Neil Leonard
Midtown Sound: Listening Legacy
02.04.2026 – 02.05.2026
Neil Leonard
Midtown Sound: Listening Legacy
02.04.2026 – 02.05.2026
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, with the exhibition curated by studioconcreto. 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.
The exhibit includes five new works. 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. 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.
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.
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.