June 11, 1980 NMA Minneapolis - day 5
Charlie Morrow (archive audio, talk) ● Richard Lerman ● Peter Zummo and Stephanie Woodard ● Libby Larsen & Vern Sutton (archive audio, interview) ● Stacey Bowers ● Tom Johnson with Lightfoot & Richard
Joel Chadabe - installation and maybe performance at Nicolett Mall
Richard Lerman - Travelon Gamelan Solo - bicycle gamelan
Charlie Morrow - Sunrise Celebration, Slow Reveille
Carei Thomas and Joseph Smith
Charlie Morrow with the St. Croix Rivermen - musical happening
Christopher Janney with Nancy Hauser Dance - Soundstair
Charles Amirkhanian - KSJN radio special
Joel Chadabe - sound event
Peter Zummo and Stephanie Woodard Torrent - Seoul Dance
Libby Larsen with Vern Sutton - A Verse Record of My Pyrenees
Stacey Bowers - untitled piano work
Tom Johnson with Peter Lightfoot and Gene Richard - Five Shaggy Dog Operas
Lindsay Cooper with Georgie Barn and Sally Potter - FIG
KQRS radio - midnight jazz special
KTWN radio - Leroy Jenkins and Oliver Lake Jazz in the Night at midnight
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NMA Minneapolis 1980 June 11, day 6
At dawn: Charlie Morrow and friends with Drums and Bugle Corps
Sunrise Celebration and Slow Reveille
Charlie’s use of Drums and Bugles around this time:
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archive.org recording (begins at 36m15):
https://archive.org/details/NMA_1980_06_XX_02
Transcript to this section of the recording:
36:05
Nigel Redden: “From fishing to the sunrise, composers are often inspired by nature, if in rather unpredictable ways.
♪36:15 Charlie Morrow
♪> 36:39 Redden: We’re listening to a short section of Charlie Morrow’s Sunrise Celebration. It’s rather unfair to play Charlie’s piece on the radio because it was an event that was made specifically for its setting.
Sunrise Celebration began with the sun at 5:30 a.m., a rising time which was something of a novelty to many members of the audience. The Minnesota Brass, the Drum and Bugle Corps, arrived at 6 a.m. and the police arrived at 6:30. Luckily, the policemen were mollified and the band played on, walking slowly to the top of the hill in [Pharag]’s Park, a rolling wooded park which occupies one block of a residential neighborhood in south Minneapolis.
While you won’t be able to see the small mirrors reflecting the sun on the band member’s costumes, or taste the strawberries and croissants supplied by one kind soul, you’ll be able to hear at least a bit of the music and some comments by its creator.
♪> 37:28
37:35 Charlie Morrow: When I visited West Point a few years ago, I heard their Drum and Bugle Corps and it was the finest ensemble there. And it reminded me that the bugle calls are played at different hours of the day but they are the same every day of the year. And so I decided I would create a way of tailoring the bugle call to each day of the year, according to the amount of, the amount of light that was falling on the earth.
And I’m myself quite phototropic, I do the sky singing and I’m very interested in, in image.
38:14
I always work into a site, and in that sense, this is the art of an event maker. Event making, event making is something like pool. You call the shot, you do it. And the elements of it are the location and the content of gestures and sound within it.
38:38 ♪
Woman: Well, we don’t really don’t know what we’re doing, we just kind of made it up as we went along, as the music fit it. It was unusual (chuckles) – it was different?
Man: Tiring, your arms, holding your horn up all the time…
Woman: A lot of hard, very intense concentration. Ah, I’ve never really done anything like it, it’s um, quite an experience.
39:06 ♪ [horns of all tones]
39:27
Charlie Morrow: Another aspect of event making is the politics of live music, and live action which I feel are quite different from packaging it. You know, you’re gonna put – you’re recording onto a tape and you can replay it any time and the, certain things just aren’t that way. And I’m really concerned a lot with the things that aren’t that way and making things that are really in a very, very specific way, tied to a time and a place.
39:53
Nigel Redden: That was Charlie Morrow speaking about his Sunrise Celebration, which welcomed day five of New Music America.
39:59
While this celebration is quite apolitical, Morrow’s nature inspired compositions often have politically charged overtones concerned with ecology. Julius Eastman is often inspired by political subjects of a different kind. The title of his two compositions that were performed during the festival, Gay Guerilla and Evil Nigger clearly indicate his political concerns.
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Charlie Morrow organized a Sunrise Celebration, which drew a couple of hundred spectators, despite the early hour. This time the site was a city park in Minneapolis and the performers were about 25 members of the St. Croix Rivermen, a local drum and bugle corps. Morrow faced east and chanted an introduction from a hilltop, and then, precisely at sunrise, the corps began a slow moving sequence at the other end of the park. As in some other Morrow pieces I like, there is a counting system and rigid formalistic control.
In this case the musicians counted out loud to 21, over and over. While the drums kept a steady beat, the brass players entered and exited on particular counts, playing the notes of a major chord. At the end of each 21-count sequence, everyone took a step forward. In a later section, the musicians began stepping more often, and eventually, about 50 minutes into the piece, they reached the top of the hill.
There they moved into a kind of snake dance that permitted some improvisational liberties. The performing group did not have the kind of musical and marching skills I have seen in some competitions, but they looked splendid in their uniforms, and they enacted this odd musical ritual with commitment. I later learned that if they had played the music much faster, perhaps 200 times faster, it would have been recognizable as a literal rendering of Reveille.
- Tom Johnson, “New Music America Takes Over A Town”, Village Voice, June 26, 1980
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Richard Lerman’s Travelon Gamelon Solo for Bicycle Orchestra (photograph from Minnesota Star)
“Signal Festival”’ version of Travelon Gamelon posted 2018
Stationary (and dismantled bicycles) concert version by Arizona State University
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Missoula 2008 version
1982 concert version posted by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings:
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Christopher Janney with the Nancy Hauser Dance Company
Soundstair launch - State Capitol and Northrup Auditorium, U of Minnesota
Undated video at Christopher Janney’s y2b account:
2011 presentation at the Boston Children’s Hospital
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Peter Zummo and Stephanie Woodard:
Torrent and Seoul Dance
♪
Libby Larsen with Vern Sutton
A Verse Record of My Pyrenees
[4 sopranos + percussionists] Larsen on “experimental”
From the Melinda Ward MPR version of the packaged 1980 Minneapolis recordings:
https://archive.org/details/AM_1983_07_19
St. Paul based composer Libby Larsen is a co-founder of the Minnesota Composers Forum, a group that presents concerts and gives fellowships, and which was by the way, very helpful in the organization of New Music America 1980. Her work has been performed frequently at Walker Art Center, unlike many of the composers whose work was presented at the festival, she herself did not perform.
A Verse Record of My Pyrenees which we are about to hear, is written for tenor, percussion and four sopranos. Larsen spoke with Nancy [Hution] about the development of the piece.
Libby Larsen: This is a piece which is based on a Japanese poetic diary, which is – that is, how to describe it? It’s a theatrical form in Japan, and a very ancient form. This particular diary was written at about 800 A. D. and what it is, is it’s a very black and white kind of form where sections of violent prose are pitted sections of very distilled haiku.
So what I’ve decided to do is to take the traditional use of words and follow the words exactly, and for the violent sections of prose, I’ve chosen Vern Sutton who is a tenor of remarkable capabilities to sing that section. He does things, he sings chords, he sings five octave glissandos, he wails and screeches and he sings normally. With the impetus being that this particular diary is about a fellow who is in the hospital, and this is the period of crisis, he really could die or he would get well, so it’s the breaking of the fever.
The key word to this piece is “distill”. I’m using solo voices and a speaking voice and one bell, in the piece and what I’ve decided to do is to create a sound environment in the auditorium, so that your eyes are directed towards the tenor but your ears are surrounded with sound. And so using four women’s soprano voices, I’m directing them through a series of speakers. They sing cooing, morning dove kinds of songs – cooo-rooo-rooo, cooo-rooo-rooo and little sounds that sound like morning doves kind of a, kind of an internal lullabye. How you feel when you’re extremely ill, when you just wrack yourself back into health, is, is the kind of feeling created by them.
And then the speaker, actually reads the haiku part of the Japanese diary. I used a female voice to counterbalance the male voice and she will be – and I’m just starting her voice with a harmonizer, so what I’m actually doing is using electronics in a theatrical way.
[Hution]: You write music for a variety of purposes. Some of your pieces have been done with theatre productions, you’ve done opera, you’ve even done a piece for string band, is there a common thread that it’s definitely Libby Larsen in all of those things?
Libby Larsen: I think the thread that’s Libby Larsen is I try and bring joy to whatever I do. I – if I write a piece that’s a tragedy, or that has tragic characteristics, I almost always think of tragedy as bittersweet, whereas as tragedy is survival. Tragedy is anything but “dah” in my mind and ah, so I try and bring a kind of quiet joy into all my music, no matter what it is from the most objective to the most subjective.
That’s usually accomplished through a kind of flow, whether it’s exactly metered or whether it’s the flow of sound to sound or whatever it is, I try and create an undercurrent of flow and oftentimes that would be with a subconscious beat that you don’t hear but you feel. Um, new music in my music tends to happen through the form. Okay?
I still am hanging on to the idea of form, and I realize that that may be considered old-fashioned or cop out or whatever, I don’t care. I know, for instance form is no form, there is no piece that does not have form. It has a beginning, it has an end, no matter what.
So I am playing around with form. My form tends to be again, almost a sensitivity based form, it’s fragmented so that I will jump from one thing to another and then come back to what I was talking about before. I think that way, too. So I guess, the form of my pieces tends to reflect my thought patterns.
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Stacey Bowers [piano work]
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Tom Johnson with Peter Lightfoot and Gene Richard
Five Shaggy Dog Operas: The Dryer
https://archive.org/details/NMA_1980_06_XX_02/NMA_1980_06_XX_02_A_ed.wav
Program notes:
Many artists in recent yeas have allowed their works to spin themselves out logically according to a few basic premises. Sculptors like Carl André and Sol LeWitt, poets like Dick Higgins and Emmett Williams, choreographers like Laura Dean and David Lushy, and dozens of grid painters have all worked in this way, and so have some composers.
Ideally this kind of work should be intricate enough for the form itself to be interesting, rigorous enough that the logic really controls what happens, and clear enough that one can easily perceive what is going on, and it seems to me that few musical compositions have met all these criteria.
During the last few years I have focussed my attention more and more on this area and have investigated many types of patterns.
I have gained some insights from systemic painters, who have been working in this direction for some time, and from ornamental designs, which can be found in the arts and crafts of many cultures. I have found other techniques by reconsidering medieval isometric music and exploring ways of overlaying rhythmic patterns with melodic patterns.
Other principles have arisen from mathematics, where numerous types of logical sequences have been discovered and studied. Also helpful have been conversations with my friends Philip Corner, David Feldman and Daniel Goode, who have been interesd in similar problems.
In the Five Shaggy Dog Operas, Nine Bells and the very recent Movements for wind quintet, I have worked with visual theatrical elements as well as purely musical ones.
But whatever the materials, I try to structure them in ways that are fairly intricate and yet totally perceptible, and I allow them to follow their premises in completely consistent ways. I like to refer to this kind of work as "deductive music".
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From the transcription pertaining to Tom Johnson in the Nigel Redden hosted radio program at this link:
https://archive.org/details/NMA_1980_06_XX_02
23:24
Redden: That was Pattern Study no. 2 by Stacey Bowers, performed by the St. Paul based new music group Zeitgeist. By the way, that piece was recorded on the group’s album called, simply enough Zeitgeist, which moved the Village Voice to comment the piece sounded as if the players and composer too are really enjoying themselves.
I think that Tom Johnson was enjoying himself, at least as much as Stacey Bowers, in the next piece we’re going to hear. Five Shaggy Dog operas is what Tom Johnson called “deductive music”. He takes a musical idea which is quite simple, and follows it to its conclusion. In this case, accumulation is the basic idea. We’ll hear only a selection, the climax in fact.
Tom Johnson plays the piano, Peter Lightfoot and Gene Richard sing and act. Both singers are dressed elegantly in white. The tenor is torn by uncertainty. Should he ask a question of the baritone who is fishing? Between each verse, the baritone catches a fish, which he hangs on a clean white grid upstage. Here then is the final section, The Dryer, part four of Tom Johnson’s Five Shaggy Dog Operas.
♪24:33 Johnson, Lightfoot and Richard Five Shaggy Dog Operas: The Dryer
35:41 applause
35:54
Redden: You’ve just heard a section of The Dryer from Five Shaggy Dog Operas by Tom Johnson, with the composer at the piano. Joining him were singers Peter Lightfoot and Gene Richard.
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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_f95031e6eaf6403e88eef8271b7fa39c.pdf