David Watson

Growing up, I experienced music as being of the physical landscape. Being worthy of deep investigation. And listening as being good work to do.

I enjoy a good problem. Reinventing the bagpipes and bringing them into the 21st century would be one of those. To play traditional music, I have put a lot of time into crafting sounds. These nuggets have already had hundreds of years of attention invested in them. But as an improviser, they are of no more value than any other sound. I am working at a crossroads where the ancient and the future, the junk and the gems can all meet.

I regard myself, first and foremost, as a performer. I also compose, make scores for dance and film, and organize music events. These are all ways of making music: putting elements together and letting them play out. This has given me years with people thinking aloud: breathing together, conspiring. And that becomes a life.

Whatever music I am doing, the source that I have kept returning to has been collective improvisation. That complex and mysterious interplay of people working in ways as reciprocal and as open as possible. I bring my own history to any situation, as do they. The aim being a complete fluidity between listening and playing, between reacting and making choices. And creating.

I am recalling George Kahi, my very first bandleader: "Ki te tuhura koe i te moana, me manako, kia mākuku." ("If you want to explore the ocean, you should expect to get wet.")

David Watson is an experimental musician, guitarist, bagpiper, and all-around music making person. His work encompasses improvisation, composition, and scoring for film and dance. Since 1991, Watson has been on a journey to reinvent the Highland bagpipes as a new-music instrument, creating a distinct vocabulary for the instrument both inside and outside of their Scottish tradition. His interest in parades and processions as a form has led to several commissions to compose new music pieces for marching bands, including a work for two marching pipe-bands in Hobart, Australia. 

In the early 1980s in his native New Zealand, Watson co-founded Braille Records, a collective dedicated to improvisation and experimentation. After moving to New York in 1987, he immersed himself in the downtown music community, performing in hundreds of public and informal situations. Watson performed in the 1995 Japanese premiere of John Zorn’s Cobra and premiered Robert Ashley’s Trios (White on White) (1963) at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, NY (2007). He has collaborated with many artists, including Christian Marclay, Ikue Mori, and Okkyung Lee, and is a member of the improvising trio Glacial with Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth) and Tony Buck (The Necks). For over 30 years, he collaborated with Phill Niblock (1933-2024), performing many of Niblock's pieces and making five pieces together.

Watson has collaborated extensively with choreographers, notably Moriah Evans and Jamar Roberts. Watson has also scored several films, including Martin Lucas’s Hiroshima Bound (2015) and Laura Parnes’s No Is Yes (1997). He was Music Director for Cindy Bernard’s adaption of the seventeenth century satire, The Inquisitive Musician, at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands (2013) and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA (2011).

Watson’s belief in artist-led initiatives has inspired him to organize hundreds of festivals, concerts, and music series, most recently under the monikers of WOrK ØØ, Shift, and Striped Light. These series have given a platform to artists who might not otherwise have found one, and resulted in his collaborations with a younger generation of musicians, notably Judith Hamman, Bill Nace, and Luke Stewart.

He has been awarded a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant (2023) and was an Artist-in-Residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX (2022) and Art Omi in Ghent, NY (2011). He has held residency weeks at The Stone at The New School, New York in 2022, 2021, and 2017.

Watson earned his M.F.A. in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College, CUNY and B.A. in History from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He teaches at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY.