Alvin Curran makes music, with all means, anywhere and for any occasion. From rarefied string quartets to blaring ship horn concerts to Holocaust memorial installations; from Midi-Grands to digitized ram's horns - these are his natural laboratories. At Recombinant Media Labs he will bring out an audio tour de force consisting of a massive electronic sampling network and two collaborators, Cenk Ergun and Tana Sprague.
For those into the spectrum of wild style audio experiences from articulated textures to all out onslaughts of noise, pulse and dynamic intensities, this promises to be a remarkable evening! Democratic, irreverent and traditionally experimental, Curran travels in a computerized covered wagon between the Golden Gate and the Tiber River, -- 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 100 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. The sounds of places and things, real and imagined are Curran's alphabet.
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, he studied the piano, trombone and all forms of popular music. He began composing at Brown University under Ron Nelson and completed his studies (M.Music) at Yale with Elliott Carter in 1963. Following a year with Carter in Berlin he moved to Rome - his adopted home. With Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum in 1966 Curran co-founded the radical collective Musica Elettronica Viva - a group renowned for inciting free music as well as musical uprisings. Since then, his solo explorations and significant encounters with the likes of AMM, Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton, Simone Forti, Steve Reich, Joan La Barbara, Michael Nyman, La Monte Young, Ashley, Behrman, Gordon Mumma, Alvin Lucier, Larry Austin, Robert Moog, Phil Glass, Charlemagne Palestine, Terry Riley, George Lewis, Evan Parker, Serge Tcherepnin, Pulsa, Maryanne Amacher, John Cage, David Tudor, Morton Feldman, Scelsi and many, many others have led to a stunning repertoire of seminal works.
Cost: 16