July 11, 1982 Last day: New Music America Chicago + installations / Ushio Torikai birthday
Jon Gibson - Joan LaBarbara - Jill Kroesen - Ronald Shannon Jackson - Douglas Hollis - Liz Phillips - Bill and Mary Buchan - John Cage - Robert Snyder - Ushio Torikai birthday
Last day performance:
Jon Gibson Extensions
Joan La Barbara Klee-Alee
Jill Kroesen I'm Sorry I'm Such a Weenie, I Really Want to Bomb You, Wayne Hays Blues, I am Not Seeing That You Are Here, Honey, You're So Mean, When I Get to Heaven and Freak of Nature
Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society New works
All week - Installations:
Douglas Hollis "Sound Shade in C Major"
Liz Phillips "Windspun Watertower"
Bill and Mary Buchan "Wind Antenna"
David Behrman and Paul DeMarinis Sound Fountain
John Cage and others Visual works by Cage and other composers
Robert Snyder and School of Art Institute Electronic Music exhibit or installation?
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Jon Gibson Extensions
Extensions II, a reworking of the original 1981 composition, appeared on a 1992 recording which is described here:
https://www.discogs.com/release/1486345-Jon-Gibson-In-Good-Company
and heard here, posted by Jon Gibson on y2b
Saxophonist Jon Gibson presented Extensions, a restrained and sinuous solo work with tape playback
- M. Staff Brandl + Thomas Emil Homerin, "Big Noise from Lake Michigan", Ear Magazine 1982
***
Another exciting piece was a piece for solo soprano sax and electronic time delays, written and played by Phil Glass ensemble saxophonist Jon Gibson. The piece consisted of some tonal figures that were layered on top of each other using electronics.
- Wayne Siegel, “Rapporter: New Music America Festivalen 1982” (original dutch, google translation), DMT Seismograf, 1982
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Joan Labarbara Klee-Alee
Klee-Alee (1979) was commissioned by and produced at RIAS Radio, West Berlin and was inspired by a Paul Klee painting, which is layered in both two and three dimensions; one can look at blocks of color from a distance and at delicately scratched detail on closer inspection.
I did not intend to sing the painting, but to create a textured piece translating some of the visual elements into sound: thick, block-like solid colors became repeating melodic units, green and blues, with delicately curving figures, designs carved into the thick fabric of sound.
- Joan La Barbara program notes
***
posted on y2b by “suzukireaction”
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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Joan La Barbara - co-announcer with Charles Amirkhanian of the live/taped festival broadcast on radio station WFMT - presented an extended-voice interpretation of a Paul Klee painting, entitled Klee-Alee.
- M. Staff Brandl + Thomas Emil Homerin, "Big Noise from Lake Michigan", Ear Magazine 1982
***
Joan La Barbara's Klee-Alee was otherwise technically advanced. Joan La Barbara is known as a composer and as an excellent interpreter of new vocal music. She has thus premiered works by John Cage, Steve Reich and Philips Glass. In Chicago she performed her own piece for voice and strings. But KLEE-ALEE was not only a demonstration of La Barbara's enormous singing skills, it was also atmospheric, composed and beautiful music.
- Wayne Siegel, “Rapporter: New Music America Festivalen 1982” (original dutch, google translation), DMT Seismograf, 1982
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Jill Kroesen
with Rebecca Armstrong, Ernie Brooks, Peter Gordon, Tim Shellenbaum, Ned Sublette, "Blue" Gene Tyranny, David Van Tiegham
I'm Sorry I'm Such a Weenie, I Really Want to Bomb You, Wayne Hays Blues, I am Not Seeing That You Are Here, Honey, You're So Mean, When I Get to Heaven and Freak of Nature
I’m just a human being who can hardly keep her own house clean. And I lay in bed and I think how the president is just a human being and it scares me to think about the life he leads. And I think about all those people who’ve been irresponsible and stupid who’ve had power over me, like the Oakland Police when I was only seventeen. And the New York State Unemployment bureaucracy, they made a cripple out of me. And those boys who had my heart in the muscle of your whim. And then a particular human being transcends it all and makes me feel pleased. And I as a particular human being hate all those protections and insulations that one needs.
My family led me to expect that human beings were responsible and just. Then I moved to New York. But in this real world you need a vast network of insulations or you’ll turn to dust. So I think I’ll just die here in my room until I’m ready to fight. And I think about anarchy and how nice if it were a possibility. If all those bestial and primitive instincts were set aside and substituted for a higher form of life.
- Jill Kroesen, program notes
***
Jill Kroesen's songs also raised a few eyebrows. Although musically reminiscent of Kurt Weill, her lyrics and delivery were much closer to Marianne Faithfull, particularly the rhythmically driven Secretary (Wayne Hays Blues).
- Tina Clarke, "Chicago's new music festival filled with sound and fury" Toronto Globe & Mail, July 17, 1982
A 1982 video from her youtube:
I draw your attention particularly to Jill’s recent release which covers these years and contains those tracks:
https://sundazed.com/jill-kroesen.aspx
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Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society
Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society ended the festival with energy. The musical structure produced by the ensemble was divided into three basic layers which functioned in different manners: rhythm (bass guitar and Jackson on percussion underscored all movement); dominant melody (saxophone and trumpet rode on top of the texture with simple, free-floating solo lines); and intertwining melody (electric guitar plus an additional bass guitar acted in a twofold role -as a fast-paced melody cushioning the slower dominance of trumpet and saxophone and, at the same time, as a subdivision lilting above the rhythm and bass). From the first blast of sound, the audience felt a special excitement emanating from the Decoding Society. Jackson, with beaded braids flying, piloted the tightly-knit ensemble from behind cymbals and drums of all shapes and description as other members listened and contributed to the product. Various layers of the structure took turns rising into the perceptual forefront and then blending into the background, constantly enticing audience attention.
- Deborah Campana "Two Reports" Perspectives of New Music, Autumn 1981
***
… WFMT broadcasts were, at times, irrelevant for the general listening audience (at one point Ronald Shannon Jackson's performance was cut off in mid-composition in order to play an interview!).
- Deborah Campana "Two Reports" Perspectives of New Music, Autumn 1981
***
...the last to perform on the last concert, the best for last, Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society. Jackson and his Society blew away the cynical performers, the bland introverts, blew away everything except his dense, powered drumming and funk-fusion band.
It was worth the entire week to see one group who made me thump the table: crazed demons with glazed eyes throwing showers of sweat in all directions.
(Jackson was shamefully treated in one aspect of the Festival: on the radio rebroadcast his performance was faded down in the middle of the third song to cut to a pre-recorded interview.
I nearly threw the radio out the window! Couldn't they have dumped the interview and let the man finish his set?
The live audience went berserk from a dose of the real thing and Jackson didn't even get his fifteen minutes.
- Chris Merrick, KOPN Columbia, Missouri Music Director in Ear Magazine, Report from "Middle Ear"
***
However, truly innovative New Wave Jazz concluded New Music America '82 in the music of Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society.
The creativity and technical expertise of the performers, particularly Jackson (former with Blood Ulmer), demonstrated how popular and experimental music can be fused.
- M. Staff Brandl + Thomas Emil Homerin, "Big Noise from Lake Michigan", Ear Magazine 1982
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installations (most all week, some more)
Douglas Hollis Sound Shade in C Major
Second stop, then, was Promontory Park out on Lake Michigan for a piece of sound sculpture by Douglas Hollis titled Sound Shade in C Major. The sculpture consisted of three sets of scaffolding, each carrying rows of streamers at the top which were excited by the ever-present wind, producing an enjoyable unpitched texture, the characteristics of which varied from scaffold to scaffold. Additionally, the hollow metal poles of the scaffolds had small holes cut in them, producing whistles of varied pitches as the wind rushed through them. The effect was poetic, but was undermined considerably by the clamor of noisy lakeshore bathers nearby.
- Carl Stone, "Two Reports" Perspectives of New Music, Autumn 1981
***
From the Renaissance Society webpage:
JUL 5–AUG 31, 1982
DOUGLAS HOLLIS SOUND SHADE IN C MAJOR
Sound Shade in C Major uses a series of aeolian organ pipes which function as both a compositional and structural framework within which other strung structures can be pitched, like sonic tents. These ‘tent skins’ are made of an industrial strapping material which has the wonderful quality of making the wind’s passage both audible and visible. Low floating platforms are incorporated beneath the shades, which people can sit on, becoming in a sense ‘airborne,’ celebrating the windscape.” Douglas Hollis, Summer, 1982
Installation of Sound Stage in C Major by Douglas Hollis at Promontory Point was sponsored by The Renaissance Society in conjunction with The Museum of Contemporary Art and Mayor Byrne’s New Music America ‘82.
https://renaissancesociety.org/exhibitions/319/douglas-hollis-sound-shade-in-c-major/
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Liz Phillips Windspun Watertower
Windspun Watertower is my most recent sound installation which electronically senses and responds to the changing wind. It is tuned for its setting, the Chicago Watertower. The architectural form of the watertower combines with weather conditions in ‘the windy city’ to provide the material for the composition of this vertical soundscale.
This landmark building has unique acoustics resulting from approximately 250 feet high cylindrical hollow. As the wind activates electronic sounds, they are played into the chamber at different levels. They resonate within this tall space and natural delay is added to them. What is heard at street level is truly a new instrumental music. In this case the architectural form itself becomes the instrument.
For thirteen years my installations have used sound as the principal material to describe intimate and dynamic relationships of events that take place in three dimensional space and in time. In each work a custom designed interactive electronic system senses, characterizes, and then synthesizes sound structures. Some of my installations, like Sunspots, measure and describe distances between audience (figure) and object (sensor) and ground.
Those human scale proportions and rhythms made by audience presence-stillness or motion – in a space can be interpreted in sound as weights and balances that make activity near objects into a composition.
Windspun and Come About are concerned with the construct of a changing landscape and soundscape using natural energy impulses. Windspeed and direction are sensed (electronically). That “felt” information is used to create an ever-evolving sculpture of sound. It contains immediacy and variation and yet expresses pattern and structure in a new composite sound.
The electronic system used in the wind installations was originally constructed for location in the tower of “Aeolus”, a wind turbine generator at Bronx Frontier Development Corporation’s branch in the South Bronx. The prototype installation Windspun for Minneapolis was part of New Music America 1980.
- Liz Phillips’ description of the work from the program notes
***
Later that afternoon it was time to go off in search of some of the sound installations around town. First stop was the Chicago Water Tower, where the plan was to experience the latest project of Liz Phillips, a New York artist who has worked for some time with environ- mentally interactive electronic sound projects. For example, her piece Windspun, located at Hunts Point in the Bronx, utilized synthesizer sounds produced within a large and very resonant windmill tower, with the sounds being determined in part by the direction and speed of the nearby wind, interpreted according to a complex processing scheme devised by Phillips. Clearly an artistic direction that should prove appropriate for Chicago's windy clime, but alas, the installation was shut off during my entire visit to the festival. Again not a word of explanation from festival organizers, although a rumor emerged later that some of Mayor Byrne's neighbors (she lives nearby) complained about the unfamiliar sounds.
- Carl Stone, "Two Reports" Perspectives of New Music, Autumn 1981
I’ll have to look into whether this work appeared during the festival at all but if you’d like to look at something Liz Phillips was doing at the time you can to to the NMA Minneapolis posts which include a short video, or go to her website to check out what she was doing in the eighties… and ever since.
http://lizphillips.net/w/?page_id=260
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Bill and Mary Buchan Wind Antenna
Program description:
Wind Antenna is an Aeolian sound sculpture which produces shimmering harmonic overtones when the stainless steel strings are activated by the wind. The aluminum parabolic dish functions as a resonator, provides ideal focus of wave frequency transmissions, and is widely used in aerospace and telecommunications technologies.
This work is an exploration of energy conversion systems. Sails on a ship’s mast turn wind energy into thrust. Antennas receive wave frequency transmissions and convert them into electrical energy. Wind Antenna uses both mast and parabolic dish to convert wind energy into sound waves. The full moon of the parabolic dish is a signpost of our civilization. It rides on our spaceships, sits atop our skyscrapers, and nettles with silos in the rural landscape. Like radio telescopes, Wind Antenna is a gatherer of the unknown; an ear trained on the sonic wilderness.
***
Two important trends in American music have emerged from Cage's and others' attempts to liberate music from the concert hall. One is "landscape music", or music created in a larger geographical area, while the other important direction is "sound sculpture", or a kind of combined sculpture, musical instruments and composition that plays itself using natural forces such as wind and sun.
In both of these directions, the traditional conception of the work is changed: the artist renounces being able to precisely control the tonal result of the performance, since the wind, the sun or random street noise cannot be predetermined, especially when the listener is free to wander around as it suits him or her . Instead, the artist creates a musical situation which can develop in many directions.
Bill and Mary Buchen's Wind Antenna produces different overtones when its stainless steel strings are set in motion by the wind. A large parabolic antenna built from aluminum is used to amplify its screeching sound. This large, modern wind harp was installed at "North Beach" - a beach on Lake Michigan in Chicago.
- Wayne Siegel, “Rapporter: New Music America Festivalen 1982” (original dutch, google translation), DMT Seismograf, 1982
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David Behrman and Paul DeMarinis Sound Fountain
there actually is a project description on the cd cover of the recording they released, posted on y2b by “WailaStone” and apparently which is track 39 on a compilation of some sort…
There were several sound sculptures installed around the city, including a particularly amusing one at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Entitled Sound Fountain, the audience interactive sound/video interface by David Behrman and Paul Demarinis provided a musically activated cross between Pac-man and Etch-a-Sketch for anyone who happened by.
- Tina Clarke, "Chicago's new music festival filled with sound and fury" July 17, 1982, Toronto Globe and Mail
***
Another form of sound sculpture was conceived and built by David Behrmann and Paul De Marinis. They are both composers and electronics engineers who consider it unfortunate that traditional instruments are so difficult to master. The dream of building a musical instrument that enables the common man to effortlessly express his musical thoughts is not new. This dream points to a thought-provoking and, for some, scary 'brave new world', which in reality is already upon us - this can be clearly seen in some of the new compact computer-controlled synthesizers and sequencers that are becoming readily available.
The problem with realizing this dream is that if the system does not have built-in limitations in the form of some predetermined musical elements, extensive learning is still required of the user - so you still have to be a kind of expert. On the other hand, if too much is predetermined by the system, then it is the system that plays on the user and not the other way around.
Behrman and De Marinis had tried a middle ground with their installation Sound Fountain at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. In a smaller room at the museum, four boards with electronic buttons were set up on a table. One board determined the tempo, the second the rhythm, the 3rd the melody and the 4th the timbre. Then four random museum visitors who neither knew each other nor had any musical background could play together. But the system was no more free or open than that you could easily hear the two designers' musical thoughts behind it all.
- Wayne Siegel, “Rapporter: New Music America Festivalen 1982” (original dutch, google translation), DMT Seismograf, 1982
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New Music America '83 is currently up for grabs. The New Music Alliance is considering Philadelphia or Washington, D.C., although Cage suggested holding it in Canada.
- Tina Clarke, "Chicago's new music festival filled with sound and fury" Toronto Globe and Mail, July 17, 1982
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NEW MUSIC AMERICA BIRTHDAY -
1952 USHIO TORIKAI
Ushio Torikai performed once at NMA New York 1989 in a duo with Peter Cusack at Experimental Intermedia. I missed that one but this is an impressive wikipedia post that would make me want to search that composer’s stuff…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ushio_Torikai
I did find one thing featuring Torikai’s music on the y2b, this string quartet presented in 2012:
Profile and some samples here: