June 12, 1981 NMA San Francisco - Day 6
R. Jones ● H. LeRoux ● Margaret Fisher + Robert Hughes ● Conlon Nancarrow ● Ustad Ali Akbar Khan (vid, audio stream) ● Keith Terry ● Douglas Hollis ● Other Music Gamelan All Stars ● Geri Allen b'dy
Conlon Nancarrow and Charles Amirkhanian - workshop
Ralph Jones Rotunda Sounding
Various business types - Publishing and distribution workshop
Hermann LeRoux and the Veil of Isis - New music from the San Francisco Conservatory
Margaret Fisher with Robert Hughes and Azuma Kabuki The True and False Occult
(with archive audio on stream)
Conlon Nancarrow - player piano performance with composer in attendance
(archive recording on stream)
Ustad Ali Akbar Khan - Raga and Tala (video and audio stream of performance)
Keith Terry - Jazz Tap percussion ensemble
Douglas Hollis Fire Watercycle
Other Music Gamelan All Stars - Late nite modern American gamelan
June 12 is the birth date of Geri Allen who performed twice at the NMAs.
At NMA 1989 in NYC, she performed live music to accompany the silent film “The Scar of Shame” as part of a special series at the American Museum of the Moving Image
The original film (without Geri Allen’s accompaniment)
In 1987 at NMA Philadelphia, she performed a set of solo piano; this was part of a preview aired during the week of the festival on Philly radio:
At NMA Hartford, July 1984, Geri Allen took part in Joseph Jarman’s Stone Stories - Sky - in December 1983 she had participated in Jarman’s full recording Inheritance.
https://www.discogs.com/release/4398757-Joseph-Jarman-Inheritance
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New Music America San Francisco 1981 - day 6
Conlon Nancarrow
[workshop most likely with Charles Amirkhanian] Exploratorium
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Ralph Jones Rotunda Sounding
at Palace of Fine Arts Rotunda
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[someone to be discovered]
[Publishing and Distribution Workshop] Exploratorium
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Herman LeRoux and the Veil of Isis
[new music from the san francisco conversatory]
de Young Museum Hearst Court
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Margaret Fisher, Robert Hughes and Azuma Kabuki
The True and False Occult Japan Center Theatre
27 minute excerpt from the Other Musics streaming archive:
https://archive.org/details/NMA_1981_06_12_1
Audio description:
The first Act of the June 12th concert of the 1981 New Music America Festival was a multi-media dance piece by choreographer Margaret Fisher with music by Robert Hughes. Entitled “The True and False Occult” this work involved three dancers, image projection, and music by Robert Hughes with additional music provided by the Azuma Kabuki Musicians. The New York Times (8/16/81) describes the piece as: “set to a suite that begins with coolly percussive music by the Azuma Kabuki Musicians and ends with atmospheric flute and cello music and an electronic sequencer study by Robert Hughes, Miss Fisher's collaborator. The dance, newly revised for solo performance, spreads out across the entire performance space with rectangular panels used for projections of words, the letter sequence ''abracadabra'' and mysterious line drawings of figures, one of which Miss Fisher suddenly inhabits. In several of the sequences she appears to perch, suspended, over water, now swimming it, now riding it, her long arms and deft fingers diving, it seems, into a teeming sea to retrieve its smallest treasures. At other moments she stands, her upper body and arms wavering and scribbling in flyaway gesture. There is a sequence in which she unfolds and curls atop a tiny pedestal as projections of a wonderfully innocent looking teapot, designed by Beth Fein, sail through the air above. A flying Ouija board and two hands skim across the space, settling neatly to end the dance. The fragments have come together into a cohesive waking dream.”
Found this from her website which includes a couple of very brief (30 second) excerpts but more importantly, the point of the whole thing… photo from the link/ mafish’s archives
https://www.mafishco.com/art+tech04_FalseandTrueOccult01.htm
From her webpage:
The True and False Occult proposes three new relationships to time and space to be realized within the Japanese “floating world”:
Toward a Metric Calendar
Toward Zero Gravity Environments
Toward the Elimination of the Perspectival Horizon LineExperiments with floating heads on a pilgrammage to Mt. Fuji, a swimmer in a mylar pool, and calligraphy exercises for the hands create confusion between two- and three-dimensional space. Clusters of words move like the corps de ballet across the corrugated terrain of Mt. Fuji. A dancer spells out words with the hand alphabet at lightening speed. Above her head the light spells out ABRACADABRA in a spastic rhythm matching that of her hand. Dance proceeds on the horizontal planes, the dancers suspended one moment in space, another, in water. A teapot above pours words, not liquid, along an arc that defies the gravity of the situation. The logic of space and language is turned on its head.
This work and its companion piece The True and False Occult were unique to the field of interdisciplinary performance art and showcased at a diversity of art festivals such as New Music America (San Francisco), New Dance USA (Minneapolis), The Ideas Festival (Telluride, Colorado), The San Francisco International Theatre Festival, Neofest (Performance Art, La Jolla), CRT (Center for Research in Theater, Milan, Italy) and a variety of art schools. Fisher received a one-year Japan-U.S. Artist Exchange Fellowship from the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission following a U.S. tour of this work. More information can be downloaded here:
The Drama Review (Dec. 1980): Gail Bochenek, “Two Performance Pieces by Margaret Fisher"
San Francisco Bay Guardian: Rita Felciano, “Artful Intellect" September 20, 1989
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Conlon Nancarrow Studies for Player Piano
Japan Center Theatre
Archive recording of actual presentation of the tapes that were necessary because they couldn’t get one of his player pianos on the plane from Mexico.
https://archive.org/details/NMA_1981_06_12_2
Audio description:
The second Act of the June 12th concert of the 1981 New Music America Festival was devoted to the music of Conlon Nancarrow, who specialized in composing for the player piano. However unlike the ragtime player piano music that many people are familiar with, Nancarrow’s works are distinguished by their immense mathematical complexity and remarkable speed. In some ways they are not unlike a Bach fugue or canon played at speeds that were impossible to imagine before the advent of the computer. Impossible that is, unless you were Conlon Nancarrow, who was perhaps the only person to recognize the unique potential of the player piano to produce such challenging new music. This concert is particularly noteworthy because Nancarrow was in the audience, on his first trip back to the United States after over 30 years of living in Mexico City, where he had moved to after facing persecution for his communist sympathies and involvement in the Spanish Civil War in the early 1930s. Due to the fact that Nancarrow composed for his own player piano which he had modified in order to get a crisper sound, an instrument that was too large to bring on the plane, this concert presented tapes of his studies played over loudspeakers.
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21:49
We’re talking with Han Reitziger and ah, Han, before we close, could you just give us some more of your impressions of the festival, any other things that particularly stood out from your point of view, as a…
Han Reitziger: Well…
Charles Amirkhanian: …producer in Holland?
Han Reitziger: …ah, that was anyway to see and to hear Nancarrow again. Well, to see him and to meet him, that was really ah, well, it was really an event.
Charles Amirkhanian: Yeah, and he – all those years he’s been composing player piano roll studies and nobody really ever meets him unless they go to Mexico City…
Han Reitziger: Yeah.
Charles Amirkhanian: …and here at the age of sixty-eight he comes back and ah, it was quite moving for everybody.
- From KPFA’s Morning Concert with Charles Amirkhanian June 18, 1981 San Francisco
Some of the versions that were played that night of the Studies were listed and made available to subscribers at the radiom.org website, though it isn’t noted whether these were the same recordings that made their way to the legendary 1750 Arch records.
The second Act of the June 12th concert of the 1981 New Music America Festival was devoted to the music of Conlon Nancarrow, who specialized in composing for the player piano. However unlike the ragtime player piano music that many people are familiar with, Nancarrow’s works are distinguished by their immense mathematical complexity and remarkable speed. In some ways they are not unlike a Bach fugue or canon played at speeds that were impossible to imagine before the advent of the computer. Impossible that is, unless you were Conlon Nancarrow, who was perhaps the only person to recognize the unique potential of the player piano to produce such challenging new music. This concert is particularly noteworthy because Nancarrow was in the audience, on his first trip back to the United States after over 30 years of living in Mexico City, where he had moved to after facing persecution for his communist sympathies and involvement in the Spanish Civil War in the early 1930s. Due to the fact that Nancarrow composed for his own player piano which he had modified in order to get a crisper sound, an instrument that was too large to bring on the plane, this concert presented tapes of his studies played over loudspeakers.
Musical Selections: Studies No. 21 “Canon X” (2:49) -- Study No. 10 (3:05) -- Study No. 36 (4:00) -- Study No. 25 (5:35) -- Study No. 12 (4:15) -- Study No. 40b (4:24)
No. 21 - a roll made (and signed) by Conlon Nancarrow for Juergen Hocker
No. 36
The musiciologist specializing in player piano music has many more of the Nancarrow works, including those played at the performance at his y2b site:
https://www.youtube.com/@playerpianoJH/videos
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Ustad Ali Akbar Khan [performance]
Japan Center Theatre
Actual performance video, posted by y2b user “Raga Rang”:
Audio stream described in the stream from the Other Minds archive;
https://archive.org/details/NMA_1981_06_12_3
From the stream post:
A recital by the renowned sarod player, and founder of the Ali Akbar College of Music, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. As with any North Indian classical concert, the music played depended on the time of day as well as the mood and inspiration of the artist. Therefore, the raga and tala of this concert was chosen accordingly, to match the mood of the evening, and was decided upon just prior to the performance. (from KPFA Folio)
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Keith Terry [Jazz Tap percussion ensemble]
Performance Gallery
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Douglas Hollis Fire Watercycle
Palace of Fine Arts Rotunda
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Other Music Gamelan All Stars “late-nite”
“modern American gamelan” the Complex
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