Sonic Arts Union: David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, Robert Ashley (in memoriam) / with Special Guests including Oren Ambarchi & Crys Cole, James Fei, Paula Matthusen, Joseph Kubera
ISSUE Project Room Brooklyn, NY
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Sonic Arts Union: David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, Robert Ashley (in memoriam) / with Special Guests including Oren Ambarchi & Crys Cole, James Fei, Paula Matthusen, Joseph Kubera
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 groups extensive individual performative histories with ISSUE and celebrates Sonic Arts Unions 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.
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 Unions 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 Mummas 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, Mummas 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 Luciers famed Music 109 course at Wesleyan, performs with composer, performer, improviser Philip White. Matthusens work often considers discrepancies in musical space -- real, imagined, and remembered, an approach that pairs remarkably with Whites own deconstructive process using closed electronic systems -- an array of homemade electronics at the intersection of noise, jazz and contemporary concert music.
Additionally, Alvin Luciers 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 Luciers quintessential compositional works that have defined his delicate and lyrical compositional legacy. 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, David Behrmans 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 Behrmans 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. Behrmans recent revival of the piece features laptop, arduino, and photosensors, performed in the dark by 3 people.
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 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. Call Myself is a long meditation for electric organ and guitar, featuring an overlay of Coles hushed voice. Francis Debacle (Uno) consists of a recording of a game of UNO processed so as to render it disorienting: rain falls, slowed-down voices drawl across the audio field, shuffled cards splatter across the table.
Finally, the evening and series concludes with a staging of Robert Ashleys 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 more or less 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 me the kind of decision-making that must have characterized the earliest quartets.
The program observes the Sonic Arts Unions 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 Kubrera
