Synopsis
Although Alvin Curran is one of the leading figures of the late 20th century musical avant-garde, he has never received the recognition he deserves in the form of a proper publication. This is, in fact, the first book ever to present a complete and coherent picture of this gigantic figure of experimental music. A radical experimentalism and a kind of innate volatility have, in fact, long kept the person and the work of Alvin Curran, one of the historic founders of the group Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV), at the margins of contemporary musical historiography. His vast and all-inclusive experience refuses to fit into the common schemas and cubbyholes, excluding him from the conceptual straitjackets of current Western musicology. Lavishly produced and conceived, this book is centered around extensive descriptions of the most important works and compositional techniques, providing a historical account of Curran's musical concerns and changing style: in permanent flux between two distinct cultural geographies (Italy and USA), sensitive to an infinity of pressures, encounters, transformations, and provocations, Curran's artistic voyage is presented here through a comprehensive historical and critical study that avoids buzz-word definitions and gives great respect to his otherness -- an otherness clearly and happily a part of the variegated musical universe of our time. Gathered for the first time in a single monograph, the contributions of several of the foremost Italian and international scholars -- enriched by an astounding "travel log" by Alvin Curran himself and by unpublished images from his private archive -- confirm the role of this composer-performer-teacher-writer as a major contributor to the evolution of artistic languages in the late 20th century and beyond. Edited by Daniela Margoni Tortora. 300 pages, softcover, in Italian and English.
About the Author
Democratic, irreverent and traditionally experimental, Curran travels in a computerized covered wagon between the Golden Gate and the Tiber River, and makes music for every occasion with any sounding phenomena -- a volatile mix of lyricism and chaos, structure and indeterminacy, fog horns, fiddles and fiddle heads. He is dedicated to the restoration of dignity to the profession of making non-commercial music as part of a personal search for future social, political and spiritual forms. Curran's music-making embraces all the contradictions (composed/improvised, tonal/atonal, maximal/minimal...) in a serene dialectical encounter. His more than 150 works feature taped/sampled natural sounds, piano, synthesizers, computers, violin, percussion, shofar, ship horns, accordion and chorus. Whether in the intimate form of his well-known solo performances, or pure chamber music, experimental radio works or large-scale site-specific sound environments and installations, all forge a very personal language from all the languages through dedicated research and recombinant invention. With a fortuitous bang, he begins his musical journey (1965 in Rome) as co-founder of the radical music collective MUSICA ELETTRONICA VIVA, as a solo performer, and as a composer for Rome's avantgarde theater scene.
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