June 9 - NMA Birthday - SHELLEY HIRSCH
gd note: as this has been a historical rather than newsworthy set of posts, I’ll wait until later to present updates on composer performer adventures in the 2020s - both Shelley Hirsch and Amy Denio have been very busy in the last year and their websites and you tube offerings can give you a good idea; meanwhile, I still celebrate their contributions to the New Music America festivals.
First, an introduction to her massive oeuvre with many links to performance recordings (video and audio) appear on Shelley’s website:
http://www.shelleyhirsch.com/shelley/
https://soundcloud.com/shelleyhirsch
https://www.youtube.com/shelleyhirsch
In 2012 when I started seeing the potential via facebook to reconnect with my personal lost tribe, the alumni of New Music America. It had been 22 years since the last NMA festival and I only attended a few festivals in Canada over the next few years, before leaving that world altogether after my sessions with René Lussier in Montréal in 1996.
A project or two created from my New Music America archives were a dream unformed, moving with me some 25 times from 1990 to 2015. The box of archival materials I had amassed for the most part were not touched in all that time, until I had to leave them with friends in 2009 while I started on my Great Canadian In America Adventure, with Ohio-escapee Kira, who I had married in 2008. The 150 cassettes and 4000 pieces of paper were safely stored at the Funny Farm, artistic and home-home of Laura Kikauka and Gordon Monahan, in Meaford, Ontario.
In 2012, when my time with Kira (we’re still good friends) was coming to an end, I saw that Gord and Laura’s Electric Eclectics festival
http://electric-eclectics.com/
was welcoming Shelley Hirsch to perform that year. I wasn’t able to attend and meet up with all of them and retrieve my things, but via facebook, I added Shelley to my preferred friend list on facebook where I’ve gotten to learn about her works during the last decade!
The first performance at New Music America by Shelley Hirsch was at the 1987 festival in Philadelphia, at the Painted Bride Art Center. I’ve posted most of my (allowable) recordings at my Soundcloud, and it includes this track, taken off CBC Radio with the celebrated interviewer Augusta LaPaix conducting the interview with some excerpts from the actual performance.
A version of Power Muzak appears on the Hirsch-Weinstein album named Haiku Lingo and what is only a small amount of her creative output is listed here at the Discogs site.
https://www.discogs.com/artist/230536-Shelley-Hirsch
Another recording that survived my archive’s travels was this static-filled presentation about the concert during the week of the festival at WXPN radio with host Kimberley Hause. File under “archival”!
Philadelphia Inquirer review by Andrew Stiller, Computer Songs Come To Life
Strangely enough, under a different author’s name (Francis Davis), the exact same short description (“Imagine a cross between Cathy Berberian and Laurie Anderson with a dollop of Goldie Hawn”), word for word, is repeated in a wrap up of the highlights at the end of the festival.
The program from that performance indicates also the participation of Anthony Coleman and the local ensemble the Shamanistics
Shelley would attend the New Music America festival in 1988 in Miami, this time performing in an amazing acoustic instrument, Horst Rickels’ The Mercurius Wagon, in a performance she named Air Court.
The Mercurius Wagon is a delight to view as it is to hear, and she has one video on her youtube page that shows it. Consisting mostly of rubber tuning and pumps, it almost takes a Buchla-like dexterity and a gymnast’s flexibility to get the wide range of sounds possible, and Shelley tops it off with improvisational vocals that literally link her being to the instrument’s output! This was 21 years later, at David Weinstein’s Mixology Festival held at Roulette in New York in 2019.
Shelley notes that Rickels saw the device as a composition in itself, extending the musical creation to sculpture and even performance art when Shelley literally inhabits it.
She has also posted this from the eighties, though the setup seems to me to be different than what I remember at the Miami festival.
However, I did attend one of her two performances in Miami and she has allowed me to post it on my Soundcloud, so here is the archival recording of her in Miami.
Program descriptions from her performance at the Barbara Gillman Gallery:
As part of the Miami Club Night series of NMA88, she also performed Haiku Lingo with David Weinstein in that setting as well.
Although this would be her last official appearance at NMA, she did a pre-festival concert at Roulette in 1989, between the NMA89 opening gala and the first night of performance, this time with Christian Marclay. It was an event which I was indeed privileged to witness, along with 150 other people including Laurie Anderson! This excerpt from 2008, again at Roulette, is also from her youtube files.
On the other hand, David Weinstein and Roulette did have a tape recorder handy and provide this archival stream:
https://roulette.org/event/shelley-hirsch-w-c-marclay-d-weinstein-maroney/
…which is a nice place to leave off because if you use the Roulette’s search device, you’ll find over 30 streamable audios of her performances at that venue!