July 9, 1982 NMA Chicago day 5
John Cage panel - Lowell Cross - Harold Budd - Roscoe Mitchell - Annea Lockwood - Peter Gena - Jeffrey Lohn - Salvatore Martirano - Live National Radio - Robert Ashley to end the evening at Navy Pier
♪
John Cage panel "New Music and our Changing Culture" symposium
Lowell Cross Laser event with electronics
Salvatore Martirano - Sal-Mar Construction (day 4)
Charles Amirkhanian + Joan La Barbara - live broadcast from festival
Harold Budd Solo piano - Children on the Hill + interview
Roscoe Mitchell - Prelude and Variations and Sketches from Bamboo
Annea Lockwood - Delta Run
Peter Gena - S-13, S-14 for woodwinds, keyboards and harps
Jeffrey Lohn - Theoretical Music
Robert Ashley - Perfect Lives (Private Parts) - parts 6 and 7
♪ ♪ ♪ ♪
John Cage panel
"New Music and our Changing Culture" symposium
with Christian Wolff, Dan Graham, Marjorie Perloff, David Behrman
and Ben Johnston
♪
Lowell Cross Laser Event
Performances of Laser Event will take place under the dome of the Sky Theatre at the Adler Planetarium, utilizing a multi-channel sound system and Video/Laser IV, the Planetarium’s six-color laser deflection system. Members of the audience will experience a real-time performance by Lowell Cross of kinetic laser imagery operating in conjunction with prerecorded and electronic sounds.
Video/Laser IV was designed and built at the University of Iowa in 1979-80 by a team headed by Lowell Cross, and installed under his supervision in March 1980 as part of the Planetarium’s 50th anniversary celebration.
The sound materials for Laser Event are directly interrelated with the visual materials. The performances will incorporate improvisational techniques made available with a “3D Laser Display Processor” as well as prerecorded sounds on magnetic tape, either acoustical in origin or generated by analog and digital electronic circuitry. The special Processor permits the projection of laser imagery having the visual illusion of three dimensions, while also serving as an electronic sound generating and processing device.
- Lowell Cross program notes
*
The local planetarium hosted a laser and electronic piece by Lowell Cross, which some people loved and others could take or leave.
- Chris Merrick, KOPN Columbia, Missouri Music Director in Ear Magazine, Report from "Middle Ear"
========
Salvatore Martirano Sal-Mar Construction (day 4)
♪
~~~Charles Amirkhanian and Joan La Barbara
Live broadcast from festival~~~~~~~~~~~~
https://archive.org/details/NMA_1982_07_09
Radio station WFMT in Chicago presents the fourth 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, with additional commentary by Neil Tesser. After beginning with a rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner” sung by various unidentified and not necessarily professional singers, the actual concert gets underway with Harold Budd performing a number of his works for solo piano. This is followed by two songs performed by a jazz trio led by Roscoe Mitchell on saxophone joined by tenor Tom Buckner. Other pieces heard include a tape piece by Annea Lockwood that features an interview she had with sculptor Walter Wincha, just days before his death, a work by Peter Gena inspired by two moons orbiting Saturn. Intermission features include a profile of Lockwood and an interview with Robert Ashley about his opera “Perfect Lives (Private Parts)”, and a look at the work of Richard Maxfield.
The streams of the broadcast with my transcriptions:
♪
Harold Budd Children on the Hill
Kyle Gann’s archives from the festival have provided this actual performance recording of which I’m most grateful to discover:
I think that one of the most spectacular goals composers can achieve these days is to be at least partly responsible for a music that can change your life. This is occurring anyway, but mostly outside of art music traditions, and I think this is a most wonderful confusion.
- Harold Budd’s program statement
*
The other solo, Harold Budd's Children on the Hill, as performed by the composer, had the effect of a drug-influenced piano improvisation - soft clouds of rippling arpeggios floating over a repetitive series of deliberately banal harmonic progressions.
This is 1980s "head music" for the minimalist cult.
- John Van Rhein, Chicago Tribune 'New Music America Leaves Echoes of Success"
*
5,000 kilometers from noisy Manhattan lies a land of palm trees, orange groves, vineyards and Hollywood. It's California and it's hard to imagine a composer more Californian than Harold Budd. He has lived his entire life in the Los Angeles area. His music is of an immediate and uncomplicated beauty. He is simply trying to please the listeners. Therefore, his music stands in sharp contrast to both the aggressiveness of the new generation and the theorists of the older avant-garde.
In the last few years, Harold Budd has had success with a number of gramophone records: especially those he has released in collaboration with the English composer and producer Brian Eno. At the festival in Chicago, Budd himself performed a piece for solo piano and "harmonizer" with the title Children on the Hill, whose simple and delicious expressions bordered on the naive. The connection between Harold Budd's music and jazz is immediate, and jazz was also well represented at the New Music America festival.
- Wayne Siegel, “Rapporter: New Music America Festivalen 1982” (original dutch, google translation), DMT Seismograf, 1982
♪
Roscoe Mitchell
Prelude + Variations and Sketches from Bamboo
Prelude
Version featuring Mitchell with Thomas Buckner and Gerald Oshita from 1981
Variations and Sketches from Bamboo
Prelude, originally composed as a duet for E flat Contrabass Sarrusophone and B flat Bass Saxophone, received its premiere performance in August 1979 in New York. In 1981, a Vilas Grant for Music from the University of Wisconsin in Madison enabled me to rewrite Prelude as a quartet adding the Triple Contrabass.
In Paris, 1970, Donald Rafael Garrett presented me with a bamboo flute which he had made… thus began The Bamboo Writings. With the flute’s irregular scale as a guide, a series of related settings emerged with the bamboo flute as their focus.
The first composition, Dastura, a trio for bamboo flute/flute, guitar and piano, received its premiere performance in 1974. Bells for Marianne, five short pieces for solo bamboo flute, followed in 1975.
Variations and Sketches from Bamboo, a trio for Cono Saxophone in E tenor voice, and B flat Tenor Saxophone, was performed with Prelude in 1981 in Berkeley, California.
- Roscoe Mitchell program notes
*
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"
*
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"
***
... two intriguing works by Roscoe Mitchell which focused on a rarely-heard bass improvisation (and featuring a 13-foot-long triple contrabass).
- M. Staff Brandl + Thomas Emil Homerin, "Big Noise from Lake Michigan", Ear Magazine 1982
***
Here one had to state that the boundary between jazz and avant-garde music has also disappeared in the USA. Of particular note was a movement in a work by jazz saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, which he performed with his quartet Space. The movement was written for voice, contrabass sarrusophone, bass saxophone and triple contrabass - that is, a contrabass which sounds an octave deeper than a normal contrabass and is therefore also twice as loud.
Guest bassist Brian Smith had to climb onto a special stand to play this astonishingly beautiful and elegant giant. The sight and sound of this unusual instrument was exciting and beautiful. The music, on the other hand, was not. Differently exciting was a piece for solo soprano saxophone and electronic time.
- Wayne Siegel, “Rapporter: New Music America Festivalen 1982” (original Dutch, Google translation), DMT Seismograf, 1982
♪
Annea Lockwood Delta Run
…actress Annea Lockwood's bizarre performance accompanied by a tape of the words, thoughts and experiences of sculptor Walter Wincha 30 hours before his death
- Tina Clarke, "Chicago's new music festival filled with sound and fury" Toronto Globe & Mail, July 17, 1982
***
Sometimes the concept for a work is more intriguing than the actual work. Such was the case of Delta Run by Annea Lockwood. As the audience heard Lockwood's taped interview with a dying artist, they saw her sitting alone, slowly lifting two halves of a circle into the air. Under the guise of "it's the process, not the product" the inevitable happened -the circle was joined and the interview ended (the artist died thirty hours later)-just as all knew it would. Questions that were asked during the interview were trite ("how do you feel?") and answers were predictable ("time's up, I've got to go now. . dying is a peaceful process"). Because all knew what would and eventually did happen, and because the process was dull and superficial, the experience was more grueling than enlightening.
- Deborah Campana "Two Reports" Perspectives of New Music, Autumn 1981
***
The most thought-provoking work of "New Music America '82" [was] "Delta Run" by Annea Lockwood.
This multi-media work centered on the reflections of sculptor Walter Wincha thirty hours before his death in 1979, at age thirty.
Wincha, invalid from terminal cancer, affirmed his creativity in a recorded interview in which he spoke of his impending death.
Lockwood sat on stage, slowly bringing together two small half-circular talismans with her arms, denoting in aboriginal ritual the completion of a life.
But Lockwood also contributed to the piece in her inability to be objective during her taped interview with Wincha and by asking questions which revealed universal concerns and fears regarding death.
Wincha: I'm very accepting of death.
Lockwood: Like it's in your control?
Wincha: Ah well... of course not. It's not in my control at all. But that's what it is... but I'm very accepting of it.
Lockwood also wove bird songs and other environmental sounds around the sculptor's voice to give a certain naturalness to dying, to integrate it comfortably with life.
Yet, the recurring sound of a runner on gravel omniously presaged the death which stalks us all.
It was this contrast between Wincha's dispasionate approach to the situation and Lockwood's conceptualization and symbolization of it which contributed to the intriguing nature of Lockwood's work.
"Delta Run" proved one of the outstanding offerings of the festival, even through the sound quality was poor at times, diluting the work's impact.
- M. Staff Brandl + Thomas Emil Homerin, "Big Noise from Lake Michigan", Ear Magazine 1982
***
Annea Lockwood is an actress as well as composer, and in her tape piece Delta Run, she asks us to confront the "taboo" subject of death through the perceptions of the dying sculptor Walter Wincha.
What could have seemed like a questionably morbid work was executed with taste, dignity and imagination.
- John Van Rhein, Chicago Tribune 'New Music America Leaves Echoes of Success"
♪
Peter Gena S-13, S-14
for woodwinds, keyboards and harps
S-13, S-14 was written in 1980, after it was announced that Voyager discovered the 13th and 14th moons of Saturn. The idea for the piece came along just as I was searching for an excuse to integrate two harps in a small ensemble.
- Peter Gena, program notes
*
By contrast [to Annea Lockwood's Delta Run], Peter Gena's S-13, S-14 was of high technical quality.
Gena proposed a significant variation on prevalent minimalist concerns by introducing two harps and thereby creating a unique envelope of sound.
Gena, a co-director of the festival, was also responsible for realizing - and so a "co-composer" of A Dip in the Lake.
- M. Staff Brandl + Thomas Emil Homerin, "Big Noise from Lake Michigan", Ear Magazine 1982
*
Peter Gena's S-13, S-14 (1980) took simple diatonic patterns through the circle of keys with a sunny naiveté that as oddly reminiscent of Virgil Thomson.
- John Van Rhein, Chicago Tribune 'New Music America Leaves Echoes of Success"
♪
Jeffrey Lohn Theoretical Music
Part 1: Hypothesis; Part 2: Refutation/dirge
(part 3 Finale not performed in Chicago)
With Steve Antonelli, guitar; Ann DeMartinis, electric piano; Mark Brooks, bass guitar; George Aravella, guitar; Rich Robinson, guitar; Rob Tomaro, guitar; Jeff Siegel, percussion; John Leland, percussion
Theoretical Music was composed in 1981-2 as a tribute to the memory of N. Kgoathe. Mr. Kgoathe died in prison February 4, 1969, Pretoria, South Africa. The cause of death was officially noted as “slipped in shower.” Since the death of Mr. Kgoathe, over 75 persons have died in detention in the hands of the South African Security Police.
- Jeffrey Lohn, program notes
***
Kyle Gann was also able to save a good copy of this performance:
***
Coincidentally, that evening Jeffrey Lohn and his band of electric guitars, piano and percussion played excerpts from Theoretical Music. Lohn, with Branca, had formed the band "Theoretical Girls" years before and experimented with overtones that are more easily heard when electric guitars are played at high decibel levels. Near the end of his work, which was performed as loudly as Branca's, Lohn threw the music from his electric keyboard and proceeded to conduct the final five minutes of blasting noise while he played along. Theoretical Music was under-rehearsed and the ensemble was apparently unprepared for any performance at all. Both Lohn and his musicians took turns getting lost among the pages of the score as the composition droned on. If power and energy was what the composer desired, his efforts fell flat. Long pauses and holds stopped any momentum that was started; ragged entrances undercut a unified statement.
- Deborah Campana "Two Reports" Perspectives of New Music, Autumn 1981
***
Less interesting than {Peter] Gena's work was Jeffrey Lohn's selection from his Theoretical Music, which carried minimalism to a Punk extreme.
- M. Staff Brandl + Thomas Emil Homerin, "Big Noise from Lake Michigan", Ear Magazine 1982
♪
Robert Ashley Perfect Lives (Private Parts) 6 and 7
Linda Montana about her prism through which she saw the performances:
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-outside: Robert Ashley Perfect Lives (Private Parts)
For five evenings after the three-hour Navy Pier Concerts, crowds surged willingly and eagerly up the gangplank into the S. S. Clipper ship to be immersed in Ashley's event.
Perfect Lives (Private Parts) is a consistent ritual, a fatherly bedtime story which includes fantastic characters (Kroesen, Sublette, Tyranny, Gordon, Van Tieghem etc.) and spectacular sights and sounds (Tyranny's hands on video with nail polish, on the other monitor Van Tieghem and Kroesen walking in a midwestern cornfield wearing outerspace-looking clothes and facial gestures).
Ashley becomes everyone's uncle as he croons almost undecipherable words about the midwest, about farmers, about life itself. He kindly provides video monitors with the running text on them, so that readers can translate his sounds.
But it's not the words that you want, it's the experience and comfort of knowing you are with someone you can trust, someone who will sing you the truth, cowboy style, someone who will tell you one of the best stories you have ever heard or seen.
- Linda Montano, "Moments of Consciousness", Ear Magazine 1982
Though this particular video (part 7) can’t be posted here as a link, go to Mimi Johnson’s vimeo account at this link and you’ll find most of Public Lives (Private Parts): https://vimeo.com/user2965755
♪
On attendance at this point:
Attendance for the nightly series of Navy Pier concerts had been growing all week, so that by Friday and Saturday up to 1800 new music enthusiasts were crowding into the auditorium rotunda.
The pompous pundits who predicted the festival would be an esoteric bust are not crowing anymore.
- John Van Rhein, Chicago Tribune “New Music America Leaves Echoes of Success”