(Aug 11) NMA Chicago July 6, 1982 - National Radio Broadcast no. 1 with transcript (1/3)
Charles Amirkhanian, Joan La Barbara, Tom Cameron, Robert Moran, Nicholas Slominsky, Charles Ives, Peter Gena, Alene Valkanas
Robert Moran’s current Bandcamp photo
New Music America 1982,
Radio Program no. 1
https://archive.org/details/NMA_1982_07_06/NMA_1982_07_06_A_ed.wav
Program Description:
Radio station WFMT in Chicago presents the first of six broadcasts from Navy Pier, as part of the fourth New Music America Festival. Charles Amirkhanian hosts, assisted by composer and vocalist, Joan La Barbara. The concert includes electronic music by Tom Cameron, Robert Moran’s “Spin Again” for harpsichords, organs, and percussion, “Autumn Resonance” for piano and delay by Wayne Siegel, and to conclude, Meredith Monk’s work for four voices and organs, “Turtle Dreams”. Also heard, although unfortunately not seen, is a work of avant-garde musical theater by the performing duo of Ed Harkins and Philip Larson known as THE. This work combines strictly choreographed movements by the two, often involving sight gags of one type or another, mixed with electronic and new wave rock music. the intermission features includes a profile of Charles Ives, a talk with John Cage about his sound installation “A Dip in the Lake”, and a look at the only theremin virtuoso ever, Clara Rockmore.
transcription by georges dupuis
Contents:
0:00 Show intro - Charles Amirkhanian and Joan La Barbara
♪2:15 Tom Cameron Balsa, Palferal/Ironwood, Briar
12:05 Amirkhanian ID insert
26:15 Amirkhanian La Barbara extro, ID, re New Music America and Chicago, re Day 1 (July 5) – Alvin Lucier, Muhal Richard Abrams, Frederic Rzewski, Steve Reich, re Day 2 Yvar Mikhashoff, John Jay Becker, intro
♪36:42 Robert Moran Spin Again
52:23 Amirkhanian La Barbara - extro, intro
54:03 Amirkhanian - short profile on Nicholas Slonimsky and Charles Ives
56:47 Amirkhanian La Barbara - re Ives, introduction
58:59 Interview with Peter Gena and Alena Valkanas
1:02:26 Amirkhanian La Barbara - intro ensemble “The”
Aired live July 6, 1982
Part 1 of 3
0:12 Applause, audience murmurs
0:24
Charles Amirkhanian: Live from Chicago, these are the sounds of New Music America ’82.
♪
This evening, Meredith Monk and company will present the waltz section from Turtle Dreams and we’ll hear several representatives from what the French call musique repetitive or pattern music by keyboard performer/composer Wayne Siegel, performing his Autumn Resonance and Robert Moran with seven keyboard and mallet percussion players. Also music by Tom Cameron who’s on stage now and is ready to begin his piece, which will be in three segments and you’ll also experience the high comedy of THE, performers Ed Harkins and Phil Larson from San Diego, whose hilarious sight gags should be a real treat for radio
We have a capacity audience here at the Navy Pier auditorium and I’m Charles Amirkhanian with Joan La Barbara.
Joan La Barbara: Welcome to the first of six broadcasts from this site of the fourth annual New Music America festival, all taking place on Navy Pier, stretching out into Lake Michigan in the beautiful city of Chicago. These programs are being originated from WFMT in Chicago and this year’s events…
(announcer overtalking live MC)
Tom Cameron: Good evening…
Joan La Barbara: …sponsored largely…
Tom Cameron: One quick announcement before I start today. All the music I’ll be performing tonight will be created in real time. There is no prerecorded material other than some crowd noises and some crickets. Thank you.
Charles Amirkhanian: Due to a late start, we’re going to go right to the stage…
Applause
Charles Amirkhanian: …and Tom Cameron, the young Chicago composer born in 1948 will be performing three selections, Balsa, Palferal or Ironwood and Briar. He’s using homemade electronics and a thing called the stick which is ten strings and which he plays with both hands, left and right at the same time in guitar style. All of his instruments are synched with a rhythm box which he’s modulated by adjusting the wiring so it (music starts, CA keeps talking anyway) synchs all of his music at the same time.
♪ 2:17 Tom Cameron Balsa, Palferal or Ironwood and Briar
9:36 applause
9:52 second piece
12:05 (talking over piece)
Charles Amirkhanian: You’re lis-…
♪
Charles Amirkhanian: …you’re listening to Tom Cameron live here from New Music America by Navy Pier auditorium [...] Lake Michigan in Chicago, coming to you from WFMT. (he keeps talking over the piece, and during the loudest synth parts) Mr. Cameron is the first of five performers on tonight’s first of six programs from the 1982 New Music America festival.
♪ 12:35 [piece allowed to continue without the Amirkhanian]
26:08 applause
26:15
Charles Amirkhanian: You’ve heard three works by the young Chicago-area composer Tom Cameron. Balsa, Palferal and Briar, played by this one-man electronic band. Lots of rock and roll instruments hooked together and modulated with a rhythm box which keeps them all in synch.
This is the opening of our New Music America concert, live from Navy Pier auditorium in Chicago. With Joan La Barbara, I’m Charles Amirkhanian. We pause now ten seconds for station identification. These are the sounds of New Music America ’82.
26:50 ten seconds of silence
27:04
Joan La Barbara: You’re listening to the first of six broadcasts from the site of the fourth annual New Music America festival. These programs are being, originating from WFMT Chicago and this year’s event sponsored largely by the city here, is billed as “Mayor Byrne’s New Music America ‘82”, marking perhaps a coming of age for this event, which began four years ago at New York’s alternative performance space, the Kitchen.
Subsequent events were held at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and last year, at the Japan Center Theatre in San Francisco, featuring lots of inventive experimental sound sculptures located around the city. On our broadcasts, we’ll be bringing you these along with some spectacular Chicago thunderstorms, which seem to have cut out the phone lines for the beginning of our program tonight. Ah, we do seem to be getting our satellite coverage now, and so…
Charles Amirkhanian: That’s sort of typical of some of the earlier electronic music performances I think.
Joan La Barbara: (chuckles) That’s true!
Charles Amirkhanian: Nothing would be right if we didn’t start with a bang. (Chuckles)
Joan La Barbara: New Music America ’82 is sponsored by the Mayor’s Office of Special Events and the Chicago Tribune, and the festival is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in collaboration with the New Music Alliance. These broadcasts have been made possible in part from grants from the Illinois Office of Tourism, the Nathan Medlow Foundation. This is Joan La Barbara, I’m here with Charles Amirkhanian.
28:22
Charles Amirkhanian: And we’re enjoying the opening concert of six from Navy Pier auditorium, but last night we had a spectacular experience in Orchestra Hall in downtown Chicago as Dennis Russell Davies conducted five works by composer who are here attending the festival.
Joan La Barbara: Yes, it began with Alvin Lucier’s Crossings for oscillator and amplified orchestra, in which a very slowly moving oscillator wave passed from the lowest frequency of the orchestra up to the, the very upper end of the piccolo and individual instruments came in, causing interruptions or beats against the oscillator.
Charles Amirkhanian: It was a fascinating experience because the orchestra was conducted by television sets which read digital read outs of the oscillator frequencies in numbers and the instrumentalists at a certain point, would start playing a certain frequency on their score, which would then slide away on the oscillator, and the beating pattern would be caused. It was a beautiful, beautiful performance. And we’ll hear more about it later when we talk with Dennis Russell Davies at the end of tonight’s broadcast.
Joan La Barbara: The audience was really enormous. We’ve had different estimates for the numbers, some say 1800, some say 2000 but Orchestra Hall was certainly packed, and it’s – it’s very gratifying to see a – an – a symphony concert so well attended. Following the Lucier piece, we heard Variations for Flute and Baritone Sax Solo with Chamber Orchestra, composed by Muhal Richard Abrams. That was followed by Frederic Rzewski’s The Silence of Infinite Spaces for an amplified chorus and Rzewski doing an improvised piano solo along with chamber orchestra.
This was followed by John Cage’s Score: Forty Drawings by Thoreau that were interpreted by the musicians. Followed by a tape of the dawn, recorded at Stony Point in New York. And Steve Reich’s Tehillim, settings of four Hebrew psalms, who are sung by four vocal soloists with the chamber orchestra.
Charles Amirkhanian: A very, very exciting event because every piece was in some way wildly experimental and yet you had a rapt audience really enjoying the music and in fact, it was an exciting experience because one didn’t know what to expect next and as the evening went on, things just got better and better.
Then today, there was a concert of piano music by Yvar Mikhashoff at the downtown library.
Joan La Barbara: The Chicago Public Library, at the Cultural Center, was a wonderful performance by Mikhasoff of notable American composers, including John Jay Becker, his Sound Piece No. 5 written in 1937.
Charles Amirkhanian: I like that piece a lot.
Joan La Barbara: (chuckles)
Charles Amirkhanian: We’ll hear more of Becker on this year’s festival as the Chicago experimentalist who died in 1961, is featured on other concerts including the next event in our series.
Joan La Barbara: Also on the program were James Sellars Sonata no. 2 and Alvin Curran’s moving homage For Cornelius, in honor and memory of British composer Cornelius Cardew. Also Lucas Foss, Solo for Piano and Dane Rudhyar’s Rite of Transcendence, followed by Frederic Rzewski’s Piano Piece no. 4.
Charles Amirkhanian: A spectacular concert this noon in Chicago on July 6, 1982, which makes one want to hear more piano music by some of these composers who are part of the New Music Alliance festival (sic) this year. We’re going to be hearing next music by Robert Moran. Joan, what is the piece?
Joan La Barbara: The piece is called Spin Again and it involves seven musicians playing different keyboards and mallet percussion instruments. A few notes about Moran: he studied composition in Vienna and then completed his Master’s Degree program at Mills College, studying with Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud. And while he was in San Francisco, Moran was founder and co-director of the New Music Ensemble at the San Francisco Conservatory…
Charles Amirkhanian: Things haven’t been…
Joan La Barbara: …of Music.
Charles Amirkhanian: …the same since then either…
Joan La Barbara: (chuckles)
Charles Amirkhanian: …in San Francisco, let me tell you. (Chuckles)
Joan La Barbara: Moran has done a lot of work in Europe as have a lot of American composers. In 1974, he was composer-in-residence in the city of Berlin as part of the DAAD Visiting Composer program. And he’s designed what he calls “city compositions” involving local ensembles, marching bands and various kinds of participation by the people in the city…
Charles Amirkhanian: Didn’t he just do something…
Joan La Barbara: …he’s done three of these…
Charles Amirkhanian: …in Hartford, Connecticut? I – I think there was an enormous piece just in the city of Hartford that I got a poster in the mail about. Didn’t go, of course, but…
Joan La Barbara: (chuckles)
Charles Amirkhanian: …I’ll bet people…
Joan La Barbara: It’s hard to get to everything.
Charles Amirkhanian: …in Hartford – that’s right. Well, Bob Moran’s keyboard ensemble is being set up on stage. It’s a piece called Spin Again which once again falls into the category of musique repetitive…
Joan La Barbara: Or Pattern Music…
Charles Amirkhanian: …as – pattern music…
Joan La Barbara: (chuckles) …if you will.
Charles Amirkhanian: And you’ll notice that many of the events tonight, particularly four of the five ah, are going to be in this style of music which perhaps was spawned in the early sixties by the work of LaMonte Young and Terry Riley and Steve Reich and Philip Glass. But now, you can say that a new generation of composers, many of whom are presented on the New Music Alliance series (sic) have embraced his music (music starts, probably tuning?) and have gone off into very inventive ways and means of going about making their own variations on these ah pattern piece ideas.
Of course the ideas is to listen to a small fragment of music and hear into it lots of things which are normally missed in a piece of music where there is a lot more variety. So by focusing on smaller images, one perceives a greater wealth of material in smaller amount of notes and phrases and it’s a fascinating idea, I think, which has not only had its time come, but has almost been overdone one might say. There are so many people who have written in this style, (tsk) and who have done so many things with it.
Frederic Rzewski’s piece for orchestra last night even was a pattern music piece, wasn’t it?
Joan La Barbara: It was indeed, yeah.
Charles Amirkhanian: It was explosions from wood blocks and percussion instruments all over the stage and there were seven ensembles (sic) that ranged around the stage, a very beautiful experience.
Joan La Barbara: The vocal writing was quite extraordinary, too. Sometimes very fluid and melodic and other times we heard amplified whispering from, from individual soloists in the chorus.
Charles Amirkhanian: And text of Pascale. The piece by Muhal Richard Abrams was, featured the solo playing of Wallace McMillan, saxophone and flute and Mr. McMillan played a baritone saxophone and a goodly part of the piece was devoted to a duet for baritone sax and timpani which I think was one of the highlights of the piece. Ah, a dialogue in – between those two instruments which is a very unusual combination.
In just one minute, we’ll be going down to the stage here at the Navy Pier auditorium. We should say that we’re on the end of a, about a mile-long pier which sticks out into Lake Michigan from downtown Chicago and tonight we’ve had thunderstorms and all sorts of excitement as the waves are lapping up on the sides of the building. This is a glass enclosed sort of elaborate Quonset hut.
Joan La Barbara: (chuckles) Now, that’s not nice. It’s a gorgeous…
Charles Amirkhanian: Oh, I’m sorry…
Joan La Barbara: …building, very, very beautiful…
Charles Amirkhanian: And the stage…
Joan La Barbara: …with a rounded ceiling…
Charles Amirkhanian: …lights, the stage lights that go all up around the ceiling in a sunburst pattern are, are extraordinarily beautiful and people are sitting at cabaret-style tables, enjoying themselves and on the way in, they (big feedback) probably stopped in the lobby to see the extensive displays of videotape works by classical and rock musicians.
Our musicians are on stage now, and we’re expecting composer Robert Moran to come from the wings to conduct his piece Spin Again, here at the first of six concerts at Navy Pier auditorium in Chicago’s New Music America ’82 festival. Come – coming up at intermission, we’ll be talking with John Cage, who’s Dip in the Lake, a piece composed for the city of Chicago, and published this month in Chicago magazine is being realized by Peter Gena and friends from the Music Department at Northwestern University and is on the SS Clipper just outside of the dock.
Joan La Barbara: Now, we go to Robert Moran and Spin Again.
36:42 applause
♪ 37:17 Robert Moran Spin Again
52:08 applause
52:23
Joan La Barbara: We’ve been listening to Robert Moran’s Spin Again, pattern music performed by Salvatore Spina, electric piano, Neely Bruce, electric organ, Yvar Mikhashoff, amplified – amplified harpsichord, Anthony Demare, electric piano, Steve Elkins, marimba, Andrew Spencer, vibraphone and conducted by the composer Robert Moran.
Charles Amirkhanian: This is the first of six concerts of the 1982 New Music America festival, coming to you from Navy Pier auditorium in Chicago. We pause now for station identification. From Chicago, these are the sounds of the New Music Festival ’82. You’re tuned to WFMT Chicago’s fine arts station at 98.7 FM.
53:16
Joan La Barbara: We have a rather large set change here in between Robert Moran’s Spin Again pattern music for keyboards and percussion instruments and before the group THE comes in.
Charles Amirkhanian: The group THE!
Joan La Barbara: (chuckles) The group THE!
Charles Amirkhanian: I don’t believe the name of this group. It’s not the (thee), it’s THE (tha).
Joan La Barbara: It’s THE. What we’d like to do is to give you a kind of historical perspective, a flashback as it were, about where the roots of this New Music in America can be found. We have a special insert on the music of Charles Ives.
Charles Amirkhanian: We’re going to be doing several of these throughout the broadcasts and we hope you’ll enjoy them.
54:03 ♪
Charles Amirkhanian: 1934. Fifteen years after ill health has forced him to cease composing altogether, the American composer Charles Ives sees his music recorded on disc for the very first time.
♪ Ives on a 78
Charles Amirkhanian: The haywire meanderings of folk and amateur musicians which fascinated Ives so greatly inspired his excursions into polyrhythms and polytonality long before other composers made similar experiments. The young conductor in this recording, issued by Henry Cowell from the New Music Quarterly Recordings label, is Nicholas Slonimsky.
Uncredited wikipedia photo of Slominsky conducting Varèse’s Ionisation in Havana, Cuba and yes, there does appear to be a conga player.
After the release of this record, and his barnstorming tours of Europe performing the music of Ruggles, Cowell, Reigger and Varèse, Slonimsky is hired as regular conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. However, he continues to program modern music of the most extreme sort. Very soon the patrons on the Board of Directors fire him in mid-season, paying him the remainder of his annual salary to ease their conscience and Slonimsky turns to the writing of music books and dictionaries such as Music Since 1900 and Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, which he edits to this day.
Several decades after his firing, the Los Angeles Philharmonic hires him again, this time to write their subscription series program notes. Again, he is fired. The orchestra management claiming that his program notes contain too many polysyllabic words and just aren’t serious enough in tone.
Nicholas Slonimsky, musicologist, composer, lexicographer, raconteur, conductor of the Panamerican Symphony and Charles Ives’ first commercial record release, 1934. On April 27, 1982, Slonimsky celebrated his 88th birthday and put the finishing touches on an autobiography soon to be released. This is Charles Amirkhanian.
♪ Ives/Slonimsky [an old 78 rpm recording]
56:47
Charles Amirkhanian: Well, today Charles Ives is a classic and widely accepted by symphony audiences around the globe and it’s quite possible that some of the young composers that you’re going to be hearing on this New Music America festival will be in the same position, that is to say, right now their music is not so well known but these are certainly the people who are active and exciting and who are writing music at the moment and getting it played and it’s very possible that they have an advantage over Charles Ives since he didn’t hear a lot of his music ‘til after he had ceased writing.
Charles Ives Wikipedia photo uncredited from 1913
Joan La Barbara: He didn’t hear some of it?
Charles Amirkhanian: No…
Joan La Barbara: (chuckles)
Charles Amirkhanian: …most of, most of it in fact because by the time he really quit writing in 1918, there still were very few performances of his own music, so people here tonight have a bit of an advantage if they’re playing on stage.
Joan La Barbara: Ives was part of a group that’s now referred to the American Five, which includes Becker, Ruggles, Reigger, and Cowell along with Ives. It’s a classification, rather new classification so that critics and music historians who are trying to give a kind of perspective on the American tradition of new music, are, are getting an idea of where to place people in this historical perspective.
Charles Amirkhanian: We’ve been joined in the broadcast booth by Alene Valkanas who is Performance Director at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and who’s spent the last year of her life devoted to organizing this festival, and with her is Peter Gena, composer on the faculty at Northwestern University and he, along with Alene has been co-director of this festival.
Both are founding members of the New Music Alliance and I suppose we should say something about the New Music Alliance because without a group of very young and very talented arts administrators, there would be no New Music America festival. Composers don’t do these festivals by themselves, Peter, do they? It takes fund raisers with genius and brains to put together something as extraordinary and vital as this festival.
Peter Gena’s Discogs photo
58:59
Peter Gena: It certainly does. Usually, usually composers are interested mainly in of course getting their works performed and getting the exposure. It’s a very difficult thing to compose and promote your works at the same time, even more difficult to raise money for it.
Charles Amirkhanian: Alene, maybe you could tell us a bit about the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and its involvement in this festival.
Alene Valkanas photo from a y2b video from 2020
Alene Valkanas: I’d like to do that, but first I’d like to comment on your, on your earlier remark. It seems that the three previous New Music Alliance festivals (sic) were organized pretty much by individuals who worked with a small community around them. But what’s so wonderful about this one is that this is the first festival in which an arts administrator and a composer have worked together in the planning of the festival and have worked together with a city agency.
And from that, networking even spread further so that it seems to me, and it seems to Peter as well that we have a whole city involved in one way or another, one agency or another, one organization or another and this is – I mean, look at the broadcast as well. That, that we have really stretched out, reached out and now are growing and growing.
1:00:05
Charles Amirkhanian: Isn’t it true that the Office of Special Events here in Chicago does lots of summer festivals in Chicago. Chicago is known for this, it’s quite an exciting and innovative procedure, I think.
Alene Valkanas: We have had incredible audiences in the short two days of this festival, and we had to because Chicago has enormous audiences for its festivals. It has a half a million and a million attending Taste of Chicago and ChicagoFest and Jazz Fest.
Charles Amirkhanian: What’s Taste of Chicago for people who are listening in other parts of the country?
Alene Valkanas: Taste of Chicago is a marvelous food festival in which the best restaurants in the city all, as purveyors, set up displays and sell their special dishes in the park for four or five days.
Joan La Barbara: And that just happened recently.
Alene Valkanas: Right, the Fourth of July weekend.
Charles Amirkhanian: We’re talking with Alene Valkanas and Peter Gena, co-directors of the 1982 New Music America festival. Peter, there’s a lot of to-do about John Cage and you’ve had a great part in bringing him here. He has never been on a New Music America festival before, and since he’s 70 years old this year, what are some of things that have happened around that visa?
Peter Gena: Well, of course John himself is very, has been very busy. He’s been involved in festivals in his honor all over the world, Japan, Germany, after this he’s heading off over to Spain. We recently have put out a John Cage Reader which is devoted – devoted essays to his work and his writings and we can only [collonate] all the festivities I think and having him here at this festival.
Charles Amirkhanian: That is an Issue of TriQuarterly Magazine.
Peter Gena: It’s the TriQuarterly Magazine. Yes, it’s due to come out in hardbound by CF Peters. A late birthday celebration.
Charles Amirkhanian: Alene, what if people in the audience want to write and get a copy of the catalogue of this year’s festival, is it possible they can write to the Museum of Contemporary Arts?
Alene Valkanas: Yes, that’s Museum of Contemporary Art, 237 East Ontario Street, Chicago 60611.
Charles Amirkhanian: Thank you very much for visiting with us and congratulations…
Alene Valkanas: Delighted…
Charles Amirkhanian: …on a spectacular event…
Alene Valkanas: Thank you.
Peter Gena: Thank you.
Charles Amirkhanian: ...we’re delighted that we’re here to broadcast it and thanks for the support for the broadcast as well. Those are the masterminds of this broadcast and this festival, Alene Valkanas of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Peter Gena, of Northwestern University faculty.
1:02:15
Joan La Barbara: We’re about to be treated to a performance event by the group THE which consists of vocalist Philip Larson and vocalist and trumpeter Ed Harkins. Both from San Diego and both have been studying extended vocal techniques, that particular area of vocalizing that uses the voice as an instrument and you’ll hear some of their very special vocal techniques in their piece tonight called Voldy.
It’s also a very sight-oriented piece, so we may find ourselves describing some of the actions that are taking place on stage. There’s quite a wonderful bit in the piece that I have happened to have seen several months ago in California in which Harkins is playing the trumpet and six, ah, continues to put different kinds of mutes into the trumpet and continues to get the same sound until we find that at the end, that he’s been making the sound not with the trumpet but with his voice. An extraordinary, yeah…
Charles Amirkhanian: I think… (chuckles)
Joan La Barbara: ... (chuckles) sight gag.
Charles Amirkhanian: I hear there’s also some dry ice fog effects…
Joan La Barbara: Yeah, dry ice fog and…
Charles Amirkhanian: …there are fishtanks on stage.
Joan La Barbara: A little car crosses stage very slowly. A lot of wonderful visual things, some, some films of golf games taking place in the desert, with Harkins and Larson climbing over rocks.
Charles Amirkhanian: Looks like a sort of magician set up. There are two standing screens on stage, each of them about six by nine feet, on the left and right of the stage and in the center, a black backdrop and then a number of pedestals which are covered with colorful cloth that hang down to the floor, as if they might hold underneath them some surprise and as Joan La Barbara has just told you, this is a piece which will involve some spectacular sounds and sights as well. So if you hear some mirth emerging in the form of laughter from the audience, you will know you are missing something very funny. (Chuckles)
Joan La Barbara: (chuckles) We’ll try to keep you appraised of what’s going on, on stage, so you don’t miss so much.
Charles Amirkhanian: We’re live here at the Navy Pier auditorium, this is the first of six concerts from New Music America ’82.
Joan La Barbara: And we’re in the midst of a spectacular thunder and lightning storm out here in the middle of the water (chuckles) .
Charles Amirkhanian: Which means that we may or may not be with you for the rest of this broadcast…
Joan La Barbara: (chuckles)
Charles Amirkhanian: …so we hope that things will hold. Um, coming up at intermission, we’ll also be hearing from John Cage as we run out to the SS Clipper, which is just down the pier from us, in the permanently docked ship and in their Art Deco bar. We will talk with the maestro about his new piece for the city of Chicago.
Also later we’ll be talking hopefully with Dennis Russell Davies who conducted the Orchestra Hall concert last night, which is the opening event of the 1982 New Music America festival.
Joan La Barbara: And we may even have time for a special feature on Clara Rockburn.
Charles Amirkhanian: Clara Rockmore?
Joan La Barbara: Clara Rockmore, okay. (Chuckles)
Charles Amirkhanian: That’s what I thought you said. Clara Rockmore is a famous theremin player and we will have an interview with her and some of her performing coming up at intermission.
Joan La Barbara: We’re about to have the sounds of THE.
Charles Amirkhanian: The lights are dimming and we expect on stage these two performers momentarily.
[end part 1]
gd note: I will be adding the comments pertinent to the works on their respective spaces on the original Chicago daily substacks for convenience!