Idiosyncratic Composer Explores the Sonic Mystery of the World
By Peter Monaghan
Oakland, Cal. -- Bring on the technological developments that allow composers to sample, call up, or download the sounds of the world!
So exclaims Alvin Curran. He happily adds: "I can take a minimalist idea, I can add drones, I can throw in 12-tone-styled improvisations, I can refer to Cole Porter, I can refer to John Cage, I can throw it all into the same soup.
"And, in fact, I do."
The thought moves him to gleeful laughter.
Mr. Curran's reputation is growing as one of the more distinctive of modern composers. In addition to compositions for traditional instruments and ensembles, he has created idiosyncratic pieces that incorporate animal calls, ships' horns, snatches of speech, car engines, and radio transmissions, among other sounds.
Four years ago, he brought his philosophy -- "We're faced with a possibility of making music with anything" -- here to Mills College, where he is the Darius Milhaud professor of composition. The position is named for one of the key figures in 20th-century composition. Since 1975, it has been awarded, for up to six years at a time, to composers considered likely to join Milhaud among that select group.
David Bernstein, chairman of the music department at Mills, considers Mr. Curran an inspired choice: "He really has his finger on the pulse of what's going on at the turn of the 21st century."
For most of the past 30 years, Mr. Curran lived in Rome. In 1966, he and four other young American composers based there, including the now-well-known Frederic Rzewski, formed Musica Elettronica Viva, to improvise electronic music freely. The outcome, Mr. Curran says, was "collective anarchy of the most sublime kind."
"We amplified junk with contact microphones, and we became a media success. People heralded our music as revolutionary."
One commentator at the time likened the music to "intense ritual which recalls Japanese Gagaku music and Tibetan chant." A 1968 event made use of the amplified sounds of a human fetus, a Volkswagen truck, and stones dropped from the roof of the auditorium.
Over the years, as Mr. Curran gained attention as a composer, he also wrote many works for solo piano, string quartet, and other standard settings. Some of those comparatively conventional pieces are among his most highly regarded, particularly "For Cornelius" (Mode 49, 1995) for solo piano. It commemorates Cornelius Cardew, an influential English musical innovator who died in 1981.
But newcomers to Mr. Curran's music are likely to be struck first by his continued use of non-standard musical elements. His many large-scale environmental compositions, for example, combine man-made and natural sounds for performance in town squares and fields, or on lakes and rooftops. When he stages, say, a ship's-horn concert using vessels in a harbor, such pieces also become visual events. His intention, he says, is to let the shapes, dimensions, acoustics, and even weather conditions of the sites shape the music. He wants to "put music back where it comes from."
Mr. Curran's most celebrated and ambitious work is "Crystal Psalms" (New Albion 067, 1994). This powerful, austere work -- "bone chilling" is Mr. Bernstein's word for it -- marked the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht. It is scored for 300 musicians -- seven choruses and seven ensembles, including trombonists, cellists, violinists, accordionists, and other instrumentalists -- together with recorded sounds of aspects of Jewish life, including the ritual blowing of a ram's horn, praying at the Western Wall, and singing by Mr. Curran's niece at her bat mitzvah; Offenbach, Strauss, and Verdi melodies; and the sounds of crows, trains, and breaking glass.
The work's premiere, in 1988, hinged upon another distinctive feature. The musicians were divided into seven groups and were stationed in seven different studios, in six European countries. They could not hear each other as they performed together via satellite, which also broadcast the performance live around Europe. The performers were, as Mr. Curran puts it, "just casting their sound into the pool, as a gesture of pure faith."
During the 20th century, "serious" music has countenanced much in the way of experimentation, and in recent decades popular genres have been revolutionized and recombined. This suits Mr. Curran, because, in his soundscapes, traditional notions of "high" and "low" music have no place. He decided long ago not to exclude any of his musical influences, from jazz-oriented avant-gardists like Thelonius Monk and Anthony Braxton, to such key figures in modern chamber music as Giacinto Scelsi and Elliott Carter, to the musical satirist Spike Jones.
His catholicity of taste emerges in performance. In The Village Voice, the writer Kyle Gann described a 1990 performance as "minimalist patterns, serialist gestures, cocktail-jazz licks, marvelously intricate tonal counterpoint, all turned into dream images, each undercutting the one before it: call him the Charles Ives of electro-improv."
Mr. Gann took particular note of Mr. Curran's "fantastic jazz chops." These stand out in such works as "Electric Rags II" (New Albion, NA027CD, 1990), recorded with ROVA, a San Francisco-based saxophone quartet that is prominent in avant-garde-jazz circles. In the piece, random cues prompt the performers to change the direction of their improvisations around written themes.
One of Mr. Curran's goals in organizing pieces this way is to disrupt the habitual patterns that improvisers inevitably fall back on. Beyond improvisation, he believes, lies "spontaneity without memory." He says he is pursuing a new form of music, "based entirely on human trust, a form of music whose goal is to get beyond time and space momentarily, which is the goal of most music, in any case. That is, to step somewhere into those perilous spaces in our psyche that allow us, just momentarily, to leave our minds and our memory outside of us."
It is here that Mr. Curran clearly diverges from the man he cites as his greatest influence, his long-time friend, John Cage, the iconoclastic American composer, artist, and poet who died in 1992. Like many other American composers, Mr. Curran has taken to heart Cage's adage that all sounds are fodder for music-making. But he has not been slavish to Cage's influence. For example, inspired by the I Ching, Cage literally tossed coins to determine many elements of his scores. In contrast, Mr. Curran wants not chance, but his performers' instincts, to determine what is played. He says he wants improvisers often to be his score.
Improvisation has not enjoyed much favor in chamber music since the 18th century. But for Mr. Curran, it is "so simple, and so outrageously primitive in a way, reducing sound to this kind of almost animal spontaneity."
It complements his own way of composing -- generally at the piano, where, he says, "I feel myself to be an instinctual, wild animal, one who in my case expresses my wildness, or my creativity -- controls it -- through sound."
David Abel, a violinist and a professor of music at Mills who is a respected interpreter of modern compositions, is a great admirer of Mr. Curran's work, some of which he has recorded. He says Mr. Curran incorporates many compositional styles and elements, but without falling into the mannerism of postmodern collage. "He doesn't do it in a disjointed way," Mr. Abel says. Rather, each component of Mr. Curran's pieces, whether notes from a violin or blasts from a ship's horn, is carefully chosen.
When Mr. Curran lists his formative aural experiences, radio shows like "The Lone Ranger" and "The Green Hornet" share billing with the natural and maritime sounds of Providence, R.I., where he grew up. His mother was a ragtime pianist, and his father led a dance band and played violin, bass, and trombone.
In his childhood, he says, "radio was the great bringer of the sonic mystery from the outer world. This is where all my music comes from, and now where it's all going out."
He is at work now on a large radio project called "Erat Verbum" ("In the beginning was the word"). Each of its five 23-minute programs will explore one form of communication, including animal calls and various phonetic alphabets. In one program, Mr. Curran explains, "I bring together some of the most well-known and unknown languages of the world into the same space, a kind of universal glossolalia, but going at breakneck speeds, with MIDI sampling and very virtuoso keyboard technique." MIDI is computer software for digitally processing music.
Mr. Curran will return to full-time composing in a year or two. He says he has found teaching graduate composition students here -- working extensively with each of them -- gratifying. But "I don't think it's something I could do again on a full-time basis," he says.
He is under increasing deadline pressure as he enjoys a string of commissions that stretches more than two years into the future. And he would not be content to give the students less than his full attention.
"It is a major, major responsibility, accepting to guide the lives of young composers. These are people who are essentially professionals and are being trained to go out into the world and be a kook, like myself."
Copyright © 1996 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
