Friday, July 20th, ISSUE presents the first evening of a two day series observing the legacy of late 60s-early 70s experimental music collective the Sonic Arts Union and its founding members: David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, and the late Robert Ashley (1930-2014). The series intersects the group’s extensive individual performative histories with ISSUE and celebrates Sonic Arts Union’s role in pioneering many practices that have since become essential to experimental performance in the United States, including the use of live electronics, homemade instruments, and multimedia presentations. The programs feature both performances from Sonic Arts Union members and stagings of their compositions.
The July 20th program features newer works penned by the collective, performed by friends and collaborators including Oren Ambarchi, Stephen O’Malley, Bernhard Rietbrock, Jan Thoben, Joseph Kubera, Gelsey Bell, Aliza Simons, Dave Ruder, Trevor Saint, John King and Cleek Schrey.
The evening features the world premiere of Alvin Lucier’s Double Helix for four guitars, his second ever piece written exclusively for the instrument. The piece is performed by composer and multi-instrumentalist Oren Ambarchi and doom-metal legend of Sunn O)))) Stephen O’Malley, who together gave the NY premiere of Lucier’s Criss-Cross at ISSUE in 2014, and additionally features Ever Present Orchestra director Bernhard Rietbrock and sound studies lecturer Jan Thoben to complete the quartet. Later in the program, glockenspiel performer Trevor Saint follows his exceptional performance of Lucier’s Richochet Lady at ISSUE in 2017 with the premiere of Tilted Arc, a new piece written by Lucier this year featuring bowed glockenspeil and pure wave oscillators.
Additionally, Gordon Mumma and leading interpreter of contemporary music Joseph Kubera stage Mumma’s 2006 composition From the Rendition Series, which combines piano and electronics with newly evolving construction-set procedures. Mumma, who rarely stages his work live, accompanies Kubera with electronics -- an incredibly rare opportunity to witness Mumma performatively engaging his compositions.
Vocalist Gelsey Bell then stages a recent 3-person arrangement of the late Robert Ashley’s 1993 work Love Is A Good Example featuring Aliza Simons and Dave Ruder. Wide-ranging in its subject matter, from physics to schizophrenia, the piece features a title phrase interrupted by varying, often humorous intonations of the word “sure.”
The evening concludes with David Behrman’s Long Throw performed by Joseph Kubera, John King, Cleek Schrey and Behrman himself. The piece was one of three works by three composers commissioned by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as music for the 2007 dance, “eyeSpace.” Long Throw makes use of 21st Century digital technology -- music software and sound sensors -- and has performance roles for the core musicians of the Company in 2007: Christian Wolff, Takehisa Kosugi, John King and Stephan Moore. In Behrman’s signature style of composing music that is partially-notated and partially based on interactive relationships between performers and laptop software, the piece has continued to change and develop from it’s 2007 inception, with this staging featuring newly notated components.
The program observes the Sonic Arts Union’s multifaceted recontextualization of technical objects and their role in the formation of a new musical genre, live electronic music, as a specific achievement in the development of American experimental music. SAU formed in 1966 when Ashley, Behrman, Lucier, and Mumma, all of whom had worked together in the instrumental performances of the ONCE festivals, decided to pool their resources and help one another with the performance and staging of their music. The distinct democratic orientation of the union, and the composers’ individual contributions to non-hierarchical approaches to sound, technique, method, and technology developed a crucial context for the production of experimental music and culture in the United States into the 21st century.
PROGRAM:
Alvin Lucier: Double Helix (2018) - Oren Ambarchi, Stephen O'Malley, Bernhard Rietbrock, Jan Thoben
Gordon Mumma: From the Rendition Series (2006) - Joseph Kubera & Gordon Mumma
Intermission
Robert Ashley: Love is a Good Example (1993) - Gelsey Bell, Aliza Simons Dave Ruder
Alvin Lucier: Tilted Arc (2018) - Trevor Saint
David Behrman: Long Throw (2007/2018) - David Behrman, John King, Joseph Kubera, Cleek Schrey
Since the mid-1960s, Alvin Lucier has produced a range of important compositions that have influenced the culture of experimental music and the sonic arts. Early works such as Music for Solo Performer (1965), Vespers (1968), I am sitting in a room (1970), and Bird and Person Dyning (1975) establish a clear thread throughout his long career. Lucier was born in 1931 in Nashua, New Hampshire. He was educated in Nashua public and parochial schools, the Portsmouth Abbey School, Yale, and Brandeis and spent two years in Rome on a Fulbright Scholarship. From 1962 to 1970 he taught at Brandeis, where he conducted the Brandeis University Chamber Chorus, which devoted much of its time to the performance of new music. In 1966, along with Robert Ashley, David Behrman and Gordon Mumma, he co-founded the Sonic Arts Union. From 1968 to 2011 he taught at Wesleyan University where he was John Spencer Camp Professor of Music. Lucier lectures and performs extensively in Asia, Europe and The United States. Alvin Lucier was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States and received an Honorary Doctorate of Arts from the University of Plymouth, England.
Gordon Mumma’s work employing electronic circuits into the creation of music led him to the use of feedback to modify sound - one of the first artists to do so. Mumma’s multichannel compositions have incorporated sculpture, multimedia, and choreography within an interdisciplinary spectacle. Mumma collaborated on the legendary ONCE Festivals with Robert Ashley during the early 1960s, played in the ONCE group and Sonic Arts Union, and was a composer-musician with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. With David Tudor and Fred Waldhauer he designed an electronic music system for Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan. In recent years Mumma has focused on acoustic composition, although his musical studies were in piano and horn, and he has been a lifelong practitioner of symphonic and chamber music. In collaboration with musicologist Michelle Fillion his book Cybersonic Arts: Adventures in New American Music, published by the University of Illinois Press in 2016, is a major selection of his writings from 1960 to the present.
David Behrman is a composer and artist active since the 1960s. Over the years he has made sound and multimedia installations for gallery spaces as well as musical compositions for performance in concerts. Most of his pieces feature exible structures and the use of technology in personal ways; compositions rely on interactive real-time relationships with imaginative performers. Together with Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier and Gordon Mumma, Behrman founded the Sonic Arts Union in 1966. He had a long association with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as composer and performer, created music for several of the Company’s repertory pieces, and was a member of the Company’s Music Committee during its last years. Behrman has received grants from the NEA, NYSCA, NYFA, the Japan-United States Friendship Commission, the D.A.A.D., the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Henry Cowell Foundation. He was a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2016. Audio recordings of his works are on the XI, Lovely Music, Pogus, New World, WERGO, and Alga Marghen labels.
Robert Ashley (1930-2014) achieved an international reputation for his work in new forms of opera and multi-disciplinary projects, innovative use of language in a music, and as a pioneer of opera-for-television. In Ann Arbor in the 1960s, Ashley organized the ONCE Festival and directed the legendary ONCE Group, with whom he developed his first operas. Throughout the 1970s, he directed the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College and toured with David Behrman, Alvin Lucier and Gordon Mumma as the Sonic Arts Union. Stage versions of Perfect Lives, as well as his following operas, Atalanta (Acts of God), Improvement (Don Leaves Linda), Foreign Experiences, eL/Aficionado, and Now Eleanor’s Idea have toured throughout the US and Canada, Europe and Asia. His final opera, Crash, premiered in 2014 as part of the Whitney Biennial.
Oren Ambarchi's works are hesitant and tense extended songforms located in the cracks between several schools: modern electronics and processing; laminal improvisation and minimalism; hushed, pensive songwriting; the deceptive simplicity and temporal suspensions of composers such as Morton Feldman and Alvin Lucier; and the physicality of rock music, slowed down and stripped back to its bare bones, abstracted and replaced with pure signal. From the late 90's his experiments in guitar abstraction and extended technique have led to a more personal and unique sound-world incorporating a broader palette of instruments and sensibilities. On releases such as Grapes From The Estate and In The Pendulum's Embrace Ambarchi employed glass harmonica, strings, bells, piano, drums and percussion, creating fragile textures as light as air which tenuously coexist with the deep, wall-shaking bass tones derived from his guitar.
Stephen O'Malley is the guitarist and founder of numerous seminal groups including Sunn O))), Khanate and Burning Witch among others. Born in New Hampshire and raised in Seattle, he eventually spent a decade in New York and presently is based in Paris. As a composer and musician he has been involved in hundreds of concerts and performances around the world over since 1993. He is a frequent collaborator of many outsider and experimental musicians, artists and composers in various formations, and has served as a link between the doom-metal and art spheres. His collaborators have included Boris, Merzbow, Jim O’Rourke, Keiji Haino and Oren Ambarchi to French theatre specialist Gisèle Vienne, American sculptor Banks Violette, Italian performance artist Nico Vascellari and Belgian filmmaker Alexis Destoop, among many others. Since 2011 he has curated the label Ideologic Organ.
Hailed by Village Voice critic Kyle Gann as one of “new music’s most valued performers,” Joseph Kubera has been recognized as a leading interpreter of contemporary music for the past 30 years. Composers who have written for Mr. Kubera include Larry Austin, Anthony Coleman, David First, Alvin Lucier, Roscoe Mitchell, Howard Riley, and “Blue” Gene Tyranny, among others. Mr. Kubera is a core member of S.E.M. Ensemble and Orchestra, and the Downtown Ensemble, and he has performed with a broad range of New York groups from the Brooklyn Philharmonic to the New York New Music Ensemble to Steve Reich and Musicians. He tours frequently with baritone Thomas Buckner, and luminaries such as Terry Riley and Ingram Marshall have written for his duo-piano team with Sarah Cahill. He has worked closely with such composers as Alvin Lucier, Robert Ashley, Morton Feldman and La Monte Young.
Gelsey Bell is a singer, a songwriter, and a scholar. She has been described by the New York Times as the “future of experimental vocalism,” an “imaginative,” “brandy-voiced,” “winning soprano,” whose performance of her own music is “virtuosic” and “glorious noise.” She performs regularly as an vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, culling from a wide range of techniques and styles to create her own performance works, to literally voice those of contemporary composers, and to explore improvisation.
Trevor Saint plays new music for glockenspiel. He performs the first solo works for the extended-range instrument, and improvises wildly with the instrument’s extreme offerings. Trevor performs in the duos Skewed and Such (Jeff Herriott, laptop) and Tanngrisnir (Christopher Burns, electric guitar), with the duo Tongue Depressor (Henry Birdsey/Zach Rowden, fiddles), and in the Ever Present Orchestra.
Cleek Schrey is a fiddler and composer from Virginia, now based in NYC. An active force in both traditional and experimental music communities, he collaborates regularly with a wide range of musicians from disparate milieus. Recent engagements include a residency with David Behrman and Anton Lukoszevieze at London’s Café OTO, the Beckett in London Festival with Gare St. Lazare, and solo appearances at the Kilkenny Arts Festival (IRL), Supersense Festival of the Ecstatic (AUS), and the Big Ears Festival (USA). He is currently pursuing doctoral studies in music composition at Princeton University.
John King, composer, guitarist and violist, has received commissions from the Kronos Quartet; the Belgrade Philharmonic (co-commission with Aleksandra Vrebalov), Ethel; the Albany Symphony/“Dogs of Desire”, Bang On A Can All-Stars; Mannheim Ballet; New York City Ballet/Diamond Project, Stuttgart Ballet, Ballets de Monte Carlo; as well as the Merce Cunningham Dance Co. His string quartets have also been performed by the Eclipse Quartet (LA) and the Mondriaan Quartet (Amsterdam), in addition to the Secret Quartet which has premiered many of his compositions at The Stone (June 2007, May 2015), The Kitchen (April 2009), Lincoln Center Festival (July 2011); and Roulette (Oct. 2014).
Bernhard Rietbrock is a musician, producer, and research associate at the Institute for Theory at the Zurich University of the Arts. He is the founder and artistic director of the Ever Present Orchestra, the head of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) research project “Reflexive Experimental Aesthetics after Alvin Lucier”, and editor of the Alvin Lucier Illuminated by the Moon Box Set.
Jan Thoben is a Berlin based musician and musicologist. He is part of the experimental electronics duo 60Hz exploring the interface of analog video- and sound synthesis. In 2017 he joined the Ever Present Orchestra dedicated to the presentation of Alvin Lucier’s instrumental compositions. Thoben works as research assistant at the Art Academy in Mainz and as program coordinator for the master's program Sound Studies and Sonic Arts at the Berlin University of the Arts. He has published on Cage, Lucier as well as early 20th century media arts practices.
