NMA82 Radio show 3.1: Don Malone, Kyle Gann, Ben Johnston, Cordier String Quartet // NMA Birthday - August 17, 1952: Heiner Goebbels
Charles Amirkhanian + Joan LaBarbara hosts - Don Malone - Kyle Gann (piano work and interview), Cordier String Quartet, Ben Johnston (String Quartets #3+#4 and interview)
Live Radio Broadcast link and transcript
New Music America July 8, 1982 Chicago
Charles Amirkhanian and Joan La Barbara
Part 1 of 3 (note: all three parts are at the same link)
https://archive.org/details/NMA_1982_07_08_2
Full program description:
Radio station WFMT in Chicago presents the third 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. Included in this concert are works by Don Malone, Kyle Gann, Ben Johnston, Jay Clayton, and Michael Byron. Intermission features include a roundup of events from earlier in the day, including a noontime concert of Percy Grainger’s music with pianists Dennis Russell Davies, Yvar Mikhashoff, and Neely Bruce, At the end of the program are segments on microtonal composer Harry Partch, pianist and conductor Dennis Russell Davies, and a brief excerpt from an interview with the “bad boy of music”, George Antheil. (from KPFA Folio)
Transcript
0:00 ♪ (sounds like Subotnick, plays in background during show intro)
0:09
Charles Amirkhanian: Live from Chicago, these are the sounds of New Music America ’82.
00:24
Joan La Barbara: Tonight’s program opens with music by two Chicago composers. Don Malone presents Sogetto Cavato for three solo voices and Kyle Gann will do Long Night for three solo pianos.
Charles Amirkhanian: Composer Ben Johnston from the School of Music of the University of Illinois, and one of America’s leading proponents of microtonal music in just intonation is represented tonight with his String Quartets 3 and 4 performed by the Cordier Quartet of New York.
Joan La Barbara: Jazz singer-composer Jay Clayton will be here with an ensemble consisting of Jane Ira Bloom, saxophone; Brian Smith, bass and Kirk Nurock, piano.
Charles Amirkhanian: And we close with music by Michael Byron, a work called Ensembles, performed on two pianos, PolyMoog synthesizer and string quartet.
Joan La Barbara: Today, July 8, 1982 also marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of composer and pianist Percy Grainger, and Chicago celebrated in a big way earlier today. We’ll report on the two Grainger concerts and tell you why there’s renewed excitement about his music, both conservative and experimental, during our intermission segment.
Charles Amirkhanian: So welcome to the third of six programs from Mayor Byrne™’s New Music America ’82 coming to you live from Navy Pier Auditorium in Chicago. With Joan La Barbara, I’m Charles Amirkhanian.
Joan La Barbara: These broadcasts are made possible in part by the Illinois Office of Tourism, the Nathan Manilow Foundation and Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art.
Charles Amirkhanian: Don Malone is a composer-performer, born in 1943, currently on the composition faculty at Chicago Musical College of Roosevelt University, where he directs the new music ensemble and electronic music studio. His performance instruments include electronic music systems, trombone and environmental found instruments.
Joan La Barbara: Sogetto Cavato, written in 1976, is based on a sixteenth century technique of carving a musical theme from a literary source. The most familiar use of this technique is the B-A-C-H, b-flat, A, C- B theme used by several composers. In this piece by Malone, the source is the names of the performers, which are subjected to a recombination in an electronic environment.
Charles Amirkhanian: Don Malone recently has been associated with Musical Menta, a group he co-founded and here is on stage with two other performers, for his composition, Sogetto Cavato.
♪ 2:48 Don Malone Sogetto Cavato
15:57 applause
16:08
Joan La Barbara: We’ve been listening to Sogetto Cavato, by Don Malone with performers Darlene Cowles, and Sheldon Serge Atovski, all Chicago composer-performers.
Charles Amirkhanian: And they were using a tape loop which was exactly two minutes long and ah which made seven revolutions and each time recording on two channels to give us a multi-track effect.
Mayor Byrne’s New Music America festival ’82 is sponsored by the Mayor’s Office of Special Events, the Chicago Tribune and the festival is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art. And we’re here live at Navy Pier Auditorium. I’m Charles Amirkhanian with Joan La Barbara. We hope you’re enjoying tonight’s program.
Our next composer is Kyle Gann who was born and raised in Dallas. He says he had a great part in putting together this festival because he has been Project Director of the event with the Museum of Contemporary Art, and has worked closely with Alene Valkanas and Peter Gena to make this a reality.
17:07
He studied composition with Peter Gena and Randy Coleman and computer music with Gary Kendall and has performed his works in Dallas and Chicago. He was recently a new member of the Chicago Interarts Ministry. He had this to say earlier today about his piece, which is going to be heard on this program, Long Night. (I presume that’s Gann ♪ in the background throughout)
Kyle Gann: Tonight’s piece of music is ah, really has as a premise the idea that the things that make us understand ourselves as a person from one day to the next are really more superficial than the things that make us seem like a different person from one day to the next.
And the idea that came up to me in connection with this was the ah, passages in Heidegger’s Being and Time where he talks about how our entire metaphysical and ontological relation to the world changes when ah things happen to us like falling in love, losing a job, et cetera. You become a re-, have – really have a different relation to the world from one, even one hour to the next.
18:06
And I think what Heidegger did is sort of made it seem as though those features that changed were just as important as the features that didn’t change. And that the ah, in a sort of a break with early philosophy that the ah, theory of personal identity was challenged at that point.
The, ah, form of the piece is sort of A-B-C-D-E-F-G and each section is – has a certain ah mood, a certain texture and a certain tonality, which changes into the next section without any break. It blends into each one – you – in a period of transition between the two sections, you don’t really notice I think the transition into the next until all of a sudden it changes and you’re there, it’s like a – I call it Long Night because it’s like a series of dreams where you dream you’re in one situation and all of a sudden you realize you’re in a different situation that you were dreaming a second ago, and it’s a change that you don’t notice but – because you can’t ah, it’s the nature of consciousness that you can’t follow those changes when you’re involved in them.
And you should realize the – after the fact that your relation to things is entirely different.
19:17
Charles Amirkhanian: Kyle Gann, who is also a collector of Wagner operas, and a student of Heidegger. An interesting young man and he’s going to be on stage momentarily with, ah, Salvatore Spina and Katie Hildebrand, to perform Long Night for three pianos.
Joan La Barbara: We should mention that um, in conjunction with the New Music America festival ’82, the Museum of Contemporary Art is presenting two related exhibits. One is an exhibition of scores and art works by John Cage, to whom this festival is dedicated in his seventieth birthday year, and it includes the score to A Dip in the Lake, drawn on a Chicago street map.
A Dip in the Lake is ah, being performed every afternoon at the S. S. Clipper out here on Navy Pier from 6:30 to 8:30. It’s a series of 88 tape loops played on 12 tape recorders, and um, also at the Museum of Contemporary Art is an installation piece by uh, David Behrman and Paul DiMarinis, called Sound Fountain.
Charles Amirkhanian: We hope to bring you some of that on our program. Now we go down on stage, for music by Kyle Gann, here at New Music America. This is his piece for three pianos, entitled Long Night.
Applause for walk on
♪ 20:53 Kyle Gann Long Night
40:15 applause (goes to background)
40:23
Joan La Barbara: We’ve been listening to Long Night by Kyle Gann with pianists Katie Hildebrand, Salvatore Spina and Kyle Gann. I should mention that the three keyboards are playing in three different tempi; each of the pianists is watching a small metronome that um, operates with a…
Charles Amirkhanian: [...]
Joan La Barbara: …a flashing light, you don’t hear any of the ticking, but that’s how you get that slight delay between the three keyboards.
Charles Amirkhanian: We’re live at New Music America ’82 here in Chicago…
(applause ends)
40:55
Charles Amirkhanian: …and ah, we are going to hear next the String Quartets 3 and 4 by Ben Johnston. They were written to be performed together, as they will be tonight and, ah, the movements are entitled Virgings and the Silence in Quartet no. 3 and then Ascent, Quartet no. 4. They’ll be played by the Cordier String Quartet.
Ben Johnston was born in 1926, in Macon, Georgia. He holds degrees from William and Mary, the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and Mills College. He joined the faculty of the University of Illinois in 1951 as a very young man and he apparently serves as professor of composition and theory there until today.
He’s well known for being at the forefront of Midwestern experimental music, and his contact with the late composer Harry Partch led him to investigate alternative forms of intonation. We’ll hear more about that toward the end of our program, but earlier today, we talked with Mr. Johnston about the music we’re about to hear.
41:50 (tape)
Ben Johnston: In this, ah, pair of pieces, I set about to use just intonation in two completely contrasting manners. Ah, in the first – of course that – that is the third quartet – ah which begins this pairing – um, I set about to use a twelve tone technique but to move the pitches so that I have twelve regions per octave and one representative from each region, and the pitch is variable. Ah, there are – I have no idea how many notes in the quartet.
Ah, it isn’t done according to a scale. It’s done with moveable pitches and all of this is done by ear, by the performers who match the, ah, the tunings in a slightly different manner ah, from what is – has become our Western tradition.
In the second part, the fourth quartet, ah, which ends the work, ah, I wanted to use an American – Indigenous American folksong, which is Amazing Grace and, ah, treat this as it was undoubtedly treated by the people who made it up, ah, the shape note singing tradition and – and the sort of open American sound that Copeland and many other people, Ives among them, ah, have made so well-known to us.
43:02
This sound um, is capable of a development and a direction that uh, I think is quite native to it, but which nobody as far as I know has done ‘til now. That is, a proliferation of microtones.
So, using Beethoven as a model, I have a set of variations that get increasingly involved, rhythmically and pitch-wise as the piece proceeds in the manner of the [...] 111 variations for piano.
43:29 (live)
Joan La Barbara: There seems to be a – a lot of interest now in microtonal music. Uh, there’s a renewed interest in the music of Harry Partch and a number of younger composers are, um, working with – with dew-, new instruments trying to develop ah new pieces for ah microtonal settings.
Charles Amirkhanian: And I think just intonation is the goal of many of them, the intonation which has a very pure sort of overtone structure ah, and so that each note in the scale will relate to the overs-, overtone structure as opposed to ah, the ah kind of intonation we get with the piano, in which there’s a sort of false sense of ah, a relationship between the different pitches that are done.
They’re divided up mathematically, the octave is divided mathematically rather than, in a way which is ah true to the ah vibrations of sound. At the outset according to Ben Johnston, there appeared to be three ways to achieve this aim of just intonation. You could first build new instruments as Harry Partch did. Secondly you could use electronic synthesizer or computer to make ah mathematical relationships ah which would equal just intonation.
Or third, one could choose to change performance practice in such a way that traditional instruments could be used. He says “it is this third option which I have adopted. In pursuance of this, I have invented a precise notation for pitch.”
Joan La Barbara: We’re about to hear Ben Johnston’s String Quartet no. 3 and String Quartet no. 4. The performers, the Cordier String Quartet, Shem Guibbory, Richard Rood, violins, Linda Elazko, viola and Gene LeBlanc, cello.
(from the stage)
Shem Guibbory(?): Apparently, it’s not been made clear that we have a slight change in the program of the quartets we’re going to be playing. Um, instead of the Fifth String Quartet, by Ben Johnston, we’re going to play two others, the third and the fourth. The third is in two parts, called Virgings and The Silence. The fourth is entitled The Ascent.
♪ 47:07 Cordier Quartet Ben Johnston String Quartet no. 3
59:31 applause
59:49
Charles Amirkhanian: You are listening to music by Ben Johnston, and we just heard his String Quartet no. 3, which is coupled with a fourth string quartet and now on stage a group of uh what I presume to be page turners, have come to join the Cordier Quartet of New York in a performance of the String Quartet no. 4 – the Ascent by Ben Johnston. We’re live at Navy Pier auditorium, this is New Music America ’82.
♪(tuning)
[end at 1:00:18]
Note: the Cordier Quartet playing Ben Johnston’s String Quartet no. 4 appears at the beginning of this link:
https://archive.org/details/NMA_1982_07_08_2/NMA_1982_07_08_2_C_ed.wav
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Heiner Goebbels, 1952
Wiki Commons photo taken by Joe Mabel
wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heiner_Goebbels
Heiner Goebbels only had one appearance at the NMAs, during New York City’s 1989 festival celebrating ten years since the first. He was booked for several days at the Kitchen with a work with texts by Heiner Müller, titled Man in the Elevator and featuring among others, NMA alumni Arto Lindsay and Fred Frith.
This is a short documentary with excerpts from a version of the work in 1987, performed in Hamburg and featuring Tim Berne, George Lewis and Don Cherry:
But I just discovered today that the Wendy Hour is still around and posted this full performance video from NMA New York City 1989 at the Kitchen.
This seems to be the performance I attended which had a dramatic (though German-styled dry) encore, as earlier that day the Berlin Wall had started coming down… thus a Funeral March for the Berlin Wall. (Although it wouldn’t surprise me if they had done this at the end of every performance, since the fall was not a single evening event, either!)
I had prepared this profile in July 2023, and this is the full description of The Man in the Elevator with program notes, as I presented them last December.
