June 8, 1979 - New Music New York day 1
Kitchen Archives ● ICQM Conference ● John Rockwell ● Tom Johnson ● Steve Reich ● Pauline Oliveros ● Philip Glass ● Meredith Monk ● Robert Ashley
John Rockwell with Mary MacArthur and Rhys Chatham - panel
Experimental Music Today
Steve Reich - Drumming (part one)
Pauline Oliveros - The Tuning Meditation
Philip Glass - Dance No. 4
Meredith Monk - Traveling Song, Biography, Do You Be
Robert Ashley - The Wolfman
Home page for the pertinent online Kitchen archives
http://archive.thekitchen.org/?p=2794
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Full pdf of the original Festival program of which many excerpts will appear in these pages over the next few days… (it’s also available at Michael Galbreth’s feature essay on his named website)
http://archive.thekitchen.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Book_New-Music-New-York.pdf
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A 25th year anniversary retrospective of New Music New York
gd - I don’t recognize any of the pieces but about half of the names are definitely from the NMA rosters.
https://www.discogs.com/release/3281724-Various-The-NYFA-Collection-25-Years-Of-New-York-New-Music
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Day 1: Opening of Conference by Institute on Contemporary Experimental Music (Music Critics Association)
Photo of panel of Administrators at NMNY (not the one held on the first day), found in Joan LaBarbara’s analysis of the meaning of the event in Musical America, September 1979.
Full week’s plenary sessions, separate from but linked to the performance series. I misread one line when cleaning this one up and thought I saw “please note that the times are subject to change”.
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An Institute on Contemporary Experimental Music, sponsored by the Music Critics Association, attracted critics from around the United States for ten days of intensive exposure to experimental music. Representing writing interests ranging from rock to jazz to traditionally defined classical music, fellows and auditors heard panel discussions and lectures on the history and techniques of experimental music; its interrelationships with classical traditions, jazz, rack (sic), improvisation, Third World music, electronic music and other arts: the importance of the recording studio as a compositional tool; even the search for stardom by many of its composers.
- Charles Ward, Houston Chronicle, July 24, 1979
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John Rockwell’s underwhelming New York Times preview of the tenth anniversary of the festival when it returned to NYC, reprinted in Ear Magazine during the week of New Music America 1989 in NYC. Though he had been a large part of this first festival, he stopped being more than a NY Times reviewer of the festivals past 1982, almost never acknowledging in his later articles his participation at this first one. This is from Ear magazine, as part of a special issue during the 1989 festival:
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On the other hand, Tom Johnson’s most excellent Village Voice preview of the 1979 festival can be found here:
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The official New Music America archives at the University of Houston Library:
https://libraries.uh.edu/about/news/new-music-america-collection/
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June 8, 1979 - New Music New York - (New Music America) - Day 1
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Steve Reich with David Van Tieghem, Gary Schall, James Preiss, Richard Schwarz - Drumming (Part One)
(1972 limited edition of 500 produced by Jon Gibson and Multiples Inc.)
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Beth Anderson “Report from the Front: Guerrilla criticism of ‘New Music New York’ “ (26 pages), June 1979:
(Despite the 1979 copyright notice below, a year’s worth of many thanks to Beth Anderson-Harold for okaying her writings to appear here!)
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Reich was represented by members of is ensemble, four percussionists who played Part 1 of Drumming (1971), an important work of the movement that grew from his experiences studying with a master drummer of Ghana. The four drummers tossed the piece off at such a speed that many of the nuances were thrown away.
- Charles Ward, Houston Chronicle July 24, 1979
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Reich steals the show with a rattling, thrillingly visceral performance of the first part of his epochal Drumming.
- Tim Page, on remembering the performance via the release of the Kitchen CD, Washington Post - May 9, 2004
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…back to the good old days before Glass got all pretty on us. On the other end of the album is Steve Reich’s Drumming, Part I, a piece that was eight years old at the time of recording and that still hasn’t lost its edge.
---- Quinn, American Record Guide, April 2005, reviewing the recording
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The trouble with these benefit or festival potpourris is that composers whose work needs time or large ensembles aren’t usually heard at their most characteristic. The first part of Mr. Reich’s Drumming, for instance, exemplifies his rhythmic interests, but it doesn’t get into the coloristic variety of later sections in the same score.
- John Rockwell, NY Times June 10, 1979
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Pauline Oliveros The Tuning Meditation
(y2b user “Samuel Vanicek” post with trippy visuals – original Kitchen recording from the performance on the 2004 cd)
https://www.discogs.com/release/550900-Various-From-The-Kitchen-Archives-New-Music-New-York-1979
I have placed in a folder 16 versions on youtube of the Tuning Meditation. There will probably be additions…
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmyw9E0_Jh8bV3I3zHVTVyoautTcGfJJd
They’ve all been put in a separate substack here:
https://georgesdupuis.substack.com/publish/post/122342157
From that playlist, this one seems to be the coolest version on first glance:
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Pauline Oliveros, a native of Houston now teaching in California, presented The Tuning Meditation, a piece in which the audience became the performer. Members were instructed to select a note, hold it for a while, then tune to a note held nearby. The haze of sound, which emerged only after a truck roared and rumbled by outside, giving audience members a chance to sneak in a tone, was gorgeous.
- Charles Ward, Houston Chronicle July 24, 1979
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… Still, religious instincts make themselves felt in all human societies, and they have had much to do with the evolution of experimental music. Composers, perhaps more often than their contemporaries in any of the other arts, have been quite aware of spiritual values.
Pauline Oliveros is a case in point. On the opening night of the festival, she came on stage and simply offered a few brief instructions to the audience. ‘Sing a tone on one breath, sing someone else’s tone on the next breath, and continue in this way.’ Then she just closed her eyes and waited. It was an act of faith, and an uncooperative audience could easily have ruined the whole thing, and yet, as the gorgeous choral texture began to rise very gradually out of the audience, it began to seem almost impossible that anything could go wrong. There was something irresistible about her, about her belief, and about how she was able to somehow plug herself, and us, into an almost cosmic experience. The result was not really a Buddhist statement, and certainly not a Christian one, and yet it was a devotional act. Something mystical, something superhuman seemed to be controlling that performance, and even those who would rather not think about such things were respectful of the atmosphere that took over the space. As the last voices were dropping out, after perhaps 10 minutes of this unrehearsed chanting, the room fell into an extraordinary peacefulness.
- Tom Johnson, Village Voice July 2, 1979
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Oliveros’ Tuning Meditation, performed by the Kitchen audience, is so sweetly seraphic that it makes a listener want to join in.
- Tim Page review of Kitchen CD, Washington Post May 9, 2004
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…and easily identifiable pieces by Meredith Monk (Do You Be) and Pauline Oliveros (The Tuning Meditation). Oliveros’s piece is meant for the audience to perform – she asks people to hum, and to sing any note they like and to match the pitch of someone they hear. After some laughter from the audience (Oliveros says she’s going to do her best to disappear), they launch into it with gusto, creating a sound that is touching and lushly beautiful, however cheesy the ideas seems a quarter-century later.
---- Quinn, American Record Guide, April 2005, reviewing the recording
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Sing only long tones. Contribute one of your own and then tune to someone else’s.” Ms. Oliveros disappeared and waves of pitches appeared. Power tripping by the audience. Everyone wants everyone else to sing their pitch. It sounds like an Orff-sound-alike-at-the-movies, just before the wife goes insane. It really is gorgeous.
She wears red == looks red == has amulet and Indian overlay == looks comfortable without shoes. She is pulling the sound out of us and we get off. It’s like the Episcopal church where everyone sings almost everything == participation == but better, sicne its (sic) not possible to be out of tune. For this one, there is great admiration.
- Beth Anderson “Report from the Front”:
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Q: What do you think of the music?
A: Tom Johnson’s ‘pokalockadukala’ piece sounds like the opening scene in The Music Man. Scott Johnson’s crying track was the most interesting part of his piece.
Q: What composers do you like?
A: J.S. Bach, Varese, Berio, the Rolling Stones before Let it Bleed, John Fahey and on this series the music I’ll remember the most is the Oliveros piece. And Ashley’s Wolfman.
- From the same report by Beth Anderson - Joseph D. McLellan of the Washington Post
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Of the four [Oliveros, Reich, Monk and Glass], the best effect was made by Miss Oliveros, who did an audience-participation piece that was lucidly simple in its instructions and lovely to hear and to participate in.
People were asked to sing long notes on a pitch of choice, and to alternate between that pitch and the matching of their voices to somebody else’s pitch. The result was a shifting, dappled choral texture of sound, and the very timidity of many of the audience helped lend it a magically distant and ethereal quality.
- John Rockwell, NYT review on June 10:
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Philip Glass Dance no. 4
From the Kitchen Archive recording
Program description:
Jeebus, the score appears to be available on line!
https://musescore.com/bradley_g/scores/5935164
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Glass played his Dance No. 4, a work in progress that raises more questions than it answered. It showed that he is moving more and more towards a western aesthetic of teasing with the musical emotions through a piece and that he has not solved the problem of bridging Western and non-Western ideas.
- Charles Ward, Houston Chronicle, July 24, 1979
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Glass has never been the best exponent of his solo keyboard music, and there is much more grandeur in his “Dance No. 4” than his performance on a portable electric organ would let on; still, it’s a great vamp.
- Tim Page, Washington Post, May 9, 2004
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The set opens with Glass’s blazing, in-your-face Dance No. 4 for electric organ, played by the composer at a million miles an hour on a terrifically harsh instrument, a time machine that takes us right back to the good old days before Glass got all pretty on us.
- ---- Quinn, American Record Guide, April 2005
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Mr. Glass got a haircut. He, with Mr. Reich, believes in the great spirit of amplitude – but he reminds me of Bach. Organists through the centuries. Electric organ with beautiful pedals -- played with boots at a slant. That constant five-finger technique, lots of notes flashing by – genuine harmonic and timbral alternations (to be ‘changes’ he’d have to stop going round and round and round). The bass movement cannot make up for the fact that the longer he does this to em, the louder it seems. He and Mr. Reich resemble each other more than they know.
- Beth Anderson “Report from the Front”
From the same report, short, snort and snappy interview with Joseph D. McLellan of the ‘Washington Post’ by editor:
Q: How about Phil Glass’ performance?
A: I like Glass on principle, but not on this occasion.
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Mr. Glass did a solo electric organ section of a forthcoming work, and while it had its merits, his solo pieces are to this taste usually less challenging than his ensemble works.
- John Rockwell, NY Times June 10, 1979
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Dance No. 4, played by the composer himself on what sounds like a pipe organ of huge dimensions, is a monumental coruscating toccata, unstoppable in its allegro perpetual motion. Two principal ideas alternate: the first grows, modifies and corrupts on each reappearance; the second stubbornly remains the same. For 18 minutes that relationship remains stable. Then, without warning, the second idea suddenly blossoms into a stately sequence of chords, revolving around the circle of fifths with a magnificence that recalls Bach at his most monumental. If there is a slight sense of strain in the performance, this can be attributed to the exceptionally intricate layering of different rhythms and metres that have to be shared between hands and feet. That alone would daunt almost any other organist from taking on this work; but then, like virtually everything else Glass has written, the score is not published, and this recording stands as the sole testimony of its existence.
- From the Gramaphone unsigned online review of the Philip Glass album of dance pieces
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Meredith Monk
Traveling Song / Biography
Do You Be
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Meredith Monk, a dancer who now spends an equal amount of time singing her original mix of vocal styles ranging from chanting to Balkan singing to operatic styles, best represented SoHo’s revival of the composer-as-performer tradition with her music that sounded at once both simple and yet compellingly complex in its vocalisms.
- Charles Ward, Houston Chronicle July 24, 1979
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“Hey, Hey, Hey” to Ms. Monk with the flower in her hair. The piano repeats sounding like rhythm back-up for a folk-rock band, but the singing over top is like nothing except Monk. The second song (doo-who-yin) becomes echoes of ‘dyin’ and seems to be what to sing if you're an ancient french laundry woman kvetching about work on an expressive day.
The, she (sic) gets going and just takes me away and whatever she's doing is so strong, so tough, so real, so herself -- it makes people cry. It's theatre in sound. She did two slow ones and a fast number and did every kind of singing in the top of the spectrum.
- Beth Anderson “Report from the Front”
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…although Miss Monk’s remarkable vocal techniques and hieratic allure never failed to make an impact, her solo works from 1970 and 1973 don’t suggest her more complex recent ensemble scores.
- John Rockwell, NY Times June 10, 1979
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Robert Ashley with “Blue” Gene Tyranny
The Wolfman
Due to the wonderfully extensive amount of material found, there is a separate entry for this work and its reactions - below find Joseph Franklin’s first person account and the current Lovely Music label description.
Robert Ashley Wolfman substack
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Among the works we were most eager to hear and see was The Wolfman by Robert Ashley.
To our knowledge, only Robert Ashley had previously performed The Wolfman. It requires a performer to sing loudly – very loudly – into a microphone a tone that slides over the range of an octave (or more). The voice is “accompanied” by a separate taped composition. The performer is required to, (from Bob Ashley’s instructions that appeared in the July 1968 edition of Source – music of the avant garde) “slide the top front surface of the tongue from extreme front (against the teeth) to extreme back along the roof of the mouth, thus producing a range of 'vowels'.
By manipulating the tone production technique, the vocal sound (in combination with the taped sounds) becomes increasingly louder and louder. Then the sounds are controlled in a manner that causes severe audio feedback at a level that is approximately comparable to 1/2 watt of available power for every seat in the performance space. The resultant sound can be painful, causing members of the audience to flee the space with hands over their scorched ears. In its brief history The Wolfman caused controversy wherever it was performed and this night was no exception.
Almost everybody fled the Kitchen as Bob, bathed in an amber light, dark wrap-around sunglasses hiding his intense stare and sweating in tempo while leaning into the microphone, produced a very, very loud sound. It was loud, but strangely soothing.
Annson and I stayed throughout the performance, among a handful to do so. There was no other work on the festival which profoundly elicited an immediate reaction from the audience as The Wolfman did.
- Joe Franklin (NMA Philadelphia) from his autobiography, Settling Scores (pp. 213-214)
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The title track, The Wolfman, was composed in early 1964 and first performed on Charlotte Moorman's festival of the avant-garde in New York in the fall of the same year, gaining considerable reputation as a threat to the listener's health. For the occasion instigated by Feldman, Robert Ashley composed a piece of tape music, The Wolfman Tape, to be played along with the vocal performance of The Wolfman. The idea of a tape composition, which is to come out of the same loudspeakers as the voice and the feedback (the main sound source for this composition), is to fill-in the ongoing performance sound and to transform the performance into an elaborate version of the 'drone' under the influence of electronics. The choice of what sounds should be on the tape is determined by the need to have the whole range of frequencies brought into the feedback, but to give those sounds a short duration-in other words, a blizzard of very short sounds across the whole frequency range-so that the illusion of the sounds coming from all parts of the room is preserved. For the performance of 'The Wolfman' recorded here, produced at the University of California at Davis, Robert Ashley used an earlier (1960) tape composition entitled 'The 4th of July'. That composition changes gradually from a parabolic-microphone documentation of a backyard party into a layering of tape loops and tape-head feedback. The Wolfman Tape (1964) is, as descibed above, a tape composition made for a short performance of The Wolfman. It uses tape-speed manipulation and mixes of many layers of 'found' sounds, both from AM radio and from recordings made using different kinds of microphones.
- From the Lovely Music liner notes of the recording at http://www.lovely.com/titles/cdalgamarghen2.html
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Screen shots of the original New Music New York 1979 program were from a downloadable photocopied pdf available from the site of the late Michael Galbreth. Direct link to the downloadable program here:
https://www.michaelgalbreth.com/_files/ugd/b4072f_e5d11c9f076542479f8a38108565980a.pdf