This week, CalArts faculty members Arne De Boever (Critical Studies) and Michael Pisaro-Liu (Music) are leading a series of workshops, presentations, and performances in Paris centered on their collaborative course “Silent Music.”
The programming takes place across multiple institutions and venues, including École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy (ENSAPC), an exchange partner of the MA Aesthetics and Politics program at CalArts, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and the experimental music venue Instants Chavirés.
At ENSAPC, De Boever and Pisaro-Liu are teaching a workshop connected to “Silent Music,” a course they have developed at CalArts that explores silence as an active element in composition, performance, and listening. The two will also publish a book based on the course in 2027.
As part of this collaboration, they are participating in the international symposium Silence as Material: Studies on the Most Subtle Sounds, held at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne on April 1. The symposium, which they are co-organizing with Matthieu Saladin, professor of visual arts at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, brings together artists, musicians, and scholars to examine how silence functions across contemporary sound practices, with discussions focused on composition, listening, and the broader cultural and ecological contexts of sound.
The program also includes a concert at Instants Chavirés in Montreuil on March 31, where De Boever and Pisaro-Liu will perform with the Dedalus ensemble in works (including the premieres of two new pieces by Pisaro-Liu) that engage silence as a compositional material.
De Boever teaches in the School of Critical Studies and the MA Aesthetics and Politics program at CalArts. Pisaro-Liu is a composer and guitarist and serves as director of composition and experimental music at CalArts’ Herb Alpert School of Music.
