Saturday, July 21st, 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.
Starting at 6pm, the July 21st program is a longer evening of works and archival presentations spanning the history of Sonic Arts Union, featuring presentations from friends, colleagues, and invited guests inspired by their approach, including Paula Matthusen & Philip White, James Fei, and Oren Ambarchi & crys cole.
The evening opens with a presentation of historical materials and archival content on the Sonic Arts Union’s activities given by Gordon Mumma. The presentation includes video & audio documentation of friends and artists (including Maggi Payne and Pauline Oliveros), as well as a 1972 SAU performance in Bremen, Germany. Following, leading interpreter of contemporary music Joseph Kubera then performs Mumma’s 1962 work Large Size Mograph 1962. Although Mumma is best known as an electronic music composer and instrument builder, he also has written extensively for solo pIano. In these works, Mumma’s methodical, leisurely, style demonstrates a remarkable consistency over more than four decades -- with meticulous care and consideration given to organizing pitch, dynamics, and registers.
Next, composer Paula Matthusen, who inherited teaching Lucier’s famed Music 109 course at Wesleyan, performs with composer, performer, improviser Philip White. Matthusen’s work often considers discrepancies in musical space -- real, imagined, and remembered, an approach that pairs remarkably with White’s own deconstructive process using closed electronic systems -- an array of homemade electronics at the intersection of noise, jazz and contemporary concert music. White and Matthusen’s customized live-electronic instruments draw on idiosyncratic methods of combining feedback with a variety of recording technologies. This performance marks the first time both are coming together to link the analysis engines of both of their instruments together to create a meta instrument performed simultaneously.
Additionally, Alvin Lucier’s stages two of his major early works, Chambers (1968) and Vespers (1969). Having premiered new works and his paradigmatic works Bird and Person Dyning and I am sitting in a room at ISSUE in fall of 2017, the performances of these two works complete a thread of recent performances demonstrating Lucier’s quintessential compositional works. Lucier himself performs Chambers, a word-score piece that asks the performer to “collect or make large and small resonant environments” (sea shells, subway stations, canyons) with the simple directive to “find a way to make them sound” (blowing, cracking, exploding). Vespers is a work “for any number of players who would like to pay their respects to all living creatures who inhabit dark places and who, over the years, have developed acuity in the art of echolocation.”
Composer, performer, and engineer James Fei, who has often collaborated and performed with Alvin Lucier over the past twenty years, performs Sine of Merit III, a solo electronics piece with transducers and feedback. Fei's setup consists of a mix of old modular equipment and homebrewed circuits. The system is driven by multiple feedback loops, often on the brink of instability with signals recursively routed through microphones, spring reverb, and converted between audio and control voltages.
Next,
The evening also features composer and multi-instrumentalist Oren Ambarchi & Canadian sound artist crys cole (returning to ISSUE since her previous performances at Tectonics in 2014 and as half of Ora Clementi in 2015) perform two works from their 2017 Black Truffle release Hotel Record. For the album, the couple continues the project of skewing narratives embedded within intimate field recording, as shown on their 2014 LP Sonja Henies Vei 3, by taking other aspects of their relationship as subject matter. On Hotel Record, the two are presented as a musical duo, as bored competitors in a game of UNO, as romantic epistolary partners, and as travel companions.
Finally, the evening and series concludes with a staging of Robert Ashley’s 1963 quartet piece In Memoriam: Esteban Gomez (quartet), the first of a group of four pieces (quartet, concerto, symphony, and opera) that Ashley thought of as prototype versions of the ensembles named in their titles. Ashley remarked that when the group of pieces was written, he was thinking of the evolution of certain ideas expressed in music in Europe through the four forms named --- the quartet, the trio concerto, the symphony and the opera --- and how they corresponded in a peculiar chronological way with the social or political forms that were developing in North America at the same time. He continues, stating that “an idea that could be expressed in Europe in an art form had to take a social or political form in America, because there was no art in America. The four names represent the chronology of those ideas.” Ashley used Esteban Gomez, one of the three Spanish Captains chosen by Magellan to accompany him on his trip around the world,” as an example of a character who had to “scout out the routes of South America before Magellan himself.” Ashley notes, “apparently Gomez took a good look at what is now the Strait of Magellan and decided to head home, taking the other two captains with him.” Somehow, this symbolized for Ashley “the kind of decision-making that must have characterized the earliest quartets.”
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:
A History of Sonic Arts Union presented by Gordon Mumma
Gordon Mumma: Large Size Mograph 1962 (1962) - Joseph Kubera
Paula Matthusen with Philip White: outline unlabled
Intermission
Alvin Lucier: Chambers (1968)
Alvin Lucier: Vespers (1969)
James Fei: Sine of Merit III (2017)
Intermission
David Behrman: Runthrough (1967-68) - David Behrman, crys cole, Cleek Schrey
Oren Ambarchi & crys cole: Call Myself (2017) & Francis Debacle (Uno) (2017)
Robert Ashley: In Memoriam: Esteban Gomez (1963)
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 an artist, musician, composer and producer born in 1974, in New Hampshire, USA and raised in Seattle. He eventually spent a decade in New York and presently is based in Paris. O’Malley is a founding member of several music groups including Thorr's Hammer (1993), Burning Witch (1995), Sunn O))) (1998), Khanate (2000), KTL (2005), Nazoranai (2011), ÄÄNIPÄÄ (2011) and others. He is a frequent collaborator of many "outsider" musicians, artists and composers in various formations, in projects inside and out of concert, exhibition, gallery and studio settings. He was also part of the formative teams which created the Southern Lord (1998) and Ajna Offensive (1995) record labels, and has worked as the art director for the Misanthropy records label (1997-2000) and others. In 2011 he created the Ideologic Organ record label in collaboration with Peter Rehberg / Editions Mego. Wildly prolific, O’Malley’s oeuvre is defined by its remarkable breadth, complexity and multidisciplinary interests. It includes collaborations with a wide range of experimental musicians and composers, including Scott Walker, Merzbow, Jim O’Rourke, Keiji Haino, Mats Gustaffson, Thurston Moore, Attila Csihar, Peter Rehberg; contemporary composers Iancu Dumitrescu, Eyvind Kang and Alvin Lucier; and many others across the disciplines of sculpture, visual and performance art, photography, film, and fashion. O’Malley is a vigorous live performer and has toured performing concerts constantly around the world since 2003. He has performed nearly 1000 events across the world, in venues ranging from the Domkirke in Bergen, to the Musée du Louvre, Paris to the Foundation Serralves, Porto, and many theatres, clubs, venues, stages and museums across Europe, North America, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, Mexico, and Brazil. He performs extensively with his group SUNN O))) but also with the D.A.C.M. theatre group, numerous solo concerts, and in in a huge variety of constellations of collaborations with musicians and within his other groups.
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.
James Fei (b. Taipei, Taiwan) moved to the US in 1992 to study electrical engineering. He has since been active as a composer and performer on saxophones and live electronics. Works by Fei have been performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble, Bang on a Can All-Stars, MATA Micro Orchestra and Noord-Hollands Philharmonisch Orkest. Recordings can be found on Leo Records, Improvised Music from Japan, CRI, Krabbesholm and Organized Sound. Compositions for Fei's own ensemble of four alto saxophones focus on physical processes of saliva, fatigue, reeds crippled by cuts and the threshold of audible sound production, while his sound installations and performance on live electronics often focus on feedback. He was a recipient of the 2014 award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Fei has taught at Mills College in Oakland since 2006, where he is John and Martha Davidson Professor of Electronic Arts.
Paula Matthusen is a composer who writes both electroacoustic and acoustic music and realizes sound installations. In addition to writing for a variety of different ensembles, she also collaborates with choreographers and theater companies. She has written for diverse instrumentations, such as “run-on sentence of the pavement” for piano, ping-pong balls, and electronics, which Alex Ross of The New Yorker noted as being “entrancing”. Her work often considers discrepancies in musical space—real, imagined, and remembered.
The music of composer, performer, improviser, and sound designer Philip White (b.1981) is known for its ecstatic intensity and expressive sonic palette. Working with an array of homemade electronics at the intersection of noise, jazz and contemporary concert music, White exploits the tension between rigorous, closed electronic systems and the urgency of human compulsion. In addition to his solo work (“bona fide evocative music,” Brooklyn Rail, “vibrant textural tapestry” (Wall Street Journal) current projects include R WE WHO R WE with Ted Hearne (“utterly gripping” Time Out Chicago) and a duo with Chris Pitsiokos (“annihilating and enervating” Village Voice).
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.
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.
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.
