July 6, 1982 New Music America Chicago, day 2
Yvar Mikhashoff plays Becker, Sellars, Foss, Rudhyar and Rzewski - Salvatore Martirano - Tom Cameron - Robert Moran - [THE] - Robert Ashley - Kapture at Midnight - Radio Amirkhanian - Labarbara
Yvar Mikhashoff died in 1993 but afterwards, there was a trust established in his name and you can find it and his biography here:
https://mikhashofftrust.org/biography
Mode Records photo:
Mode Records biography: https://moderecords.com/profiles/yvarmikhashoff/
Wikipedia bio indicates he was Ronald McKay of Troy when he was born in 1941. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yvar_Mikhashoff
*****************************************************
Menu of NMA Chicago July 6, 1982:
Yvar Mikhashoff - John Jay Becker: Soundpiece no. 5 (1937), James Sellars: Sonata no. 2, Lucas Foss: Solo for Piano, Dane Rudhyar’s : Rite of Transcendence, Frederic Rzewski: Piano Piece no. 4
(Cancelled: Kronos Quartet were gonna play Nancarrow, Riley, Cage and Oliveros. They would be back in future festivals, though.)
Salvatore Martirano Sal-Mar Construction (day 1 of 5)
~~Charles Amirkhanian with Joan La Barbara ~~ Live radio broadcast (1 of 5)~~
Tom Cameron": That Which Is Not Science Is Magic
Robert Moran: Spin Again
[THE] (Ed Harkins and Phil Larson) Voldy
Wayne Siegel Autumn Resonance
Meredith Monk Turtle Dreams
Robert Ashley Perfect Lives (Private Parts) parts 1 and 2
=========================================================
The festival's principal order of business got under way Tuesday night with the first of the six Navy Pier concerts. The sound was good, but the sheer size of the auditorium, with 1,500 people sitting at nightclublike tables, meant that everything had to be amplified and that works conceived on an intimate scale lost impact. As at each of the previous three festivals, local sponsors had to choose between local composers and those with national reputations.
- John Rockwell, “Concert: New Music America in Chicago”, NY Times July 7, 1982
=====
A noontime concert at the Chicago Public Library offered great promise: world premieres of string quartets by Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley and Conlon Nancarrow plus Cage's String Quartet from 1950, all performed by San Francisco's youthful and energetic Kronos Quartet. Many of those who showed up for the concert perhaps thought they had erred and strayed to the wrong location when, upon arrival, they spotted a 12-foot Bosendorfer and no string players in sight. But this was the place and soon, without a word of explanation from any of the festival organizers, Yvar Mikhashoff, pianist from SUNY Buffalo, ventured out to deliver a recital of the works of Rzewski, Rudhyar, Foss, Curran, Sellars and Becker. Although I was disappointed at the change in program, I easily found solace in Mikhashoff’s performance, which was full of style, elan and unquestionable authority.
- Carl Stone, "Two Reports" Perspectives of New Music, Autumn 1981
***
Yvar Mikhashoff - John Jay Becker: Soundpiece no. 5
The recital opened with the Soundpiece No. 5 of John J. Becker. Becker, who was born in 1886 and died in 1961, lived most of his life in the Midwest and was active in promoting new music, especially that of Ives, Ruggles, Riegger and Cowell, with whom he sat on the editorial board of the New Music Quarterly. His output was broad if not large, ranging from solo piano pieces and string quartets to large multi- media works including the Marriage with Space of 1933-35, which used solo and mass recitation, dancers, colored lighting and large orchestra. Soundpiece No. 5, from 1937, showed the composer's spiritual kinship to others of the so-called American Five, Ruggles in particular, with the work's large and dissonant blocks of harmonies.
- Carl Stone, "Two Reports" Perspectives of New Music, Autumn 1981
Yvar Mikhashoff - James Sellars: Sonata no. 2
Description of the work on James Sellars’ website:
The Piano Sonata II takes its departure from the sonorous quality of the modern grand piano, and especially from the use of the damper pedal in producing large harmonic combinations. The word “sonata” is used here for its original meaning as “a sounding,” rather than for its acquired reference to sonata form. The formal plan is quite simple, moving from slow to fast, and from soft to loud. The musical content is essentially one long line, at times accompanied by dense harmonic material, which lends to the musical continuity a relentless momentum from beginning to end. Of interest, en route, are the cadenza-like passages of rapid pitches (digital) that fuse into a sonic expanse (analog), much like the dots of a newspaper photograph make up a solid image. The final (and longest) cadenza was inspired by the extensive solo harpsichord part in Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto. This cadenza (again, similar to Bach’s example) leads directly to a virtuosic codetta.
The Piano Sonata II was composed during the winter of 1980-81 in Hartford, Connecticut, and is dedicated to the brilliant American pianist, my friend, the late Yvar Mikhashoff.
-James Sellars
Yvar Mikhashoff - Alvin Curran: For Cornelius
For Cornelius, by Alvin Curran, was composed shortly after the death of Cornelius Cardew in London in November of 1981. Beginning simply with straightforward harmonies, the piece had at its core a continuous, slowly evolving strum/tremolo that Curran often uses in his own performances. Mikhashoff played with absolute control and mastery, offering up a dazzling spectrum of color ending abruptly, poignantly, in an unmistakable comment about Cardew's untimely end.
- Carl Stone, "Two Reports" Perspectives of New Music, Autumn 1981
Mikhashoff recording:
Yvar Mikhashoff - Lukas Foss: Solo for Piano
Mikhashoff recording
Yvar Mikhashoff - Dane Rudhyar: Rite of Transcendence
Curiously, there is this lead I found by googling the work… another reason to spend a month in Chicago with my oral history recorder!
http://library.buffalo.edu/music/audioreserves/
The University at Buffalo graciously agreed to digitize a tape of Yves Mikhashoff from 1982's New Music America festival, at my request. I know of no other recording of Dane Rudhyar's Rite of Transcendence, which was one of his largest and most interesting late works.
This recording will only be available to stream until October 15, 2010. It cost the library $185 to digitize the tape, but they requested no payment from me. All they asked is that if I wanted to make a donation to the music library, to mail them a check payable to UB Foundation, with the note "For Music Library" in the memo line. I would like to request that if you listen to this rare and valuable recording, please consider doing so as well.
University at Buffalo 112 Baird Hall Buffalo, NY 14260-4750
In addition, since this was a work specifically dedicated to Yvar Mikhashoff, Soundings magazine decided to reprint a profile of Rudhyar and included the full score of the work here:
https://www.vasulka.org/archive/Artists5/Rudhyar,Dane/music.pdf
♪
Yvar Mikhashoff - Frederic Rzewski: Piano piece no. 4
Lisa Moore performs the piece here:
After pieces by Lukas Foss and Dane Rudhyar, the program closed with Frederic Rzewski's Piano Piece No. 4 from 1977. Like the composer's well-known El Pueblo Unido Jamas Sera Vencido, the work is based on a melody coming from the "New Song" movement of Chile, and like El Pueblo it was written for and dedicated to Ursula Oppens. Unlike the other work, Piano Piece No. 4 is short, concise (though just as exciting), and stays well within the bounds of its welcome.
- Carl Stone, "Two Reports" Perspectives of New Music, Autumn 1981
gd note - an earlier version of this post also included Mikhashoff playing Christian Wolff’s 11 Preludes for Piano. Turns out he did that on July 10, where the details and audio have been moved to. I thought that kind of made it a long concert…
========
Salvatore Martirano Sal-Mar Construction
Description from his website:
The SalMar Construction is an amazing large music synthesis engine conceived and constructed in the early 1970s by a composer for use by a composer.
Under development from the late 1960s, the SalMar is believed to be the first interactive "composing machine," with digital logic circuits at its heart. When you listen to this recorded performance of Sal Martirano playing his "Construction," you experience such mastery. The instrument under his command does his bidding, and what you hear are compositions, not jams.
Full description from his website, including short video from him:
1969 photo https://distributedmuseum.illinois.edu/exhibit/sal-mar_construction_/
==============
Evening concert which was the first of six live radio programs broadcast nationally via WFMT Chicago public radio and hosted by KPFA’s Charles Amirkhanian. Each program is currently on the archive.org website and this is their description of the first program which adds things like John Cage coming into the studio and an interview with Clara Rockmore in Manhattan from 1979. Turtle Dreams gets cut for time at the end.
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.
https://archive.org/details/NMA_1982_07_06
Transcripts at these substacks: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
====================================================
Tom Cameron
That Which Is Not Science Is Magic
for solo electronics
Kyle Gann’s recording from that evening for the first three acts: Cameron, Moran and “The” (same as on the radio broadcast but without the announcers):
I have been developing my music toward the goal of real-time performances with the richness and texture that usually is achieved only in the recording studio or with large ensembles.
My music is the result of structure and non-structure. The structure is formed from the hardware and programming decisions I make with my sound producing equipment. This usually establishes the rhythms and progressions which give the piece its identity. The non-structural element is what I call spontaneous composition. This gives the piece a sense of flow and continuity which I consider to be the most exciting characteristic of my work.
- Tom Cameron program description
***
It was theoretically appropriate to begin with a Chicago composer, Tom Cameron, but his electronics sounded trivial and out of place.
- John Rockwell, “Concert: New Music America in Chicago”, NY Times July 7, 1982
***
The second evening concert of the festival began promptly at the appointed time of 8:30, punctuality abetted by the live coast-to-coast broadcasts produced by WFMT. The evening led off with Chicago area local Tom Cameron, who pointedly announced before beginning that none of the sounds that were to follow (except some crickets) were pre-recorded. Cameron, using multiple synthesizers, a canned rhythm box, tape recorders (for delay purposes) and electric guitar, is a kind of quasi-pop electronic one-man band who wows them regularly in parks around town. His presence was inappropriate, his performance in bad taste.
- Carl Stone, "Two Reports" Perspectives of New Music, Autumn 1981
***
The entire performance apparently is included in Tom Cameron’s album “Music to Wash Dishes By” and they include a sort of retort/tribute to Carl Stone’s words in the y2b description by user “AlphaState NYC”. Not sure what was cut with that last word being “grea”…
This 2016 edition comes with an extended bonus track: the entirety of Cameron's performance at the New Music America 1982 festival on Chicago's Navy pier, about which none other than Carl Stone wrote, "His presence was inappropriate, his performance in bad taste." (yikes; I wonder how Carl would feel about this now?) This live-set sounds like a million bucks & is quite far away from the cod-Berlin school approach that perhaps Stone was railing against - but given the absurdly grea).
found at https://alphastate.nyc/products/tom-cameron-music-to-wash-dishes-by
***
Intense, quiet performances are important and I appreciate them, but casual, unspirited servings of banana pudding depress me.
I want to thump the tables, I want to see fur flying, to see crazed demons on stage so totally wrapped into their life's work that they're in another galaxy.
I want to stare into the glazed eyes of professionals performing.
Well, I did get to a few times, at least.
Tom Cameron opened the second night with a wall of sequencers and an electric guitar; he had fun laying down three hundred electronic patterns and riffing pleasantly. The crowd, which was at least 1500 people, had fun, too.
- Chris Merrick, KOPN Columbia, Missouri Music Director in Ear Magazine, Report from "Middle Ear"
***
Tuesday July 6 began with an electronic composition by Chicagoan Tom Cameron.
Playing solo on a bank of equipment, Cameron generated an entertaining crescendo of sound in real time.
- M. Staff Brandl + Thomas Emil Homerin, "Big Noise from Lake Michigan", Ear Magazine 1982
===============
Robert Moran Spin Again
for multiple keyboards
with Salvatore Spina, Neely Bruce, Yvar Mikhashoff, Anthony DeMare, Steve Elkins, and Andrew Spencer
Things improved thereafter. Robert Moran contributed a demonic essay in abrasive motoric minimalism, reminiscent of the nuclearapocalypse music in Philip Glass's ''Einstein on the Beach'' and accompanied by lurid thunder-and-lightning obbligato.
- John Rockwell, “Concert: New Music America in Chicago”, July 7, 1982 NY Times
***
Robert Moran's Spin Again, an intense piece for multiple keyboards which received added natural punctuation from an electrical storm outside the hall.
- Tina Clarke, "Chicago's new music festival filled with sound and fury" Toronto Globe & Mail, July 17, 1982
***
Moran, whose multi-media circuses have transformed whole cities (San Francisco, Graz, Austria and most recently Hartford, Connecticut), was in touch with supernatural powers during the performance of his Spin Again. Just as the demonic drive produced by four electric keyboards and amplified marimba and vibraphone began to gain momentum, Moran found himself conducting a thunder and lightning show as well. The aggressive pulse of patterns incessantly drilling in the auditorium was uncannily accented by the activity occurring outside.
- Deborah Campana "Two Reports" Perspectives of New Music, Autumn 1981
***
Robert Moran's music followed. Loudly. His Spin Again for two electric pianos, electric organ, amplified harpsichord, marimba and vibraphone utilized choppy, aggressive rhythms. More could be said about the work, but perhaps unfairly, as the performance was marred not only by the blurry acoustics of the Navy Pier but also by a distracting and very powerful thunderstorm that took place just outside, sending noisy charges of static electricity coursing through the wiring of the auditorium.
- Carl Stone, "Two Reports" Perspectives of New Music, Autumn 1981
***
There in/on the Pier Robert Moran - and Mother Nature - electrified the audience with "Spin Again" for keyboards and bar percussion.
It was loud, repetitious and intense - and right at the beginning of the music all the rest of hell broke loose outside as a great Midwestern lightning storm hit the lake.
Moran, dressed in black, twirled around as lightning crashed into the water around the pier. Talk about a well-staged performance!
- Chris Merrick, KOPN Columbia, Missouri Music Director in Ear Magazine, Report from "Middle Ear"
***
From Ear Magazine: 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 outside: Robert Moran Spin Again
Moran's music had me on the edge of my seat, outside my head, fearful that the world would end. He played music of serial intensity, and as the Jekyll-Hyde fervor grew, so did the nature's response.
The room lit up, movie-like, and the electrical storm struck precaiously close to the gargantuan hall, turning it into a Hollywood stage set. Most children - and some adults - seemed honestly frightened by the blend of music and natural fury.
Did Moran order the effects from United Studios? It was a dramatic transformation of what could be been music into an operatic scene from a horror movie. Listeners had to pay more than ordinary attention in survivalist terms, so that they could run for their lives in case lightning did strike.
The story, on cue, ended with the piece.
- Linda Montano, "Moments of Consciousness", Ear Magazine 1982
***
The lack of structure in this [Chicago Tom Cameron's] sonic experience was set off by the next piece, Spin Again, a minimalist multiple keyboard work by Robert Moran.
Andrew Spencer was outstanding on vibraphone. Spin Again seemed especially judicious for its workable, unindulgent length; it even came to appear frugal as the festival progressed.
- M. Staff Brandl + Thomas Emil Homerin, "Big Noise from Lake Michigan", Ear Magazine 1982
***
apparently it had been released in 1981 in Yugoslavia…
============
[THE] Ed Harkins and Phil Larson Voldy
Statement for [THE] in the program:
Recently much of our work has been primarily concerned with reunified and pomped investment, with various influences from resources beyond their scope (scope).
***
Ed Harkins and Phil Larson, a performance-art duo from San Diego who call themselves (THE), gently parodied vanguard cliches but suffered from the scale of the space.
- John Rockwell, “Concert: New Music America in Chicago”, July 7, 1982 NY Times
***
What followed was one of New Music America '82's truly fresh and surprising presentations:
Musical Dadaists Ed Harkins and Phil Larson deftly parodied the contemporary arts - new music, visual performance, modern dance - while managing to produce interesting and very funny music.
Dressed in black like Kabuki stage hands, Harkins and Larson utilized voice, horn, tape effects, movements, and film to criticize established genres and accepted concerns of music and art.
- M. Staff Brandl + Thomas Emil Homerin, "Big Noise from Lake Michigan", Ear Magazine 1982
*
The comedy duo was titled [THE], with brackets. One thing they did that I remember was show a film of themselves playing golf in some rugged mountains - every ball disappeared into the wilderness, and they, wearing kilts, trudged on. I have a better memory of the concert I reviewed in NY in 1990:
https://www.kylegann.com/VV-PDQStockhausen.pdf
Maybe some of the same stuff.
- Kyle Gann got in touch with me after this was posted to fill in a bit of the memories and the above article link has a great photo of the duo.
♪
Wayne Siegel Autumn Resonance
for piano and digital delay
Artist Description from his website at
https://waynesiegel.dk/?page_id=664
Autumn Resonance for piano and delays was written in 1979 and has since been performed frequently by the composer in concerts and radio broadcasts in Europe. The piece was given its U.S. premiere by Wayne Siegel in 1982 at the New Music America Festival in Chicago, a concert which was broadcast via satellite throughout the United States.
Each sound produced by the piano is heard live through both speakers, but it is also sampled and processed by two digital delays and repeated 187 ms. (0.187 second) later through the left speaker and again 187 ms. later ( or 374 ms after the original sound) through the right speaker. Autumn Resonance is thus a very fast canon and at the same time a spatial hocket, in which musical figures move very quickly around the concert hall.
This delay process with the two delay times is the same throughout the piece, but it is used in two very different ways: both as a textural effect, in which the overtones of fast tremolo chords are layered upon themselves to create a singing, drone-like effect, and also as a rhythmic and spatial idea in the middle section of the piece, in which the pianist plays fast staccato figures synchronized with the two delays.
Though Autumn Resonance is precisely notated in the form of a score, each performance by the composer is slightly different, depending on the resonance of the individual piano and of the concert hall. The work is recorded on the PAULA label with Wayne Siegel performing on a Bösendorfer concert grand.
***
Wayne Siegel contributed a rather aimless minimalist piano solo…
- John Rockwell, “Concert: New Music America in Chicago”, July 7, 1982 NY Times
***
Wayne Siegel's music fared better in the peculiar acoustic environment of the hall, for the outer sections of his Autumn Resonance, for piano and electronic echoes, were made up of lush, almost decadent-sounding tremolo textures. The room blended the piano and its two equally- spaced (spatially and temporally) echoes to nice effect. The middle of the work, however, uses short patterns repeated on the piano and its echoes to create a pronounced hocket, which under the circumstances was obscured. The piece was notable (and applaudable) as being the quietest music thus far in the festival.
- Carl Stone, "Two Reports" Perspectives of New Music, Autumn 1981
***
Wayne Siegel's Autumn Resonance for piano and digital delay, a three-voice canon, provided textural interest but grew tiresome at its excessive length.
In this, the piece exemplified a major flaw in many works performed at New Music America '82.
- M. Staff Brandl + Thomas Emil Homerin, "Big Noise from Lake Michigan", Ear Magazine 1982
======
Meredith Monk Turtle Dreams
Andrea Goodman, Robert Ian, Paul Langlan, Steve Lockwood + Nicki Perisa
Ping Chong video
*
...and the program ended with Meredith Monk's earnest, evocative and pretentious Turtle Dreams, for four singer-movers, two electric organists and a miming ''Woman in White.''
- John Rockwell, “Concert: New Music America in Chicago”, July 7, 1982 NY Times
***
The concert series was not without its disappointments. A quartet including composer-singer-choreographer Meredith Monk performed an excerpt from her Turtle Dreams. In this performance, one expected the evocative splendor produced on her last recording, Dolmen Music, to be joined with inventive movement. Instead, useless zombie-like motion illustrated the lackluster vocal strains.
- Deborah Campana "Two Reports" Perspectives of New Music, Autumn 1981
*
Meredith Monk's Turtle Dreams, scored for 4 dancer/singers and two electric organs (plus a silent dancer, doll-like, dressed in white) involved -like Cameron's, Moran's and Siegel's (as well as Reich's piece of the night before)-much use of pattern repetition, which occurred not only musically but in the dancers' gestures and phrases. As always, the vocalizations of Monk ("the Renaissance Woman of New Music", according to festival blurbs) and her ensemble are the most compelling part of the performance as they mellifluously blend a wide variety of techniques such as glottal singing, yodeling, ululation, and split-tone voicing along with various styles of singing such as operatic or folk.
- Carl Stone, "Two Reports" Perspectives of New Music, Autumn 1981
*
Such a flaw did not mar Meredith Monk's Turtle Dreams, perhaps the best composition, and most impressive performance, of the festival.
Of Brechtian mood and tone, Turtle Dreams was born of a desire to escape the clamor of the urban sound environment.
Its lyrics and free-form extended voice evoked an omnious almost primeval atmosphere, yet the piece also conjured an urban din with its grating sounds.
Four singer-dancers accompanied by two organs executed a mesmerizing "stripped-down waltz step" which deepened the work's portentous quality.
Turtle Dreams and other of her music-theatre works certainly entitle Monk to the recognition and esteem given to lesser artists in the multimedia field.
- M. Staff Brandl + Thomas Emil Homerin, "Big Noise from Lake Michigan", Ear Magazine 1982
*
Meredith Monk's Turtle Dreams for 4 "dancing" singers and electric organ is also worth mentioning. Unfortunately, the performance took place immediately after I had performed my own Autumn Resonance, and I will therefore be reluctant to write anything about the play, even though I heard it from the backstage. But on the whole, it is only a small bit of the week-long festival's content that is discussed here - nevertheless, I hope that it has become a fair taster.
- Wayne Siegel, “Rapporter: New Music America Festivalen 1982” (original dutch, google translation), DMT Seismograf, 1982
the eventual ECM album:
=======
Robert Ashley Perfect Lives (Private Parts) parts 1 and 2
After each pier concert, Robert Ashley is presenting his video opera, Perfect Lives/Private Parts, in live performance, which he has still not done in New York
- John Rockwell, “Concert: New Music America in Chicago”, July 7, 1982 NY Times
***
The most popular event of the festival was the nightly post-concert presentation of excerpts from Robert Ashley's opera, Perfect Lives (Private Parts), on the lounge deck of the S.S. Clipper docked at Navy Pier.
Perfect Lives is an unusual work combining live performance and music with pre-mixed audiotapes as well as visual reference points offered by several video monitors placed strategically around the performer area. Although Ashley refers to Perfect Lives as his agricultural piece - he opens each performance evoking the muse of the Midwest with, "These are songs about the corn belt and some of the people in it" - with his wonderful use of technology, the piece is often powered to both aural and visual ecstasy.
- Tina Clarke, "Chicago's new music festival filled with sound and fury" Toronto Globe & Mail, July 17, 1982
***
Each evening (save the first) a concert was given at Navy Pier on the shores of Lake Michigan, cabaret style with refreshments served at tables whilst the music went on, followed by an after-concert concert/performance aboard the yacht, featuring Robert Ashley's multi- sectioned video opera Perfect Lives (Private Parts).
- Carl Stone, "Two Reports" Perspectives of New Music, Autumn 1981
****
Let Robert explain it to you himself at his website:
http://www.robertashley.org/productions/1977-83-perfectlives.htm
40th anniversary celebration at Roulette, NYC, 2023
https://roulette.org/event/perfect-lives-screening/
=================================
Kapture - kind of open mic or maybe avant-hootenanny
at Cross Currents, a local nightclub every midnight
Also after the concerts, a venturesome group of younger Chicago composers called Kapture is sponsoring programs of less-well-known composers at a Chicago nightclub.
- John Rockwell, “Concert: New Music America in Chicago”, July 7, 1982 NY Times
***
Fortunately, a Chicago group called Kapture organized the "Music Mostly at Midnight" series at a local club.
They solicited groups, got almost thirty responses, paid nothing, hustled sound equipment and technicians, printed posters, ran ads and got 150 people in a night to see what the Chicago/Midwest monsters could deliver.
And here, there was very little banana pudding. The midnight series was the most exciting manifestations of the whole Festival.
There were groups that grabbed me by the ankles and dragged me around as so little did in the festival proper.
Kapture itself is a multi-media performance group who does snappy, outlandish pieces using toy organs, tapes, group chants, and things like that to talk on love and violence, art and communication, cooperation and music.
Now I'm looking at the program sheet and names like Musica Menta, Liof Munimula, The Dancing Cigarettes, the Marcel Duchamp Memorial Players, Sheldon Atovsky and Ed Herrmann conjure up fierce images, reminding me how creatie and entertaining "New Music" can be.
There were even some easteners there - Joseph Celli, Charlie Morrow, Robert Moran - as well as a group from Germany, Anima, and a duo from Poland known as the Orchestra of the Eighth Day.
- Chris Merrick, KOPN Columbia, Missouri Music Director in Ear Magazine, Report from "Middle Ear"
============
NMA Chicago 1982 - youtube collection of videos of works presented