SNO talk
SNO talk is an ongoing seminar program.
[left to right] Richard Lippold, Morton Feldman, John Cage, Ray Johnson, 1952.
4. when morty met john: the seeds of indeterminate composition
Presented by Geoffrey Barnard. 29 January, 2026.
“When Morty met John”: This talk will explore the initial friendship between Morton Feldman and John Cage in the early 1950s and the subsequent development of indeterminate composition, with a particular focus on two of Feldman’s graph scores from 1951, Projection 4 and Intersection 2.
-
ABOUT GEOFFREY BARNARD
Geoffrey Barnard is primarily a music historian but is also active in freely improvised music on an occasional basis, mostly playing bowed percussion. During the 1970s he was a member of the new music organisation AZ Music and the electroacoustic improvisation group Teletopa.
Consuelo Cavaniglia. Image provided by Consuelo Cavaniglia.
3. writing on practice
Presented by Consuelo Cavaniglia. 23 October, 2025.
SNO has invited Cavaniglia to lead a round table discussion to look specifically at the approach and methodology her writing and research takes in forming creative insights about this significant studio practice. Conseulo’s chapter, contained in the groundbreaking Dumbrell catalogue raisonné THRUM, will form part of this discourse.
-
In 2024 artist, curator, academic Consuelo Cavaniglia joined a distinguished team of scholars and art historians to map out a major study of the work of one of Australia's leading abstract painters, Lesley Dumbrell, at the Art Gallery of NSW.
Douglas Kahn. Image provided by Douglas Kahn.
2. energies, Buddhism, and jack kerouac’s visionary experience
Presented by Douglas Kahn. 26 July, 2025.
Douglas Kahn, writer, historian and theorist of the arts, lives and works on Dharug and Gundungurra land in Katoomba. Books include Energies in the Arts (MIT Press, 2019), Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (Univ. of California Press, 2013), and Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (MIT Press, 1999). Honorary Professor, Sydney College of the Arts, emeritus at UNSW and University of California at Davis. Current projects include The Energies Artists Say with Pia van Gelder (ANU).
-
February 1949, Jack Kerouac walked along Market Street in San Francisco when he looked into a fish-n-chip cafe. A few steps later, he froze in a panic attack that then instantly flipped into an expansive, cosmic vision. For the account in his novel, On the Road (1957), he fused it with Buddhist imagery and his experiences approaching samadhi while meditating. The hyper-automobility of the novel, pivots around a still point immobility. It is a historical oddity that the Market Street vision has been a blind spot in scholarship for decades, despite Kerouac saying it was the only time he found God. The problem may be that approaching it is dependent on engaging his mammoth 400+ page Some of the Dharma as obsessively as it was written. Or that a similar blind spot exists with respect to rigorously investigating energies, all of them. In an elemental physics and cultural dynamics of matter-energy-information, energy has been the odd one out. It is also the stuff through which much in the arts, all of them, is crafted.
1. HOME from home
Presented by SNO. January 2024.
‘Opera Victorine, 1984’ performed by Anthea Duffy, Jesse Hogan, and Ruark Lewis for SNO 174.
Art & Language: Interview with Victorine Meurend is a fictional conversation between Victorine Meurend, the model who posed most frequently for the painter Édouard Manet and the Art & Language collective. This four-act detective opera was composed by British conceptual artists Art & Language. It was created in English in the summer of 1983 and published in the collective's journal, Art-Language, volume 5, n°2 of March 1984. The French translation of the opera was first published in 1993 by the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume on the occasion of the Art & Language exhibition.