US-born composer Alvin Curran (1938), a student of Elliott Carter (1963), moved to Europe to continue his studies. However, he soon opted for a hippie life in Rome, where he met other restless expats. He played piano in bars to pay the bills. In 1966, Curran and two other expats from the USA, Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum, founded Musica Elettronica Viva, an agit-prop avantgarde and improvising group. Two years later they were joined by free-jazz saxophonist Steve Lacy. The extended line-up staged legendary live performances during the late 1960s of totally improvised music.
Musica Elettronica Viva debuted with Spacecraft (Mainstream, 1968), recorded in 1967 by Frederic Rzewski on percussion and found objects, Richard Teitelbaum on synthesizer, Alvin Curran on percussion and trumpet, Ivan Vandor on saxophone, and Allan Bryant on synthesizer. The 41-minute long piece indulges in chaotic non-technical free-form improvisation. The viewpoint is not the one promoted by free jazz, but by the post-Cage avantgarde, although the praxis would be borrowed by the jazz improvisers of the following decade. Initially the music is confused and direction-less (to say the least), but eventually a sense of purpose emerges, and the ensemble launches into loud whistles, ear-splitting dissonance and a childish percussive frenzy. The second part restarts from quasi silence. The instruments are shy and undecided. Then, again, the horns lead the charge towards the musical apocalypse.
Democratic, irreverent and traditionally experimental, Curran travels in a computerized covered wagon between the Golden Gate and the Tiber River, and makes music for every occasion with any sounding phenomena -- a volatile mix of lyricism and chaos, structure and indeterminacy, fog horns, fiddles and fiddle heads. He is dedicated to the restoration of dignity to the profession of making non-commercial music as part of a personal search for future social, political and spiritual forms.
Curran's music-making embraces all the contradictions (composed/improvised, tonal/atonal, maximal/minimal...) in a serene dialectical encounter. His more than 200 works feature taped/sampled natural sounds, piano, synthesizers, computers, violin, percussion, shofar, ship horns, accordion and chorus. Whether in the intimate form of his well-known solo performances, or pure chamber music, experimental radio works or large-scale site-specific sound environments and installations, all forge a very personal language from all the languages through dedicated research and recombinant invention.
With a fortuitous bang, he begins his musical journey (1965 in Rome) as co-founder of the radical music collective MUSICA ELETTRONICA VIVA, as a solo performer, and as a composer for Rome's avantgarde theater scene. In the 70's, he creates a poetic series of solo works for synthesizer, voice, taped sounds and found objects. Seeking to develop new musical spaces, and now considered one of the leading figures in making music outside of the concert halls -- he develops a series of concerts for lakes, ports, parks, buildings, quarries and caves -- his natural laboratories. In the 1980's, he extends the ideas of musical geography by creating simultaneous radio concerts for three, then six large ensembles performing together from many European Capitals. By connecting digital samplers to MIDI Grands (Diskklavier) and computers, since 1987, he produces an enriched body of solo performance works -- an ideal synthesis between the concert hall and all sounding phenomena in the world. He creates a visually striking series of sound installations, some of them in collaboration with visual artists including Paul Klerr, Melissa Gould, Kristin Jones, Pietro Fortuna, Umberto Bignardi, Uli Sigg. Throughout these years he continues to write numerous pieces for radio and for acoustic instruments.
Playlist :
Alvin Curran : Alef Bet Gimel Shofar (Shofar Rags - Tzadik - 2013)
Alvin Curran : Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri (Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri - Ananda - 1978)
Alvin Curran : Maritime Rites (Maritime Rites - New World Records - 2004)
Alvin Curran : Animal Behavior (Animal Behavior - Tzadik - 1995)
Alvin Curran : 2 (Crystal Psalms New Albion - 1994)