June 14, 1980 - NMA Minneapolis - day 8
Nigel Rollings & Ad Hoc Rock (NMA catapulted him to Spoleto, you know) (Bill Laswell played with him?) ● "Blue" Gene Tyranny ● Laurie Anderson ● Alvin King
Nigel Rollings Ad Hoc Rock
“Blue” Gene Tyranny Country Boy Country Dog
Laurie Anderson Americans On The Move
Alvin King 13 Acts for Adult and Consenting Piano
Nigel Rollings Ad Hoc Rock
with Mark Abbott, Bill Laswell, Bill Buchan, Shelley Hirsch and David Garland
After New Music America 1980, Nigel Redden would go on to spend the next three decades involved with the Spoleto Festival USA, in Charleston, South Carolina. He retired from that festival in 2022.
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“Blue” Gene Tyranny
The Country Boy Country Dog Concert for Improviser(s) and Electronics
...and verbiage and my movements in the teenage macho atmosphere of the Midwest, this piece happened, for better or worse. The general procedure was to cover the ground where I lived from day to day, moving in certain geophysical and animalistic ways (it's true, I'm trying not to be cute), and to record the environmental sounds and myself, and then by an electronic method to derive harmonic, melodic and rhythmic patterns or codes - simple events physically inherent in the relatively more complex sounds... the Bo Diddley rhythm kept turning up. Another person making a version of this piece in a different time and place would come up with quite different stuff, and the piece wouldn't have this title, of course.
For me, this procedure increased my feeling for the unnamed but real transition between the sounds of daily life and tonal information (music), much the same way that a person wakes up with a tune in his head for no reason, or the howling of wolves sounds strangely human. The building and release of pressure inside and outside results in music and images (ideas). I don't remember if it solved anything.
There is another version of this piece just using a portable thing like a transistor radio, in "real" time. This much of the piece need never reach the concert stage. I made the Concert to show that the patterns or codes could sound like some more recognizable tonal music something with a tuning, and to have a piece to improvise with. It is a mix (1980) of 4 of the codes, with some acoustic sample-and-holds and a scan-rate track, during which a solo performer or performers freely improvise with certain tonal material pitched to the resonances of the codes. The performer does not have to react to, or imitate any of the "circumstantial' taped sounds. This completes the re-cycling. Get rid of the plot, leave the feeling, who wrote this story anyway?
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Tyranny would go on in 1994 to record a suite named How To Discover Music in the Sounds of Your Daily Life, described as “a procedural score for recording and composing with environmental sounds. Eclectic, flowing music alternately gesturing toward impressionism and minimalism.”
https://www.discogs.com/release/918199-Blue-Gene-Tyranny-Country-Boy-Country-Dog
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‘Blue’ Gene Tyranny (also known as Robert Sheff), who is familiar around New York mostly for his collaborations with Robert Ashley, came from San Francisco to present Country Boy Country Dog. As a composer who works with pop sounds he was, after all, being compared with Laurie Anderson, Peter Gordon and Julia Heyward, all of whom had brought with them whole stagefuls of personnel and equipment. For Tyranny, however, the stage was completely bare except for one little electronic keyboard dwarfed in the middle. But as soon as he walked out, dropped his old sport coat on the chair, sat down, and began playing, I knew everything was okay. The music has harmonic richness, physical intensity, and coloristic brilliance all at once.
- Tom Johnson, “New Music America Takes Over A Town”, Village Voice, June 25, 1980
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Laurie Anderson
Americans on the Move
No details on this performance which would become sections from United States Live. On the other hand it was a work that she would occupy for at least five years until the film Home of the Brave.
Program notes:
For the past year I have been working on an extended series of performance work about various aspects of American culture. It is in four parts: Transportation, Psychosociology, Money, and Love. Selections from this work will be presented at New Music America.
Primarily, this work is based on language. Musical lines are derived from spoken passages and filters such as the Harmonizer and Vocoder act as electronic bridges to instrumental parts. Rhythmic structures are defined by series of images as well as by sound.
Various forms of coded language are run through systems which, in the following series, accelerates musically from reading rate to 24 frames per second to rapid scanning and eventual deterioration.
The detective novel is the only novel form truly invented in the twentieth century. In the detective novel, the hero is dead at the very beginning. So you don't have to deal with human nature at all. Only the slow accumulation of facts.
In science fiction films, the hero just flies in at the very beginning. He can walk in zero gravity... bend steel with his hands. And everybody just takes this for granted. Nobody asks how he is able to do these things. They just say, "Look ! He can walk in zero gravity!" So you don't have to deal with human nature at all.
When TV signals are sent out, they don't stop. They just keep going out into space, picking up speed as they leave the solar system. By now, the first TV shows ever made have been travelling for thirty years. They are well beyond our solar system now. All those characters from cowboy series, variety shows, and quiz games are sailing out. They are the first true voyagers into deep space. And they sail farther and farther out, intact, still talking, our predecessors. And as we listen with our instruments - as we learn to listen farther and farther into…
Excerpts played at the Nova Convention, 1978, and appearing on the double album (double cassette, actually) on Giorno Poetry Systems:
The “cover” of the digital version of an article in the Cambridge University journal Drama Review in a special issue on women and performance. No author nor abstract is available on this side of the academic paywall, but we do have this nice teaser:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-drama-review-tdr/article/abs/americans-on-the-move-parts-1-2/44591450D50B4C5D19567D8664290535
A review by Bérénice Reynaod in Performance Art Magazine (MIT Press), probably May or June 1979 but could be 1978…
Undated, your guess is as good as mine!
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Alvin King
13 Acts for Adult and Consenting Piano (1979)
No information beyond the program description on this one, but it does make me think of a work from a decade later, John Zorn’s 13 movement string quartet work named Dead Man, all about S & M (though that’s not always pointed out when it’s played).
Official program notes:
13 Acts for Adult and Consenting Piano (1979):
I The Rubber
II The Holes
III The Brushing
IV The Slide
V The Fingering
VI Inversion
VII The Response
VIII The Whip
IX The Fragments
X The Balls
XI The Snub
XII The Descent
XIII Epitaph
13 Acts is a variation on a Greek theme from around the first century. In the variations, several means of exciting the strings of the piano are employed.
The theme appears first sounded by the rubber eraser of a pencil, followed by a polygamous entry into the seven holes of the metal frame.
The brushing is accomplished with the peripheral instruments of human function, the toilet and tooth brush. The delicate touch now on one string releases the theme in harmonics.
The fingering at first gentle and then rough creates a terrific buzz. In the inversion the theme appears head to toe. The strings respond to the voice of the performer.
Not pleased, the performer resorts to punitive means which result in an unexpected positive response. There remains only a fragmentary memory. Balls, racket balls, bounce here and there.
Now, classical music, too heavy for the strings, allows only a choking sound to emerge. The theme appears with a descending accompaniment and the epitaph brings its message from the distant past.
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There was a lot of humor, ranging from Macalester College professor Alvin King’s silly 13 acts for Adult and Consenting Piano, during which he beat piano strings with a whip and caressed them with a toilet-bowl brush.
- Jon Bream, Minneapolis Star
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