“My friendship with Richard goes back to 1961.” That is composer Alvin Curran, speaking from Rome, explaining how he first met Richard Teitelbaum, a composer, improviser and important electronic musician who died in April 2020. Curran will be in New York this month for a tribute to Teitelbaum at Roulette, which will also feature Elliott Sharp, James Ilgenfritz and the Ghost Ensemble playing a world premiere from the leading contemporary composer Catherine Lamb, who studied with Teitelbaum at Bard.
“I was already a graduate student at Yale and Richard became a graduate student in ’61,” Curran explains. “We became very, very close friends and actually roommates in that period. We were coming out of a strict period of 12-tone theocracy. I was invited by Elliott Carter, who was my teacher at Yale, to join him in Berlin in a residency program. After my year there, I decided I needed a Mediterranean cure. So I came to Rome. Richard was already there on a Fulbright. We met up again and with others, primarily [political composer and pianist] Frederic Rzewski, we decided to form an experimental music group called Musica Elettronica Viva [MEV]. This was vital musically and even, to some degree, politically revolutionary.”
There had never been a group like MEV before, nor one like it since, bringing electronic instruments—even homemade ones—to the stage, including early Moog synthesizers, and using those for free improvisation. Their performances were often raucous and explosively chaotic, going on until the musicians could no longer sustain the energy....
...
Continue Reading: PDF or visit the NYC jazz record site