June 10, 1980 NMA Minneapolis - day 4
Marianne Amacher ● Ingram Marshall ● Leif Brush & Libby Larsen ● Leif Brush interview MPR● Rich Gold ● Michael Nyman ● Nyman interview with Charles Amirkhanian
Ned Sublette - Installation at Nicollet Mall, KUOM radio specials
Ellen Fullman Film in the Cities - “Streetwalk”
Ingram Marshall Fragility Cycles (maybe)
Leif Brush with Libby Larsen Terraplane Chorography II
Sid Farrar
Dean Granros
Maryanne Amacher Research and Development
Rich Gold Modern Golf
Michael Nyman A Neat Slice of Masterwork
KQRS radio - Midnight Album Hour special
KTWN radio - Jazz in the Night - European New Jazz special
=============================================================
Birthday: Serge Arcuri
Born on this date in Beauharnois, Québec, Serge Arcuri presented as part of the Electroax Series at Montréal Musiques Actuelles his work “Murmures”. This is his latest bio en français courtesy of le wikipedia: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serge_Arcuri
and a promotional biography with a much younger picture at https://electrocd.com/en/artiste/arcuri_se/serge-arcuri/biographie
June 10, 1980 New Music America Minneapolis - Day 4
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
At the Minnesota festival, Ellen Fullman presented what she called a “Streetwalk” as part of a work called Film in the Cities wearing a metal skirt sound sculpture, described on her website. (There is a video but it may not may not be available; sometimes they don’t reach beyond the US to Canada in my case - gd)
https://www.ellenfullman.com/performances-archive-19802007/1980/6/10/film-in-the-cities-gallery-st-paul-mn
Screenshot of part of that web page describing the work in Minnesota:
She wrote this description:
In my last semester of art school I built and performed in my Metal Skirt Sound Sculpture, a landmark piece in my career because it worked on many levels. It was funny and provocative, and produced simultaneous rising and falling glissandos simply through the mechanics of walking. Four guitar strings were attached to the edges of the skirt that extended down to the toes and heels of my shoes. As each leg stepped forward, the back string stretched out while the front slackened. A contact microphone on the skirt amplified the sound of these strings through a small battery-powered amplifier that I wore strapped over my shoulder as a handbag. The restriction of the metal construction mechanized and exaggerated the sway of my hip motion. I looked like a cartoon cutout wearing armor. I walked on the street where the prostitutes worked and called my performance, literally, Streetwalker.
=============================================
Marianne Amacher Research and Development
June 10-14 226 Grotto Street, St. Paul
found here:
https://www.discogs.com/fr/release/37857-Various-OHM-The-Early-Gurus-Of-Electronic-Music-1948-1980
“Living Sound” on recording from 1980
*
For her installation, Maryanne Amacher selected a large house in St. Paul which had recently been vacated by Dennis Russell Davies and family. Even from half a block away, the whole house seemed to be screaming, as I approached I thought twice about subjecting my ears to the source of the sound just inside the front door. I held my hands over my ears as I went in, but as I passed into adjacent rooms on the ground floor, upstairs, and out onto the terrace, the volume became bearable, and the sound became more and more interesting.
At first, I had perceived little more than an undifferentiated roaring, but gradually I moved deeper into the sound, picking out complex sliding movements, shifting bass tones, and some of the countless other pitches that oscillated all over the spectrum. I also began to discern radical differences as I moved from one room to another. Of course, the setting was an important part of the project. Vacated houses are strange places to begin with, a little like broken machines. They are not functioning the way they are supposed to. They have no raison d’être. Yet this particularly empty house, filled so passionately with this particular roaring, began to take on so many layers of symbolism that I have still not managed to decide on my favorite interpretation.
- Tom Johnson, “New Music America Takes Over A Town”, Village Voice, June 26, 1980
* *
From Marianne Amacher’s website https://monoskop.org/Maryanne_Amacher
The second work group is a site-specific series called Music for Sound-Joined Rooms. In these works, Amacher used idiosyncratic speaker placements (facing walls or the floor of her installation space) to send sound through the solid medium of built space before allowing it to circulate in air, creating multiple, overlapping acoustics. Opposed to the usual air-borne transmission of sound waves (the single carrier medium for all traditional Western music), she referred to this practice in her writing as structure-borne transmission. In such works, the architectural site of the installation itself became the physical medium of the work, shaping and coloring the sounds as they propagated through it. The first piece in this series was Living Sound: Patent Pending (1980), presented as part of the Walker Art Center’s New Music America programming. Amacher described it as follows:
The house, on a hill in St. Paul with its panoramic view of Minneapolis, was lit by tall quartz spots, as if a movie set. The time: midnight. [In the] music room, where two grand pianos had been, was now an “emergent music laboratory,” there were 21 petri dishes with something growing in them — the musicians and instruments of the future. DNA photos and biochemical diagrams were placed on music stands. Meanwhile, the entire house was full of a spectacular sound — incredible loud and unbelievably dense — sound, circulating throughout the rooms, out the doors and windows, down the hill, past sedate Victorian mansions. It seems to contain the energy of all frequency ranges at once, yet never approached white noise. [Listeners] felt themselves pushed, as if by acoustic pressure, out into the garden, where the entire house was heard, sounding, as a gigantic instrument.”
=====================================
Ingram Marshall Fragility Cycles
======================================
Leif Brush with Libby Larsen
Terraplane Cheorography II
Program notes:
Leif Brush Duluth, Minnesota
My work investigates time. Through outdoor installations, electronically monitored, I develop an analog and involve nature directly as source. I am using, at times, what the unaided ear cannot, and seek eventually to see the inaudible imagined as a component of light, with unheard sound serving as simultaneous and revelatory adjunct to form.
I prefer, for example, the overhearing of brown sound's structural order: an actual natural force, neither inferred not synthesized. The Terrain Instruments installation enable observation though specialized sensing involving sound and light wave phenomena, corelating the internal and external dynamics of the forest.
Among them, the Treeharps Networking encompasses the acoustic events within 400 square feet; the Snow Pixel makes an electronic snowflake catch. Others "orchestrate" airborne vibrations, or intercept wind vortices above the ground. The Terrain Instruments computer, used for the first time in Loring Park, searches sound as a component of time.
The Chorography is an additional interactive aspect, particularizing my interests within the landscape toward the formation of whole audible constructs. Future Circulation Trilogy works will continue to meld the physical installations concept with performance or production interests through "orchestration" of diverse geographical and climatic locations.
The imagery I seek evolves from a different regard fo structure, for the internal matrices of form, probed electronically.
* *
https://archive.org/details/NMA_1980_06_XX_02/NMA_1980_06_XX_02_B_ed.wav
transcript to that part of the program hosted by Nigel Redden and with Nancy [Fuchle?] interviewing Leif Brush over the sound of some of his sound creation
1:27:10
Leaving the concert hall for a moment, let’s hear a small part of Leif Brush’s Terraplane Choreography, International Listening 2” which brought the sounds of Minnesota’s north woods near Duluth, to Loring Park adjacent to Walker Art Center.
1:27:36 ♪ Leif Brush
♪> 1:27:43 Nigel Redden: It was a highly unusual performance, involving dancers, a hundred speakers and a hundred transducers connected to leaves, twigs, and the bark of trees in the park. Leif Brush describes the work to Nancy [Fuchle].
1:27:58
Leif Brush: What happened last night was the second in a series of Terraplane Chorographies involving sound that is, as it exists in the, in space, as it exists in competition with the wind, as it exists by being absorbed by the people in their clothes, by being absorbed by the grass. It’s the, it’s a chorography that has to do with time. A computer handled the leaves for the first time, I’ve never before for leaves.
The most significant thing about the Duluth feed had to do with a comparison of the leaves in Loring Park’s oak trees and the birch trees in Duluth.
[Fuchle]: What was the difference – you mean in terms of the sound produced?
Leif Brush: Yes, this is – actually it was the first solo for a cottonwood tree – it’s a fifty year old cottonwood tree and I was – it appears it was the universal wind, obviously the wind that strikes Minneapolis isn’t guaranteed to strike Duluth, so I am very interested in different climatic conditions or atmospheric conditions, as a part of the orchestra that I’m aiming for.
[Fuchle]: Does this kind of experimentation lead to maybe grander projects or hooking in larger distance to places?
Leif Brush: Oh yes, that’s the reason why I’ve given myself to this whole thing, to me personally is a retrospective. I’m taking five parts to define that retrospective and this is number two. Number three already is a horrendous thought in my mind – um, yes, I think that the thing that I’m being guided by is the availability of the satellite.
And I’m thinking of a satellite as the orchestra leader. And, ah, when I – I’m looking forward to buying acres of land and in different climatic locations. Texas, Georgia swamps, ah, even a mix in some urban areas ah, as a part of this orchestra and these sites would be totally solar powered and those would be the members of the orchestra. And then the output from that – could, has many implications for a national radio and also video signal. The signal could also be a part of the plan that I have for Chorography III has to do with importing these sounds at the side of performers in halls. They could have one earphone on, they would play, like this way, they’d play a piano.
At their, at their feet they would have two, two buttons, one they could select Georgia swamps, northern trees, or they could select whatever they wanted and at the time where they were playing, they could punch up the Minnesota forest, control the volume and contribute not only, only instrument but by a speaker at their sides, they could furnish that to the local conductor. It depends a lot on the people participating and help defining it, what it is, that’s one of the most powerful things I think that an art work can do, is not to have someone do it, stick it someplace, and say to someone, “you cope with it” but to
♪> to have them participate and so they know first hand, in real time in real history, what, how it is.
♪ 1:31:35 Leif Brush Terraplane Chorography (excerpt)
1:31:56
Nigel Redden: While Leif Brush is trying to capture the sounds of nature, the sounds of Peter Gordon’s Love of Life Orchestra are extremely urban.
*
Leif Brush’s effort to broadcast 200 different sounds through 200 speakers suspended in Loring Park were not executed as well as they had been conceived.
- Jon Bream, Minneapolis Star. June 17, 1980
=================================
Rich Gold
Program notes:
Rich Gold Oakland, California
My music is bubble music, music of the population bubble that arose between VJ day and the end of the Korean War, that left in its wake now closed elementary schools and four bedroom suburban homes.
My young adulthood was the product of bubble fear and bubble madness as big business and government trembled in the face of an over-supplied labor market and temporarily saved America from depression with a war in South East Asia and wholesale deferments to college - dividing the bubble in two, (their word) half here, half there.
As the bubble began to surface, the government created bubble support systems including the N.E.A. (formed in the mid-60s) which grew in power as the bubble approached their collective thirties, until now when the government (federal and state) controls nearly all of the bubble music in the United States.
My music is bubble music, and it is expansive, close knit, populist, problematic, folk-like and not without its charms.
*
There was a lot of humor … Modern Golf by Buffalo’s Rich Gold, in which he gave a 25-minute lecture on the history of golf, which parodied the history of new music.
- Jon Bream, Minneapolis Star, June 17
================================================
Michael Nyman A Neat Slice of Masterwork
Audio:
https://archive.org/details/AM_1983_07_19/AM_1983_07_19_B_ed.wav
Sort of artist statement in official program
Michael Nyman London, England
Working notes
A. shorter pieces: an invariant chord sequence (say 4-8 chords) supporting a simultaneous overlay of related/unrelated rhythms and melodies subitted to a single process the completion of which indicates the end of the piece (e.g. Bird List). Avoidance of any kind of contrast.
B. extended pieces: a chord sequence (say 4-8 chords) generating a variety of distinct and self-contained sets of materials and procedures. Maximize contrast (of texture, dynamic, rhythm, tempo, metre, mood, melodic evolution, pitch level, etc.). Juxtapose irrationally to form a constantly changing sequence of interrupting/interrupted, continuously developing/ static processes.
Further possibilities:
1. Juxtaposed material presented as variation-in-succession but where the chord sequence is invariant it is possible to superimpose contrasting material as simultaneous variation-in-combination.
2. Modify the chord sequence by means of temporal extensions/diminutions, repetition and deletion but especially and preferably by harmonic substitution and addition thus generating a new set of materials and processes which interlock both with themselves and with those derived from the original invariant sequence to produce a secondary set of variant and invariant harmonic structures.
3. Introduce and incorporate harmonic structures totally unrelated to the original and derived sequences to generate a third possible set of interrupting materials/processes, which also interlock with and contradict the other processes.
4. The connecting of unrelated harmonic structures by means of common rhythmic and melodic characteristics.
A work in a constant state of (attempted) resolutions between disparate elements derived from a common harmonic ground and common elements shared by disparate harmonic grounds.
Presumed this is the same audio as above in y2b form:
*
Interview with Charles Amirkhanian and Michael Nyman as part of the packaged MPR version of the 1980 recordings - Melinda Ward’s introduction here:
While most of the composers who participated in the festival were American, a few such as Michael Nyman represented other countries. Nyman, an English composer and critic is known for is known for his introduction to avant-garde composition called Cage and Beyond and for his collaboration with filmmaker Peter Greenaway on such films as The Draughtsman’s Contract and The Fall.
During the fourth concert of the festival, Nyman performed a solo version of the masterwork called A Neat Slice of Masterwork. The masterwork which he described to Charles Amirkhanian is a performance sculpture for theatre, was composed for Nyman’s band and produced in 1979 at Riverside Studios in London.
Michael Nyman: The Neat Slice part of the title comes from a piece I wrote, a choral piece commissioned by Belgian radio called A Neat Slice of Time, which is a quotation from Susan Sonntag where she discusses the difference between still photographic images which she says encapsulate a neat slice of time, and moving images which she talks of in terms of flow.
So, the way I’m writing these at the moment, I see as being more analogous to neat slices of time, sown together so to speak, than with continuous flow. See, I had a problem up til the time that I wrote the score, I’d been writing mainly three, four, five minute pieces, maybe ten minute pieces and confronted with the problem of writing two hours. I had to work out a method of creating continuity and creating length.
Charles Amirkhanian: As some of the classical composers, you bring themes back over and over again, but you do it in a different way.
Michael Nyman: Right. I mean the whole – in fact, the amount of literal repetition is very limited. I have – I mean I’ve been listening to repetitive music for a number of years now, ten years I suppose, maybe twelve, and I’m very concerned with the rate of change, or the lack of rate or the slow rate of change in a lot of repetitive music and also the nature of that change, which seems to be too minimal.
So not only is the material in the masterwork given a particular matrix, very varied, but also every time it recurs, it does change in some ways although obviously when I do it with my ensemble, it changes far more radically than it does in a piano version.
Screenshots of the Minnesota 1980 New Music America program were taken from the late Michael Galbreth’s essay on the festival. Downloadable pdf direct link:
https://www.michaelgalbreth.com/_files/ugd/b4072f_efcb98c9bb70451e8ef98fbc89cf2f41.pdf