Díaz, percussion, voice
Diego Lopez, bata, voice
Duration: approx. 30:00
Curated by Carrie Mae Weems
Premiered in the rotunda of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NYC, NY for the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems, Past Tense, Future Perfect
9. Rosa de los Vientos, Rose of the Winds (2013)
Processional performance by Campos-Pons and Leonard
Sound: Leonard – soprano and alto saxophones, composition
Oriente Lopez - bata, flute
Mauricio Herrera - bata, voice
Roman Díaz - bata, voice
Curated by Rachel Weingeist
Premiered by the Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY
10. 53+1=54+1=55. Letter of the Year (2013)
Installation by Campos-Pons and Leonard
100 rattan bird cages; 55 media players for audio and video; 80 bamboo sticks; 18 custom-designed audio speakers,18-channel non-repeating sound composition based on Cuban field recordings of street criers (Pregoneros) by Leonard
Curated by Jorge Fernandez and Giacomo Zaza
Commissioned by Cuban Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale, Italy
11. 53+1=54+1=55. Letter of the Year (single-channel version) (2013)
Video by Campos-Pons and Leonard: Single-channel video with 2-channel composition based on Cuban field recordings of street criers (Pregoneros)
Curated by Jorge Fernandez and Giacomo Zaza
12. Fefa (2013)
Processional performance by Campos-Pons and Leonard
Sound: Leonard, soprano saxophone, composition
Jason Lim, violin
Feliciano Arango, bass, voice, percussion, composition
Eugenio Arango, voice, percussion
Cristina Arango, voice, percussion
Curated by Jorge Fernandez and Giacomo Zaza
Commissioned by Cuban Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale, Italy
13. Cuba Walk (2012)
Single-channel silent video by Campos-Pons and Leonard
Camera and video editing by Neil Leonard: shot on Malecon, Havana, Cuba
Duration: approx. 4:01
14. Llegooo Fefa (2012)
Performance by Campos-Pons and Leonard
Sound: Pregonero (street crier), competition at Centro Wifredo Lam
Curated by Jorge Fernandez
Presented by 11 Bienal de Habana, Havana, Cuba,
15. Llegooo Fefa (2012)
Installation by Campos-Pons and Leonard
Sound: 2-channel non-repeating sound composition based on Cuban field recordings of street criers (Pregoneros) by Leonard
Curated by Jorge Fernandez
Presented by 11 Bienal de Habana, Havana, Cuba
Duration: approx. 9:00
16. Llegooo Fefa (2012)
Processional performance by Campos-Pons and Leonard
Sound: saxophone and Pregoneros (street criers)
Curated by Juanito Delgado
Presented by Detras del Muro, Malecon, Havana, Cuba
17. Journeys (2011)
Performance by Campos-Pons and Leonard
Sound: soprano saxophone, electronics, composition
Presented by Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN
18. 1470 MB (2010)
Performance by Campos-Pons and Leonard
Sound: performance by four Pregoneros (street criers)
Presented by Casa Las Americas, Havana, Cuba
19. Bar Romeo (2006)
Video by Campos-Pons and Leonard
Sound by Bar Romeo patrons with electronic sound by Leonard
Presented by Galleria Pack, Milan, Italy
Duration: approx. 7:42
Single Commission Works
(works by Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons in collaboration with Neil Leonard)
1. Llego FeFa.Remedios II (2018)
Performance by Campos-Pons with sound by Leonard
Sound: 2-channel live electroacoustic composition
Presented by Colby College, Maine
2. My Mother Told Me I Am Chinese. China Porcelain (2008)
Installation by Campos-Pons with sound by Leonard
Sound: 2-channel electroacoustic composition
Presented by Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA
Duration: approx. 5:48
3. My Mother Told Me I Am Chinese (2008)
Performance by Campos-Pons with sound by Leonard
Sound: 2-channel live electroacoustic composition
Presented by Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA
4. Corner/Opera. Rethinking a Site (2007)
Installation by Campos-Pons with sound by Leonard
Visual: custom-designed wallpaper, video
Sound: recording of Leonard performing solo bass clarinet composition
Presented by Philagrafika, Temple Gallery and the Paul Robeson Home, Philadelphia, PA
Duration: approx. 2:18
5. Regalos (2007)
Performance by Campos-Pons with Leonard and Dawoud Bey
Music: Leonard, soprano saxophones
Dawoud Bey, shekere
Presented by Indianapolis Museum of Art
6. Mojitos, Habilitation and Crocodiles Tears (2006)
Performance by Campos-Pons with sound by Leonard
Music: Leonard, alto/soprano saxophones, composition
Gadi Sassoon, laptop/turntables
Ernestico Rodriguez, Cuban percussion
Presented by Galleria Pack, Milan, Italy
7. Madonna Pellegrina (2006)
Video by Campos-Pons with sound by Leonard
Camera by Neil Leonard
Presented by Galleria Pack, Milan, Italy
Duration: approx.9:40
8. Mil Maneras Para Decir Adios/Threads of Memory (2004)
Installation by Campos-Pons with sound by Leonard
Sculpture: five-screen video installation, cast-cut polymer resin, mild steel, rebar
Sound: 2-channel electroacoustic composition
Duration: approx.7:00
Curated by Selene Wendt
Commissioned by Sonia Henie Onstad Museum, Oslo, Norway
9. Interiorita o Luna Sulla Colina (2003)
Permanent outdoor mixed media installation by Campos-Pons with sound by Leonard
Sculpture: alabaster spheres, backlight with text by César Vallejo, video
Sound: 2-channel electroacoustic composition with text by César Vallejo
Duration: approx. 12:00
Curated by Salah Hassan and Gabi Scardi
Commissioned by La Marrana di Montemarcello, Ameglia, Italy
10. Meanwhile the Girls Were Playing (2000)
Installation by Campos-Pons with sound by Leonard
Sculpture: metallic organdy, silk, embroidered fabric, pâte de verre flowers, 4 projected videos tracks
Sound: 4-channel non-repeating electroacoustic composition
Curated by Jennifer Riddell
Commissioned by MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA
11. Spoken Softly with Mama (1998)
Installation by Campos-Pons with sound by Leonard
Sculpture: embroidered silk and organza over ironing boards with photographic transfers, embroidered cotton sheets, pâte de verre irons and trivets, wooden benches, six projected video tracks
Sound: 4-channel non-repeating electroacoustic composition
Curated by Sally Berger; Collection of National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada
Commissioned by Museum of Modern Art, NYC, NY.
12. History of People Who Were Not Heroes: A Town Portrait (1994)
Installation by Campos-Pons with sound by Leonard
Sculpture: wood, glass, steel, clay tablets, black-and-white photographs, 3-channel video
Sound: 2-channel electroacoustic composition
Presented by Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
13. The Herbalists Tools (1994)
Installation by Campos-Pons with sound by Leonard
Sculpture: acrylic on wood, photographs, aluminum casserole pans, corn meal, machetes, etched glass bowls, pressed wood[I4] , live plants, fresh herbs
Sound: 2-channel electroacoustic composition
Commissioned by Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD
14. Initiation Rite/Sacred Bath (sometimes referred to as Baño Sagrado) (1990)
Single-channel video by Campos-Pons with sound by Leonard
Video: Campos-Pons
Sound: composition for alto saxophone, bells, clay flute, interactive music system by Leonard
Duration: approx. 31:00
Curated by Kate Craig
Commissioned by the Wester Front, Vancouver, Canada
15. Rito de Iniciación (1988)
Single-channel film by Campos-Pons with sound by Leonard
Film: Campos-Pons
Sound: electroacoustic composition for Super 8 film by Leonard
Duration: approx. 10:00
16. A Woman at the border/Una Mujer en la Frontera (1989)
Invitation card for exhibition by Campos-Pons, designed by Leonard
Presented by SOHO 20 Gallery, New York, NY
(work by Neil Leonard in collaboration with Maria-Magdalena Campos-Pons)
1. Reverberations II (2016)
Performance by Leonard and Rudresh Mahanthappa with Campos-Pons
Music: Leonard, soprano and alto saxophones, live electronics, compositions
Rudresh Mahanthappa, soprano and alto saxophones, live electronics, compositions
Video by Campos-Pons
Duration: approx. 40:00
Curated by Pieranna Cavalchini
Premiered at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA
2. Dreaming of an Island (2007)
Performance by Leonard with Campos-Pons
Music: Leonard, live electronics, composition with the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra
Video by Campos-Pons
Duration: approx. 14:00
Premiered at Indiana History Center, Indianapolis, IN
3. Echoes and Footsteps (2007)
Performance by Leonard with Campos-Pons
Music: Leonard, soprano live electronics, composition
Video by Campos-Pons
Duration: approx. 9:40
Premiered at Auditorium di Roma, Rome, Italy
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