NEW MUSIC AMERICA SERIES PREVIEW
(Substack and the original draft radio pilot series aired in 2019; includes full written transcription of the radio program previewing the summer radio series)
On May 1, 2019, I presented on my local non-profit radio station a preview of the New Music America festival, something I would spend the summer of that year exploring with a program dedicated to each of the 12 festivals, of which I attended the last seven. This was in part to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the first of these festivals which was then named “New Music New York” before the organizers decided to take the festival on the road, presenting it in a different city every year (with a return to New York City in 1989) until the last one, New Music America Montreal 1990 / Montréal Musiques Actuelles.
Prior to the festival, participant composer Tom Johnson who was then a weekly columnist in the New York Village Voice featured a preview.
He would later write about the festival itself and its accomplishment in July of that year and that latter essay appears in his book “The Voice of New Music” (launched during New Music America 1989) and which you can find in its entirety at Charlie Morrow’s website (https://www.charliemorrow.com/pdfs/TheVoiceOfNewMusic.pdf) and which I had a tattered copy, which I will retype so that it can be read in June when this blog gets ready for a year’s worth of daily writings on June 8, 2023.
From the Village Voice (killed by Rupert Murdoch):
This is the transcript of my preview of the New Music America festival series, along with this link to an archival copy of the program (the Station has since destroyed all but one of the 100 programs I aired and never re-aired any of the “Music of the Last Century” series but all of the NMA programs will be offered here in the same way throughout the next year during the anniversaries of each of the festivals. Check in at the beginning of June 2023 for previews of what to expect and why subscribing to this blog will bring all of them to you.
An aircheck copy of the program is here:
https://archive.org/details/190501-1400-motl-c-nmapreview
MUSIC OF THE LAST CENTURY NO. 61 (aired live May 1, 2019)
0:00 x- ♪ Aldo Nazarko’s show [which preceded mine] closing theme “The memory lingers on”
0:52 station tag (alarm clock version)
1:33 advertisement Vancouver Island Student Public Interest Group
2:00 Music of the Last Century theme: Laurie Anderson’s “Difficult Music Hour”
Welcome to Music for the Last Century. My name is Georges and we are broadcasting from the traditional Coast Saalish territories of the Songhees and Wesaanish peoples on the Station.
Laurie Anderson: So sit bold upright in that straight back chair, button that top button and get set for some difficult music. Ooh la. Ooh la.
Gd: And we begin the Music of the Last Century. This hour is going to be a program on, a preview about the New Music America festival which I’m going to be talking about for the rest of the year. But first, our serialization of A River of Oranges by Aldo Nazarko and a chapter called Villa Monte Grappa.
Laurie Anderson: Ooh la. Ooh la.
Gd (recording): Villa Monte Grappa. The two story twelve room villa at 17 Villa Monte Grappa has a beautiful terraced garden. The many trees that dotted the property, fig, cherry, pear, apricot and mulberry, also provided welcome shade in the heat of summer. The front of the house faced the northwest…
(at this point I notice that I’m airing the same book excerpt that I presented during the previous week, so I stopped the recording)
Gd: (live) Ah, I believe like Glenn Gould that there should be take twos in life. We had promised that we would we do “Calle Ca’D’Oro” and we want to do the whole book, so we are going to present the proper “Calle Ca’D’Oro”. And there! I thought I had done it perfectly to begin the show! Here we are. Aldo again, with the proper chapter, so follow from your books, “A River of Oranges”, “Calle Ca’D’Oro”.
From A River of Oranges – full book audio and link to a pdf of the book at:
https://accenti.ca/product/a-river-of-oranges-aldo-nazarko-pdf-version/
13:11
Gd: And that was me reading, ah, the river – A River of Oranges by Aldo Nazarko, host of the program that you have heard just before me, and is broadcast every Wednesday on The Station, the program in which he plays the ridiculous and sublime, is called “Off the Beaten Track”. And this program is called “Music of the Last Century”.
I’ve been off for a couple of weeks and I’ve been planning for actually the rest of the year, because this is kind of a major year for me: 1979, New Music America festival was born and I participated in half of them! So ah, “Music of the Last Century” and I’m going to be doing fill-in programs too that are related to it, is going to be doing one program at least on all the 12 festivals.
14:03
Now, New Music America was a festival and a conference put on by composers and sound creators who just were not being noticed by the American mainstream in the 1970s. There’s a lot of the different experimental musics and electric-side music like Miles Davis or psychedelic rock, or FM kind of long records, they were all popular, but the people who had seriously doing the adventurous, the experimental, the pioneering works were not getting mass recognition.
Mostly because they’re not meant to fit on top forty radio, they’re not easily fit-able on something like the CBC or NPR, and so they decided they wanted to create their own festival, at least once, where they could actually present their works, and actually talk to the audience and explain what this new music was about.
14:50
Because “new music” was a – it’s like “alternative music”, it was a catch-all phrase to basically talk about people that were ahead of the avant-garde. Now, I joined it as a fan in 1984, I was 24 years old when I went to the one at Hartford, Connecticut, and I had such a good time. And when I learned that it switched cities every year, ah, well for a young kid who doesn’t know people in the States, this was a great way to discover a different city by going to the festival every year and seeing the composers that are featured from that city in their own town.
I’ll talk a lot more about that in the weeks to come, but today we’re going to get just a little bit of a taste of it. Ah I mean – and people, you would know them now but they weren’t known then and they participated – some of them were organizers – ah, in the early ones: Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Pauline Oliveros, Carl Stone, Laurie Spiegel, Brian Eno, Ornette Coleman, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, ah, and Laurie Anderson, who 40 years ago, June 1979, premiered what would later become “United States Live”.
From which comes that tune that you heard at the beginning of the show, which I think is going to be my theme song. Why not? It just fits, right? This is “Music of the Last Century”, the difficult listening hour.
16:18 ♪ Laurie Anderson “Difficult Listening Hour” (from United States Live Parts 1-4)
y2b posting by LukeK79 in 2010:
19:28
Gd: Laurie Anderson and “Difficult Listening Hour”, one of 79 parts of the major work called “United States Parts 1-4”. Actually, it was called “United States Live” when it was presented at the, I think, Brooklyn Academy of Music in the early 1980s. At New Music America, Laurie Anderson premiered the first sections of that at the very first New Music America in New York City, 40 years ago.
My name is Georges, this is “Music of the Last Century”. Back in a minute.
20:02 advertisement
20:41
Gd: So, I was away from radio, from campus and community radio – ah, I did a little bit in French in nineteen, in 2002, ah, in Halifax, but my own program, the last time I did one was in 1994 in the area of Moncton, New Brunswick and in French, so this is actually the very first program that I’ve ever hosted and presented that is in English and being away for about twenty years, it was impossible, impossible for me to find out what had happened in all these streams of music that I loved and discovered in my twenties.
Mostly at the New Music America festival but also through participating and getting to know some of the people involved with the Brave New Waves program in Montreal, in the early years when they were a six hour program. And also, and living in Ottawa, I was able to find a lot of these things and teach myself about the whole structure of twentieth century music.
21:36
So when I came back here, one of the delightful things was finding that some of these people that I had met, some of these people that I’d seen in performance were still releasing records, like Jean Derome and Carl Stone and some people that I’ve played on my program over the last year.
And so, this is kind of a like roots program that I’m going to be doing for the rest of the year, and it’s something that I’ve always wanted to do. I wanted to write a book about New Music America, still might if I can, but for now, I just wanted to take the 40th anniversary, which is going to be in June, and on “Music of the Last Century”, I’m going to do one program on each of the festivals. And of course, this is only a 52 minute program and one of the works for example was Morton Feldman’s “String Quartet no. 2” which you should be familiar if you’re a regular listener, because I played about four hours of this five hour work so far.
22:29
Ah, so I’m not going to be able to in these twelve episodes fit all of the music. So what I’m going to do is kind of make it like a – a drop of ink in a water bottle. Every episode is going to give you one drop of the musics that were found at New Music America and throughout the summer, I’ll be doing fill-ins and then I’ll be featuring longer works on other programs and let you know when you can hear them.
Of course we’ve got the streaming service that – so any programs, including this one, that you’d like to hear for a second time is streamed for a week at [the station’s website].
So, it’s been forty years like I said since the space in New York City called The Kitchen put on a composer’s conference called “New Music New York” that was, 29 years ago after close to a thousand performances – oh yes, so in New York, they did that in 1979. It went on for twelve years, something close to a thousand performances and 29 years ago, the presentation of the festival ended in Montreal, with Montréal Musiques Actuelles in 1990, organized by more or less the same people. Composers wanting to present composers.
23:41
And part of the neat thing is that the audiences that you went into, there might have only been a hundred people for the really difficult stuff, but there would be other composers in the room! I mean I saw one friend of mine perform with Laurie Anderson only like about three rows away and there was only like about 150 seats in the place. So that was kind of a wonderful experience.
Rhys Chatham, the guitarist, was one of the originators and in fact, he’s going to be delivering some lectures this year in France about those years. He’s been writing historically on his website about it and we are now going to present one of his works from around the early period, when he was one of the first people in New Music America and this is from 1977, a piece that has been performed by many other people. Ah, but here is Rhys Chatham, Joe Disney and Nina Canal on the version of “Guitar Trio” from 1977.
24:37 ♪ Rhys Chatham “Guitar Trio” (1977 version)
From Rhys Chatham’s y2b channel, a 2008 video version of the same tune:
32:42
Gd: Whoo-hoo! Rhys Chatham, “Guitar Trio” from 1977 ah, and that’s the short version. Ah, more recent versions, including ones done by the guitarist from Sonic Youth can last up to 25 minutes. Rhys Chatham, Joe Disney and Nina Canal are the three guitarists on this version, ah with the bass and drum section of Moon and Linton.
You are listening to “Music of the Last Century” and this is a program about New Music America. Ah, New Music America was the festival that lasted only 12 years. It changed cities every year, and here’s the description on Wikipedia that I wrote.
“New Music America was a nomadic American festival (held in Montreal during this last year) showcasing at its origins New York City’s downtown music but growing into one of the largest new music festivals ever heard, held in North America, all in an attempt to bring the popular shadows – out of the popular shadows the breadth and history of twentieth century composition and creation as well as current trends.
From 1979 to 1990, each New Music America – officially bilingualized into “Montréal Musiques Actuelles” in 1990 – had a wealth of local, regional, national and world premieres adding to its scope, some music from the around the world at the time of the Miami festival.”
34:01
And I saw 500 performances or exhibits or artistic presentations during the seven years that I attended it, and you’re going to hear a lot of that before the end of the year, but featured mostly on – as well “music of this last century”, which is this program heard every week between two and three p.m.
34:25 station tag with phone number
Gd: Please do. Or you can also write to me at musicofthelastcentury@gmail.com or you can go to my facebook page that has – or attempts to present – the musics and information on the music that were presented on each show and I’m going to be augmenting that throughout the summer as well. That would be at facebook.com/musicofthelastcentury, all in one word.
35:18
And we’ve got some weather, beautiful weather. Sunny, sunny, sunny, sunny, sunny, mix of sun and cloud, and sunny, that’s the next seven days and it’s going to get warmer finally at night, seven to eight degrees and I think that’s all you need to know about that. Enjoy before the tourists come, eh?
And in the events calendar, there’s a few things that I want to point out. Thursdays, Hermann’s is presenting Ryan Oliver Quartet and I point that out because it’s dedicated to the music of Dexter Gordon all night, I think two sets, seven thirty and ten thirty. It’s at Hermann’s tomorrow night.
On the – May 4th, the public library, the Victoria Public Library, will be presenting its annual Emerging Local Authors collection launch. Now, this is a cool thing. This is where my book got released, the only place in Canada where my book got released because it’s not really a book meant for commercial consumption. Anyway, the – when I was there, 150 authors all launched their books at the same time and what it is, it’s a self-publishing thing. When, if you publish your own book and it’s acceptable under the Victoria Public Library standards – you can submit it to it, the library - and they will have it on a special rack in the front of the Central library downtown.
And it will stay there for a year, and after the year, the book will stay on the collection as an e-book, so my book called “Rosenberg 3.1.1 Not Violin Music” (yeah, right, that’s why it doesn’t sell), that’s actually now available as an e-book.
Anyway, May 4th, this year’s Emerging Authors Collection will be launched. It’s a really cool thing, 150 authors in one room whether they’re professional or not, whether they’re great or not, doesn’t matter. Two o’clock to three thirty, that’s on May the 4th.
37:21
And finally, my neighbour in radio, Fiji Mermaid, also performs under the name of “L L” and will part of a three ensemble presentation at the Oddfellows Hall. More about that in a little bit, but that’s the “Rite of Spring” and I think that’s on next Monday, I’ll have to check that to make sure that I know about the dates.
37:45
Now, New Music America was where I met Eugene Chadbourne in Los Angeles at a gig that he was giving at the legendary Club Lingerie, so this would have been the 1985 New Music America festival in L.A. Now, that was a great gig, and Eugene loves to play so by one o’clock there were only six of us in the club including the good Dr. Chadbourne, and it took the sound engineer to come in after a medley ah to announce (fuzzy voice) “Eugene, can we go home now?” A wonderful memory I’ll always have.
So when Eugene came to play Victoria, to play Logan’s in 2017, I went to rekindle my old music flame and I also lit two new musical flames in my heart by witnessing locals Sol Mogerman, who has since become a friend, and the Tremblers of Sevens, who have also since become friends. So, meta-nepotism aside, here are all three opening with me, finding Rad Juli at Wheelie’s last week and getting her to give me some details about the next dates of their presenting. I wasn’t using a very good recorder so I had to kind of repeat it so you can hear it clearly.
38:48
Rad Juli (Tremblers of Sevens): May 10th at the Roxy or the Vinyl Envy Second Full fest (3) then May 19th in Nanaimo at Backyard fest then we’re back in Victoria at Wheelie’s on May 31st. We are going to be releasing track by track our new record over this summer… The first track’s been released, “Bride Waltz” was released already (3) ♪
39:53 ♪ Tremblers of Sevens “Bride’s Waltz”
Distrokid y2b post from 2020:
42:40
Gd: The Tremblers of Sevens with the “Bride’s Waltz”, a new single, second single to be released from a, as of yet, unofficially not titled album that is coming out in the fall. They still have their vinyl, if you go to Vinyl Envy, which is that first thing that Rad Juli said on that tape, where they’re going to be playing part of that weekend for Vinyl Envy at the Blue Ridge Theatre. Then you will, if you go to their bandcamp site, you can get these two singles, this and “Poison”. Oh, and I was going to say last night on Venus Wave, Mark Anthony Brennan played the first, or the second single from the new album, which is a new version of “Poison” which they did a Burt Jansch song.
Here’s Sol Mogerman, who was at that same concert that I went to see Eugene Chadbourne in.
43:30 ♪ Sol Mogerman “Child”
45:21 ♪ Eugene Chadbourne “Bach: Sonata and Partita”
Burtdockx’s y2b post from 2012:
48:07
Gd: Eugene Chadbourne and the Bach Sonata and Partita from his “Eastern European Country and Western” album. Before that, Sol Mogerman from his, one of his triplicate releases in January, a song called “Child” from an album called “Was It Fun” and more of those two in the weeks to come as well.
You are listening to “Music of the Last Century”, your braver new waves on The Station here in Victoria.
48:32 show promotion for “Planetary Radio”
49:02
Gd: Hey guy, if you’re gonna be part of the Station, how about loaning me your orchestra once in a while, eh? Yeah, I’d like to have strings talking to me behind my words. Anyway, my name is Georges, this is “Music of the Last Century” and next week it’s, I will be reintroducing you to the works and the life of the late Dr. Johannes Rosenberg. The chief Rosenbergologist, now semi-retired is Jon Rose whose music I’ve played on this show as well. Who I met at New Music America and who has also played with Dr. Eugene Chadbourne, author of the recent mega-work “Dreamamory”.
Now, Jon Rose is of course the co-author of my only book which I keep talking about, which you can find via the Victoria Public Library e-service and Jon and I, we share one friend from these parts here, ah, Metchosin composer Cassandra Miller. Now, Miller has announced that, in a recent posting, that she is going to be releasing a recent concert, a vinyl of a recent concert with legendary minimalist Charlemagne Palestine, ah, and that’s going to be coming out hopefully this year.
And that brings us back full circle to close off the program because one of Charlemagne Palestine’s most recent recordings is a duet with one of the founders of New Music America, who I’ve talked about, called Rhys Chatham. So, here is all three to take us to the end of the hour, starting with the Quatuor Bozzini, all-Cassandra Miller album that we received, that was on our charts for a while. Here’s the title track, “Just So”.
50:36 ♪ Quatuor Bozzini: Cassandra Miller “Just So”
53:01
Gd: Quatuor Bozzini doing Cassandra Miller’s “Just So”, the title track from the album released earlier this year, and Miller will be releasing an album, a duet with Charlemagne Palestine, also known as Chaim Moshe Tzadik Palestine, a minimalist composer who’s been around for many years and here he is with Rhys Chatham on their album, from their album “You and Me = We”
53:33 ♪ Charlemagne Palestine and Rhys Chatham “You and Me equals We” (excerpt)
The Billser y2b post from 2017:
56:07
Gd: Rhys Chatham and Charlemagne Palestine from a duet, just three minutes from a hour long duet on one of the triple album set called “You and Me equals We” released in 2015. And that’s it for “Music of the Last Century”. One last piece, related to the New Music America festival but first a quick word here.
56:24 show promo
56:53
Gd: And we close the program with a work that I talked about just earlier in the program. Rhys Chatham like I said, ended the New Music America festival by opening the gala in Montreal in 1990 with his one hundred guitar ensemble doing a work called “An Angel Moves Too Fast To See”. We have the recording here at the station and it lasts 42 minutes and it’s absolutely gorgeous. I listened to it for the first time in thirty years this week and I remembered parts of it and aspects of it that are just incredible.
The curtain raises and you see 20 electric guitars and they’re all plugged in and they’re ready to play and that’s the most you’ve ever seen in your life. But the curtain goes up and there’s another twenty guitarists. And then the curtain goes up and there’s another twenty guitarists. And then the curtain goes up and there’s another twenty guitarists. And then the curtain goes up and there’s another twenty guitarists. And then the curtain goes up and you’re 101 electric guitarists, all tuned, alto, soprano, baritone tonings (sic) and they’re all moving beautifully. Rhys Chatham from “An Angel Moves Too Fast To See”. And this would be the fifth part of it. You can’t get it, the full feeling of it but it’s pretty neat nonetheless, 100 guitars (sic).
58:08 ♪ Rhys Chatham “An Angel Moves Too Fast To See” (excerpt)
Rhys Chatham y2b channel with a mini-documentary on the 1991 performance of the same work: