June 15 - closing days - 1980 NMA Minneapolis and 1981 NMA San Francisco
David Byrne (twice!) ● Art Ensemble of Chicago (twice!) ● David Byrne with Brian Eno (maybe?) ● Philip Glass ● Bill Fontana, later with Stewart Dempster
1980
David Byrne with a 10 piece string accompaniment
High Life for Strings
Art Ensemble of Chicago (two closing gala performances)
1981
David Byrne and Brian Eno My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
Philip Glass
Bill Fontana Landscape Sculpture with Foghorns
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Minneapolis 1980 last day
David Byrne High Life for Strings
a four minute piece with a ten member string section
Balenscu Quartet 1991 version:
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The festival’s unassuming token rock star, David Byrne of the Talking Heads, simply played a four-minute piece with a 10-member string section. Linda Fisher of Ithaca, N.Y., who had never performed a concert of her own material until last month, led two of her friends through a simple-minded percussion and synthesizer composition of remarkably quiet strength. And the sound man and his mixing board took on center stage with the ensemble led by Philip Glass, the pioneer in minimalism (a style that features repetition to a hypnotic extreme.
These new music composers didn’t want to be judged (or be judgmental of their peers). They just wanted their music to be heard, their unconventional ideas to provoke thought, and, above all, everyone to have a good time.
- Jon Bream, Minneapolis Star, June 16, 1980
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Art Ensemble of Chicago festival closer
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And the much-touted Art Ensemble of Chicago, making its local debut, put on an absolutely marvelous, spirited performance of ensemvle and solo improvisation in various styles of jazz and black music at Sunday’s closing concert, at the Guthrie Theatre.
- Jon Bream, Minneapolis Star, June 17, 1980
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From Rob Firchau’s blog:
On today's date in 1980, a week-long, festival entitled "New Music America" came to a close in Minneapolis with a concert at that city's Guthrie Theater. The program included the premiere of a piece entitled "High Life for Strings," composed by David Byrne, a musician best known for his work with a rock band called The Talking Heads.
Byrne later recalled, "When I participated in the New Music America festival in Minneapolis, minimalism and New-Age noodling were making big in-roads into a scene that had been, for better or worse, more insular and academic. My piece, for a dozen strings and me as a timekeeper, was on a program with Philip Glass." Byrne says he was fascinated by the intricate rhythms of West African pop music at the time, and that also influenced his "High Life for Strings.
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Talking Heads’ leader David Byrne composed a short, undulating web of African-flavored melodies scored for a 10-piece string section. Byrne described his piece as being “experimental in that it is out of context and asks strings to play in an uncharacteristically repetitive, rhythmic style.”
Brian Eno was another rock musician represented during the Festival in Minneapolis. Some years earlier, Eno had been so irritated by the inane, chirpy muzak he heard while traveling that he composed a soothing ambient synthesizer score he called "Music for Airports." Appropriately enough, during the eight days of the Festival, Eno's score was broadcast 24 hours a day throughout the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
- Kristine McKenna, Minneapolis Calendar, July 7, 1980
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1981 New Music America San Francisco closing - June 15, day 9
David Byrne and Brian Eno My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
(gd - presumably that was the work performed; I’ve been able to find nothing written about the performance, but it was the last day of a very successful festival, the point at which everybody gets rid of their notepads)
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Philip Glass
(gd note - sorry about the blurry text from the program; I’ll fix it later - it doesn’t tell which piece was performed, though)
Philip Glass New York, New York
There was a time when there wasn't this tremendous distance between the popular audience and concert music, and I think we're approaching that stage again. For a long while we had this very small band of practitioners of modern music who described themselves as mathematicians, doing theoretical work that would someday be understood. I don't think anyone takes that very seriously anymore. There was a time, too, when Paganini, Liszt, Berlioz made their living playing. I would like to think that we're entering a period again when concert musicians, people who are concerned in a progressive way with musical ideas, are involved with that.
There's one important distinction between pop and concert music; I think it's the only important distinction. When you talk about concert musicians, you're talking about people who actually invent language. They create values, a value being a unit of meaning that is new and different. Pop musicians package language. I don't think there's anything wrong with packaging language; some of that can be very good music.
I realized long ago that people were going to make money off my ideas in a way that I'm not capable of or interested in doing. It doesn't bother me, the two kinds of music are just different. One thing these English and German groups have done, though, they've taken the language of our music and made it much more accessible. It's been helpful. If people had only heard Fleetwood Mac this music would sound like music from outer space.
The record companies are crossing over, the audience is crossing over, but I'm not. I began writing a certain way because I've always been interestd in the grammar of music, in the way it fits together. I'm a serious composer, but I'm working at a time when audiences no longer assume strong and exclusive allegiances to one musical style. The significant thing isn't what's happening to me, it's what's happening to audiences.
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Art Ensemble of Chicago
festival closure Guthrie Theatre
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Bill Fontana’s Landscape Sculpture with Foghorns
ongoing at the East Wall of Pier Two at Fort Mason until June 20
The actual performance was part of a re-release of the work in 2020
Y2b from “orchard enterprises” streaming thing. The album also has installation versions from 1981 and I would presume reassembled in 2018:
Depiction in KPFA’s Folio magazine
magazine note about his appearance on the Morning Show, June 11
In 2018, KQED did a tribute to the work and to the NMA 81 festival in general:
https://www.kqed.org/arts/13824762/bill-fontana-landscape-sculpture-with-foghorns
With a clearer version of the map:
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Another bonus track!
After the festival, Stewart Dempster performed around the work for a live radio broadcast at KPFA on a Friday night, so fresh the find that I haven’t gotten around to creating a transcript for it… got another 50 weeks of dailies to fill so I’ll probably get around to doing that. In the meantime, there is the music…
https://archive.org/details/OTG_1981_08_03_c1
Description of that live Friday night program on KPFA:
Ode to Gravity
Trombonist Stuart Dempster, master of the sewer pipe didjeridu, performs live from San Francisco's Fort Mason's Pier 2, where the sound installation of Bill Fontana, "Landscape Sculpture with Foghorns", created for the 1981 New Music America Festival, was still sounding. Dempster's earlier performance at the Japan Center was a Festival hit, and when Stu went to Pier 2 and heard his alter egos performing across the Bay, he decided then and there to play in concert with the live foghorn feeding from eight locations as they were transmitted live by telephone line to the pier. Sit back and enjoy this two hour sensuous soundscape. (from KPFA Folio)