April 11, 1986 NMA Houston 7/9
Bonnie Barnett - Diverse Works panel: Third Coast music - McLean Mix - David Behrman - David Weinstein - Larry Kucharz - Reynold Weidenaar + Jane Ira Bloom - Larry Austin - Myrna Schloss - Bill Seaman
April 11 New Music Alliance Meetings, then…
Bonnie Barnett Tunnel Hum
A 16 minute documentary on the Tunnel Hum project from 1982 to at least 1991 posted on Bonnie Barnett’s own you tube channel https://www.youtube.com/@bonniebarnett4293, so an excellent location for you to comment on the work, especially if you got to witness it…
She returned to Houston, to do another Tunnel Hum in 2014:
https://diverseworks.org/past-works/archive/bonnie-barnett-another-houston-humming/
The McLean Mix
Barton and Priscilla McLean from 1985:
David Behrman: Circling Six
Jon Pareles’s review in the New York Times in November, 1985 talks about Circling Six and actually opens with the words “artificial intelligence”!
ARTIFICIAL intelligence research, music division, could be sampled Saturday night at the Samaya Foundation, 75 Leonard Street in TriBeCa. The composer David Behrman presented two works, ''Circling Six'' and ''Interspecies Smalltalk,'' that centered on computer programs responding to a live soloist.
While Mr. Behrman was behind a table covered with electronic gear, the soloists sat onstage watching a video monitor and playing into microphones ''heard'' by the computer.
In Circling Six, Ben Neill played his own invention, the mutantrumpet - a horn with three bells, two sets of valves and a slide - which allowed him to produce muted, open and sliding notes in quick succession. Mr. Neill's modest, sustained notes were heard amid the rich, organ-like chords produced by the computer program - a small set of them, recurring at various speeds and rhythms, sliding from one to the next - and, eventually, rapidly cascading chords and a high, quasi-random melody line.
Behrman also released the track on a 2017 recording, Music with Memory (https://www.discogs.com/release/11340400-David-Behrman-Music-With-Memory) on the Italian label Arga Marghen - and from the liner notes give this detail:
The second side begins with the work Circling Six, an early version of Leapday Night, which would appear later in the decade on the album bearing its name. It utilizes six looping synthesizer phrases, accompanied by Werner Durand on saxophone, forming a strange and bent alternate vision of what Minimalist music might have been…
David Weinstein: Ma
Though I’ve got at present no further information about the work, David Weinstein was reviewed a couple of weeks prior to the festival by the New York Times by a 28 year old named Will Crutchfield whose title seemed curiously bland, even for the Times: “David Weinstein in Avant-Garde Show”. I think he liked the performance (but not Ma), though what is useful here would be a bit of extra detail about how his performance may have been presented in Houston:
ROULETTE is a performance space at 228 West Broadway, a second-floor room small enough to get uncomfortably smoky from a single cigarette, as David Weinstein demonstrated by lighting one during a jittery piece called ''Calm'' on his program of electronic and vocal music there Friday.
Mr. Weinstein works with various kinds of synthesized and pre-recorded material (noises, notes, words) and with amplification/manipulation of such natural sounds as the wheezing of an accordion bellows or the tones of his own voice (which came through the speakers on several pitches simultaneously in one piece.)
He presented five of his pieces: Ma (its meaning undisclosed and hard to divine); Picasso (a taped work, mostly a collage of spoken lines, taking off on the idea of a learn-to-draw-like-Picasso cassette; Logger (a funny song), Calm and Ooooeeee. The audience of about 40 was warmly appreciative.
An outsider to this scene can only report bemusement. The main impression left was of dwellers in a noisy city, in a mechanized age, gathering to hear sounds reflecting those aspects of their environment, manipulated and deployed in a way that they perceive as art. That isn't meant to disparage the perception - indeed the perception of the beholder is probably the most valid way to define art - but only to confess non-understanding of it. When Mr. Weinstein's comments are wry, enjoyment is easy (though it didn't help that in ''Logger,'' through failure to count, he got out of sync with his synthesized vamp accompaniment in every verse, and looked around sheepishly at his machinery each time). When he waxes serious, as Ma seemed to do at great length, the gap of understanding is harder to bridge.
Larry Kucharz
Reynold Weidenaar and Jane Ira Bloom: The Stillness
I also found this complete package about the work The Stillness: Marshall Taylor’s performance notes (he, of Philadelphia and Relâche), written in January 1986 and including a complete score:
https://magneticmusic.ws/TSscore.PDF
Larry Austin: Ludus Fractalis
Myrna Schloss: Windows
Bill Seaman: The Water Catalogue
Janis Crystal Lipzin: Other Reckless Things
I note that this is a film that is available in the libraries-streaming service Kanopy; this is from a filmmaker’s coop site and some stills:
https://film-makerscoop.com/catalogue/janis-crystal-lipzin-other-reckless-things
Program material at the event: