Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris’ work includes television, film, theatre, dance, radio, interdisciplinary performance based collaborations and concert and recording settings. As a composer he in known most notably for the development and evolution of Conduction, conducted improvisation and interpretation that transcend culture and geographics to present a new social-logic to the language of music.

In the last 16 years he has assembled over 100 ensembles for performance in 14 countries.  In 1999, the Bell Atlantic-Jazz Awards nominated him Composer of the year and creative musician of the year. Morris also develops interdisciplinary projects with choreographers such as Min Tanaka, with visual artists such as David Hammons, with writers such as Ntozake Shange, and with theatre artists such as The Wooster Group. 

He has worked with countless musicians/composers including Alice Coltrane, Gil Evans, Philly Joe Jones, Cecil Taylor, Steve Lacy, David Murray, Don Pullen and Reggie Workman.

Christian Marclay is a New York based visual artist and composer whose innovative work explores the juxtaposition between sound recording, photography, video and film. Born in California and raised in Geneva (Switzerland), he studied sculpture at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and at Cooper Union in New York. As performer and sound artist Christian Marclay has been experimenting, composing and performing with phonograph records and turntables since 1979 to create his unique "theater of found sound."

Marclay has collaborated with musicians such as John Zorn, Elliott Sharp, Fred Frith, Zeena Parkins, Shelley Hirsh, Christian Wolff, Butch Morris, Otomo Yoshihide, Arto Lindsay, and Sonic Youth among many others. A dadaist DJ and filmmaker his installations and video / film collages display provocative musical and visual landscapes and have been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art New York, Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou Paris, Kunsthaus Zurich, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Excerpt from "One Conductor's Notes to Self"
- Pia Catton, The Wall Street Journal, July 12, 2010

When you go to a concert, you typically have some notion of what you're going to hear, and your brain shifts into a relaxed gear.
When you go to hear Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris, though, you must be mentally present.

For more than 25 years, Mr. Morris has been developing a way of conducting musicians—ranging from nine-member ensembles to 25-piece orchestras—without written music. "Conduction," as he has dubbed it, is a series of signs and gestures that communicates directions—such as "repeat" or "sustain"—to the players. The directions create a structure or framework, and musicians provide the content....

... mark your calendar for September 8 to 12, when Mr. Morris will be conducting performances at the Whitney Museum. "Christian Marclay asked me to interpret some of his work," said Mr. Morris, who will be leading a string octet and a chorus of poets.

Poets? Yes. "A lot of them are actors and writers," he said, adding that the musicians with whom he works come from all backgrounds "Some people come from pop, jazz, blues or bluegrass. When I get them together, it is a harmonic concept. Just check this out and see where it goes."