David Behrman: Long Throw

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 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.

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.

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.

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).