ONCE Upon a Time in Ann Arbor

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.

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

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