Composer and transdisciplinary artist Neil Leonard—known for his site-specific performances and installations—presents Midtown Sound: Listening Legacy, a collection of new multimedia works developed during his inaugural residency at THE BLANC in New York. Bringing together audio, video, and sculptural elements, the exhibition traces shifting urban soundscapes while revisiting the enduring question of what constitutes music and what is dismissed as noise.
Leonard’s research began with an unexpected personal discovery. While exploring the neighborhood surrounding THE BLANC, he uncovered the work of his grandfather, Paul J. Washburn, a musician and acoustician who, unbeknownst to Leonard prior to the residency, was a Charter Member of the Acoustical Society of America and an advisor to Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s 1935 “War on Noise” campaign. Working from an office just steps from the present-day exhibition site, Washburn contributed to some of New York’s earliest sonic mappings—helping reframe urban noise as a measurable civic condition with implications for public health, privacy, and freedom of expression. Leonard’s installations revisit this historical moment, inviting audiences to consider how debates around sound in the 1930s anticipated our own technologically mediated present.
Curated by studioconcreto, the exhibition brings together four newly commissioned works. Midtown Sound reconstructs an assemblage of sound sources cited in contemporary press coverage of Washburn’s work. Listening Legacy, a video installation drawn from Leonard’s family archive and period journals, reflects on three generations of listening practices, positioning sound as both a personal inheritance and a cultural construct. Noiseless Nights, October 1935, a kinetic sculpture, references the city’s widely publicized campaign to regulate urban noise, incorporating the historical use of decibel measurement as both scientific instrument and civic tool.
Jasmine 40th Street extends Leonard’s collaboration with the Italian curatorial platform studioconcreto, building on his 2023 work Casino dei Angeli. The installation revisits “Mo Li Hua,” a Chinese folk melody transmitted to Europe via 19th-century mechanical music devices and later incorporated by Giacomo Puccini into Turandot. Marking the opera’s centennial, Leonard reexamines its transnational circulation. A newly developed vocal performance by soprano Judy Chen, created at the invitation of the project, presents both the operatic and a Shanxi folk version, using subtle control of pitch and timbre to bridge historical reference and contemporary listening.
Building on Leonard’s recent Matanzas Sound Map at Tate Modern, Midtown Sound: Listening Legacy continues his long-term investigation into sonic cartography and collective listening. At a moment when auditory experience is increasingly individualized and mediated by technology, the exhibition proposes alternative modes of listening together. In doing so, it returns a family legacy of sonic inquiry to the very urban context in which it first emerged—while opening new questions about sound, memory, and cultural transmission across time and place.
