Neil Leonard: Interdisciplinary Curiosity in Motion

Berklee Interdisciplinary Arts Institute artistic director Neil Leonard doesn’t miss an opportunity to embark on—and learn from—new interdisciplinary adventures.

June 5, 2015

Long before interdisciplinary education rose to prominence in academia, Neil Leonard, artistic director of the Berklee Interdisciplinary Arts Institute (BIAI), was living an interdisciplinary life. Leonard started out as a jazz saxophone player but as personal computers became affordable in the early 1980s, he was among the first wave of artists to seize their potential. In doing so, he expanded his artistic social milieu and found opportunities to work for dance companies, installation artists, filmmakers, and others, and now Leonard helps the Berklee students who study with him open up similar career possibilities.

“When I looked at the computer in 1985, it was like looking at the saxophone in the 19th century,” Leonard says. “What’s this thing going to do? We don’t know. But you know what? You might be part of the group of people who figure that out, and that sounded like an adventure that was worth signing up for.”

Since that time, Leonard has rarely missed an opportunity to sign up for new interdisciplinary adventures.

Have Art, Will Travel

In the last few months alone, Leonard traveled to Casa da Música in Portugal to help plan a massive interactive live performance involving audience members via their mobile devices, performed for TEDx with Berklee student Olivia Mok, and was commissioned to create a sound installation as part of an exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum on the sugar trade in the port cities of Matanzas, Cuba and Salem, Massachusetts.

Of the latter, which will open in 2016, Leonard says, “It’s a major undertaking but it’s going to be a wonderful and very tactile experience.”

A Fulbright specialist, Leonard is also a research affiliate at the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology, where he has fostered collaboration between MIT and Berklee students on sound for final projects such as a stairwell installation in a Frank Gehry-designed building that drew on the architecture’s unique acoustical properties to create a piece that essentially resonated the sounds of the building. After decades of work of this nature, Leonard was recently nominated for and awarded a prestigious Robert Rauschenberg Fellowship, along with his wife, acclaimed artist María Magdalena Campos Pons.

All of this comes on the heels of two recent electronic music album releases from Leonard as well as a sound and video installation, “True Bread,” that drew praise from the New York Times. The installation celebrated the pregoneros of Cuba, street vendors who have recently reemerged to sell goods—mostly food—after 60 years of being denied the right to operate by a more restrictive government. The installation submerged its attendees in the sights and sounds of the new Cuba, and, as Leonard explains, it shines a light on “the folk-art of the spoken word while connecting art with commerce and with food.” “You can hear capitalism coming through these charming vendors,” he says.

The Art of Lifelong Learning

As artistic director of the BIAI at Berklee, Leonard, who is also a professor in Berklee's Electronic Production and Design Department, leads students in collaborative projects with artists across every medium as they build mixed-media portfolios. If accepted into the BIAI, students build a mixed-media portfolio while learning to explore, experiment, and manage professional-level projects across multiple artistic disciplines. BIAI students also contribute music, sound design, and composition skills to enrich the work of other artists.

Meanwhile, Leonard has also been busy researching and writing. He recently published a piece about Walter Smetak, who invented many musical instruments that he used in his original compositions. With virtually no English-language materials on Smetak in existence, Leonard drew on interviews with those who played with him in Bahia, Brazil to contribute to our understanding of this musical pioneer who is only now beginning to be appreciated despite his key influence on the Tropicália movement.

“The most rigorous and visionary work can be connected to a marketplace like New York or London but it could be a place where nobody thinks cutting edge work gets done, like Bahia,” Leonard says. “It could even appear to disappear, but it’s still there.”

For Leonard, the allure to uncovering more about a fellow artist like Smetak is clear.

“In approaching any piece that I do, whether it’s with the saxophone or an installation or research, I’m always thinking, ‘Is there something new I can learn when I do this?’” Leonard says. “When that’s the agenda, what you can learn is phenomenal. You have to find ways to surround yourself with artists who have that same curiosity, intention, and ambition to keep on learning.”

Curiosity Saved the Jazz Cat

After beginning his career as an illustrator and later working in ceramics before migrating to jazz performance and then to sound more broadly, there’s no doubt that Leonard, in true Renaissance man spirit, is eager to try it all, and to share what he has learned with his students.

“I can’t envision a life that doesn’t include making art,” Leonard says. “I started making visual art as early as I can remember because it was and is a way to understand the world, and to invent a new world.”

As Leonard’s students have no doubt absorbed from his example, inventing that new world requires an appetite for exploration and a die-hard belief that, when it comes to art, the old aphorism about curiosity killing the cat is entirely incorrect.