Artists Studio: Alvin Curran

ABOUT THE ARTISTS STUDIO “Sitting in a chair in the Veterans Room and slowly panning side to side and up and down (which you will do when you go there), you encounter a kind of visual music: the energy in that design and those colors, the shades of brown and blue and black and pale yellow, alive and roaring at you.”

— The New York Times When the Veterans Room reopened in 2016 after an extensive revitalization, it was lauded as “a riot of color, visual rhythm and contrasting details,” and “if walls could speak, these would alternately whisper of refinement and roar with audacity” (Wall Street Journal). Designed by Louis C. Tiffany & Co., Associated Artists, the room is a monument to the American Aesthetic Movement and represents the innovation of exceptional young artisans approaching the decorative arts with a bold new vision. This season, the series adds to the exuberance of the space with interventions by some of today’s most creative voices who have a distinct relationship to sound with a visual aesthetic that blurs the boundaries between installation and performance. Curated by jazz pianist, composer, and MacArthur fellow Jason Moran, these interventions utilize the newly restored space as visual material, while allowing these imaginative innovators to explore exciting new directions in their practice.

UPCOMING EVENTS:

MATANA ROBERTS

JULIANA HUXTABLE

“Panoramic sound-quilting” is the term internationally renowned composer, saxophonist, sound experimentalist, and mixed-media practitioner Matana Roberts uses to describe her combination of instrumental music, singing, text, and visual imagery. Exploring themes of American history, memory, and ancestry, her very personal and improvisatory body of sound work is startling in its originality and gripping in its historic, political, and social power. She brings her creative practice as a musician merged with social consciousness to the Veterans Room for a site specific performance in her ongoing anthropological examination of music, storytelling, and the long, diverse history of her birth country.

The artist and DJ Juliana Huxtable will create a new work combining video, sound, spoken word, and performance in her ongoing exploration of what it means to be human and to resist the caging of people within fixed selves, private bodies, and prescribed identities. Huxtable straddles the worlds of art, fashion, and night life, exploring the intersections of race, gender, queerness, and sexuality through a mix of media including self-portraiture, text-based prints, club music and parties, poetry, and social media.

April 24

CHARLEMAGNE PALESTINE September 14

A pioneer of experimental music, Charlemagne Palestine creates intense, resonant music centered on layered overtones, electronic drones, and dense hypnotic rhythms created by percussive repetition to playfully defy the conventions and contexts most associated with modernist composition. He explores the world of experimental sound through performance and immersive installation, incorporating bears and other plush toys—viewed as representations of the soul that are either hand-made by the artist or found—into unique performance environments. The multifaceted artist creates an immersive, site-specific installation in the Veterans Room that invites audiences into his colorful, fantastical world.

October 10

2018 ARTISTS STUDIO

IN THE NEWLY RESTORED VETERANS ROOM

Wednesday, March 14 at 7:00pm and 9:00pm Veterans Room, Thompson Arts Center at Park Avenue Armory

THE ALVIN CURRAN FAKEBOOK Alvin Curran, Composer and Musician Tonight’s program will include selections from: Shofar Shoals Octograms Endangered Species Era Ora Unstandard Time This performance is approximately 75 minutes with no intermission.

SEASON SPONSORS

SERIES SPONSORS

The Artists Studio is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the city council, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and by public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Support for Park Avenue Armory’s artistic season has been generously provided by the Charina Endowment Fund, the Altman Foundation, The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, the Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Shubert Foundation, The Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Foundation, the Marc Haas Foundation, The Kaplen Brothers Fund, the Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation, the Leon Levy Foundation, the May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, and the Isak and Rose Weinman Foundation.

ABOUT THE WORK & ARTIST “…Let’s get one thing straight here, I do not write songs… I may compose unpopular music but for the record, do not write songs…”

This quote from an recent interview between me and myself is really aimed at the digital music culture which has linguistically reduced the end-product all music making (composed or improvised) to songs.

So what, in these special times of rampant fakery, is a FAKEBOOK? Simply an illegally reprinted collection of popular songs – melody, chord symbols and words – which appeared in the early 1940’s and gradually circulated widely among jazz musicians and enabled popular music performers, to “fake” (i.e improvise or spontaneously realize) any of the 1000’s of popular standards in the collection..

The Alvin Curran Fakebook is a kind of autobiography in musical notation. Designed by my wife Susan Levenstein and self-published in 2015, this book contains an abundance of musical essences both written and conceptual which any musician may perform in their own way. These fragments, compositions, and instructions might be thought of as a selfportrait…

In these concerts I want to give both you and myself an idea of what I have been up to lately, from the Fakebook and otherwise, offered quite informally in my typical one-man-band style – a New Common/No Common Practice in which music is allowed to begin somewhere and continue anywhere.

Digitized electricity (thanks to Angelo Farro) intersects with an archaic horn, the Shofar (in this case not from a ram but from an East African Kudu). Then maybe just two tones an octave apart emerge on the piano – a kind of music made from next to nothing (an octave is a sandwich with nothing in it) … this might segue into my rendering of sounds (human, animal, environmental, mechanical, etc.) from the whole planet played ad-lib from my huge collection of digital sound files, what I call “Endangered Species.” Then I might sit and play the piano – one of my fast driving minimalist pieces based on my twopiano work “Era Ora” (“It’s About Time”), which could lead to “Unstandard Time,” where I might mix a jazz standard with the electronic sounds….and so on always in this tenuous, real-time world of “might and could” where the order of the musical and sonic flow is simply a mirror of the moment in which it sounds.

As in life, everything is subject to change.

—Alvin Curran

Democratic, irreverent and traditionally experimental, Alvin Curran travels in a computerized covered wagon between the Golden Gate and the Tiber River, and makes music 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 began his musical career in Rome in 1965 as a solo performer, as a composer for Rome’s avant-garde theater scene, and as co-founder of the radical music collective MUSICA ELETTRONICA VIVA. His more than 200 works feature taped/sampled natural sounds, piano, synthesizers, computers, violin, percussion, shofar, ship horns, accordion and chorus.

Whether pure chamber music or his well-known intimate solo performances, experimental radio works or large-scale sitespecific sound environments and installations, all forms forge a very personal language through recombinant invention.

From 1975-80 Curran taught vocal improvisation at the Accademia Nazionale d’Arte Drammatica in Rome, and from 1991-2006 was the Milhaud Professor of Composition at Mills College in Oakland, California. He currently teaches privately in Rome, in addition to master classes, residencies, and lectures.

Curran studied Composition at Brown University (B.A 1960) and Yale School of Music (M.Mus., 1963).

Production Acknowledgements Sascha von Oertzen, Sound Designer John Chrils, Audio Technician Steinway & Sons

ABOUT THE VETERANS ROOM “...the Armory, a once-crumbling landmark, has transformed itself into one of the world’s most sought-after venues for performance, music, and supersized art projects. And in a sense, the Veterans Room, of all the Armory’s opulent reception rooms, has the deepest spiritual kinship with a work of contemporary art, the feel of an installation by a young collective whose members were reacting to one another and making it all up as they went along.”

— The New York Times The Veterans Room is among the most significant surviving interiors of the American Aesthetic Movement, and the most significant remaining intact interior in the world by Louis C. Tiffany and Co., Associated Artists. This newly formed collective led by Tiffany included some of the most significant American designers of the 19th century at early stages of their very distinguished careers: Stanford White, Samuel Colman, and Candace Wheeler among them. The design of the room by these artisans was exotic, eclectic, and full of experimentation, as noted by Decorator and Furnisher in 1885 that “the prepondering styles appear to be the Greek, Moresque and Celtic, with a dash of Egyptian, the Persian and the Japanese in the appropriate places.”

A monument of late 19th-century decorative arts, the Veterans Room is the fourth period room at the Armory completed (out of 18). The revitalization of the room responds to the original exuberant vision for the room’s design, bringing into dialogue some of the most talented designers of the 19th and 21st centuries – Associated Artists with Herzog & de Meuron, Platt Byard Dovell White Architects, and a team of world-renowned artisans and experts in Tiffany glass, fine woodworking, and decorative arts.

The revitalization of the Veterans Room follows Herzog & de Meuron’s design approach for the Armory building, which seeks to highlight the distinct qualities and existing character of each individual room while interweaving contemporary elements to improve its function. Even more so than in other rooms at the Armory, Herzog & de Meuron’s approach to the Veterans Room is to amplify the beauty of the room’s original vision through adding contemporary reconstructions of lost historic material and subtle additions with the same ethos and creative passion as the original artisans to infuse a modern energy into a harmonious, holistic design.

The room’s restoration is part of an ongoing $215-million transformation, which is guided by the understanding that the Armory’s rich history and the patina of time are essential to its character, with a design process for the period rooms that emphasizes close collaboration between architect and artisan.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________ The restoration and renovation of the Veterans Room was made possible by The Thompson Family Foundation, Inc., Susan and Elihu Rose, Charina Endowment Fund, Lisa and Sanford B. Ehrenkranz, Almudena and Pablo Legorreta, Assemblymember Dan Quart and the New York State Assembly, Liz and Emanuel Stern, Adam R. Flatto, Olivia Tournay Flatto, Kenneth S. Kuchin, R. Mark and Wendy Adams, American Express, Rebecca Robertson and Byron Knief, Amy and Jeffrey Silverman, the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Fund of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and Anonymous (2).

Cover photo: James Ewing