Audio Poverty

Alvin Curran is undeniably one of the American “mavericks,” those slightly odd and unique compositional free thinkers who consciously avoid the beaten track to explore unsuspected terrain with daring maneuvers. New American music, beyond all those compositional traditions whose key characteristics are no longer so American, is impossible to conceive without John Cage as a subsidiary principle; his influence simply continues still today. Alvin Curran, too, names him as a mentor, but he also counts the “classical” lessons with Elliot Carter as one of his sources, just as he is considered a pioneer of radical improvisation. He co-founded and led the group Musica Elettronica Viva in the late 1960s together with Richard Teitelbaum, Frederic Rzewski, Anthony Braxton, and Maryanne Amacher to unbelievable heights, where the most varied elements of effusive free jazz outbursts, intuitive contemplation, and loosely shaped electronic forms were brought together in an unprecedented manner. The combination of all sorts of things, anything that’s there and swimming about out in our imagination, which should then accordingly be produced is one of Curran’s principles, a music that includes recordings of environmental sound from everywhere and at the same time feeds on contradictory tendencies and influences that new music has brought forth throughout the years. Alongside the power of Cage, there are for example the intonarumori sounds of the Italian painter Luigi Russolo, Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète, the bebop of Thelonious Monk, the sarcasm of de Spike Jones, of course Charles Ives, but also the resolute musical language of Ciacinto Scelci. Curran does not seek to reconcile these various parameters, his inventions have to do with his basic understanding of architecture and geography as a “natural stage for music”; he is an explorer and collector of sound phenomena that he all declares to be music. A concentration on an extreme reduction in sound, simplicity, on sparse “field recordings” is not his interest. Alvan Curran’s art consists rather in the experimental use of large format ornamentation up to gigantic performances sometimes involving hundreds of participants. He also often uses the radio as an instrument, as in Crystal Palms, an international live broadcast that combines simultaneous live performances in six European cities. Other works like A Piece for Peace, which includes a similar transnational concept, or For Julian have been awarded prestigious prizes. The structures, complexly woven in live performances of contemporary environment and live electronic music with their multiple layers of mechanical sounds, human language, animal noises, human activities from all realms, music from all continents and all centuries, industrial and environmental sounds, shortwave radio, computer technology as well as natural sources of sound like the wind and the sun given the impression of huge frescos of musical theater: one of the most well known examples here would be The Magnetic Garden. His piece Endangered Species: The Economics of Appropriation, which will be performed at the Musica Povera Viva concert on Sunday, configures these cross-cultural assemblages to a global panacoustics of the avant-garde. For Alvin Curran, it is music that belongs to all. Looking for it and collecting it means for him, as he once accurately put it, also a possibility “of giving oxygen to the often airless realms of New Music.”

Joachim Ody