Alan Licht

Faculty, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts

Academic Program Affiliation(s): MFA Music/Sound

Biography: Music/Sound. B.A. Vassar College. Guitarist Alan Licht has released six albums of his own structured improvisations for solo guitar and tape pieces and appears on over 70 other commercially released recordings. He has played with figures in the worlds of jazz, rock and the avant-garde, ranging from Rashied Ali to Tom Verlaine to Michael Snow. He works frequently with sound installation, and has made intermedia collaborations with such artists as Charles Atlas and Gary Panter. He co-founded Text of Light, an ongoing ensemble which performs freely improvised concerts alongside screenings of classic avant-garde cinema, with Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo in 2001. He has written extensively about the arts for Artforum, Modern Painters, Rhizome, the WIRE, Film Comment, Sight & Sound, Village Voice, Time Out New York, and other publications. His book Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Media, the first extensive survey of the genre in English, was published by Rizzoli in 2007. Licht was curator at the famed New York experimental music venue Tonic from 2000 until its closing in 2007. He has also been a guest lecturer at Cornell University, New York University, California Institute of the Arts, Janacek Academy of Music and the Performing Arts, and Le Quai School of Art.
Phone: 845-758-7481
Department: Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts