June 27: Radio Preview: New Music America Hartford, Connecticut 1984
During the summer of 2019, "Music of the Last Century" ends its 18 month run at the post-teen local radio service provider, with 12 programs in 12 weeks about the 12 New Music America festivals.
Music of the Last Century on Hartford 1984
The radio program I created on my local post-teen broadcast provider’s FM signal in 2019. (I saw this as a draft/pilot to a real radio series and am still looking for my ideal “home radio”, even willing to relocate!)
It’s really a quick run-through because after the regular audio book reading and advertisements, I only had 50 minutes left. That’s one of the bones I have in a bag marked “contentious”.
The y2b folder which holds the videos and audio that I’ve been able to find related directly or indirectly to 1984 NMA Hartford, including a folder of “spares” when there were many variations available of the same work:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmyw9E0_Jh8a_XcDRefD9GLAE6p1I7Wz1
Audio of the radio program whose transcript follows below:
https://archive.org/details/190710-1400-motl-c-hartford-nma-84
Music of the Last Century, July 10, 2019
aired then destroyed then reconstituted now streamed
x-♪-x (previous program last tune)
0:27 station tag
1:21 advertisement for student services
1:52
Gd: And good afternoon. This is Music of the Last Century and you are listening to CFUV 101.9 FM here in Victoria, broadcasting from the traditional Coast Salish territories of the Songhees and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples and from the traditional Coast Salish territories of the Lekwungen and SENĆOŦEN speaking peoples.
2:11
And ah, today is the program that I was going to tell you about – well I am going to do – about New Music America in Hartford. Now – in this series, I’ve been doing one episode, although the very first one was four hours long, one episode each week having to do with a different New Music America festival.
Ah, and this is a festival that changed cities every year. I joined it in 1984 when it was Hartford, Connecticut, but before that it had been in New York City, it had been in Minneapolis, it happened in San Francisco, Chicago and Washington, D.C. And all the musics that I was able to find, ah, you can actually listen to them.
So after this program, you can go straight to You Tube and if you do “1984 N-M-A Hartford”, NMA for New Music America, go to You Tube, go “1984 NMA Hartford” and you will see the DJ Notdeadyet you tube channel. And if you go to the playlists, I have pa-, made a, ah, file folder for every program, so (chuckles) I had to choose 164 tunes to fit into this one program.
So I’m not going to talk that much, ah that would be ah at the website, everything I’m going to be playing in excerpt is going – is there available in full for you to enjoy the secret history of the music of the 1980s.
3:38
So when I was 17 years old, and I had come from New Brunswick, I went to Ottawa, Carleton University in 1977. I took journalism, I wasn’t good enough, they put me to a lower grade. They, back then, if you didn’t ah continue for journalism school they allowed you to try to get back by doing good grades in Mass Communications, where I went for a year.
So I was hoping to return but I ran out of money. I came back in 1981 to university, Carleton University for the third time, this time in Film Studies. Got to actually have one of my professors turn out to be the guy who ah, headed the Toronto Film Festival for 25 years, Piers Handling, gave me a B+ in one of my papers.
But I had a meltdown in 1982 and I did not graduate. So I went to the country for a year, and I returned and I started working for the federal government and I took a vacation to check out the New Music America festival in Hartford, Connecticut with my new job and my ability to travel a little bit.
So that is where I became a radio artist and it’s there that I became a composer. This is going to be our theme for the rest of the last eight episodes here on Music of the Last Century
4:57
♪ Philip Glass Theme from Mishima
7:28
Gd: Philip Glass and the he-, opening theme from the movie Mishima, a movie directed by – oh, what’s his name? The guy who did Raging Bull, oh it’ll come to me. Ah, anyway he was the director of that and it was an abstract film about the poet, the Japanese poet Mishima, and Philip Glass and the Kronos Quartet were two people, or two organizations, or two musicians that I discovered through the New Music America festival.
I didn’t meet them personally, but I have friends who ah (chuckles) know them well actually. And one of the things that I had seen when I had arrived at the New Music America festival, I had no idea what “new music” was, what the experimental world was. I just knew that I needed to get away from Ottawa and having some kind of a connection with creators.
And this was a very low-budget thing at the time. It started off with, at least at this point in 1984, had a budget of 300,000 dollars, but when it ended in Montréal in 1990 and I’d help to organize that one, a little bit, they had a budget of a million dollars and they were able to show all aspects of new composition. Not only orchestral, things like Philip Glass and experimental sound collages, radio art, um, and you’re going to hear a lot of that during this hour.
8:40
Ah, and also, connections with the past and with this piece of music, you know the tune – this is a Strauss waltz, but because it’s added, they’ve added a saxophone and accordion improvisation to the rondos of the song, you’re going to hear the song but you’re also going to hear what microtonal variations can do to a piece of classical music. So this is Strauss and what you know as the Skater’s Waltz but here under the ah, Marshall Taylor and Guy Klucevsek, which I heard at the New Music America festival is Blue Window, their interpretation of the same
♪ 9:19 Guy Klucevsek - Marshall Taylor: Blue Window
[y2b from Orchard Streaming]
12:56
Gd: Marshall Taylor’s rearrangement of Johann Strauss’ Skater’s Waltz, ah, Blue Danube you might know it as, and this one renamed Blue Window which appeared on a cassette that Guy put out, sold on a little shelf, a little table outside the concert that he performed that I got to see him in, ah, and I bought it and that – that’s been my happy tune for the last thirty years or so.
I saw Guy Klucevsek with Pauline Oliveros, I think that was the second night of the perfor-, of the festival, and they were playing kind of an open mic gig for composers ah, who weren’t able to present their stuff officially in the festival and ah, Pauline Oliveros who’s one of the legends of new music – look her up if you haven’t o-l-i-v-e-r-o-s, um, she passed away in 2016 and Guy did a beautiful, beautiful tribute to her.
13:52
Um, I saw Pauline – I actually got a chance to talk to her at the end of the festival and I told her the first time that I’d ever had the experience of ah, an uncontrolled tear or two at a music performance, and not even knowing why, just the music released me, was when I saw her and ah, Guy Klucevsek playing together. He, as I said, did a five part wonderful wonderful called Pauline Pauline and we’re going to hear a little bit of that nearing the end of the show to pay that tribute.
14:17
Coming up, um, I’m going to do a collage of a whole bunch of different influences that were heard at the festival. You are listening to Music of the Last Century, my name is Georges and I shall be right back.
14:31 advertisement
15:04
Gd: So, um, yeah, if you’ve got something to do on Saturday is look at the calendar and wondering why you’re still home. Ah, my name is Georges and this is Music of the Last Century, a program that has been dedicated to presenting all aspects of musical composition and creation, um, partly because when I came back to radio after 18 years, I had no idea what happened in music in the world before, so I stuck to two things, what I could actually describe that was brand new and what I remembered back from the 1990s, the last time I was doing anything in the world of music.
Ah, and this is my, my world, the new music, contemporary music, twentieth century music, contemporary composition, serious music, post modern music, all that stuff. It was a great education as I went to seven of these festivals and you are going to hear lots of that over the next ah, eight weeks or seven weeks and the last program is going to be Sol Mogerman who was supposed to have been here a couple of weeks ago but he will in concert, finally ah on August 28th.
16:02
Now, this is a kind of a thirteen minute collage and I hope I can all get it all in, in which I’m going to be presented two beds, two kind of background sounds. One will be Joe Celli, Joseph Celli who was one of the two organizers of the 1984 festival, along with Mary Luft. Oh, and they were such wonderful people that they really did encourage me to come to more festivals, and it worked.
We’re going to hear his percussive work called Piece for Camus, there’s a better name for that, I don’t have that right here. And also we’re going to hear plinking of microtonal pianos, four Canadian pia-, or three Canadian pianists and composer James Tenney did a work called Bridge ah for microtone piano.
This is kind of cool because it was four pianos on stage, two of them microtuned and with people sitting all around, not knowing that it’s going to be like fifteen minutes of this kind of stuff and some of them liked it and some of them didn’t. In the middle of these things, you’re going hear Arto Lindsay, a very progressive latino-now working ah – ah, into noise rock, and they are accompanied by David Moss, a super percussionist on the little excerpt that we’re going to hear.
Then we’re going to hear James Fulkerson, the trombone work that he did for tape delay. Remember, this is in 1984 and a lot of these new technical gizmos are really new for a lot of people. They weren’t new to Morton Subotnick who also you can hear, and he was one of the great computer, ah, ah, pioneers working with Mills Lab in San Francisco, so he was at the festival presenting a new work called ah, The Bull, the Red Bull, I think? The Wild Bull.
Ah, Yura Adams and IXNA, two different women that are – were exploring the kind of fringes of pop music. New wave was coming out, ah replacing punk as the big next thing* ah, and ah, a lot of people started to look at the song form in different waves. Liquid Liquid was another band also as well that you’re going to hear and they did a lot of progre-, not progressive but synthesizer based dance music, but also with tiny variations where you’d find normally find solos and you’d kind of see – hear them going off in very interesting polyrhythmic directions.
And finally, the – Goldstein, Malcolm Goldstein’s violin will be heard at the end and one of my greatest pleasures in my life was seeing the composers James Tenney and Malcolm Goldstein playing pool at the end of a long concert night. So, enjoy this kind of mix, these were all – again, these are pieces of music that, ah, I heard back then and you can find if you go on You Tube, Google or just search in the You Tube for “1984 NMA Hartford”* and all 150 tracks that I had to select from, they’re scrunched into the fifty two minutes, you’ll find the full works. But for now, start off with Joe Celli and his Snare Drum for Camus.
[gd note – Celli throughout, Fulkerson in and out, Tenney longer excerpt,
♪19:03 Joseph Celli Snare Drum for Camus – x
x- ♪19:48 Ambitious Lovers Locus Coruleus - x
x- ♪20:29 James Tenney Bridge – x
x- ♪20:37 James Fulkerson - x
24:35
Gd: So I’ll take this occasion while you’re listening to two separate pieces, that’s James Tenney’s Bridge on piano and Joseph Celli’s Snare Drum for Camus, that’s the proper term for the drumming that you hear on the left channel, ah, and I guess it will be mono for those peo-, those people who listen to ah, this program on the stream.
You are listening to Music of the Last Century on New Music America 1984.
x- ♪25:01 Tenney/Celli combo -x
25:21
(music in background)
Gd: Composer had been fed up more or less by the 1970s, ah, development of ah the concert world as an entertainment venue but it was leaving modern com-, composers completely out. So they made their own festival, they called it New Music America. And for twelve years, they put on a festival that got bigger and bigger and bigger and finally proved that you can have difficult music and large audiences, and even make it into a financial success. Of course they had to change cities every year.
♪ Tenney/Celli
26:40
Gd: And there are two Canadian pianists on this too. One is Gordon Monahan who’s been played on this program many times. And another is Casey Sokol, one of the few free jazz pianists in Canada.
♪ Tenney/Celli
28:05
Gd: And I think that’s kind of easy having a little plink here and there, but there are four pianists and eight hands and all of them are following a very precise score. In about you’re going to start hearing a little bit of, ah, Morton Subotnick’s piece called The Wild Bull which was also premiered at the festival.
♪ Tenney/Celli
x- ♪ 29:26 Morton Subotnick The Wild Bull
30:14
Gd: And from Morton Subotnick, an excerpt from Yura Adams, from [Detrira]
♪ Tenney in and out throughout the next tracks
x- ♪30:30 Yura Adams
x- ♪30:37 IXNA Somebody Said –x
gd: IXNA, Somebody Said
[orchard streaming via y2b]
31:10
Gd: All from 1984. Next is Liquid Liquid.
IXNA in background
♪ James Tenney
32:00
Gd: Yeah, that was IXNA. This is Liquid Liquid.
x- ♪ Liquid Liquid
(still with Tenney in the background)
32:47 ♪ James Tenney
33:07
Gd: So this really cool piano thing was about fifteen minutes long. Once again, go to you tube, put in your search device 1984 Hartford – or sorry, 1984 N-M-A Hartford and you will come upon the DJ Notdeadyet website, or youtube and the playlists of all the programs in this series, as well all the tunes I could find for this program itself will be there.
33:34 ♪ James Tenney
33:45 station tag
34:12
Gd: And ah, from the Live Victoria dot com concert listings tonight, if you like Shakespeare, Camosun is doing their annual summer series of the Shakespearean festival. It’s either Julius Caesar or I think Much Ado About Nothing – see what they’ve got this year. Julius Caesar is one of them, ah, and Two Gentlemen Of Verona is the other Shakespearean classic that you should really, you know, check out once.
Karaoke Wednesdays featuring You-Yah-Rock-Star at Copper Owl, at 9 o’clock. Ah, the Lost Boys at Darcy’s Pub at 10:00. Hermann’s is closed for a private party. I don’t know why they put that on the list but maybe you sh-, had been planning to go? Ah, Q at Five O’Clock is presenting the Dean Wolf solo and Spiral Swing is every Wednesday, is presenting smooth folk-jazz I think, with ah the Damon Quintet. And Eastern European and Balkan music and dance party, how can you say no to that? That’s at the Victoria Events Center. If you go and check out Eventide and your ears need a little bit of relaxation, well, probably Balkan music won’t give them that much because it is fast.
35:25
And taking note quickly, very quickly at the weather here in Victoria, well you know it’s cloudy and a little bit of showers designed for the rest of the day, 70% so you better try and keep yourself to that 30% zone of the city. Ah, and it’s gonna kind of ah taper off late in the night, early in the morning with a nice little pat-, fog patches so if you are visiting the Victoria area, ah, the coolest sunrises do happen when the fog is in.
35:57
So you are listening to Music of the Last Century and ah, about a month ago I had said that we were planning to have a live concert by Sol Mogerman to celebrate his new release called Pick of the Pops. Now, this is mostly, ah, works that have appeared on his triplicate and I’m going to try and read my liners for that because, ah, conflict of interest notice here, ah, I am the person who did write the ly-, the liner notes for this ah being able to describe his music fairly well.
And ah, for the last nine programs here, I am going to be playing one of the nine tracks on each of them, at about this time, and from Pick of the Pops, Sol Mogerman from Victoria and Skull Cap Jangle.
36:52 [silence] Of course you know when I try and do this thing with perfect timing, all that it takes is for me to hit the wrong button and you don’t get the perfect cue. Like I said. Sol Mogerman, Skull Cap Jangle from Pick of the Pops
♪ 37:06 Sol Mogerman Skull Cap Jangle
41:00
Gd: And apologies for the cd player having hiccups there and inserting spaces where there shouldn’t have been. But the momentum of the song does continue. A little bit more about Sol Mogerman near the ending of the program. You are listening to Music of the Last Century, a program that’s dedicated to looking at the art of composition, the art of creating sound by all different kind of means at our modern disposition.
Ah, and I am looking at the New Music America festival of 1984, the place where I gained my own formation, the place where I started meeting composers over the last ah, over the next seven years. Ah, by my count, I think I’d met about 150 composer or performers of different caliber from the very very celebrated to some people that I saw at one performance and would never see again.
41:44
Ah, and in that I also learned that there are so many ways to create using sound and words and voices, ah, that were not really accessible to me, except through the program Brave New Waves which was, back then, was hosted by Augusta LaPaix and used to be a six hour program and in the last three hours, they played modern composition because, you know stuff like what I play is mostly enjoyed by people at four o’clock in the morning, right?
Ah, anyway, they did present complete pieces and then you got to see the difference between a two minute piece and a fourteen minute piece or in the case of Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2, a five hour piece.
Now, on the very last day, ah, there was a wonderful concert at a church, 125, 126-year old church, if I remember correctly, called the Cathedral of St. Joseph in Hartford, Connecticut. Ah, and it is there that we got to see a long performance, it started at 11:00 and ended at four, opening up with David Hykes and the Harmonic Choir doing microtonal chanting using overtonal series to basically create staggers of sound.
Then we got to see William Albright at the organ playing pieces by George Crumb and Morton Feldman. If you are a fan of Just Say Nono later on in the day, ah, that’s the kind of ah, music that is played there. Then we got a voice choir from Amina Claudine Myers, and then another couple of works on pipe organ, setting us up for Glenn Branca and his thirteen guitars, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, actually 12 guitars here, arranged for his Symphony No. 4. And then finally Morton Feldman with a work done for solo voice, ah with tape, Beth Griffin did a one hour long vocal rendition of the Feldman which –
So I’m going to try and play bits and pieces of this with the time that we have remaining, ah, and again, go to my You Tube channel, ah, go and put in the search device “1984 NMA Hartford” and that will lead you to the playlists for this program, for the last five programs and for the ah, seven programs that will follow, or six programs that will follow on this series of New Music America.
43:59
Ah, anyway, that very last day, that did leave me quite quite an impression. Um, because of – I guess the combination of the two, you’ve got the other kind of a modernistic po-, ah, music pieces that you’d find at a new music concert back then, but then combining them with both Hykes opening up, which is probably the softest, most soothing, definitely a pioneer of new age music, definitely a pioneer of the kind of music that is meant to react, have your body react, not just your mind and ears.
But so does the music of Glenn Branca, but the difference is where Hykes uses very soft singing, people, five people around a single microphone pushing sounds against each other creating overtones, well, Glenn Branca does the same thing, creates overtones but he does it by playing guitars at a pain threshold and we were in this cathedral thinking that the stained glass was all going to fall down on us.
It didn’t. But the impression that is left ah, by Glenn Branca’s music once you’ve seen it, there’s nothing like it. And so what I’m going to do is, this is going to be a very short, I think only a couple of minute excerpt where I have David Hykes on the left channel and Glenn Branca on the right channel. I think this is cued up. We’ll see if we can hear – so you can get to hear that, and then after, I’ll come out of that with what was the one hour vocal piece by Morton Feldman sung by Beth Griffin.
45:31 gd: overtone chanting on the left channel, Glenn Branca on the right
♪ 45:45 (excerpts) Branca + Hykes (mixed into mono in this version which seems to eliminate the Hykes channel – gd)
♪ 48:03 Joan La Barbara sings Morton Feldman’s Three Voices
y2b posted by “Minima Moralia”
49:53
Gd: So definitely, that was a concert that did put a – quite an impression upon my life, opening up with the quiet of the overtonal chanting going through the other performers including the pipe organ music, then Glenn Branca with his electric guitars and now what you’re hearing in the background, full hour-long version of Three Voices by Morton Feldman, created for Joan La Barbara who sings it in this version, ah, done by Ben (sic) Griffith at the festival itself.
Now, um, hearing that, I don’t know if it was a trigger of hearing the intensity of all the different kinds of music, but that was the second time in my entire life at the age of 24 that I had an unexpected tear upon hearing a piece of music and not even knowing why. Ah, and Pauline Oliveros was in the church where we listening to this, ah and just a couple of pews over and we had seen each other throughout the festival, I had met her.
But I did come up to her and told her that’s the second time that’s happened to me and the first time was when I saw you and Guy Klucevsek in concert ah, giving that performance at Mad Murphy’s. And she gave me a hug and we became friends would be able to be in contact right up until ah 2015, a year before she passed away where I was able to tell her that living in Esquimalt, I was able to over 14 months write a three hundred page book that was co-written with Jon Rose who I had met at the festival that she had ah hosted in Houston in 1986.
(La Barbara / Feldman still in background)
51:34
Gd: Anyway. You are listening to Music of the Last Century. I am going to have another piece or two of music right after this, ah, message.
51:42 program promo
♪ 52:11 Guy Klucevsek Pauline Pauline
54:09
Gd: The conclusion of a five piece – or five section suite written by Guy Klucevsek after – ah, and performed at Roulette, ah, in its entirety which you can find on the youtube, my site or go right ahead and K-l-u-c-e-v-s-e-k, find one of the world’s greatest accordion players. Ah, and this is it for me, ah, Yogi’s coming up to fill in for the Fiji Mermaid Radio Program ah and I want to finish off again with Sol Mogerman who, um, I guess this is the launching of his recording.
Um, because he made it available and the station got it into its digital archives, and I’m going to play the digital version now so it won’t – the cd won’t skip. Um, and I – as I said, I wrote – these are the – this is ah, ah, a disclaimer I guess. I have written the liner notes so I have a vested interest in it. In fact, I say that in the very beginning of the liner notes.
55:01
I guess you could say that I had a predisposition to like Sol’s music. A friendship which is revealing itself to have a two wei-, two way clear communication of intent and good humor would make me seek out the qualities in his work. That work branches into the recent septuagenarian renaissance of his new creations, both with words of his own and of his lifelong partner Gundula.
The age of wisdom and wear and tear is easily identifiable in his voice and finger work as a veteran guitarist. The youth is to be found in his works uprooted from their California hippie sixties and seventies base and given new form, if only in the statement that these songs are still to be played, but with an elder’s virtuosity, still quite fine but not so much with the urgency of a young man’s claim.
With the exception of the freshly recorded Yo, Pick of the Pops is a selection of tunes taken from the triplicate release of albums Chain of Life, Was it Fun and Feed the Masses all released in the winter of 2018, following the re-release of electric jazz with more than just a dollop of the avant-garde that consisted of the tracks in Wishbone Bridge, a prelude to Sol’s return to the world of music beyond salons.
Definition of Sol’s style: folk music needs to be augmented by his literary capabilities and those of Gundula Morgan’s – Mogerman’s poetry, and unlike many elders of music, his ease and fluidity of speech allows the words to actually be formed by the guitar playing. The strokes in which his fingers are dancing a three-dimensional percussion are not independent once you are familiar with the vocabulary, something that you can do by diving into the triplicate or you can get your toes wet and your ears whetted.
The Pick of the Pops, a best-of from the triplicate selected by one of Sol and Gundula’s four sons. Ah, so this is the world premiere, unless of course somebody played it this morning, but this has not been played anywhere and you are the first listeners to hear a brand new recording of the song called Yo. By Sol Mogerman off Pick of the Pops.
Thank you for listening, Yogi’s coming right up.
♪ 57:11 Sol Mogerman Yo