June 16, 1980 NMA Minneapolis - the installations are still around... but not Eno
Liz Philips ● Max Neuhaus ● Paul DeMarinis ● Alvin Lucier ● Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno
Liz Phillips Wind Spun for Minneapolis
Max Neuhaus Como Park Greenhouse
Paul DeMarinis The Pygmy Gamelan
Alvin Lucier Music on a Long Thin Wire
Brian Eno Music for Airports
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Sergei Kuryokhin 1956, Murmansk, Russia
Sergei Kuryokhin performed piano improvisations during one of the club sets in Miami in 1988. Details to be sought out…
Wikipedia photo by Andrey Ukhov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Kuryokhin
He died of a rare heart condition only eight years later at the age of 46, although he was able to produce at least 11 albums. After his passing, Otomo Yoshihide and Kenny Millions (Keshavan Maslak), his partner who he had planned to tour with, created a tribute album and performed it twice in Russia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Without_Kuryokhin
https://www.discogs.com/release/798038-Kenny-Millions-Otomo-Yoshihide-Without-Kuryokhin
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New Music America Minneapolis 1980
About some of the installations (and Music for Airports), many which stayed up after the end of the first New Music America festival.
First, the installations created by those who were not Brian Eno:
(For Marianne Amacher, see profile and author’s note on the June 10 posting.
https://georgesdupuis.substack.com/publish/post/122585601)
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Liz Phillips Wind Spun for Minneapolis
Liz Phillips also has higher quality videos at the Vimeo service for many works, including both works presented at the NMA festivals…
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Perhaps the biggest difference from the Kitchen programs is the inclusion of a wide range of special events and ''installations.'' The latter are musical compositions that in one way or another interact with their site, which by definition is not a conventional concert hall. New Music America has some rather silly, trendy (and worse, yesteryear's trends) examples of this genre, mostly by local composers. But there is a fine piece by Liz Phillips in the plaza outside the Minnesota Orchestra's concert hall - clever, entrancing and ingenious. There is a permanent installation of a subtly lively steady-state work for 64 speakers and small synthesizers by Max Neuhaus in Minnesota's largest greenhouse. Brian Eno's gentle ''Music for Airports'' is chiming away in the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, and Alvin Lucier has an example of his thought-provoking minimalism in a large indoor courtyard.
- John Rockwell, NY Times, June 9, 1979 on Liz Phillips’ installation
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Liz Phillips’s electronic installation stood in a pool located on an attractive downtown plaza. Here the sounds were controlled by a little weather vane. When the wind drifted in from the north we got one sound, from the northeast we got another sound, and so on around the compass. Since the wind tended to shift a lot, the musical sequences often moved quickly between high-pitched beeping, low-pitched drones, and some more complex effects. Additional variables were controlled by wind speed, passing pedestrians, and a screen test that responded to the touch of passersby.
“The installation around much curiosity, and whenever I passed by at least 20 to 30 people would be hanging around, listening to the sound, and waiting to touch the screen. I was bothered by the rickety nature of the structure that held the weather vane, and loose wires that flapped around, and the general visual untidiness of the installation. It seems to me that projects of this sort must to a certain extent be regarded as sculptures, and regardless of budget, it seems that some care should be taken with visual as well as aural matters. But in purely musical terms, the work was quite successful, and again some symbolism was involved. The site, you see, was adjacent to the hall where the Minnesota Orchestra continues to provide a steady diet of standard repertoire and where, until Phillips installed her project, one could have been completely isolated from any radical musical ideas.
- Tom Johnson, ibid. re Liz Phillips Wind Spun for Minneapolis
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Photograph by Greg Hegelson, Village Voice
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Max Neuhaus - Permanent installation at St. Paul’s Como Park Conservatory
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Max Neuhaus’s new installation in a large domed greenhouse at the Como Park-Conservatory in St. Paul had a particular appeal for me. While I have long sympathized with Neuhaus’s sophisticated electronic devices and his relentless attempts to install them in public spaces, I have not always liked the results, and have been particularly disappointed in his low machine-like pitches that get lost in the hubbub as they drone on in the caverns below Times Square. It’s been a year or so since I even bothered to walk over and listen to them.
But the greenhouse project is another story. Here the sounds are little birdlike bleeps emitted from 64 loudspeakers, and the loudspeakers are neat little black circles that run around the dome overhead. They emit their sounds intermittently, as dictated by their individual-computer-driven oscillators, and together they produce unpredictable melodies on four pitches. The pitches remain precisely in tune, and the general effect is lovely. As I passed from the domed room into one of the adjoining rectangular greenhouse spaces, the bleeping could still be heard, but all from one direction. On returning to the space under the dome, I began to appreciate the differences in the directionality of each individual bleep. Even the most sophisticated stereo or quadraphonic system just doesn’t place system the way 64 loudspeakers do. The project, which represents over two years of planning and a budget of $43,000, is to be a permanent installation, and is perhaps the composer’s most elegant work to date.
- Tom Johnson, “New Music America Takes Over A Town”, Village Voice, June 26, 1980
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Paul DeMarinis The Pygmy Gamelan
(location and dates unknown)
Free download link from the composer’s website within this text
listed as Forest Booties (1978) featuring the Pygmy Gamelan
https://pauldemarinis.org/PygmyGamelan.html
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Alvin Lucier Music on a Long Thin Wire
… Pick up the sounds of the vibrating wire with the microphones on the resonant bridges and amplify them for stereophonic listening through loudspeakers. Light the wire so that the modes of vibration are visible to viewers.
1979 recording made at Bowling Green, New York
There is an Italian You Tube video demonstrating the device during an exhibit in Italy in 2021 but cannot be previewed outside of Youtube. To get to it, do a y2b search for the name Alvin Lucier + Music on a Long Thin Wire + y2b user name “Musica e Nuove Tecnologie Conservatorio A. Casella”.
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Brian Eno Music for Airports
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Brian Eno, the dominant presence at last year’s New Music Festival, failed to put in an appearance but installed ambient music at the Minneapolis airport, the Walker lobby and in a large shopping mall (it all sounded the same, incidentally). City residents seemed to enjoy it, although I overheard one airport employee moaning, ‘This stuff is really slowing all of us down.’ Precisely the point, I believe. Eno should be pleased.
- Kristina McKenna, Minneapolis Calendar, July 6, 1980
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Bang on a Can album
https://www.discogs.com/master/108504-Bang-On-A-Can-Brian-Eno-Music-For-Airports
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Classic Eno From an Eon Ago
Mark Jenkins Washington Post March 22, 1998
Bang on a Can: Music for Airports album review
Music for Airports, the 1979 album by self-professed "nonmusician" Brian Eno, was audacious in the quietest way possible. Although preceded by such barely there Eno works as "Discreet Music," the disc is widely considered the cornerstone of "ambient" music. Since it was assembled mostly from tape loops, Eno's composition (or construction) is also a prime example of the way recording is replacing notation as music's essential form. The classically trained musicians of Bang on a Can, however, refuse to accept that.
Bang on a Can is a New York festival of new music, but it has also become the accepted name for a group of "all-star" musicians associated with the fest. Working with the festival's three artistic directors and 15 supplementary musicians, the sextet has painstakingly produced a version of "Music for Airports" (Point Music) that replaces electronic manipulation with live instrumentation. This seems a quixotic venture, but the outcome is lovely -- and altogether appropriate.
Eno was heavily influenced by composers such as Steve Reich, who applied to live music the techniques he discerned from tape-loop experiments. Bang on the Can does much the same thing here, rendering Eno's synthesized shimmerings as elegant glissandos. The serene mood of the four unnamed movements is similar to that of the original, but the tones are subtler and richer. The album's back cover suggests "File under: New Age," but that doesn't seem right at all. Although it lacks rock's persistent beat,this music is not wispy or vaporous.
Ironically, Eno's latest album, "The Drop," is a dreary, synthesized jazz-rock flop. Perhaps he'll find this interpretation of his work inspiring. Such recent art-music recordings as "Music for Airports" and "Trance" (written by Bang on a Can artistic director Michael Gordon) owe much to rock and dance music. But their textural abundance is a noteworthy rebuke to the tinny, banal timbres of much contemporary synth-oriented music.
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