July 6, 1984 - NMA Hartford day 6
David Garland - Spiral - R. Frehling - Ursula Oppens plays Curran, Carter, A. Davis, Wuorinen +Rzewski - A. Lucier - J. Hunt - F.-M. Uitti plays John Cage - SEM Ensemble - Joseph Jarman + Geri Allen
"It may be hazardous to your career not to applaud. The person playing the worst piece may be the person making an important decision about your life in 10 years" - Bob Robinson, a student at the California Institute of the Arts, explaining why he was applauding for a work that he had just said was dreadful.
- Jeffrey Schmalz, NY Times July 6
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Well, we all applauded Ursula Oppens for the set of works that she presented, including this one, Elliott Carter’s Night Fantasies. More on her performance below.
New Music Alliance Meetings U of Hartford
Old state house video series day 5 10:00-17:00
David Betts Garland Control Songs
Songs about “being in/out of/under control” for electric keyboards, guitar, flute, bowed psaltry and voice - 11:30 Old State House
David Garland's aurally intricate and lyrically provocative Control Songs entertained listeners while delivering his view on social control.
- Brooke Wentz High Fidelity November 1984
https://www.discogs.com/release/1802553-David-Garland-Control-Songs
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Bob Gatzen and Spiral
Sound sculpture accompaniment - Baschet sound sculptures
Artist description in program:
A performance of Spiral is a realization of improvisational music (free and structured) on varied and unusual instrumentation. The Baschet Sound Sculptures are incorporated in a chamber music setting which effectively captures their beautiful sonorities. A given segment of music might range from all the players performing on pitched melodic instruments to a trio of percussive sounds or various combinations.
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Robert Ashley Perfect Lives (Private Parts) Second Half
Visually, it's quite striking for its state-of-the-art video trickery - images splinter, float, turn in on themselves. What one hears, though, is arch and numbing: Ashley, in a lecturer's tone of voice, reciting circular nonstories from which stray words detached themselves and appeared on screen as titles. The music, such as it was, combined some happy-hour piano-bar nullities with art-rock minimalism.
- Richard Buell 'A day of listening at New Music America', Boston Globe July 6, 1984
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Robert Ashley's video opera Perfect Lies shown for the first time in its entirety (eight hours) was a funny, probing, intelligent and relentless interrogation of American mythology.
- Paul de Berros - Philadelphia Inquirer, July 7, 1984
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Russell Frehling River Run meet the installation artist
In Russell Frehling’s River Run, sounds are taken from the Hartford Civic Center and transmitted through the Connecticut River as well as transmitted through basic materials of contemporary buildings. The results of this audible alchemy are then returned to the original space, providing it with a radically altered self-image.
"An urban river with its often bleak surroundings, difficult access and serious pollution can find itself in a situation where the populous is alienated from the natural river experience. River Run was designed to generate a new kind of personal involvement... by bringing into play those wonderful qualities which might otherwise go unnoticed." - Russell Frehling
Detailed artist description:
River Run grew out of some work I did in Iki, Japan a few years ago under the auspices of several environmental groups. The project was to develop an underwater sound system and library, to be used by local fisherman to create, in effect, a 'sonic fence' around which migrating dolphin would travel and feed.
This would leave a clear patch of ocean in the midst of these tremendous migrations in which the fishermen could effectively work their lines...
In my open water research and experimentation I encountered many delightful and sometimes surprising acoustical anomalies associated with water as a sound-carrying medium, such that the sounds received on distant hydrophones were often subtly or even remarkably different from those sent. It turns out that water is a wonderfully complex and unpredictable medium with unique and intriguing effects on sound waves.
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Russell Frehling (who'd worked in Japan to create underwater sounds that would keep dolphins out of harm's way when fisherman are around) recorded noise from the Hartford Civic Center, filtered it through the Connecticut River, and gently returned it for all of us to hear back at its source.
- Geoffrey Stokes, "Trade Fare - footnotes to New Music America", Village Voice July 31, 1984
In the Civic Center mall, the Connecticut River was talking to Maureen Schupf. "Am I supposed to understand what it's saying?" Mrs. Schupf asked.
Russell Frehling, a Florida artist, was sending the sounds of the mall over to the river by telephone line. There, hydrophones picked them up again - mixed in with the sounds of the river - and sent them back to the mall, where they were played over loudspeakers. The result was a hollow whooshing noise that hovered above the usual din.
"The old men who hang out here every day," Mr. Frehling said, "they have squatters' rights to the place and didn't want me here. They were ready to string me up. But I've heard that ow they like it, that they imagined it was like being under water, with the people like little fishes floating through."
But is it music? "I used to worry about that," Mr. Frehling said. "But now I think, no, it's just art. I'm doing art pieces with sound as my medium."
- Jeffrey Schmalz, New York Times July 6, 1984
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New Music America 1984 Hartford hosts Various Service Organizations incl. at the Hartford Art Center
Joel Chadabe, Nancy Clarke, Robin Kirck, John Duffy, Winnifred Keane, Lily Jacob, Randy Davidson, Steve Paulus
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John Driscoll Third Mesa
Hartford Arts Center
John Driscoll’s Third Mesa is based on loudspeakers capable of incredibly precise movement. These speakers articulate reflection patterns created by the walls in their environment and create their own patterns of Doppler shift and phase modulation. It also happens to be a great deal of fun to watch speakers do the Mambo.
- Ron Kuivila program notes
Artist description:
Return to installations: Revisit to John Driscoll's Third Mesa: A comfy place to just go and sit perhaps to con- verse in undertones, while soft speakers spin their elegant dance and sounds from several blend- ed tapes mesh gears. Outside world, wind and traffic enters and exits through windows. So sit in different places or walk slowly about You'll like it changing on you. The larger immobile speakers purr. Mmm. Mmmmm. When one of the smaller speakers turns your way, it's as if it has a personal thought to say to you alone.
Across the way, David Weinstein's installation, another cyclical tape with a mosaic (reminding me of Ostia Antiqua) treads effortlessly onwards.
Downstairs, Sylvia Smith's Scribing Sound is an eyecatching exhibition of musical notations from composers whose styles run the century's gamut.
- David Hicks, "A Cross Country Music Tour" Perspectives of New Music Vol 22 no. 1-2 Autumn 1983 pp. 519-531
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In another room, John Driscoll suspended floating speakers that chirped bird calls.
- Brooke Wentz High Fidelity November 1984
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Ursula Oppens - Alvin Curran: For Cornelius
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Ursula Oppens - Elliott Carter: Night Fantasies
(Ursula Oppen’s recording of the work is at the top of this post.)
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Elliott Carter's 1980 Night Fantasies, presented by pianist Ursula Oppens on one of the festival's few solo recitals, stood out as the week's most finely wrought offering simply because its creator is one of the few living American composers who deserve to be called geniuses.
- James Wierzbicki, “A comeback for the musical avant-garde?”, St. Louis Globe-Democrat July 14, 1984
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Ursula Oppens added both a touch of class and - even on a toothless piano - real musical chops; she offered Elliott Carter (Night Fantasies) and Charles Wuorinen (a winningly bratty item called The Blue Bamboula) with cheerful defiance not of the audience but of the academic pall people like me say those names ought to cast.
- Geoffrey Stokes, "New Music Back to Normal", Village Voice July 24
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Ursula Oppens - Anthony Davis: Middle Passage
Ursula Oppens - Charles Wuorinen: The Blue Bamboula
Ursula Oppens -
Frederic Rzewski: The Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues
Ursula Oppens, pianist: Afternoon In the context of almost exclusively "Downtown" music, this solo virtuoso piano concert (feelwise pretty "Uptown") is a nice contrast. The perform- ances were all characterized by a devotion to the music (and the composers, Alan Curran, Elliott Carter, Anthony Davis, Charles Wuorinen, Frederic Rzewski). (A piano virtuoso sems to be a different species from other virtuosi.)
- David Hicks, "A Cross Country Music Tour" Perpectives of New Music Vol 22 no. 1-2 Autumn 1983 pp. 519-531
Rzewski plays himself in this recording, but apparently there is a cool version for four hands in which he plays with Ursula Oppens!
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Alvin Lucier Seesaw
meet the installation artist
Photo of Alvin Lucier from Matrix – pdf from publication “Matrix” found at Wadsworth Atheneum’s wadsworth.org site:
https://www.thewadsworth.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Matrix-79.pdf
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In the Wadsworth Atheneum, Alvin Lucier's Seesaw generated single pitched tone waves moving around stationary listeners.
- Brooke Wentz High Fidelity November 1984
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Lucier’s Seesaw is, quite obviously, hardly a conventional musical composition. The very fact that it is conceived in terms of a quiet, intimate room in a museum, rather than for the large, open stage of a concert hall, in itself represents a radical break with predominant musical traditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Lucier’s goal is to use the gallery space to investigate the properties of sound. Museum visitors to Seesaw will experience sound waves as actual physical presences. Lucier’s work narrows the gap between art and science. He celebrates both as intertwined modes of experimentation and inquiry.
Lucier frequently uses electronic technology to translate normally inaudible sounds (e.g. echoes, brain waves, room resonances) into more accessible forms. Thus he does not employ musical notation or even formal structures based on scales, intervals, tonality or serialism. Says Lucier: “My method of composition consists in studying a particular phenomenon until I understand it; experimenting with it empircally, in real situations; then, in trying to think of beautiful ways of using it in musical performance. I regard music as a means of putting people into harmony with nature.”
Lucier’s artist statement:
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Jerry Hunt Transphalba (ROTA): monopole
video + audio cross-scan
The most charming works of the festival were by improvisers John Zorn and Jerry Hunt. Zorn allows for human interaction and spontaneity while Hunt focuses on man and machines, but both composers use a sign/signal system. Zorn's musicians (Fred Frith, Christian Marclay, David Noss, Wayne Horvitz, and Ned Rothenberg [+Robin Holcomb]) played Rugby, a game for six improvisers, each cued by a human prompter. Hunt, on the other hand, hit suitcases, banged metal, and flashed lights at his awesome "video-scan and audio cross-scan" computer, which responded to his commands.
- Brooke Wentz High Fidelity November 1984
Artist description. I do believe this is the only time I have ever heard of the term “Rosicrucian chess”.
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Frances-Marie Uitti -
(Originally planned as a duet but Michael Pugliese couldn't make it)
John Cage: Études Boréales
world premiere
John Cage's Études Boréales, premiered by Frances-Marie Uitti, emphasized intervallic relationships based on time structures.
- Brooke Wentz High Fidelity November 1984
Frances-Marie Uitti plays John Cage: Evening again, phenomenal cello-playing. Ms. Uitti belongs to a rare breed of performer-she makes anything she plays sound hot.
- David Hicks, "A Cross Country Music Tour" Perspectives of New Music Vol 22 no. 1-2 Autumn 1983 pp. 519-531
Marco Simonacci Etudes Boréales for solo cello, 2010
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S.E.M. Ensemble
Petr Kotik: "Solo and Incidental Harmonies"
Petr Kotik's "Solo and Incidental Harmonies"[was] a sad-eyed romp in a combined minimal and medieval style that evoked the improbable thought of Samuel Beckett dancing a jig.
- Geoffrey Stokes, "New Music Back to Normal", Village Voice July 24, 1984
S.E.M. posting of 1987 recording
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Joseph Jarman
with Geri Allen and S. Banks (movement)
Stone Stories - Sky -
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Joseph Jarman's Stone Stories-Sky- a dark ritual Jarman on woodwinds, Geri Allen on keyboards as divining rods of unseen electricity, divided by miles of empty floorspace S. Banks ("movement") enters easily, joining the other two with her string pluckers sounds; physically joining them too, these two who remain forever on opposite sides of dark, ritual emptiness oblique contacts merge without a struggle; a poem and a wooden flute, sawn askew; and a dancer whose scalene movements speak the language of fingers to lips de-stylized gesture, more pure than dance, she slowly unfolds it against sparse synthesizer and ticktack sax, lip-popping; they all listen, sparsely, sparkling; it's a gem.
- David Hicks, "A Cross Country Music Tour" Perpectives of New Music Vol 22 no. 1-2 Autumn 1983 pp. 519-531
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Joseph Jarman incorporated dancers in his vague, ritualistic piece for woodwinds, synthesizer and movement
- Brooke Wentz High Fidelity November 1984