Colin Tucker

Colin Tucker is a cultural producer living in Buffalo, NY. Active across music composition, time-based art, curation, and research, his work explores institutions of historical Western art music such as score, musical instrument, and concert performance in relation to embodied materialities.

Recent compositional work takes the bodies of performers and listeners as points of departure, approaching scores as contingency networks driven by real-time perceptions of embodied comportment. The score’s authority is leveraged against recent Western art music’s mind-supremacy, and thus refigured as a catalyst for sonic entanglements between bodies. Tucker’s works have been performed by ensembles dal niente, East Coast Contemporary Ensemble (ECCE), ELISION, Linea, S.E.M., soundinitiative, Surplus, and Uusinta, and the symphony orchestras of Detroit and Ann Arbor, presented at Constellation Frequency Series, Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Eastman School of Music, Issue Project Room, June in Buffalo, MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music, New England Conservatory, Orchestra Hall (Detroit), Slingshot Festival, and Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics-Stanford University, and recognized by grants and awards from Akademie Schloss Solitude and BMI.

Also active as a curator, he is founding artistic director of Null Point, an initiative for experimental music and sound in Buffalo. A flexible collective of artists working at junctures between music, performance, media art, and social practice, the initiative focuses on context-sensitive, embodied, participatory, and durational sound work. Past projects include new place-based sound works in vacant Buffalo grain silos, the world premiere of David Dunn’s 1975 outdoor piece PLACE, and participatory deskilled sound-making events in community spaces. Tucker’s curatorial projects have been presented in partnership with Cikada Ensemble, Dartmouth College, DePauw University, the Fridman Gallery, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Princeton University, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Squeaky Wheel, and Temple University, and with financial support from Art Bridges Foundation, New Music USA, and the arts councils of Norway, NY, and Toronto.

He holds a PhD in music composition from the University at Buffalo (SUNY), where was a Presidential Fellow, Dissertation Fellow, and teaching assistant. Tucker also holds degrees from the University of Huddersfield (MPhil) and the University of Michigan (BM, summa cum laude).