July 10, 1982 - New Music America in Mayor Jane Byrne's Chicago day 6
Douglas Ewart - Yvar Mikhashoff plays Christian Wolff - Phil Winsor - Dary John Mizelle - Peter Gordon - Radio Amirkhanian and La Barbara - Salvatore Martirano - Unknown NMA dance band
Douglas Ewart photo from his website biography
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Menu:
Salvatore Martirano Sal-Mar Construction (last day)
Charles Amirkhanian + Joan La Barbara - live broadcast from festival
Douglas Ewart - Clarinet Quartet
Yvar Mikhashoff - Christian Wolff: Preludes for Piano (world premiere)
Phil Winsor - S.T.O.C. - for strings, winds, drums and organ
Dary John Mizelle - Polyphonies I for shakuhachi and tape
Peter Gordon - Excerpts from Birth of the Poet and Roses on Bond Street
New Music America 1982 Chicago Dance Band Service Dance bands on the Navy Pier
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Salvatore Martirano - Sal-Mar Construction (last day)
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The main show on July 10th was preceded by two multi-media performance by Joseph Pinzarrone. Puppet-like dancers and musicians dressed in white with painted faces responded to audience statements sent through microphones to performers' headphones.
Periodically a videotape played, showing Pinzarrone and a friend in the roles of outlandish critics who seem to talk of everything but the intended subject of discussion.
- M. Staff Brandl + Thomas Emil Homerin, "Big Noise from Lake Michigan", Ear Magazine 1982
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Charles Amirkhanian + Joan La Barbara Live broadcast no. 5
https://archive.org/details/NMA_1982_07_10_2
Radio station WFMT in Chicago presents the fifth 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. This concert features the Clarinet Quartet by Douglas Ewart, the world premiere of Christian Wolff’s Preludes for Piano and Phil Winsor’s Same Tired Old Changes, and a work for solo shakuhachi (Japanese flute) and tape by Dary John Mizelle. Also included is a performance by Peter Gordon and the Love of Life Orchestra. Intermission features include a profile of composer and pianist Leo Ornstein, a look at the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, an interview with John Cage, and concludes with a profile on Conlon Nancarrow.
Transcripts and archival stream here:
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Douglas Ewart — Clarinet Quartet
The clarinet choir consists of four performers utilizing the entire clarinet family. I have had a long and sustained interest in the clarinet because of its technical capabilities, its power, its vast sonic spectrum, the multiphonic possibilities, and its illusionary quality. The harmonic and multiphonic capabilities of the contrabass clarinet in B flat is quite evident with the emanation of but one note. Because of these complex acoustical phenomena, four clarinets being played simultaneously (sopranino, sprano, alto, bass or contrabass) can give the illusion of being a much larger and more complex group.
My sense of the phonetic and textural vocabulary of the clarinet was further extended by listening to recordings of whale sounds, walrus sounds, and songs sung by American Indians in which they imitate whale, walrus and other animal songs.
My current work is dedicated to the concept of life, with the hope that world peace, world government and a world language will soon crystallize.
- Douglas Ewart program notes
Thanks to Kyle Gann for having preserved this archival recording of the performance:
The festival organizers rightly wished to showcase the accomplishments of the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and particularly two of AACM's leading exemplars of avant-garde jazz composition, Roscoe Mitchell and Douglas Ewart.
Ewart's Quartet explored the multiphonic-coloristic properties of a mixed clarinet choir, with special emphasis on the lowest member of the family, the contrabass clarinet.
Mitchell's Prelude and Variations on Sketches from Bamboo for four instrumentalists took this fixation even further, bringing in a 13-foot triple contrabass, which resembles a normal bass fiddle with a thyroid condition.
The sound is so subterranean in frequency that there is no discernible pitch, only beats. Like the Ewart, the piece grunted along with no discernible organization of materials, but the sight of Brian Smith gamely sawing away at his stringed behemoth from high atop a special perch gave it a saving touch of comic theatricality.
- John Van Rhein, Chicago Tribune 'New Music America Leaves Echoes of Success"
***
Chicago native Douglas Ewart's Clarinet Quartet provided an aurally enigmatic urban landscape
- Tina Clarke, "Chicago's new music festival filled with sound and fury" Toronto Globe & Mail, July 17, 1982
***
The first and last works on Saturday evening's concert stand as two extremes in NMA programming for the Navy Pier series. The evening began as members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians performing Douglas Ewart's Clarinet Quartet entered the stage improvising as they travelled. Dressed in lush, floor-length robes paneled in velvet and metallic lame, they converged in the center, commanding a battery of clarinets in nearly all sizes.
Ewart's design unfolded, laced with improvisation. Ensemble members listened intently to one another; unifying textures with colors extracted from an expanded sound palette. Harsh, screeching noise blended with the softest breath, finding innovation in tradition, diversity in oneness.
- Deborah Campana "Two Reports" Perspectives of New Music, Autumn 1981
***
There were few people from the jazz world who played in the Festival. There were Roscoe Mitchell and Space, and Doug Ewart from the AACM with a clarinet quartet, both groups playing what I would call "chamber jazz".
Mitchell has been experimenting with very low tones and captivated the audience with a triple contrabass and a contrabass sarrusaphone as well as bass sax and vocals.
Ewart used the entire clarinet family to create his chamber piece and did a bit of extemporaneous blowing.
- Chris Merrick, KOPN Columbia, Missouri Music Director in Ear Magazine, Report from "Middle Ear"
***
Douglas Ewart and fellow AACM musicians led off the night with a clarinet quartet encompassnig the entire clarinet family (sopranino, sporano, alto, bass and contrabass).
This grouping expanded into the highly creative inspirations for which the AACM is noted.
- M. Staff Brandl + Thomas Emil Homerin, "Big Noise from Lake Michigan", Ear Magazine 1982
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Yvar Mikhasoff
- Christian Wolff: Preludes for Piano (world premiere)
Actual performance recording of this work courtesy of Kyle Gann whose cassettes survived many decades!
Not every piece required an army of performers, however. Yvar Mikhashoff gave the American premiere of Christian Wolff's 11 Preludes for Piano (including one for piano duet), whose extensions of the academic-serialist style run a wide, expressive range.
This is absorbing music for ear as well as mind, music that could find its rightful public with more such powerful advocacy.
- John Van Rhein, Chicago Tribune 'New Music America Leaves Echoes of Success"
***
Cage colleague Christian Wolff's piano piece, Preludes, was a lively, witty reminder of how Cage helped change so dramatically the boundaries of music in the last 35 years.
- Tina Clarke, "Chicago's new music festival filled with sound and fury" Toronto Globe & Mail, July 17, 1982
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Music by Christian Wolff followed, a series of short piano pieces lacking the vibrant tone of [Douglas] Ewart's work - though some of these were enhanced by pianist Yvar Mikhashoff's scored whistling.
- M. Staff Brandl + Thomas Emil Homerin, "Big Noise from Lake Michigan", Ear Magazine 1982
* *
Philip Thomas has recorded a version of the Preludes and his online notes for the work are as follows:
Preludes 1-11 (1980-81)
Of all Wolff’s piano music, these eleven preludes are the most virtuosic and, despite their looking more like piano music in the classical and romantic style are, in fact, resistant to familiar gestural patterns. In contrast to much of the music which came before and which he has composed since, these pieces are characterised by forward motion, leading toward something, rarely resting and never resolving. The hesitancy and fragmentary character of, for example, the Incidental Music, or the Tilbury pieces, is generally avoided in favour of sustained lines, confident flourishes, and improvisatory flair. Improvisation is encouraged, even, in the first Prelude, which allows the pianist free reign on two occasions. Song is present for most of the set, even if sometimes hidden within the texture, and despite the complexity of much of the writing there is also frequent resource to monody. Wolff’s own programme note lists songs used including ‘Hallelujah, I’m a Bum’ (Prelude 3), ‘Rock About’ (Prelude 4), ‘Abi Yoyo’ (Prelude 7), ‘Po’ Lazarus’ (Prelude 9), Big Rock Candy Mountain’ (Prelude 10), and ‘Acres of Clams’ (Prelude 11). The pianist is even required to sing - or, rather, whistle or hum - in the fifth Prelude, though almost as if to herself, occasionally emerging from widely spaced chords, Wolff’s response to Chopin’s set of Preludes, perhaps the famous C minor (Op.28 nr20).
Wolff writes that ‘[t]he title … suggests orientation towards some kind of future, open to something that might come next’ and several years later, writing about a different set of preludes, his Bowery Preludes for small ensemble (1985-86) he continued the theme: “‘Preludes’: working out within a limited compass more or less one idea; making a beginning; practicing, warming up; opening up: What for? Musically, almost anything – so long as the music’s content (wherever it may be) also point us in some way towards our present history and the hope of getting through it, to common liberation and peace.” Combined with the technical difficulties of the music, the aspirational sentiments expressed here are somewhat redolent of John Cage’s statements regarding his own sets of etudes, composed only a few years earlier to the effect that performing such difficult music might inspire others to ‘change the world, to improve it’, though Wolff’s politics would undoubtedly nuance that toward a more social, collective response.
Currently, all 11 seem to be available on y2b, beginning here:
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Phil Winsor - S.T.O.C. (Same Old Tired Changes)
for strings, winds, drums and organ
An excerpt from this performance, from the Kyle Gann preserved archival tapes, soon going to the New Music America archives at the University of Houston Library…
S.T.O.C. was composed in 1982, specifically for the New Music America festival. The acronym is borrowed from the jazz arranger’s vocabulary, and represents the phrase “Same Tired Old Changes”. The title refers to triadic chordal material, which is subjected to a process of gradual alteration across several dimensions of the musical canvass. The composite texture is the result of superposition of numerous “operational” loops during the compositional process, and was facilitated by the use of a personal computer.
- Phil Winsor, program notes
***
Following intermission was a short modular piece by Philip Winsor lacking the intensity of similar works by Philip Glass.
Part of Winsor's softness was his scoring for clarinets, saxophones, and strings: thus "easy listening" serial progression was generated.
- M. Staff Brandl + Thomas Emil Homerin, "Big Noise from Lake Michigan", Ear Magazine 1982
***
The title of Phil Winsor's S.T.O.C. borrowed from the jazz arranger's lexicon, stands for "same tired old changes" - an apt description for the basic triadic materials that had Winsor's 11 winds, strings, organ and percussion almost literally spinning in circles.
- John Van Rhein, Chicago Tribune 'New Music America Leaves Echoes of Success"
***
Phil Winsor's S. T O. C. (Same Tired Old Changes) was based upon harmonic progressions associated with jazz. The "tired old changes" were pepped up, however, with the help of a home computer providing new harmonic permutations. An ensemble of strings, woodwinds, electric organ and percussion produced a timbre similar to that of an accordion. Rhythmic regularity, established by repeated patterns, instantly shifted without warning into new patterns. The combination of the instrumental sonority and irregular meter reminded one of central European folk music.
- Deborah Campana "Two Reports" Perspectives of New Music, Autumn 1981
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Dary John Mizelle Polyphonies I
for shakuhachi and tape
More actual performance archives from Kyle Gann’s recordings:
This is the first section of an hour-long electronic piece based on the idea of the emergence of multi-voiced musical phenomena out of elemental sound quanta. Subtitled Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Polyphonies I explores the sound world of those materials and the timbral spaces between them.
The shakuhachi, a Japanese vertical flute which is highly identified with nature, is used in this performance version and plays a part which symbolizes the development of music from breath.
When great Nature sighs, we hear winds
Which noiseless in themselves
Awaken voices from other beings,
Blowing on them,
From every opening
Loud voices sound
Have you not heard
This rush of tones?
From the Way of Chuang Tzu
- Program notes by Dary John Mizelle
***
Although Navy Pier provided elegant twilight settings for the concert series, its mammoth auditorium limited the effectiveness of many works based upon solo improvisation or a slowly evolving process. Jon Gibson's Extensions for soprano saxophone, Joan La Barbara's Klee Alee for voice and electronic tape and Dary John Mizelle's Polyphonies I for shakuhachi and electronic tape all suffered because the audience was physically distant and removed from the performer's experience. An intimate relationship between audience and performer could not be developed in the huge hall's concert format. Instead, the audience, forced into the role of passive receptor as the performer was creator of action, eventually grew restless and unreceptive.
- Deborah Campana "Two Reports" Perspectives of New Music, Autumn 1981
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Linda Montana explains how she came to evaluating six performances at NMA Chicago 1982.
"By allowing the Festival sounds and events to work on my body/spirit in this way, I was able to determine which pieces produced effective meditation responses. Although there were many memorable moments during the Festival, I can analyze only six pieces that prepared the ground for deep meditation experiences.
Inside/Outside ... These two approaches were 1. Sounds that allowed the listener to go inside and 2. Sounds that allowed the listener to come out."
Focus Inside: Dary John Mizelle Polyphonies 1 - Earth
The only reason I knew I liked Mizelle's piece is because my body liked it.
After many days and nights of sonic experiences it responded by relaxing completely and went into a dream pre-sleep space that I associate with meditation. There were no visuals to distract the event; in fact, the lights seemed to be completely off, except for a soft blue focus on Mizelle and his shakuhachi.
Tape delay allowed Mizelle to accompany himself along with other sounds which evoked natural memory (water & wind). They were attached thoughtfully. It's hard to do but this piece successfully merged the East and West. My body told me so.
- Linda Montano, "Moments of Consciousness", Ear Magazine 1982
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One of the better pieces of the evening was Dary John Mizelle's Polyphonies I for shakuhachi.
The bright lights of the auditorium were replaced by a blue glow as Mizelle created an ethereal atmosphere that blended with the Lake's expansiveness.
The sounds Mizelle produced were time-delayed around the room and slowly added layer upon layer, finally to produce a culminative resonance.
- M. Staff Brandl + Thomas Emil Homerin, "Big Noise from Lake Michigan", Ear Magazine 1982
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If Gena and Winsor understood the built-in limitations of their chosen esthetic and kept their pieces correspondingly short, Dary John Mizelle, in his Polyphonies I followed no such strictures.
A pity, for the world would be twice as effective if cut to half its length.
As the composer-performer wove the breathy, mournful voice of his shakuhachi (Japanese vertical flute) in and out of a gentle descant consisting of electronic cricket-chirps as well as natural sounds, the work took on the haunting quality of primal night-music.
- John Van Rhein, Chicago Tribune 'New Music America Leaves Echoes of Success"
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Peter Gordon
Excerpts from Birth of the Poet
and Roses on Bond Street
Again, thanks to Kyle Gann for having kept these tapes alive; a full hour of this performance:
Birth of the Poet (excerpt from Act I) An Opera by Peter Gordon and Kathy Acker. This work is being created at the request of director Richard Foreman, who will stage it in its complete form. This first act takes place in a power plant which literally and metaphorically explodes. (This is an adaptation of Georg Kaiser’s play Gas). The music is derived from my idea of what a vernacular use of serialism might be.
Roses on Bond Street – This is a concert/dance piece for the Love of Life Orchestra. It begins with a brass chorale and ends up in some other polyrhthmic/polytonal region. The compositions for LOLO end up changing with every performance.
- Peter Gordon, program notes
***
Perhaps the most accessible music was provided by another New York group and, although it enlisted members of Branca's band, it was a world apart. Saxophonist/composer Peter Gordon led the Love of Life Orchestra, an 11-piece outfit, through excerpts from his opera Roses On Bond Street, and Birth of the Poet, both jazz/pop-inspired pieces with an experimental edge - and for the first time all week a considerable number of people in the audience started to dance.
- Tina Clarke, "Chicago's new music festival filled with sound and fury" Toronto Globe & Mail, July 17, 1982
***
Peter Gordon closed the night's show with fast exhilarating compositions, Birth of a Poet and Roses on Bond Street, incorporating many elements of popular music.
Unfortunately the fine soprano, Rebecca Armstrong, was usually overwhelmed in the mix.
- M. Staff Brandl + Thomas Emil Homerin, "Big Noise from Lake Michigan", Ear Magazine 1982
***
Almost as powerful, but with a more traditional starting point, was Peter Gordon's rock opera Birth of the Poet. Gordon has led the Love of Life Orchestra together with drummer David Van Tieghem since 1977. The opera was only performed in concert in excerpts at the New Music America Festival. Gordon is also the director of programming for the well-known concert venue The Kitchen in New York.
- Wayne Siegel, “Rapporter: New Music America Festivalen 1982” (original dutch, google translation), DMT Seismograf, 1982
***
...within that diversity there must inevitably be a certain paradox. So, while one faction of composers was proclaiming serious music's liberation from the tyranny of Art [in a hieratic sence], another faction, as represented by the new-wave rock performers Peter Gordon and Jeffrey Lohn, was celebrating its renewal via heavily amplified, hard-drivign funk dressed in the tribal garb of counterculture ritual.
Gordon, the mixer/sound producer for Robert Ashley's video opera, Perfect Lives (Private Parts), played the sizzling saxophone solos as part of his own [literally] exploding opera, Birth of the Poet, sung in excerpts by two vocalists who were assisted by Gordon's Love of Life Orchestra.
Quite apart from its theatrical subtext (which could only be guessed at here), the music celebrated the raw energy of rock at its most sensual level of appeal, and its effect was instantaneous and exhilirating.
Piercing volume notwithstanding, I found the Gordon work a lot less pretentious than Ashley's weird country-cabaret act that was playing nightly aboard the SS Clipper at Pierside. ...
Give Lohn and Branca credit for one thing: they have taken experimental music beyond the pain barrier into what may well be a new frontier of human insensibility.
Whether lasting liberation can be achieved through such puerile means is another matter.
- John Van Rhein, Chicago Tribune 'New Music America Leaves Echoes of Success"
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From the compilation recording, posted on y2b by “Minima Moralia”
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When it finally made it to the stage in Brooklyn in 1985 - at the BAM archives:
https://levyarchive.bam.org/Detail/occurrences/1096
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New Music America 1982 Chicago - Dance Band Service - Dance bands on the Navy Pier
Name of the bands to be discovered, I would hope, sooner or later