June 9, 1980 - NMA Minneapolis Day 3
Jerry Hunt ● Ron Pellegrino ● Joseph Celli and Malcolm Goldstein ● Pauline Oliveros ● Robert Ashley (with archive audio and interview clip) ● Birthday - N. U. Unrah (Andrew Chudy)
Brian Eno - Sound sculpture at Nicolett Mall (or Walker Art Center?)
David Means with Regina and Lisa Zakeejsek, flutes; and Jim Staley and Homer Lambrecht, trombones (today until June 13) Support System V: The Gnomes of Zurich installation
Ned Sublette - KUOM new music radio specials (June 9-13)
Zeitgeist - performance at the NSP Plaza
Jerry Hunt Cantegral Segments (or Haramand Plane)
Ron Pellegrino Ephemeral Forms: Mother Musing’s Flight Patterns
Joseph Celli and Malcolm Goldstein duet
Pauline Oliveros The Witness
Robert Ashley Perfect Lives (Private Parts) MPR archive recording
Conrad DeJong
KQRS radio The Music Makers radio special
Pat Moriarty Quartet
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Birthday: N. U. Unrah
N. U. Unrah (aka Andrew Chudy), percussionist and instrument maker of the ensemble Einstürzende Neubauten (with Edouard Lock’s La La La Human Steps dance ensemble). The two ensembles performed the very last New Music America concert at Montréal Musiques Actuelles in 1990.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N.U._Unruh
June 9, 1980 New Music America Minneapolis - Day 3
John Rockwell report to the New York Times, opening stanza:
MINNEAPOLIS, June 9 -- There is a benignly brooding ''video portrait'' of John Cage greeting people in the lobby of the Walker Art Center here. That's only appropriate, because people are gathering for a nine-day festival called New Music America that began Saturday night. This is a follow-up to a similar festival held last June at the Kitchen in New York, and part of what is now hoped will be an annual event in different parts of the country, all devoted to the openly experimental spirit that Mr. Cage pioneered.
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Jerry Hunt
Cantegral Segments and (maybe) Haramond Plain
The original version of this post had me simply putting a fuzzy copy and paste of the program description of his work provided by the composer himself (no press attaché writes like this!). I’ve decided to retype it and though coming from Jerry it sounds like poetry (his grant submissions must have been literary), nonetheless, I’m not sure if I mistyped something or that it’s just gonna have to be fuzzy notions in my mind as well..
Jerry Hunt Dallas, Texas
All the works in this performance are derivatives and transformations of components of Cantegral Segments, a continuing series of material for various mechanical and electrical combinations and systems.
The series of Cantegral Segment(s) has as its source a compositional procedure begun in 1972, Haramand Plane: parralel/regenerative.
The principal consideration in these continuing, overlapping and overlaying music components has been an exposition of some way sin whihch the transformational procedure of Haramand Plane can be interrelated to specific contexts of gesture and stylistic definitions and general situations of perceived expectations of gesture, function, and sequence.
This produces a defining core for this music, and that bundle core is involved directly in the many levels of perceived activities convergent with the music, performing and listening.
Haramand Plane is a collection of general procedures for signal generation derived from standard signal analysis techniques.
For the compositional and analysis process, pattern components are recirculated [as performance material, or for analysis, electronically] in ways to allow limit defined convergent and divergent chracteristics to develop in time.
The pattern loops that constitute, at the signal analysis level, the means for defining the sound structure and its development, and at the pattern [performance] level, the memory of prototypes: the develoment in rehearing of the history of a musical performance in such a way to determine its stylistic and gestural tradition.
In analysis, composition and performance, the signal activity is selectively monitored in a goal-directed manner by interaction with the current output and in adaptation to the harmonic definitions of the prototype memories, the compositional result is characteristically cyclic but at once open to interruptive and highly variable goal changes.
The compositional procedure can be described as harmonic variation involving situations for the generation and interactive adaptive specification of the control of sounds, the process engaging both the individual components of sound structure [timbre, rhythm, melody] and the interaction of control leveling in composition [the continuation of variation].
Variation in the context of this music means the patterned deviation [gesture] from drone [still].
This still is harmonically specified and for each work consists of a complex envelope of time-varying phase and amplitude relationships (the harmonic relatedness of components in this definition is taken as an implicit function of pattern deviation and results in all of the specific features. For example, the intonational variations characterizing melody.]
Perhaps not what was played that night, but part of the process, I gather:
Chimanzi from Haramond Plain
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…there was Jerry Hunt, a mild-mannered composer from Texas who surprised everyone with a mystical, intensely personal bit of sound/dance shamanism…
- Christina McKenna, Minneapolis Calendar, July 6, 1980
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Jerry Hunt, who lives in Dallas, presented his Haramand Plane in a performance that I found profound, skillful, completely original, and utterly baffling. His actions as he paced quietly around the stage were incongruous and I find that I can’t remember many of them. Yet I can’t get the piece out of my mind.
I recall that the light was very dim, that Hunt kept walking downstage to whack a large cardboard box with a curious stick, that he rattled some identifiable objects in one hand for a while, that a recording of electronic sounds sometimes accompanies him from the loudspeakers, that there seemed to be no explanation for anything that happened, and that I was simultaneously fascinated and disturbed.
I think I must have dozed off during part of the performance, but I’m not really sure. The piece already existed in some strange dream world. Later I asked Hunt how he structured the performance and he explained that the work has a steady beat and that it all has to do with counting and structuring phrase lengths. This surprising answer helped me a little, but it didn’t really account for the mysteriousness of the piece. All I can say for sure is that Hunt was doing something very strong, and very different from anything I have ever heard from New York composers.
- Tom Johnson, “New Music America Takes Over A Town”, Village Voice, June 26, 1980
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Ron Pellegrino
Ephemeral Forms: Mother Musing’s Flight Patterns
Program notes and meanderings
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Joseph Celli and Malcolm Goldstein
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Pauline Oliveros The Witness
Though often listed as written in 1989, there are several new versions of the work on You Tube, one of which is performed by Claire Chase, Susie Ibarra, Alex Peh and Senem Pirler in 2021:
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Conrad DeJong
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(not in the official program)
Robert Ashley
Private Lives (Perfect Parts) : The Living Room
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Beyond the occasional bright spots of quirky personality, the festival also had its moments of inspired genius. Robert Ashley, director of the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College and a leader in the new music field, “sang” a brilliantly original song-poem accompanied by pre-recorded voices. The piece moved with a lively swing that sent it soaring above the surrounding composers’ clink-clanking modernism.
- Christine McKenna, Minneapolis Calendar, July 6, 1980
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Interview and broadcast excerpt (would this still make it “live”?) from the NPR packaged post-fest package with Melinda Ward (Media, Walker Art Center)
https://archive.org/details/AM_1983_07_19
Melinda Ward, Media, Walker Art Gallery (script by Nigel Redden):
Robert Ashley who first appeared at Walker Art Center in 1970, performed The Living Room section of Perfect Lives (Private Parts) as a solo. His voice track is live but the other voices of David Van Tieghem and Jill Kroesen as well as the instrumental sections are on tape. Perfect Lives is an opera in seven parts. The action takes place in a small town in the midwest, where there is a bank robbery. Ashley explains why he chose the rather complicated plot.
Robert Ashley: I started with the notion of the two entertainers who come to this anonymous small town in the midwest and they, they fall in with these two local people and I was trying to think of some, some sort of incident that would, that would function in a traditional sort of operatic way, that is to say an incident that everybody could be talking about.
And when I – what I came up with was the idea of the bank robbery because it’s so much involved with that midwest tradition of you know, Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker and the boys and those kinds of things.
Melinda Ward: In this portion of Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives (Private Parts), the sheriff named Will solves the bank robbery as he discusses the crime with his wife Ida in the living room.
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: