Midtown Sound: Listening Legacy

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. Leonard's work incorporates audio, video and sculptural components, tracing shifting urban soundscapes and the enduring debate over what counts as music and what counts as noise.

In his exploration of the neighborhood around THE BLANC, Leonard uncovered the work of his grandfather, Paul J. Washburn, a musician and acoustician who, unknown to Leonard prior to the residency, was a Charter Member of the Acoustical Society of America and advised Mayor LaGuardia's 1935 War on Noise campaign. Leonard's project investigates how his maternal grandfather, working from an office diagonally across from THE BLANC, contributed to New York's earliest sonic maps, helping to reframe urban noise as a measurable civic condition with consequences for public health, privacy, and freedom of speech. Leonard's installations reconstruct this historical moment—inviting visitors to consider how debates over sound in the 1930s anticipated our own technologically mediated present.

Curated by studioconcreto, the exhibit includes four new works by Leonard:

Midtown Sound, an assemblage of sound sources cited in the New York Times coverage of Washburn's work on Mayor LaGuardia's "War on Noise" campaign.

Listening Legacy is a video installation based on Leonard's investigation of his family archive and articles on Washburn from period journals. In the video, the artist describes how three generations in his family approached listening and how this research at THE BLANC created an awareness of his own identity. On the centennial of the first scientific noise measurements in New York City, the work questions modes of collective listening in our time and explores noise as a cultural construction.

Noiseless Nights, October 1935 is a kinetic sculpture that refers to Washburn's support of the city's highly publicized "Noiseless Nights" month. Working in tandem with the City Health Commissioner, Washburn used his company's cutting-edge 80lb. decibel meter to measure sound emanating from car horns, radios, and musical instruments blaring from Radio Row and in local dance halls.

Jasmine 40th Street is a video installation extending Leonard's ongoing collaboration with studioconcreto, first explored in his site-specific 2023 work Casino dei Angeli in Lecce, Italy. That project revisited "Mo Li Hua," a Chinese folk melody, as it traveled to Rome via a 19th-century music box—a pre-electronic mechanization of music that enabled the sharing of music among a global audience, foreshadowing technologies like Spotify playlists—and became a centerpiece of Giacomo Puccini's opera Turandot. In Jasmine 40th, Leonard revisits the original song on the opera’s 100th anniversary, incorporating a newly commissioned vocal performance by renowned soprano Junhua Chen. Leonard invites Chen to reimagine the folkloric melody and its impact on western music in a new composition for voice and saxophone.

Building on Leonard's recent installation Matanzas Sound Map at Tate Modern, Midtown Sound: Listening Legacy continues his long-term investigation of sonic cartography and communal listening. The exhibition proposes modes for listening together amid an increasingly individualized and technologically mediated society. In doing so, it returns his family's legacy of sonic inquiry to the very urban context in which it first emerged.

On View: April 2 - May 2, 2026

Gallery Hours: 11AM-6PM, Wed - Sat

Opening reception: 5-8pm, April 2

Location: THE BLANC, 15 East 40th Street, New York, NY 10016

Artist

Neil Leonard is a composer, saxophonist, and transdisciplinary artist whose work centers on collective listening and cross-cultural dialogue. He maintains active collaborations across the U.S. and in Brazil, Burundi, Cuba, Italy, Japan, Korea, Tanzania, and the UK.

In 2025, Tate Modern featured his Matanzas Sound Map as a collection highlight. His multimedia works are held by MoMA, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia. Installations and performances with Fujiko Nakaya, Phill Niblock, Tony Oursler and Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons have been presented at documenta, the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial andthe Getty Museum.

New York presentations include Carnegie Hall, the Guggenheim, Issue Project Room, Roulette, and The Kitchen. Musical collaborators include Robert Black, Joanne Brackeen, Terence Blanchard, Alvin Curran, Richard Devine, Vijay Iyer, Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, Robin Rimbaud, Stephen Vitiello, Hal Wilner, and Amnon Wolman. Recent international performances include Donaueschinger Musiktage and the Venice Biennale.

He founded the Interdisciplinary Arts Institute at Berklee College of Music, where he taught for three decades, and was a Research Affiliate at MIT.

Curator

studioconcreto is an independent artistic and curatorial platform founded in 2018 in Lecce by Luca Coclite and Laura Perrone. Rooted in long-term research, the project investigates immateriality, precarity, performativity, and the erosion of collective life.

Operating from a domestic space within a social housing neighborhood, studioconcreto conceives architecture as a site for relational and pedagogical practices involving artists and local communities. Its activities unfold across private interiors and public spaces, activating temporary situations that foreground encounter and dialogue.

The platform's research focuses on the relationships between body, language, dance, and architecture, treating social space as a flexible field. Through live performances, exhibitions, and actions of radical pedagogy, studioconcreto explores artistic practices as tools for collective learning.

Recent projects include Where Language Moves with Teatro Koreja, featuring Yvonne Rainer and Cesare Pietroiusti; Il Mito – Unconventional Archive, on the fiftieth anniversary of Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino; and Performance di Parola, a constellation of international artists.

Performer

Junhua Chen (Judy Chen) is a nationally recognized Chinese vocalist and a First-Class (National Level I) Performer. She has performed extensively across Asia, Europe, North America, and Africa. In 2006, she was invited by the National Symphony Orchestra of China to perform the symphonic fantasy Farewell My Concubine at Lincoln Center in New York, becoming the second Chinese artist—after Peking Opera master Mei Lanfang—to present this work on that stage. She has appeared on China Central Television’s Spring Festival Gala for ten consecutive years, performing representative works including The Shepherd Girl, Carrying the Wedding Sedan, Tonight Belongs to You, and Butterfly Fly. Chen is a multiple-time award winner of the National Young Singers Television Competition. Her work Butterfly Fly won the Best Vocal Performance Award at the 21st Century International Arts Festival in Budapest, marking the first time a Chinese folk song received this distinction in Europe.

Acknowledgements

Neil Leonard and studioconcreto would like to thank Junhua Chen (vocal performance on Jasmine 40th Street), Mason Mann (electronics fabrication), and Qian Yang (calligraphy demonstration). We are indebted to Linda Liang (Director of THE BLANC) for her vision, and to THE BLANC team for their dedication: Leo Yuan (curation assistance), Silver Qi (image production and technical support), Yuhanxiao Ma (3D scanning and processing), Xiaotian (Tian) Zhang (equipment restoration), Finnley Xuereb (3D rendering), Queralt Giralt and Nina Wu (production assistance). We are grateful for production assistance from Michael Crehore, Dakota Bowman, Elle Fang, Salome Zhang, Nancy Aleo, Avanti Singh, and Takumi Sugai. Special thanks to Joia Mukherjee, Naivy Prez, Silfrido Martinez, and Julie and Chris Bowman.