David Behrman: Runthrough

ISSUE presents the second 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.

David Behrman’s Runthrough is performed by Behrman, crys cole and Cleek Schrey (who recently performed alongside Behrman in April of this year). Behrman describes Runthrough as a piece that requires no special performance skills other than the ability to turn knobs and aim flashlights, making this early work of interactive live electronic music as playable by non-musicians as musicians. Often performed by the Sonic Arts Union, it is one of Behrman’s earliest experiments in electronic interactivity, pre-dating his landmark work with computer circuits by nearly ten years. In the words of scholar Thomas Holmes, “sounds would result from any combination of dials being turned, switches being flipped, and photocells being activated with players generally feeling their way along this sonic beachfront, learning to work together to produce astonishing effects.” Behrman’s recent revival of the piece features laptop, arduino, and photosensors, performed in the dark by 3 people.

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.

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.

crys cole is a Canadian sound artist working in composition, improvised performance and sound installation. Generating subtle and imperfect sounds through haptic gestures, she creates textural works that continuously retune the ear. Delicately seeking to both reveal, and obscure, the intricacy of seemingly mundane sounds and sources. She has exhibited and performed in Canada, Europe, Japan, Thailand, Australia, and the USA. In addition to her ongoing collaborations with James Rushford and Oren Ambarchi (AU), she has also worked with Keith Rowe, Lance Austin Olsen, Jamie Drouin, Mathieu Ruhlmann, Tetuzi Akiyama, Seiji Morimoto, Anthea Caddy, echo ho, Tim Olive and many more. Her work has been published on labels Black Truffle, Penultimate Press, Touch, MeGO, caduc, Bocian, Another Timbre and Infrequency editions.

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.