The Birth of a New Ritual

As a child, Alvin Curran would lie in bed at his parents’ Providence, Rhode Island home and listen to the counterpoint between the booms of trains shunting together at a nearby rail yard and foghorns down at the harbor a few miles away. “Was that a piece of music?” I ask him. “Absolutely,” he replies. “And it’s been one ever since!”

We’re at Spike Island in Bristol for the opening of “When There Is No More Music to Write,” an exhibition of films by Eric Baudelaire and archive material collected by Maxime Guitton, which together place Curran’s work from the formation of Musica Elettronica Viva onwards within the context of Italian politics in the build up to the economic stagnation of the notorious Years of Lead. Born in December 1938, Curran was 25 years old when his tutor Elliott Carter invited him to Berlin on a DAAD scholarship supported by the Ford Foundation. The following year Curran wound up in Rome where, after a fortuitous encounter with composer Franco Evangelisti, he formed MEV with Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum. 

With a combination of traditional instruments, early electronic synthesizers and a motley collection of contact-miked objects, that group (which would initially feature Carol Plantamura, Allan Bryant and Ivan Vandor, alongside Curran, Rzewski, and Teitelbaum) became pioneers of free improvisation and live electronics, later collaborating with the likes of George E. Lewis, Garret List, and Steve Lacey, as well as opening up the stage to anyone in the audience who cared to join in with a series of often spirited events dubbed The Sound Pool. Recently, Curran’s solo records from the 1970s, lyrical and often playful collages of found sound and live instruments like “Canti E Vedute Del Giardino Magnetico” and “Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri,” have been reissued on labels like Black Truffle and Superior Viaduct to critical acclaim. 

While the technicians downstairs put the finishing touches on the show before the private viewing, Curran and I spoke in the Spike Island offices about protesting against Pierre Boulez and getting shut down at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.