June 8, 1980 - NMA Minneapolis - Day 2
Zeitgeist (archive recording) ● Stacey Bowers (archive recording) ● Robert Ashley (archive rec of work in progress: Perfect Lives (Private Parts) ● Barbara Kolb ● Megan Roberts & Raymond Ghirardo
Megan Roberts and Raymond Ghirardo Assembly Line
Unknown - “mystery concert” at Lake Harriet Bandstand
Zeitgeist - Stacey Bowers: Pattern Study no. 5
Barbara Kolb
Eric Gravatt Quartet
June 8, 1980 - New Music America Minneapolis - Day 2
The first performers from this day are still active. They even have a mission statement!
This is their current website:
http://www.zeitgeistnewmusic.org/
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Zeitgeist - Stacey Bowers: Pattern Study No. 5 at the Walker Art Center
https://archive.org/details/AM_1983_07_19 + https://archive.org/details/NMA_1980_06_XX_02/NMA_1980_06_XX_02_A_ed.wav (same recording, same script, different hosts)
(Minnesota Public Radio recording)
Transcript to that portion of the recording:
♪
040
New Music America. A coproduction of Minnesota Public Radio and the Walker Art Center. This program features highlights from New Music America, a festival of new music held in Minneapolis-St. Paul in June of 1980.
♪Digirobo-finger snaps with light tone wavey synth
1:07
This program is made possible in part with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Now here is your host for New Music America, Nigel Redden, Director of Performing Arts at the Walker Art Center.
Nigel Redden:
The theme music is from Linda Fisher’s Apparent Form in which the composer mixes the sounds of acoustic and electronic instruments. Like many composers, she is exploring the potential of a full range of sounds from many different types of sources.
During New Music America, a festival of new music sponsored by the Minneapolis Star and the Walker Art Center, we had a chance to hear the work of composers who are experimenting with sonic possibilities, both inside and outside the concert hall.
Seventeen sound installations were scattered around the Twin Cities from the airport to a greenhouse to various parks and office buildings. The festival brought some 75 composers and some 250 performers from around the country to the Twin Cities for nine days of concerts, lectures and happenings.
Composers whose idioms range from avant-garde concert music to creative jazz, from new wave rock to performance art. In this program, we’ll hear a composition by Stacey Bowers performed by Zeitgeist. Tom Johnson’s Shaggy Dog Opera, Charlie Morrow’s Sunrise Celebration, Julius Eastman’s Evil Nigger and the music of LeRoy Jenkins and Oliver Lake, Leif Brush and the Love of Life Orchestra.
2:38
We’ll start with a performance of Stacey Bower’s Pattern Setting No. 2 which as the name implies uses simple, repeated phrases which overlap, unfold and are modulated slowly during the performance.
Zeitgeist, a new music ensemble based in St. Paul, performs the work. Zeitgeist members, pianist James DeMars, percussionists Jay Johnson and Joe Holmquist are joined by Pat Moriarty on alto sax, Homer Lambrecht on trombone and Anthony Cox on bass. Here ow is Stacey Bower’s Pattern Study no. 2.
3:12 ♪ Zeitgeist Pattern Study no. 2 for piano, saxophone, trombone, percussion and bass (1977)
23:06 applause
23:24
Redden: That was Pattern Study no. 2 by Stacey Bowers, performed by the St. Paul based new music group Zeitgeist. By the way, that piece was recorded on the group’s album called, simply enough Zeitgeist, which moved the Village Voice to comment the piece sounded as if the players and composer too are really enjoying themselves.
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Robert Ashley Perfect Lives (Private Parts)
https://archive.org/details/AM_1983_07_19
Official Program Notes:
Robert Ashley New York New York
This journal might have been called End of the Line. That was the first name that came to mind. In fact, the name End of the Line and the idea for which it is the name came to mind together, as often happens, showing how names come into use. Labels are surely a sign of lower kind of mentality. I think that as a title End of the Line is not so bad ethically. it’s not a label. But it embodies a bad sort of pun. I wanted to signal my feelings of resentment at having my music labeled “experimental",” as in “experimental music",” and in the journal to talk the idea out for myself. The name End of the Line, then, would have the tone of admonition or warning, or threat, which may be the proper tone of resentment, but is too narrow to be much fun. Also, it is a little too vocal. It’s tone (sic) is so strong that as a written utterance it brings with it to the reader’s imagination too much sound, which is in bad taste, as in: too much flavor or too much odor or too much bulk.
I wonder how long the word experimental has been around. I don’t remember ever hearing of it before reading John Cage’s Silence, but I remember that I felt that Cage’s allowal (sic) of the word in connection with his music had a brilliantly concealed, a just brilliantly executed quality of defense. There is in Silence so much of definition. And the quality of defense tells us we are in the presence of a history. I suppose a writer could adopt the quality of defense or tone of defense in order to persuade the reader of the general use of an idea, even if that idea were unique to the author. So, I can’t be sure that experimental was a general problem that Cage only felt he had to try to solve. I mean, it could be just a fiction of John’s imagination - something about “labels” that I missed. But I don’t think so. I think it was a new problem for composers and musicians, and Cage exposed it for the first time.
*
Last night's second concert had editing troubles. A mixed-media piece by Charles Amirkhanian and Carol Law failed to present Mr. Amirkhanian's clever ''text-sound'' manipulations at their full aural potential, and Barbara Kolb's three works not only went on far too long, but also seemed curiously out of place in their sober, East Coast-formalistic way. A local group called Zeitgeist combined Reichian ostinatos with jazzy brass improvisations inoffensively but trivially. The evening was handily salvaged, however, by Robert Ashley at the end.
Mr. Ashley was at once old and new, an honored veteran of pioneering new-music groups, and the purveyor, in collaboration with Blue Gene Tyranny, Peter Gordon and others of the rock-art vanguard, of about the freshest sound heard in recent months. This was another in-progress installment of his ''Perfect Lives - Private Parts'' series. But instead of the wonderful, floating dreaminess of previously encountered parts, the latest section partook of the tension, energy and anger of new-wave rock. Yet it hardly ''ripped off'' rock; this was always Mr. Ashley's piece, and it earned him the most fervent ovation of the festival so far.
- John Rockwell review, New York Times, June 9, 1980
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Barbara Kolb
Artist Statement from Official Program
Barbara Kolb New York, New York
Recognizing one’s own personality is probably the single, most essential ingredient to the development of an artist and may very well take an entire lifetime to achieve. The more an individual develops a consciousness of what he is, of himself, the more he’s able to transform what comes into him and integrate it into some substance or energy which is creative.
For as long as I can remember I’ve been interested in and influenced by poetry and the visual arts and through these art forms have somehow developed as a composer. Since 1970, my thoughts on composition have focused on the development of layers of sound which emerge and disappear from a sound matrix, much like a kind of confused perspective in painting.
For example, the development of lines and “motivic” ideas are treated similarly to objects in space which either gradually or suddenly collide. In painting terms, it would be like a time when the figure/ground relationship becomes interwoven and mixed up. As a fine painter and dear friend, James Herbert, once stated: “You just paint things clearly enough and there is nowhere to go except to make them more complicated. Then you make them too complicated and you clarify them again.” In musical terms, several parts sound at once, resulting in a dimension of depth, an idea distributed in space, a union of parts rather than one part expressing the idea.
If one has something to say, one must have ideas. And, the beauty of expressing an idea that can’t be expressed in any way but sound continues to be a source of stimulation for me. Perhaps, the expression of love is the same.
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Megan Roberts & Raymond Ghirardo Assembly Line
Another project I liked was the Assembly Line, installed by Megan Roberts and Raymond Ghirardo in a large lobby at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Here conveyor belts, levers, ladders, a large flywheel, and other apparatus one might find in a factory had been assembled in a sort of theatrical set that manufactured music. I could have done without the rather tired machine-oppresses-modern-man theme, which induced the Minnesota artists to send human heads along the conveyor belt, strap a man to the rotating flywheel, and perform the piece like robots, but I was nonetheless enticed by the complex texture of prerecorded sounds that were triggered when the seven performers began setting everything in motion.
Afterward, when we were invited to run the factory equipment ourselves, I found that I particularly enjoyed pulling one lever that stimulated a super squeal and allowed me to feel momentarily very powerful.
- Tom Johnson, “New Music America Takes Over A Town”, Village Voice, June 26, 1980
* Either Mr. Rockwell or I got dates mixed up because Charles Amirkhanian and Carol Law’s pieces were in my records on June 11th. So we’ll get to that later.