Mumma’s early encounters with John Cage and David Tudor, his work with them in the ONCE Festival and other situations primed him for his eventual work with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

Merce Cunningham was one of the great American dance artists of the 20th century. Cunningham was born in Centralia, Washington in 1919. He started off learning tap dancing from a local teacher where his ear for rhythm and sense of timing were honed from an early age. He later attended the Cornish School in Seattle from 1937 to study acting and mime, but didn’t take to it. He loved the way dance could be ambiguous while also allowing for full expression of movement. Martha Graham had seen him dance during this time period and she invited him to join her company. It was through Graham that Cunnigham’s life intersected with Cage in something of a chance operation. Graham had needed a musical accompanist for her dancers. One of her pupil’s, Bonnie Bird, recommended composer Lou Harrison, who declined, but suggested in his place the young Cage. Cunningham and Cage met in 1938 and later became romantically involved, and life partners until Cage’s death in 1992.

Cunningham sometimes played in Cage’s percussion group at the time, and they had become quick friends. Over the subsequent years Merce loved to talk to John about ideas. As each of their personal situations evolved in art and life, Merce finally took the step of establishing his own dance company in 1953 and Cage came along Cage for the ride as companies music director. Cunnigham’s Company had many opportunities as it grew over the years. Cage’s own career continued with more and more in the late 60s and throughout the 70s. As each pursued their vision other musicians needed to step in to the role of director when Cage wasn’t available. Mumma and Behrman, among others, were natural choices, due to their friendship and affinity.  Mumma states it was never very clear how he ended up working with the Cunningham Dance Company, but it was something he just drifted into through these associations.

In the 60s and 70s Cunningham’s troupe made increasing use of electronics and this was an area where Mumma’s expertise could shine. He was a perfect fit; primed by his dedicated work as a creative composer, a cunning electronic technician, and as someone for whom the collaborative mode was second nature. In Mumma’s work with Cunningham’s troupe he got a chance to use all of these aspects of his character and put them to the test on tours that tested the endurance and dedication of everyone involved. The programs often involved collaborative music making and separate choreography, the latter determined by chance operations. The musicians were free to draw from their personal repertoires, and combine it with original material. 

Mesa

The first major piece Mumma wrote for Cunningham’s company was Mesa in 1966 for the dance Place. He was already working on something with David Tudor, who worked regularly in the company, when this came about. Instead of starting over he decided to alter the work in progress to accommodate the commission. Tudor had gotten into playing the Bandoneon, a relative of the accordion and squeezebox that has become popular in Argentina. It became the perfect instrument for Mesa because of its wide frequency and dynamic range. The Bandoneon can also produce long sustained drones and sounds, just what Mumma for the monolith that was taking shape.
 
Like the geological feature after which it is named, Mesa, is a tectonic slab of music sustained at one level of thrust with occasional interruptions. He had thought of using tape for the piece, but the dynamic range he wanted couldn’t be contained with the tape. That was one concept for the piece. The other was his desire to use “an inharmonic frequency spectrum with extremes of sound density.” In the performace space the placement of different portions of the sound in different loudspeakers creates a spatial diffusion. The final mixing of the sound is in the ears of the listener.

To further extend the dynamic range of Tudor’s instrument and create the timbres he imagined Mumma needed to design a circuit. The piece represented a creative problem and a technical challenge. His electronics needed to be able to translate frequencies, equalize, and required the use of logic circuitry in tricky configurations to control musical continuity. It’s another composition where the circuit diagram and instructions are more of the score than notated music.

Mumma developed Voltage Controlled Attenuators (VCA) in collaboration with Dr. William Ribbens in Ann Arbor. These extended the range while also including envelope controls. Ribbens is a Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Aerospace Engineering at the University.

In performance six microphones are attached to the Bandoneon, three on each side. The microphones are different with each being sensitive to different frequency bands. As a way of “thickening the plot” and for other reasons Mumma fed one mic from each side into the other side of the circuit. Six channels of sound from one instrument source are being processed to create this massive place.

Using a logic circuit Mumma was able to route control signals and program signals to different channels during performance. He used a frequency shifter with equalization that processed parts of the sound determined by internal control signals or from Tudor playing the Bandoneon. The logic circuit itself determined the source and nature of the control signal.

Mumma used a multiplier to take portions of the spectrum and transform it by whole integers to further equalize the sounds. Phase and amplitude modulators also work with portions of the sound, gating parts of the spectrum transfer with the output from the multiplier. Further gates, formant modulators, pass band filters and other baroque electrical wizardry were also built into the circuit score of Mesa. In creating the piece he was setting up a cybersonic system.

The VCA also included delays that further shaped the envelope of the program signal. Mumma wanted to use very specific delays that were not possible with either electronic manipulation, or from a mechanical source, such as building a tape delay. Mumma writes, “the solution to this problem is inherent in the concept of MESA itself, since at this point in the system it is the envelope of the otherwise sustained sounds which is to be shaped. This is achieved by subjecting the VCA control signals to frequency-sensitive thermal-delay circuitry. The wide dynamic range of the VGA is due to special bias procedures.”

Every control signal for sound modification first comes from the Bandoneon. “Because the control signals are automatically derived from the sound materials themselves, I call the process, and the music, "cybersonic".”
​
What Mumma has created in Mesa is  a situation where the Bandoneonist can play a duet with a piece of electronic circuitry. A third person, most often Mumma, in performance, tweaks the circuit live to override parts of the internal logic with an artist’s intuition. 

Telepos

One of the pieces by Mumma used by Cunnigham in a variety of settings including TV Rerun was his Telepos (1972). For this he made belts to be worn by the dancers that contained small accelerometers, a device that measures vibrations and accelerations in motion. The belts were also equipped with voltage controlled oscillators and a miniature UHF transmitter. Inspired by telemetry, or the transmission of device data that is read remotely at a different point of reception, the dancers made music by their movements “in a process similar to that encountered in space travel, undersea, or biomedical research.”

Mumma worked with the group for seven full seasons and also collaborated on works with individuals from the circle. He also continued to work with Cage. One such instance was as part of the creation of a soundtrack to an electronic game of chess.

Reunion was a big piece conceived by John Cage as a chess game to be played between himself and Marcel Duchamp and a second match with Teeny Duchamp. It had a collaborative musical element performed by Gordon Mumma, David Behrman, and David Tudor on an electronic chessboard designed by Lowell Cross. The chess board controlled certain aspects of the live electronic music.

Cage had first met Marcel in the early 1940’s when they were both in New York, but the meeting had been awkward, due to a blowup between Cage and Peggy Guggenheim, who had first introduced them. At that time Cage and his then-wife Xenia were being put up by Peggy after they had moved from Chicago. Cage took a gig at the Museum of Modern Art, when he also had a gig at Peggy’s new art gallery. She felt snubbed by him having a show she thought stole the spotlight from her presentation of his music in the city. At the time he was so in awe of Duchamp, he didn’t want to disturb him, but simply enjoyed in his presence.

In the winter of 1965-66 Cage’s circle and Duchamp’s overlapped again and they found themselves at the same parties. Cage had long been an admirer of Duchamp and they shared a number of sensibilities, one appreciating readymade objects and the appreciating readymade music of sound occurring everywhere in life. He wanted to reacquaint himself with Duchamp, but wasn’t sure how to go about it, until he asked Teeny if she thought Duchamp would tutor him in chess. She said to ask the man himself, and when he got the gumption to do so, Duchamp said yes.

He started to meet with Duchamp once a week to learn the game, and other social visits followed, including vacationing with the couple in Spain. Though he had used chess as a ruse to get to know the artist he admired, Cage was fascinated with the game and became a serious player. More often than not he lost to his teacher, who had played chess for decades.  
In 1968 the idea for Reunion was hatched. According to Mumma it “descended upon us at the same time” and the exact source of it was obscured amongst the collaborators. At the time Cage was very interested in expanding the people with whom he collaborated beyond the group of musicians and electronic pioneers who had clustered around him and Cunningham.

Lowell Cross was one of the people Cage was interested in working with. At the time Cross was writing a thesis that explored the history of electronic music and electronic music studios from between 1948 and 1953, and Cage played a large role in his thesis. Cross was studying media and society under Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto, and also ethnomusicology with Mieczysław Koliński, and electronic music with Gustav Ciamaga and Myron Schaeffer.

Cage had been interested in Lowell’s work as an instrument builder, and had known about his device called the Stirrer, which was a panning system for moving up to four sounds in space which he had created between 1963-65. Cage called him in February of 1968 and asked him if he could build him an electronic chessboard capable of selecting and diffusing sounds around an audience in a concert hall as a game unfolded. Cross at first declined, politely, because he was swamped with his work at school.

Cage then made his move and said, “Perhaps you will change your mind if I tell you who my chess partner will be.” When Duchamp’s name was dropped it was enough to persuade the assiduous student to get even busier and build what would become the 16-input, 8-output chessboard used in the subsequent performance.

The chessboard had sensors that triggered the electronic music being produced by the musicians according to the way the pieces were moved. The outcome musically was beyond the control of the performers, who each had their own systems and set-ups feeding into the mix. The board was also equipped with contact microphones that picked up the movement of the pieces.

At the performance on March 5th, which kicked of the “Sightsoundsystems” performance series organized by composer Udo Kasmets, the chess players sat and smoked cigarettes and drank wine while the musicians made electronic sounds. The performance lasted for four hours and was a celebration of everyday life as a form of art. Marshall McCluhan was noted to have been in the audience.
​
It was these kind of collaborative group work situations that Mumma found himself to be drawn to and a part of over and over again. Mumma’s talent as a composer, player, electronics specialist and creative thinker made him an invaluable asset to all the groups and milieus he circulated within and between.

.:. .:. .:.
​
Read the rest of the Radiophonic Laboratory: Telecommunications, Electronic Music, and the Voice of the Ether.

Each month of 2021 will contain a biographical sketch of someone who did things their own way, who lived their own iconoclastic life. Last month we looked at the audio obsessed OCD recluse lifestyle of David Wills, aka the Weatherman. This month we are going Native with Frances Slocum, Maconaquah.

(If you are interested in the background of WHY I am writing these notes on American weirdos you can read this post by John Michael Greer on Johnny Appleseed's America.)

Before we look at the life of the lady who came to be known as Little Bear, I want to start with some quotes from an essay by John Michael Greer where he explores the idea that the very landscape we live in effects our consciousness. Each land mass has its own effect and the land mass of North America has a particular flavor. He writes: 

"Carl Jung, while traveling in America, happened to see workers streaming out of a factory. To his European eye, many members of the crowd looked distinctly Native American, and he was startled when his host insisted there was probably not one Native American there. Both men were correct. The land—any land—puts its stamp on the bodies, the actions, and the thoughts of the people who are born and raised there; the American who tries to be European has been a butt of edged humor in Europe for centuries now, because the result always rings false to European ears."

He then goes on to discuss how "because of this imprint, reflected in details of history and culture" it's possible to get a glimpse of a future great culture and civilization that will take shape here in America.

"The first stirrings of the American great culture are fainter at this point—not surprising, as its flowering will likely be quite a bit further in the future, and we have a second pseudomorphosis to get through first. One measure of that faintness is that there isn’t yet a good clear English word for the theme that already differentiates American culture from those of other societies. Since the land keeps radiating its basic influence while peoples come and go, I’ll borrow a term from Chinook jargon—the old trade language of the northwest quarter or so of native North America, which was once spoken from northern California to Alaska and from the Pacific Ocean to the eastern slopes of the Rockies—and speak of tamanous.

Tamanous—that’s pronounced “tah-MAN-oh-oose,” by the way—is the guardian spirit of the individual, and also his luck and his destiny. In a great many Native American cultures, finding and establishing a sacred relationship with one’s tamanous, via various traditional practices, is the primary religious act a person can engage in, an essential part of achieving adulthood and thus something that most people do as a matter of course. The result is a religious vision unlike any other, in which the personal relationship between the individual and an equally unique and individualized spiritual power takes center stage."
-John Michael Greer, America and Russia, Tamanous and Sobornost

This process of going Native here in America has long been underway. When colonists first arrived however, and long into the 18th and 19th centuries sometimes the person who went Native didn't have much of a choice about it. Aside from the ethical considerations of kidnapping people and making them part of your tribe, it cannot be denied that this has been part of the American experience. Some of those who were kidnapped, taken by force from their birth family, made the most out of an ordeal that often began in violence. These people, assimilated into Native tribes, have much to teach those of us who hear the call of this land that is America.​

​Frances Slocum (March 4, 1773 – March 9, 1847) who became Ma-con-na-quah, "Young Bear" or "Little Bear" was one such woman, an adopted member of the Miami people. Her story began in Warwick, Rhode Island, and ended in Indiana. At the age of four her family left New England for the Wyoming Valley of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. 

The area had already been occupied since time out of mind by the Americans who were already Native. Several historical tribes including the Susquehannock, whose tongue was the  Iroquoian language, and the Delaware, whose tongue was Algonquian, had made it a home.

In the mid-18th century settlers primarily from England ventured into the valley. Some came to do that most questionable of religious services -"missionary work"- i.e., convert the Indians from what these Christians though was their barbaric beliefs over to the sane and civilized thought systems of their own ways of life.  

Others simply wanted to farm the fertile land near the Susquehanna River and escape the freaks back home they'd been trying to get away from in the first place -often for their own religious freedom and liberty. Then the French and Indian War broke out and its violence drove the settlers away for a time. 

The colonies and colonists were often as much at odds with each other as they were with the people they were displacing. The colony of Pennsylvania and Connecticut both said the Wyoming Valley was their own -irrespective of the ancient culture already on the land. One faction was at the throat of another. They were at the throats of  one another in a series of skirmishes known as the Pennamite-Yankee Wars. The Connecticut contingent returned to the valley to settle the town of Wilkes-Barre in 1769. Yet armed bands of Pennamites were already there and took issue with the interlopers.Physical violence continued as the Revolutionary War itself broke out. United against the common enemy of the oppressive mother country, they still fought among themelves until the disputes were settled in 1780.

It was in the time of tumult that Slocum family skittered off to Luzerne County in 1777. Frances was just five years old. They had survived much of the previous violence in the area, and thought God, their Quaker beliefs, their pacifism, and the friendly relations they had with the Natives would protect them from harm. Many other souls with less courage, and perhaps less faith or foolishness,  had fled during the Battle of Wyoming in July 1778, when British soldiers, allied with Seneca warriors destroyed Forty Fort near Wilkes-Barre. More than three hundred American settlers were killed in the fight.

On November 2nd, 1778, three Delaware warriors captured her at their farm in Wilkes-Barre. The father Jonathan was away when three Delaware warriors attacked the Slocum family farm near Wilkes-Barre. Mother Ruth and eight of her ten kids escaped into the forest. But the Delaware captured five-year-old Frances in their raid, along with her brother Ebenezer who was disabled. They also snatched Wareham Kingsley, a young boy whose family was living on the Slocum farm. The Delaware didn't end up keeping Ebenezer, but the other two were taken and Frances never did see her folks again. A little over a month later the natives killed her father and grandfather. Her mother Ruth who died died in 1807 never stopped believing that one day her  daughter would be found.

Frances was given to a Delaware chief and his wife who were childless. They named her after their own youngest daughter, who had died, Weletasash. Frances recalled in her later years how the group she was with migrated from the Niagra Falls area, to Detroit, and then ended up near Fort Wayne, Indiana in what they called Kekionga.

Frances got married the first time between 1791 and 1792 but returned to live with her parents due to domestic violence. She met her second husband when she found him injured in the woods. She brought him home and her parents helped him get well and back into shape.

He was know as She-pan-can-ah, Deaf Man, because he couldn't hear. A strong warrior, Shepancanah later became a Miami chief. The pair had four children together. Their two sons died young. They also had two daughters, Kekenakushwa or Cut Finger and Ozahshinquah or Yellow Leaf. Marrying into the Miami Frances adopted another name, Maconaquah or Little Bear.

After the War of 1812 they settled along the Mississinewa River near Peru, Indiana. The next 23 years are a blank as far as the historical record goes. Yet in 1835 she shared some of her story with a visiting trader named Colonel George Ewing: the fact that she was a white woman who had been taken as a child. 

Ewing was a fluent speaker of the Miami tongue.  She spoke no English at this time  but remembered her family's name was Slocum and that they had been Quakers who lived along the Susquehanna River.

When Ewing met Slocum she was a widow living with her extended family at Deaf Man's village. The small enclave consisted of a double log cabin with two or three cabins attached to it, a corn crib, a stable, and outbuildings for livestock.  Living with her were her two daughters, Ozahshinquah (Yellow Leaf), a young widow, and Kekenakushwa (Cut Finger), Slocum's eldest daughter; Kekenakushwa's husband, Tanquakeh, a métis named Jean Baptiste Brouillette; three grandchildren; and an elderly relative.

Ewing took her story back out into the world and tried to locate her relatives. He sent a letter to the postmaster at Lancaster, PA and aske about the Slocum family and if they had a relative who had been kidnapped during the Revolutionary War. The letter never made it to its intended recipient, but was discovered two years later at which point it was published in the Lancaster Intelligencer. A minister from the Wyoming Valley read the news and passed it along to Joseph Slocum, her Brother who then got in contact with Ewing. 

In September of 1837 Joseph, his brother Isaac and sister Mary traveled with interpreters to Peru, Indiana to meet their long lost sibling.  Having confirmed her as their sister, they offered to take her back with them, but she had grown up with the Delaware and the Miami and the Indian way of life was what she knew and was accustomed. At this point she also had a family of her own. She spoke no English and had forgotten her given name was Frances. She had been fully assimilated into the life of the tribe. But it was a reunion and they got to meet their nieces and her son-in-law on their visit, and she got to see her brothers and sisters.

The village Little Bear had lived in with Deaf Man was a kind of crossroads for the multicultural American experience. Their family was not in any way the only one to be mixed racially and culturally. African-American's had also mixed with the tribe and been assimilated and lived nearby. 

At the time the U.S. Government was working on removing Indians from their land and resettling them in Kansas and other points west. The Miami were coerced to sign treaties in 1838 and 1840 that forced the Miami community in Indiana to consider moving west. All but a small portion of their remaining tribal lands in Indiana were ceded to the federal government, and in 1840 they agreed to move across the Mississippi River within five years.

Yet another deal was made in 1838. Three years after she came out as white a new treaty was made for some Miami families with individual land grants that would allow them to remain in Indiana. Among the recipients were Ozahshinquah and Kekenakushwa , her two daughters, who together received 640 acres of land, exempting them from the removal to Kansas Territory. Little Bear was recognized as the head of the family at this time, but was not named in the land grant. 

As the knowledge of her being white spread in the community it encouraged those who had been able to stay in Indiana to mask their Indian identity and try to pass. This strategy was emboldened by the political maneuverings of Miami Chief Francis Godfroy.

​Godfroy was born at Little Turtle's village (Fort Wayne) in 1788, son of a French trader and Miami woman. He ended up becoming a key figure in helping to keep some of the Miami people on Indiana land as a tribe through his landholdings and the leadership of his descendants. His treaty grant for the land around Mount Pleasant became a refuge for Miamis without land who had come home from Kansas after  returning from Kansas after their removal in 1846.

On March 3, 1845, the United States Congress passed the joint resolution that exempted Slocum and twenty-one of her Miami relatives from removal to Kansas Territory. Her Miami relations in Indiana were among the 148 individuals who formed the nucleus of the present-day Miami Nation of Indiana.

On March 3, 1845, the United States Congress passed the joint resolution that exempted Little Bear and twenty-one of her Miami relatives from removal to Kansas Territory. Her Miami relations in Indiana were among the 148 individuals who formed the nucleus of the present-day Miami Nation of Indiana.
The rest of the reservation land of the Miami’s in Indiana was ceded to the feds in 1846. Six months before Little Bear's death a major removal of more than 300 Miami began at Peru. A smaller group was removed in 1847. All told, it was less than half the Miami tribe that got removed, and more than half that either returned to Indiana or were never made to leave under the terms of the treaties.

She died at age 74 of pneumonia at Deaf Man's village. The graves were later moved when the Wabash dam was built, flooding their old home. 

Little Bear's grandson, Camillus Bundy was born in 1854, son of Ozashinquah. He was a shaman who knew the old rituals and traditions, the use of plants and other Miami lore. He was known as a gifted storyteller and farmer. He became the chief after his father. He lived most of his life on the reservation land and cared for the grave of his grandmother. He taught what he knew to his sons Charles Z and David Bondy. He also became 
the tribal attorney in charge of contacting Washington in with regards to the Eastern Miami's first formal pursuit of claims.

The Eastern Miami were bringing forward claims in regards to illegally collected taxes by the State of Indiana on Tribal Reserves. Camillus Bundy called together the Miami to discuss general claims and the future of the tribe. On September 23, 1923 60 to 80 people attended the meeting that is seen as the beginning of what is now the Miami Nation of Indiana. In 1930, at the age of 75, Camillus Bundy retired from actively pursuing Miami claims. Pimyotamah passed away in January of 1935. 

A Brief Sideshow in Peru, Indiana

The town of Peru itself also forms an interesting nexus for this story, and I hope to visit it myself, especially during the "circus days". 

Peru, Indiana was the winter headquarters of many major circuses of the time, and is recognized as the circus capital of the world. It all started in 1884 when the Wallace Company started out, with Peru as it's base. Benjamin Wallace was livery owner in Peru who took a chance on starting his own show when he bought a few rail cars worth of circus equipment. He called his entertainment the Wallace and Company’s Great World Menagerie, Grand International Mardi Gras, Highway Holiday Hidalgo and Alliance of Novelties. His show was a success and the name became simplified after he purchased the Hagenbeck Circus and it became the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus.​

​With his show wheeling out from Peru every spring, and returning in the winter, Peru became a locus for wayward clowns, trapeze artists, and anyone with a gimmick or a schtick.  Buffalo Bill's Wild West show made use of the Winter Quarters Wallace had built. There were huge barns for elephants and other exotic animals. There was even a hospital on the grounds, amidst all the other outbuildings and bric-a-brac of circus life. Lion tamers and animal trainers such as Clyde Beatty who came to the circus in the 20th century also  made it a home. Beatty's great granddaugther Tarrin Cooper lives in Peru and does the occassional roadshow highwire act. Many of the Miami Indians in the area found work with the circuses there.

In the summer Peru was quiet without all the circus folk around, but come fall they'd be back. The musicians treated the townies with the song of “Back Home Again in Indiana” from the high pitched steam calliope. The last commercial steam calliope builder in the world, David Morecraft, opened up shop in Peru in 1985 to keep these instruments and tradition alive. His calliopes are featured in the annual circus festival and parade there in July. One of the festival’s largest calliope is called the Gentry. It  was built in Cincinnati in the 1920s and is housed in a circus wagon made in Peru in 1901. The whole contraption now gets hauled on the bed of a 1949 Ford pickup.

The Ringling Brothers swooped into Peru and the circus community became there circus community. Like everywhere else in the Great Depression the town took a big hit and in 1941 the doors to the Winter Quarters closed, but the freaks.  In a desperate act to save space and money on maintenance the circus wagons were burned. Even as the old dream of the circus life died there in town, many of the freaks and carnie types couldn't leave and so joined the world of everyday people they had once entertained. Thus it is that in Peru a high concentration of people with the circus in their blood live to this day. 

​In the patches of sound bites that make up the quilt that is Negativland's 2020 album The World Will Decide, the song “Before I Ask” portrays an underlying feeling of panic that persists throughout the experience of the album. With the help of the voices of Siri, Alexa and Google, the song is able to convey a certain message about social media usage in this day and age, and how scary it can be. It contains the vocals of David “The Weatherman” Wills, who intensely shouts absurd questions into the void, each question getting weirder than the last. Like some songs on the album, this track contains a dark undertone in terms of sound. It’s the type of sound that makes people’s heart beat faster and faster, the feeling of uncertainty pushing down on them.  

Longtime Negafan's will know that the Weatherman, or the "dumb stupid Weatherman" as he is called. (Yes, sometimes he operates under the moniker of the Clorox Cowboy under certain unclean and dirty conditions.) The Weatherman is no stranger to shouting at electronic voices or having conversations with recordings. 

He is also no stranger to wiring up his whole house with outside microphones to record ambient sounds. The Weatherman is something of a "home tape" recording enthusiast, and also a radio scanner enthusiast, and a radio ham jamming enthusiast.

Remember JamCon '84? This was the collection of Over The Edge episodes presented as a radio documentary covering a convention of amateur radio jammers, with commentary on radio jamming and Culture jamming, and the history and cultures surrounding them. This whole aspect of listening to jammers in California jamming other ham radio operators was something the Weatherman really got into with his many trusty scanners.

All this jamming makes more and more sense the more you listen to Negativland. David Wills (born April 3, 1954) is one of the founding members of Negativland, and since the band hardly made any money over the first few decades of their existence, he worked as a cable repairman until he retired from that job in the 1990s. If you know he worked as a cable repairman it makes songs like "The Playboy Channel" of which he is the main narrator, or "lead singer" take on a whole new resonance.

As a cable repairman, audio enthusiast, and person who loved to make all kinds of tapes of just about everything, especially family tapes, the detritus of the Weatherman's audio recordings are littered throughout the Negativland discography, and he took center stage in many episodes of Over the Edge.

His notable Over the Edge contributions include the episodes that make up the Willsaphone Stupid Show, The Weatherman's Dumb Stupid Come Out Line, Sex Dirt, and many others. As a frequent contributor and caller over the years the Weatherman's contributions can be found in many episodes of the Over the Edge. One of his greatest contributions to the show was the Booper, heard on nearly all episodes of the OTE since he first gave one to Don Joyce.

The Booper is an electronic oscillator invented by the dumb stupid Weatherman. It has been described as "an electronic noise-making device that creates unstable feedback using multiple transistors and an FM radio receiver. The resulting sounds are different each time they are played but are sure to excite the ears and engage the mind."

Wills is also a founder of the Fake Bacon Society. He is also a recluse with a bit of OCD about cleaning and cleaning products. Fans will recognize him armed with 409 and other cleaning products to wash away the sex dirt. Because he is a recluse, it has been difficult for fans of Negativland and sometimes even the band themselves to contact him. He just goes into recluse mode. Sometimes he has shown up in virtual form at Negativland concerts on a TV screen or video projector. Starting in June 2008, The Weatherman has been posting audio, video, pictures and more from his enormous archives on his section (Dumb) of the Negativland website. Many off air recordings there to listen to for the radio and scanner enthusiast.

The best way to get a sense of his personality is to listen to the radio shows he is a part of, and those Negativland songs where his vocals are prominent. You could also learn a lot from this video At Home with the Weatherman.

Back on the westcoast in 1966 Pauline Oliveros had been hired to direct the San Francisco Tape Music Center after it’s move to Mills college under the auspices of the Rockefeller grant they had received. The next year she got a competitive job offer at the University of California San Diego and left to take that position. Californians Lowell Cross and Tony Gnazzo replaced her but they soon left. When Roger Reynolds was asked if he wanted the job he’d already gotten another gig himself at UCSD as well, but he recommended Robert Ashley in his stead. In the fall of 1969 Ashley’s family packed up their bags and left Michigan for the golden sun of California. 

When he got into town he called upon Nick Bertoni for help in revamping and expanding the electronic studios at CCM. Bertoni had come to California to work on sound for film director Robert Altman. In 1968, he had settled in Berkley to form a collective household of writers, artists, musicians and scholars. Bertoni would go on to become a pioneer of the maker movement promoting the idea of tinkering as a learning method, first at the S.F. Exploratorium Museum, where he was manager of the Artist in Residence Program, and then in his own Tinkers Workshop in Berkeley where he explored electronics, woodworking, metal crafts and inventing and encouraged others to do so as well.

With Bertoni’s expertise he helped Ashley build a studio split into five sections. It included a recording studio, a tape library and a tape editing suite, a Moog synthesizer studio, and a workshop devoted to building musical instruments. Having a space whose sole purpose was the creation of new instruments kept CCM firmly at the forefront of the do it yourself ethos. This ethos was further enhanced when Ashley opened up the studio to people who weren’t even students at the college, making it a public access facility. In this way he continued the tradition and legacy of the San Francisco Tape Music Center from which it originated.

Running the studio ended up being a good career move for Ashley. After two years in that capacity he was invited by Mills to become a professor. He agreed under the condition that he be given tenure. The professorship was a situation he thought quite ironic when he considered how his own progress in music had been hindered more than helped by many of his past music teachers, Ross Finney chief among them. “I never thought of myself as a teacher. Teachers have mostly been the bane of my existence,” he later wrote.

Never the less where other teachers had failed for Ashley, he was able to guide a number of young composers on to successful musical careers. These include Maggi Payne, who in turn went on to become a co-director of the CCM and Paul DeMarinis who went on to explore many different parameters around the convergence of technology, communications and music. John Bischoff was another of his students whose work with the League of Electronic Music Composers is explored later in this chapter. DeMarinis also sometimes played with the League.
   
It was during his time in California that Ashley’s attention turned to opera. He had dabbled in the form twice before in the 60’s but now it started to consume him. Putting on an opera isn’t cheap, and the more experimental the work is, the harder a time a composer will have finding backers to support the work. At the same time, the lack of financial backing can lead to innovation as strategies for bypassing various obstacles are sought. This latter path was the way Ashley took when he started getting interested in the form, and during his tenure at the CCM between 1969 and 1981 he established a new genre of opera.

I was in the 1970’s that Stockhausen came up with the Licht superformula and himself started writing operatic works that would take the form outside of its traditional mold and into new territories. Something must have been in the air in the 1970s when the these two different musical minds were fertilized with operas.

Ashley’s genius was to create an opera intended for television, a music that could be enjoyed comfortably in someone’s living room. Keeping with the SFTMC’s multimedia tradition his operas include video, electronic music, and improvisation. His complex and literary libretti also show the influence of his time working at the Speech Research Institute at Michigan University. Not only do the texts of his operas have multiple levels of meaning, but the way the performers are instructed to utter, sing, declaim the libretti bring the focus in to the different ways voice can be used. Ashley brought the extended techniques so popular in the ONCE Groups instrumental music to bear on vocalists as influenced by his time as a speech analyst.

AUTOMATIC WRITING

One of the pieces he worked on at CCM was to be a direct precursor for the new mode of storytelling he established in his operas and it came out of a mild form of Tourette syndrome he’d noticed he had. It was composed in recorded form over a period of five years and not released as an album until 1979, but some of the musical features of the piece and the vocal phrasings would appear in his operas that he started working concurrently, progress on them overlapping with the years.

Ashley noticed there were certain words he muttered, certain phrases he repeated out loud. He got curious about these unconscious patterns that were emerging, and asked himself, as a composer, if he could find a way of working with them musically?  

He’d recalled how Morton Feldman had made a remark that any composer who walked around with a tune in his head should be locked up. Ashley knew he had to bring forth the mysterious utterances emerging from himself, and he knew that within them was a great creative potential. To not use these “tunes” coming out of his head in some way was to hold back his gift from the world.

After some false starts trying to use these involuntary tics in voluntary live performances, Ashley came to the conclusion that working on this material might be better as a studio project.  So he started making recordings, but they weren’t coming out the way he hoped, as the conscious element was still involved, like it had been in the performance attempts. Yet he kept at it and the necessary conditions finally came about one summer when the Mills campus was dead and empty. Students had gone home or gone wherever they went on summer break. With his head free from the responsibilities of teaching, the halls and studio quiet, he inched his mouth very close to the mic and made the involuntary utterances. Eventually he captured a total of forty-eight minutes of his Tourette derived speech onto tape, and this became the basis for Automatic Writing.

With the tape in place as the base structure he was now able to develop other material to ornament his voiced unconscious. His second wife Mimi Johnson (who would later start the Lovely Music record label that released this and many other recordings) read in French a translation of Ashley’s involuntary words. Her voice forms a second character for the work. A third was made with Ashley playing moog and organ tones beneath and around the voices -the unconscious ocean from which these voices emerged.

The way the words are said by Ashley, and the way they are recited by Johnson forms a kind of template for a way of using language that would be a hallmark in his later operas. Paul Demarinis, composer and master of circuitry, who was a student of Ashley’s and David Behrman’s while at CCM, designed a switching circuit used for the piece. The final result is a landmark work of hypnagogic music that is at once ambient, spoken word, and experimental. Just as the words seem to lull one on the edge of sleep, they will also disturb and make a person sit right up at attention.

The piece is a favorite of Steve Stapleton, the man behind surrealist music outfit Nurse With Wound.  Automatic Writing was a major on influence on the album A Missing Sense. Stapleton recalls, "A Missing Sense was originally conceived as a private tape to accompany my taking of LSD. When in that particular state, Robert Ashley's Automatic Writing was the only music I could actually experience without feeling claustrophobic and paranoid. We played it endlessly; it seemed to become part of the room, perfectly blending with the late night city ambience and the 'breathing' of the building."

MUSIC WITH ROOTS IN THE AETHER

As Automatic Writing came together in the CCM studio Ashley was still thinking of writing operas and new ways of presenting them. He was also thinking of television and how perfect television could be as a medium for new American music. Philip Glass had made a complaint that “the situation for the American composer can never improve because the only thing Americans are interested in is television and sports.” This statement got under Ashley’s skin and he took it into himself, stating the only thing he was interested in aside from music “as a composer, are television and sports: television, because like music I can have it in my home; and sports, because like in contemporary music nobody gets killed.”

Joining music with television seemed like a logical next step. He had already been composing for experimental films and also wanted to help get the music of American composers out there to the public. In a way this was a continuation of the impetus that had been behind the ONCE Festival: a forum for sharing what was happening now among American composers. Only instead of people having to drive from all across the country and show up in Ann Arbor, all they would have to do now was switch on their television set. Music in the Roots of the Aether was a way to seed the ideas of the new generation of American composers out into the minds of the public via the medium they were already entranced by. Because he liked the medium so much himself, it was obvious to combine it with opera.

“I know a lot of people who watch television for five hours straight; I do it myself. My idea of my music is to jump in bed, with whatever you like to be in bed with, drinks and whatever, there’s the TV, the music is coming out of the TV, and you watch it for six hours,” Ashley noted. He would be perfectly at home with contemporary streaming services and the habit of binge watching programs. 

With some funding he got from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations he was able to move forward with the idea of combining television, opera, and conversation with his fellow composers to create a groundbreaking cross-genre work. With cash in hand he produced and directed Music with Roots in the Aether: video portraits of composers and their music. The project was a 14-hour television opera that was also a documentary about the work and ideas of seven American composers. For each composer an hour was dedicated to an unscripted conversation about their work and ideas, and another hour dedicated to a presentation of their music.

“I intended, first of all, to make a work of ‘musical theater’ in the medium of video, not a polemic. Music With Roots in the Aether  is the realization of an idea I had worked on in various ways for about ten years -- to make an opera of personalities and to illustrate those personalities with actual quotations, e.g., to quote the music of David Berhman by having David Berhman perform his music. … Because so much of my work has to do with ‘speech’ and its relationship to music, I conceived of Music With Roots in the Aether as a series of ‘duets' -- another composer and myself -- alternating with ‘solos’ by the composer. In each of those seven portraits the theater of the music is established in the landscape we inhabit and in the uninterrupted (‘performed’) camera style of the video recording.”
For the interviews he adopted a “casual and desultory” style. “They had to be, because of the manner in which they were made. They were made in front of a video camera, with the rule that there would be no video editing. So, the composers are just talking. Then, the conversations are edited for print to take out as much of the conversational looseness as possible.”

The composers included David Behrman, Philip Glass, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros, Roger Reynold and Terry Riley. It premiered at the Festival d'Automne à Paris in 1976 and has since been shown worldwide in over 100 television broadcasts and closed-circuit installations.

The very nature of this work also relates to the spirit of public access television. The development of public access TV happened in parallel with developments of the open house studio concept at CCM. It was created between 1969 and 1971 by the FCC due to pressure being placed on the commission by media activists who were dissatisfied with the corporate behemoths who were the gatekeepers to the video airwaves. Even with the grant money to make the work there is an admirable scrappiness to the series.

But is it opera? According to Ashley it is, and the success of the series paved the way for him to further explore musical massage via America’s favorite medium.

PERFECT LIVES

Towards the end of his tenure as director of the CCM Ashley had worked on experiments and small pieces that later became the episodes The Park and The Backyard for his first proper TV opera Perfect Lives. Hearkening back to his Midwest origins, “These are songs about the Corn Belt / and some of the people in it / ... or on it.”

The pieces were developed musically in live performance in America and Europe. On the keyboard was Ashley’s collaborator “Blue” Gene Tyranny, whose harmonies, melodies, and playing define the character of Buddy. Ashley and Tyranny performed chamber versions on many occasions. One of these was at The Kitchen in 1978 and shortly after that concert Ashley was commissioned by The Kitchen to create Perfect Lives as an opera for television.

At the center of this work is the poetic, sing-song reading of Robert Ashley’s voice in a hypnotic syncopation. The ever-flowing words narrate a story of life in small town America updated to the time of its writing, the late 70s and early 80s. The story is filled with a number of characters but revolves around the lives of two musicians, the aforementioned Buddy who is “the World’s Greatest Piano Player” and “R”, a singer of myth and legend played by Ashley, and who can be viewed as a version of himself.

The composer describes the dramatic plot. "They fall in with two locals to commit the perfect crime, a metaphor for something philosophical: in this case, to remove a sizable about of money from The Bank for one day (and one day only) and let the whole world know that it was missing." One way to look at it is as a metaphysical heist drama.

As the tale unfold the couple Ed and Gwyn elope, the sheriff, his wife and a bunch old fogies at the old folks home unravel the mystery of the stolen money. Another character, Isolde, watches a sundown celebration from the door of her mom’s place. These and other characters act and sing across the television in the seven episodes that make up the opera.

Ashley described the plot as a “comic opera about reincarnation.” As such it is purportedly based on the Bardo Thodol or Tibetan Book of the Dead. Yet, since it deals with the corn belt, there are also fiery strains of midwestern evangelism threaded through the work. Or is that televangelism? Either way it amounts to a celebration of the everyday and perfect lives of those in the flyover states as the mundane and familiar gets transformed through music into a sublime meditation on the rebirth of the human soul.
Ashley put all the tools he had developed in collaborating with others at ONCE and CCM into practice in his operas.  “The collaborative aspect of the work follows principles I have used for many years in search of a new operatic style. The collaborators are given almost absolute freedom to develop characterizations from the textual and musical materials I provide. The musical and visual materials are coordinated through ‘templates’, a term I have come to use to describe the subjective assignment of emotional values and moods to visual forms and corresponding musical structures. Within the rules defined by the ‘templates’ the collaborators in all aspects of the work are free to interpret, ‘improvise’, invent and superimpose characteristics of their own artistic styles onto the texture of the work. In essence, the collaborators become ‘characters’ in the opera at a deeper level than the illusionistic characters who appear on stage.”

In 1980 using the templates provided by Ashley’s score, John Sanborn, who became the television director of the production, recorded the basic video tracks on location in Illinois. From this bounty of material, a preview version called The Lessons was produced through the TV Lab at WNET, the same place where Laurie Spiegel had worked on the sound production for The Lathe of Heaven.

Two years later a pre-sale was obtained from Channel Four Television in the UK that made it possible to complete work on the opera. John Sanborn masterminded a shooting and editing plan for the visual elements of Ashley’s score. Then in 1983 it went into post-porduction at VCA Teletronics where Sanborn worked with Dean Winkler on processing the images and editing it all together. In 1984 the opera celebrating the American Midwest premiered on Great Britain’s Channel Four. It has since been broadcast throughout Europe and in various cities in the United States. Perfect Lives was also expanded into a live version which included orchestral music layered onto tapes by composer Peter Gordon, and the singing of Jill Kroesen and David Van Tieghem.

In the U.S. its cult success is owed mostly to various recorded audio versions which became favorites for late night air play on community, college and other radio stations not beholden to record companies and ad revenue. In other words: stations that weren’t jailed into restrictive formats.

For the rest of his career Ashley would continue to work in the operatic form to create a uniquely American conception of opera both in subject matter and in the use of American language and ways of talking. Kyle Gann considers Perfect Lives and Ashley’s operas in general to be “performance novels” and I concur that this is an apt moniker.

Around this time in the late 70’s and early 80’s a number of different works, that could be considered to cross the genres of spoken word, radio play or opera, and otherwise contained spoken and sung narratives started to appear. David Rosenboom’s Future Travel from 1981 is one example, a sci-fi story set to Buchla Touché & 300 Series Electric Music Box, piano, violin and percussion.

The same year David Behrman, Paul Demarinis, Fern Friedman, Terri Hanlon and Anne Klingensmith recorded She’s More Wild at the CCM. It started life as performance art piece described by the artists as ‘Western Performance Noir.’ The record centers on a series of texts written by Friedman and Hanlon in which female narrators comically embody a series of iconic roles (The Recording Artist, The Former Movie Star, and The Rancher). Other lyrical themes include recurring references to the notorious cannibal pioneers, the Donner Party, an ironic take on Japanophilia, and the luscious “Archetypal Unitized Seminar,” a satirical poke at self-help culture, whose lyrics are rendered in Indian raga style to the accompaniment of electronic glissandi and toy noisemakers.

Records like these and other text pieces set to music sit in the same milieu that Ashley would command in further operatic works. As “performance novels” they are uniquely positioned for transmission via a variety of telecommunications channels and mediums.

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Read the rest of the Radiophonic Laboratory: Telecommunications, Electronic Music, and the Voice of the Ether.


.:. .:. .:. ​Do you like what you have read here? Then sign up for Seeds from Sirius, the monthly webzine from Sothis Medias. It delivers blog posts here to your door while gathering and sowing much additional material, news of various shortwave and community FM transmissions, music,  deindustrial fiction, strange meanderings and more: 
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David Behrman was born in Austria in 1937 and came from a family of artists and performers. He was son of noted playwright and Hollywood screenwriter S.N. Behrman. His mother Elza Heifetz Behrman was the sister of violinist Jascha Heifetz. Performance, music, and the arts were all in his blood. The family piano was something always available to him, and he spent a lot of time sitting with the instrument. His inclination towards music was encouraged and he was able to continue to study it in the world of higher education. There he met some of the people who were working towards the awakening of a distinctive American music in the classical tradition, and others who would go on to have a lasting influence over his own musical trajectory.

From the American Five the American Four

In 1953 he went to the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. It was there he met a person one of his lifelong friends and musical companion, Frederic Rzewski. It was around this time period that he also met Wallingford Riegger. He became a student of Riegger’s who initiated him into the alternative current of American classical music.
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In an interview Behrman commented, “One person from whom I learned a lot, about music and also about feisty independence, was the composer Wallingford Riegger. One year in New York, when I was 17, I went twice a week to his little apartment to take composition lessons. Riegger had taught Morton Feldman and Bob Ashley and had been a friend of Henry Cowell and Edgard Varese.” Behrman was soaking in the ambience of some rarified musical circles.

His teacher Riegger had been born in Albany, Georgia, at some point moved to Indianapolis and from there went on to school at Julliard in New York. He graduated in 1907, a member of the prestigious music schools first graduating class. Riegger went to Germany for a spell in an attempt to become a conductor. He learned a lot and also improved his cello skills before coming back to the States in 1917. Back in New York in the twenties he devoted himself to composition when he couldn’t find work as a conductor. 

Riegger was one of what was called the “American Five.” The other members of the American Five included Henry Cowell, Charles Ives, John J. Becker, and Carl Ruggers. The group aimed to cast off the long shadow of European composition. Just as the Transcendentalists and later Walt Whitman had begun to build up an American identity in literature, these composers were feeling into the wide open spaces of a new and independent American music. In particular Riegger immersed himself in the work of the New Music Society started by Henry Cowell. This society put out publications and recordings to spread the work of American composers. Riegger also played a part in forming the Pan American Association of Composers that represented composers throughout the western hemisphere.

Within the American Five, Riegger was known as an early adopter of a twelve-tone system. Though he learned the technique from Schoenberg’s student Adolph Weiss, he wasn’t a strict adherent to serialism. He also wasn’t strict in the way he used Schoenberg’s method. He didn’t think he needed to always use rows with twelve tones and he didn’t necessarily transpose his rows. If he wanted to use a note, he used it, and if he didn’t, he didn’t. Twelve tone techniques were just another tool in his tool box, not a rigid compositional dogma. In this he was truly part of an American tradition of using whatever tools happened to be at hand and discarding them when they didn’t suit him.
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In 1957 Riegger got summoned to the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was on their list of suspects during their investigations into communism in the musical world. Behrman recalls his former teachers political views, “He was a courageous dissenter; because of his political views his music was blackballed during the McCarthy era. He used to alternate counterpoint lessons with lessons in radical politics. It was from him that I learned about some of the independent voices in American music - about Ives and Cowell, Varese and Cage. And I'm still a fan of Riegger's; his music had a wonderful sense of sonority and rhythmic vitality.”

​​Riegger had nurtured this spirit of independence and it found full flowering in many of his students, including Behrman and Ashley. This connection to two members of the Sonic Arts Union to one of the American Five, and the spirit of independence they picked up from him was a key influence on Behrman and Ashley. Perhaps, for their generation, another name for the Sonic Arts Union might have been the American Four.

Alternating Currents

Two of his other musical friends had a huge influence on him. “Frederic Rzewski and Christian Wolff, had a lot to do with what was on my mind in those days. Christian was a graduate student at Harvard when I met him. He and Frederic knew a great deal about new developments in European and American music. Frederic was always the first person in the area to order the latest scores by Stockhausen and Boulez. He got them way before the Harvard Music Library did.”

In 1959 Behrman was keen to get a taste of what was going on in Europe. He had become a fan of Stockhausen, especially impressed by Gesang der Juenglinge, which was in many ways the gateway drug for a generation of electronic music composers. His imagination fired by Stockhausen, he went to the Darmstadt composition class in the summer of 1959 to study with the composer. La Monte Young and Naim June Paik were fellow students in his class, while David Tudor and Cornelius Cardew were his advisers. “Stockhausen's course was an eye-opening experience for me, in part because of his intense devotion to new music, in part because he encouraged my efforts, in part because it was at that course that a long-lasting friendship with David Tudor began.”

Back in the United States his friends Wolff and Rzewski hatched a plan to bring David Tudor to Harvard for a concert. All three were members of the music club but they only had a small fee to give the musician. To their surprise “not only did Tudor accept, but he brought his friends John Cage, Morton Feldman and Earle Brown with him. Tudor played new European and American music brilliantly that night; it was a moment that considerably expanded the mental horizons of many of the students who were present.”

David Tudor’s influence got the younger students further interested in the possibilities of using both traditional and electronic instruments, alone and in combinations. When Behrman met Gordon Mumma at the 1963 Feldman/Brown concert the two became fast friends, and took up a lively pen pal correspondence which also included the exchange of circuit diagrams. Mumma started tutoring him in basic electronics through the mail and gave him instructions on how to build things. Electronic music offered a workaround for young composers in the early sixties. It was often hard to get musicians to play an unknown composers work, but in the DIY milieu that was coming up around electronic music, a composer could build their own equipment and play their own compositions; in part because the building of a circuit was essential to the structure of the piece, a crucial component of the score.    

 “From David Tudor and Gordon Mumma I learned how to build little battery-powered devices that could radically alter or hugely amplify acoustic sounds. Gordon Mumma's enthusiasm was catching; he wrote me a series of letters in 1964 that were like a basic course in electronic music before there were any books on the subject. The first letter had a circuit for a ring modulator, which I eagerly built. Before that I'd had the experience of composing scores and copying out parts and asking other musicians to play them; one was always in the situation of asking favors and that didn't usually feel very good. Better was the self-reliant feeling of performing oneself, and of using homemade instruments to create sounds that no human ears had ever before experienced!”
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In 1965 Behrman had one of his electronic pieces played at the ONCE Festival. The next year the Sonic Arts Union would blossom. 

Wave Train and Runthrough

Behrman has written much fine music, well worth spending time with. Two pieces from the Sonic Arts Union era are noteworthy.

In Wave Train he uses guitar pickups placed around the body of a grand piano to explore properties of feedback and resonance. The gain on the guitar pickup is set high enough to excite the strings through its feedback. In performance Behrman would often have Mumma play the piano, while he moved the microphones around during various points in the piece, to showcase the different effects this would have on the piano.

Alvin Lucier said of the piece, “The performer’s job is to ride the feedback, raising and lowering the volume levels, creating arcs of sound waves. David likens this activity to surfing where one is constantly monitoring one’s position along a surging wave front.”
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In one sense Wave Train is a prepared piano piece in the tradition developed by Cage and Tudor; in another it explores the properties of microphones being placed around an instrument, as Stockhausen had investigated in his Mikrophonie pieces from 1964 and 1965. 

Runthrough was a piece where all four of the Sonic Arts Union members played a variety of Behrman’s homemade instruments. It is built from “cheap circuitry put together at home” and is used to make improvised music. There isn’t a score, but two of the players use the sound generators, modulators, and dials and switch to play the electronic sounds. One or two other people use flashlights to control a photocell distribution circuit that acts as a kind of mixer for the other sound sources. The audio is fed into four or eight loudspeakers set in a circle around the listeners. Behrman suggests that no skill is necessary to play the music, so it is a fun piece for non-musicians to explore. The piece emerges as players run through the various combinations and settings of the equipment, each time the sound potentially different. “Because there is neither a score nor directions, any sound which results from any combination of switch and light positioning remains part of the 'piece.' (Whatever you do with a surfboard in the surf remains a part of surfboarding).”
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This piece is an exercise in improvisation and intuition, a playful way for three or four people to listen to each other, a communion made in music and shared electricity.  

Choreographing the Music of Our Time

It was in the late 1960s that Behrman would get a job that helped bring a lot of the new music to a wider audience. He landed a gig at Columbia Records and worked on producing the “Music of Our Time” series of albums. Two of the most well-known records he helped produce for this series were by Terry Riley, his In C and A Rainbow in Curve Air. Other works that Behrman produced for the series included recordings by Robert Ashley, John Cage, Mauricio Kagel, Alvin Lucier, Richard Maxfield, Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros, Henri Pousseur (under whom he had also studied), Steve Reich, David Tudor, and Christian Wolff.

Along with Mumma, Behrman had the privilege and opportunity to work with the Merce Cunningham dance troupe, writing music for their performances, a gig that came from their connections to Cage and Tudor. Of his time with the troupe Behrman said, “Merce Cunningham, besides being a great choreographer whose career has spanned more than a half century, has been a long-term champion of live music. He always has live music-makers in his performances and must be the only choreographer on earth who never tells the musicians he works with what to do. In 'Events' in particular -- Cunningham Company works in such a way that nothing at all about the music is prepared in advance -- musicians can explore the idea that 'a movement, a sound, a change of light' can all independently share the space and time of performance. Often coincidences occur among the media in a way that seems magical and that could never be planned.

The Cunningham Company tours have provided much experience over the years of performing repeatedly for large live audiences. Lately I've learned a lot about the use of interactive software on tours with fine musicians such as Kosugi, Stuart Dempster, Steve Lacy, Jon Gibson and others. Looking back on the earlier years, the memories of touring and performing with John Cage and David Tudor, Gordon Mumma and Maryanne Amacher are very precious.”
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In 1969 fellow Sonic Arts Union member Robert Ashley was asked to come and direct the CCM at Mills College. In 1975 Behrman came and joined him as the co-director. Those years formed another chapter in his creative life.

Each month of 2021 Sothis Medias will feature a brief sketch of someone who did things their own way, who lived their own iconoclastic life. Last month we looked at the fringe dweller Harlan Hubbard, this month we are going to ride the rods and look at the life of orphan, hobo, boxer and writer Jim Tully.

(If you are interested in the background of WHY I am writing these notes on American weirdos you can read this post by John Michael Greer on Johnny Appleseed's America.)

“Jim Tully was one of the fine American novelists to emerge in the 1920s and ’30s. He gained this position with intelligence, sensitivity, and hard work. . . . No matter how crazily violent or fantastic his stories are, readers accept them as nonfiction. Tully makes the improbable seem true.”— Harvey Pekar

Jim Tully is a true American hero, a writer's writer and hero who came to the fore in 1920s and '30s. He started his career as a hobo, a train hoppin' tramp, who left behind the slop and shudder of life in St. Mary's, Ohio to see the country for himself. His story is a rags to resources tale of hardscrap pluck.

Jim Tully's father was a ditch digger, an Irish immagrant named James Dennis. His mother, Bridget Marie Lawler Tully gave birth to him in 1886. Until the death of his pop, he was happy, even if living in a family whose financial condition was broke. His mom died when he was six years old, and like many kids whose moms died in that era, his father found himself unable to really care for his son. So he was sent down to Cincinnati where lived at the St. Joseph Orphanage Asylum for six more years. 

At some point he went back home to St. Mary's where he lived with his relatives, the "Shanty Irish", and the name of one of his later books, exploring the world of the underclass Irish workers in the mud spattered streets of Ohio. There wasn't much going on for him there except for hanging out with his cousins, with his Uncle John Lawler, a horse thief who was sentenced to fifteen years in the state pen for his crimes, with his grandpa, Old Hughie Tully, who had the gift of gab and was a natural storyteller, “capable of turning death into an Irish wake and pouring liquor down the throat of the corpse.” He also had a girlfriend of sorts, herself a young prostitute, who was fond of Jim for his kind boyishness and his red hair.

On a fortuitous occasion he was hanging out at a bridge where he met a young vagabond, who convinced him there was nothing for him but hard labor if he stayed in town. He decided to head out for a life on the rails himself. This was Tully's education. His first trip took him to Muncie, Indiana, where he was quick to spend a night in a hobo jungle. It was a gateway to a  hobo jungle state of mind. AS he crisscrossed the United States by railway he spent a lot of time in the public libraries where he satiated his lust for the written word.

Sara Haardt wrote that “He became an inveterate library bum, ducking in and out of public libraries from one end of the country to the other. He read everything: biography, history, fiction; Dostoievsky, Carlyle, Olive Schreiner, Balzac, Dumas, Mark Twain, Conrad, the files of the old Smart Set.”

During the six years he spent tramping about,  he spent some time working  for a circus. Too bad running away to join the circus isn't much of a viable career option anymore as it was in the days of Tully, and the days of the Mighty Atom, another man who met his fate underneath the canvas of the big top. Another of Tully's books, Circus Parade, came out of his experiences as a laborer the traveling entertainers. He paints a lively if unflattering look at the life. In its pages you meet Blackie, a drug addict without a moral compass, the hard-ass Cameron, the owner of the circus, whose business practices erred on the side of the seedy, and Lila the four-hundred pound strong woman, amongst others.

In 1907 he'd had enough of the roadlife for a time. He'd traveled back to Ohio and found himself in Kent. There he found work as a tree surgeon, chain maker, and in another instance where his life gave material for his writing, as a boxer. His experiences in the ring gave authentic shape to his 1936 novel The Bruiser, the tale of a drifter who brawls his way up the ladder and into the heavyweights. Tully got to know a lot of boxers in his life and the characters are modeled on figures such as Jack Dempsey, Joe Gans, Stanley Ketchel, Gene Tunney, Frank Moran, and Johnny Kilbane. Tully dedicated the novel to Dempsey, whom he counted as a friend. Dempsey said of the boo, “If I still had the punch in the ring that Jim Tully packs in The Bruiser, I’d still be the heavyweight champion of the world today.”

During his time in Kent, inspired by all that he'd read on the road, he started giving his own words space on the page. He started writing poetry which was published in the local papers. In 1912 he decided he'd finally had enough of Ohio and moved to Hollywood, where he really started burning the midnight oil as a writer. He became a freelance journalist, which at that time was a path still open to working class folks who hadn't gone to college (1).

Tully was one of the first reporters to start covering the Hollywood scene. As a free-lancer he wrote what he wanted and how he wanted. His portrayals of people like Charlie Chaplin, for whom he had worked, were not always flattering, but people still loved Tully. His work writing up the exploits of the movie stars earned him the name of the most-hated man in Hollywood -and his muckraking wasn't nothing compared to the vituperation and vile seething of today's hate mongering media. Even so, Tully grew journalistic strength from the barbs and lashes thrown at his way, reveling in the title. 

As he gained success in the papers, he gave his hand to writing books, memoirs, such as Beggars of Life, about his early days as a hobo. Beggars of Life was his first book and he wrote it in a six week stint while he was living with a bootlegger. His novels that drew on his experiences followed, and he continued to write article after article. 

Critics of the day thought his work was violent, his depictions of the realities of prostitution and the life of common workers cut too close to the bone. He did not water it down for a public he thought could not handle it. He respected his audience more than that.

In writing to an editor he said, “I have tried, however futilely, to get away from all the namby-pamby trends of American literature. My reward has been misunderstanding. I am considered a roughneck because, as an artist, I seek to lay bare the broken hearts of the people from whom I sprang.... I have no whine at fate. I began with nothing and have ended with more money than is good for one. . . I write because I love to. . . I have perhaps less academic training than any man who has ever succeeded at writing in America. . . I will never be the artist I thought I would. Words are not elastic enough. . . I have done as nearly that which I set out to do as any American writer ever has. . ."

Please forget and forgo the MA in creative writing. In my opinion it is a mar on America's once vibrant literary landscape. Skip class and go to the library instead, forget the debt. Read books and consider getting into the thick of life, as Jim Tully did. 

Literature is in need of the hot fire of lived experience, and the souls like Tully who could lay it all bare and share their unique journey.

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Footnote as media rant:
1 [Matt Taibbi covers the transition of journalism from a job a blue collar type could get into without a degree, to the credentialed mire of elitism for rich kids that it is today in his excellent book Hate Inc., the "Manufacturing Dissent" of today's youtube generation ;) Hate Inc. is probably the most important book I've read this year in terms of the divide between the Coke/Pepsi type non-choice of Red Church or Blue Church.]  


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A major development that came out of the ONCE Festival was the creation of the Sonic Arts Union, first known as the Sonic Arts Group, which formed in 1966, the year of the final festival. The members of the group, Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma, Alvin Lucier and David Behrman had all played together in various configurations as part of the ONCE Festival and sidereal events.

The four composers had first met at a Morton Feldman and Earle Brown concert in New York City on October 11 of 1963. Ashley and Mumma had driven in just for the event, and Alvin Lucier was there to conduct the chamber chorus from Brandeis University where he was a student. David Behrman was also there. Behrman and Lucier had become friends while in Europe, introduced by pianist and composer Frederic Rzewski, who himself later became a founding member of Musica Elettronica Viva.

A year after the Feldman concert Mumma and Ashley invited the Brandeis Chamber Chorus to perform at the ONCE Festival. Two years later in 1966 Lucier invited Mumma, Ashley and Behrman to perform at Brandeis. Despite the excitement to be had with four friends playing pieces together on the same evening, the Brandeis show ended up as something of a failure on the technical level. Yet something was salvaged out of it in that afterwords the four minds came together and hatched a plan to start an ongoing collective ensemble to share electronic equipment, musical ideas and help in performance.

Ashley remembered talking with Lucier after the concert. “We just had the idea that if one of us got invited to someplace, we could offer the guy four composers instead of one composer… I think that was a successful part of it. Then we started doing a lot of concerts.” They made immediate plans to embark on a tour of North America and Europe.

All the members of the Sonic Arts Union were friends who appreciated each other’s music and the different approaches to composition they each engaged in. “It was the fact that we were all very different, and doing interesting things, they different than what I was doing, different from what Ashley was doing, and all the rest of it,” said Mumma.

An artist statement written in the later sixties or early seventies explains their approach. “The four composers are devoted to the composition and performance of live electronic music. In general, Ashley's works are theatrical and are concerned with social conditions both inside and outside the musical situation, while Lucier's often refer to natural systems--brainwaves, bat and dolphin sonar and resonant frequencies of rooms. Behrman and Mumma design and build their own complex systems of electronic components for the production and control of sounds for specific works. All have used speech as well as instrumental sounds as source material for electronic processing. In addition, all have used, or intend to use, the computer.”
By this point the members of the Sonic Arts Union lived far apart geographically. Ashley was furthest away having gone to California in 1969 to head up the CCM. The rest were on the east coast. Mumma had moved to New York City to be close to Merce Cunnigham and David Tudor, as he was a resident composer with the dance troupe between 1966 and 1974. Behrman was in Stony Point, New York, and Lucier remained in Connecticut. Yet they wrote, talked on the phone, and traveled, seeing each other at concerts and other events. As such they were not just a union but a decentralized network.

Performances ranged from concerts in which four works were presented, one by each of the members, to longer, more environmental installations. Occasionally, guest musicians and visual artists got involved in the action. One of their first concerts was in November of 1966 when they played in New York on a bill with Fluxus founder Ben Patterson, Max Neuhaus, Takehisa Kosugi, and Takahiko Iimura.  

For some of the concerts the Union was joined by a cadre of wives, lovers and other artists. Shigeko Kubota, a member of the Japanese avant-garde who had been involved with Group Ongaku before moving to New York was one of these, during the years she was married to Behrman. She was a Fluxist known for her work as a video artist and for creating sculptural installations, all done in the spirit of DIY. Some of her sculptures had video monitors embedded within them playing her own videos. Mary Ashley and Mary Lucier also contributed their own pieces to the variety of events.
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At a Sonic Arts Union concert, according to Behrman, “established techniques were thrown away and the nature of sound was dealt with from scratch." Each of the four members built sounds from scratch in their own unique and individual ways that deserve to be explored. 

THE SONIC POETRY OF ALVIN LUCIER
For Alvin Lucier, who had composed chamber and orchestral works since 1952, the throwing away of established techniques exemplified by the ONCE Group and the Sonic Arts Union was a liberation of imagination. He had felt stifled by the formality of serialism and the often rigid parameters of academic music in general. His work with the Brandeis Chamber Chorus gave him a basis for how his future work in the precise knowledge of acoustics he acquired while working with vocal music in different settings. As Lucier started to blossom as a composer he often turned to very specific acoustic properties such as resonance, and incorporated them into the gestalt of his compositions.

He counts his 1965 piece Music for Solo Performer as the beginning of his compositional career. From that point on Lucier wrote a number of pieces investigating brainwaves, vocoders, acoustics and long thin wires that made the voice of the aether audible to the listening audience.

Pauline Oliveros called Lucier “the poet of electronic music.” His pieces are eloquent haikus, elucidating natural principles with creative insight in simple set ups underscored by profundity. Mumma said his “works are at once gemlike in their exquisitely defined concept, and large-scale, even vast, in their theatrical presence.” The Sonic Arts Union gave Lucier a vehicle for presenting these works to an expanded audience. In sharing these works with the public he has given listeners a chance to explore and experience the world of sound alongside him.     

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Music for Solo Performer

All music involves commands from the brain, whether conscious or unconscious. Music for Solo Performer demonstrates this in a unique way.  In 1965 Lucier met Edmond Dewan a scientist who was investigating alpha brainwaves. Dewan was a physicist who had stirred up the imagination of the public when he hooked up an electroencephalogram (EEG) to a lamp, and through the control of his brains alpha activity, switched the lamp on and off. His next feat was to hook the EEG up to a Morse code oscillator and spell out “I can talk” in dots and dashes.

At the time Dewan was doing this brainwave research for the US Air Force in a laboratory near Brandeis. Dewan had many interests and music was one of them. As an amateur organist he used to go over to Brandeis and visit the music department where he made the acquaintance of Lucier.

When the physicist and the composer met, Lucier had stopped writing music. Dewan helped get Lucier back into the game when he asked him if he would be interested in using his equipment to detect the alpha waves and turn them into a musical piece. It was the kickstart he needed to start writing music outside the mold of notated sheets which had stifled his creative process, so Dewan brought some of his gear to the Brandeis electronic music studio so Lucier could start experimenting with brainwaves hooked up to various electronic components and see how he could excite them.

Studying the temporal cycle of the alpha wave which has a frequency of 8-13 cycles per second Alvin hit upon the idea that they could be thought of as rhythms and so he decided to create a percussion piece.

Alpha brain waves are commonly associated with meditative states of mind and to create them a person needs to be in a relaxed mental state. This presents a problem for live performance when the nerves of a performer are often excited and on edge. Still Lucier thought the potential payoff of sitting in front of an audience, with an EEG hooked up to his head and using it to control musical activity was worth the artistic risk. So he took what he called “a dangerous course which is to sit on stage and try to produce alpha waves, live, in front of the audience.”  

It took practice to get consistent results, as he could only produce alpha waves in short bursts at the start. Lucier writes how through experimentation he found “precisely the right physical and psychological conditions” to create alpha waves for extended periods of time, or long enough for a performance in any case.

To achieve the correct physical and psychological conditions he basically had to teach himself how to meditate. He remembered a time when he had been imprinted with the memory of a monk in contemplation while he was attending preparatory school at the Portsmouth Abbey  in Rhode Island.

“I remember going into the chapel and watching a Trappist monk in the act of contemplation... he was thinking – deeply. It looked like somebody just thinking as hard as he possibly could. I remember I went back an hour later – he was in the same attitude – and I thought, ‘Well, if there’s any such thing as pure thought, that guy is doing it.’ And that impressed me a lot... So when I did the brain wave piece, you’ve got to sit and not think of anything; because if you create a visual image your alpha will block.”

EEG measures voltage fluctuations resulting from ionic current within the neurons of the brain and those currents being picked up by the electrodes and passed on to an amplifier. Next the signals pass through a filter allowing only the alpha waves to pass through. For Lucier’s piece the signal was then split into several different channels, each amplified again and routed to a loudspeaker. These loudspeakers were placed on snare drum heads, or other percussion instruments, so when the amplified alpha wave came into speaker it would vibrate the drum, cymbal, or the air. An assistant or two controlled the volume of individual channels to shape the piece live during the performance.

Part of the interest in watching a performance of the piece is that the soloist is just sitting there. John Cage had brought in the idea of creating a music free from the composers own ego, of allowing chance operations to control and set all parameters of a composition, from duration, to dynamics, notes and more. Lucier took a similar tack with Music for Solo Performer, creating an elegant set up in which the soloist does nothing but relax into meditation under the pressure of a staring audience.  

It was by chance that Lucier had first met Dewan, and it was this chance meeting that inspired him to take a chance at a performance whose results, from concert to concert, though similar, were largely indeterminate. It set the course for his continuing exploration of music and sound as a physical phenomenon, for using the parameters of composition to ask questions rather than showcase the same specific answer over and over again, and to use non-musical instruments as a standard operating procedure. 

After Lucier other composers took up using their brainwaves to drive instruments. Richard Teitelbaum, another member of the collective Musica Elettronica Viva, became a prominent practitioner of the form. In the mid-1960s Teitelbaum asked Robert Moog to adapt his synthesizer to use neural oscillations as control voltages.
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David Rosenboom, who worked closely with Don Buchla, also explored the uses of biofeedback in his music. His 1976 album Brainwaves is an expansive document showing the possibilities involved. Rosenboom also wrote the book on the subject, Biofeedback and the arts: results of early experiments, published the same year his album came out. Artists have continued to explore this extended musical interface with the human nervous system.

I Am Sitting in a Room: Exploring Resonant Frequencies

“I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.”

So go the words, and so begins the repetition of those words, in what is arguably Alvin Lucier’s most famous composition. The piece features Lucier recording himself reading the above text, and then playing the tape recording back into the room, and re-recording it. He then re-records that recording, and repeats the process until his words totally disappear and only the sound of the resonant frequencies of the room remain. It is a fascinating piece that shows how certain frequencies in speech are emphasized as they resonate in the room. Through the process of re-recording the words eventually become unintelligible, replaced by the pure resonant harmonies and tones of the room itself.

All rooms and spaces have characteristic resonant frequencies. A large concert hall or cathedral would have different resonant frequency than a dry walled bedroom, or a basement, or the crypt of an old church. When performed or recorded in different spaces, the end results will be of different tones and harmonies.

The inspiration for the piece came after one of Lucier’s colleagues mentioned attending a lecture by Amar Bose, the man who developed the famous Bose speakers, at MIT. Bose described how he was developing and testing a set of loudspeakers by feeding audio back into them so that the audio they had originally produced in the first place was picked up again via microphones. This triggered Lucier’s idea.

Each time Lucier’s process was repeated the sound of his speech became disarranged as specific frequencies began to supersede the words. These frequencies grow with each successive playback until Alvin’s voice disappears and the only thing left to listen to is the sound of the room. It doesn’t take long for the words to disappear. At about the 17 minute mark the formants start to deform into pure tones, and by the 27 minute mark any trace of the words has been absorbed by the room’s resonant frequency. It is a magical thing to listen to and hear how utterance can been transformed into pure tones.

The work is a great example of a process piece, where the technique itself is showcased as part and parcel of the content of the composition. It’s also an excellent example of minimalism as a repeated text is transformed over the course of 45 minutes into a long and sonorous drone.

I Am Sitting in A Room is also an exploration of the concept of generation loss. This is when the quality between subsequent copies gets reduced with each further copy. Lucier shows how the original representation is liable to disappear with each copy of a copy of a copy. Audio artifacts are introduced as the process continues and these increase during the process.

Many other musicians and composers have since used the process. The generation loss aspect of the work was notably used in 2008 by Iranian born musician Kamran Sadeghi when he was selected as a resident artist for Sastop, an artist organization utilizing an old nuclear cooling tower in Washington state. In the 1970s a group of public utilities started to build what was to be the largest single nuclear power project in United States history. Five reactors, divided between sites located near the cities of Hanford and Satsop were intended to be a solution to projected energy demands of the area.

Before the facility was completed construction stopped. There remained however a structure 423 feet across the base with a height close to 500 feet. The left behind building contained uncanny acoustic properties (the kind of place Pauline Oliveros would have liked to play in). For four years between 2004 and 2008 a small group worked to bring artists and musicians into the space, recognizing that it had unique acoustic properties, and that its weathered industrial architecture showcased a derelict beauty. 

Sadeghi was inspired by Lucier’s composition and decided to amplify an original electronic music passage two minutes in length into the open aired structure and then re-record the outcome of the tower's reverberant response. He then took the recording and reamplified back into the tower and re-recorded. He repeated this a total of ten times. The natural acoustics of the tower began to reshape the original passage until it disappeared completely. It’s a unique document of a structure exposed and re-exposed to a passage of music and the passage of time.
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Sadeghi named the piece Loss Less in reference to the audio engineering term lossless compression, a process that allows for the preservation and perfect reconstruction of audio data when a recorded waveform is reduced to differing extents for transmission without the loss of quality.

Scanner also made use of this technique on one of the versions of his architectural work, Vex.

NORTH AMERICAN TIME CAPSULE

Lucier himself explored audio compression, and specifically speech compression in his 1967 piece North American Time Capsule.  Compression may have not been top on his mind when he created the piece, but a principle function of the vocoder was to compress the audio bandwidth of the voice down. It did this by sending only the parameters of the vocal model over the communication link, instead of a direct recreation of the waveform. Since the parameters change slowly compared to the original speech the bandwidth required to transmit speech can be reduced.

Which is perfect for encryption.

This piece came about when Lucier was invited by Sylvania Applied Research Laboratories to come and use their prototype vocoder in 1967. Sylvania Electric Products was a manufacturer of a variety of electrical equipment, including transceivers, vacuum tubes, semiconductors, and the MOBIDC mainframe computer. The engineers at Sylvania were also involved in the developing the COBOL programming language.

Since he would be using the vocoder to create a work, Lucier decided on making a vocal piece and he enlisted the help of the Brandeis University Chamber Chorus in what must have been one of their most interesting assignments. His score required the chorus members to “prepare a plan of activity using speech, singing, musical instruments, or any other sound producing means that might describe—to beings very far from the earth’s environment either in space or in time—the physical, social, spiritual, or any other situation in which we find ourselves at the present time.”

Along with Sylvania engineer Calvin Howard, Lucier used the vocoder to isolate and manipulate elements of speech in real time. Eight separate tracks were recorded and subsequently mixed by Lucier.

Since one way to use a vocoder is as an encryption tool, where a person with a vocoder on the other end of a transmission could decode it, Lucier got the idea that this whole piece was an encoded message for people who haven’t heard about us here in North America. The first time I heard it, close to twenty years ago at the time of this writing, I didn’t know the slightest thing about vocoders but I was captivated by the raw expressiveness exuded by all the voices -all the voices I couldn’t quite decipher.

Lucier’s instructions leave a lot left open to the vocal interpreters while still providing a sturdy sketch or outline. He wrote “Using sound, the performers might choose to convey, for example, the ideas of life and death, young and old, up and down, male and female. Sonic aspects of our technological environment, such as household appliances, trains, aircraft and automobile horns, might be used.”

These every day activities and occurrences that might be of interest to someone outside our own circles of space and time become alien to the present day listener when processed by the vocoder. The audience hears these wild utterances coming out of the time capsule as if they had dug it up themselves.
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Alvin Lucier brought a conceptual sonic poetry to the performances of the Sonic Arts Union.

.:. .:. .:.
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Read the rest of the Radiophonic Laboratory: Telecommunications, Electronic Music, and the Voice of the Ether.


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.:. .:. .:. ​Do you like what you have read here? Then sign up for Seeds from Sirius, the monthly webzine from Sothis Medias. It delivers blog posts here to your door while gathering and sowing much additional material, news of various shortwave and community FM transmissions, music,  deindustrial fiction, strange meanderings and more: 
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Further Growth of a DIY Community

Despite Ross Finney’s domineering manner and the condescension he showed towards the work of his many students, he continued to give back to the musical community through his open lectures, and became something of an unwitting agitator for new music. By giving flack to the efforts of the composers who studied under him, he became a kind of foil, a block they could thrust against when forging their own path.

Finney also had a generous side, and when in 1958 Karlheinz Stockhausen came to the university to give lectures, he opened up his home to the visiting composer for a gathering and invited the students who found much to admire in the charismatic and leonine Stockhausen.

In his talks at the university Stockhausen had sketched out a direction of self-reliance and self-responsibility to the young composers who looked up to him as an example and drank in his words. He encouraged the creators of new music to create their own performance opportunities and to not become dependent on institutional support. Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma and the other founders of the ONCE group took Stockhausen’s advice to heart. The impetus Stockhausen showed towards building a new musical culture germinated a few years after his visit, nurtured along by some other figures got who mixed into the Ann Arbor scene.

Avant-garde composer George Crumb milled about the campus of UM in the late fifties, and received his doctorate there in 1959. Donald Scavarda was a friend of Crumb’s and the two talked about putting on concerts that had no affiliation with the university. 
 
The poet Keith Waldrop also attended UM in the early sixties and he encouraged Mumma to look to the theater students as a model for how musicians might work together.  “When they couldn’t get space at the University, they’d put on their own productions in people’s basements.” Eventually Mumma followed this example, putting on the ONCE concerts wherever they could find a space. The basement show, still a fixture of the independent music scene, had in this an early precedent.

When Ross Finney took a sabbatical in 1960 the Spanish composer Roberto Gerhard was brought in for a year-long residency. Gerhard represented another link to what was going on musically in Europe and was a breath of fresh air compared to Finney’s totalitarian tendencies. Gerhard had been a student of Schoenberg’s, and had also been the main driver behind the 1936 Barcelona festival where Alan Berg’s Violin Concerto had premiered.  His reputation preceded him before he arrived. Though firmly embedded in serialism, he didn’t make his students toe a strict serialist line. He had an affable nature and insisted that his students develop their own distinctive style and voice.

“Gerhard was the catalyst,” said Donald Scavarda. Mumma said Gerhard was, “Wide open” and “enthusiastic about differences.” 

Another catalyst for the festival came in April of 1960 when Roger Reynold’s visited New York at the invitation of his friend Sherman van Solkelma, who had encouraged him to come check out the art museums. Sokelma was composer and musicologist himself and when Reynold’s made his visit to the big city he was privileged to attend a concert where La Monte Young’s piece Poem for Chairs, Tables, Benches, Etc. was performed. John Cage was one of the performers of the piece, pushing a metal chair around the floor to create part of the musical texture for Young’s unorthodox tone poem.

After the show Reynolds introduced himself to Cage and expressed his admiration and interest in the composer’s ideas. Cage had always been a gracious and enthusiastic ambassador for new music and promptly invited Reynolds to his home in Stony Brook. The pair hit it off. Reynold’s arranged for Cage and David Tudor to come to Ann Arbor the following month, having managed to get them on the bill for the College of Architecture and Designs third annual open house.

The event that followed in May of 1960 proved to be a watershed for the circle of friends and composers who would become the ONCE Group.  It started the weekend of the 14th when Cage and Tudor arrived in Ann Arbor. They gave two concerts; the first featured Cage’s piece Indeterminacy where he read one-minute long stories accompanied by Tudor on electronics.

The second concert was on the 16th and was part of a program sponsored by the Dramatic Arts Center (DAC). Other features on the evening’s musical menu were works by Stockhausen, Christian Wolff, and Sylvano Bussoti. Van Solkelma and Ed Coleman who were both graduates of the University of Michigan’s music department had approached the DAC board to secure the funding for the concert. DAC had started in 1954 by putting on theater events in the local Masonic Temple, making six or seven productions a year. In 1957 they lost access to the Temple and diversified their endeavors to include music, poetry readings, and dance as well as theater with events happening at a number of different venues. The Cage and Tudor concert, performed at a high school theater, was the first avant-garde music funded by the organization and it proved to be habit forming as DAC became the ONCE Festivals chief financial sponsor.

Seeing Tudor’s accomplished pianism and focused devotion to music and playing had a profound effect on the other composers and musicians who were there for the concert. But the next night, May 17th was equally inspiring and galvanizing to the growing circle of composers. The additional stimulus came in the form of a public lecture given by Gerhard, entitled “Is New Music Growing Old?” The title had been an adaptation of one used by Theodor Adorno in his 1956 book Dissonanzen. In his talk Gerhard refuted Adorno’s contention that the new developments in twentieth century music had been on a steady decline since a summit had been reached in the twenties when the Second Viennese School was in full swing. Gerhard instead thought that the world of music, with the seeming disruptions brought on by the introduction of aleatoric and chance operations, the birth of electronic music, and other contemporary trends was healthy. He thought it was “what one would expect from a social body deep in ferment and teeming with creative energy. It would seem a poor show if an epoch does not manage to develop its ‘contemporary’ ideas fully in all directions, to the utmost limits of contradiction.”

This lecture was received with enthusiasm, and gelled with the other events happening that month to give the young composers a feeling of success and excitement about all the possibilities fermenting around them. That same May, Robert Ashley had also brought in the composer Luciano Berio to Ann Arbor. Luciano played his piece Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) at a record store followed by a talk and discussion on the work. The Ann Arbor crew of music devotees had made a lot of things happen that spring.

At the end of the summer Ashley, Mumma, Reynolds and Cacioppo crossed the border into Canada to attend an international composers conference in Sratford, Ontario. The conference was put on by the League of Canadian Composers with help from a number of other organizations and drew in sixty-three delegates from twenty different countries. Otto Luening, Vladimir Ussachevsky, and Edgar Varese among many others were all in attendance. The National Festival Orchestra, CBC Symphony, a number of chamber groups and variety of soloists gave five concerts with one evening dedicated specifically to electronic music. A number of lectures were also given, including “Music by Synthetic Means”.

Yet the group from Michigan left the event feeling dispirited. What should have been a great event and a chance to interact with some more of their musical heroes turned out to be another disappointment. The composers they had gone to meet, interact and exchange ideas with were held at arms bay by the events organizers, “closeted off” according to Reynolds.  As the four fellows drove back home a frustrated Robert Ashley remarked “we could do a better festival than that.”
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A plot and a plan had been born. 

The ONCE Festivals, 1961-1966

Having sketched out a plan on the ride home from Canada, the musicians now had a project to sink their teeth into. Back in Ann Arbor the next few months were filled by mapping out their idea into a concrete blueprint they could bring before the board of DAC. Ashley and Reynolds pitched their plan for a contemporary music festival that was to include six concerts, featuring three from local musicians and artists, and three they would bring in from outside. DAC agreed to give funding to the project in the amount of $750 if the organizers could earn an equal amount through ticket sales, donations, or general scrounging for funds. Composers Lucio Berio and Paul Jacobs chipped in some further money, and the group was off to the races.

The festival found a strong ally in Anne Opie Counselman who was the secretary of DAC from 1960-61. Her experience and connections in the community made life easier for the festival organizers and participants as she nailed down many of the practical aspects of putting such a feat together: finding venues for people to play in; lodging and places for the musicians to crash when their work and fun were done and a myriad other details. The first year it, in February and March of 1961, it was held at the Unitarian Church. As the event grew over the years it sprawled out into a variety of locations, even as the church remained a central locus in following years as a rehearsal space for the program.

In 1960 Cacioppo had gotten a job as an engineer and programmer at the university radio station WUOM. Using station equipment he was able to make recordings of the entire festival and these were subsequently broadcast in different segments over the coming months, giving the festival a wider, spectral coverage. In this manner the music also reached people who might not show up for a concert, and all those random listeners who just happened to tune across the dial and hear something out of the ordinary. The practice of broadcasting the concerts was kept up in succeeding years, with Cacioppo engineering the recordings.

Nick Bertoni was another key player in putting together the festival, and he became the technical director for the ONCE Group. An Ann Arbor native, after graduating high school he joined the U.S Navy Submarine Corps where he became a highly skilled electronics technician. After the Navy, he returned home and attended the UM’s School of Architecture and Design where he ran into Milton Cohen and George Manupelli who became mentors to him. His expertise with electronics was vital to putting the events together.

The first year set the stage for what was to come. Each festival featured acoustic, electroacoustic, and purely electronic music. The first year also featured a two-channel film called The Bottlemen by George Manupelli with an original soundtrack by Ashley. The tape and electronic piece The Fourth of July was also shown at the first ONCE to a mixed reaction from the critics. Theatrical works started appearing in coming years. It quickly became an early multimedia festival.

The organizers had not originally intended for the festival to become a recurring event, hence the name. But the artistic success of the event for players and attendees garnered enough support to ensure it happened more than ONCE.
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A year by year breakdown of what was played at the festivals is outside the scope of this book, yet there are a number of key compositions that deserve attention. One from each of the five founding ONCE Group composers will be examined, followed by a few of the pieces played there by the visiting musicians.

The Fourth of July

Robert Ashley’s tape piece The Fourth of July had originally been recorded for use in Milton Cohen’s Space Theater, as were many of his and Mumma’s electronic music. At the 1961 Festival it received its premiere as an independent work. For this work Ashley had taken a tape recorder along with him to an Independence Day party. He had wanted to test a new parabolic microphone. What he captured ended up becoming a quintessential American piece of music. The sounds of people having a grill out, mix with tinkling glasses, children, animals, the kind of fun conversation and chitter you hear when family and friends get together to celebrate. To this he added a number of sounds built up on tape loops in the Cooperative Studio. As the piece progresses over its eighteen minutes, the noisy electronics gradually take over the sounds of the party as fireworks explode in the background.

The press for the first year of ONCE was mixed, but the Fourth of July was singled out with the distinct criticism of being compared to a faulty radio circuit. To ears who grew up on the kind of noise Ashley pioneered, it sounds wonderful. To the old guard whom the ONCE Group was rubbing up against, it sounded like an all-out assault on music itself. All these years later when I hear the piece, I am whisked back in time to an early sixties middle-class neighborhood. It was a time when people started getting their hands onto tape recorders and playing with them as a hobby. It is also an expression of the then novel circuits available to the basement or garage tinkerer used to a creative end. Perhaps the distorted oscillations that gradually overtake the party are also a reflection of the anxieties of the time lurking beneath the surface of things.
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The bombs bursting in air could have easily been nuclear.

Megaton for Wm. Burroughs

Megaton for Wm. Burroughs is a piece Mumma wrote for the ONCE Group to perform.  It opens with a searing blast, a long overdriven tone that gradually builds in intensity, the hot white heat of a nuclear decimation, then fades like smoke from a mushroom cloud. The sounds of laser ray guns emerge from the ruins, a chirping crossfire of blips and squeaks. Strangled strings and other oddments are played ONCE Group members Robert Ashley, Harold Borkin, Milton Cohen, George Manupelli and Joseph Wehrer as accompaniment to Mumma’s tape composition.

As the piece progresses the bleeps are elongated into psychoactive slurs, trailing electric glissandos, the white fuzz of a burned out television set. For a time no clear reception is present, but then voices come in: different military men giving orders and reports in each speaker, along with the rat-a-tat-tat of machine guns. The song ends with the steady hi-hat taps of simple jazz percussion. I can see why this song was dedicated to William Burroughs: it is very evocative of the apocalyptic interzone he inhabited. In the mid-60s it was also a musical commentary to the bleak cold war hovering over them.

The piece was written as a sound-sculpture, but also as a theatrical performance piece. The music consists of live and pre-recorded elements projected to ten loudspeakers surrounding the audience. The players are in darkness during the opening roar of the bomb blast. As that sound fades, the chirping of radioactive electronics darts about the space between the speakers. Gradually light is shined on the players who are revealed to be wearing aircraft headsets which they use to communicate with one another, as if the ensemble are members of an air force squadron flying over the rubble, and the sounds increasingly are those of a battle. Over a low toned drone a number of voices come speaking as military operatives to each other over radio, coordinating their efforts in the theater of war. “Good luck. Hello to all other aircraft. We are going in to attack. We only have three bombs. Let me know when you are in position. How many guns do you think there are Trevor? Enemy coast ahead.” These words were sampled from a war film and reveal that Mumma was not averse to taking material from other sources when he needed to. The piece fades out with a sample of patriotic movie music accompanied by a lone drummer.
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Megaton showed a seriousness of subject matter, while at the same time pointing to how the brutality of war is recuperated in the spectacle of the film industries during Megaton’s final moments.

Advance of the Fungi

Like other members of the ONCE Group Cacioppo also had something of a background in science. On the one hand he had his job as a radio engineer at WUOM, and on the other a degree in chemistry he picked up alongside his musical degree. Perhaps this interest in the microscopic side of life played a role in his composition, Advance of the Fungi.

It had originally been planned as a mimed stage work, and was inspired by the book Post-Historic Man: An Inquiry by Roderick Seidenberg, who put forth a sociological perspective on technology. Seidenberg had been born in Germany in 1889 but came to the US in 1910. An architect by trade, he was imprisoned during WWI for his position as a conscientious objector. In his book he argued that human history on the macro scale is essentially predetermined, and can be graphed as a three-part sequence: prehistory, when instinct dominates intelligence, and then history, a smaller period of time when intelligence is at war and in struggle against instinct; and post-history when intelligence, and in his view complex technology, become indefinitely in control. He thought that genetic engineers would co-ordinate the human race with their instruments. 

A brief snippet from his book gives a taste of the heaviness with which Seidenberg approaches his jeremiad: “Modern man learned to accommodate himself to a world increasingly organized. The trend toward ever more explicit and consciously drawn relationships is profound and sweeping; it is marked by depth no less than by extension. Affecting virtually every aspect and condition of man's affairs, it is everywhere apparent: in our systems of production, distribution, and consumption; in the operations of labor, capital, and finance; in the spheres of communication and transportation; in art, in sport, in education; in the fields of commerce, industry, and agriculture… Reaching down everywhere into the domain of the individual, it is apparent in an ever closer mesh of socialized patterns and institutionalized procedures. It is their function to bind, coordinate, define, and control his duties and activities, his purposes and behavior, in relation to those of his fellow men. Scientific research -- once the happy hunting ground of the individual savant -- is increasingly subject to co-ordinated control.”

This is the kind of scenario and book I can imagine would hold the attention of the intensely saturnine Cacioppo. And at the time of this writing, it’s hard not to agree with Seidenberg’s perspective.

The stage production never got the funding needed to put it on, but Cacioppo still had the title and the music he wrote for the piece. It was scored for 3 clarinets, 2 horns, 3 trombones, percussion and male chorus. Cacioppo says, “Its form generates from the exploitation of the color possibilities of the ensemble. Pillars of sound, vertically organized structures of dynamics, timbre, register and pitch densities move as constantly changing spectrums. Additional color elements are developed through the use of phonemes. The chorus sings a variety of phonemic sounds that act as vocal filters or modulators, changing the timbre of the vocal element. Occasionally, the brass player is called upon to do a similar thing, by singing a non-harmonic pitch above or below the played pitch of his instrument. Color differences, harmonic frequencies, beats, sum and difference tones are produced. Vocal modulation unifies and integrates as common ground the entire ensemble. Sounds are related only in terms of their intrinsic qualities. No pre-compositional technique or idea, other than those of a simple acoustical nature, inform the work.”

Cacioppo was a critic of serial music and found inspiration from the likes of Cage, Feldman and Varèse with their appreciation for the sounds themselves. His own approach to composing followed suit and he let the sounds be themselves as he explored clusters of tones arranged in ways both harmonious and noisy. 
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Another influence on the piece Advance of the Fungi came from Ernest Charles Large who had written a book of the same name. The book discussed the battle humans had fought against various fungi from the potato blight of 1845 up to 1940. The influence of this book and the first on the subsequent work show a mind active and engaged with acute biological realities. The microbes of music continue their advance despite efforts of humans to stop them from colonizing their own perceived territories.

Matrix

Matrix by Donald Scavarda, written and performed at the second festival in 1962, is a ground-breaking work in extended technique for the clarinet. It pushes the solo player out of the monophonic comfort zone known to reed players, who typically play one note at a time, and forces them to branch out into multiphonics, when several notes are played at once.

The influence of Luciano Berio can be seen in this composition. He had composed Sequenza I for solo flute in 1958, and had visited Ann Arbor in 1960 as related above. Sequenza I was one of the first pieces to require multiphonics for the flute, and Matrix was one of the first pieces written for clarinet to use the technique. 

When a musician is playing a wind instrument the tone it emits consists of the fundamental (or the pitch identified as the note being played) alongside pitches with frequencies that are integer multiples of the frequency of the fundamental. In other words, overtones. By controlling embouchure, the flow of air, and by the creative manipulation of fingering or valve positions a player can produce distinct tones that aren’t a part of the same harmonic series.  
 
Scavarda saw the potential for the clarinets multiphonics when he heard one squeak. From that moment he was on a quest to see what the instrument could do, spending “six intensive weeks of working and coaching and controlling and learning fingering, embouchures, breath, the lips, everything.” With this inventory of sounds from the instrument he was able to create Matrix, a score of 36 boxes that can be played in any order by the soloist, adding an aleatoric element to the composition. The player may also repeat a box or not use it at all as the soloist saw fit.

Each box contained written instructions for the multiphonic fingerings, or other extended element or instruction. For instance, box nine says “With teeth (no lip)” and has the instructions below the staff notation “same fingering throughout. At the culmination of overtone cluster produce several (single tones of indeterminate pitch and duration which occur naturally) as fast as possible. Total duration: 1 full breath.” 
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Having spearheaded multiphonics for woodwinds to a rave review by Alfred Frankenstein in High Fidelity magazine, other composers felt liberated to go in and keep exploring the territory. Five years later Bruno Bartlolozzi came out with his influential New Sounds for Woodwinds that incorporated extensive multiphonics. Sometimes it takes initial explorers to go in and see what is in the territory before others are willing to come down along the initial path and see what else might be done.

A Portrait of Vanzetti

Roger Reynolds Portrait of Vanzetti started off as a piece of work with Gottfried Michael Koenig for the WDR’s electronic music studio in Koln. From this electroacoustic element that he had crafted with Koenig he created a new piece in honor of two Italian anarchists, Niccolo Saccco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti who had emigrated to Massachusettes and were wrongfully convicted for two murders in 1921. Four years later a man stepped forward and confessed to the crime, his conscience weighing on him. Even with a confession at hand the courts refused to open the case back up and the immigrants were murdered by the state on August 13, 1927. For the piece a narrator reads a text edited out of the letters written by Vanzetti. This is accompanied by a tape of processed sounds alongside live piccolo, horns, trombone, clarinet and percussion that indeed does create a moving portrait of a man whose life was cut short by injustice.

In his last statement to the court a few days before his execution Vanzetti said, “This is what I say: I would not wish to a dog or to a snake, to the most low and misfortunate creature of the earth—I would not wish to any of them what I have had to suffer for things that I am not guilty of. But my conviction is that I have suffered for things that I am guilty of. I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I was an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian; I have suffered more for my family and for my beloved than for myself; but I am so convinced to be right that if you could execute me two times, and if I could be reborn two other times, I would live again to do what I have done already.”

Radical undercurrents such as these moved through the works of the festival, and from there further out into the world. 

The Music World Comes to Ann Arbor

At time of the first festival the organizers had a modicum of sympathy and support from Ross Finney and the UM music department, but as the success of the festival grew, that support was removed. The old guard became territorial over what they thought was their rightful purview and they denounced the works being put on outside of the school system. ONCE was doing what the music school would not. The festival also became an embarrassment for the music department. When official music groups from other schools came and played at ONCE on their departments budget, when the UM department would not sanction participation in ONCE.  The festival also disrupted the work of many music students who were part of the festival and the university. Arguments erupted in class each year around the festival, adding to the tensions.

Many musicians outside of Ann Arbor came to Michigan to participate in the festival. They enriched the lives of the musicians who lived there, and others from near and far who traveled just to take in the scene. Where there was already ferment, a deepening of flavors occurred as ideas were exchange in the creative matrix of the people who had joined together there. The ONCE Group and its festival gave a jolt to the New Music scene in the United States. There was no other festival like it in the country and it gave the composers who came to perform a venue to showcase their new works that wouldn’t be touched by the stalwart end of the musical establishment.

Nothing like the ONCE festival was going on anywhere else in the country. Composers were willing to come and give concerts. The strong pool of talent in Michigan showed their skill and determination to get things done in the gritty Midwest. In doing so connections and bonds between the ONCE group and composers from around the country and abroad were forged. An ad hoc network of new music composers, players, and performers got put into place that would last for decades to come.

In the first year visiting composers Paul Jacobs and Berio conducted works by Messiaen, Stockhausen, Webern, Berg, Schoenberg, Varese and others. In the second year La Monte Young performed with saxophonist Terry Jennings.  Cage and Tudor came in 1963 and in 65 the last year of the festival Pauline Oliveros was there accompanied by David Tudor on a purely electronic piece.
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The inclusivity of film and unorthodox performance pieces also put ONCE at the vanguard of the kind of multimedia and intermedia productions that would increasingly become the norm in avant-garde music and art circles.

Legacy of the ONCE Festival

One of the many legacies of the ONCE Festival can be seen in punk rock, and can be traced specifically to one of the God Fathers of Punk, Iggy Pop. When you listen to a Stooges or an Iggy Pop record the twentieth century avant-garde may not be what first comes to mind, yet during the years of the ONCE Festival Iggy was forming his first bands right there in Ann Arbor. With his voracious appetite for listening to music, he went and checked out those concerts, becoming a regular attendee of the festivals. 

Iggy Pop spoke of the influence of that music scene on his musical development: “Ann Arbor, Michigan was kind of a way station for working beatniks and avant-gardists between New York and the West Coast. I met Andy Warhol first in Ann Arbor. There was a female artist named Charlotte Moorman, and she never got her due during her life. She was a beautiful girl from Alabama who hung with the John Cage, Nam June Paik crowd, very avant-garde music people. I was, I think, 17, and I saw a picture of her playing the cello topless, bound. It made a big impression on me. It made a big, big impression. It wasn’t lascivious, but it was more like, in some way, she influenced me a lot. There was another man named Robert Ashley, who made screaming sounds through amplifiers. There were a lot of, kind of, loose cannons around, and that’s a great thing, you know?”

Ashley’s unhinged piece The Wolfman in particular had a liberating effect on the young Pop. It was premiered at the 1964 festival and was something of a reputation maker for Ashley. It also could be considered a precursor to the battle cry of punk and an essential part of the source code for the genres of noise and power electronics.

Wolfman is in part an 18-minute tape collage piece built up of found sounds from television and static filled AM radio recordings mashed together in an uncompromising fashion. Over top of it is the howling human, or should I saw, the snarl, guttural snickering, and deranged moon induced vocalized madness, thick with abrasive screams. When performed live the vocals are fed into the same speakers as the prepared backing tape. These two sources feedback together in the microphone and sound like a piece of sheet metal being cut by a grinder. For the vocalist it actually has to be done in a relatively quiet manner or the feedback would be canceled out yet the sound is loud and lashes on the nerves, The Wolfman showed how the microphone itself is an instrument of utterance, and in the piece he paved the way for vocalists like Iggy Pop and the many punks who would follow to grab the mic and let it rip.

Another connection to the influence of the festival can be seen in the work of Kim Gordon, inside her noise-rock group Sonic Youth, and her various projects since the end of that band. Though she didn’t attend the festival, one of her teachers while studying art in the mid-70’s Toronto was George Manupelli. She started her first band Below the Belt while he was her teacher. Under his auspices she also made a silent surrealist film about Patty Hearst. The influence and example of Manupelli and his life of creativity stayed with Gordon over the following years.

The ONCE Festival had been a grand playground for the organizers and participants. As they wrapped up shop in Ann Arbor, the members of the ONCE Group moved onto other things, such as the formation of the Sonic Arts Union, and eventually Robert Ashley taking over as director of the CCM.

References:

Cybersonic Arts: Adventures in American New Music, by Gordon Mumma, University of Illinois Press, 2015
Robert Ashley, Kyle Gann, University of Illinois, 2012
Music from the Once Festival 1961-1966, New York, NY, New World Records, p2003, 1966.
https://www.caledonianrecord.com/orleans_county_record/community/george-manupelli---obituary/article_d2a1efbf-ffac-5034-8c0c-172b8c68c3eb.html
https://smtd.umich.edu/muse/2010/spring/once.html
https://cse.engin.umich.edu/about/history/
Electronic music of theatre and public activity, Gordon Mumma, New York, NY New World Records, 2005
Post-Historic Man: An Inquiry, Roderick Seidenberg, University of North Carolina Press, 1950
https://moderecords.com/profiles/georgecacioppo.html
https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2017/04/iggy-pop-early-experimentation
Girl in a Band, Kim Gordon, New York, Dey Street Books, 2015.
https://issuu.com/jbfb/docs/_american_composers__kyle_gann-robe
https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/120439/recent-submissions
https://moderecords.com/profiles/georgecacioppo.html
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/seidenberg_roderick
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sacco-and-Vanzetti#ref253399

*Stockhausen Footnote: Stockhausen himself exuded the DIY spirit throughout his long career. Though he received many commissions and concert opportunities his direct involvement with all aspects of his musical production is something to be admired. After some quarrels with the publishers of his scores and early recordings, Stockhausen established his own publishing company and record label to issue all of his scores and recordings of his music. In addition to conducting his works himself, Stockhausen also recorded and mixed these works himself. Direct artistic control of the artistic product was something he wasn’t willing to concede to those who would not create something to the exact high standards Stockhausen set.

​.:. .:. .:.

Read the rest of the Radiophonic Laboratory: Telecommunications, Electronic Music, and the Voice of the Ether.

.:. .:. .:. ​Do you like what you have read here? Then sign up for Seeds from Sirius, the monthly webzine from Sothis Medias. It delivers blog posts here to your door while gathering and sowing much additional material, news of various shortwave and community FM transmissions, music,  deindustrial fiction, strange meanderings and more: 
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Once a month over the next year Sothis Medias will feature a brief sketch of someone who did things their own way, who lived their own iconoclastic life. Last month we looked at the transformations of the Butterfly Bard, Brother Blue. This month we are going to explore Cincinnati legend and outsider artist, Raymond Thundersky.

(If you are interested in the background of WHY I am writing these notes on American weirdos you can read this post by John Michael Greer on Johnny Appleseed's America.)

Once upon a time when I was in junior high and high school, I started seeing a man out and about on my skateboarding-and-metro-bus-riding excursions around the city. It was a man I became somewhat afraid of, though I later learned those fears were unfounded.

I was afraid of him because he wore a clown collar and carried around a construction workers lunch box. Some people called him the construction clown. As I got older I wondered if he was some kind of John Wayne Gacy impersonator, as Gacy had been a construction worker who moonlighted as a clown. Even though I love the circus, clowns are high up on the spectrum of creepy, for me anyway. Maybe he was just a fan of ICP, yet I never saw him with a bottle of Faygo.

Most of the time when I saw him it was downtown, near construction sites. I've always loved going downtown, ever since the summer after the sixth grade when in the summer my mom put me on a metro and sent me down to see my sister at her workplace, the Bagel Stop, and go to the Friend's of the Library book sale on Fountain Square. I still have the poetry anthology I picked up that day. As I got further into skateboarding, downtown became one of my favorite spots, and it was just a quick bus ride away, and only fifty cents on the weekends, and during the summer. Downtown also happened to be a favorite spot for the construction clown, but at the time, I didn't know why.

There was one occasion where I was waiting at a bus stop in Westwood -a layover stop across the street from the then still going Westwood Movie Theater- and the construction clown was waiting with me. He kept staring  at me but not talking, as if he knew I was scared, and delighted in making me more so. I contemplated skating down the street to another bus stop, but knew he would still end up on the same bus with me.

Another time, stoned and cotton mouthed on my way back home with a friend who was spending the night, the construction clown got on the bus and sat behind us. He put his hands on the arm handle or rest in front of him,  that was also part of the seat I had my bottom on. It was quite unsettling. Most people don't rest their hands on those blue plastic bits if a person is sitting on the seat in front of them.

I'd see him around for years to come after, though in time, without as much frequency. It was only later I learned he was an artist. An outsider. An outsider artist. And that it wasn't his lunch he was carrying in the lunchbox, but his colored pencils, crayons and paper. 

​Raymond Thundersky was obsessed with construction sites, and deconstruction sites. It was the demolition of buildings he most liked to draw. And I also learned he was a Native American. Besides the construction clown his other nickname was the Chief or the Mohawk Chief. 

Though Cincinnatian's inhabit a landscape vibrant with the traces of past cultures, the Moundbuilders, the Adena, the Hopewell, and later the Shawnee, with burial mounds set in the midst of urban neighborhoods and in our many parks, the presence of a Native American community here seems absent to me. Personally, I have known just one or two Native American's in this town. 

His obituary in the Cincinnati Enquirer says he was born in California in 1950. His father was Richard Brightfire Thunder-Sky, the last full blooded chief of the Mohawk tribe. His dad was born on St. Regis Reservation on border of New York and Canada. At some point Richard went out to California to work as an artist and actor. He had appearances in nine Hollywood Westerns... Cowboy and Indian films in other words.

He was Hungarian on the other side of his family. Another form of noble lineage, came from his mom whose father hailed from the Habsburg Dynasty. Irene Szalatzky met Richard at a party in an American Legion in NYC, where her father had emigrated to after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Married in 1946, the couple popped out two before coming to Cincinnati in 1961. & they had a long marriage of forty-three years. The couple had settled in the Northside neighborhood, and this was where I encountered Raymond around the streets and waiting for the bus when I was in my early twenties, just before his death in 2004. 

Raymond's drawings were monomaniacal, in a way similar to Louis Wain's: whereas Wain was obsessed with drawing and painting cats, cats, more cats and when painting cats he was drawing cats. Thundersky's single minded focus centered on construction and demolition sites, with a small dose of clown. The clowns weren't so much in the pictures as they were in the cryptic captions he would write on a drawing where something was being built such as "New Clown Costume Factory." He also brought his ancestry and their possible trajectories into the mix with titles like "Future Mohawk Freeway."

​I have friends who also have tendencies towards a certain single minded focus. Some might say they are on the spectrum. Hell, we're all on the spectrum somewhere, or there would be no spectrum to be on, no point A or point B. Yet those close to Mr. Thundersky thought he might be autistic even though he was never formally diagnosed.

Yet he was assigned a social worker named Bill Ross in 1999. Ross was also an artist and once he gained the trust of Thundersky he was invited into the mans Northside apartment, where over time he got to know a bit more of the background of Thundersky's family. Thundersky's father apparently left California to get a job here in Cincinnati as an ironworker alongside several other Mohawk families.

For her article "Trickster, Artist and Native American" Mary Annette Pember notes that, "Ray Cook, an editor at Indian Country Today Media Network who is from the St. Regis Mohawk tribe notes that “Thundersky” is not a Mohawk name. He speculated that Raymond’s father might have changed the family name while working in Hollywood into something considered 'more Indian.'"

And further: "According to David Stadden, Ojibwe, Public Relations coordinator for the St. Regis Tribe, neither Raymond nor his father Richard Thundersky are enrolled in the tribe."

Cook however did note that photos of Raymond showed a strong resemblance to Mohawk families.

Raymond's childhood love of the circus and admiration for his father's work on construction sites gave birth to his distinct and unique way of dressing, and his independent vision as a self-taught artist.

In 2001 Keith Banner and Bill Ross put together a small show of Raymond's artwork, and it set the stage for the legacy that was to follow the Cincinnati icon, with his pieces later traveling to shows across the nation and around the world.

He left behind over 2,000 drawings of demolition and construction sites when he died. Building and destroying were for him fused together. There was no creation without destruction. 

In 2004 Ross and Banner Founded Thunder-Sky Inc. This is a non-profit gallery and small storefront in Northside that has been a home for other outsider artists. It provided workspaces and a place to exhibit works whose origins lay outside the academy, outside the realm of production conferred by the economy of the art world and beyond the scope of art schools.

​Raymond was still alive when the space first opened, but he didn't like to work there. He preffered his own routine and methods, though he did like to go to the parties and openings held in the space.

Keith Banner noted that “Raymond was a cultural and spiritual figure who, through the persistence of his art-making and brave exploration of his own aesthetic universe became a touchstone for what it means to be creative and alive.”

The same year the gallery was founded Raymond passed away from cancer.  Artworks, a non-profit group that pairs students and professional artists to paint murals all around Cincinnati made a mural of Raymond Thundersky at another outsider artist hot spot, Visionaries & Voices. 

As a youth I didn't understand Raymond or what he was about. I didn't see beyond the clown suit or beneath the hard hat or what lay inside his lunchbox. Even though I was naively afraid of him, I'm appreciative of my encounters with him around the city.

Thundersky Inc. closed its doors at the end of 2020. But I swear I can feel the spirit of Raymond walking down the streets, looking for new demolition sites and seeing what new buildings are sprouting up in his old haunts.