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John Zorn's Theatre of Musical Optics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 January 2022

Extract

This is when I founded the Theatre of Musical Optics. What you see and what you hear is the same thing, music. Music had never anything to do with sound… In my shows the objects in performance are like solid sounds...different shapes and textures.

John Zorn

John Zorn founded the Theatre of Musical Optics in 1975. Since then he has developed two different types of concerts. In one he plays a musical instrument. As a saxophone player and composer, he appears regularly with a group of musicians working with “improvised music” or “music for improvisers.” In other concerts he performs alone in intimate situations using small objects visually as though they were musical “notes.” Though he has performed these shows with objects at Anthology Film Archives, the Collective for the Living Cinema and the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, most of the work has taken place at his small studios on Lafayette Street and, more recently, on the Lower East Side.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1979 The Drama Review

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