Our regular listen to and look at living, breathing composers and performers that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since they’re nice enough to offer so much good listening online:

Gilbert Artman and Urban Sax (France)

Urban Sax is a long-running ensemble / musical extravaganza founded by the French musician Gilbert Artman. It was was formed in 1973, when Artman organized a concert by a group of eight saxophonists at a classical music festival in the south of France. In subsequent years, the number of players grew to 12, 20, 30, and by now consists of 52 musicians (with saxophones ranging from the soprano to bass registers). Artman frequently integrates local musicians and dancers into his performances, and thus the ensemble can encompass as many as 200 performers.

Urban Sax has performed throughout Europe and Asia. The group’s performances are art happenings; players wear metallic space suit-like costumes together with masks, and each performance is a unique event that is planned for the particular architectural or natural space where it takes place. The music is strongly minimal and ritualistic, as much about space and spectacle as anything else. Later, larger incarnations have the look of some mad cross between Sun Ra, Blue Man Group, and Cirque du Soleil. Another way of thinking about it is as a kind of sax analog to what Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham were doing with guitars around the same time. It also seems to me to be a strong progenitor to all things “Bang-On-A-Can”.

The link at the top of this post will take you to the official Urban Sax website. It’s mostly in French, but for non-speakers there’s still plenty of photos, a discography, four short Quicktime movies of performances (in Lebanon, Tokyo, Versailles, and Dubai), and even a score to peruse.

BUT: What I really want you to do is take a listen to an MP3 file kindly parked on the web by NY/NJ’s greatest radio asset, WFMU. It’s the complete side one of Urban Sax 2, released in Europe in 1978. (Urban Sax 1 came out in 1977, with sides one and two called “part 1” and “part 2” respectively; Urban Sax 2‘s two sides were labeled “part 3” and “part 4”.)

The ensemble used in this recording: 27 saxophones (11 altos, 13 tenors, 2 baritones and 1 bass sax), a chorus of eight voices, and one tam-tam (played by Artman himself).

In 1979 I was a poor Air Force newbie, stationed in Wichita Falls, Texas. Bereft of my collection of records, scores and books, with no musical instrument at hand, my only connection to art-music was a few cassettes and a small, single-speaker player. But fate smiled in the form of the manager of a local mall record store, who beyond any hope or expectation happened to be a fellow progressive-music geek. He dubbed cassettes for me, of all kinds of obscure and wonderful things — and one of them was this very piece. Those tapes were musical life-savers for me, and will always remain full of charged memory. Eternal thanks, Larry (who I’m happy to report reconnected with me via the web! More than twenty years on now, he’s currently driving a bus in Austin.)

(A little early this week, as I might be out on the weekend) …Our regular listen to and look at compositions and performances that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since folks are nice enough to offer so much good listening online. Time to sit in on a few “first moments” in musical history:

George Gershwin & Paul Whiteman : Rhapsody in Blue – Original 78rpm Acoustic Recording (1924)

Made shortly after the premiere performance, and a year before the electric microphone came into use. The two records are on different pages: record one is here, and record two here. I can’t do any better than give B. Stockwell’s commentary from the Archive.org site:

“This is an edited performance, with cuts made to fit the 15-minute work onto two 78-RPM discs. Total time is under 9 minutes, but the cuts are pretty smart ones. This work was originally written for a large dance band, the way you hear it here. This isn’t ‘Symphonic Jazz’. It’s authentic 1920’s style — completely different from the bloated ‘violins and cellos’ versions that we’re used to hearing. You can hear the banjos in this version. Gershwin plays the piano part and the performance is fast fast fast. The opening clarinet glissando wails and breaks off into reedy laughter. This is SO different from the the syrupy swooning you now hear. The sound isn’t spectacular — the microphone wasn’t invented until the next year, 1925 — but these 78s are still pretty well transfered. The recording of Rhapsody in Blue was a hit. In 1927 the same group — again with Gershwin but now with a microphone — made another recording. Paul Whiteman had a quarrel of some sort and walked out of the recording session. They recorded anyway, with another conductor — Nathaniel Shilkret, I think — taking over. Whiteman was happy to promote the recording as his own, nonetheless. The electric version is better recorded but it lacks, well, electricity. Everyone, including Gershwin, just punches it harder in 1924.”

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Percussion Music from Lou Harrison’s Collection of 78rpm Acetate Records

An absolutely fascinating audio document, this 1971 KPFA broadcast by Charles Amirkhanian presented extremely rare recordings of percussion music from the composer Lou Harrison’s (1917-2003) personal collection. Especially important are the acetate disks of a concert given by John Cage’s percussion ensemble at the Cornish School in Seattle on May 19th, 1939.

Cornish (still there and going strong; as a college student in 1978 I caught Cage himself at a tribute concert in the same hall, performing some of his Sonatas and Interludes) was where Cage found a job accompanying dancers, and it was there that he founded his first percussion ensemble and experimented with the prepared piano. (The stage in the Cornish performance hall was too small to accommodate all his percussion during a dance performance, so Cage came up with the idea of turning a single piano into its own percussion “ensemble”.) The performers heard include Cage, his then-wife Xenia, and the dancer Doris Dennison. (there has to be at least one more, quite possibly Lou Harrison himself. The photo here shows Lou, John, and Xenia behind, Doris and Margaret Jansen in front).

The pieces on these recordings represent the core of the West-Coast experimentalist group (I know, I know, Harry Partch; but he was off on his own very different journey): Lou Harrison’s Counterdance in Spring, Henry Cowell’s Pulse, two movements from Cage’s own Trio, Johanna M. Beyer’s Tactless and Endless, William Russell’s Three Cuban Studies, and again Harrison with his Fifth Simfony. You just can’t get much closer to sitting in on the roots of this exciting period.

The remainder of the broadcast features a 33rpm disk that captures a 1948 performance of Harrison’s Canticle #3, introduced and conducted by Leopold Stokowski during a concert at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

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On a personal note, I’ll mention the release of my own new CD, The Composer Plays IV: Works for Imaginary Piano, on the NiwoSound label. Along with my performance of Stravinsky’s Piano-Rag Music, the CD collects a number of my works that feature piano: either solo, doubled, or with recorded sound.

Jumping into the first wave of what I’m sure is to become common practice, no physical copy of the CD will be offered for sale in stores; it will only be available to subscribers at both eMusic and iTunes (the link is to eMusic; the CD is not “live” on iTunes yet, but will be soon — not only in the US, but iTunes Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia as well. iTunes folks can simply search “Steve Layton” to find the complete list of my available CDs in their country). For those who want something in their hand to read, complete liner notes for the CD can be had as a free downloadable PDF file (300 kb) from my own website. Enjoy!

Settle in for a little history…

Juan Hidalgo (b.1927 –Spain),

Walter Marchetti (b.1931 — Italy),

and Zaj

Most musicians who’ve fallen for John Cage and David Tudor, also know that offspring of the 1960s and 70s, FLUXUS. Far fewer know about the Spanish version, running parallel yet independently. It’s one thing to have gone experimental in, say, England at the time; quite another to have pursued this stuff in the fascist dictatorship of Franco’s Spain. In one you ran the risk of apathy; in the other actual persecution.

 In the mid-50s, Juan Hidalgo and Walter Marchetti were both young student composers. Marchetti’s friendship with Bruno Maderna led them to visit the high-modernist mecca of Darmstadt, but it was their encounter with the ideas, music, and above all the actions of Cage and Tudor (along with the general rediscovery of Marcel Duchamp) that resonated with the two.

Explorations began soon thereafter, and in 1964 the loose confederation of artists (also including the likes of Esther Ferrer, Ramón Barce, Tomas Marco and many more), officially were born under the nonsense-moniker Zaj (Castellano pronunciation “thahh“). High-profile events and confrontational polemics would have never worked in Spain at the time, but keeping everything more “guerrilla” and informal seemed to both confuse and lull the regime into thinking these “fools” weren’t worth the effort to crack down on.

For a good decade and more, the members of Zaj staged a wealth of small subversions, and had already stirred the atmosphere among quite a few key Spanish artists for the day when Franco’s death would suddenly open the country’s door to an intoxicating inrush of fresh air (followed of course later by new problems, but hey, that’s life…).

In the 1970s Gianni Sassi’s small, Italian avant-art music label Cramps would document (besides other notables like Cage, Robert Ashley, Cristina Kubisch, Demetrio Stratos, Alvin Lucier and even a free-improvising Ennio Morricone) some of Hidalgo’s and Marchetti’s work on LP, and some of that can be heard on the web, courtesy of the Universidad de Castilla – La Mancha’s Arte Sonoro website.

Juan Hidalgo’s Tamaran (subtitled “drops of sperm for 12 pianos“) is a 40-minute unmoored landscape, layering twelve recordings of prepared piano. Rrose Sélavy (referencing Duchamp’s female alter-ego and subtitled a la Satie “six moldy pieces for six sound sources“) collects six tracks; the first’s single line has one more semi-related line join in on each successive track, leading to a happy cacophony.

Walter Marchetti’s La Caccia (“the hunt”) uses all manner of toys, bird-calls and other improvised sound-making objects, to create a kind of loopily busy virtual “forest”. His Natura morta (“still life”) pays homage to Satie: both to the notorious Vexations (which happens to be a piece Hidalgo and Marchetti have performed), and the idea of musique d’ameublement (“furniture music”). For more than an hour the piano — buried under a huge display of fruit and flowers — plays the same simple-yet-unsettled phrase, the damper pedal constantly depressed.

Like all art movements, interests and allegiances shift, some things focus and some fall apart, time and people move on. Ferrer a well-known artist; Barce and Marco both highly-respected “establishment” composers… Hidalgo and Marchetti remained faithful to the object, action and subversion. Hidalgo turned more to Duchampian artifact, but Marchetti (now resident in Italy) has continued to produce a number of newer musical works mostly with manipulated sound and piano (though still highly conceptual), many of them issued on CD. Mimaroglu Music Sales can provide you with what’s currently for sale by both Marchetti and Hidalgo.

The link on Juan Hidalgo’s name at the top of this post goes directly to his website (where you might want to wish him a happy 80th birthday this year!); Marchetti doesn’t seem to have a full site, but the link on his name will take you to a short but good interview in English from 2000 (and for those who read Spanish, here’s a recent interview with Hidalgo). The link for Zaj will take you to a history kept at UBUWEB.

Our regular listen to and look at living, breathing composers and performers that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since they’re nice enough to offer so much good listening online:

Caroline M. Breece (b.1977 — UK/US)

Michael G. Breece (b. 1971 — US)

Mike over at Avant Music News this week purely by chance beat me to posting about Caroline. I’d planned showing off her and her husband Michael, ever since I bumped into them on Myspace last summer. A number of married composer couples come to mind, but few if any will have the story that’s Caroline’s and Michael’s. A lot of it may only be known to them, but the part we see shows the real possibilities in what might at first seem the improbable.

Caroline, until recently a British native, has the “official” classical education and experience. Playing, studying and composing from a very early age, touring with the Suffolk Youth Orchestra, degrees from the University of East Anglia… all the standard classical upbringing. Yet there’s something in how she relates these and other details (found in her site’s generous writings), and in how her own music works, that is anything but standard.

Michael on the other hand, starts right out of the gate as anything but standard, and there’s every indication that he should have rightfully just kept careening down that highway to oblivion. Hard life in a tough blue-collar non-musical family, serious emotional hurdles, not much if any financial or educational support… Yet part of that mind, against everything that says culture and environment shape us, grew its own seeds of artistic awareness. Schooled by instinct and the resources of the Indianapolis Public Library, he found something incredibly important in the work of composers from Debussy through Varèse and Cage, all the way up to the avant-garde of today. And something told him that he had to not just listen, but *make* this stuff, using whatever means he had.

The meeting of the two? I don’t have a clue. But somehow the English composer with her fresh MMus degree ran into this thundercloud of a self-made musician, and the next thing you know she’s in America. It’s definitely not a fairytale yet; Caroline and Michael both work as janitors to pay the bills, stealing whatever free time they can to create what they have to create. Yet there’s nothing “poor” about either’s music; there’s an incandescence and a real sense of discovery in there. You can hear for yourself when you visit their websites, since they’re both offering entire CDs for free download (though you can do the right thing and send them a few reasonable bucks for a full-spectrum CDR straight from their hands to your ear). And take the time to read through; nothing I write can tell you anything better about them than a few paragraphs in their own words.