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a r t i s t : Alvin Curran
t i t l e : Inner Cities
d a t e : 2005
l a b e l : Long Distance (#0560304)
g e n r e : Avantgarde
r l s. d a t e : September/2005
t r a c k s : 11
b i t r a t e : VBRkbps
s i z e : 315,1 MB
_______________________________________________________________________
Composed by Alvin Curran
Performed by the Belgian pianist Daan Vandewalle.
Inner Cities are where you go to get debriefed, to dance a
tarantella with Gurdjieff; to see Italo Calvino greet Giordano
Bruno in Campo Dei Fiori; to play low C 78 times and low
D-flat once for Giacinto Scelsi's 79th birthday; to hear Louis
Armstrong fuse time and space in Providence, and Ella, Peanuts
Hucko, and Brubeck fill a Newport stadium unamplified; to
watch Cage and Braxton play chess in Washington Square Park;
to roll around in a pile of rags with Pistoletto and Simone
Forti; to listen to Ezra Pound's silence by the Grand Canal;
to hear Julian Beck say "Paradise Nooow..." and years later on
film say "I wuz bawn in a garbage can"; to become a composer
in the Coolidges' apple tree; to hear Miles and Coltrane blow
minds at Storyville (price, one coca-cola); to listen to Cy
Twombly just back from the Gobi desert; to meet Diana in her
temple on Lake Nemi; to hear Art Tatum play the whole world
from memory; to record, for Perlini's "Otello", a tin can
rolling through a Venetian church; to give an impromtu
ram's-horn concert for Palestinian shopkeepers; to ride with a
New York cabbie nuts about Gubaidulina; to sit at Patience
Gray's table; to plant a Magnetic Garden in the Beat 72
theater; to make love with a Jewish Rhein-maiden; to help
Giuseppe Chiari remix Palazzo Strozzi and Robert Ashley
collect dust from the union-floor of Local 802; to hear
fog-horns with the Narragansett Indians; to cook funghi
porcini for Luigi Nono in Berlin-Friedenau; to meet Morty
Feldman on Eighth Street; to make the Ligurian coast into
watercolormusic with Edith Schloss; to hang with the Carrara
anarchists and the Bertolucci's in Tellaro where DH Lawrence
had his piano delivered by mules; to get booed off the floor
staging Korean folk songs in Darmstadt; to help to listen for
Messiaen in Birdland; to hear Evan Parker play the Festa
dell'Unita and George Lewis play the Tower of Pisa; to see
and hear Annea Lockwood's astounding glass concert at the
Middle Earth; to be sitting in a room with Alvin Lucier; to
hear Thelonious Monk detune time at the Five-Spot; to observe
Sartre and Beauvoir drinking Campari from a window on Piazza
Navona; to accompany ventriloquists, hypnotists, sirtos
dancers, and bouzouki players in the Catskills; to watch Lenny
Michaels dance the mambo at Susan's Piano-Bar and Grill; to
see Steve Lacy play his soprano sax with his left leg; to blow
shofar to Judith Malina's Shelley; to split the MEV door at
the Obitorio; to copy for Cardew while he rolled the
revolution on the banks of the Tiber; to play on a Holland
American Ocean Liner which later catches fire and sinks; to
wish that Meredith Monk, Diamanda Galas, Joan LaBarbara,
Billie Holiday would sing from the minarets five times a day;
to play Dixieland in the Brussels World's Fair across from
Varese and Xenakis' Phillips Pavillion; to play "An American
in Paris" in Dahomey with John Sebastian Sr. on harmonica; to
witness real Balinese dance in trance; to accidentally step on
Dietrich Fischer Dieskau's foot backstage at the Akademie der
Kⁿnste; to record an interview with King Hussein of Jordan; to
watch Trisha Brown levitate on Bach in San Francisco; to help
Cage squeeze lemons into his fresh taboule on 18th Street and
watch David Tudor mix chili peppers and lasers at the Grand
Hotel des Palmes; to play the Sydney Harbour like a bandoneon;
to teach advanced-orchestration in the Greek Theater at Mills
College with Pauline Oliveros and the ghost of Harry Partch;
to shake Stravinsky's hand in the American Sector-Berlin and
Varese's in New Haven; to watch Kosugi dance his electric
violin around Marcus Aurelius; to get thrown off stage in
London as a warmup act for the Pink Floyd; to meet Stockhausen
at a strobe-light show in Dusseldorf; to open windows on
Cage's cue for adding real cold air to his Winter Music; to
camp out with Teitelbaum and Rzewski for Antonioni's Zabriskie
Point; to hear Terry and LaMonte's landmark concerts at the
Attico in Rome; to help Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik
get an introduction to the Pope; to nearly get sequestered
along with Arnold Dreyblatt's instruments at the Bahnhof
Friedrichstrasse; to play the "Tennessee Waltz" with a
banjo-band in Florence; to hear Maryanne Amacher make sound
circle your head in her Boston harbor basement; to have tea
and guffaws with Helen and Elliott; to play "Drumming" with
Steve Reich in Pamplona; to bury 80 loudspeakers under
Melissa's Floor Plan in Linz and feed hay to a Diskklavier in
Donaueschingen; to play with the original Scratch Orchestra;
to make 300 people in 6 countries who cannot see or hear one
another play together on the radio; to drink a Turka-Cola at
the foot of Mt. Ararat; to hear Scelsi's piano sonata on the
car radio in central Anatolia; to make a concert of shiphorns
in the "Golf of Poets"; to be 5 years old in Central Falls,
Rhode Island, sitting next to my father in the trombone
section at the Sunday afternoon Vaudeville show.
I offer these disconnected autobiographical fragments like a
drawer full of fossilized imprints to put you in the same
position I am in now, attempting to connect the dots and tell
you something, anything about the pieces on this set of CDs,
maybe my best music.
In these Inner Cities there is no "drive-by" anything; there's
merely back alleys, empty lots full of stubborn weeds and
clear sky, trails of memory which may or may not lead anywhere
or even have relevance to the music at hand. The bottom line:
these pieces are a set of contradictory etudes - studies in
liberation and attachment, cryptic itineraries to the old
fountain on the town square whence flows all artistic
divination and groping for meaning in the dark.
Inner Cities began in 1991 as a single innocent piano piece
and has now evolved into a musical cycle of 12 pieces
sometimes performed (following Daan VandewalleÆs brilliant
intuition) in its 6-hour entirety. My goal, as always, was to
reduce the musical elements to their ultimate essences, to
repudiate and embrace dualism, and to emulate, even in
permanent notation, the feel of spontaneous music-making. The
music therefore is open, unhurried, brutally lyrical, quiet,
private and tonal as it is raucous, aggressively impolite and
obsessively meticulous in making the simple relations between
tones and durations an unending adventure of personal wonder.
Each piece starts with a single idea, chord, or cellular
pattern, which serves as its own source of narrative and
history. These could incorporate anything from the simplest
melodicizing on a single tone, in IC I, to a vast
postmodernist sonata, as in IC 10 (in itself lasting over one
hour), where the music no longer understands where it is
coming from or where itÆs going.
IC 1, written as a birthday gift for Ernstalbrecht Stiebler,
is composed on a single A major chord in first inversion
supporting a one note melody on ôAö. When this gets boring the
music ômodulatesö to a 3 note melody over a 4th chord.
IC 2 is based on two intertwined quietly arpeggiating
augmented 9th chords which slowly evolve into a piano-bar
rendition of the song ôBody and Soul.ö
IC 3, incorporated later into this collection, was originally
written for toy-piano, hence very minimalistic in its
bold-fast attitude; it too ends on a song, written in the
mid-seventies for my solo performance Light Flowers/Dark
Flowers.
IC 4 dedicated to the memory of Lou Harrison, is a long and
wandering but very focused melody, refering tangentially to
many possible melodic practices around the world. This ends on
an arpeggiated figure (quasi improvised in time) with a
continuation of the former melodic essences.
IC5 is a compressed version of the out of control structured
improv that ends IC 10.
IC 6 and 7 (written for Jed Distler) return the music to
explorations of 4 part ôunintentionalö (multidirectional)
harmony, freely interrupted by explosive and agitated mobs.
IC 7.5 is a drunken waltz which staggers out of the ethereal
end of IC 7 and, while a piece unto itself, serves as a moment
of comic relief on the way to IC 8.
IC 8 (written for Eve Egoyan) continues like the previous 2
works, refining the harmonic language down to just 3-part
chords and taking a 40-some minute tour of the world in search
of all possible family (relations and relatives).
IC 9 (written for Reinier van Houdt) is approaching virtuoso
disjunctions using unique moments very high and very low and
passionately letting all these spaces resolve themselves under
one roof û this comes in a ôwalking-bassö resolution at the
end.
IC 10 is for Daan Vandewalle, who receives a music lasting
just over one hour which is clearly a planetary sonata form
where land-masses and oceans, volcanoes and rivers and quiet
grasslands, all swirl out of a classic set of arpeggiated
5ths... a tour-de force structured triadic improvisation to be
played as fast as possible concludes.
IC 11 is by contrast the simplest of simplest musics... a
blues with a one note melody, nothing more, nothing less.
This, called the Aglio Olio Peperoncino Blues, is dedicated to
my dear friend and colleague Frederic Rzewski, who in a recent
email suggested that these three humble foods were all one
needed for lasting life: garlic, olive oil, and hot chili
peppers.
Alvin Curran 14.8.04
Curran's more than 100 works feature taped/sampled natural
sounds, piano, synthesisers, computers, percussion, ship
horns, chorus, experimental radio works or large-scale
site-specific sound environments and installations. This is
his minimal, beautiful music for solo piano [and toy piano]
which has been championed by Sorabji specialist, Daan
Vandewalle, variously dedicated to Ernstalbrecht Stiebler,
Steve Lacy, Jed Distler and Lou Harrison amongst others.
_______________________________________________________________________
cd 1
01-Inner Cities 1 [29:23]
02-Inner Cities 2 [26:49]
03-Inner Cities 3 - Light Flowers, Dark Flowers II [07:17]
cd 2
01-Inner Cities 4 [20:10]
02-Inner Cities 5 [03:21]
03-Inner Cities 6 & 7 [36:35]
04-Inner Cities 7.5 [03:28]
cd 3
01-Inner Cities 8 [43:13]
02-Inner Cities 9 [27:53]
cd 4
01-Inner Cities 10 [51:30]
02-Inner Cities 11 - Aglio, Oglio, Peperoncino Blues [14:47]
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