Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Waking in New York
A Ginsburg Tribute by Elodie Lauten

**Elodie Lauten, photographed by**
**Amy B. Marciano, 2002**

Elodie Lauten has been a fixture of the downtown New York musical scene for more than three decades. During that time she has produced some 18 recordings on 10 labels and has become widely recognized as a pioneer of post-minimalism. Her work is acknowledged in Music in the 20th Century by Kyle Gann (Schirmer), La Musica Minimalista by Giovanni Antognozzi (Rome), John Schaefer's New Sounds (Harper & Row) and the recently published Soho - The Rise and Fall of an Artists Colony by Richard Kostelanetz (Routledge).

Born in Paris in 1950, the daughter of jazz composer Errol Parker, Lauten acquired a deep understanding of improvisation and studied classical piano. Her first composition was well-received at the Paris Museum of Modern Art (1972), when she was 22. Shortly after, she moved to New York where she was discovered by poet Allen Ginsberg, whose purchase of a Farfisa organ for her dramatically changed the course of her musical career, exposing her to the possibilities of music produced electronically. Ginsberg also introduced her to Buddhism. She moved permanently to New York and became active on the music scene in the late 70s, performing at the Ear Inn, A’s, CBGBs, Max’s Kansas City, the Mudd Club, Folk City, Inroads and The Kitchen.

During the 80s, she started producing and releasing her own music; she studied privately with LaMonte Young; spiritual discipline and the study of Buddhism were an integral part of her training; she was a disciple of Sri Chinmoy, Paramahansa Yogananda and Chogyam Trungpa; she received a Master's in composition from New York University where she studied Western composition with Dinu Ghezzo and Indian classical music with Ahkmal Parwez.

Lauten's most recent CD--Waking in New York, Portrait of Allen Ginsberg from the poetry of Allen Ginsberg--is both a monument to the past and a tribute to life in New York City. During the 90s she took a two-year 'sabbatical' in New Mexico to concentrate on her compositions, returning to New York in 1996 and felt impelled to write a piece about her regained city. She asked her old friend Ginsberg for a libretto. He responded with a group of highly personal poems. Six months later--in April 1997--Ginsberg died, and soon afterward, Lauten's father died as well. Lauten continued to work on the piece and it was premiered in June 2001.

"Waking in New York is actually a lovely, effective and affecting song cycle for vocal ensemble and orchestra," wrote Allan Kozinn, in the New York Times. "Ms. Lauten has treated Ginsberg's poetry and its underlying spirit carefully, even reverently. She tucked its personal and sometimes diarylike texts into her own agreeably melodic and ecclectic style, but she also appears to have listened carefully for traces of the music that animated Ginsberg's soul."

In the liner notes, composer and critic Kyle Gann writes: "For all that Lauten came upon her musical idiom through her own idiosyncratic evolution, it nevertheless falls into a tradition, appropriately one with both American and French roots. Her syllabic, chantlike text setting follows an American usage, quite different from the melismatic European tradition based on Italian opera. The tradition is traceable back through Robert Ashley and Harry Partch to Virgil Thomson, whose operas with Gertrude Stein have a similar repeated-note urgency. And Thomson honed his craft in Paris under the spell of the great musical trickster Erik Satie, whose magnum opus Socrate is the closest musical kin to Waking in New York. Satie in Paris, Socrates in Athens, Lauten and Ginsberg in New York, all know that we can see the universe in a grain of sand. And with Ginsberg affording the grains of sand, Lauten can provide the universe."

Waking in New York
Composer: Elodie Lauten
Libretto: Allen Ginsburg
4Tay

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