This Life of Sounds: Evenings for New Music in Buffalo

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Author: Renee Levine Packer

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This Life of Sounds

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This Life of Sounds Evenings for New Music in Buffalo

RENÉE LEVINE PACKER

1 2010

1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With ofﬁces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2010 by Renée Levine Packer Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Levine, Renée, 1940– This life of sounds : Evenings for new music in Buffalo / Renée Levine Packer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-973077-3 1. Music—New York (State)—Buffalo—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Concerts—New York (State)—Buffalo—History—20th century. 3. State University of New York at Buffalo. Center of the Creative and Performing Arts. I. Title. ML200.8.B8L48 2010 780.78'74797—dc22 2009034967

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

To Arnold Packer and to my mother, Ruth Wolfe (in memoriam)

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Acknowledgments

Pinning down the past, regardless of whether one was there or not, is a precarious enterprise. After more than forty years, how can one be certain that they’ve got it just right? Is that what really happened? Were we in Paris or Berlin? Did he say that before the concert or afterward? I am deeply indebted to Lukas Foss (in memoriam), the Creative Associates, and the many interviewees who shared their time and recollections with me. Their voices animate these pages as they relate their experience of those bygone days. How many cities can claim the good fortune to have had an arts patron of the caliber of Seymour H. Knox II, whose vision and generosity would be hard to match anywhere? Yet he was engaged and supportive of our enterprise, so much so that if I called him with a problem, he was ready and willing to help. Buffalo was blessed also with two daily newspapers during those years, the Buffalo Evening News and the Buffalo Courier Express. Press coverage of the arts was generous for a city of its size, and, although frank, the critics were interested and never condescending. I wish to salute the late John Dwyer, music critic of the Buffalo Evening News, in particular, for his steadfast allegiance to the core mission of the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts—the study and performance of contemporary music—and for the unfailing perspective he brought to his task. I am grateful to Drs. Nancy Norris and John Spitzer of Johns Hopkins University and to Timothy Madigan, formerly of the Rochester University Press, for their early encouragement and

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guidance. John Bewley of the Music Library at the State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNYAB) was indispensable throughout the entire period of researching and writing this book. His patience and many kindnesses are deeply appreciated. My thanks also to Nancy Nuzzo at the Music Library and to the staff at the Special Archives at SUNYAB; to Susana Tejada at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery Library; the librarians at the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, the Buffalo State College Library, the Rockefeller Archive Center, and the Milton Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins University. Edward Yadzinsky, historian of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, was also a fount of information. Sheldon and Mary Berlow, Steve and Diana Childress, the late Betty Freeman, Barbara and Joel Packer, Eleanor and Richard Rubinstein, Jan and Diane Williams, and David and Rachel Wolfe all graciously offered me encouragement and hospitality numerous times when I visited their cities to do interviews. Linda Alston transcribed those interviews. Carol Plantamura, Esther Harriott, Robert and Katherine Martin, Gerald O’Grady, and Alan Rich were kind enough to read drafts of the manuscript at various stages of its development. For permissions, I am grateful to Margaret Sullivan at the Buffalo News, Daniel DiLandro of the Buffalo State College Courier-Express Collection; Kenneth Simon of Kosco Media, Inc., for the Buffalo New Times; Life magazine; Larry Austin and Source Publishers; Mrs. Ilaria Narici at Universal Music Publishing Ricordi for Sylvano Bussotti’s score; Gene Caprioglio and the C. F. Peters Corporation, Laura Kuhn and the John Cage Trust, and Suzanna Tamminen at Wesleyan University Press for materials from the estate of John Cage; Horace and Walter Cardew for the Cornelius Cardew estate; Albert Cohen, W. H. Bonsall Professor of Music Emeritus at Stanford University; Zeren Earls for Paul Earls’ estate; Mrs. Frances Eastman and Gerald Eastman for Julius Eastman’s estate; Cornelia Foss for Lukas Foss’s estate; Barbara Monk Feldman for the Morton Feldman estate; Michael Fredericks; Sherwin Greenberg; Esther Harriott; Irene Ikner Haupt; Amanda Hiller for the Elizabeth and Lejaren Hiller estate; University of California Press for the quotes from Allan Kaprow; Silvia Cecere Neuhaus for Max Neuhaus’s estate; Pauline Oliveros and Deep Listening; Pennebaker Hedegus Films, Inc.; Tom Johnson and the Village Voice; Kenneth W. Rose for the Rockefeller Foundation Archives; Alan Rich; Anthony Sapp and Chris Dawson for the Allen Sapp estate; Richard Siggelkow; William Thomson; Bruce A. Glena for Don Glena’s estate, David and Rachel Tuttle for Jim Tuttle’s estate; and Christian Wolff, Stuart Bratesman, Jr., Lucy Childress, and Mickey Osterreicher for photographs.

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ix

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs are from the collection of the Music Library, SUNYAB. The Music Library digital photography collection may be accessed at http://ubdigit.buffalo.edu/. As we edged closer to publication, I will forever be grateful to Jan Williams and my sister Irene Kraas for their help and advice. Sincere thanks also to copyeditor and steadfast compatriot Ryan Dohoney; Suzanne Ryan, Madelyn Sutton, the anonymous readers, and the staff at Oxford University Press. Most of all, though, it is to my husband Arnold Packer, who stood by me and kept me to the task over many years, that I wish to offer my profound thanks.

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Contents

Introduction: Experimental Music in Buffalo, 3 Prelude: Evenings for New Music in Buffalo, 11 1. The Rockefeller Years, 1964 to Spring 1968, 15 2. “Make It New”: Fall 1968 to 1972, 79 3. Feldman in Buffalo: Fall 1972, 115 4. The Final Years: 1977 to 1980, 165 5. Postscript, 187 Appendix 1. Time Line, 191 Appendix 2. Interviews, 193 Appendix 3. Creative Associates, 1964 to 1980, 197 Appendix 4. Creative Associate Graduate Fellows, 201 Appendix 5. Selected Discography of Recordings by Members of the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts, 203 Notes, 209 Bibliography, 227 Index, 233

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This Life of Sounds

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Introduction: Experimental Music in Buffalo

It was a climate. Colleagues showed each other their work and were interested in sharing ideas and ideals. The avant-garde was our club. I would say that the Center made music a part of the living world. —Lukas Foss, interview with the author, February 18, 2000 This book chronicles a unique artistic enterprise envisioned by one man and brought about through the collaboration of a foundation, a university, and a community. It provides a glimpse of a group of talented individuals who came together over a period of sixteen years, each drawn to Buffalo by the idea of ﬁnding new ways to make and think about music. What is revealed, often through the voices of the participants and the lens of the local press, is a story that is emblematic of a provocative period in American cultural life in which the people, location, timing, politics, and a host of technological advancements were all critical elements. There have been moments in the story of the arts in America when a propitious alchemy yields a special brew: Black Mountain College, the Bennington School of the Dance, North Beach in the 1950s. Like these, the Buffalo new-music group—the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts at the State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNYAB)—qualiﬁes as a notable locus of exploration and achievement in the second part of the twentieth century. Nils Vigeland, chair of the Composition Department at the Manhattan School of Music, who grew up in Buffalo, recalls: “It was one of

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those kinds of places the way people talk about Vienna in 1900–1910. It really was. I don’t think it’s stretching to say that.”1 New music may be loosely deﬁned as any classical music composed after World War I. Historian Charles Hamm writes that in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, classical music took a very different path from that followed by virtually every other music genre—popular music, jazz, church music, dance music—in which new musical currents were welcomed and absorbed but were grafted onto what already existed. American composers in the classical camp attempted to start all over again, asking their listeners to forget earlier attempts at a classical style and to accept a musical language making no reference to cultural, aesthetic, or musical elements of their own country. This new language was proving to be “extraordinarily difﬁcult for audiences.”2 Often, the players, too, found themselves bewildered by the complexities of the scores, having rarely, if ever, encountered these new forms in the course of their musical training. American composer Lukas Foss outlined the genesis of the Center in a 1963 article titled “The Changing Composer-Performer Relationship.” The article, which appeared in the journal Perspectives of New Music, addressed what Foss perceived as a serious gap between composer and performer. “The methodical division of labor (I write it, you play it)” was “a sterile state of affairs that no longer served the composer or the educated virtuoso.” Composers such as himself were involved “in and with performance” and often used trusted, hand-picked performers who could work as a “team” with the composer.3 Foss envisioned creating an environment in which talented musicians could have the time and freedom to practice and experiment—to give free rein to their creative abilities and to extend their knowledge of new music. As he explained to a reporter from the New Yorker magazine in early 1965, they were “creating a totally new kind of music. . . . We need to have the performer work with us in creating it, to take people who are mature musically—real virtuosi—and conquer them for our cause.”4 The music and the complexity to which Foss and Hamm referred embraced a wide array of ideas, from tonal and serial music to improvisation, chance processes, theater pieces, sound installations, mixed media, electronic, and computer music. Composers in the United States and abroad worked with colleagues to investigate extended vocal techniques and the technical possibilities of acoustic instruments. Performers might be given the freedom to select from various options in the musical score, thereby taking control of the path or the duration of a piece. To convey their intentions, composers were devising new notational procedures such as graphs, drawings, and sometimes simply a list of instructions. More and more composers sought to control the environment in which their music was performed. No longer was the concert hall setting to be taken

INTRODUCTION

5

for granted. Loft spaces, art galleries, atria, outdoor sites, even a swimming pool might be required. New technologies were reshaping the musical landscape as well—electronics, computers, the Buchla Box and Moog synthesizer, advances in instruments, tape recorders, speaker systems—stretching traditional concert formats and demanding new thinking. For a young musician with an adventurous spirit, the community that Foss dreamed of represented a respite from orthodoxy, a chance to ﬁnd his or her artistic path. The musicians were not alone. The painters were stretching as well. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, artists such as Allan Kaprow and Robert Rauschenberg were moving off the canvas and away from the wall. In his 1966 essay “Experimental Art,” Kaprow, who believed that the line between art and life should be kept as ﬂuid and indistinct as possible, wrote: It is no accident that the lines dividing the arts are rapidly falling out of place and everything is becoming confused. There are no clear distinctions between drawing and painting, painting and collage, collage and Assemblage, Assemblage and sculpture, sculpture and environmental sculpture; between environmental sculpture, displays, and stage sets; between these and Environments; between Environments, architectural design, and architecture per se; between the ﬁne and the commercial arts; and, ﬁnally between art of any kind (Happenings) and life.5 Rauschenberg, too, was interested in exploring the gap between art and life. As Calvin Tomkins noted, Rauschenberg once said, “Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. I try to act in the gap between the two.”6 Kaprow’s environmental events, termed Happenings, and Rauschenberg’s forays into multimedia and performance were expanding the traditional territory of the visual arts. Performance and the moving image, meanwhile, became the components of video artist Nam June Paik’s work. Paik, originally trained in musical composition and inspired by the ideas of composer John Cage, saw “the power of media as an artist’s tool.”7 Paik and colleagues, among them Woody and Steina Vasulka, Juan Downey, and Beryl Korot, “moved freely between ﬁlm, video, and installation, working in lofts and alternative spaces on the margins of the established art world.”8 Such were the revolutions—breakthroughs, breakdowns, or breakups, depending on your point of view—galloping through the art world. Foss’s dream of a composer’s utopia populated by enlightened virtuosi was, no doubt, inﬂuenced by his earlier connection to the Los Angeles concert series, Evenings on the Roof (later called Monday Evening Concerts), founded in 1939 by Peter Yates and his wife, pianist Frances Mullen, and taken over by

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Lawrence Morton in 1954. Evenings on the Roof routinely recruited some of the ﬁnest musicians in Los Angeles to present an array of rarely heard new and equally rare early music. These concerts, now under the sponsorship of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, introduced Los Angeles to composers such as Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Foss, Boulez, and Cage. A raft of efforts to promulgate opportunities for the performance of twentieth-century music bloomed across the country in the early ‘60s. Bassoonist-conductor Arthur Weisberg created the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble in New York in 1960. The group consisted of a core group of 14 musicians who were often supplemented by additional performers as the repertoire required.9 With no ofﬁcial institutional connection at the time, the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble’s existence relied entirely on the energetic convictions of Mr. Weisberg and the services of sympathetic musicians willing to work for low fees. That same year, a group of artists in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the words of composer Gordon Mumma, “took matters into their own hands” and decided to produce a festival of concerts of new music. Beginning with four concerts on two consecutive weekends and continuing for the next six years, the ONCE Festival, organized by composers Robert Ashley, Roger Reynolds, Mumma, and others, became a highly regarded platform for new experimental, often multimedia, work by a wide array of local and visiting composers.10 Increasingly engaged by the possibilities of composing music using electronics, Morton Subotnick and Ramon Sender joined forces to set up the San Francisco Tape Music Center in 1962. That same year on the opposite coast, pianist-composer Charles Wuorinen and ﬂutist-composer Harvey Sollberger established the Group for Contemporary Music at Columbia University, thus becoming the ﬁrst contemporary ensemble based at a university and run by composers.11 As with Arthur Weisberg’s group, a core nucleus of stellar performers was associated with the ensemble but paid on a per-concert basis. In 1963, the Twentieth Century Innovations concert series was founded in New York by composer Gunther Schuller, also using sympathetic freelance performers. And in 1964, composer Ralph Shapey founded the Contemporary Chamber Players (now Contempo) at the University of Chicago, using local players and musicians from the Chicago Symphony. Each of these partnerships or groups operated in its own way based on the differing personalities and interests of its leaders, their sympathies for certain types of repertoire, regional circumstances, and available funds. But with its focus on the artistic growth and development of the musicians as a resident community of artists devoted to the performance of new music, the Buffalo Center, at its inception, was unique. Foss’s programming philosophy, too,

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7

encompassed a wider range than the others, not just in his inclusion of numerous European, and later Asian, works: The only idea I disagreed with was limiting yourself to one technique. I believe the more techniques, the richer is our vocabulary. . . . Can you imagine Bach saying, “I’m a fugue composer, and that’s all I’m going to write?” It’s ridiculous. It’s just a technique. The more techniques, the merrier.12 The musicians who came to the Buffalo Center were young, mostly in their twenties. For them, money was not the dominant concern. People wanted a reliable paycheck, but making music and how well you did that was the main thing. “We were literate; we were avid,” commented pianist-composer Michael Sahl. “We thought we were the best survival readers and players and, no matter what they sent us, we could somehow or other make music out of it. We were proud of our expertise, collectively vain. That’s how we felt—like the marines or the ranger commandos.”13 In 1962, the newly established State University of New York at Buffalo was heralded as a cultural and intellectual hub for the SUNY system and for the region. Referring to the intersection of the public university and art, Center cofounder Allen Sapp wrote, “The center is a brilliant stride forward in types of mechanisms to support the performing arts and particularly the innovative artist.”14 Some people agreed with Sapp’s view; others most emphatically did not. The question of a “research” arm peopled by cocky young composers and performers who have no teaching roles may be grudgingly accepted in an atmosphere of abundance, but when the ﬁnancial winds change, resentments are bound to ﬂare. The issue of “stability” proved to be a hydra-headed dilemma. Is it realistic for a foundation to provide “seeding funds” for a project in collaborative creativity and expect that it will be sturdy enough to withstand changes in leadership and university administrations, as well as inevitable shifts in the economic and political landscape? There were catch-22s everywhere. If the Center was perceived as too autonomous, it could be eliminated more easily. On the other hand, if the Center became too intertwined with the university, outside funding, particularly state and federal support, could be jeopardized. Center and university ofﬁcials wrestled with these questions over and over again. Another recurrent theme was the question of the life cycles of such collaborative circles. Henry James has written, “The best things come, as a general thing, from the talents that are members of a group; every man works better when he has companions working in the same line, and yielding to the stimulus of suggestion, comparison, emulation.”15 Most of the Creative

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Associates I interviewed would subscribe wholeheartedly to this view. Although not published until 2001, Michael P. Farrell’s book Collaborative Circles may be read as a guide (albeit with variations) to the ebb and ﬂow of the Center’s existence.16 According to Farrell, groups often form around a single person in a “magnet place” and are likely “to be roughly similar in their levels of expertise in their disciplines.”17 From the circumstances of its formation in an intellectual hub (SUNYAB) by charismatic leaders determined to work in an experimental realm (Lukas Foss, Lejaren Hiller, and later Morton Feldman) with young professional artists in their twenties or early thirties (the Creative Associates) through to the questions of group dynamics, rebellion, conﬂicts, separation, and disintegration, the Center followed—in hindsight—a predictable trajectory.18 It is no accident that the unlikely ﬂowering of a vigorous artistic climate in a conservative, provincial setting took place in the 1960s. Even after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, there was an overriding spirit that anything was possible—idealism, energy, and enthusiasm about experimenting with everything from political and social systems to art, literature, jazz, and rock and roll. We had “switched-on Bach,” wired Cage, elaborate Indian ragas, and turned-on audiences. Along with the music, the musicians, and the institution that housed them, the story is incomplete without reference to the escalating war in Vietnam and other social struggles of the day, such as civil rights and the women’s and gay liberation movements—all volatile issues that affected everything, from where and how we lived to with whom. Throughout this period, Buffalo beneﬁted from a vigorous regional press, including a knowledgeable team of arts reporters. Their voices are included here with some frequency in order to provide external reports and assessments of events, as well as a sense of the public’s perception of the Center and its work. My connection to the Center began in early January 1965, ﬁve months after it commenced operations. In addition to his teaching duties, Richard Wernick, then a new instructor in the SUNYAB Music Department, had been assigned the task of running the Center’s day-to-day operations and of ministering to the needs of the Center fellows. This proved to be more demanding than anyone had foreseen. Foss was aware that I had worked at the Juilliard School; thus I was asked to help. When Wernick left Buffalo after the ﬁrst year, I assumed the position of Center coordinator and, some years later, was named managing director. All told, I remained with the Center for fourteen years. Buffalo, New York, as it turns out, had a tradition of embracing challenge and innovation. There was pride in being ﬁrst. The ﬁrst elevator in the world was built in Buffalo in the 1840s.19 The ﬁrst steam-powered grain elevator was developed there.20 In 1843, the railroad came to Buffalo. The town at the end of

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the Erie Canal became a city of increasing importance as a transportation center and the chief grain depot of America.21 Between 1868 and 1876, Frederick Law Olmsted and his partner Calvert Vaux began designing the extensive Buffalo park and parkway system. It was the ﬁrst park for which Olmsted personally selected the site.22 Powerful Buffalonians commissioned Stanford White, H. H. Richardson, Louis Sullivan, D. H. Burnham, and Frank Lloyd Wright to create commercial and residential buildings that stand out even today for their originality and good design. Among these was the largest ofﬁce building in the world, the Ellicott Square Building (1896), which held 600 separate ofﬁces.23 In early twentieth-century Buffalo, the Urban Company was the ﬁrst electrically powered ﬂour mill.24 Buffalo was the ﬁrst town to have a practicing woman architect, Louise Blanchard Bethune; and in 1910, the Albright Museum’s second director, Cornelia Sage Bentley, became the ﬁrst woman in the United States to assume the directorship of a signiﬁcant arts institution.25 Curtiss-Wright operated the world’s largest aircraft plant in Buffalo during World War I, and the city had an airport long before most American cities.26 In the nearby town of Wheatﬁeld, Bell Aircraft pioneered development of the helicopter and built the ﬁrst American jets, as well as the ﬁrst aircraft to break the sound barrier.27 The unprecedented level of electric illumination at Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition of 1901 embodied a boldness of spirit calculated to show the world an entirely new form of beauty, a nocturnal architecture. The electrical technology spotlighted at the Pam-Am transformed economies and living standards locally, nationally, and around the world. Industries powered by the hydroelectric power from Niagara Falls contributed jobs and prosperity to the Niagara Frontier for over half a century.28 As Robert Buck, a former director of Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery, has noted, “Buffalo was in an odd sort of way the machine shop capital in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century.” Two remarkable cars were created there, the Pierce-Arrow and the Thomas Flyer, “the ﬁrst car to go around the world and win the race.”29 Buffalo is a cozy town. When the snow is falling and it gets dark early, it’s a great place to get good work done. And it is in Buffalo, New York, that this story took place. Buffalo of the Erie Canal, the underground railroad, and the Peace Bridge to Canada, with its old moneyed families, its beautiful elm-lined avenues, its cozy West Side carpenter’s houses with front porches and yards, its draft dodgers and antiwar demonstrations, and always its “lake effect.” With all due respect to Bob Dylan, in those days one could never predict the weather— or much else—in Buffalo.

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Prelude: Evenings for New Music in Buffalo

Music is this life of sounds, this participation of sounds in life. —John Cage, For the Birds: John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles Cold as it was, the tension built as people hurried to the AlbrightKnox Art Gallery auditorium for the concert. From the street, the jewel-like glow of the brilliantly lit glass cube seemed distinct and sharply etched in the night. Inside, you could see people in clusters, some descending into the seating well. The ample window ledges surrounding the auditorium interior were ﬁlling up with people, all sitting squeezed next to one another like ballplayers in the dugout. It was special, intimate, magical. All hoped there would be room for them, too.

A Study in Sonority “You ought to kick yourself for missing this one,” declared the university student newspaper. Lukas Foss summed it up. “Tonight we celebrate the future and the past,” he announced to the standingroom-only audience at Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery. The occasion for the gala celebration on that frigid Saturday night in late October 1973 was the tenth anniversary of Evenings for New Music,

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the often controversial concert series presented by the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts at the State University of New York at Buffalo. As the ten violinists assembled on the small stage to perform the ﬁrst piece, A Study in Sonority (1926–1927) by Wallingford Riegger, Foss continued, “Look very carefully and you’ll see a candle behind each violin.” The crowd leaned forward almost visibly with rapt attention. The spell was cast. Each piece on the program, an unusually conservative one by Center standards, had been selected by Foss for its relevance to the occasion. Following the Riegger work, “a piece that veers sharply toward free atonality,” were two short pieces by Aaron Copland, one written in memory of Igor Stravinsky.1 Copland had been the ﬁrst composer invited to assume the prestigious Slee Professorship of Music at the University of Buffalo in the late 1950s, thus launching what would for decades become a signiﬁcant forum for contemporary musical thought. Closing the ﬁrst half was Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale) for Three Masked Players (1972) by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and Center alumnus

FIGURE 0.1 Rehearsal for Stravinksy’s L’Histoire Du Soldat (left to right: Seymour Knox, Lukas Foss, Edward V. Regan, Max Clarkson). Albright-Knox Art Gallery, October 1973. Photo: © Mickey H. Osterreicher.

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George Crumb. Crumb’s work Night Music I had been performed in the ﬁrst Evenings for New Music concert in 1964. But it was Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat (1918) for speakers and seven instruments, which some consider “at the root of experimental music,” that was the undisputed hit of the evening.2 “Only a man of his [Foss’s] clout and persuasiveness could have recruited a leading philanthropist, a top political ﬁgure and a prominent industrialist, all of whom are patrons of the arts, to take the three speaking roles in Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat,” wrote the Buffalo Evening News (BEN) music critic, John Dwyer.3 But there they were: Seymour Knox; County Executive Edward V. Regan; and Max Clarkson—seated at a table on one side of the stage with microphones awaiting their cues from Foss, who conducted a sparkling, decisive performance of the innovative chamber theater work. The Buffalo New Times reporter Harry Weintraub, who also covered the concert, commented that the evening was a “social event,” with the audience fairly evenly divided between the spiffy and the scruffy. “The spiffy,” Mr. Weintraub remarked, “Buffalo’s musical haute monde, sat in the seats, along with the reviewers holding passes, while the scruffy—mostly students—sat on the steps surrounding the seats.” This may or may not have been an accurate depiction of the seating arrangements, because where you sat was mainly a function of how early you arrived, but the reporter’s description of the lively birthday party that followed captured the spirit admirably: The audience hugely enjoyed the performance of Soldat but did not linger in the auditorium to discuss the ﬁner musicological points. There was rock and roll and plenty of booze (as it was announced from the stage) awaiting us in the Sculpture Gallery. The dynamite music was provided by a terriﬁc Buffalo group, Imani. What is Imani? In their own words, Imani is Music, Life, Energy, Joy, Blackness, Family, Getting It On and Doing It. They did indeed get it on, and with the help of champagne, a little hard stuff and their own exciting music, so did the spiffy and the scruffy.4

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1 The Rockefeller Years, 1964 to Spring 1968

Creating the Center Two hundred thousand dollars was a lot of money in 1964—a veritable bonanza—over a million dollars today. It was an especially startling amount of money when the subject was funding for an avant-garde contemporary music group. Yet in 1964, the Rockefeller Foundation provided $200,000 to help establish a resident ensemble of expert young musicians at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Why would they do such a thing? And in Buffalo, of all places? What was going on? In the early 1960s Buffalo, New York, also known as “the Queen City of the Lakes,” faced a crisis. The opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1950, which created a direct all-water route between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean, was destroying the western New York city’s once thriving economy. Only decades earlier, Buffalo had served as the gateway to America’s frontier, the site of the nation’s largest inland port and a center for grain storage, automotive manufacturing, and steelmaking. By the late 1920s, eleven rail trunk lines serviced Buffalo, including the famed New York Central, Erie, Lackawanna, Lehigh Valley, and others. The railroads “employed twenty thousand men and women and indirectly gave work to thousands more in the car wheel shops, palace car shops, locomotive and freight car shops.”1 In 1955, Buffalo Today, the monthly magazine of the Chamber of Commerce, reported that there were 450,000 people working in the

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Buffalo area, an increase of 20,000 over the year before. Their combined earnings were more than $2 billion. Buffalo’s per capita income of $2,500 in 1955 exceeded the national average by 25 percent. Bell Aircraft still employed 140,000 people in the development and production of jet engines. “The city leads the nation,” announced an article in Holiday magazine, “in ﬂour milling. It manufactures railroad car wheels, dredges, hair-pins, internal combustion engines, nylon stockings, pipe organs, airplanes, steam radiators and practically anything else you can think of including merry-go-round horses.”2 During this same period, however, things began to slip. The aging industrial infrastructure, the St. Lawrence Seaway, and the high cost of doing business in New York State were all cited as reasons for the numerous corporate departures. The rapid decline in Buffalo’s grain industry, a pillar of the city’s prosperity, that occurred because of the newly opened alternate shipping routes and the Interstate Commerce Commission’s rate structure caused severe damage to the city’s economy. Railroads throughout the country began curtailing less proﬁtable lines. In 1952, the Lehigh Valley Station was closed, to be followed a few years later by the Erie-Lackawanna Station. In 1958, the New York Car Wheel Company went bankrupt and steel plants closed; National Gypsum and Houdaille Industries moved their headquarters. Now Buffalo’s population was decreasing for the ﬁrst time since its founding and, as one newspaper columnist put it, the city resembled “a dowager in decline.”3 Buffalo had a solid musical tradition forged by conductors William Steinberg and Josef Krips; a world-class museum with a distinguished art collection; and a university music department boasting the Budapest String Quartet in residence. The music department had commenced operations in 1954. Its ﬁrst chairman was Cameron Baird, a prominent philanthropist and musician of the Buffalo area. From 1957 on, the department beneﬁted from an endowment of approximately $950,000 created by the will of Frederick and Alice Slee, the income of which was designated for a distinguished professor of musical composition, for a set of chamber music events, and for the annual performance of the Beethoven string quartets.4 Reportedly, Aaron Copland referred to the Slee position as “the other chair,” alluding to the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship of Harvard.5 In 1962 the State University of New York took over the sedate, 116-year-old University of Buffalo, igniting a period of huge expansion. The State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNYAB or, even today, often referred to simply as UB) was envisioned as the “Berkeley of the East,” an intellectual and cultural center brimming with forward-thinking activity and ideas. The ambitious expansion of the university was one of three signiﬁcant cultural developments

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in Buffalo at the time. Also in 1962, the inﬂuential Buffalo-based arts patron Seymour H. Knox, who had donated more than 360 contemporary art works to the Albright Art Gallery, provided the gallery with a distinguished new building, including a stunning glass auditorium. Knox’s generosity prompted amending the name of the institution to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. The scope of the gallery’s acquisitions during this period was awe-inspiring, ranging from Gauguin’s Spirit of the Dead Watching (a gift from the A. Conger Goodyear Fund in 1965) to the latest avant-garde sculpture of Marisol, Len Lye, and George Rickey. The third signiﬁcant development was the engagement in December 1962 of Lukas Foss as music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. Foss, a small, breathlessly intense man, then in his early forties, was already well known as an outstanding pianist, an innovative composer, and a promising conductor. He seemed always pressured for time because of his multiple commitments. Even while sitting and conversing about something, his eyes would dart from side to side as new thoughts invaded his mind. Women found his youthful demeanor and crinkly blue eyes boyishly attractive, “très beau,” someone once said. Born in 1922 in Berlin, Foss came to New York at age fifteen. He studied at the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and at Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (where he impressed conductor Serge Koussevitzky and became his assistant for a number of years). At Yale, he studied with Paul Hindemith. In 1953, after the death of Arnold Schoenberg, Foss at thirty-one became the youngest full professor ever hired at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), teaching composition and conducting.6 In 1957, he founded the Improvisation Chamber Ensemble. The concept of ensemble improvisation evolving out of classical roots rather than jazz roots attracted considerable interest, and the group— Richard Dufallo, clarinetist, Charles DeLancy, percussionist, Howard Colf, cellist, and Foss, pianist—performed widely in the United States and abroad. In the fall of 1963, the Rockefeller Foundation invited Foss to be part of a small committee to advise the Foundation on ways it could make a contribution of lasting value in the ﬁeld of music. One item up for discussion was how the Foundation could most effectively help contemporary composers. Foss urged the Rockefeller Foundation to establish programs “to support the young musician of exceptional talent with a bent for contemporary music, the critically important young group who usually wasted their energies and enthusiasm and special skills in unrewarding or deadening services in the commercial music world.” He wrote:

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Our conservatories turn out young musicians by the hundreds each year. These musicians receive an excellent classical training but one which only in rare cases leads the young musician on the professional path he will eventually take in the light of new music. . . . Foundations should give priority over all other forms of music support [emphasis in original] to the young professional in the years following his musical education, put him on a sound ﬁnancial basis, so that he may have leisure, concentration, facilities and outlets for such professional activities as would help him to ﬁnd himself, vis. chamber music, new music, experimental music, which rarely yield remuneration.7 The chairman of the search committee that nominated Foss as music director and conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra was Allen D. Sapp, Jr., a Harvard-educated composer, who came to the University of Buffalo in the summer of 1961 to be the Slee Professor of Composition and Chair of the Department of Music. Sapp was born in Philadelphia in 1922 and had served in Europe as a U.S. Army cryptanalyst during World War II. A large, articulate man with a commanding personality, Sapp was intent on restructuring and upgrading his new department. He quickly immersed himself in the cultural and civic affairs of the region and became an advisor to both the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Building on the long friendship between the founding music department chair, Cameron Baird, and the renowned Budapest String Quartet, Sapp successfully negotiated for the Quartet to be in residence at the school. As important, he wanted to ﬁnd a new conductor for the orchestra who would be sympathetic to the development of contemporary music within both the university and the city. In that regard, he wrote to a dean at the school: “You may be sure that although my ﬁrst aim . . . will be to get the best qualiﬁed man in the world whom we can attract here, I shall have not far from the forefront of my mind the desirability of a man who will cooperate fully with the University in its new role.”8 When Foss outlined his ideas for creating a center of new music in Buffalo, Sapp immediately saw a ﬁt between Foss’s idea for a research institute that would be staffed by special performers and his own goals for transforming the musical climate of the university and the community into one that would provide “a fertilizing experience in the music of our time.”9 The two men set down their ideas in a formal proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation, requesting support to establish the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts that would be based in the music department at the university. The plan was to invite twenty or so instrumentalists, composers, vocalists, and musical scholars to reside in Buffalo on fellowships for a year or two

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speciﬁcally to study and perform contemporary music. The Center would be a kind of “postdoctoral lab” within the university music department. Participants would have the title “Creative Associate (CA),” a term developed by analogy to a research associate, and in this case implying a musician of “articulated professional abilities.” No teaching would be required. Foss would preside over a series of concerts held at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery modeled somewhat on the famous Evenings on the Roof concerts in Los Angeles. Sapp would be codirector, concentrating mainly on administrative responsibilities. The Rockefeller Foundation, much impressed with Foss, sent copies of his proposal to a group of advisors, including the conductor Erich Leinsdorf, violinist Isaac Stern, singer Adele Addison, and the music critic Alan Rich, for their reactions. Stern demurred, saying that he was not particularly knowledgeable about contemporary music, but he did pose a question. “Can they succeed in separating the true from the false? If so,” he continued, “it will be a service to music.” Rich posed a more pointed question: “Why Buffalo?” Buffalo, he commented, was a relatively small city not very much admired for its progressive artistic taste and, after all, “How long would Lukas really want to stay there anyway?”10 With this question very much in their minds, Gerald Freund, a Rockefeller Foundation ofﬁcer, and music critic Martin Bookspan, a part-time consultant to the Foundation, went to Buffalo in January 1964 to meet with Foss and Sapp and other cultural leaders of the community, including the president of the university, the director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and the head of the symphony board. Their aim was to get a feeling for the community and a sense of how long Foss would stay in Buffalo and to ascertain whether the university was willing to contribute ﬁnancially to the project. Foss was on tour in Chicago with the orchestra when the Rockefeller people came, but the visit was adroitly choreographed by Allen Sapp, who guided the group through visits to the symphony hall, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and the university. An auspicious tone was set right away at a mid-morning meeting with Seymour Knox, a banker, polo enthusiast, and one of New York State’s wealthiest men, in his ofﬁce in downtown Buffalo.11 Freund’s memo to his colleagues at the Foundation described the scene: [Knox] has perhaps the most imposing ofﬁce GF [Gerald Freund] has ever been in. It is lined with several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of paintings, chieﬂy modern, and is furnished in the same style as the Chase Manhattan Bank ofﬁces (by the same ﬁrm) with a “desk” that is really a round marble table. Mr. Knox sits in a futuristic swivel chair that for all we know may be jet propelled and wields his

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authority through a telephone set-up with twinkling lights and multicolored buttons. . . . We were most impressed by the extent to which Knox, himself a knowledgeable person . . . and all the others we talked to during the day revealed fairly detailed knowledge of the Foss-Sapp proposal and supported it. Knox felt that the New York State Council on the Arts, of which he is Chairman . . . might be able to contribute directly to the needs of the program. . . . In our judgment Knox can be relied upon to cooperate fully, not least of all because of his high estimate of Sapp and Foss.12 Clifford Furnas, president of the State University of New York at Buffalo, voiced his support by announcing that he favored the university’s assuming the costs for up to ﬁve Creative Associate fellowships. He stated also that the university would assume major responsibility for the continuation of the Center after the ﬁrst two years if it proved successful. In addition, David Laub, president of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra Society, informed the visitors that Foss was already considered a success in Buffalo and that he was interested “in feeling Foss out” about an early renewal of his orchestra contract, which was set to expire at the end of the 1964–1965 season. A forty-minute “conference telephone call” with Foss answered the visitors’ questions: Was Foss happy in Buffalo and would he extend his contract if he had his choice? Foss said yes. Would Foss be willing to personally audition individuals for the Center fellowships? Yes, Foss said. Would Foss be willing to devote time to guide and actually work with the Creative Associates? Foss said yes.13 The strong relationship and open channels of communication between the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and the University Music Department, plus the energetic support voiced by the city’s cultural leaders, convinced Freund and Bookspan that the time was right for a bold move. Further convinced that Sapp was “just the right man to work with Lukas Foss and the proposed creative associates group,” they returned to New York ready to recommend funding for the new center—in Buffalo.14 The Rockefeller Foundation’s initial twenty-seven-month “start-up” grant, in the amount of $200,000, commenced in March 1964. As Sapp wrote in his preface to Evenings for New Music: A Catalogue, 1964–1977, the time was right: “A University with almost limitless expansion of services and resources, a leadership committed to the arts, strong relationships to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Buffalo Philharmonic, and a pervasive spirit of adventure and change all combined to underlay the formation of the Center within the University.”15 A few months later, in May 1964, the Rockefeller Foundation made an appropriation of $250,000 to the University of Chicago on a part-matching

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basis toward the costs of a program “to foster the composition and performance of contemporary music.” A portion of the funds was to be used to provide more adequate facilities for the university’s Department of Music; the balance went toward helping to support the new contemporary music group directed by Ralph Shapey. Once the Foundation gave the green light in March 1964, Foss and Sapp— now ofﬁcially the Center’s codirectors—went to work gathering the ﬁrst group of fellows. Intent on creating an international group, Foss and Sapp auditioned musicians from Los Angeles to Berlin, alerting everyone they knew of their quest to ﬁnd composer-performers and other young virtuosi for the Buffalo group. Sometimes, recommendations were not so forthcoming. One such instance occurred when Foss wrote to Alexander Schneider of the Budapest Quartet, then in residence at SUNYAB, asking him for names of string players he might recruit for the group. Schneider replied with a rather testy note asking, “Why would I ever recommend a good player to spend his time on music where the ink isn’t even dry on the page yet?”16 In the summer of 1964, Sapp described the selection process to Gerald Freund of the Rockefeller Foundation: We have received about sixty-ﬁve applications and have interviewed well over forty-ﬁve or ﬁfty people. . . . At the moment we have appointed eleven Creative Associates. They are on the University rolls. The title, Creative Associate, has been accepted and approved by the State personnel ofﬁce and carries with it full faculty status and privileges. We are in negotiation with numbers twelve through seventeen, one of whom is in Palermo at the moment. . . . We have relied to a great extent on the very efﬁcient word-of-mouth communication in the music world to relay the broad outlines of the project throughout the land.17 Foss was traveling constantly with his improvisation group or on his own as composer, pianist, or conductor. At the University of Colorado at Boulder, a quiet young piano instructor named George Crumb invited Foss to his home for dinner and showed him some of his compositions, including a piece for orchestra. Foss kept him in mind and invited the composer-pianist to come to Buffalo in the ﬁrst year. Soprano Carol Plantamura remembers auditioning for Sapp in the ballroom of a Wilshire Boulevard hotel in Los Angeles and later driving him to the airport. Composer-percussionist John Bergamo, having heard about the new group through the musical grapevine that the directors had counted on, called Foss to see if they could meet in New York. Bergamo recalls, “I went and played with Lukas one day. He was looking for people who

22

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played and composed, and he knew I also wanted to conduct. One thing led to another, and he said, ‘Yeah, come on up.’ ”18 The directors wanted two percussionists for the group, so Bergamo recommended his former classmate from the Manhattan School of Music, Jan Williams. Williams, unsure about leaving the New York freelancing life, went to his teacher Paul Price for advice. Price asked Williams to describe the position and explain what he was supposed to do. Williams answered: “I’m not quite sure, I’m supposed to go there [Buffalo] with a bunch of other young players to study new music, working with the composers and play a series of concerts. It’s at the University—a Rockefeller grant with no teaching involved.” Price replied, “Go immediately! It sounds fabulous, an ideal position for a percussionist.”19 So Williams went, pawning his typewriter to keep himself and his wife, Diane, aﬂoat until he received his ﬁrst paycheck in October. Over the next six months, Foss and Sapp assembled a notable, some would say extraordinary, group of musical talents, including trumpeter-composer Don Ellis, pianist-composers George Crumb and Fredric Myrow, percussionists John Bergamo and Jan Williams, violinist Paul Zukofsky, bassist Buell Neidlinger, guitarist-composer Stanley Silverman, ﬂutist Karl Kraber, and sopranos Carol Plantamura and Sylvia Brigham-Dimiziani.20 The international contingent, an aspect that would become a deﬁning characteristic of the group over the years, consisted of Italian composer Sylvano Bussotti and French violist Jean Dupouy. Michael Sahl joined the Center in January of the ﬁrst year: “I knew a bunch of people in Europe,” he recalled: I knew Frederic Rzewski, Fritzie [Karl] Kraber, and I had known Freddie Myrow from USC and he turned up in Rome. I also knew Sylvia Brigham-Dimiziani from Darmstadt. A lot of these people joined Lukas’ project and somebody called me up on account of Pierrot Lunaire. Nobody (not Freddie Myrow or George Crumb) wanted to play Pierrot [which Foss wanted to schedule for performance]. I didn’t either, but I was so desperate for a job that I decided to come up to Buffalo. All the people I mentioned recommended me. Also, I had been a student of Lukas’s in 1954 at Tanglewood. Although I wasn’t really part of the avant-garde, I hung with that crowd. I mean that was the only crowd to hang with.21 The Yugoslavian, French-trained trombonist-composer Vinko Globokar, who was a CA in the Center’s second year (1965–1966), remembers: Lukas Foss came to Berlin to conduct the Radio Orchestra. He attended a concert where I played one of my very ﬁrst pieces which

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he liked. He said they needed a trombonist in the Buffalo group and, since I was also a composer, he was interested in me and asked me to come. Now, a center that existed for the purpose of doing only new music and having a mix between composers and performers who are also composers—this was something that didn’t exist in Europe; this was something completely new.22 As Globokar said, the Center was something completely new, not only in Europe but also in the United States. The General Description, supporting an extension of the Rockefeller grant to the Center a few years later, notes that the initial grant to SUNYAB to establish “a center of performing and creative arts to commence on 3/1/64” marked “the ﬁrst instance in which an academic institution has given full-time support to a musical ensemble of this size [18–20 people] with the sole task of performing—no teaching duties.” The written motion continues, “The original grant was exploratory and the success of the CAs has led to the establishment of comparable groups-in-residence at Rutgers, the University of Chicago, the University of Iowa, the University of Pennsylvania, and Sarah Lawrence College.”23 Although these groups were comparable to the Buffalo center in their dedication to fostering the composition and performance of contemporary music, each was different in practice. Most used professional freelancers from their communities or faculty members and ad hoc performers. None had an ensemble brought together to live in the community for the sole purpose of the study and performance of new music. None presented as broad a cross-section of repertory with allegiance to no one school of thought, and, indeed, none incorporated as broad a representation of international composers and performers. In the mid- and late 1950s, John Cage and David Tudor gave a series of lectures and performances in West Germany at Donaueschingen, Cologne, and Darmstadt that helped establish American experimental music as a central part of German new music discourse.24 By the 1960s, West Berlin increasingly became a hub of avant-garde activity because of artist residency and lecture programs funded by the Ford Foundation, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), and the U.S. State Department. The yearlong DAAD residencies for visual artists, musicians, writers, ﬁlmmakers, and dancers were created to counteract West Berlin’s isolation from artistic developments in the rest of the world. Lukas Foss, Lejaren Hiller, and Morton Feldman, in addition to a number of CAs, such as Maryanne Amacher, James Fulkerson, and Frederic Rzewski, all went to Berlin for extended stays over the years. These, too, were ad hoc appointments, however, and in no way constituted formal ensembles designed to work together.25

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The ﬁrst group of CAs was paid between ﬁve thousand and six thousand dollars a year, depending on their marital status. (Fellowship amounts were raised at intervals over the years.) During the ensuing sixteen years of the Center’s existence, until it ceased operations in 1980, more than 100 Creative Associate fellows from all over the world came to Buffalo to join the Center. As Nils Vigeland noted, “The CAs all lived in Buffalo. They came, rented an apartment on the West Side, and they were there. There was a sense of commitment to a place. If you’re not going to do that, if it’s just your next gig, what’s the point?”26 The group’s expertise was a magnet for composers such as John Cage, Earle Brown, Elliott Carter, Robert Ashley, Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick, Roger Reynolds, and many more who visited for varying periods of time over the years to prepare their works. They participated—sometimes supervising rehearsals, sometimes conducting their own works—in Center events such as the Evenings for New Music concerts, held ﬁve times each year at the AlbrightKnox Art Gallery and for many years repeated at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York and elsewhere. Buffalo is basically a conservative, working-class community—and small enough that Foss’s new creation did not go unnoticed. Decidedly untraditional and unbuttoned-down in their lifestyles and appearance, the Center fellows inﬁltrated many aspects of local life beyond the university and the art gallery, becoming visible ﬁgures in the community. They befriended their landladies and neighbors and shopped in the local stores. They performed in the clubs, coffeehouses, art galleries, churches, with the Buffalo orchestra, and in the schools. A responsive group of reporters, guided by then–assistant managing editor of the Buffalo Evening News, Elwood Wardlow, were, as former Buffalo Evening News reporter Anthony Bannon recalled, eager to be coconspirators. John Dwyer was the dean of the critics, admired for his perspective, wit, and talent. His colleagues Jeff Simon, Terry Doran, Bannon, and Thomas Putnam at the Buffalo Courier Express took the events they covered seriously, never trivializing the work.27 At WBFO-FM, the university radio station which was originally located adjacent to the CAs’ rehearsal room in Baird Hall, a congenial fellow named Bill Siemering interviewed them and recorded their recitals for broadcast. WBFO’s early attention to and coverage of the CAs also helped instill the Center within the community consciousness. Their ubiquitous presence around town and the press coverage and radio interviews brought the CAs a celebrity status. For nearly two decades, the Center’s energy—the concerts in Buffalo and New York, the festivals, the international tours and

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recordings—was a catalyst that established Buffalo internationally as a city humming with adventurous artistic life. At about the same time that the Center fellows began arriving in the fall of 1964, another young composer journeyed to Buffalo to assume his duties as an instructor in the university music department. The future Pulitzer Prizewinning composer, Richard Wernick, just a year or so out of school himself, recalls in an essay about George Crumb, another future Pulitzer winner: “I was joining the faculty of the music department at SUNYAB for what I thought was a fairly conventional academic appointment ‘with minor administrative responsibilities.’ These minor responsibilities turned me into the keeper of the most unbelievable musical zoo ever assembled.”28 Wernick, who arrived in Buffalo expecting to teach music composition and theory, was supplied with a list of the fellows and the instruments they played— nothing else. Sapp said, “Help ﬁnd them apartments.” “Help ﬁnd them apartments!” Wernick shrieked, recalling the situation thirty years later. “I was brand new in town and could barely ﬁnd an apartment for myself. What was he talking about? Most of the Creative Associates didn’t have cars; some, such as Italian composer Sylvano Bussotti, didn’t even speak English. They didn’t know the transportation system. I didn’t know the transportation system. It was the blind leading the blind.” It was also September. All the fellows were arriving. At a loss, Wernick asked the music department secretaries for assistance and enlisted student drivers to ferry the newcomers around town, suggesting they concentrate particularly on the downtown vicinity.29 Eventually people found places to live, many in a section called the Delaware District on the City’s West Side, where Sapp and Foss had recently settled with their families. Developed in Buffalo’s booming Civil War era, this is an area of well-maintained houses of varying sizes, some of which had been remodeled into apartments. The comfortable tree-lined streets provided a feeling of cozy domesticity where children rode bikes and people put jack-o’-lanterns on their porches at Halloween. Incongruous as it may have seemed, the CAs slipped easily into this conventional middle-class setting. Others rented furnished rooms in the high-ceilinged apartments in the Victor Hugo, an elaborate 1860s mansard-roofed mansion on Delaware Avenue, now a ﬁve-star hotel. The Victor Hugo, in which one’s ample room might have been a well-appointed library, dining room, or sun parlor, remained a favorite residence for many of the fellows, particularly the Europeans, throughout the years. The university rented pianos for the CA composers so they could work at home, thus somewhat alleviating the touchy space problem in the music department. Finally, everybody was ready to get to work.

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THIS LIFE OF SOUNDS

Getting Their Gongs Wet As Sylvia Brigham-Dimiziani said: My favorite things were the rehearsals. Wrong notes didn’t exist. There was a very reﬁned understanding, a very high level of music making. We were dealing with often very difﬁcult scores, new notation, breaking new ground. It was wonderful being able to offer this level of music making to the public. We were interpreters rather than mere “performers.”30 Foss and Sapp set up ﬁve Evenings for New Music concert dates between November and May in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery Auditorium. The Gallery’s auditorium, a stark glass cube, was designed by Buffalo native Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill in 1962 as part of a new wing built to house Seymour Knox’s contemporary art collection. Although the hall was conceived as a place for art lectures and ﬁlms and had no backstage, by simply laying down a plywood ﬂoor over the carpeted stage surface and tying back the curtains, it worked adequately enough for the concerts and provided an intimate setting for the musicians. The ﬁrst Evenings for New Music concert, set for late November 1964, included works by Henry Cowell, Iannis Xenakis, George Crumb, Don Ellis, Earle Brown, and others. Right away, the musicians balked. For one thing, everyone wanted some say in what was going to be performed. Second, no one wanted to spend endless hours of rehearsal for just one concert in Buffalo. So Foss got on the phone with Julius Bloom, the director of Carnegie Hall, and persuaded him to present the Evenings for New Music concerts at Carnegie Recital Hall in a yearlong series of concerts closely matched to the Buffalo dates. The custom of repeating the Evenings for New Music program in New York a few days after the Buffalo concert would endure for well over a decade. Now everyone was anxious to begin. But no one was quite sure what they were supposed to do, where they were supposed to do it, when they would be paid, who had authority to make decisions, and so on. The fellows began to get together, and John Bergamo’s house became a social hub. At the time, music publishers printed only a few sets of the score and instrumental parts of new works. Performance organizations such as the Center had to rent the music from the publishers and have it shipped to Buffalo, which might take several weeks. As no music had been ordered before Wernick arrived, what would they do in the meantime? Wernick and the CAs quickly took matters into their own hands by arranging concerts on campus in the music department’s Baird Hall, an unappealing

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cement bunker-like recital hall that people forgave because of its unusually ﬁne acoustics. These concerts became known as the Creative Associate recitals. They developed their own proﬁle and were highly valued by the Center members, who programmed Schubert, Mozart, Harold Budd—anything they wanted to do. Clarinetist Sherman Friedland, soprano Carol Plantamura, and pianist-composer George Crumb presented the ﬁrst CA recital on November 13, 1964, in which they performed works by Robert Schumann, Franz Schubert, and Alban Berg. A month later, a group of the CAs got together with colleagues from the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and presented a second recital, including works by Handel, an arrangement of Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel, and William Walton’s Façade. In a third recital in early February 1965, violinist Paul Zukofsky teamed with percussionist John Bergamo and George Crumb to perform Crumb’s Nocturnes, Violin-pianoforte, as well as works by Ralph Shapey, Gunther Schuller, Arthur Berger, and others. The series was launched. As the members of the group began to discover one another’s interests and expertise, a sense of pride and congeniality took hold. Cellist Robert Martin, who became a CA in 1966, remembered, “We all came to each other’s concerts. I played Elliott Carter’s sonata with Carlos Alsina. In a way, I have more vivid, happier memories of the Baird Hall recitals. It was a ‘homey’ kind of thing.”31 And, as George Crumb noted, “There was a missionary kind of aspect to it; spreading the gospel of the new style.”32 The directors’ decision to hold the Evenings for New Music concerts at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery rather than on the university campus was a brilliant idea. This arrangement brought the concerts directly into the community. It was also evidence of the implicit backing of the powerful Seymour Knox and, along with Foss’s high visibility, gave the concerts the glossy aura of “an event.” The debut Evenings for New Music concerts at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo on November 29, 1964, and in Carnegie Recital Hall in New York on December 1, 1964, were packed. For most of the Buffalo audience, the music was a revelation. Certainly no one had ever seen a gong immersed in a tub of water to create a glissando before. In George Crumb’s Night Music I (1963), they did. Henry Cowell’s Twenty-Six Simultaneous Mosaics for violin, piano, clarinet, cello, and percussion opened the concert, followed by Morisma—Amorisma for piano and three stringed instruments by Iannis Xenakis. Next came works by Toshiro Mayuzumi, George Crumb, Girolamo Arrigo, and Wlodzimierz Kotonski. Trumpeter-composer Don Ellis performed an improvisation with twelve of his colleagues, and the concert ended with a performance of Novara by Earle Brown, conducted by Richard Dufallo, Foss’s associate conductor at the Buffalo Philharmonic. John Dwyer, the music critic of the Buffalo Evening News, was thoughtful and generous in his review, noting particularly the works

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of Japanese composer Mayazumi, Crumb’s Night Music I, and Arrigo’s Quatro Episodi for Soprano and Flutes, and taking care to name each Creative Associate individually.33 When the program was repeated in New York a few days later, a high percentage of composers ﬁlled the hall, including Leonard Bernstein, Henry Cowell, Gunther Schuller, Elliott Carter, Morton Feldman, and Vincent Persichetti, among others. Both the New York Times and the Herald Tribune reviewed the ﬁrst Carnegie Hall concert. William Bender of the Tribune wrote enthusiastically about “a splendid new series of four concerts of contemporary chamber music that can only enrich the days ahead.”34 A month later, in January 1965, the New Yorker magazine printed an interview with Foss about the new center in “Talk of the Town.” “Things are really lively in Buffalo,” he said. “You would hardly believe what is going on.”35 Buffalonians could hardly believe it, either. Although many were riveted by these weird people making such strange music and bringing so much attention to their town, they didn’t know that Foss and his CA colleagues were just getting warmed up. Buffalonians did not have to wait long for concerts that would prove even more puzzling. On January 10, the Evenings for New Music concert began politely enough. Three small pieces by Charles Ives opened the program: Requiem (1911), performed by Laurence Bogue, baritone, Don Ellis, trumpet, and Fredric Myrow, piano; Aeschylus and Sophocles (1922) for baritone and piano; and The Innate (1916) for baritone, piano, and string quartet. The Ives pieces were followed by Elliott Carter’s Tell Me Where Is Fancy Bred (1939) for baritone and guitar (Stanley Silverman, guitarist). Fredric Myrow’s Songs from the Japanese (1963–1964) for large ensemble closed the ﬁrst half. The radicals hit after intermission: Christian Wolff ’s In Between Pieces (1963) and two works by La Monte Young: The Four Dreams of China, Excerpt: The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer (1962), and Composition No. 6 (1960). Sylvano Bussotti’s Sette Fogli, Excerpt: No. 6 Manifesto per Kalinowski (1959) followed. In his review, music critic John Dwyer pleaded for “a little sharper selectivity by the producers which would save us many precious moments out of the normal life span.” Dwyer dismissed the Wolff piece as “a chance operation for three instruments.” Of Young’s “Second Dream,” he wrote, “[the] two ﬁddles sounded exactly like what it was, a mutual reverie by two Oriental telephone wires, after 9:00 p.m. when the rates are lower.” He continued, saying, “Composer Foss gravely narrated comments on the piece’s variable pitch, frequencies and conditions of entrance and exit. It was ultimate proof that there is no such thing as a long joke.” “Mr. Young’s Composition No. 6,” he wrote, “was for a few players making motions but no sounds. Musically, there may be no

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such thing as a short joke, either, though it struck several viewers as ludicrous in one way or another.” Sylvano Bussotti’s Manifesto per Kalinowski (conducted by the composer) was, Dwyer concluded, “a tonal collage inspired by the same form in visual art, for the whole ensemble including singers, full of tight epigrams and ﬂeeting tonal remarks which seemed to have a nice, barbed wit and lean vigor, with a keen sense of balances in grouping oddly-contrasted elements.”36 In retrospect, if one wonders how Foss might have gone about building this program, certain guidelines are apparent: (1) Highlight the performance forces within the group, in this case, the singers; (2) showcase two of the resident composers, Fredric Myrow and Sylvano Bussotti, in works that use voice; (3) open the program with a venerable twentieth-century ﬁgure such as Ives whose songs are considered touchstones of American music; (4) develop the program with another American composer on his way to becoming venerable; (5) turn it all loose after intermission with doses of the latest ideas on temporal issues, contextual processes (rules and indeterminacy), and the collaborative engagement of performer and composer. Doubtless, some of these factors held sway, but there was also something more. La Monte Young’s Fluxus-tinged work, The Four Dreams of China. Excerpt: The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, consisted of a list of complex directions with two violinists, Paul Zukofsky and Charles Joseph, playing on ampliﬁed open strings. According to Richard Wernick, coordinator of the Center at the time, Foss said to him, “Look, La Monte Young has just gotten out of jail from being busted on a drug charge. He needs money so we have to do a piece of his.” Foss gave Wernick a bundle of Young’s performance materials to look over. Wernick recalls, “There was a piece for piano in which the pianist simply comes out and looks at the audience. Another called for a piano on stage with a bale of hay placed under the piano along with a bucket of water. The piece is over when it is evident to everyone in the audience that the piano is not interested in eating or drinking.”37 (For the record, the directions for Piano Piece for David Tudor #1 by La Monte Young are as follows: “Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over after the piano eats or decides not to.”38) As he tells it, Wernick ﬁnally settled on the excerpt from The Four Dreams of China because it incorporated two musicians and some real sound. When Foss walked into the ﬁnal rehearsal, however, and heard the players screeching and scraping along with banjo strings and their ampliﬁed ﬁddles tuned a quarter-note apart, he said, “We can’t do this. It’s totally incomprehensible. What are they doing up there?” Wernick showed him the set of directions. “O.K.,” Foss said, “I’ll read the directions to the audience

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while the musicians are playing so that they will understand what is happening.” Wernick summarized the episode saying, “The performance sounded like a Bund meeting—Lukas saying in his distinct German accent, ‘vile the ﬁrst violin plays on the G string, the second violin may play on the D and the A strings.’ ”39 The pieces Wernick described emerged from La Monte Young’s Fluxus period, when the composer was experimenting with “the direct experience of unmeasured time within a monostructural framework,” concentrating on “delimiting the work to be a single event or object” in deﬁantly untraditional musical areas.40 In his essay on the Fluxus movement and music, Douglas Kahn discusses La Monte Young’s “foray into sustained sounds, in particular, pointing to a rich and unexplored artistic area of sonic spatiality in relation to physical acoustics.”41 The term Fluxus (derived from the Latin word denoting a continuous passing or ﬂowing) refers to a loosely knit collective of conceptual artists and composers in the late 1950s and early 1960s who proclaimed their anti-art and anti-art-as-commodity philosophies with performance events in the United States and Europe, most notably West Germany. Fluxus, it may be said, is “the name of a way of doing things—a way of viewing society and life, a way of creating social action and life activity.” The poet Emmett Williams once wrote, “Fluxus is what Fluxus does—but no one knows whodunit.”42 “Like Dada,” Andreas Huyssen has written, “Fluxus worked out of an aesthetic of negation: negation of the art market, negation of the notion of the great individual creator, the artist as hero or redeemer; negation of the art object as reiﬁed commodity; negation of traditionally deﬁned boundaries between music, literature, and the visual arts.”43 The composer-art theorist-publisher Dick Higgins pointed out that Fluxus charted the interstices between the mediums of painting, sculpture, music, dance, poetry, and theater and sought to relate one to another conceptually, as well as physically. With a host of theatrical strategies to infuriate or exasperate the audience, Fluxus succeeded, in the manner of a genuine avant-garde, in putting distance between itself and the public.44 In the historical genealogies that George Maciunas (who named, promoted, and disseminated the group’s activities) drew up for Fluxus in 1961, John Cage is positioned as the bridge between the avant-garde of the earlier part of the century and artists of the postwar period. Art historian Judith Rodenbeck points out that: [Maciunas] understood Marcel Duchamp to have democratized the art object radically; John Cage offered a model of rule-based chance operations and indeterminate composition that deemphasized

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authorial control. Anything could be art and anyone could make it. From these precedents, Maciunas drew several principles: work should be concrete and game-based; it should be simple, humble, and funny, rather than sophisticated and precious; in the ideal, it should be anonymously or collectively produced; and any sincere “playing” of a performance score or game was valid.45 Once, while walking in New York, I saw a man crossing the street with a glove hanging upside down from his mouth. For George Brecht, another original member of the Fluxus movement, this simple sighting, which deﬁes one’s usual expectation of the order of things, would qualify as an “event.” Brecht was interested in the random procedures in twentieth-century art. Like John Cage, with whom he studied at the New School in the late 1950s, Brecht believed that “theatre” takes place all around us. As Michael Nyman notes, “Brecht’s events may be simultaneous gags and quite serious exercises to reduce things to their essence.”46 Brecht’s 1962 Solo for Violin, Viola, Cello, or Contrabass carries one instruction: “Polishing.” The “composer” and Ben Vautier interpreted this work for solo instrument as follows: the musician enters, dressed for the occasion, with a violin, a bottle of the best violin polish, and a polishing rag; he sits down carefully and after a brief pause proceeds to polish his violin in public. Accidental sounds, such as touching the strings, the creaking of the chair or the street noise entering through the window, become the music. His task performed, the musician bows to the audience and leaves the stage. It all happens in an authentic concert situation.47 Along with Brecht, Maciunas, and Dick Higgins, ﬁgures associated with the Fluxus movement include Allan Kaprow, Robert Watts, Jackson MacLow, Robert Filliou, Alison Knowles, and others who joined at various times, such as Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Philip Corner, and Joseph Beuys. In the months to come, Buffalo audiences would be hearing additional compositions associated with the Fluxus aesthetic, such as John Cage’s Theatre Piece (1960) and György Ligeti’s Poème symphonique (1962). Music wasn’t the only thing that was shaking things up in Buffalo at the time. Swollen with funds and status as a newly designated hub in the mammoth State University of New York system, the university’s population ballooned. New faculty and students—including many New Yorkers—were dramatically changing the character of the old University of Buffalo and eliciting mutterings in the community about Jews, Communists, pot smokers, and beatniks.48 As Mark Goldman writes, these were children from working-class families in New York City—“the children of cab drivers, high school teachers, and civil servants who could for the ﬁrst time afford to go to college, pouring into Buffalo and bringing with them the excitement, color, and creative dynamism of their

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native city.”49 In 1964, the English department was a hotbed of luminaries, including the poets Charles Olsen, Irving Feldman, and John Logan and writers John Barth, Leslie Fiedler, and Lionel Abel. Student activism and dissent were escalating around such simmering issues as free speech and selective service and would soon erupt over Vietnam. SUNYAB was no longer, if it had ever been, a placid oasis, a world of quiet study. Students were making themselves heard. A particularly ingenious student prank provides a sense of the community’s discomfort with the university and the readiness of the press to exacerbate it. On December 15, 1964, a small item appeared in the Buffalo Evening News with the headline, “Ruler Due Here from Marchantia.” The story reported that Avillugd Urubod, the Thallus, or ruling monarch of the principality of Marchantia in the southwestern section of the Arabian peninsula, would be arriving at 1:48 p.m. the following day for a two-day visit to the Buffalo area. The bogus news item had been released by SUNYAB students ostensibly to test the gullibility of the local news media and to prove that most people believe what they read in the papers. (For the record, a thallus is a stalk and marchantia is liverwort, both plants resembling mosses.) Once the article was published, student interest in picketing and demonstrating spread rapidly, and, by the time the plane was due, approximately one thousand students were waiting at the airport. According to Richard Siggelkow, the demonstrators were amicable and remarkably well disciplined, some displaying signs reading, “Thallus, Return to Your Palace,” “No Malice Toward Thallus,” and “Arab, Go Home.” The Thallus, a seventeen-year-old ﬁrst-year student, wearing a dark business suit under a white trench coat, had that same day purchased a round-trip ticket from Buffalo to Newark and, after a forty-minute layover, was returning—as Thallus—complete in authentic kefﬁyeh for headwear. This was later described by Lt. Benedict Kostizewski of the Cheektowaga Police Department to the New York Herald Tribune as “some strange sort of ﬂowing headdress.” A bugler conveniently appeared and announced that “the Thallus requests that you sit,” and “the Thallus asks that you walk backward,” to which the crowd of students cheerfully complied. As the Thallus alighted from the plane, waving to the crowd, the police observers who had been dispatched to the scene mistook the welcoming cries of “Hail Thallus” for rage and anger. The real trouble began when the bugler decided to sound a “charge,” sending the students “running wildly through the airport” and out of the terminal. In Siggelkow’s account, the Arabian head of state then made his big mistake. Surprised by the unexpectedly large student turnout, the Thallus accepted police protection, only to ﬁnd himself being driven directly to station headquar-

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ters. During the ride, he blurted out his real identity, “I’m only Artie Schein from Brooklyn.” Presumably less than amused, the authorities booked him on a disorderly conduct charge. Although all the participating students knew that a hoax was on, the News had been duped. The managing editor had checked with the local hotel where visiting dignitaries usually stayed and was informed that, indeed, the Thallus was registered for two days. An Associated Press wire story carried the News’s account that the rampaging students “broke windows, slashed seats and frightened travelers.” The airport manager gave the impression that property had been deliberately destroyed in a full-scale riot and assessed the damage at two thousand dollars. An editorial in the Jamestown, New York, Post Journal stated that the hoax had endangered the lives and limbs of many a traveler and damaged property extensively. The Utica Daily Press, also relying on incomplete and biased reports, wrote about the incident under the headline, “Buffalo U. Students Vandalize Airport.” In fact, the city editor of the News wrote years later in an article about the incident, titled “The King of Liverwort,” that no travelers were knocked over or reported any injuries and that not one arrest other than that of the Thallus was made. The “broken windows” turned out to be one window with a crack in it. Four ashtrays valued at ﬁfteen dollars each were broken, and four airport employees worked overtime for ninety minutes to clean up the mess. The damage ﬁgure shrank from two thousand to six hundred dollars.50 This affair, Professor Michael Farrell points out, is somewhat reminiscent of the “Dreadnought Hoax,” instigated by Horace Cole and Adrian Stephen, Virginia Woolf ’s younger brother, in which they concocted a plan to “hoodwink the British Navy into showing their ﬂagship, the HMS Dreadnought, to a supposed delegation of Abyssian royals.51

Settling In Foss wore his status as a famous pianist, conductor, and composer lightly. Offstage, he was casual and friendly, never acting in a standofﬁsh manner. He and Allen Sapp, his codirector, made a convincing team. My association with the Center began in early January 1965, a few weeks after the Center’s opening concerts. Just twenty-four, I had arrived in Buffalo the previous August from New York with my new husband, Jesse Levine, a violist whom Lukas Foss had recruited for a principal chair in the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. We found an apartment on the second ﬂoor of a private home on a quiet residential street on the West Side, off Delaware Avenue. It was not far from Kleinhans Music

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Hall, the beautiful Eliel and Eero Saarinen building where the orchestra played. The Fosses lived a few houses away on the same elm-lined street. By early winter, it became apparent to Foss and Sapp that Richard Wernick was struggling to juggle the administrative needs of the Center by himself. There was simply too much for any one person to do. The Creative Associates alone demanded endless attention. The university was now a state agency, and there were no precedents for how the fellows would get paid, when they would get paid, or whether their stipends were tax exempt or not. There were, in addition, the myriad tasks involved with producing concerts, such as communicating with music publishers to rent scores and parts, setting up rehearsals, notifying the CAs about rehearsal schedules, and arranging travel and equipment rental, as well as printing and publicity. There was the daily correspondence from all over the world with composers and instrumentalists who had heard about the Center and wanted to know more. And life within the music department called for delicate negotiations on everything from location of mailboxes to room assignments and recital dates. Richard Wernick recalled: [The Center directors] never thought about the practical things like having to purchase or rent music [for performance]. In this case, it was mostly rented because contemporary music is all copyright, protected by publishers, and not for sale. I remember having to go several times to the purchasing ofﬁce of the university because they simply didn’t understand why (a) we couldn’t just buy the music, and (b) why we couldn’t put it out for competitive bids which the state university rules insisted upon. I had to explain to those people, who never understood and probably don’t understand it to this day, that copyright music is controlled by the copyright owner. The publishers hold the material and they do not sell it. The music is only for hire. These were the days before music publishers could do short run and custom printing. Presser Music Publishers today will sell sets—You want to pay a hundred bucks and get a set? You can have it; it’s yours. Now they do these things in-house. Before, there was no way to do that. Those were the days of the mimeograph machine.52 Probably through casual conversation, I had heard that things were a bit bumpy with the new music group at SUNYAB. Although I am not a musician, Foss was aware that I had worked at the Juilliard School and with Young Audiences, Inc., in Manhattan. He asked whether I would consider working part time in the Center ofﬁce with Wernick. I was intrigued at the thought of participating in such a unique project with so many talented people, and, even though they offered me an absurdly small amount of money, I agreed. (Partly

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because I started in this ad hoc fashion, the salary issue persisted throughout my tenure at the Center, once even prompting someone at the New York State Council of the Arts to call my ofﬁce and inquire whether the ﬁgure listed as my salary on a grant application was a typographical error.) The original grant application to the Rockefeller Foundation made no provision for a Carnegie Hall series, and, as the ﬁrst concert in New York had made clear, the travel and lodging expenses could not be sustained on a regular basis. My ﬁrst assignment, therefore, was to ﬁgure out a way to reduce the New York concert expenses, which I accomplished by arranging for people to drive or take the bus to New York instead of ﬂying. We saved a lot of money, but the outcry from the CAs was emphatic: This was not the way to go! Consequently, the Center directors and the president of the university appealed to the Rockefeller Foundation for a supplemental grant expressly to cover the New York concert costs. The Foundation came through with a two-year supplemental grant in the amount of ten thousand dollars. According to Warren Bennis and Patricia Biederman, “recruiting the most talented people possible is the task of anyone who hopes to create a ‘Great Group.’ These are people with original minds; people who see things differently.”53 On the heels of the New York travel fracas, another storm was brewing between the CAs and the Center directors. It soon became apparent that the people who had been recruited by Lukas Foss had different expectations from those in the group whom Allen Sapp had invited. Sapp’s philosophy was, “Come to Buffalo, a place where we will make our own culture, we’ll make our own concerts, our own music—we’ll live together, we’ll work together and we’ll make music together here in Buffalo. We’re going to make a cultural center out of this place that nobody has ever heard about.”54 So the people Allen Sapp recruited came prepared to stay and make music in Buffalo. Foss, on the other hand, did not emphasize the residency aspect with equal precision. Thus composer-guitarist Stanley Silverman and others came to Buffalo prepared to use it as a part-time base only. Furthermore, Foss had assured everyone he spoke with that the fellowships were tax exempt. This was not the case initially, and the university lawyers took nearly a year to get it resolved. “We are learning where we have to be more speciﬁc and draw some lines,” Allen Sapp wrote to Gerald Freund at the Rockefeller Foundation. He continued: This ﬁrst year had to be a little more ﬂexible since our recruitment was relatively late and forced many Associates to modify plans already conﬁrmed—concert dates, trips and the like. We have had some difﬁculties with the state ﬁscal system on the matter of tax withholdings which it has taken me a long time to straighten

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out . . . [but] I feel that the university has reacted almost heroically to the absorption of the Creative Associates and many new kinds of problems which had never been faced by any unit of this system.55 In addition, everyone wanted to have input into the programming. Tempers ﬂared over the directors’ choice of music, particularly in the ﬁrst year when the fellows were feeling overworked and irritated with the lack of consultation regarding programming decisions. In the spirit of the time, any policy, or the lack thereof, was criticized. Motivations were questioned, meetings were held, manifestos were written. Some saw the generous programming of so many European composers as Foss’s attempt to gain acceptance for his own work in Europe. Others lamented what they felt to be the directors’ reluctance to program contemporary classics. Still others wanted a voice not only in the selection but also in the positioning of the works on the program. The CAs as a group wrote to Foss and Sapp stating their grievances and demands. Following are excerpts of a letter signed by seventeen CAs in early March 1965 following a marathon “Festival of the Arts” performance schedule: If the word “virtuosi,” so highly publicized and ostensibly the basis of our invitations to come in the ﬁrst place, implies what it always has in the world of musical performance, then more than half of the playing we have done this year is a contradiction in terms. If, as was so beautifully stated in the prospectus for this project, new music demands extraordinary technique and preparation, then how is it that the situation here has been allowed to degenerate into that of a typical contemporary music festival—feeding on publicity, and incapable of dealing with questions of quality? . . . If this entire venture is worthy of the enormous time and effort already spent in its realization—and we truly think it is—then how could the choice of music for us to present have been relegated to a haphazard chance game of names and misinformation? We have played some eminently excellent music this year, but not nearly enough. Of the things that require clariﬁcation, two stand out (aside from the ﬁnancial problems so often discussed as to require no re-statement). First of all, we must know what you mean by “grantee” and what you intend by the word “virtuoso.” What is our function? What is yours? What is the relation of our concerts to the total conception of this project? Of the Buffalo concerts to the New York concerts? Is your ﬁrst consideration our development as musicians and the establishment of procedures that will make concerts of the

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highest caliber possible (i.e., the very best performances we are capable of giving, of the very best new music we can ﬁnd), or are you simply interested in concerts good enough to serve promotional purposes and to fool most of the audience? Programming procedure must change. The administration must consider being put on no more than an equal footing with us in determining the nature and structure of programs. We are more than willing to form a committee of the whole, to consider several workable solutions to the problem of ﬁnding new music. . . . Suggestions for works worthy of our time and attention should be accompanied by real knowledge of the piece and/or a feeling of responsibility for assisting at rehearsals. . . . We must be told ofﬁcially if it is not within the limits of our project to perform contemporary classics, and if not, why not. Not just the selection of works but also their positioning on programs is a legitimate and open question, eminently worthy of discussion.56 “A collaborative circle,” states Farrell, “is a primary group consisting of peers who share similar occupational goals and who, through long periods of dialogue and collaboration, negotiate a common vision that guides their work. The vision consists of a shared set of assumptions about their discipline, including what constitutes good work, how to work, what subjects are worth working on, and how to think about them.”57 Although there may have been some aspect of “rebellion against authority” exhibited in the Creative Associates’ letter, these were legitimate issues that required mediation. The Center directors, admittedly new to this enterprise and somewhat dispirited to receive such a vitriolic communiqué from the group, realized that even more care would have to be taken. They were also mindful, as one former CA who was present at the time said, that, in general, “contrariness was in the air.” Plus, everybody was high. The pianist-composer, Michael Sahl, remembers: One of the important things was grass: the connection between grass and music. Grass makes you hear differently. It makes it hard to follow the late Beethoven string quartets because of the abrupt changes in direction. Grass takes away a kind of restlessness which my grandmother used to call ‘schpilkes,’ meaning pins and needles, which makes it impossible for people to listen to things that go on a long time. So, if you were stoned with other musicians, you could listen to things forever—like [the music of] Morton Feldman. That contributed to the atmosphere of what went on there.58

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The original proposal called for the Center to provide support to young professional musicians so that they might gain “leisure, concentration, facilities and outlets for professional activities that would help them to ﬁnd themselves via chamber music, new music and experimental music.”59 The strategy appeared to work. As George Crumb explained, “You were essentially in an alien place and you didn’t know other people in the city, so you found the folks in the group who were on your wavelength and got to know those people pretty well.”60 The fellows formed small ensembles, performed in local coffee houses and clubs, and arranged their own brief tours. While in Buffalo that year, Crumb wrote Madrigals, Book I for his colleagues—contrabassist Buell Neidlinger, soprano Carol Plantamura, percussionist John Bergamo—and himself. George Crumb recalls: Madrigals, Book I was an important work for me in developing the Lorca pieces. Eventually there were to be nine cycles of Lorca. I learned so much from Buell Neidlinger’s extended contrabass technique and from John Bergamo. Some of the things John invented on the vibraphone, such as a glissando that is the bending of the tone downward (which was totally unknown as vibraphone technique), I incorporated in that work. I also found it interesting to see what [Mauricio] Kagel and Bussotti were up to, particularly in their uses of the voice.61 Composer-trombonist Vinko Globokar remembered: One thing was very important for me—the improvisation that took place with Andy White, Buell Neidlinger, and John Bergamo. Even though I was a jazz musician before and had improvised with different groups, this kind of free improvisation that they did at that time was very new and important for me.62 And Carol Plantamura noted, “To be faced with a score of Sylvano Bussotti’s Manifesto per Kalinowski, for example—the ﬁrst piece of music I ever saw that was rendered like a painting—was thrilling.”63 The creativity and proﬁciency of the musicians led Foss to remark that the group had more intelligence than any individual. This would seem to bear out Farrell’s thesis that the dynamics of dyadic relationships within a circle facilitate the type of intimate interaction that may lead to creative synthesis.64 Michael Sahl recalls that the informal trading of knowledge, the conversations and rehearsals provided community: David Tudor showed me The Banjo by Gottschalk. He showed it to me in his house and I fell in love with it. It also meant something to me to

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1.1 Page from score of La Passion selon Sade by Sylvano Bussotti. © Universal Music Publishing Ricordi srl. Reproduced by kind permission of Universal Music MGB Publications. Collection Renée Levine Packer. Photo: Lucy Childress.

FIGURE

realize that David Tudor was interested in this kind of campy stuff that I was interested in. The personal part of the Buffalo experience is very important. David also taught me how to make Indian food and a lot about music. And then when Frederic Rzewski came, there were a lot of late evenings of stimulating talk. For example, Buell Neidlinger was not very open conversationally, but he would say useful things. We would sit down to play a jazz trio and he would lean over to me and say, “Michael, don’t play real chords.” That was a great revelation. Then later when I heard McCoy Tyner and Alice Coltrane, I understood what he meant. Now maybe this was a bad thing not to play real chords, but it opened my eyes to something. In all kinds of ways, it was a most extraordinary, stimulating experience.65 Jon Hassell, the CA trumpeter-composer who joined the group a few years later, told a similar story:

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I met Terry Riley there. It was my ﬁrst contact with Minimalism. I came to Buffalo directly from Europe where I had been studying with Stockhausen and I had been there for two and a half years. I can remember Terry characterizing the post-Webern Viennese School as “neurotic,” and I thought, “What an extraordinary simpliﬁcation,” but it was a blinding ﬂash for me, in a way. . . . Music that makes you feel good was a radical thought in the avant-garde classical tradition of that time.66 Perhaps predictably, not all of Buffalo’s musical community welcomed the Center with open arms. The faculty of the university music department found itself displaced not only in terms of department resources and room space but also in being overshadowed by all the publicity that the Center and its colorful participants were receiving, locally and nationally. Meanwhile, the orchestra players took the position that if Foss, their conductor, wanted to have a new music group, why didn’t he simply use people from the orchestra and give them the extra money? Ed Yadzinsky, former saxophonist with Buffalo Philharmonic and guest performer with the Center, recalled: There was a lot of chatter about this in the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. First of all, the orchestra itself had a history of seven years of William Steinberg and then eight years of Josef Krips as conductors. So the model was an old-fashioned European/Viennese-style orchestra. When Lukas Foss came to town and programmed Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring for the opening night, the town was in minor shock. And then during that year with all the modern programming that continued including Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Momente, I listened on stage to a lot of grousing about, “Why are we doing this avant-garde crazy nonsense?” And suddenly there were these eighteen or nineteen marvelous performer/composers in town. The Philharmonic musicians were struggling with a 30-week season at the time and said, “Well, if there’s extra work in this town, why aren’t they ﬁnding money for us to expand our seasons?” . . . But right away after the ﬁrst couple of CA concerts, the word traveled among the Philharmonic players that, “Hey there are some great players here.”67

“Can This Be Buffalo?” The Life magazine photograph got it exactly right: the nuns in their long, black habits are silhouetted against the huge, exuberant orange ﬁeld painting with

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small blue dots splayed across its surface. The caption reads, “Two nuns examine Larry Poons’s eye-dizzying painting called Orange Crush.” The Life reporter, Rosalind Constable, continued: Buffalo exploded last month in a two-week avant-garde festival that was bigger and hipper than anything ever held in Paris or New York. . . . Musicians played iconoclastic works to turnaway houses. . . . But for sheer audacity the Hungarian composer György Ligeti outdid everybody. For his Poème Symphonique 100 metronomes ticked away for 13 minutes, while the delighted audience sat hypnotized by the sight and sound.68 The ﬁrst Buffalo Festival of the Arts Today was held from late February through mid-March of 1965. Sponsored by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, in cooperation with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, State University at Buffalo, the State University College at Buffalo, the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, and the New York State Council on the Arts, the Festival was an audacious survey and celebration of work produced during the previous ten years in all the arts. It was organized around a spectacular exhibition at the Albright-Knox titled “Art Today–Optic and Kinetic.” The 1964–1965 annual report of the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy–The Albright-Knox Art Gallery describes what happened: Although we anticipated that the events of the Festival . . . would attract considerable interest, we did not anticipate that they would draw an attendance of 186,640 during the two-week period. We hoped for some favorable publicity, but we never once expected that we would have 554 columns or 12,182 inches and 215 captioned pictures in newspapers and magazines, both here and abroad, nor that the Festival would be the subject of nationwide TV programs in this country, Canada, and Europe. Art Today, the special exhibit organized by the Gallery for the Festival . . . marked the ﬁrst time in this country that a public art gallery had exhibited the two movements [optic and kinetic sculpture] simultaneously . . . anyone entering the room where [Nicolas] Schoeffer’s Chronos 5 was installed, found himself literally inside the sculpture as the moving colored lights and shadows were projected on him and on the walls around him. . . . The sculptures and constructions react to touch, to color, to heat and light, and change with the position of the viewer in relation to the work. A large percentage of the works in Art Today were motorized. . . . Startling, exciting and overwhelmingly attended

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were the programs by Merce Cunningham and his dance company with music by John Cage, Morton Feldman and LaMonte Young, costumes and settings by Robert Rauschenberg; two special concerts by the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Lukas Foss; three programs by artists from the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts; poetry and music symposia; and the American premiere of four plays by Eugene Ionesco. . . . It has been the widespread consensus that the ﬁrst Buffalo Festival of the Arts Today could not have been more successful—if it had been, there are doubts that even our sturdy building would still be standing.69 “What should we do?” asked the Buffalo Courier Express critic in an article entitled, “Buffalo Arts Festival Stirs Controversy.” “Is it a matter of getting used to the new way? Should we laugh or leave? . . . It is going to require a meeting of open, intelligent, informed and concerned minds on both sides.”70 Nearly 187,000 people attended Art Gallery events in the two-week festival period, in stark contrast with the previous year’s total attendance ﬁgure of 140,000. Besides Life magazine, Time, the New Yorker, the New York Times, and several European journals covered the Festival. The Festival was also the subject of national TV programs in the United States, Canada, and Europe. The Creative Associates played a major role in the festival, presenting three demanding concerts in as many days and a fourth at Carnegie Recital Hall a few days later. Each concert attracted overﬂow houses. With hundreds of people turned away the ﬁrst night, some people resorted to arriving as much as two hours early. “Everyone,” wrote the New York Times drama critic Howard Taubman, “even the people who have only read or heard about the goings on, has been arguing about it.”71 One debate was over what constituted the most sensational event in the festival: sculptor Robert Morris and dancer Yvonne Rainer, who, nude except for a coat of mineral oil and locked in an embrace, moved slowly across the stage while a Verdi aria and the sound of falling rocks blared from a tape recorder; or György Ligeti’s Poème symphonique (1962) for 100 metronomes.72 In the Ligeti, the metronomes were neatly arrayed, facing the audience, on three large tables almost spanning the width of the stage. Ten musicians, in concert dress, ﬁled in and took their places behind the metronomes. With the downbeat from the conductor, they began winding the metronomes. At another signal from the conductor, the musicians activated the devices and left the stage. Fifteen or so minutes later, when the last metronome had wound down (with the bemused audience betting among themselves which table would hold the last surviving clicker), the musicians returned to the stage to receive the applause of a cheering audience.

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FIGURE 1.2 Buffalo Festival of the Arts Today. Crowds waiting to enter exhibit at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, March 1965. Photo: Buffalo Evening News. Courtesy of Buffalo Evening News and Collection, Albright-Knox Art Gallery Archives.

Italian composer Sylvano Bussotti, a CA during the ﬁrst year, made several memorable contributions to the Center’s festival programs. The ﬁrst was his staging of Luciano Berio’s Visage (1960), an electronic tape originally created as a radio piece. While the audience heard the voice of mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian making inarticulate sounds suggesting pain, fear, and orgasmic ecstasy, they watched a gauze-wrapped ﬁgure curled in a fetal position on the ﬂoor rise slowly, imperceptibly, and over a period of twenty minutes assume a Statue of Liberty pose. Like a ﬂower that one can never quite catch unfurling, the mime, Romano Amidei, amazed the audience with this incomprehensible feat. Excerpts from Bussotti’s chamber opera La Passion selon Sade (1965) provided another unsettling experience. Employing an ensemble with electronics, percussion, piano, and strings, the composer conducted this semistaged version from a settee placed with its back to the audience. Soprano Sylvia Brigham-Dimiziani, in black cape and hood, had the principal role, using speech, noises, grunts, and melodic episodes in a spectacular fashion. Jay Humeston, cellist, and Michael Sahl, pianist, were directed to ﬂagellate the

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FIGURE 1.3 Buffalo Festival of the Arts Today, Poème symphonique for 100 Metronomes (left to right: Stanley Silverman, Jean Dupouy, George Crumb, Michael Sahl, Sherman Friedland, Richard Wernick, Jan Williams, Don Ellis, John Bergamo, Carol Plantamura). Albright-Knox Art Gallery, March 1965. Photo: Sherwin Greenberg. Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery Archives.

strings of their instruments with small whips that Bussotti had brought with him from abroad. Others in the ensemble were led on and off the stage in ritual-like behavior. The mysterious drama cast a compelling, disconcerting aura, prompting Theodore Strongin of the New York Times to write, when it was repeated several days later in New York, “There was an undeniable spell about the work, a sort of ‘Last Year at Marienbad’ atmosphere in which the slow, indeﬁnable procession of events generated individual meanings just below the verbal level.”73 Nils Vigeland, chair of the composition department at the Manhattan School of Music, recalled: All kinds of people came to these concerts . . . they had the reputation of being a good show. I remember particularly the 100 metronomes piece of Ligeti in which it seemed that an absolute slice of Buffalo was in the Gallery auditorium, some roaring with laughter, others—including my father—absolutely livid. . . . I was an extremely conservative person in a way so it was a little bit naughty to go to the concerts, especially when

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I was 14 or 15 years old. . . . I didn’t realize until later that the childhood I had in Buffalo was unusual. I thought it was normal that six times a year these wild concerts would happen with all these amazing people. . . . The music may not have been to everyone’s taste, but it was lively.74

Adagio and Canto The inaugural season’s ﬁnal Evenings for New Music concert in Buffalo on May 9, 1965, included three pieces—“Recitative,” “Moto Perpetuo,” and “Improvisation”—from Elliott Carter’s Six Pieces for Kettledrums (1950). These pieces, originally written as rhythmic studies for Carter’s String Quartet no. 1, were performed by Jan Williams. The following November, he performed the remaining three pieces in the set—“Saeta” (an Andalusian song of lamentation), “March,” and “Canary”—in Buffalo and again in the December 21st Evenings for New Music concert in Carnegie Recital Hall. Carter attended the New York concert, thanked Williams for his performance, and mentioned that he was thinking of revising the pieces because the published editions of “Recitative” and “Improvisation” would soon expire. Carter said that he wanted to ﬁnd ways to bring more varieties of timbre to the pieces to increase their effectiveness as a performance vehicle for solo timpani. Carter added that he was scheduled to be in residence with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra for a week later that spring and wondered if Williams would be willing to spend some time with him, with the timpani, in order to explore ideas he had about possible revisions. He had questions, he said, about the instruments, the beaters (sticks), articulation, and tuning. Williams agreed, and over the period of a week in May 1966 they spent eight hours or so working together in the Creative Associate rehearsal room at the university. In those working sessions, Williams would play through one piece at a time and then respond to the composer’s questions. Together, they explored the different sounds obtainable relative to where the drum was struck, whether it were possible to play harmonics on timpani, the use of snare drum sticks on the timpani, and the question of minimizing the retuning pauses between pieces in performance, among other things. During one of their sessions together, Carter mentioned his interest in composing two additional pieces utilizing extensive pitch changes, which would result in a total set of eight pieces. Some months after leaving Buffalo, Carter sent Williams the manuscripts for two new pieces—“Adagio” and “Canto.” He speciﬁed that no

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more than four of the (now) eight pieces should be performed on any one occasion. Williams has written of the experience, which was an explicit realization of the Center founders’ vision of a laboratory for composers and performers: I continue to marvel at Carter’s success, as a non-percussionist, in having found a notational system that provides the performer with exactly the right information with which to elicit the desired result. . . . To say that I was thrilled to receive these new pieces in the mail, study them, and have the opportunity to perform them many times . . . would be a huge understatement. I knew at the time that they were extremely important additions to the repertoire and destined to become classics of the genre.75 After the initial year, applications for Center fellowships far exceeded available slots. Generally, singers and instrumentalists were invited for two years, composers for one. This rotating model of holdovers and new people each year led to a constantly fresh energy and sense of discovery among the players and audiences, as well. But sometimes things became awkward, as in the case of George Crumb. Crumb was in a way the embodiment of the ideal fellow—a ﬁne composer and pianist, who was amicable and collegial, writing and performing works for and with others in the group. As the story goes, Foss called Crumb in early spring, asking if he might come over to discuss the next year’s fellowships. On his arrival, Foss said, “George, you know we’d love to have you for another year, but I think of the composers in the group as the fertilizer and, you know, we have to change the fertilizer.” And Crumb, thinking it was one of the funniest things he ever heard, could hardly keep from laughing aloud as he responded in his slow West Virginia accent, “Well, gosh, Lukas, I’ve been called lots of things, but that’s a ﬁrst.” Now, reﬂecting back on his year in Buffalo and thinking about all the knowledge he gleaned from working with so many ﬁne performers, Crumb tends to agree. “Actually,” he said in our interview, “you do need to change the fertilizer.”76 And the line of composer/pianists who were Center fellows is notable indeed—among them Crumb, Frederic Rzewski, David Tudor, Michael Sahl, Carlos Alsina, Cornelius Cardew, Yuji Takahashi, Richard Trythall, Thorkell Sigurbjornsson, Julius Eastman, and David Del Tredici.

David Tudor David Tudor’s acceptance of an invitation to be a Center fellow in the 1965– 1966 season was a boon. His dedication to the performance of contemporary

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piano music and, in the 1950s, his close association with the work of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, as well as with developments in live electronic music, was legendary. Composers such as Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Henri Pousseur, Morton Feldman, and Sylvano Bussotti all had written music for him. We were all proud that he had chosen to spend time at the Center. Several weeks before he came to Buffalo, small packages addressed to him began arriving in the mail from Alaska, labeled “smoked game” or (as I seem to remember) “bear,” and from herb and spice shops in New York and California. In a conversation preceding his arrival, a professor in the music department asked me whether Tudor played “old music.” “Oh sure,” I answered. “He plays Stravinsky and Schoenberg.” Although Tudor arrived late in the fall, he was busy performing with the ensemble by the time of the December concerts, when he played in Michael von Biel’s Book for Three for ampliﬁed, prepared barbecue broilers (1961) and Gilbert Amy’s Inventions (1961) with Karl Kraber, ﬂute, Jan Williams, percussion, and Francis Pierre, harp. The next month, he mounted a recital on campus featuring the work of John Cage and Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. Later that season he performed with Frederic Rzewski in Rzewski’s Composition for 2 Performers for ampliﬁed plates of glass and tape (1964). Richard Wernick recalled a night when he was working late in his music department ofﬁce on the campus: It had to be close to midnight. The building was dark and I was heading toward the door when I heard some piano music. I thought, “Who’s playing the piano at this hour?” I was curious so I went up the stairs to the balcony where you could hear the music with more deﬁnition. I saw a light under the door, and heard this glorious Chopin coming from inside the room. I didn’t want to interrupt whoever was playing, so I sat on the ﬂoor, leaning against the wall by the door and just listened. At a certain point, I couldn’t resist anymore. I opened the door very quietly and went in. There was David Tudor! He looked at me and said, “You caught me.” He had the most wonderful sense of humor. “You caught me. Don’t tell anybody,” and almost with tears in his eyes he said, “I never get the chance to play his music and nobody wants to hear me play this music in public.”77 Michael Sahl remembered, “David loved the bandoneon, he loved the tango, and he loved Gottschalk. You never, never knew what pressed ﬂowers from somewhere Tudor was going to ﬁnd and show you.”78

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1.4 On Grant Street, spring 1966 (left to right: David Tudor, Diane Williams, Buell Neidlinger, John Bergamo). Photo: Jan Williams. Collection Renée Levine Packer.

FIGURE

“News for You” We always traveled to New York the day before a concert so that the musicians could have a full day of dress rehearsals in the hall. Monday, November 8, 1965, was no different. The programs were rehearsed, generally in reverse order, so the stage was left perfectly set for the ﬁrst piece. That Tuesday, everything seemed ﬁne for the opening of our second season in New York—all the rented percussion and sound equipment had arrived and worked properly, the musicians worked out ﬁnal details for their performances, the piano was tuned, the comp tickets left with the box ofﬁce. I was at the hairdresser in a major department store when, a little after 5:00 p.m., the light in the room began to grow dim. There were no windows in the hair salon, but within minutes word spread that electrical power all over the city had gone out. It took me twenty minutes to walk back to the hotel. None of the trafﬁc lights worked. On 57th Street, people were frantically trying to hail cabs. Cars and buses were unable to move— everybody honking their horns, everything already hopelessly clogged. The lobby of the Great Northern Hotel, a seedy (and cheap) old place near Carnegie Hall where the group was staying, was totally dark. A crowd of people clustered around the reservations desk, everyone wanting information or a

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room. The ﬁrst people I saw were two members of the group, Buell Neidlinger and Andrew White. Neidlinger, with his precious contrabass, and Andrew White, fearful that someone using candles in one of the rooms might burn down the hotel, had followed their toilet-paper-torch-carrying colleague, Carol Plantamura, down ﬁfteen ﬂights of ﬁre stairs. They had decided to park themselves in the lobby for the duration. A group of us went over to the backstage entrance of Carnegie Hall. Frank Angelino, one of the regular stagehands, was absolutely certain that even if the lights did go on again that night, the concert was canceled. We returned to the hotel to spread the word and went out again to see what was going on. The streets were full of people, all trying to get somewhere or were, like us, out just taking stock. As we approached Rockefeller Center, the Yugoslavian composer, Vinko Globokar, who barely spoke English, jumped into the middle of the street to help untangle what appeared to be another hopeless trafﬁc jam. He was laughing and seemed right at home. Returning to Carnegie Hall to check on the instruments, we found everything locked up, so we repaired to the Carnegie Tavern on the corner for dinner. What we found was a full-ﬂedged party. The restaurant, illuminated completely by candlelight, felt cozy, a haven in the chaos of an unraveling city. A friendly, casual atmosphere prevailed, everyone talking with everyone else and ordering whatever the kitchen still had available. All I could get by then was a cheese sandwich, which I accepted gratefully. Carol Plantamura, a Californian, bumped into a friend from the West Coast whom she hadn’t seen in years. Gradually, it emerged that the problem had originated near our home base, in Niagara Falls. An overloaded power grid had failed, and, for the ﬁrst time in its history, Consolidated Edison had experienced a massive power failure affecting more than eighty thousand square miles of the northeastern United States.79 Jan Williams had the best story of the night. Finished with his rehearsals by mid-afternoon, Williams had gone to his room to take a nap. He planned to return to the hall early to check his instrument setup one last time. He awoke around 5:30 p.m. with plenty of time to take a shower, dress, and get over to the hall. His bedstand light didn’t work, nor did the bathroom light go on. He peered into the hallway and saw no lights there, either. Making his way to the bedside phone, he called the downstairs desk. “Operator,” he said, “the lights on the tenth ﬂoor are out.” “Honey,” she said, “do I have news for you!”80

Excavating Riches If the Center could be characterized as a postdoctoral laboratory, its university base constituted a gold mine of expertise and opportunity, providing access to

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facilities and brainpower that many of the fellows, all of whom held faculty rank, enthusiastically exploited. John Bergamo recalled: I was just twenty-four years old and just starting out. To have that amount of time for the music and the big rehearsal room available to use any time we wanted to was a huge plus, especially for a percussionist. We could go all night if we wanted to and leave our setups for rehearsals and practice.81 And CA cellist Robert Martin remembered: I got to know Mischa Schneider, who was the cellist of the Budapest String Quartet, which was in residence at the University, and we used to play for him from time to time. He was always amused and a little bit scornful of the Center. Once I played a piece, Bridges, by Yuji Takahashi for electric piano, gong, and electric cello. It involved only one note on the cello, and that just killed Mischa. He had a joke he loved to tell, and this was the perfect piece for his joke. The joke is about a cellist whose wife complains to him, saying, “When I hear all the other cellists playing, they go up and down, up and down [on the ﬁngerboard]. They play all these different notes and you just keep playing the same note all the time, just the same note over and over and over. Why is that?” And he replies, “Oh, they’re searching for the note. I found it!”82 The presence of the Music Department Slee Professor was a particularly stimulating aspect of the university for the Center fellows. As noted earlier, the Slee Endowment supported the cost of an annual performance of all the Beethoven string quartets (in a prescribed, highly idiosyncratic order) by the music department’s resident string quartet—the Budapest Quartet from 1963 to 1968 and, later, the Cleveland String Quartet (1971–1976). In addition, the Slee Endowment supported a chair for a master teacher of harmony, counterpoint, and fugue, who would be considered equal in stature to a professor at the Paris Conservatory. Consequently, a series of distinguished composers took up residence, usually for a semester or two, in the department. Aaron Copland was the ﬁrst Slee Professor beginning in 1957, followed by a similarly impressive list of composers including Carlos Chavez, Ned Rorem, Leon Kirchner, Virgil Thomson, George Rochberg, Alexei Haieff, Allen Sapp, Leo Smit, David Diamond, and Nicolas Nabokov. Once the Center was established, the creative posture of these visiting professors leaned more toward the experimental. In the ﬁrst years of the Center, Mauricio Kagel and the Belgian composer, Henri Pousseur, were Slee Professors. Subsequently, others included Charles Mingus, Luis de Pablo, Betsy Jolas, Lejaren Hiller,

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and Morton Feldman, the latter two becoming Center music directors in the 1970s. The allure of the Slee Professor’s ample salary increased as the presence of the Creative Associates in Buffalo became well known in contemporary music circles. Slee Professors in those years could count on receiving outstanding performances of their works under their own personal direction by the Center players and with plenty of rehearsal time. The Center, in turn, was enhanced by the presence of these senior composers who came to Buffalo to live for a while because of the opportunity to work with such a ﬁrst-rate group of generally sympathetic musicians. The Belgian composer Henri Pousseur was invited to give three Slee lectures during the 1966 spring semester. He lived at the Victor Hugo apartments on Delaware Avenue, where his friend Michel Butor had lived some years before and where Frederic Rzewski occupied the room across the corridor. Pousseur recalled: Frederic played my Miroir de Votre Faust at one of the concerts and the Creative Associate ensemble including Sylvia BrighamDimiziani, soprano, and David Tudor and Michael Sahl as keyboard players performed my Répons. The French violist, Jean Dupouy, recited the actor’s text which Michel Butor had written one year earlier. . . . The following year I returned, this time with my family. . . . I remember that Carlos Alsina played my Apostrophe et Six Reﬂexions to illustrate my analysis of the work. Afterwards, Music Department faculty member, Bob Beckwith, and Cornelius Cardew made completely and amusingly opposite remarks on the music which I had just explained. I think this illustrates very well the lively and intense milieu that existed there at the time.83

Composer-Performers Experimental music, notes Michael Nyman: engages the performer at many stages before, above and beyond those at which he is active in traditional western music. It involves his intelligence, his initiative, his opinions and prejudices, his experience, his taste and his sensibility in a way that no other form of music does, and his contribution to the musical collaboration which the composer initiates is obviously indispensable.84 Creative Associate soprano Sylvia Brigham-Dimiziani remembers:

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There wasn’t one stylistic order that dominated. We were presenting all the streams of contemporary musical thought. We played tonal music, highly serial music, aleatoric music; we did performance art; we did theater pieces. Everyone participated in Don Ellis’ jazz improvisations even though we were starting at different ends of the musical spectrum.85 Michael Sahl says: There was an exchange of material between all the musicians in the Buffalo group. In my case, it had a lot to do with jazz and with Indian music. We’re talking about 1965–1966, and there was a real explosion of rock at the time—English and American rock. There were two terriﬁc radio stations in Buffalo to which we were all addicted, WYSL and WKBW, not even counting the public radio station at the university.86 The eclectic nature of the concerts and the versatility of the individual CAs ensured that the audiences were usually in for a surprise. Chances were that not everyone would like everything, or even very much, on any given program, but, as was noted in a New York Times review, “Something is always bound to come up to alarm, irritate or stimulate, depending on one’s musical outlook.”87 Saxophonist Andrew White III, contrabassist Buell Neidlinger, and percussionist John Bergamo led double lives. As John Dwyer wrote, “Downtown at the Purple Fang or wherever, they are known as the New Jazz Trio.”88 But at the university, they were known as the Creative Associates. In the opinion of one former Center fellow, “The CAs as an ofﬁcial group were actually rather timid. Buell Neidlinger, a former Yale student, and John Bergamo, a graduate of the Manhattan School of Music, however, were in several worlds at once.”89 The versatility of Andy White, a twenty-three-year-old graduate of Howard University and a John Hay Whitney fellow at the Paris Conservatory, was vividly demonstrated in the December 1965 Evenings for New Music concert in Buffalo. White, Neidlinger, and Bergamo opened with a piece by Cecil Taylor titled Toll (1962). Later that evening, White played the oboe in Arnold Schoenberg’s seldom-performed Herzgewächse (1911), along with Sylvia Brigham-Dimiziani, soprano, David Tudor playing harmonium, and French guest artist Francis Pierre, harp. Tudor, another versatile musician, performed again on the same program with German composer Michael von Biel, a former student of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Morton Feldman, in von Biel’s work Book for Three (1961).

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An electronic carillon, a wood plank, and an electronic sound generator opened the ﬁnal Evenings for New Music concert of the season at Carnegie Recital Hall in late April 1966. John Cage’s Music for Carillon No. 4 (1961) was performed by David Tudor and sounded, according to New York Times critic Allen Hughes, “like 15 minutes of hectic bell-testing in the Riverside Church tower, accompanied by construction noises (the plank was struck with a mallet) and the booms and whistles of boats on the Hudson River.”90 In the same review, Hughes also wrote that if Erik Satie were alive, he could hardly have wished for a nicer advance birthday entertainment (his 100th birthday fell on May 17, 1966) than the Center’s performance of Le Piège de Méduse (The Ruse of Medusa) (1921), a lyric comedy in one act for which Satie wrote both the words and the incidental music. The English translation was supplied by the poet and potter M. C. Richards, who had made the original translation from the French while at Black Mountain College in the early 1950s. Rospo Pallenberg, a short-term visitor to the Center, directed the production; Richard Dufallo conducted. With CAs as the actors and musicians and dancer Albert Reid from Cunningham’s dance company as the monkey, the performance delighted the audience.91 Répons (1960, rev. 1965), a kind of musical game by Henri Pousseur with a text by Michel Butor, closed the program. Pousseur described Répons as “a large mobile for seven players in which each has an active part in the decision that forms the actual performance.” The narrator (in this case, the French violist Jean Dupouy) called forth the players, each of whom has a name, who entered with great ceremony. In moves reminiscent of a chess game or, as Hughes described it, “a very sophisticated version of musical chairs,” the players decided how to respond to their assigned tasks as they moved from one instrument to another. David Tudor played both piano and electric organ, the celesta player doubled on the piano, “and both the violinist and the cellist had some innings on the percussion instruments.” 92

Renewal and International Influences (1966–1967) The original Rockefeller grant continued through spring 1966, when the Foundation, impressed by the Center’s rapid impact and success, renewed its funding in the amount of $150,000 for another two years, through spring 1968. With this award, however, the Rockefeller Foundation made clear its expectation that by the 1968–1969 academic year, the university would assume the entire cost of the project. On September 30, 1966, Allen Sapp

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wrote to the university’s president, Martin Meyerson, to formally tell him that the Rockefeller Foundation had renewed its grant for the continuation of the Center. In closing, he added, “At my home yesterday, we had an opening reception for all the newly arrived Creative Associates. I wish you could have been there to share in the enthusiasm and the extraordinary vitality which is present in this group, representing Israel, England, Italy, Germany, Japan as well as the United States.”93 Throughout the life of the Center, fellows were invited each year from abroad. This arrangement had its difﬁculties, as was graphically described by an incident related to the British composer-pianist Cornelius Cardew. Cardew was scheduled to perform the premiere of a recently discovered piano piece by Anton Webern and to participate on a panel of composers on the subject of Webern’s legacy at a Webern Society meeting in Buffalo in late October 1966. By the second week of October, he had not yet arrived in town, and we were getting nervous. Cardew’s Maoist leanings perhaps lay at the root of the bureaucratic postponements he kept encountering while applying for a visa, which he described in an amusing letter:

FIGURE

1.5 Webern Festival Panel, “Webern’s Legacy” (Albright-Knox Gallery, left to

right: Henri Pousseur, Allen Sapp, Niccolo Castiglioni, Lukas Foss, Cornelius Cardew, Maryanne Amacher). October 1966. Photo: Jim Tuttle.

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27A Nevern Square London SW 5 13 × 66 Dear Mrs. Levine, Thank you for your letter. I appreciate your dismay at my nonarrival, and richly deserve your rebuke. However, I have never before been in America, and I was told that visa negotiations would not take more than three months, and scheduled my application accordingly. This morning I phoned the embassy and my clearance has still not come through. They (in the form of a highly obnoxious and uncommunicative woman’s voice) tell me repeatedly that there is nothing that can hurry this process, repeat nothing, and would I kindly stop inconveniencing their switchboard or words to that effect. I feel it terribly that I am leaving you in the lurch like this, but the lurch that the whole affair leaves me in is worse, much worse: I left my job at the end of August and my ﬁnancial resources are vanishing smartly. If I hear nothing from the Embassy the end of this week I shall be forced to seek temporary employment washing corpses at St Thomas’ Hospital on the South Bank (that is the only alternative to ﬁnally taking the plunge into ﬁlm music and never being seen again). Meanwhile I sit at home making a melancholy sound on the Cello. In the evenings I am slightly more optimistic, but of course that does not make the slightest practical difference. Truly it is meaningless to wander longer in this ridiculous vale of tears. Visions of wellbeing moulder and decay simply through inattention: Surely it would be preferable if someone were working purposefully for my downfall. I will cable you immediately I hear from the Embassy. Yours sincerely, Cornelius Cardew (letter quoted in large part from Shelley’s correspondence with the Marquis of Monmouth)94 According to one of his colleagues, Cornelius Cardew was not anxious to leave London to come to Buffalo. The fellowship money was probably the major reason for his acceptance of the Center’s invitation for the 1966–1967 academic year. When he ﬁnally arrived just in time to participate in the Webern Festival, Cardew settled into a furnished room in the rambling old Victor Hugo apartments, where so many CAs and visiting professors chose to live.

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While at the Center, Cardew performed in works by his colleagues Niccolo Castiglioni, Carlos Alsina, and music department faculty member Leo Smit, as well as Stefan Wolpe, Roberto Gerhard, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. From 1958 to 1960, Cardew had been an assistant to Stockhausen in Cologne, Germany. The performance he, Jan Williams, and Edward Burnham gave in April 1967 at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery was the ﬁrst U.S. performance of Stockhausen’s work Plus Minus (for composers) (1962). Cardew supplied the following note for the program: I began composing this piece several years ago and have now reached the third page. Things are slowing down; at this point it takes me 26 minutes to play only four events. So I decided to hand on the esoteric information obtained by me in the course of my work to my two percussionist friends, Jan Williams and Ed Burnham (both of whom come relatively fresh to the art of composition), in the hope that they might wring some less somber constellations from the complex mass of data and directives originally provided by Mr. Stockhausen. This evening’s performance consists of simultaneous presentation of their work and mine.95

1.6 Richard Dufallo conducting rehearsal of Stephan Wolpe’s Piece for Two Instrumental Units (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, left to right: Shaul Ben Meir, Cornelius Cardew, Robert Martin, Klaus v. Wrochem, Jan Williams, Andrew White, Makoto Michii). March 1966. Photo: Jim Tuttle.

FIGURE

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Cardew’s program note about Plus Minus touches on several issues that arose fairly often with the performance of “indeterminate” scores. True, if the composer had not set down the (sometimes) intricate rules, directions, or possible actions for a performer to incorporate in his or her performance, there would be no performance. On the other hand, one might ask, “To what degree is the performer also the composer?” Cardew posed a related question as it pertained to his London-based performance group, AMM: “Does the collaboration of a set of minds mean the development of another authority independent of all the members but consisting of them all?”96 During his residency in Buffalo, Cardew wrote a portion of his large work Treatise, which he called Treatise, Fragment: American Pages (1966), published by Ed Budowski’s The Gallery Upstairs Press in Buffalo. In his book Modern Music: The Avant-Garde Since 1945, the music critic Paul Grifﬁths refers to Treatise (1963–1967) as “a magnum opus of graphic design.”97 The score is a set of beautifully rendered pages of lines and geometric shapes laid out with no apparent scheme—“a kind of secret code for the trained musicians,” as Michael Nyman describes it in his book, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond.98 The American section of Treatise provoked frustration and even anger among some of the Center members; the paradox being that whereas the notation was so extremely open, in the rehearsals Cardew was meticulous and demanding in his expectations. Jan Williams, who performed in the ensemble, recalls: There was a real bone of contention. Cornelius was very cool about it, saying that someone had to be responsible for the realization of each performance and that he was making the decisions in this one— “Let’s do this.” Our performance of Treatise wasn’t an anarchistic kind of improvisation; it was shaped by a hand of someone with the full understanding that subsequent shapings by another person would have completely different results, and that was ﬁne.99 Fourteen years later, in December 1981, Cornelius Cardew was killed by a hit-and-run driver in London. By that time, I was working at the California Institute of the Arts, where I was a codirector of the annual contemporary music festival. We were stunned by this tragic event and wanted to present one of Cardew’s pieces in memoriam at the upcoming festival in February, so I called Cardew’s friend and colleague, composer Christian Wolff, to ask him to suggest a piece. I also asked him if he would write something about Cardew to include in the program book. Following is an excerpt from his remarks, which helps situate Cardew in the musical landscape of the time:

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FIGURE

1.7 Page from Treatise: American Pages by Cornelius Cardew. Courtesy of

H. Cardew. Photo: Lucy Childress. Collection Renée Levine Packer.

He was the most important composer in England, because of the quality of his organizing, because of his thinking, speaking and writing. In the mid-50s he linked the U. S. and European avant-garde. He worked with Stockhausen and he established in England the music of John Cage, Morton Feldman, LaMonte Young, Terry Riley and my own work. . . . He was personally and musically, someone you knew you had to come to terms with. He made no compromises. His directions changed, but on a progressive path, towards people’s lives and struggles. . . . And the music came along, changing to be useful in the process. This process, together with his ﬁne and lively musical intelligence and feeling, continues to be the source of his music’s strength.100 In that crisp western New York fall of 1966, a number of other composers arrived at the Center from abroad as well, including the virtuoso pianistcomposer Carlos Alsina, from Argentina via Germany; Klaus von Wrochem, violinist-composer from Germany; and the thirty-four-year old Niccolo Castiglioni, an Italian pianist-composer who spoke almost no English. Tall, thin, and bespectacled, Castiglioni had a hesitant, innocent quality and seemed totally befuddled by everyday, ordinary life. His general awkwardness was increased by the fact that he had what I assumed was a wooden leg. He walked with a pronounced limp and, whenever he sat down, he would manually twist

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the knee section of the hidden contraption into a forward-pointed stance. At these times, the fold of his trousers revealed what appeared to be nothing but a crude wooden slat. There was no indication of the curvature of even a false leg. It occurred to me that, whatever he had under there, his quality of life might be greatly beneﬁted by the latest U.S. technology in prostheses, so I cooked up a plan with the University Student Medical Services Department to ﬁnd a way to send him over for an exam, at which time they could recommend a more modern device for him. Week after week, I called him and left notes saying that all foreign faculty and staff were required to have a university physical examination. He steadfastly ignored all my efforts, pleading confusion about the messages, and continued twisting and cranking. One day, two hefty young men, crisp in crew cuts and dark suits, arrived at my ofﬁce. Flashing FBI badges, they asked my name and said they wanted to talk with me. As I motioned for them to sit down, my whole life whirled before my eyes. Buffalo is a border town, only minutes away from Canada. Sometimes there were issues. “Do you know a person named Niccolo Castiglioni?” “Yes,” I replied, “he is a visiting composer from Italy who is spending a year with us on a Rockefeller fellowship at the Center.” Immediately thinking there was a visa problem, I asked if something was wrong. They proceeded to tell me that several counterfeit one hundred dollar bills had surfaced in the city that had been traced to Castiglioni, someone who didn’t exactly melt into the crowd. I gave them Castiglioni’s address in the Victor Hugo apartments and never saw them again. Niccolo’s explanation was that he had purchased two one hundred dollar bills at a discount from someone in the Milan train station, never suspecting that anything might be wrong. Although some of us were dubious, he apparently convinced the Feds. Not long afterward, the Federal authorities made another visit to my ofﬁce, this time to investigate why two argon gas tanks had been leased to the Center. The composer Maryanne Amacher, in residence along with Cardew and Castiglioni, had come to the Center from the University of Illinois. At Illinois, Amacher had been undertaking acoustical studies with the computer pioneer (later to become the Center codirector) Lejaren Hiller, as well as independent research at the Studio for Experimental Music there. Interested in the spatial properties and physics of sound, Amacher had recently composed a piece for harps, timpani, cymbals, and gas tanks, in which the sound was “choreographed” through enormous speakers placed around the hall and on the stage. Convinced only after seeing the score and the rehearsal schedule, the Federal visitors retreated, puzzled but assured that the tanks were not being used for politically subversive measures. Somehow, though, word about the piece got to

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FIGURE

1.8 Maryanne Amacher. Photo: © Mickey H. Osterreicher.

CBS, which dispatched a crew to televise a rehearsal, later aired on the Sunday Morning show. In his review of the November 6, 1966, Evenings for New Music concert, Dwyer wrote in the Buffalo Evening News, “When they dragged out two shoulder-high gas bottles, red and yellow, and the ﬂat tray of dials and drumsticks disclosed two large-sized brake drums, factory green, some of us in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery auditorium got a warm, comfortable feeling. . . . The avant-garde was back in town.” He went on to write about the piece, Adjacencies, from Audjoins Suite, that “the sounds were ﬁnely structured and modulated, and the two soloists concentrated on two felicitous techniques, bowing and subtle hammer work on two harps, and a small scale formation of gongs, in which the gas bottles took their place.”101 The Buffalo new music group was a rich world of ideas. When Foss and Sapp had asked the Rockefeller Foundation for support just three years before, they wrote, “Perhaps most important is the role such a project could have in developing regional musical events of diversiﬁed and professional character and causing the interworking of institutions.”102 Amacher’s piece, City Links (1968), took their goal into realms they hadn’t even imagined. The boundaries of what constituted a composer’s “territory” were crumbling, and the conventional

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concert hall was not always the preferred venue for performance. An especially original thinker, composer Maryanne Amacher approached William Siemering, manager of WBFO-FM, the university campus radio station, to propose a twenty-eight-hour marathon sound composition that would be broadcast uninterrupted and in its entirety. In City Links, microphones would be placed at eight locations throughout the Buffalo area that were connected directly to a dedicated telephone line that fed to the mixer at the WBFO studio, where the composer could mix the sounds live. Siemering agreed. The composer negotiated with location managers and, with the help of the tireless technical staff from the Center, the microphones were placed in a steelmaking chamber at Bethlehem Steel, the bell tower of a local church, and the airport runway of Allegheny Airlines, among other sites. (To my surprise, I received a call from someone at American Airlines noting that they had heard about the piece and asking if they could have a microphone placed on their runway, too!) Jack Allen at the Buffalo Courier Express wrote, “Listeners could simultaneously hear such city sounds as airplanes landing, downtown chimes ringing every half-hour, and steel being produced.” The station, which, the article continued, “operates on a shoestring,” won an Ohio State Award, the Oscar of educational broadcasting, for City Links. The citation called it “an adventure in sound experimentalization available to the mass audience only through radio for imaginative participation. Such experimentation in radio is unique and innovative.”103 Siemering went on to become a founder of National Public Radio and a creator of All Things Considered.

The Berkeley of the East The Rockefeller Foundation considered the stability and resources of a fully developed university to be an optimum setting in which to create the new music center. From the beginning of its deliberation about whether or not to establish the Center, however, the Foundation wanted assurance that SUNYAB would provide ongoing support after the Foundation’s initial commitment ceased. Now, just three years after SUNYAB President Clifford Furnas not only had stated his support for creating the Center but also had promised to assume responsibility for its continuation, he was quitting his post. And so the ﬁrst major change in leadership at the State University of New York at Buffalo since the founding of the Center occurred in September 1966. Because of the Center’s unorthodox nature as a research center grafted onto an academic department, we were all mindful of its vulnerability. Still, Foss and Sapp were ﬁrmly in place, and the appointment of Martin Meyerson, formerly a dean at the University of California at Berkeley, as president of SUNYAB

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seemed to personify the new spirit on campus. By all accounts, he was a highly qualiﬁed, intelligent leader, a scholar of urban planning with a commitment to public education. The Buffalo Evening News noted: At the time of the severe campus strife in Berkeley, when Mr. Meyerson was acting chancellor, he won strong and widespread faculty and student support. Holiday magazine, commenting on the situation in October, 1965, said: “The quiet hero turned out to be Martin Meyerson . . . he came in as acting chancellor and held campus factions together through his personal courage and tenacious intellectual honesty.”104 Warren Bennis, Distinguished Professor of Business Administration at the University of Southern California, portrayed the feeling at the time: On December 19, 1966, I received a phone call from an assistant to President Martin Meyerson at the State University of New York at Buffalo . . . who proceeded to describe an academic New Jerusalem of unlimited money, a [planned] new $650 million campus, bold organizational ideas, a visionary president, a supportive chancellor and governor, the number of new faculty and administrators to be recruited, the romance of taking a mediocre upstate college and creating–well–the Berkeley of the East.105 Other forces were at work, as well. The previous year, students had peacefully demonstrated against the Selective Service Qualiﬁcation Test, which they saw as a draft-deferment tool. “The test determined the eligibility of draft-age students with the lowest academic records for temporary exemption from military service—and Vietnam,” explained Allen H. Kurtz, then director of the university’s Testing and Research Center.106 Now the rallying point was the presence of Dow Chemical Company recruiters on campus. Dow produced napalm, the agent used to torch large areas of Vietnam. Already there had been serious student demonstrations at Harvard and the universities of Illinois and Michigan. Fearing student arrests, injuries, and general mayhem, the university put off the Dow interviews. The postponement triggered a contemptuous editorial in the Buffalo Evening News, saying that the university had “timidly bowed to threatened demonstrations.”107 The Buffalo Courier Express reported that a “backlash demonstration was planned by an opposing group who insisted that ‘all have a right to be heard’ ” and that the university was “suppressing freedom of speech by banning the representatives.”108 The student paper, The Spectrum, called the withdrawal dangerous to the university community and narrow-minded.109 President Meyerson led a faculty discussion ruing the

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erosion of the “ ‘open campus’ principle.” Several weeks later, the recruiters came to the campus, held their interviews, and left without incident.110 Meyerson and his administration swiftly instituted changes that transformed the old University of Buffalo culture. With Albany pouring money into the new SUNY hub, large numbers of young faculty were hired. Professor George Levine remembers that in 1965, the English department hired eleven assistant professors in one year. Within two years, the philosophy department would grow from ﬁve to nearly forty people.111 “Congeries of people,” recalls Bruce Jackson, SUNY Distinguished Professor, “in scholarship, in the arts. That kind of energy, that kind of money, that kind of action, that sense of being in the place but not of the place–it all worked to make this a very rich, energizing place. Harvard did not have this kind of energy.”112 Meanwhile, Meyerson organized a “college system,” advocating smaller “centers of identiﬁcation” around speciﬁc intellectual or professional interests.113 The ﬁrst two colleges, A and F (Tolstoy College), aspired to educate students about the need for social change in America and reputedly became a haven for students involved in political activism. College A, stressing an unstructured approach to education, was located in a storefront on the Main Street thoroughfare, across from a parochial grammar school. As Bennis writes, “Every time a Scarsdale Maoist wrote ‘fuck’ on the wall or a braless coed played her guitar in the storefront window, the residents of the neighborhood understandably reacted. . . . The whole business snowballed, increasing the community’s normally high level of outrage against the University.”114 By early 1967, there were close to 400,000 troops in South Vietnam, and an increasing number of Americans disapproved of President Lyndon Johnson’s war policy. Johnson was caught between a majority who wanted the war escalated into complete victory and those who demanded an immediate cessation of U.S. involvement. The students began staging round-the-clock vigils outside the Student Union but, essentially, things remained quiet.

Diamonds and Mud In fall 1967, the Center was entering its fourth year. Several returning Creative Associates were joined by a California contingent consisting of virtuoso trombonist Stuart Dempster, ﬂutist David Shostac, and, in the spring semester, composer Terry Riley; also arriving were the composer-violist and award-winning young scientist David Rosenboom from Illinois, mezzo-soprano Merete Bekkelund from Denmark, and the composer-pianist Yuji Takahashi, among others. David Rosenboom, now Dean of the Music School at the California

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Institute of the Arts, remembers that he was at the University of Illinois when he received the invitation to come to the Center: I knew that there were all kinds of interesting things going on in Buffalo, that it was high proﬁle. People were paying attention to it. When I told my teacher, Salvatore Martirano, that I had gotten the call, he said, “Well, you have to drop everything and go. . . . There’s no question about it.” Others around there were less certain, but Sal said, “You shouldn’t pass that up.” So I didn’t and I’m very glad I didn’t.115 The new people had to get settled, programs ﬁnalized, performance rights secured, music and special instruments rented, recordings negotiated, and rehearsals scheduled. Meetings and parties were organized to welcome everyone. Even the looming problem of the waning Rockefeller support took a backseat to the tasks at hand. But in late fall, the CA ﬂutist David Shostac was called up by the reserves and assigned to an Air Force base in Niagara Falls. That was a shock. All of us now felt personally involved with the Vietnam War. A member of the family had been drafted. Still, the intense focus of the group never faltered. That fall, Maryanne Amacher charmed the city of Buffalo into participating in a weekend-long experimental art project she called In City, Buffalo, 1967. As the Buffalo Evening News reported, the “ﬂaxen-haired” composer’s idea was “to underline what is attractive and beautiful in our everyday environment and to transform this ordinary environment, with the unexpected use of commonplace materials and situations, into an artifact.”116 Local “citizen-artists,” the business community, and several public institutions were enlisted, and a continuous program of events was unleashed all over Buffalo, including photography exhibits, walk-through sound environments in downtown corporate buildings, pictures called “astro-colors” projected on clouds (weather permitting), and redecorated department store windows lit up at night to provide passers-by with a sense of a continuous color strip. Some downtown streets and Delaware Park Lake were colored with vegetable dyes. In the closest thing resembling a concert that took place all weekend, Cornelius Cardew performed pages of his work Treatise with members of the Center and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra in the beautiful atrium of the famous Ellicott Square Building, a Buffalo landmark. John Dwyer’s review describes that event: “In City, Buffalo,” the avant-garde enchantment aimed at expressing the psyche of Buffalo in terms it would never recognize, rose to a

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shattering climax of ﬁtful sound and pulsating lights in a mixed-media concert Friday evening in the Ellicott Square lobby. . . . They made one point, at least. Most of us see things in just one way, and many an eye-level citizen on his way to get a license has never really seen it—the magniﬁcent, close-girdered, star-crystal ceiling, the swirling mosaic of the ﬂoor tile, the wrought-iron ﬁligree, the great sweeps of staircase and corridor. . . . These young musicians and theater people had it in mind to “express” this remarkable old building of another era.117 The closing event was the launching of visiting composer-percussionist Max Neuhaus’s ﬁrst sound installation, titled Drive-in Music No. 1, a sound environment for people in automobiles, which was projected to last for six months. Drive-in Music No. 1 commenced at the lakeside entrance to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and continued for about half a mile down the wooded Lincoln Parkway, where Neuhaus had placed low-power radio transmitters in the trees at intervals along the roadway. Each transmitter, using a separate electronic sound generator, broadcast its own sonority over an area that impinged on sound areas established by other transmitters.118 Neuhaus hoped that when drivers tuned in the piece on their car radios, they would be able to hear a combination of sounds that would allow them to “sense the aural shape of the site.” By changing speeds, they could affect that shape.119 Intrigued, the Buffalo Evening News published a graphic blueprint of the weekend festival as a guide for visitors to the events, as well as several articles alerting the public to what it called “an unprecedented experiment.”120 In the early 1970s, Neuhaus returned to Buffalo to mount another of his acoustical environments, Water Whistle, this time with the cooperation of the Jewish Community Center. To hear Water Whistle, the audience submerged itself in a swimming pool, where Neuhaus had set up a system of hoses attached to whistles instead of nozzles. Sounds were generated by the water pumping through the hoses, each whistle spreading its sound over “a perceptibly delimited tract.”121 As Carter Ratcliff noted, “In his waterworks Neuhaus describes the amniotic sublime—an underwater topography whose invisible contours invite exploration.”122 For people to be able to stay in the water for any length of time, the pool temperature had to be raised by several degrees over a period of two or three days. The higher temperatures infuriated the city’s basketball team, who used the pool for regular workout sessions. Nevertheless, Thomas Putnam, the music critic from the Buffalo Courier Express, came, reviewed the piece for the paper, and seemed to enjoy himself. Not only was this an indisputable Buffalo premiere, but it was also the ﬁrst and only time the Center published a poster for a public event stating “bathing suits and caps required.”

1.9 Drive-in Music by Max Neuhaus, diagram. Courtesy of Silvia Neuhaus. Photo: Lucy Childress. Collection Renée Levine Packer.

FIGURE

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Buffalo’s audiences were becoming accustomed to, if not enamored of, their town’s growing reputation as a bastion of the avant-garde. With Seymour Knox’s largesse, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery had become the leading museum of its size for new and experimental art. About the Gallery, New York art critic John Russell has said, “Inch for inch and painting for painting, no museum in this country can better the Albright-Knox in Buffalo when it comes to the art of the second half of this [the twentieth] century.”123 In an article for the New York Times titled “Buffalo Is Not a Vacuum,” Lukas Foss referred to Buffalo’s wellestablished musical tradition, forged by his predecessors at the Buffalo Philharmonic, William Steinberg and Josef Krips, arguing that tradition provided the ground for innovation. “This tradition in no way lessens the resistance to the new,” he wrote. “On the contrary: resistance is particularly keen where there is tradition. Resistance to the new is itself traditional and there is enough of it in Buffalo to make innovation something of an adventure.”124 The ﬂavor of the university music department was also changing, and not everyone was happy about it. Allen Sapp had been anxious to make the rather conventional music department he had inherited into something special. According to former faculty member David Fuller, the department became an emanation of Sapp’s expansive personality, and he ran it like a dictator. “The money was ﬂowing and people were living in a dream world. Sapp had big ideas and the Center was part of all that.”125 The Center had been foisted on the department faculty with a minimum of consultation. In the administrative ambiguity of those early days during the shift from private to state institution, rules and procedures for such semiautonomous centers had yet to evolve. As Jan Williams put it: Who in the Music Department was going to say, after the fact, “We don’t want this thing. Lukas Foss and Allen Sapp just got a $200,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, but we don’t want it.” When the existence of the Center was formally announced, some faculty members were told that they had to relinquish their teaching spaces and move out of their rooms. Eviction was followed by the realization that the newcomers were not going to teach or even perform their primary concert series on the campus. Meanwhile, the Center was reaping national publicity. The departmental grinding of teeth was exacerbated when some faculty charged that the Center did not sufﬁciently advertise its connection to the University or to the Department.126 Sharon Grieggs Almquist, a historian of the SUNYAB music department, points out that the CAs were not always compatible with the rest of the music department faculty. In an unusually testy moment, even Allen Sapp observed

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that the CAs were “the shaggiest, most unkempt, most undisciplined, most disagreeable crowd of people: anti-academic, anti- establishment, antieverything.”127 And in the 1967–1968 Annual Report, Eric Larrabee, Provost of the Faculty of Arts and Letters, noted that the music department presented “a most perplexing expression of the dilemma posed by the co-existence of the performing and academic capabilities under the same departmental jurisdiction.”128 Understandably, it rankled the music department faculty that these comparative youngsters received signiﬁcant university resources and a huge amount of public attention not readily available to the rest. In the endless controversy that surrounded the new group, the recurring objections were that the CAs worked with relatively few restrictions, that they had no formal teaching obligations, and, just as aggravating, that the music they performed was uneven in quality. As faculty member Livingston Gearhart remarked, “a lot of what was being performed was not worthy of performance. It was like looking for a diamond in the mud. Occasionally, you ﬁnd a diamond, but there was a lot of mud.”129 “We complained a lot,” remarked Marijke Verberne, remembering the players’ frustration. “Sometimes pieces would be programmed that weren’t so fantastic. Lukas had chosen them and then, when the piece turned out not to be very good, Lukas was never there to deal with it. Later, he would say at the concert that it wasn’t a very good piece.”130 But Nils Vigeland sees it differently: Part of the fun of it was that a lot of these composers were just establishing a reputation so, although there were some famous names, it was sort of an open shop. You came and you cast your vote and you left. . . . It is intriguing to see how high the batting average is on the people who were in those programs—both composers and performers—in many cases, they were under thirty years of age. They were kids. To be honest about it, there were manifestations at these concerts which seem pretty transient now. There was a little bit of the “concept piece” orientation—the pieces Cage wrote in the 1960s and 1970s when he was so interested in political action, and Cardew too. But it was remarkable that Crumb really got off the ground in Buffalo.131 Even if the CAs got on people’s nerves and the music they performed was less than uniformly convincing, no one questioned their formidable musical skills, and there was a certain satisfaction in their growing renown. One faculty member remembers that when mentioning Buffalo to some musicians during a trip to Europe, “the ﬁrst thing that came out was, ‘Oh, that’s where all that avant-garde music is done.’ They never heard of the Buffalo Philharmonic, but they knew about the Creative Associates.”132

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The Rockefeller Foundation had its worries and suspicions as well, my role being one of them. Two members of the Center complained to Gerald Freund at the Rockefeller Foundation that I was taking on too much responsibility, dealing with issues that should have been attended to by Foss and Sapp. The memo in the Rockefeller Foundation Archives, sent by Freund to Howard Klein and Norman Lloyd on October 18, 1967, was prompted by a sizable advertisement in the New York Times outlining that season’s Evenings for New Music concert dates and the composers whose work would be performed. The statement, “Prepared by Lukas Foss,” appeared in bold letters near the top. Toward the bottom of the ad, the names of Foss and Sapp, who were identiﬁed as the Center directors, appeared, with my name following as “coordinator.” The copy had been pulled directly off a ﬂyer that had been used in Buffalo, with only the concert dates changed. No doubt the mention of my name was unnecessary, but the response it sparked from Gerald Freund reﬂects the deeply entrenched male-dominated power structure and attitude that prevailed in those days: GERALD FREUND : Doesn’t this conﬁrm worries and suspicions? What is Mrs. Levine doing in such a prominent position? Are we ﬁnancing something we didn’t bargain for? “Hurok” was not part of the deal? HOWARD KLEIN :

Does Mrs. L’s name and title reﬂect a weakening of program? The composers listed seem strong enough and the concerts well balanced. Is she in fact making major decisions, or merely “coordinating” the ideas of AS and LF? NORMAN LLOYD :

I am not bothered by this—if she is doing the work well and under AS and LF’s direction.133

Gerald Freund’s carping took a back seat to the main point: the music. Foss was keenly interested in the work of his European and Asian colleagues, and an impressive cross-section of their work was being played by ﬁrst-rate musicians. In the 1967–1968 season alone, the composers performed included Axel BorupJogensen from Denmark; the Americans Ben Johnston, Pauline Oliveros, and David Rosenboom, as well as David Del Tredici, William Albright, Foss, and John Cage; the Italians Bruno Maderna, Luigi Dallapiccola, and Luciano Berio; German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen; the Belgian Henri Pousseur; the Argentine Carlos Roqué Alsina; and the Japanese composer Yuji Takahashi, among others. The Evenings for New Music concerts continued to generate sufﬁcient excitement among Buffalonians that they were, as John Dwyer noted in his review of a December 1967 Evenings for New Music concert, “packed to the walls.”134 The December concert, which was presented in Carnegie Recital Hall a few nights later, included works by CA composers David Rosenboom and Harley Gaber.

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In his piece, Then We Wound Through an Aura of Golden Yellow Gauze, Rosenboom, then age twenty, created a whole system of notation based on tearing apart musical and acoustic parameters: I tend to get interested in developing a kind of language of composition, a system of working with form. These systems are useful to me to the extent that they give me surprises, new material to work with. There were a dozen parameters in this piece deﬁning scales of relatedness and scales of relationship among these parameters—simple ones like density, timbre, brightness or dullness or smoothness or jaggedness of a line. I created a graphic notation system which was all mapped on a score that was 36 inches in diameter—a big disc (a geometric analogy to a thought process)— with a plastic overlay on it that the performers rotated in order to frame different groups of notes. There were seven little movements so the rules of performance had to do with how you traveled around that map. Accompanying the score was a dictionary for every instrument that explained how each symbol was to be interpreted, say, for the ﬂute, or the trombone, or the percussion. All seven of us had to learn all that. There was a lot to remember and they did it. That would be hard to do without a group that was willing to put in a lot of effort into learning a whole new language, which everyone there was willing to do.135 In March 1968, a second, equally enthralling Festival of the Arts Today took place, once again with the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Buffalo Philharmonic, and the university leading the way. This one featured premieres of two new plays by Edward Albee, Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao TseTung, along with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company presenting the new work Rainforest in collaboration with Andy Warhol and David Tudor, who created the live electronic music score. There were also three concerts with the CAs, including works by Lukas Foss, John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, Luciano Berio, and David Rosenboom, and a performance of three sections of Henri Pousseur’s Votre Faust, a “fantasy in the manner of an opera.” Other events included lectures by Buckminster Fuller and the Greek architect and city planner Constantin Doxiades and panels on theater with Albee and the director Alan Schneider. Additional highlights were appearances by the jazz artists Cecil Taylor and the Ayler Brothers, poetry readings by Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olsen, and Allen Ginsberg, ﬁlms by Jonas Mekas, and more iconoclastic performances by the Buffalo Philharmonic. The Public Broadcast Laboratory obtained the rights to cover the entire festival, which was ﬁlmed and edited by the noted ﬁlmmakers

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1.10 Following performance of excerpts from Henri Pousseur’s opera, Votre Faust (left to right: Robert Beckwith, Merete Bekkelund, Michel Butor, Henri Pousseur, Miriam Abramowitsch). Second Festival of the Arts Today. Albright-Knox Art Gallery. March 1968. Photo: Jim Tuttle.

FIGURE

Richard Leacock and D. A. Pennebaker. Once again, the festival was an unqualiﬁed success, prompting a review by John Dwyer in the Buffalo Evening News under the headline, “Futuristic Music Brings Drama, Creative Brilliance to Festival”: The main line music of the Second Festival of the Arts Today got under way before a wall-sitting crowd Sunday evening in the AlbrightKnox Gallery with Lukas Foss, John Cage, a stave of young composers and a quaver of far-out performers, including a pioneer chorus we won’t soon forget. This was a SUNYAB Creative Associates ‘Evenings for New Music’ concert, with added visiting talent. Along with the futuristic pings and whees, there seemed to be a self-surprised whisper winding its wraithy way through the new-style auditorium, a sneaking suspicion that there might be something genuinely creative in all this preposterous stuff, after all.

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The younger ones, in the seats and on stage, are convinced of it. But this was an audience full of Brahms lovers, too, and probably on hand mainly because this is where the action is, and because the arts in progress, however peculiar, ought to be supported. They remained to be affected and, in part, durably impressed.136

Aquarium What counts as music and what counts as noise is contested territory. —Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco, Analog Days The Center’s robust concert schedule meant that my ofﬁce was a constant hub of activity. It was the meeting place when the CAs came to Baird Hall for rehearsals, to pick up their mail, to make a complaint, or just to see what was cooking. The ofﬁce was an ugly ground-ﬂoor room of grey cinderblock and grey linoleum ﬂoor covering, located just across from an entrance to the concert hall stage. One wall, the building’s façade, was entirely glass—the kind that looked almost black and opaque from the outside and just plain dreary from the inside. There was a bulletin board for rehearsal schedules and ﬂyers of interesting concerts, generally in New York. Someone had pinned up a photo from a Tanglewood brochure showing a very young Lukas Foss with other young Tanglewood students, Leonard Bernstein and Eleazar de Carvalho among them. Inserted in ink over Foss’s name were the words “our leader,” and over Bernstein’s name was written, “our leader’s leader.” There were desks for me and a part-time assistant, ﬁle cabinets topped with an unruly mound of scores of all sizes and shapes sent by composers hoping their work might be selected for performance, and a couple of chrome-plated modern chairs with black upholstered seats. One winter night I was working late in my ofﬁce, while in the concert hall, composer Robert Ashley and the Sonic Arts Union—an experimental group based in Ann Arbor, Michigan—were giving a concert. The ﬁerce ampliﬁed growls and yells emanating from the hall were made by Ashley performing his piece, The Wolfman. I was hurriedly preparing stacks of program notes, most written by the composers about their work, for a concert we were presenting at a nearby university the next evening. A set of notes consisted of three or four pages, so I was wrestling with endless stacks of paper when John Cage walked in. Cage came to Buffalo frequently and may have been traveling with the Sonic Arts Union group —Robert Ashley, David Behrman, Gordon Mumma, and Alvin Lucier—all of whom were friends of his. As always, it was great to see

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him. Something about the man gently energized the room. I explained what was going on. He took a stack of paper, sat down at the assistant’s desk, and began stapling, too. John Cage begins his book Silence with the text of a talk he gave to a meeting of a Seattle arts society in 1937: Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we ﬁnd it fascinating. The sound of a truck at ﬁfty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments. Every ﬁlm studio has a library of “sound effects” recorded on ﬁlm. With a ﬁlm phonograph it is now possible to control the amplitude and frequency of any one of these sounds and to give to it rhythms within or beyond the reach of the imagination. Given four ﬁlm phonographs, we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heartbeat, and landslide.137 Cage was very much part of our landscape. Among the various philosophical camps in new music in those years, the serialists, personiﬁed by the composers Milton Babbitt and Pierre Boulez, exercised complete control of all facets of their work, whereas, on the other hand, the John Cage camp embraced indeterminacy and chance operations. While Foss’s and Sapp’s programming strove to reﬂect the various points of view, many of the Center fellows felt personally enfranchised by Cage. As Michael Sahl put it: We had been conditioned to think that European culture was superior, and all of a sudden we were doing things here [in the United States]. The ringleader, of course, was John Cage. Cage stuck his thumb in everybody’s eye and the Europeans loved him for it. It made a tremendous difference; perhaps it was the most important thing. You stood up differently. You thought differently. It was like a civil rights movement for American artists.138 According to David Revill, Cage had attempted to establish a center of experimental music as early as 1940 for the purpose of doing “research, composition and performance in the ﬁeld of sounds and rhythms not used in the symphony orchestra.” Although he had tried repeatedly to create such a center, he was never able to successfully raise sufﬁcient ﬁnancial support.139 “It was his oldest dream,” writes Calvin Tomkins.140 This may partially account for Cage’s appreciation of the Buffalo scene. Foss programmed Cage’s work at the Buffalo Philharmonic and on the Evenings for New Music concert programs with some frequency. He also came to town as music director of the Merce Cunningham

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Dance Company, sometimes realizing the live electronic scores or doing readings as part of performances. During one of these visits, Cage was holed up in the Holiday Inn while he worked on his book, Notations, a collection of music manuscripts representing visual samples of mid-twentieth-century music notation later published by Something Else Press. Cage says in the preface that the collection was “determined by circumstances rather than any process of selection” and thus shows the many directions in which music notation was going at the time—“from the continuing dependence on notation to its renunciation.”141 Cage amassed original manuscript samples from composers as far aﬁeld as John Lennon of the Beatles and Iannis Xenakis and asked them to “write about notation or something relevant to it.” He described the book with its absence of explanatory information beyond the scores themselves as analogous to the contemporary aquarium: “a large glass house with all the ﬁsh in it swimming as in an ocean.”142 To me, the Center seemed like that—the big ﬁsh and the little ﬁsh all swimming together in a large glass house. Toward the end of the Center’s fourth year, the group made its debut recording with Terry Riley’s hypnotic minimalist masterpiece, In C, for the Columbia Masterworks “Music of Our Time” series. The composer David Behrman, who produced the album while on leave from CBS Records to be a Creative Associate, writes that In C is a launching pad. The one-page score, written in 1964 and reproduced on the album cover, “can be played by any ensemble, amateur or otherwise, but,” Behrman writes, “the best performances will be made by musicians gifted with special ability to improvise and to listen to one another.”143 To perform In C, each instrumentalist plays consecutively through 53 notated ﬁgures at his or her own speed, repeating a ﬁgure as many times as he or she wishes (although the performers are requested to stay within two to three phrases of each other). Anchoring the ensemble is a piano part, called the Pulse, which consists of a steady repeated eighth note “drumming” of the two top Cs on the piano for the duration of the piece.144 The performance by the Center’s community of musicians was organized by trombonist Stuart Dempster and was led by Riley, who played saxophone in the ensemble. Margaret Hassell, who wore gloves during at least some of the recording sessions to protect her ﬁngers, played the Pulse. In C evokes a humming, singing kaleidoscope of sounds and textures. Although there is no discernable beginning, middle, or end, it is constantly moving and changing, saturating the senses. For the listeners who travel with the musicians as they complete their odyssey through the score, there is a special feeling of shared experience, of community. Composed entirely of interlocking repetitive patterns, Riley’s In C has been called a “manifesto of

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minimalism,” and, as such, it may be considered a seminal work. Ed Ward, writing in the Wall Street Journal, called it “as much a watershed as Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was in its day.”145 During those sessions with the meticulous and congenial engineer Fred Plaut in the converted church/recording studio in New York’s East 30s, the Center musicians performed enough music for two additional records. Also recorded were works by CA composers Carlos Alsina, David Rosenboom, and Yuji Takahashi and some early pieces by John Cage that constituted part of an uncompleted work he called “a projected concert.” These gems included She Is Asleep (1943) and a ﬁfteen-minute work in three sections made up of “Quartet” (for 12 tom-toms), “Duet” (for voice and prepared piano), and “A Room,” the third piece in the unﬁnished cycle.146 Lovingly prepared by the musicians, none of the works was ever released, and the tapes may still be languishing in Columbia Records’ vaults. We all knew that the 1967–1968 season was a critical juncture in the Center’s existence. The $150,000 extension grant to the Center for the years 1966–1968 would end with the close of the academic year. In that ﬁnal season of Rockefeller support, 4.5 fellowship positions had been supported through the Rockefeller renewal grant, while the state underwrote eleven positions, the highest level of state support the Center would ever obtain. At this point, not one member of the senior administration who had participated in the original negotiations to bring the Center to the university was still in place. Moreover, the university had undergone a major administrative reorganization in 1967 when its more than ninety departments, schools, and programs were restructured into seven new divisions known as faculties, each with a provost as chief operating head.147 There was a lot going on, and no one seemed too sure of just where the Center stood. Spring 1968 was a nightmare. On April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, where he had gone to support a sanitation workers’ strike. Rioting, looting, and ﬁre tore through close to one hundred cities all over America, including Chicago, Boston, New York, Baltimore, and Denver. Things had gone tragically sour. For many of us, the outrage we felt was mixed with a sense that the very underpinnings of the country were imperiled. At the Center, a disenchanted violinist-composer from Europe, one of the very few ever invited based on recommendations but not personally known to the music directors, voiced dissatisfaction with almost all musical and administrative aspects of the Center to ofﬁcials at the Rockefeller Foundation. Following are excerpts from a letter to Lukas Foss from the Foundation Associate Director Gerald Freund, which was evidently triggered by those complaints:

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As Allen knows, Norman Lloyd and the rest of us are much concerned about the way the work of the group at Buffalo has developed. There seem to be more problems than effective solutions. From what I’ve heard, the center has certainly not developed in the way all of us hoped when the ﬁrst Foundation grant was made, but then I may be hearing only one-sided stories. It is, of course, not only the success of your Center in Buffalo, that concerns us but also the impact on the prospects of developing comparable centers elsewhere of what happens and doesn’t at Buffalo.148 And excerpts from Foss’s response: It is important that there be a frank interchange of ideas and criticism between the foundation which has fathered a ﬁne project and its now grown-up child. . . . Alas, the parent only knows the child from hearsay. Not once in four years did you or one of your colleagues attend one of our many concerts. You write: “I have heard the center has not developed in the way all of us hoped when the ﬁrst Foundation was made.” Hasn’t it? I believe our facts speak stronger than the gossip of a few malcontents. In our ﬁrst years there was quite a bit of unrest and criticism. Ours was the pilot project and had to ﬁnd its format. You are right in saying, “It is not only the success of your Center in Buffalo that concerns us, but also the impact on the prospects of developing comparable centers elsewhere.” I recommended these myself. They followed our example, sometimes came to us for the beneﬁt of our advice. But in two crucial aspects they did not: A. The leaders of the centers you developed in Chicago and Rutgers received fellowship monies themselves. Allen Sapp and I do not. It would rob us of our independence and initiative. B. The same leaders emphasize in their programming works which give them a chance to produce themselves as conductors. I do not. I favor the fellows conducting if necessary. . . . It is my belief that these two factors are primarily responsible for the excellence of our work and for our repertory being by far the most catholic and yet advanced. This fact in turn earns us more praise and more criticism. Good. That is what we’re about, controversy. The things we are criticized of are the things we are proud of. Someday even those who fathered us will be proud of us. I’ll have to learn to be patient. Kafka says, “Impatience is the only thing properly called sin.”149

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In May 1968, Allen Sapp resigned as chairman of the music department and as codirector of the Center while retaining his dual position as head of the Division of Languages, Literature, and the Arts and Director of Cultural Affairs, a post of increasing importance, as the university now focused on the planning of a new $650,000,000 campus. Because Foss remained in place as the Center codirector, Sapp’s departure did not seem dangerously disruptive, especially as he was still on the scene and available for consultation.150 Furthermore, the acting department chairman, James McKinnon, a Columbia University-trained medieval music expert, seemed supportive of the Center’s mission. Still, Foss was only tangentially aligned with the university and not part of the new executive decision-making team. The current cast comprised Martin Meyerson, President (who had succeeded Clifford Furnas in 1966 but would soon decamp to the University of Pennsylvania, ushering in a third university president in less than ﬁve years); Warren Bennis, Vice President for Academic Affairs; and Eric Larrabee in the newly created post of Provost of Arts and Letters. University priorities were changing with the emergence of fresh areas of interest, such as Environmental Studies and American Studies, that required faculty and support. The Center’s nonteaching fellows, though well regarded for their excellence and visibility, were increasingly viewed by many as a luxury. Two factors served the Center well during this precarious phase: the university’s initial commitment to the Rockefeller Foundation still held sway, especially in light of the Center’s national and international acclaim, and it was perceived to be protected by the mantle of Seymour Knox. The success of the Evenings for New Music concerts at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and Knox’s leadership position at the New York State Arts Council and in the Buffalo community forestalled any fatal coups. Still, the precious state salary lines that Sapp and other supporters of the Center had carefully built up over the years slipped away, as they were siphoned off to other divisions of study. Confronting this reality, Sapp’s budgetary projections for 1968–1969 included provision for only nine CAs (down 6.5 salary lines) plus logistical support, with the hope that an increase in each succeeding year would bring the Center back to its earlier numbers. Inevitably, rumors started that the Center was folding. Music theorist and critic Ben Boretz wrote, in The Nation, “Grass Roots Under Siege,” arguing that the Rockefeller Foundation’s largesse in creating groups devoted to the performance of contemporary music (where previously little or no activity of the kind had developed indigenously) had been misguided, especially because the Foundation had not made signiﬁcant support available to the excellent New York-based ensembles such as the Group for Contemporary

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Music, directed by composers Charles Wuorinen and Harvey Sollberger, and a series led by Gunther Schuller based at Carnegie Recital Hall. “And now, ﬁnally,” he wrote, “at the critical point when the original Rockefeller grant has run out . . . both Rutgers and Buffalo apparently intend to discontinue their programs.”151 The attack was immediately rebuffed by Thomas Putnam, in the Buffalo Courier Express, then the city’s major morning paper, who quoted Foss: “The center will deﬁnitely be working next season.” In the same article he listed the Creative Associates slated for the 1968–1969 season. Among these were composer Larry Austin (also editor of the avant-garde music magazine Source), composer-percussionist Stanley Lunetta (associate editor of Source), Canadian ﬂutist Robert Cram (newly graduated from the Juilliard School), soprano Gwendolin Sims, and the Dutch cellist Marijke Verberne. Among those scheduled to return from the previous year were composer-trumpeter Jon Hassell, clarinetist Jerry Kirkbride, and Japanese composer-pianist Yuji Takahashi.152 Another person who would drop into our lives that season, totally unannounced, was the prodigiously talented composer-pianist Julius Eastman. Still, Ben Boretz, although wrong in his main assertion that the Center was folding, had inadvertently put his ﬁnger on something. In fact, the Center would never again be on stable ﬁnancial footing or be able to reclaim the lost fellowships.153

2 “Make It New”: Fall 1968 to 1972

Altogether a stimulating place to work through those troubled years: Pop Art popping at the Albright-Knox Museum; strange new music from Lukas Foss, Lejaren Hiller, and their electronic colleagues; dope as ubiquitous as martinis at faculty dinner parties . . . and, across the Peace Bridge, endless Canada, to which hosts of our young men ﬂed as their counterparts had done in other of our national convulsions. . . . I confess to missing . . . that lively Make It New spirit of the Buffalo sixties. —John Barth, The Friday Book: Essays and Other Non-Fiction The 1960s in Buffalo: Beat poets Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg, Ravi Shankar, the Beatles, Thelonius Monk, the legalize marijuana movement (LEMAR), communes such as the Hog Farm, the Vietnam protesters en route to Canada—a pulsating climate that celebrated risk taking and freedom of personal expression. An article in the Buffalo Courier Express reported that “a new form of art—stereophonic poetry— is being born in Buffalo.” Working with the music department’s sound technicians, John Barth was then a professor in the SUNYAB English Department. He was writing what he called “electronic verse,” made by blending tapes recorded at different times by the same or different voices. “In my construction of verbal collages,” Barth said, “the medium becomes the metaphor: that is, the tape recorder, sitting on stage, becomes personiﬁed.” “At the end of one of his selections,” the article continues, “the machine asks to be turned off.”1

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Technology Rising Three thinkers who were contemplating the social implications of making art with the new technologies were Billy Kluver, Marshall McLuhan, and John Cage. Kluver, a Swedish-born scientist working at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey in the early 1960s, was aware of the profound impact technology was to have on all our lives. He was especially interested in the potential for the integration of art and technology. Kluver’s idea was that the artist’s work is like that of a scientist, an investigation that may or may not yield meaningful results. “First,” he said, “the artists have to create with technology because technology is becoming inseparable from our lives.”2 He envisioned artist/engineer collaborations in which the problem-solver engineer would be indispensable to the artist working with technology.3 In just such a way, Kluver worked with Swiss kinetic sculptor Jean Tinguely to realize Tinguely’s huge construction Hommage to New York, unveiled for the ﬁrst and last time on March 17, 1960, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Tinguely thought of Hommage as “a piece that had evolved in ‘total anarchy and freedom,’ a machine that had rejected its machine nature to become humor and poetry.” “With this work, composed of scrap metal, electric circuits, motors, bicycle wheels, chemical stinks, and such, and which ultimately self-destructs in performance,” Calvin Tomkins wrote, “the nineteen sixties may be said to have begun.”4 Kluver also read Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, in which McLuhan wrote, “Technology is the extension of our nervous system.” With this pronouncement, McLuhan became a celebrated oracle. The inﬂuences and consequences of the new technologies, he said, would transform man’s future and merited careful examination.5 “I don’t want them to believe me, I just want them to think,” he told a seminar audience at Columbia University’s Teachers College in 1955.6 Another “idea maker,” John Cage, was interested in nonhierarchical strategies for making art. In Diary: Inter-Arts, an unpublished presentation to the National Council for the Arts in 1983 in Washington, D.C., he spoke of “Finding ways for artists to work together, ways in which no one artist tells the others what to do. Finding ways that don’t push people to conclusions, that simply get them started using their own faculties. Suitcases for imaginary travels.”7 Cage, like McLuhan, hoped his work would act as a catalyst for other people’s journeys.8 In Cage’s brief introduction to the book Marshall McLuhan: The Man and his Message, he notes their similar outlook: “In his [McLuhan’s] writings I like the way he leaps from one paragraph to the next without transition. This also happens in the Journal of Henry David Thoreau. . . . Each one leaves

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space in his work in which a reader stimulated, can do his or her own thinking.”9 Former SUNYAB professor and media studies expert Gerald O’Grady concurs that “every word, sentence and paragraph [McLuhan] wrote was part of a process to generate insight, not to establish classiﬁcations.”10 In 1966 Kluver founded Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) with fellow engineer Fred Waldhauer and artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman “to establish alliances within the corporate and public sectors”11 and “to catalyze the inevitable active involvement of industry, technology, and the arts.”12 According to Tomkins, Billy Kluver was the moving spirit behind the series of large-scale performance events that year at the Sixty-Ninth Regiment Armory called “Nine Evenings: Theater and Engineering.” The idea was to assemble a group of artists with engineers from Bell Labs to collaborate on experimental, open-ended projects that would be exhibited and/or performed for an audience. Rauschenberg’s multimedia production Open Score incorporated, among other aspects, a tennis match played with ampliﬁed rackets and sound-activated lighting. Each time a player (one of whom was the painter Frank Stella) hit a ball, a tier of overhead lights was triggered to shut down. The players continued their game until the Armory fell into darkness. John Cage’s Variations VII was a collage of live sounds piped in from various locations outside the Armory and mixed by Cage and David Tudor. Dancer Yvonne Rainer worked with a physicist on a piece called Carriage Discreteness about “the idea of effort and ﬁnding precise ways in which effort can be made evident or not.”13 These were ambitious, costly undertakings that required formidable fund-raising and publicity efforts by Kluver and Rauschenberg, not to speak of prodigious investments of time by all the other engineers and artists. The performances involved hundreds of people, mountains of electronics, motors, props such as (low tech) mattresses and giant turtles (with ﬂashlights harnessed to their backs) and (high tech) open telephone lines, a closed-circuit TV hookup, and infrared illumination. Each night large audiences of a thousand people or more attended these technological happenings. Nevertheless, it was a theatrical and ﬁnancial disaster. Clive Barnes at the New York Times wrote that “if the American engineers and technologists participating in this performance were typical of their profession, the Russians are sure to be the ﬁrst on the moon.” He rued what he called “amateurism, the new curse of the artistic classes.” But Barnes went on to say, “Even so make no mistake–this depressing spectacle is very probably a ramshackle sign post into a genuine artistic future.”14 In retrospect, the “Nine Evenings” extravaganza provided the antecedent for even greater art/technology spectacles yet to come, such as John Cage and Lejaren Hiller’s HPSCHD, premiered at the University of Illinois in May 1969, and EAT’s Pepsi Pavilion collaborative, designed for the Osaka Expo ’70.

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Commenting on “Nine Evenings,” Rauschenberg said, “We made a lot of people awfully happy, but not the audience.”15 Nevertheless, technology had been publicly embraced and was assuming orthodoxy as a tool for artists alongside acoustic instruments, brushes, and chisels.

Continuance The State University of New York at Buffalo opened the 1968 academic year with an enrollment of 23,567 students.16 There were now nearly ﬁve hundred thousand American servicemen in Vietnam, and the American people had been stunned by televised images of the ﬁghting during the Communist-led Tet offensive the previous January. Opinion polls reﬂected a sharp upturn in those dissatisﬁed with the war, and, for the ﬁrst time, the doves and the hawks in Congress were almost equal in number.17 Still, there was no hint of turbulence on campus. Its Rockefeller funding having expired, the Center faced a brewing crisis as well. In a virtuosic sleight of hand, the university administration created a short-term ﬁnancial ﬁx for the Center by using the accrued funds from a bequest—the Slee Endowment—to pay for ten CA fellowships. Four of the state lines went to American Studies and the English department to pay for graduate assistantships. A new Slee Professor, Lejaren Hiller, would be hired who would also serve as codirector with Foss of the Center. In this way, the CA fellowships might be construed as support for the Slee Professor. Although apparently a good solution on the surface, this windfall allowed administrators to shift the “hard” permanent state salary lines that Sapp had so painstakingly sequestered for the Center fellowships to be traded out to other departments, leaving the CAs to rely on a soon-to-be-depleted ﬁnancial core of “soft” money. At the end of September, the composer Norman Lloyd, then an ofﬁcial at the Rockefeller Foundation, paid a visit to Buffalo. I had known Lloyd since 1960, when I worked at the Juilliard School. He and his wife Ruth had been longtime friends of my supervisor (and to some degree mentor), Dance Department Director Martha Hill.18 On a rainy weekend morning, he came to my home to have a talk about the Center’s current situation. Excerpts from his memorandum to his colleagues at the Foundation follow: R[enée] L[evine] has just come from a long meeting with Lejaren Hiller who this year will be co-director of the Creative Associates at the University of Buffalo. This was RL’s ﬁrst meeting with LH, and she was most impressed because he was very much involved in all

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2.1 Lejaren Hiller and Lukas Foss, fall 1970. Photo: Jim Tuttle.

the practical matters of the Creative Associates. It is not deﬁnite as yet, but RL thinks it is very possible that LH will take a permanent post on the composition faculty at Buffalo. LH plus Henri Pousseur, who will be in Buffalo starting the second semester, will make a strong composition faculty core and, according to RL, the University is attracting for the ﬁrst time a goodly number of graduate students in composition. . . . Allen Sapp has been appointed Dean of Cultural Affairs for the University as well as chairman of the College Masters Program that is going to be set up when the University moves to its new campus. . . . Tomorrow, members of the University’s music department are going to a welcome party for Peter Yates, the new head of the music department at Buffalo State College. The combination of LH, Foss, Pousseur and Yates will probably cause Buffalo to slide over Niagara Falls at the very least. Of course, if LH leaves Illinois [permanently] as [Kenneth] Gaburo has, this leaves only Salvatore Martirano of the original group of activists who put Urbana on the map. I am sure there is some moral here about the “stability” of the major universities.19

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Illiacs and Oscillators Speed and synthesis are characteristics of our epoch. We need twentieth-century instruments to help us realize them in our music. —Edgard Varèse, in Carol Oja, Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s Lejaren Hiller came to Buffalo from the University of Illinois at Urbana, where he was a professor of music and director of the Experimental Music Studio, and settled with his wife Elizabeth Halsey and their children into a house just north of the campus. From his slightly disheveled but gentlemanly demeanor, no one, least of all his suburban neighbors, would have suspected that this soft-spoken man was not only a prodigiously brilliant scientist who had developed the ﬁrst reliable process for dyeing acrylic ﬁbers such as Orlon but also a pioneer in computer music. Born in New York City on February 23, 1924, the son of the noted photographer Lejaren A. Hiller, Hiller Jr. (often called Jerry by friends and colleagues) studied counterpoint and ear training with Milton Babbitt while still a teenager. He took his bachelor of arts, master of arts, and doctoral degrees in chemistry at Princeton University, where he continued to study musical composition and analysis with Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions. After graduation at the age of twenty-three, he worked as a research chemist for E. I. DuPont de Nemours and Company while continuing to compose. In 1952, he joined the chemistry department at the University of Illinois and continued studying and writing music. It was there in 1956 that he composed the groundbreaking Illiac Suite for string quartet (today known simply as String Quartet No. 4) in collaboration with mathematician Leonard Isaacson–the ﬁrst signiﬁcant work to use a computer in its composition.20 (The original name Illiac Suite is a combination of the University of Illinois and the Univac computer, on which it was composed.) In 1958, Hiller established the Electronic Music Studio there, overseeing production and research in composition, electronics, acoustics, computers, linguistics, information, and communications theory.21 The composer James Tenney has remembered Hiller’s classes: “I had read a little notice in the New York Times saying that for the ﬁrst time anyplace, certainly for the ﬁrst time in North America, a course in electronic music was going to be given at the University toward the end of 1958. . . . I went to Illinois and took Hiller’s course. He also gave a course in musical acoustics and information theory which was fabulous.”22 The composers Maryanne Amacher and Ramon Fuller followed Tenney as attendees of these classes.

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Hiller titled his opening SUNYAB Slee Lecture series “The Composer’s Uses of Modern Technology.” In an interview in the Buffalo Courier Express preceding the lecture, Hiller told Thomas Putnam: “To make valid artistic statements, the composer must reﬂect his time and place. It is only natural that the composer, like everyone else in the society, has felt the impact of electronics—radio, television, phonograph records.”23 In this regard, Randall Packer and Ken Jordan also observed that “‘old-fashioned’ forms limited to words on a page, paint on a canvas, or music from an instrument were considered inadequate for capturing the speed, energy, and contradictions of contemporary life.”24 And, writing about his Ballet Mécanique (1924–1925), American-born composer George Antheil wrote, “I have used the sound of airplane propellers because they are a part of the musical sound of our modern life; they are part of the vast new material of sound, as steel and aluminium are now part of the facing material of modern buildings.”25 Composers here and abroad were increasingly experimenting with technology to create works entirely generated with electronics; to produce pieces in which tape sounds were used in conjunction with live performers; or to create “live electronics”—the use of electrical equipment to amplify, alter, distort, enrich, and intensify sounds produced by live performers.26 In 1959, the Rockefeller Foundation helped establish the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, an outgrowth of a studio founded earlier by Columbia University professors Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening and Princeton professors Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions. Two years later in California, Morton Subotnick and Ramon Sender, who would a short while later be joined by Pauline Oliveros and visual artist Anthony Martin, combined their studios to form the San Francisco Tape Music Center. After a brief period in an old attic on Jones Street, they moved to 321 Divisadero Street, a venue that became well known locally as a platform for explorations in new forms, particularly multimedia work. (Dancer Anna Halprin and KPFA Radio were also tenants.) Subotnick suggests that the Tape Center may even have been the ﬁrst alternative art space, much like the Kitchen (in New York) today. According to Subotnick, while he and Sender were still at Jones Street, they put an ad in the paper for an engineer to help them create something cheap and easy to use that would enable them to express themselves freely with sound, something they thought of as an “electronic musical easel.” The engineer Donald Buchla replied, and their association began, with Buchla teaching them about voltage control and other electronic techniques.27 A childhood tinkerer with a natural facility for electronics, Buchla worked in the University of

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California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). During this period Buchla developed his prototype Music Box, a keyboardless modular synthesizer that composers could use to produce electronic music without “cutting and splicing.”28 The move to Divisadero Street, which contained two large performance spaces, enabled the artists to augment the number of performances and the public access that was central to their outlook. By this time Anthony Martin, who was doing real-time paintings using liquid dyes on overhead projectors, was also doing light shows for rock groups at Fillmore West. Terry Riley’s In C, written in 1964 to be performed by all the Tape Center habitués (including Sender, Subotnick, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, and Riley), had its ﬁrst performance there. In 1966, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Tape Music Center moved to Mills College. Pauline Oliveros became the director in the new institutional setting. Morton Subotnick moved to New York. The Buchla Box became widely known from Subotnick’s piece Silver Apples of the Moon (1967), the ﬁrst electronic music composition created speciﬁcally for the recorded medium. Thus Buchla’s device, like Robert Moog’s, became a pivotal instrument for the experimental music community, allowing composers to develop a personal language using the tools of their own time.29 Performances of electronic music were part of the Center’s repertoire from the beginning—Luciano Berio’s Visage (1960), Ramon Fuller’s Music for Two Channel Tape and Two Percussionists (1964), and Mario Davidovsky’s Synchronisms for various solo instruments and electronic sounds are examples. Early in his tenure, Allen Sapp had designated an electronic music center as an item on his wish list for the university. In 1965, he invited composer-theorist Ramon Fuller on a Creative Associate fellowship to begin designing a state-of-the-art facility. Fuller held a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, where he had studied acoustics, information theory, and electronic techniques with Hiller. But it was Hiller’s groundbreaking work with technology and his enthusiasm for multimedia works that galvanized the Center in new ways. One such way was Hiller’s link with another formidable innovator who was helping to ﬁnalize the design and equipment for the music department’s electronic music studio. In the early 1960s, at about the same time that Buchla was developing his “box” on the West Coast, Robert Moog, situated in Trumansburg, New York, invented his synthesizer. By that time, Moog had already built a few pieces of equipment for Hiller’s studio at Illinois. Probably on Hiller’s recommendation, Moog consulted with Ramon Fuller on the formation of the Buffalo studio as well. Later, in a desire to make the Buffalo facility a model studio, Moog and Hiller tried out new analog equipment and installed a high-quality mixer. Because Moog lived only a few hours down the

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thruway from Buffalo, Creative Associates began seeking his advice concerning the development and implementation of their ideas relating to electronic music and performance. Robert Moog helped composer-trumpeter Jon Hassell build MAP, an installation piece designed to be presented outside the usual concert situation, that was included in an Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) show at the Brooklyn Museum and in a show of Russian Constructivism at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. In MAP, gallery visitors move handheld tape heads over a surface to create “corresponding modulations in the magnetically printed sound.” A version of this sound map was also produced in Source magazine.30 Along with Moog and Hiller, the music department employed several talented recording engineers and technicians, “electronicists” as they called themselves—Joe Romanowski, George Ritscher, and Clifford Stoll (who later became a well-known astronomer and author)—who worked enthusiastically with the Creative Associates and served as mentors, helping them experiment with the possibilities of the latest technology. David Rosenboom remembers: I wrote a solo oboe piece for oboe and analog electronics for my colleague, the oboist Lawrence Singer, which was recorded and published in Source magazine. Joe Romanowski, the music department technology guy, helped me develop a means of doing electronic music using analog computers. Joe helped me acquire and put together a setup which led eventually to a whole approach to synthesizer design that I developed. The borders between disciplines were probably the lowest they had ever been, and we were exploring across those borders. It turned out that later I did a lot of collaborating designs with Donald Buchla at Mills.31 Jon Hassell’s and David Rosenboom’s collaborations, as with Subotnick and Buchla’s work, were evidence of Kluver’s vision taking hold. Hiller also provided audiences with music composed entirely on computer. He explains his complex structural processes in this excerpt from a program note on his Algorithms I (Version I) (1968, rev. 1974) which is scored for ﬂute, clarinet, percussion, pianoforte, guitar, violin, cello and tape: The ﬁrst movement (The Decay of Information) of Algorithms I is stochastic music in which the melodic lines become progressively more dependent upon previous pitch and rhythm choices. The second movement (Icosahedron) is a complete serial composition in which all row permutations are used once each; also, rhythmic choices are least organized at its beginning and end, and most organized in its center.

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In the third movement (The Incorporation of Constraints), controls of vertical sonorities, of melodic motion, of resolutions of dissonant chords, of rhythmic patterns and of cadential structures are progressively introduced. The sounds on the two tape channels were produced by digital-to-analog conversion on ILLIAC II.32 Yet another ingredient in the mix was Hiller’s intriguing collaboration with John Cage on HPSCHD, which was well under way when Hiller arrived in Buffalo in the fall of 1968. The preceding year, Cage had gone to the University of Illinois as Visiting Research Professor in the School of Music. As Cage explained to Larry Austin in the pages of Source magazine: Jerry Hiller called me from Urbana and said he could arrange for me to do a piece using computer facilities . . . if I was interested in doing it. . . . The original idea, I thought, was more or less tailor-made for the computer: that is to say, an enormous project—enormous in the sense of having so many details in it that . . . [it] would be suitable for a computer. So Jerry Hiller did the programming for me and, since he’s had so much experience in the ﬁeld, the piece has become a collaboration between us.33 In an interview with Thomas Putnam, Hiller outlined the piece: “HPSCHD is scored for from one to seven ampliﬁed harpsichords and from one to 51 tape recorders. It is a modular composition. Each of the 58 modules has been completely composed throughout.”34 It was clear that Hiller’s arrival heralded a new dimension for the Center. Technology assumed a much heightened presence and, although HPSCHD would not be performed in Buffalo until the spring of 1980, things would never be the same.35

Music and Theater Like tape and electronic music, theater pieces, works composed for the concert hall that employ extramusical elements such as sets, lighting, spoken text, ﬁlm, dance, and so on, were part of the Center’s performance repertoire from its earliest days. During the Center’s ﬁrst season (1964–1965), the Buffalo Festival of the Arts Today provided a platform for several such works, such as John Cage’s Theatre Piece (1960) for “one to eight performers (musicians, dancers, singers, et al.) to be used in whole or part, in any combination,” each of whom designs his own schedule of actions within certain constraints supplied by the composer; and two U.S. premieres—Sylvano Bussotti’s chamber opera, La

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Passion selon Sade (1965), conducted by the composer; and Mauricio Kagel’s Sur Scène (1959–1960). Sur Scène, subtitled “chamber music theater in one act,” is scored for speaker, mime, recorded tape, singer, and three instrumentalists. Framed as a rambling semicomprehensible lecture decrying “the crisis that has befallen the musical situation,” while chaos is perpetrated around the speaker by the performers, the work was staged by the composer with fastidious attention to nuance and detail. Although historian Reginald Smith Brindle notes that Sur Scène did not have “a spectacular success” in Europe, it was roundly embraced by a capacity Festival audience, who gave it a standing ovation.36 Buffalo Evening News critic John Dwyer called it a “zany adventure” and a “brilliant opus.”37 Hiller, who was married to actress Elizabeth Halsey, was a staunch proponent of the theater piece (sometimes referred to as multimedia). In addition to his involvement with electronics and computers, he relished incorporating theatrical elements in his work and often did so. The ﬁrst concert of the 1968– 1969 season took place in New York on the opening of Hunter College’s series “New Image of Sound.” The composers represented were Foss, Hiller, and Larry Austin. Each work on the program incorporated elements of theater to varying degrees. Foss’s piece, Paradigm (1968, revised 1969), is for ﬁve musicians. The Hunter College performance was the premiere; it was repeated several days later in Buffalo. The score calls for a percussionist-conductor (with musical saw, ﬂexatone, and superball, among other things), plus four instruments (with high, medium, and low ranges) capable of sustaining a sound, and electronics. Words are spoken, whispered, or shouted by the instrumentalists, resulting in a jazzy, quasi-theatrical musical game.38 The CA performers were Jan Williams, percussionist-conductor; Jerry Kirkbride, clarinet; Johnathan Marcus, guitar; Charles Haupt, violin; Marijke Verberne, cello; and Jon Hassell, Stanley Lunetta, and Joseph Romanowski, “electronicists.” The governing conceit of the piece is a statement on various forms of contemporary composition. In the ﬁrst movement, the performers utter syllables, mostly incomprehensible, until the audience hears, “Someone will be held responsible!” Words are more coherent in the second movement, in which the players, after announcing in unison, “Bury,” continue, one after the other, to choose words at random from ﬁve printed columns representing a subject, a verb, and so on while playing. The result might be, “Bury . . . your idle . . . pretensions . . . timid . . . games . . . with 12 tones.” In the ﬁnal movement based on a Foss lecture, the musicians command, “Show me dangerous music.”39 Cellist Marijke Verberne laughs when recalling a rehearsal of Paradigm in which she selected the word “choices” and Lukas said, “No, Marijke, you don’t

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pronounce that well,” remarking on her Dutch accent. Then, in order to demonstrate the proper way, he repeated the word, “Choices!” with his even more distinct German accent. Music critic Alan Rich, writing for New York magazine, described the Hiller and Austin works: In Lejaren Hiller’s Avalanche an old-fashioned circus pitchman in costume stood on a garishly decorated scaffold and gave a passionate but purposely unintelligible speech into microphones, while a coloratura soprano tried on fancy costumes on the other side of the stage and sung snatches from famous arias; all the while an unmanned player-piano in the middle ground out another medley of the classics, which had been messed up according to directions furnished by a computer. In Larry Austin’s The Magicians some children tromped around on a set hung with ﬂuorescent designs and a revolving movie screen, and did instrumental imitations with their voices. . . . I liked these pieces very much for their wit and color and imagination. I liked them particularly because both composers appear bent on breaking out of the circle that has closed in on much new music today. The very fact that their music is both fully visual and fully musical, both things at the same time, lends excitement and vitality to the idea of live artistic experiences. . . . I would like at this early stage to express a certain optimism for the idea of the theatre piece . . . as a valid artistic possibility.40 Foss’s Paradigm and Hiller’s Algorithms I, Version 1 (1968) were subsequently recorded on Deutsche Grammophon, along with Signals (1968) by Elliott Schwartz. Hiller’s interest in theater and interdisciplinary work propelled the part-time appointments of a broader group of Center fellows that included theater directors Joseph Krysiak (1969–1970), Joseph Dunn (1970–1971); Terry Moore (1971– 1972); Frank Parman, playwright (1970–1972); and Mary Fulkerson, dancer (1971). These artists brought new breadth to the Center’s presentations, but lean budgets curtailed any efforts toward signiﬁcant expansion in these directions.

A Holiday Angel Jerry Hiller wasted no time. Along with his composing, his teaching, and travels for guest lectures and concerts, Hiller took a hands-on interest in the mounting ﬁnancial problems facing the Center. We worked together, often late

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into the night, preparing proposals to obtain funding from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, two increasingly crucial partners in the Center’s continued operations. And, from his new seat as Director of Cultural Affairs for the university, Allen Sapp was shooting around communiqués, urging the university’s top ofﬁcials to come to grips with the Center’s vulnerable ﬁscal situation. One night, not long before the Christmas holiday break, I was working in the ofﬁce, ﬁnalizing fall-semester concert budgets, when my phone rang. The man on the other end identiﬁed himself as a lawyer from Lewis, Rice, Tucker, Allen and Chubb, a ﬁrm in St. Louis, Missouri. He said he represented a client who wished to remain anonymous but who was interested in assisting the Center. What sorts of expenses did the Center face? he asked. I felt we had nothing to lose and explained that each Carnegie Hall concert cost the Center approximately $2,500 for travel, lodging, per diems, instrument rental, guest artist fees, and so on and that each Creative Associate fellowship cost approximately $10,000. I told him that the fellows were the heart of the Center and that any future cuts in this area would severely affect the very essence of the Center’s capabilities. The gentleman politely thanked me for the information and bid me good night. I mentioned the call to Foss but, otherwise, didn’t think much more about it. A few days into the new year, a letter arrived from the same law ﬁrm containing a check for $10,000 from the anonymous donor speciﬁcally for a Creative Associate fellowship. Each year thereafter I sent a scrapbook of the Center’s programs, reviews, and other projects to the ﬁrm, and for the next ﬁve years or so, we kept receiving the coveted fellowship award. This gift, so unexpected and so helpful, not only boosted our morale but also served as a new fundraising model. It inspired me to write proposals to the Kosciuszko Foundation to bring a CA from Poland; to a local foundation for an ofﬁcial composer for the City of Buffalo; and to Meet the Composer, an organization that helps to pay for composers to participate in programs of their music. In this way, we began to piece together funding that, along with support from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, would help see us through the coming rough times.

Julius Eastman Among the works performed that season in Buffalo and in Carnegie Hall were four short piano pieces by the twenty-eight-year-old composer-pianist Julius Eastman. Julius simply appeared in my ofﬁce one day—a tall, slim, handsome

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black man dressed in a long Army-green trench coat and white sneakers, carrying some scores under his arm. “Lukas Foss said I should come over and talk to you,” he said in a low, modulated voice. “I have a string quartet I’d like the Creative Associates to play.” Foss hadn’t mentioned a thing to me, which meant that I hadn’t approached any of the musicians—some of whom could be quite surly about agreeing to do anything that might encroach on free time. I gave him the musicians’ phone numbers, suggesting that he could call them. “Good luck,” I said skeptically. As it turned out, Eastman stayed. He joined the Center as a guest performer that season (1968–1969), became an ofﬁcial CA in fall 1969, and began teaching music theory in the SUNYAB music department in 1971. His biographical sketch in the Evenings for New Music concert program notes: “Pianist-composer. Diploma in composition from the Curtis Institute of Music. Among his works are two ballets, songs, orchestral and piano works. Instructor of theory at the State University of New York at Buffalo Music Department.” Over the years, eight of his compositions were performed on the Evenings for New Music concerts in Buffalo and in Carnegie Recital Hall, ranging from Piano Pieces I–IV to Thruway, a theater piece incorporating jazz, ﬁlm images, and an a cappella choir from the local East High School. The last work of Eastman’s to be performed on an Evening for New Music was If You’re So Smart Why Aren’t You Rich? in 1978. To say that Julius Eastman was a “pianist-composer” slights his talent in other areas. He performed in numerous Center events in this country and abroad as conductor, actor, mime, electronicist, pianist, organist, speaker, and singer. Anyone who was present will never forget his stunning performances of Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King or his moving recitation of Sam Melville’s letter from Attica prison in Frederic Rzewski’s Coming Together. His colleague Cristyne Lawson, then a professor of dance at SUNYAB, recalls: “We did The Blacks by Jean Genet and Julius was the Black Queen. He stood on a high scaffolding in a long dress that covered the base and was in a white mask. At the very end of the piece, he takes off the mask and laughs—and the audience sees that it’s a black man underneath. Julius was a genius. He brought so many ideas to all of us.”41 He was irreverent, funny, outrageous, and undisciplined, but there was a seriousness, a grave attentiveness at his core. When he died in 1990, Kyle Gann wrote in his obituary in the Village Voice: “one of the least-recognized and most imaginative minimalists, Eastman was a pioneer. His Stay On It (1973), performed across Europe by SUNY at Buffalo’s Creative Associates, was one of the ﬁrst pieces to introduce pop tonal progressions in an art context.”42

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Fusion The late March (1969) Evenings for New Music concert was unlike any we had ever presented. One heard the sound even before one entered the darkened, ampliﬁer-strewn auditorium. Mauve and green Indian-inspired ﬁligree projections bathed the walls on either side of the stage. Incense permeated the space. In the dim light, one could barely make out La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela sitting cross-legged on the ﬂoor of the stage. Their ampliﬁed humming provided a human counterpart over the loud Moog-synthesizer-produced electronic drone. The soft colors of Zazeela’s light installation shifted. The sound became louder—a blown-away orientalist vision? Foss had asked visiting composer, Terry Riley, if he had any suggestions for the season’s ﬁnal Evenings for New Music concert. Riley proposed a collaborative event, “a seamless experience,” with music by La Monte Young, himself, and Jon Hassell (in that order). Even on the printed, single-sheet program, the three distinctive typefaces bled directly from one piece into another. La Monte Young’s piece, 8:30–9:37 P.M. 4 III 69 from “Map of 49’s Dream the Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals” (1969) began with Lawrence Singer playing oboe, Riley on soprano saxophone, Jan Williams and Edward Burnham on percussion, and Yuji Takahashi on keyboard. Jon Hassell served as electronicist for Riley’s electronic drone. In contrast to the Young, Riley’s Kundalini Dervish (1969), described in the program note as a primeval dance in which the participants try to “shake the snakes,” generated a rhythmic tension and excitement. The Riley led directly into Jon Hassell’s Goodbye Music (1969), in which the composer played the ampliﬁed zither and Riley played an organ drone. The zither music was taped live and subjected to time delays, in addition to other electronic manipulations. Herman Trotter wrote in the Buffalo Evening News, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, “This particular Evenings for New Music could be regarded as a sort of mod, Mid-Eastern tribute to classical form, along symphonic lines. There was a long exposition of the basic intervals, a lyric development section and a spacious epilogue, in lieu of recapitulation. Take your choice.”43 As usual, the concert was repeated in New York’s Carnegie Recital Hall a few days later. Under the headline, “Music: Loud Last Word—Lukas Foss’s Evenings for the New End in Collaborative Electronic Uproar,” critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote, “It was the damnedest concert . . . one composer would pick up after the others left off, in non-stop fashion. . . . The hall was ﬁlled with electronic equipment, loudspeakers fore and aft, incense . . . lights at a minimum.”44 Schonberg went on to comment that because of the loud

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amplitude of Young’s piece, a number of audience members—including Lukas Foss—stayed in the hall for a while, then left to socialize in the lobby.

Cornucopia The Center’s sixth season (1969–1970) was the university’s eighth year as a state institution. The vastly expanded student body was still shoehorned onto the old campus. Prefabricated buildings, trailers, and storefronts were set up to house classes. The parking lots, every pathway, the student union, and the classes were jammed. The campus was deﬁnitely cooking. “More poetry readings are held,” wrote Barbara Probst Solomon about SUNY Buffalo in a 1968 issue of Harper’s magazine, “more East Europeans invited, more movies shown on any given day than anyone can absorb.” There was so much going on, she continued, “that the University suffers constantly from indigestion.”45 To us, the crunch felt good. The Albright-Knox Art Gallery auditorium contains 347 seats plus another 150 or so additional spots, if you count the improvised seating along the window ledges and stairs descending into the seating well. At the opening concert of the Center’s sixth season, a Saturday night in early November, Buffalo Evening News music critic John Dwyer reported that the place was “ﬁlled up well before curtain time and 15 minutes before the ﬁrst far-out note.” “The gallery guards,” he wrote, “were trying to close the doors on a grievously disappointed overﬂow crowd standing in the misty rain.” Foss, whose work Paradigm was on the program, was caught outside among the “dispossessed,” as Dwyer called them, having no way to make the guards aware of his situation. Someone alerted me to the problem and, once I explained, the guards agreed to open the doors for a few seconds so we could yank Foss inside. Although we sympathized with the disappointed people who were turned away, it was exhilarating to know that, for at least a small portion of the population, we were a valued ﬁxture in town. The concert that night featured works by composer-trombonist James Fulkerson; Kenneth Gaburo’s Antiphony IV for chamber trio and tape (1966– 1967); and Barney Childs’ Jack’s New Bag (1967). In his review, Dwyer wrote that Fulkerson’s piece, For Norma (1968), “was a beauty, a wild mélange with soprano laughter, sensual ecstasy, tears, and derision by soprano Gwendolin Sims. . . . Jack’s New Bag by Barney Childs featured Mr. [Ronald] Peters as an intent, demented hammer soloist (a real hammer) on wood and mallets on the piano’s insides, with hisses by the cellist, and the trumpeter playing the mouthpiece alone, Lejaren Hiller conducting with rapt dedication amid chaos.” Dwyer closed the review by saying, “The troupe is the most going concern, I think, in new music anywhere in the country. It misses on some of its tries, but a couple

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of its peaks, on any series evening, make it delightfully worthwhile.”46 The concert was repeated, with minor adjustments, at York University in Toronto, Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, and at SUNY at Albany. The four remaining Evenings for New Music concerts in the 1969–1970 season were repeated at Carnegie Recital Hall and, with special funding secured from the National Endowment for the Arts by Carnegie Hall director Julius Bloom, in New Jersey at Rutgers University. The Creative Associate Recital Series, conceived and realized completely autonomously by the fellows, was often where the most innovative music, dance, and theater took place. These events were performed on the university campus or sometimes in the old Pierce-Arrow plant, called Domus, a large loftlike space across town renovated by the university to house the growing number of university-based performance groups. In these recital programs, the Center members played old music and new music, told stories, showed ﬁlms, did anything they wanted to do.

FIGURE 2.2 Collage of Creative Associate Recital posters. Design and photograph: Lucy Childress. Collection Renée Levine Packer.

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It was Petr Kotik who helped Gwendolin Sims plan and produce her recital—a mini-retrospective of Morton Feldman’s music. Newly arrived from Czechoslovakia, the composer-ﬂutist Kotik spoke German, but hardly any English. Sims, who had studied at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, was ﬂuent in German, so she became, as he describes it, “my conduit to the world.” Kotik suggested that they visit Morton Feldman, who was then the director of the Studio School on Eighth Street in Manhattan. They spent an afternoon talking about the concert with Feldman, who was thrilled, as he still received relatively few U.S. performances of his work in those years. The Feldman works they settled on for the program were Journey to the End of the Night (1947), Vertical Thoughts II (1963), Rabbi Akiba (1963), and For Franz Kline (1962). Kotik conducted the large ensembles which, in addition to Gwendolin Sims, included CAs James Fulkerson, Jan Williams, Ed Burnham, Marijke Verberne, and Julius Eastman, plus several music department students and members of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. Opening the concert was a curious gem by Rudolf Komorous, a Czech composer-friend of Kotik’s who lived in Canada. The twelve-minute theater piece, Lady Blancarosa (1967), was semistaged, using just a few props and

FIGURE

2.3 Gwendolin Sims (Warren). Unidentiﬁed photographer.

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2.4 Petr Kotik. Photo: © Mickey H. Osterreicher.

costumes. Julius Eastman, in a wig and in drag, popping out of a wardrobe closet on stage, caused great hilarity and set up a cozy, cheerfully receptive mood for the quiet, intricate weavings of the Feldman music that followed. Forever and Sunsmell (1944) by John Cage for voice, percussion, and dancers and Cornelius Cardew’s Schooltime Compositions (1967) closed the program. The concert was a triumph for Sims, who by then had traveled light years away from Salzburg.

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Kotik had had a tough time getting out of Czechoslovakia. In the early 1960s, there were only a few holes in the Iron Curtain, a few places where Czechs could go freely and meet the world. Warsaw and Vienna were two: In Warsaw, where there was a vigorous new music scene, Kotik would bring tapes of his music to the headquarters of the Composers Union on the old square. There, he and other composers would sit for hours listening to each other’s music. Among the composers he met and became friends with in Warsaw were Cornelius Cardew and Frederic Rzewski, both of whom had been CAs in the early years. Later, in Vienna, he was introduced to the German composer Michael von Biel, also recently back from Buffalo. Money was one of the attractions of the Buffalo fellowship, in addition to the promise of excellent colleagues and having ample time to work on one’s own projects. Because of the favorable exchange rate, the Europeans could save a good deal of money from their stipends, sometimes enough to live on for the next half year or more back home. In 1968, Kotik met Hiller through the Composers Union in Warsaw and expressed his interest in coming to Buffalo. Hiller told him he would try to arrange a Creative Associate fellowship for him if he could get a visa for travel to the United States. Hiller followed up by sending him a formal letter of invitation on university stationery. After the invasion by the Russian troops in 1968, Czechoslovakia was literally closed. Although Kotik was not permitted to travel to West Germany to visit his mother, a trip deemed personal, on the strength of Hiller’s letter, he got a valid exit visa to go to the United States because it was a business trip. With the border rules changing every day, Kotik called his mother and told her to contact Hiller to ask him to reword the invitation, stating that his presence was required immediately for the Center’s scheduled performances. Hiller did this and, apparently, also called the State Department to explain the situation. When the visa arrived at the American Embassy in Prague, a secretary called him and told him to pick it up without delay. While he was waiting his turn at the Embassy, a secretary quietly advised him to leave as soon as possible, that he had a day or two at most before the borders would be sealed again. He departed from Prague the next morning, leaving his wife, Charlotta, and his six-month old son, Tomas, behind for the time being. Not satisﬁed with the music Foss and Hiller were programming on the Evenings for New Music concerts, Kotik found himself a used car and an apartment and set to work organizing another group. Four months later, in March 1970, his S.E.M. Ensemble gave its ﬁrst concert at Domus, the old Pierce-Arrow plant. The two-hour program consisted of Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise, some Cage pieces, and Kotik’s own string trio. Herman Trotter, a

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music critic for the Buffalo Evening News, made the statement, “The S.E.M. Ensemble is driving the audience out.” It was the group’s ﬁrst review.47

Turmoil The political turmoil of America in the late 1960s and early 1970s was starkly evident on the country’s college campuses. The SUNYAB administration, scrambling to deal with one crisis after another, had its hands full, and the last thing on their minds was the Creative Associates. We were a polarized society wrestling with the murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the Vietnam War and the draft, racism, class privilege, and a growing awareness of the seriousness of our environmental degradation. Some would say that SUNYAB reverberates to this day from the traumas of that time. By January 1970, an atmosphere of discontent was palpable at SUNYAB. Earlier that fall, just three years after he had arrived from Berkeley, Martin Meyerson announced that he was taking a leave of absence of two-thirds of a year to direct a task force on university goals and governance and to work on faculty recruiting and issues concerning the construction of the new campus. A few months later, he announced that he would become president of the University of Pennsylvania. Warren Bennis wrote that “the changes proposed by Meyerson depended on continued presidential support for their success. The campus had, in effect, undergone major surgery and did not have time to heal. . . . When Meyerson ﬁnally did resign in late January 1970, it was as though someone had prematurely pulled out the stitches.”48 Richard Siggelkow wrote in a similar vein, “Meyerson’s new conﬁrmed ‘abdication’ was viewed within the University family as ‘untimely,’ ‘unfortunate,’ ‘inopportune,’ and a ‘disaster.’ Recently hired young faculty, many attracted by Meyerson’s glowing vision of SUNYAB’s future, were the least understanding and the most disappointed.”49 Meanwhile, the university’s growing numbers of graduate students, foreign students, faculty, and staff precipitated a severe housing shortage both on and off campus. Some students solved the problem by erecting tents on the lawn near Baird Hall, the music department building, underscoring the sense of student as beleaguered species. Other issues that prompted strenuous student opposition were Project Themis, a university research project developed by the Department of Physiology and the U. S. Navy, which generally was viewed as abetting the Vietnam War, as was the presence of ROTC, the ofﬁcer training program on campus. But it was a routine basketball game that ignited a fuse that embroiled the entire campus in a cycle of violence and destruction for months to come.

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On February 24, 1970, the black players on SUNYAB’s basketball team staged a sit-in at a scheduled game with SUNY Stony Brook to protest what they called the university’s “athletic racism” and professional misconduct by the basketball coaching staff. Non-team members joined the sit-in, swelling the group to an estimated 200 students. The game was canceled. Acting SUNYAB President Peter Regan went to the gym and told the protesters they had ﬁve minutes to leave the playing area or they would face arrest. The demonstrators left the gym ﬂoor, and the crowd dispersed. Meanwhile, fearing the possibility of a more unruly response, an administration ofﬁcial had requested the assistance of city police to augment the university’s campus police force. Thirtysix uniformed police of the Tactical Patrol Unit arrived in a ﬂeet of cars. The police, it turned out, had not been required. According to the student newspaper, The Spectrum, the next night (February 25) began with a rally called by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in support of the black athletes’ demands. At that point, a group of approximately one hundred students decided to confront Acting President Regan over the use of city police on campus. Finding the president’s ofﬁce locked, they talked to a presidential assistant. As the students left the building, they encountered approximately twenty campus police ofﬁcers, garbed in full riot gear, marching in formation toward them. After some stone throwing, the students ran back toward the student union, with the cops following in pursuit. Once in the student union, the students stacked chairs and tables in front of one of the entrances to prevent further police sweeps into the building. Windows were smashed. Campus police forced through the barricades and began chasing people. Many students reported that the police were clubbing people indiscriminately. The confused crowd, forced out of the student union, began hurling rocks and chunks of ice at the police. City police began arriving, and students scattered everywhere. The crowd had now swelled to about 500. A truck and a car were set on ﬁre. Mace, a pepper spray akin to tear gas, began pouring into adjacent dormitories; dogs from the K-9 corps were set free from their leashes by the police. Students were arrested and led into vans.50 According to Howard Mischel, a SUNYAB freshman who was on the scene at the time, bringing the city police on campus was the single most incendiary event. From then on, the disturbances evolved into a cycle of violence and counterviolence. “A lot of kids who may not have paid much attention otherwise, became radicalized immediately. My roommate got cracked across the back with a billy club. He was hospitalized. Another friend of mine was returning from an art class with a tile cutter or something in his knapsack. He was arrested for carrying a dangerous weapon. Everyone felt it was us against them.”51

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The student-police confrontation continued the next day (February 26), when hundreds of individuals packed a lounge in the student union to hear accounts of the battles and arrests of the previous night. After the rally, demonstrators tried to visit the acting president’s ofﬁce, only to ﬁnd it locked once again. They were heading back to the student union when they spotted twenty-ﬁve to thirty ofﬁcers of the campus police in full riot gear at the north end of the university. The students began slowly crossing the ROTC drill ﬁeld chanting “Off the Pigs,” as they charged the police with stones and anything they could ﬁnd to use as weapons. As the Buffalo Evening News reported, a police ofﬁcer explained, “We were greatly outnumbered, so we gracefully and very rapidly got out.”52 Over the next weeks, some of the coldest of the winter, students rallied for a strike and boycotted classes; others adamantly opposed any disruption of their education. Disturbances seeped off campus into a nearby shopping center, causing property damage and even more citizen disgust. By the end of the ﬁrst week of March, the bomb scares, rallies, and picket lines appeared to be dwindling. It was at this juncture that the acting president made the provocative decision to bring the city police back on campus as a kind of peacekeeping occupying force, “to seize the high ground,” he noted to Richard Siggelkow.53 The police occupation of the SUNYAB campus that commenced on Sunday, March 8, only two weeks before spring break, was probably the most controversial episode of the spring term. Over the next weeks, protests and demonstrations kept erupting, sometimes involving thousands of students. Ambulances raced to the campus. Sizable numbers of police and students sustained injuries. On Sunday afternoon, March 15th, shortly before spring vacation, ﬁfty faculty members staged a forty-minute sit-in in the president’s ofﬁce to protest the continuing occupation by the Buffalo police. Forty-ﬁve of the group who did not leave on request were arrested, including an eventual Nobel Prize winner, South African John Coetzee, then an assistant professor in the English Department. It took a year before the charges of criminal trespass and criminal contempt were ﬁnally dismissed.54 Spring vacation helped calm things down. But colleges and universities across the nation convulsed anew with violent protest strikes when, on May 4th, four students at Kent State University were killed by Ohio National Guardsmen. This tragic event and the government’s announcement of the bombing of Cambodia created pure frenzy. According to Todd Gitlin, “At least a million students probably demonstrated for the ﬁrst time in their lives in May.” He estimated that “at least thirty ROTC buildings were burned or bombed during the ﬁrst week of May.”55 Then came the bombing of the Army Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, which killed a physicist and wounded several other individuals. People held their breath in

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disbelief. On May 5, about 2,500 SUNYAB students marched down Main Street, along the northern edge of campus, chanting “Remember Kent State, No More War, No More Nixon.” This time the Buffalo police gassed the students. “A few days later, the police ﬁred tear gas again to disperse an estimated crowd of ﬁve hundred demonstrators near Baird Hall.”56 A large round tear gas canister crashed through the glass wall of my ofﬁce, landing squarely on the top of my desk. The building had been evacuated at the time but, for months afterward when I pulled out a book or ﬁle from my bookcase, my eyes would well up and smart from the newly activated fumes. Everything was in shambles. There seemed no point in continuing. As freshman student Howard Mischel recalled, “Finals meant nothing,” and the students were sent home early. The whole semester had been a wrenching siege. Everyone was exhausted. In an article titled “Colleges’ Strike Theme: No Business as Usual,” The Spectrum announced that antigovernment protests had taken place at more than 339 schools, striking and announcing their theme: No business as usual until the Southeast Asian war ends.57 Across town, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra was having its own troubles. The orchestra, nearing ﬁnancial collapse, was considering merging with the Rochester Philharmonic, a cost-cutting scheme Foss adamantly opposed. The orchestra’s well-publicized ﬁnancial plight encouraged even more criticism. Although avant-garde enthusiasts continued to greet his adventurous programming with open arms, a vocal group of opponents equated Foss’s name solely with experimental music and didn’t appreciate having new works forced on them.58 In May 1969, citing the proposed merger with Rochester as unacceptable, Foss resigned his post as musical director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, effective at the end of the following (1969–1970) season. He was careful to state to the press, however, that although he planned to move with his family to New York City, he was retaining his role as codirector of the SUNYAB Creative Associates.59 After stepping down as music director in the spring of 1970, Foss assumed the title of Principal Guest Conductor of the Orchestra for the following season (1970–1971), thereby remaining a presence in Buffalo for a season beyond his resignation.

The Early Seventies By fall 1970, SUNYAB had a new president. Perhaps for lack of an effective leader to rally the students or perhaps because chaos can only go on so long, the campus was calm again. As Gitlin wrote, “Activism never recovered from the summer vacation of 1970.”60 A late September edition of the student paper, The Spectrum,

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reported that the newly appointed president Dr. Robert L. Ketter, a former engineer and dean of the graduate school, expressed some optimism about the coming year and announced that his administration would be an “open” one. The Spectrum went on to say, however, that the ominous shadow of those dark days in spring were still on everybody’s mind. The music department, too, had a new leader in Dr. Albert Cohen, a historian from the University of Michigan who specialized in seventeenthcentury French music and was a violinist of professional caliber. He seemed well disposed toward the Center. When President Ketter asked him to supply “an indication of departmental stance” regarding the Center, Cohen wrote: Since its inception in 1964, the center has made Buffalo one of the half-dozen major centers for new music in the United States. . . . It has served as a prototype for similar groups having afﬁliation throughout the nation (for example, at the Universities of Michigan, Illinois and Iowa). [The department’s] strongest and most attractive program, that in composition, has ﬂourished as a direct consequence of the performances of the center on campus—particularly and importantly on the graduate level. This program of study consistently attracts our strongest and most gifted students—both nationally and from abroad. Over and beyond this, however, almost all graduate student applications cite the presence of the center as one of the main incentives for attending school at Buffalo. Creative Associate composers and instrumentalists not only inspire student interest in this department, but also have inﬂuenced the acceptance of the Slee Professor’s Chair by major living composers in the world today. This is, of course, because of the presence of these young artists who create the climate and provide the resources so imperative to the performance possibilities for both teacher and student. We have consistently sought to integrate the center’s activities with those of the Department: Student composers have performed at center concerts, advanced students are permitted performance opportunities with the Creative Associates, open rehearsals and workshops form part of the center activities.61 And yet, money problems continued to loom. My application cover letter to Walter Anderson, Program Director for Music at the National Endowment for the Arts, outlines the situation: By June, 1968, the two Rockefeller “seeding” grants to the center which had amounted to $350,000 were entirely phased out, with the

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university assuming complete responsibility for the project. Because the university received a 70% cut in State funds that year, university ofﬁcials had decided to substitute $150,000 of (non-state) accrued income from the music department’s Slee Endowment Fund to support center operations and fellowships through June, 1970. By that time, the Slee Fund had been almost entirely exhausted and, while a small amount of residual Slee monies were being used, the center was mainly funded by three sources: $60,000 from the university for fellowships, $30,000 from the New York State Council on the Arts for concert operations, and $24,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation for two special fellowships related to Hiller’s theater initiative. In addition, a few local gifts from private sources were obtained and one Creative Associate fellowship was anonymously donated by a foundation in St. Louis, Missouri.62 The reality was that money was scarce, particularly for an experimental, largely nonteaching enterprise such as the Creative Associates. We were going to have to use all our wits to cobble together sufﬁcient funding to maintain a viable ensemble. An unexpected boost came a few days later in a letter from Governor Nelson Rockefeller announcing that the Center had been chosen as one of the nine recipients of the 1971 New York State Award. The awards had been established in 1966 to recognize the demonstrated concern for physical beautiﬁcation and quality of artistic life in New York State. The Center, the letter stated, was receiving the award “for signiﬁcant contributions to the ﬁeld of new music and experimental performing arts; for successfully demonstrating the feasibility of resident artists functioning within an academic milieu.”63 The award, bestowed in an upbeat ceremony at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, was a small abstract sculpture by Kenneth Snelson especially designed for the occasion. The Snelson sculpture is on view in the SUNYAB Music Department Library to this day. The Creative Associate lineup in the 1970–1971 season was, even in straitened circumstances, formidable. In addition to Jan Williams and Julius Eastman, both of whom were now also members of the music department faculty, the Center members included virtuoso string player Mark Sokol—who would later form the Concord String Quartet, noted for its focus on the contemporary literature—and the West Coast cellist Douglas Davis, along with guitarist Stuart Fox, pianist Roger Shields, composer-ﬂutist Petr Kotik, trombonist-composer James Fulkerson, and percussionist Howard Zwickler. Two very talented graduate students in clarinet and percussion received half-time

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2.5 1971 New York State Arts Award Ceremony (left to right: Eric Larrabee, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Lukas Foss, Lejaren Hiller, Albert Cohen, Allen Sapp). Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Michael Fredericks.

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fellowships, thus rounding out the roster and cushioning the stringent reduction in fellowship funds. Meanwhile, from his Ofﬁce of Cultural Affairs, Allen Sapp, working closely with Lejaren Hiller, vigorously lobbied the Rockefeller Foundation and obtained a special “grant-in-aid” (the term for sums under $25,000) to fund Hiller’s plan for setting up an interdisciplinary program in dance, theater, and multimedia.64 Hiller was interested in broadening the scope of the Center beyond that of a modern music group. As he wrote in a foundation proposal draft, “even though numerous pieces programmed on the Evenings for New Music series contained non-musical elements (theater, projections, etc.), it was nearly always the case that personnel trained in music rather than the other arts created and/or produced the pieces in question.”65 When a Rockefeller Foundation ofﬁcial informed him that a grant-in-aid could be made only for new projects, Hiller jettisoned that idea. The actual grant, therefore, was to support a nucleus of people who would make up a new entity, the “Performance Research Unit.” Hiller stated his intention to create a twin operation alongside the existing

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Center, inaugurating a series entitled Evenings for New Theater, with a base of operations in the renovated old Pierce-Arrow plant across town. The new venture would be led by the Obie-winning director Joseph Dunn, along with a codirector, the actress Irja Koljonen. For the ﬁrst year, the new entity would be lodged within the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts, which, Hiller felt, would ﬁnally be living up to its name. The Center’s 1970–1971 roster, therefore, included theatrical director Joseph Dunn, dancer-choreographer Mary Fulkerson, playwright Frank Parman, and theatrical technician Edward Cox, all recipients of the specially earmarked Rockefeller funds for theater.

Mad Kings and Making Do “The queen’s name is Essss-ther,” growled the distraught voice from the stage. “Eastman’s ‘Mad King’: Mighty Work of Theater” was the headline in the Buffalo Evening News review. Music critic John Dwyer says it all:

2.6 Performance of Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King (left to right: Julius Eastman, Mark Sokol, Petr Kotik; not shown: Roger Shields, Howard Zwickler, Roberto Laneri, Douglas Davis, Lukas Foss). Albright-Knox Art Gallery, November 1970. Photo: Chris Rusiniak.

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The dramatic sensation of this town over many seasons was the portrayal of mad King George III by singing actor Julius Eastman, Sunday evening in Albright Knox Art Gallery auditorium, hailed by a standing crowd with noisy applause and bravos. This was the opening of the annual “Evenings for New Music” series by the SUNYAB Creative Associates, the audience packed to the walls. The music-theater work was Eight Songs for a Mad King by British composer Peter Maxwell-Davies [sic], with verses by Randolph Stow including wistful, pathetic, ranting passages by the monarch himself, as taken down at court. It’s for the one voice and six players. Appearing in royal brocaded gown and furred cap, Mr. Eastman played the pitiable monarch as stricken and crazy but endlessly human as he roved the stage or sank, spent and muttering, on his centered throne. His spastic delivery included squeaks, moans, growls and roars, a marvelous falsetto right on the tone, a remarkable mimetic gift in responding with matching timbres to string, ﬂute, bell, bird-whistle or drum. But the underlying agony, the imploring for human understanding, the wrenching effect of the king’s straining for reason amid the whirlwinds of his own mind, these were the heights of the Eastman performance. And the music with its ravaged strains of court dance, folk air and Handel oratorio reﬂected the twiceterrible insanity of familiar things in frightful disarray.66 The other expertly performed works on the program—Ben Zion Orgad’s Trio for Strings, Cocktail Music by Salvatore Martirano, and Alcides Lanza’s Penetrations V for ensemble, electronics, and lights—were simply run over by the power of Davies’s piece. In a subsequent performance at Carnegie Recital Hall, music critic Harold C. Schonberg called it “a theater piece that has direct communication, and it hits the listener like a collective shriek from Bedlam.” After describing Eastman—“a black pianist-composer currently teaching at the State University in Buffalo”—and discussing his talents, Schonberg closed his review of the piece as follows: “Toward the end [Eastman] snatched the violin from the player, tore off its strings and smashed it. We used to get violin burnings in the old (ca. 1955) days, from the Cage group. That was Dada. This was theater.”67 With increased input from the CAs, Foss and Hiller continued programming a broad mix of work that year, including a notable concentration of American and Asian composers. Among the works by American composers performed in the 1970–1971 Evenings for New Music series were John Cage’s Amores for prepared piano and percussion trio (1943), Milton Babbitt’s All Set

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(1957), Jacob Druckman’s Animus 1 for trombone (1966), Charles Ives’s Sonata, Violin-pianoforte, no. 4 (1905–24), William Hellerman’s Formata (1967), Lou Harrison’s Concerto for the Violin (1959), and Salvatore Martirano’s Cocktail Music for Piano (1962). After participating in Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan, Foss brought back a number of scores by Japanese composers for possible performances by the Center. Japanese composers performed that same season were Toru Takemitsu (Sacriﬁce, 1970), Jo Kondo (Breeze for 9 Players, 1970), and Joji Yuasa (Projection for Violoncello and Piano, 1967). The scoring of many of these works reﬂected the diminished number of CA fellows. From time to time, guest players from the Buffalo Philharmonic or from the music department faculty were hired to ﬁll out the ensemble. Breeze by Jo Kondo and Three Rituals for Two Percussionists and Lights by Lejaren Hiller were pieces that were performed on the May 1, 1971, Evenings for New Music program and that reﬂect diametrically opposed points of view. Breeze was commissioned from the twenty-three-year old composer Jo Kondo for the Music Today festival, held at the Steel Pavilion of Expo ’70 in Osaka. The trombonist-composer James Fulkerson recalled working on the Kondo as a high point in his tenure as a CA. “I was fortunate to direct a performance of Jo Kondo’s Breeze. This experience led to a lifelong friendship with Jo Kondo which I value most highly.”68 As Fulkerson remembers, he stopped by the CA ofﬁce to inquire how the Kondo rehearsals were going and was told that the piece was canceled because the musicians considered it unplayable (even though it had already been performed at Expo ’70). A major complaint, it seemed, was that one had to memorize twenty-three pages of instructions before one could begin to rehearse. Fulkerson was intrigued and, after looking over the graphically notated score, volunteered to try to mount another attempt. “It is true,” Fulkerson notes, that: One must read and understand twenty-three pages of instructions, but, if one thinks systemically, this is not a difﬁcult task. Breeze is a network of very subtle interacting sounds between three sets of three players: three percussion, two ﬂutes, two clarinets, cello, and contrabass. Each percussionist has three cowbells (higher, middle, and low). All sounds are ppp to mp with pp as the normal volume. These sounds, along with spoken words indicated in each player’s part, are picked up by an air mike and moved by a sound distributor around the room. All sounds by the string and wind instruments should be long (using the longest possible breath as the basic pulse). Their ranges are divided into high, middle, and low as well. Kondo asks each player to concentrate his attention earnestly on listening and

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accommodate his sounds to those produced by the others. For me, the piece provokes a feeling not unlike listening to J. S. Bach—one senses a beauty and an architecture at work, an architecture which one can almost aurally decipher but of course which one never does.69 Hiller provided the following note for Three Rituals: This composition was completed late in 1969 and given its ﬁrst performance in London in February, 1970 by ‘The Electric Candle.’ The present performance is the ﬁrst one in the U.S. All theatrical elements in this score are fully notated and are integral to the total concept. All gestures and movements are speciﬁed, as are all lighting cues. In short, this is not an improvisation, not a chance piece, not an opportunity to do your thing; this is a precisely deﬁned composite ritual programmed down to its smallest detail, even the costumes for the performance.70 Many Center fellows admired the Beatles, particularly the eclecticism of their musical sources and the way they used recording as kind of an art in itself. As former CA Michael Sahl remarked, “Sgt. Pepper was a real Gesamtkunstwerk [total art work] on a record.”71 Now the Beatles were breaking up. After years of being refused entry because of drug convictions, John Lennon was ﬁnally allowed to visit the United States but became entangled in a lengthy legal struggle when he attempted to make his presence permanent. There were constant reports in the papers that he would soon be deported. Lennon’s wife, Yoko Ono, had long been afﬁliated with the avant-garde, particularly Fluxus. A prestigious fellowship appointment at a large university had eased immigration skirmishes for several CAs from abroad before. Figuring that we could ﬁnd a local patron to pay for it, I phoned Lennon’s lawyer and told him that, if it would help matters, we would offer Lennon a guest composer slot in the Buffalo group. I was warmly thanked, but nothing ever came of it. By its seventh year, the Center was hanging on with half the number of full-time Center fellows. Curiously, the Center’s reduced self-sufﬁciency created several positive results. If a work recommended by a composer was scored for instruments outside the Center’s resident ensemble, we had to reach out to the orchestra, the university music faculty, and advanced students; these occasions for guest musicians to play in Center events resulted in better communication and a mutual appreciation within the musical community. CAs played more student compositions, and friendships ensued. Goodwill spread toward

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what some faculty members had seen as “those prima donnas.” Over time, the combination of the CAs, Lukas Foss, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and the Festivals of the Arts Today had achieved a national, even international, notoriety that marked Buffalo and the university as a hip art community at home with experimentation and change. Some people found this attractive enough to convince them to move to Buffalo. One of them was Peter B. Yates, music critic, author, teacher, and poet. Peter Yates was married to the pianist Frances Mullen, a highly respected champion of the work of composer Charles Ives. Together they had started a series of chamber music concerts in their Los Angeles home that became known as “Evenings on the Roof.” The programs presented contemporary music in combination with more traditional works, performed by important composers and performers in the Los Angeles musical scene. The series later evolved into the “Monday Evening Concerts” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The concerts enjoyed a national reputation for their performances of the works of such twentieth-century composers as Igor Stravinsky, John Cage, and Lou Harrison. Lukas Foss and Michael Tilson Thomas frequently participated in the concerts.72 Although the Evenings for New Music concerts did not include traditional classical music as part of the format, the Monday Evening Concerts may certainly be seen as a precursor for the Buffalo series and an early inﬂuence on Foss. In 1968, Yates was appointed the head of the music department at Buffalo State University College. Previously a teacher’s college and much smaller than SUNYAB, the College was an important partner in the city’s cultural life. Now, adding to the already percolating cultural climate, Yates, too, arranged many concerts of the works of living composers. One memorable event took place on a snowy evening in 1972 with Lou Harrison, one of Yates’s favorites. Harrison, wearing a short kimono that made one think of a jolly ﬂorist, discussed his work with gusto and pleasure, charming the appreciative young audience with his eclectic musical outlook. By the early seventies, Buffalo was a town with “a general experimental aura.”73 Now recognized as a place that was hospitable to the art of its time, new enterprises also sprang up in ﬁlm, video, and the visual arts. Before joining the English Department at SUNYAB in 1970, Gerald O’Grady, a Ph.D. in medieval English, had been teaching at Rice University in Houston, Texas. During a stint as faculty advisor to a student ﬁlm club, he found himself increasingly interested in European art ﬁlm and documentary. After arriving in Buffalo, he started an independent nonproﬁt media center in a storefront adjacent to the university after successfully acquiring funds for that purpose (with the help of Allen Sapp) from the New York State Arts Council. Eventually, the university

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administration asked O’Grady to take over a group of disparate programs at the university that engaged the media in one way or another. He was asked to make a coherent program out of the language lab, radio station, a small engineering program, and a media equipment loan service, as well as to teach some classes on ﬁlm. As O’Grady recalls: At that time, no one was hiring ﬁlmmakers as teachers. SUNYAB, however, by now had a tradition of hiring practicing composers and musicians engaged in avant-garde music, such as the Creative Associates and the more senior composers through the Slee Professor Endowment. Based on these models, I made the ﬁrst hires for what became the Center for Media Studies in 1973: ﬁlmmakers Paul Sharits and Hollis Frampton.74 Later he recruited James Blue, Tony Conrad, and video makers Woody and Steina Vasulka to work at the community media access center. Eventually, they joined the SUNYAB faculty, as well. One of the things that had impressed the original Rockefeller evaluation team was the easy communication and organizational partnering evident between Buffalo’s major educational and arts institutions. A valued component of this infrastructure was Buffalo State University College, located immediately across the street from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. The College had a good relationship with the Albright-Knox and would play a signiﬁcant role in future Gallery-sponsored arts festivals. The adventuresome arts atmosphere of Buffalo and the proximity of the Albright-Knox and its receptivity to diverse art forms were a stimulating mix for a group of art students then attending Buffalo State University College—painters Robert Longo, Charles Clough, and photographer Cindy Sherman. They attended concerts and, particularly, the ﬁlms shown by Media Studies at the Albright-Knox or on the SUNYAB campus regularly. In an interview with Anthony Bannon, Longo said, “I’ve got the ﬁlms of Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, and Paul Sharits in my blood. . . . Those movies were a primal ooze for us.”75 Longo and his colleagues decided to set up a gallery and living space in an old ice packing warehouse in downtown Buffalo owned by local sculptor/ activist Larry Griffes, a place they called Hallwalls.76 The godparents of the enterprise, one might say, were the new directors of the Albright-Knox, Robert Buck and James Wood, along with young Albright-Knox staffers Linda Cathcart, Charlotta Kotik, and Douglas Schultz, all of whom offered help and advice. With additional guidance from O’Grady and the SUNYAB ﬁlmmakers, plus their own energy and vision, the Hallwalls crew set to work creating a place that

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would provide community; a place where they could invite New York artists to come and share their knowledge, experience, and ideas; a place for having fun and doing “whatever the artists dream up.”77 The Hallwalls group ignored academic convention by considering ﬁlm, video, photography, and painting in an equal light. Cross-fertilization was simply the way of things. As Anthony Bannon writes, they came from “the ﬁrst generation of television humans. They have been fed the tube with their bottles.”78 These “media babies,” as Bannon termed them, and their colleagues Nancy Dwyer, Michael Zwack, Diane Bertolo, and others went on to achieve notable success in the art world, and they, too, cut their teeth on the Buffalo of the early 1970s. During this period, small alternative arts organizations such as Hallwalls were being born all over the United States. They were founded in response to new directions and changing formats in contemporary art and the traditional art world’s disinclination or inability to address those developments. Many were founded by artist-activists with social and political agendas (civil rights, antiwar, anti-arts establishment, feminist, gay rights). They occupied all kinds of physical spaces, from storefronts and lofts to community centers and old warehouses. Almost all these organizations, particularly those outside of New York City, were determined to identify with the artists and audiences in their own communities and to introduce nontraditional audiences to experimental work. Such organizations were, and still are, the research and development laboratories and incubators for underknown artists, many of whom might have no other platform for their work. They were about process, not heritage; a spirit of inclusion informed the variety of work and styles to be seen. But, as Mark Russell, the former director of P.S. 122, a well-known alternative art space in New York, said, “One precept uniﬁes all these places: The artist is always ﬁrst.”79 Buffalo’s low cost of living and nurturing environment helped spark the creation of another adventuresome community in addition to Hallwalls around this same time. The CEPA Gallery (the Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Arts), conceived by freelance photographer Robert Muffaletto, ofﬁcially got under way as a nonproﬁt exhibition space for photography in 1974. Combining activism with an entrepreneurial spirit, Muffaletto and the gallery’s succeeding artist-directors were interested in “ﬁnding new audiences for intelligent and tough work.” CEPA was originally located in a store front near the SUNYAB campus. As former codirector Kathy High remarked, “It was like a large workshop, think tank, and one big experiment!” CEPA evolved to embrace a wide variety of programs, including gallery exhibitions, satellite exhibits in the community, ﬁlm programs, publications, educational programs, lecture series, and collaborations with other arts organizations.80

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At the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts, we continued the nowfamiliar exercise in belt tightening. One way for the Center to get some money was to tour, and in 1971–1972, our eighth year, the Center took the Evenings for New Music concerts on the road to a number of campuses, such as McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and Middlebury College in Vermont. With the help of Patty Kerr Ross, who ran the University-Wide Committee on the Arts from Albany, we also visited a number of other SUNY campuses in Albany, Fredonia, and Geneseo, as well as community colleges in Johnstown and Middletown and in Suffolk County, New York. The audiences ranged from indifferent to genuinely enthusiastic, and it was always invigorating for us to bring work by composers such as Mauricio Kagel, Barbara Kolb, Foss, Eastman, and Hiller to new audiences. One piece that was performed quite often that season was Foss’s Ni Bruit Ni Vitesse (1971) for piano keys and piano strings. Foss supplied the program note: The title, “Neither Noise Nor Speed,” is borrowed from a French trafﬁc signal. This work which is dedicated to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, is another step in the direction the composer has walked the last several years: A notation which offers choices every instant without offering improvisation (chance). Sounds emerging, submerging—a children’s tune? (But changing with every performance.) A tape made by the performers for the performers to ‘play with.’ Ni Bruit Ni Vitesse is a Duet in the sense that it requires two performers, but they play on one instrument, the piano. A belated addition to the quasi-extinct piano four-hand literature? Hardly. It is for pianist and percussionist. The latter plays on the piano strings.81 During this period, we reviewed everything we considered “business as usual.” At the urging of the New York State Council on the Arts, whose operating funds had become essential to producing the Evenings for New Music concerts, the Center instituted a small admission charge for the AlbrightKnox concerts. We cut the Carnegie Hall presentations from four a year to three, thus saving nearly nine thousand dollars (approximately the cost of one full CA fellowship). To augment the now sparse fellowship lines, the Center enlisted three graduate student instrumentalists of advanced capability: percussionist Jeffery Kowalsky, clarinetist-composer Roberto Laneri, and bassoonist-composer Andrew Stiller. The graduate students, who were paid three thousand dollars each for the academic year, lent a great deal to the group in terms of energy, fresh viewpoints, and closer ties to the student body. Touring enhanced the

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students’ feeling of community with the CAs, in addition to giving them professional experience on a very high level. Rehearsing and sharing the stage with such brilliant performers as pianist Roger Shields, cellist Douglas Davis, and percussionists Jan Williams and Garry Kvistad was not only a great responsibility but also a thrill. In this case, perceived adversity in the form of fewer full-time Creative Associates actually brought a new dimension to the group. In future years, the tradition of appointing talented graduate students as “Junior Creative Associates” enriched the Center with highly valued performers and colleagues, such as the pianist Joseph Kubera and composers Peter Gena and Nils Vigeland, among others. As Kubera remembers, “Our growth as individual musicians was nurtured by the way the Center was set up with composers and players constantly interacting with one another—the constant feedback and the maximum time allotted for rehearsals.”82 Over the year, the CA recitals continued to provide audiences with an array of musical adventures. Roger Shields presented an evening devoted to instrumental pieces from Hiller’s multimedia extravaganza Rage over the Lost Beethoven, whereas percussionist Garry Kvistad, pianist-composer Richard Trythall, and electronicist George Ritscher partnered to perform Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontakte (1959–1960) and other works. Clarinetist Roberto Lanieri invited Slee Professor George Perle to play Perle’s work for clarinet and piano, Sonata quasi una fantasia (1972), with him. Bassoonist-composer Andrew Stiller included a slot on his recital for the Ad-Hoc Trystereo System Jug Band.

3 Feldman in Buffalo: Fall 1972

In December 1964, Lukas Foss called Gerald Freund at the Rockefeller Foundation to urge the Foundation to support the composer Morton Feldman. Feldman, he explained, although well established and frequently performed, derived virtually no income from his music and earned his living pressing suits. Foss speculated that Feldman might be invited by SUNYAB to be the Visiting Slee Professor of Music in the following year and wondered if the Foundation would enable Feldman to compose full time for a year or so.1 Feldman really did work in his father’s garment factory in Queens near LaGuardia Airport at the time, but he deliberately exaggerated the circumstances to Foss. Feldman told the story in a conversation with John Dwyer at the Buffalo Evening News: Lukas missed his plane [at LaGuardia Airport] one day and knew I was around there, so he called me up. . . . I told him to come over to the plant. Then I took off my coat, shirt, mussed up my hair and took my place at one of the giant pressers, a terrible, menacing looking machine. When Foss walked in I had the top steam on, the bottom steam on, sweating, straining away—the artist in chains. Lukas stood there, horror-struck. He said, “Oh, Morty. This will not do. We must get you out of here.”2 Except for the set-up aspect, that is the way Foss told me the story, too. It took a little longer than Foss anticipated, but in 1972 Morton Feldman ﬁnally did come to Buffalo as the Slee Professor of Music.

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We were glad he was coming. Hiller was composing and traveling a great deal, teaching and lecturing around the world. Foss, still the Center codirector with Hiller, was increasingly engaged elsewhere, having accepted principal conducting posts with the Jerusalem Orchestra and the Brooklyn Philharmonia and a teaching residency at Harvard. Morty, as most of us knew him, was quirky, amusing, a terriﬁc composer, and smart. Recently divorced, Feldman had spent the previous year in Berlin on a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) fellowship. He did not come to Buffalo intent on settling permanently, but the prestigious Slee professorship in a place noted as a hotbed of contemporary art and music, with expert colleagues who would play his work, and all while receiving a reliable paycheck, was, I am sure, extremely tempting. I helped him ﬁnd a spacious apartment on West Ferry Street, not far from Allen Sapp’s house, where he could walk to neighborhood shops. Many of us lived in the area, and, since Feldman didn’t drive because of his notoriously poor eyesight, someone was always able to give him a ride to the school and back. Somewhere Allan Kaprow described Morton Feldman as a man who “lived attentively.” Feldman had a one-of-a-kind aura. He was a meticulous dresser. He cared about how he looked and took pleasure in going to Brooks Brothers in New York to buy his clothes. I never saw him in a suit or in jeans. He usually wore a sports jacket, checked long-sleeved shirt, and khakis or neatly pressed trousers. Perhaps because he was a heavy, ﬂeshy man, he paid attention to wearing immaculate, well-cut clothes. He had a lot of painter friends, notably Philip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns, and was visually astute. I think he saw himself as a ﬁgure in a landscape. This was interesting because he had such poor eyesight and often pushed one cheek up to the bottom rim of his glasses to focus better as he studied the detail of an oriental rug or a musical score. His relish of detail was clear when he described a scene he witnessed at the Schiller Theater in West Berlin, where he had gone to have a meeting with Samuel Beckett. He spoke of entering a very dark theater and having a difﬁcult time adjusting his already poor vision until ﬁnally he made out the ﬁgure of a man on stage kneeling in front of a woman. As he came closer, he realized that it was Beckett on the ﬂoor, engrossed in making a decision about the length of the actress’s dress. He reported admiringly that Beckett spent at least twenty minutes considering that hem. A special excitement permeated the 1972–1973 season’s opening Evenings for New Music concert. The evening had a festive sheen, and even the AlbrightKnox’s key benefactor, Seymour Knox, and director Robert Buck attended. The featured works, both written in 1972, were by two new Buffalo residents: the thirty-ﬁve-year-old David Del Tredici, a recently appointed Creative Associate,

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and Morton Feldman. The program opened in the auditorium at the southern end of the Gallery with Del Tredici’s Vintage Alice, a twenty-eight-minute piece for soprano, instrumental folk group, and chamber orchestra. Players from the university music department and from the orchestra ﬁlled out the ensemble, conducted by the composer. Vintage Alice was one of the ﬁrst of a long series of compositions by Del Tredici based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. In this performance, the demanding soprano part was sung by Sylvia Brigham-Dimiziani, and, although she and the other performers did a splendid job with the humorous piece, critic John Dwyer noted, it was very conservative for “us ear-stretched veterans of the series.”3 Del Tredici has called Vintage Alice “the most seriously tonal” of the Alice pieces. It uses a poem which parodies “Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are” and works the famous tune into the texture of the piece.4 For a young composer to use such blatant tonality was actually a radical decision completely out of step with the thinking of most of his peers at the Center. In a 2002 interview with Tom Voegeli, Del Tredici explains that the predominantly modernist dissonant musical language of the time seemed inappropriate to Carroll’s “crazy world.”5 Although the tune in Vintage Alice is fractured and distorted, Lukas Foss, looking forward to the possibility of repeating the work in New York, was unsettled. “We can’t have people leaving one of our concerts in Carnegie Hall humming ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star,’” he said in a breathless whisper. “Let’s see if David can suggest something else for us to do.”6 During the intermission at the Albright-Knox, two electronic tape pieces created in the Computer Music Studio by Lejaren Hiller’s students, Ralph Blauvelt and Peter Gena, were played in the Gallery corridor, creating an aural passageway to the Sculpture Court at the northern end of the Gallery. There, chairs had been set out for the audience, and ﬁve majestic Steinway B pianos, tops fully open, waited like great ships among the Greek columns and statuary. The American premiere of Morton Feldman’s new forty-three-minute work, Pianos and Voices (later retitled Five Pianos), was performed by an impressive group of composer-pianists: Feldman himself, his student William Appleby, David Del Tredici, Julius Eastman, and Lukas Foss. Critic Thomas Putnam described the work appreciatively in the Buffalo Courier Express: “The music is ﬂoating clouds, spaced out voices [the softly humming pianists] which are intended not to cohere, but drift in separate slow times. The music is triadic, with a minor tonality implied. . . . The voices seemed to be all around, as if members of the audience had caught on to Feldman’s idea of ﬁlling out his harmonic piano tapestry with human sounds.”7

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figure 3.1 Rehearsal of Morton Feldman's Pianos and Voices (left to right: Morton Feldman, Julius Eastman, Jan Williams, William Appleby, David Del Tredici). Baird Hall, SUNYAB, October 1972. Unidentiﬁed photographer.

Feldman liked his Buffalo life. He enjoyed his comfortable apartment, his students, and the plentiful ﬁrst-rate performance opportunities available to him. Soon after his arrival, he also began preparing for his three public Slee Lectures, the ﬁrst of which took place on the university campus a few weeks after the ﬁve-piano performance at the Albright-Knox. Each lecture featured live performances, primarily by CAs, as well as taped examples of his work. A year earlier, the Trustees of Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, under the savvy leadership of Advisory Board chairman Robert Millonzi, had appointed another kindred spirit, Michael Tilson Thomas, to succeed Foss as conductor and music director of the Buffalo orchestra. A few years earlier, Foss had offered Michael Tilson Thomas a Center fellowship as pianist-conductor. In one of his ﬁrst interviews for the Buffalo Evening News Thomas commented: “This is my ﬁrst time in Buffalo. . . . I haven’t had time to see the city, except for your marvelous art gallery. That’s my best impression, aside from the orchestra, and the Creative Associates at the university. You know, when I was in college, I thought maybe I’d come to Buffalo as a Creative Associate.”8 Thomas, a

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vigorous supporter of contemporary music, conducted two performances that November of Feldman’s The Viola in My Life IV, for solo viola and orchestra. He seemed to breathe the piece, which was performed from memory with quiet delicacy by Jesse Levine, my husband at the time. Feldman was stimulated and gratiﬁed by such generous attention during those early months. It was an auspicious start, and we celebrated a genial Thanksgiving (Feldman, the Levines, and David Del Tredici) with dinner at the local Westbrook Hotel, followed by Andy Warhol’s movie, Heat. Several months later, in February 1973, the Center presented an Evenings for New Music concert, including works by former CA pianist-composer Carlos Alsina and by Stefan Wolpe and the premiere performance of another new Feldman work, Voices and Instruments II (1972). Tom Johnson, who had studied brieﬂy with Feldman, wrote about it in the Village Voice: Voices and Instruments II, which premiered on February 14 at Carnegie Recital Hall, follows the basic Feldman approach to sound. The piece is very soft and consists of individual notes and chords, mostly sustained, without melodies or rhythmic ideas to speak of. The pitches and colors are carefully chosen, and there is great concern for the constantly ﬂuctuating harmonies which result from them. In this case, the ensemble consists of ﬂute, two cellos, bass and three singers who hum, mostly in the upper register. The new piece, however, is much longer than the typical Feldman piece [19:30], and it changes character noticeably, rather than maintaining one feeling from beginning to end. At one point, a single chord is sustained for quite a while before the notes start to change again. Sometimes one or two instruments will not play for a while. The harmonic feeling of the music also seems to be different in different parts of the piece. . . . Some listeners were probably disappointed with the way the piece was performed by members of the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts of Buffalo, but I liked their approach very much. The hardest thing in the world is to play very very softly, and nobody likes to do it in public, but the Buffalo musicians accepted the challenge. They played so softly that they were right on the brink of losing control most of the time, and occasionally a cello bow or a singer’s voice did go out of control brieﬂy. But playing it this way, they gave the piece a wonderful fragile quality. At the same time, they drew the listener in by requiring him to strain his ears a little.9

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The Center and Morton Feldman fell into a mutually appreciative relationship. He enthusiastically shared his programming ideas and suggested talented musicians who might be solid candidates for future CA openings. Foss was doing his best to stay in touch while he traveled the world as conductor and guest composer, but communication was spotty at best, and his physical absence made it difﬁcult for him to play a day-to-day role in the Center’s operations. Hiller was planning to be on sabbatical leave in Malta and Poland for the 1973–1974 season. It was entirely ﬁtting, therefore, that Feldman’s role as artistic advisor should be ofﬁcially noted in the fall 1973 Evenings for New Music program. My new title was managing director.

The Tenth Year The annual tornado of Center events—new and returning CAs, the festive tenth anniversary celebration, the demanding concert schedule, negotiations, rehearsals, touring, more recording for Deutsche Grammophon, parties, readings, dinners, personal dramas—along with planning the coming season and attempting to raise money pushed everything else to the sidelines. Except in the most extreme circumstances, we hardly even noticed the weather. We put our snow tires on by Halloween, left them on until Easter, made sure our boots were waterproof, and that was that. But the tenth anniversary gave us pause: It was a reassuring milestone. Somehow, the Center had survived multiple university administrations, political upheavals, reedy funding cycles, the occasional disgruntled Center fellow, improbable musical highs, and some indisputable lows. The new CAs that year—pianist-composer Thorkell Sigurbjornsson from Iceland and ﬂutist Eberhard Blum from Germany—must have been impressed by the community’s enthusiasm at the opening concert. As with the returning CAs, including cellist-composer David Gibson and percussionist Dennis Kahle, it is fair to say that everyone felt energized and ready. We had a big year in front of us, including the Center’s ﬁrst full-ﬂedged European tour. Gibson and Sigurbjornsson kicked off the campus-based CA recital series that fall, presenting solo and chamber works with invited colleagues from Buffalo’s musical community. The recitals were a valued resource for composers, providing them with the opportunity to hear their works under their own direction. Along with his compositions, Gibson programmed works by Albany-based composer Joel Chadabe and James Drew. Sigurbjornsson brought a group together to perform an evening of his works, one enticingly titled Oft vex leikur af litlu for violoncello and pianoforte, and a piece by another Icelandic

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figure 3.2 Members of the Center 1973–1974 (left to right: Benjamin Hudson, Ralph Jones, Thorkell Sigurbjornson, Dennis Kahle, Delmar Stewart, David Gibson, Eberhard Blum, Renée Levine). Baird Hall Ofﬁce, SUNYAB. Photo: © Mickey H. Osterreicher.

composer, Atli Heimir Sveinsson. The piece he wrote and dedicated to me, For Renée, a suite for ﬂute/piccolo, cello, piano and percussion, was not yet ready but was premiered a few months later on Norma Beecroft and Robert Aitken’s New Music Concerts series at the University of Toronto. I was touched by Sigurbjornsson’s thoughtful tribute and surprised a second time when, by chance, I heard it played on National Public Radio the following year. That winter, ﬂutist Eberhard Blum put together a demanding recital program for solo ﬂute from the 1960s and early 1970s, including works by Hans Otte, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, John Cage, and Kazuo Fukushima. In his review for the Buffalo Evening News, critic Herman Trotter wrote: “His breath control, tonguing and ﬁnger technique are simply staggering . . . these works all called for phenomenal virtuosity, amply met by Mr. Blum. He’s a ﬂutist to be reckoned with internationally.”10 Blum’s virtuoso accomplishments echoed a long lineage of extraordinary instrumentalists who were members of the Center over the years, beginning

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with violinist Paul Zukofsky, contrabassist Buell Neidlinger, ﬂutists Karl Kraber, Robert Cram, and Robert Dick, trombonists Stuart Dempster and Vinko Globokar, percussionists John Bergamo, Jan Williams, and Garry Kvistad, and pianist Roger Shields, to name just a few. The number of superb CA pianists who were also composers—David Tudor, Frederic Rzewski, Carlos Alsina, Yuji Takahashi, and Richard Trythall, among others—is equally impressive. Another pianist deeply committed to twentieth-century music, Yvar Mikhashoff, joined the music department faculty in fall 1973 and quickly identiﬁed with the Center fellows, whose reputation had made the Buffalo job all the more attractive to him. Born Ronald MacKay in Albany, New York, the irrepressible Mikhashoff had been, in a previous incarnation, a professional ballroom dancer. Known for his virtuosic playing and whirlwind energy, Mikhashoff codirected new music festivals in Britain, Norway, and, from 1985 to 1993, the North American Music Festival (with Jan Williams) at home in Buffalo. He performed often with the CAs. Numerous composers wrote pieces for him, and more than one hundred composers wrote three-minute tangos for his International Tango Collection. Mounting difﬁcult new work is akin to jumping hurdles. Personality issues and differences in musical viewpoints or technical abilities are always lurking to beset the enterprise. In a question-and-answer session after a performance at a midwestern college, a student asked, “What is the most difﬁcult thing about playing new music?” Without missing a beat, Jan Williams replied, “Living composers.” In truth, there are composers who don’t deliver the completed score on time, who may be dissatisﬁed with the allotted number of rehearsals, or who are unhappy with the ﬁnal realization of their work, but the vast majority are respectful and appreciative of the skill and effort brought to their creations. On occasion, the process hums along from the beginning, resulting in a gratifying experience for all. At other times—and there were several over the years—the effort of coaxing a piece to take shape can produce tense, annoying episodes that drain everyone’s time and energy. Henze’s El Cimarrón was a case in point. German composer Hans Werner Henze was born in 1926, the same year as Morton Feldman and Earle Brown. Unlike other composers who were performed numerous times in the Evenings for New Music concerts, Henze was performed only once—our ﬁrst one-man-show—in the Center’s tenth season on November 17, 1973. The program took place at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery Sculpture Court and was repeated the following month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

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As music critic Paul Grifﬁths has written, Henze’s El Cimarrón (1969– 1970), a “recital for four musicians (baritone, ﬂutist, guitarist, and percussionist) follows a path from L’Histoire du Soldat, and Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire.” One might add Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King (also written in 1969) to that list. Although essentially chamber pieces and not fully staged theatrical works, each calls for “dramatic recitation” from the singer-speakers.11 El Cimarrón, Biography of the Runaway Slave Esteban Montejo, was written after the composer’s yearlong visit to Cuba and reﬂects his left-wing political views advocating world revolution. It is based on the oral memoirs of a former Cuban slave, Esteban Montejo, recorded when he was 104 years old. The ninetyminute work demands great stamina and focus from the players, allowing some room for improvisation, along with what guitarist Stuart Fox called “some very fancy playing.”12 The plan was to stage the piece with moderate theatrical lighting, without a conductor. El Cimarrón presented problems from the beginning. Julius Eastman, who sang the actor/baritone part of Esteban Montejo, and percussionist

figure 3.3 Rehearsal of Hans Werner Henze's El Cimarrón (clockwise, Stuart Fox, Dennis Kahle, Eberhard Blum, Julius Eastman). Albright-Knox Art Gallery Sculpture Court. November 1973. Photo: © Mickey H. Osterreicher.

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Dennis Kahle had given the American premiere of the piece in Pittsburgh two years earlier. This time, Eastman was having trouble memorizing the part, possibly because he had reservations about the piece. Even so, as he recounted his terrifying ﬂight from his overseer, or moved in melancholy solitude within the marble-columned forest of the Gallery Sculpture Court, he was enormously effective. The Center lacked a resident guitarist that year, and, after consulting the guitarist of the Philharmonic, we hired an advanced, rather shy student guitarist at the university. He struggled mightily with the ferocious, showy part, but he was essentially an introverted kind of player and couldn’t hold his own with the others. Between Eastman and the guitarist, the rehearsals weren’t going well, so I wasn’t surprised when, one afternoon, Feldman came into the ofﬁce to talk about the situation. In Foss’s and Hiller’s absences, he was becoming more involved with artistic issues and had heard the complaints and frustration voiced by the musicians. Sitting down in the chair next to my desk, he lit a cigarette, rubbed his eyes, and leaned forward, peering down at the ﬂoor. “Renée,” he said, “I know this guy is a lovely, gifted person and the Center should provide young talent with opportunities to perform challenging music. I know it’s a good thing for the Center to give promising graduate students a chance to perform with the CAs. This is just what the Center should be doing.” And lowering his voice to a gangland-style whisper, he turned to me, adding, “Get rid of him.” It was an unpleasant situation all around. Luckily, former CA Stuart Fox, who had rescued the Pittsburgh production when the original guitarist bowed out, was available and ﬂew in from the West Coast to save the day. The crowning event of the tenth anniversary year was the Center’s ﬁrst concert tour to Europe. While on a Senior Fulbright in Poland, Hiller sold a U. S. State Department ofﬁcial on the idea of sponsoring American musicians on a tour in Eastern Europe, which was then under Soviet domination and still considered to be behind the Iron Curtain. Once the idea of a tour took hold, Feldman got to work contacting his European musical friends as well. Everyone was interested: the Arts Council of Great Britain; the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon; French, German, and Italian radio for live concert tapings; Berlin’s Akademie der Kunste; and the Poles. What emerged was a three-week tour of Evenings for New Music concerts and recordings in Paris, London, Scotland (Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow), Lisbon, Barcelona, Rome, Perugia, Karlsruhe, and Berlin, after which Hiller, Jan Williams, Dennis Kahle, and I would split away from the group and continue on to Warsaw and Krakow. Touring was something we did regularly, but not for such extended periods of time. Traveling to seven countries with thirteen highly idiosyncratic

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individuals and thirteen cases of percussion and electronic equipment is an invitation to chaos. There were numerous pretour meetings to discuss the program and protocols, such as rehearsals, daily meetings, dress code, and so on. Because each musician in the group performed in almost every piece, the loss of one person along the way would cripple the entire enterprise. For this reason, two cardinal rules were established from the outset: Never pack your music in your suitcase, and no drugs. Everybody had an extra job: assisting with postconcert packing up, counting the equipment cases each time we made a transfer, checking that no music was left behind, and so forth. The concerts would be a showcase for American composers. Lukas Foss’s Paradigm (1968) was one of the older works on the program. Lejaren Hiller revised his Algorithms I (1968–1974); Julius Eastman (Stay On It) and Morton Feldman (For Frank O’Hara) composed new works for the group. Burdocks by Dartmouth-based composer Christian Wolff, Eleven Echoes of Autumn by George Crumb, and Largo by Charles Ives were included from time to time to vary the lineup. We were scheduled to leave for Paris on February 6 to record a concert for French radio, followed by a concert at the Southbank Centre in London on February 12. Christian Wolff invited us to try out the touring program at his home base, Dartmouth College, a week beforehand in their commodious Hopkins Hall. We were delighted to oblige. A stateside dress rehearsal in an unfamiliar venue would alert us to any potential glitches and give us time to sort out remedies. Hanover, New Hampshire, in late January, snow-clogged and freezing, made Buffalo seem mild. No matter: the large concert hall was crowded with students. When the program ended with Jan Williams’s virtuosic musical saw cadenza in Foss’s Paradigm, a cheering audience jumped to its feet with shouts and bravos. We were elated and ready to spread the word. A week later the group was assembled and ready to depart. Before we could even get off the ground, our ﬂight was canceled due to a huge snowstorm. After some frantic jockeying, we managed to get on an American Airlines ﬂight to New York, but no one could be sure whether our twenty-four pieces of luggage and equipment made the ﬂight as well. We arrived in Paris before 6:00 a.m. A sound and instrument check was scheduled later that afternoon in the concert hall/recording studio of the ORTF (Ofﬁce de Radiodiffusion-Télèvision Française, as it was then called), where we would tape the concert the next day. My instructions from Germaine Canard at the ORTF were that, on arrival in Paris, I should proceed to the cargo area of the airport to claim the thirteen cases of equipment. We were sent to four different agencies for clearance declaration before being directed to Transport Lyon, a shipping company ofﬁce, to sign forms expediting delivery of the equipment directly to the French Radio studios.

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figure 3.4 Creative Associates at Dartmouth College (left to right: Morton Feldman, Dennis Kahle, Amrom Chodos, Renée Levine, Peter Gena, Eberhard Blum, Julius Eastman, David Gibson, Jan Williams, David Sussman, Benjamin Hudson, Ralph Jones). January 1974. Photo: © 1974 Stuart Bratesman, Jr.

The percussionists, Jan Williams and Dennis Kahle, and the graduate student in charge of equipment, Peter Gena, accompanied me in a taxi to the adjacent cargo section of the airport, an area of dingy loading docks with small ofﬁces attached. The Transport Lyon ofﬁce consisted of a square room, a bare ﬂoor with a few beat-up old desks, a couple of chairs, and a wastepaper basket. One or two guys came in and out and rifﬂed through some paper; phones rang, but no one bothered to answer, and no one was the least bit motivated to pay attention to us. Around 11:00 a.m., in desperation, I pulled out my trusty ﬂask of brandy and asked loudly if anyone wanted a little nip to help keep warm. Magically, paper cups appeared where one would have been hard-pressed to ﬁnd even a rubber band a moment before, and everyone became quite cozy. Soon, papers were produced, and I was assured that a clearance declaration would be processed and the equipment would be delivered in plenty of time. While we waited, I had noticed that all the Transport Lyon people were passing around the racing form and playing the horses. It seemed that Buffalo Bill was racing that afternoon and was favored to win. Peter Gena and I gave the guys six francs each to place the bets for us—three to win, three to place. “How will

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we know if we win?” I asked. “Oh, just ask anyone at the ORTF, they’ll know,” was the reply. Annette Morreau, a veteran concert organizer from the Arts Council of Great Britain and a great fan of Morton Feldman’s music, arranged the British tour. After a well-received performance cosponsored by the U. S. Embassy at London’s South Bank Centre in the Music Today series (the London Times was impressed by “the greatly expert and stylish players”), we traveled by train to Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and Glasgow, where the Arts Council had arranged additional concerts. The Aberdeen concert took place in what I was told was the largest granite building in the world, Mitchell Hall, and was an especially big success, with people stamping their feet on the ﬂoor in approval. From the British Isles we ﬂew to Lisbon. There Hiller joined us to present two concerts at the Gulbenkian Foundation, an enclave of luxury in the heart of the city, which included a museum, several elegant concert halls, and gardens. In one concert the musicians performed Christian Wolff ’s Burdocks (1970–1971). The score states that the musicians may use any instruments or sound sources. At one point Julius Eastman, who had been playing inside an ampliﬁed piano, slid down, snakelike, toward the base of the piano to do something with the pedals. All of a sudden he released a cascade of beads onto the wooden ﬂoor, producing a delicate waterfall of sound as the beads fell, skittered, and rolled. When I complimented him on his imaginative realization of the score, he answered that it had been a total accident: his necklace of love beads had broken. Touring is hard and tiring. There were 5:00 a.m. hotel checkouts, tension at airports about overweight charges, tension in rehearsals regarding equipment malfunction, and the vastly different performance spaces that required last-minute revisions of ensemble setups. Late at night after one of our Lisbon concerts, the phone in my room rang. A member of the group was calling to tell me, in anguished tones, that he was returning to the States the next morning. He was unwilling, he said, to tolerate another day of feeling ostracized by Morton Feldman. Working with Feldman on a daily basis could be a knotty proposition. He had, in my opinion, very little sense of group dynamics. Perhaps he liked the way a certain instrumentalist played his music or enjoyed some other aspect of his or her personality. Whatever the reasons, he surrounded himself with the same few people each day, thus creating an inner circle, all of whom ate together and went sightseeing together, leaving others to feel left out and less than worthy. As Jan Williams said, “Composers have always had their preferred people who they think are just right for their music.” Because we were dealing with a performing ensemble, however, these tactics made life difﬁcult. After

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a couple of hours of earnest talk, the threatened defection in Lisbon was defused, but hurt feelings were not. The sold-out concert in Barcelona took place in the Capilla del Antiguo Hospital de la Santa Cruz and was the most enthusiastically received of the whole tour. I addressed the audience in Spanish and expressed our appreciation of their vibrant city. Jan Williams performed a work for solo percussion, Le Prie-Dieu sur la Terrace (1973), by Spanish composer Luis De Pablo, who had been the Visiting Slee Professor in Buffalo the previous fall. While we were there, I decided to visit the American Consulate to try to get an ofﬁcial letter from an attaché to ameliorate the ongoing problems we were having getting all the equipment cases through customs. There were several countries yet to visit, and the delays, both exiting and on arrival, were awkward and time-consuming. On the one hand, we were at the mercy of the check-in personnel. Would they let us check in the equipment, charge us overweight, or insist on sending the stuff separately on a later plane? And on the other hand, the customs ofﬁcials might refuse entry and simply conﬁscate it all. Rome was our next stop, and I could only imagine the profound confusion awaiting us. By 1973, prompted by a surge of airline hijackings in the late 1960s and early 1970s, airlines began using metal detectors to screen passengers boarding transatlantic ﬂights. Still, I was surprised when I arrived at the American Consulate in Barcelona not only to be confronted by a metal detector but also to have my purse searched. Once inside, I had some good luck: the understanding vice consul was willing to help. He prepared an elaborate document for the Italians, complete with red ribbons and seal, certifying the group’s mission and including a list of all the equipment we had with us. He instructed me that, on landing in Rome, the group should identify itself as an American ﬁlm crew, explaining, “They are used to ﬁlm companies.” He continued, saying that, on entering the terminal, I should look for a man in uniform who would be sweeping the ﬂoor. He would be waiting for us. Once we made contact, he would shepherd us to a customs ofﬁcial who would process our entry without delay. Even in all the tumult of the luggage claim area, the plan worked like a charm. The concerts in Perugia—in the Salla Maggiore of the Galleria Nazionale dell’ Umbria, under the aegis of Mrs. Buitoni (who picked some of us up in her grand limousine, even on driverless Sunday)—and later in Rome at the American Academy and for Rome Radio (RAI), were enthusiastically received. Mrs. Buitoni invited the composers in the group and me to her home for dinner with members of her family. We arrived at her villa and were greeted by her son Franco, who, I had been told, ran the Buitoni and Perugina international food enterprises. We were ushered into a large, comfortable sitting room with

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a ﬁreplace, where cocktails were served. Everyone rose immediately when Mrs. Buitoni entered the room. Her son escorted her to a seat near me, and we proceeded to converse about the mechanics of organizing a complex international tour. She was particularly fascinated by the poster-sized chart I pulled out to illustrate a point. This precomputer spreadsheet laid out an elaborate listing of each performance venue, dates, contact person, fees, currency, hotel (included in fee or not), ﬂights to and from—all accessible at a glance. At dinner, Feldman, who sat across the table from me, was happily entranced by Mrs. Buitoni’s daughter-in-law. Julius Eastman sat to my left. When the white-gloved waiter came around to offer a second helping of the ﬁrst course, exquisite ravioli stuffed with fresh broccoli, which I eagerly accepted, Julius poked me in the ribs with his elbow, whispering, “Take it easy, remember these people always have more than one course!” The whole issue of concert fees turned out to be quite tricky. Because the musicians were already on fellowship stipends, we were able to keep our concert fees low—generally, between $500 and $1,200 per performance, depending on the number of concerts—in addition to the cost of transportation from the preceding country and per diem for food and lodging. My goal was simply to return to the United States with $5,000 or so, the equivalent of a onesemester fellowship, if possible. In several instances, we were paid in cash. In those pre-euro days, if we were paid on a Saturday or Sunday and left the country the next day, getting the money to the bank to send home was impossible. And if I changed the Spanish pesetas in Italy, for instance, we would lose money on the conversion rate not once, but twice–from pesetas to lira and then from lira to dollars. In those instances, I elected to keep the payments in the original currency and change the money only when we returned to the United States. By the time Dennis Kahle and I headed to Schonefeld airport in East Berlin for the ﬂight to Warsaw, I was carrying thick wads of pesetas and lira in a large tote bag we called “the ofﬁce.” The border crossing into East Germany was unlike any I had seen. Large cement barriers intruded into the roadway in a zigzag tooth pattern that prevented any vehicle from moving faster than a crawl. Uniformed guards with machine guns were everywhere. The atmosphere was deadly serious. The rest of the group was already headed back to the States. For this segment of the trip, I was on assignment for the U.S. State Department’s diplomatic ofﬁce in Warsaw: my task was to set up future concert appearances for the Buffalo group at the famous Warsaw Autumn Festival. Williams caught up with us at Schonefeld Airport, where the three of us boarded the Polish Lot Airlines for the ﬂight to Warsaw. During the ﬂight, a stewardess handed out customs forms, telling us to declare valuables, including foreign currency we were

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carrying. I declared my personal funds in the amount of three hundred dollars or so, but neglected to mention the lira and pesetas, reasoning that because it was not my personal money and I had no intention of spending any of it, there was no need to declare it. We were warmly welcomed with tulips at the airport in Warsaw by Hiller, his daughter Mandy, Josef Patkowski, and Yagna, our translator from PAGART, the Polish Artistic Agency. Our hotel in Warsaw, the venerable old Europejski, may have been grand at one time but now was a dreary pile that reminded me of those massive stone armories where the National Guard holds drills. One thing seemed odd right away. On every ﬂoor, directly across from the elevator, there was an ofﬁce cum housekeeper’s station, with the door perpetually ajar. Clearly, no one could enter the ﬂoor or leave undetected. The overall starkness created a somber mood, and it hit home that this was Cold War territory. The episode of the customs declaration suddenly gave me pause. Had I made an error in not declaring the Center’s concert fees? The following morning, Hiller, who had joined us in Lisbon but had been living in Warsaw for several months on a Senior Fulbright Fellowship and was familiar with the political nuances, took me for coffee to sketch out the week’s schedule. On the docket, in addition to Jan and Dennis’s concerts, were meetings with the cultural attaché at the American Embassy; negotiations with Jozef Patkowski, chairman of the Warsaw Autumn Festival Committee and director of the Experimental Studio of the Polish Radio in Warsaw; and a visit with the great Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski. Before we got up to leave the café, I mentioned that I was carrying a fair amount of undeclared foreign currency with me. Hiller blanched. “How much have you got?” he asked. “Well,” I replied, “it’s not as bad as it sounds, about 160,000 pesetas and 900,000 lira.” It couldn’t have been more than four thousand U.S. dollars. Nevertheless, he looked stricken and said, now in a whisper, “This could be a problem. I’ll have to tell the Embassy people.” The next day I was called to a meeting at the Embassy. The cultural attaché was present, along with the general consul and Hiller. “Now what have we got here?” the attaché asked in hushed tones. Hiller had warned me that in all probability the rooms in the Embassy were bugged, so I explained the story again, sotto voce. The U.S. ofﬁcials discussed the situation, remarking that by international agreement, hard currency could not be shipped through the diplomatic pouch, so we couldn’t get rid of the money that way. No agreement was reached about the seriousness of my gaffe, and they said they would call me at my hotel the next morning with instructions. That night, Jozef Patkowski invited me to attend a welcome-home party for his friend, a Chopin expert who had just returned from a rarely permitted

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scholarship residency in Italy. Patkowski picked me up at around 8:00 p.m. It was pitch dark and cold, and it had been raining. As he escorted me from the hotel to his car, two shadowy ﬁgures in trench coats leapt out from behind a corner of the building, snapped our photograph with two blinding ﬂashes, and ran off into the night. I looked at Jozef and, with a sense that I was living in a John Le Carré novel, uttered the most dramatic sentence of my life: “Is this dangerous for you, Jozef ?” I asked. “Life here can be dangerous,” he replied, showing no particular emotion. The next morning I received word that I was to bring the money and my passport to the Embassy. Apparently I was expendable. They had decided to turn me over to the Polish customs ofﬁcials and let them determine my fate. Would I be deported immediately, or perhaps detained indeﬁnitely? The assistant cultural attaché and a Polish national from the American Embassy accompanied me in a taxi to a large government ofﬁce building, where we would meet with the chief of the customs bureau. I still felt that everyone was making a big deal out of nothing until I saw the Polish lady make the sign of the cross before we entered the building. On witnessing her apprehension and remembering the mysterious events of the previous evening, I took pause and tried to gird myself for an ordeal. I was ushered alone into a small ofﬁce where a short, middle-aged man in a dark military uniform was seated at a desk near a window. He motioned for me to sit down, and in perfect English asked me to explain why I had so much money in my possession. By this time, I realized that the only thing for me to do was to play a very naive ingénue who simply hadn’t paid any attention and didn’t understand the consequences of her actions. Wide-eyed, I performed my part in best Audrey Hepburn style, recounted my error, and apologized. Studying me intensely, he asked me how long I was planning to stay in Poland. I explained that we had one more concert in Warsaw that evening and a concert in Krakow two days later, after which I planned to return to Warsaw for a night before leaving for Paris. Maintaining his cool, humorless demeanor, he instructed me to leave my passport and all the money with him. He would see what should be done. When I returned from Krakow, either my passport and the funds would be in the hotel safe deposit box, or I would be detained. That night after the concert, Jan, Dennis, Jozef, and Yagna, our delightful British-educated interpreter from PAGART, went out to a nightclub, where I was carefully tutored on how the Poles drink their vodka. As Dennis Kahle recalled, “Finally, after we cracked open the third bottle of vodka, I was toast and had to bow out, but you [Renée] were still there, gamely socializing. Next morning, we all met in the lobby for that wretched six-hour van trip to Krakow. You were positively green.”13

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Back in Warsaw after the Krakow concert, everyone stood around while I nervously asked the hotel concierge if there was a package for me. He disappeared for a few very long minutes and returned saying he didn’t see anything. Luckily, Yagna, our interpreter, spied a large yellow envelope on a sideboard. Inside was my passport and the money with a note wishing me a good trip the following day. Jan and Dennis’s concerts, including the works of Luis De Pablo, Feldman, Foss, and Hiller, were warmly received. Most affecting for me was Dennis’s haunting performance of Morton Feldman’s poetic The King of Denmark for solo percussionist. The Poles, young and old, evidently appreciated new work. Jerry Hiller’s wife, Liz Hiller, remarked that in Warsaw alone at that time there were probably more than three dozen active theater companies playing to full houses most nights. Her theory was that there were very few avenues for citizens to express their dissatisfaction with the status quo. Embracing the avant-garde was one.14 The sense I had of the people we met and worked with in Warsaw and Krakow in the winter of 1974—from Jozef Patkowski and the Warsaw Autumn Festival staff to our interpreter to the housekeeper in the hotel in Krakow who saw how ill I was and drew a warm bath for me to Mr. Lutoslawski’s warm courteousness— was of a friendly, resolute people dealing in hard scrap circumstances. But the trip to Poland had been harrowing in many ways. One afternoon, I took a taxi, trying my best to explain to the driver that I wanted to go to the site of the old Warsaw Ghetto where so many Jews had been imprisoned and died. My friend Jozef told me how to ask for it in Polish, and, although the driver seemed mildly irritated, he dropped me off on a wide busy thoroughfare, motioning across the street toward a large nondescript cement plaza edged by old apartment buildings. I felt sure that this could not be the place. How could this innocuous landscape be the site of such horrendous suffering? There was only a low, unremarkable monument in bas relief at one end of the plaza commemorating the Polish people who had fought and died in World War II. No mention at all of the ghetto or the hundreds of thousands of Jews who had consecrated that ground. Stunned by what I perceived to be calculated indifference, I left my small bouquet and departed. By all accounts, the European tour was an artistic success. Without exception, audiences responded enthusiastically, and we felt that we had performed honorable service for the cause of American music. The invitation to return to the Warsaw Autumn Festival with a larger group the following fall was still in place, and a second tour was already taking shape. Back in Buffalo, composer-pianist Frederic Rzewski joined us for the 1974 spring semester. Rzewski, born in Massachusetts and a graduate of Harvard and Princeton, was a long-time resident of Europe, where he cofounded a live

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electronic music performance group, Musica Elettronica Viva, with Alvin Curran, Richard Teitelbaum, and others. Many of his compositions were concerned with political causes and events. Rzewski came originally to Buffalo as a CA in the spring semester of 1966 and now returned to complete a full year with the group. A highlight of this residency was the Center’s performance of his 1972 work, Coming Together, for reciter and eight players. Saxophone player Jon Gibson and trombonist Garrett List came up from New York to join Rzewski and the ensemble for the concert; Julius Eastman was the reciter. The text of Coming Together is a letter written by Sam Melville, an inmate of Attica prison who died during the 1971 uprising there. On the morning of September 9, 1971, more than twelve hundred black and Hispanic inmates took control of all ﬁve cell blocks at the maximum-security state prison and seized forty-three white guards as hostages. The uprising resulted in the deaths of thirty-nine men, both prisoners and hostages, when, four days later, Governor Rockefeller ordered the State Police to retake the prison by force. An ofﬁcial report issued a year later by the New York State Special Commission on Attica concluded, “With the exception of the Indian massacres in the late 19th century, the State Police assault which ended the four-day prison uprising was the bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since the Civil War.”15 Attica is located just thirty-ﬁve miles from Buffalo, and a keen emotional connection existed with regard to the notorious events that took place there. “I think,” Melville’s letter begins, “the combination of age and a greater coming together is responsible for the speed of the passing time.” As John Dwyer recounts in his review, “Melville speaks of the curious nature of time, his newfound grasp of mental equilibrium and physical well being, and the nourishment he has found in books and meditation.” Adding to the drama is the fact that Melville wrote the letter in spring, and audience members know from the program note that he would die a few months later. Eastman’s restrained reading of the spoken phrases repeated again and again juxtaposed with “a hammering momentum” of the recurring musical phrases produced an emotional political statement of great impact.16 Ten days later, the group performed Coming Together in Carnegie Hall. No one in the press remarked on the irony that this work, implicitly critical of Governor Rockefeller’s orders to retake the prison by force, was being presented in a concert partially sponsored by the New York State Council on the Arts, a government entity founded by the same Nelson Rockefeller. Several weeks after the performances of Coming Together, on Saturday, May 25, the CAs went to Attica themselves. The occasion was a joint presentation set up by Julius Eastman’s friend, dancer-choreographer Karl Singletary, for his Buffalo Inner-City Ballet Company. “When do you want to come in?” the voice on the phone asked. From my perspective, we were going out—out of

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the city; out to the country. But this would prove to be a universe entirely unlike any other we knew, and there were no two ways about it: we were going in. The lady on the phone requested that I send her a list of the names, addresses, and social security numbers of each person in the group and what instruments they were bringing with descriptions of any cases or special equipment. They would supply a tuned piano and music stands. We were to arrive at the gate precisely at the assigned time in order to go through the inspection procedure before gaining entry into the prison. The Attica Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison, is located in the low rolling farmlands of Wyoming County, about an hour’s drive from Buffalo. There is nothing to signal that you are in the vicinity of a national landmark of violence and disaster. After driving for a time through pleasant rural terrain, a huge monolithic fortress rising all alone in the countryside appears in the distance. This Attica is brute architecture—a massive, intimidating hulk except for one incongruous detail, the graceful, curved turrets sitting atop the corners of the prison walls, which, one notes upon closer scrutiny, house gargantuan searchlights. A Sunday-in-the-park atmosphere greeted us at the gate. Families with young people, some dressed up, tumbled out of cars, laden with packages and shopping bags that, I noted during the inspection, were full of food and personal articles, such as socks and underwear. Once assembled, the musicians, dancers, and I entered as a group and passed through the required procedures. Amrom Chodos, the CA clarinetist, forgot to mention that he would be bringing a knife to trim his reeds; it was conﬁscated. The guards decided that whereas all the males in the group could proceed through a cell block to reach the auditorium, the two female dancers and I would be escorted along an outside peripheral route. Several prisoners in dark uniforms were present to help us set up the performance area. These prisoners (trustees) had earned special privileges for good behavior, and some would soon be released, we were told. The ofﬁcials in charge were very precise about the seating arrangements: the trustees sat in front (leaving the ﬁrst three rows closest to the stage vacant). They were followed by 250 or so prisoners, who ﬁled in and sat down one after the other, ﬁlling one row before beginning the next, as in a grade school assembly hall. The hour-long program began with Frederic Rzewski’s Les Moutons de Panurge, performed by ﬁve musicians. The piece, written in 1969, consists of a sixty-ﬁve-note melodic sequence played in unison in gradually increasing and then diminishing progressions. So, for example, the musicians play the notes beginning with 1, 1–2, 1–2–3, 1–2–3–4, and so on. This was a mistake. Ten minutes or so into the piece, the audience began interrupting with applause. It dawned on me that their entire days were based on repetition and that Le Moutons was exactly the kind of work they would hate. The restlessness

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continued, and soon the catcalls commenced. Finally, the guard looked my way, drawing his thumb across his throat in an unmistakable sign to cut the music off. I moved closer to the performers and mimicked the guard’s signal to Julius Eastman, who sat close to the lip of the stage playing the electric piano. The ensemble soon drew the piece to a close. The main event was a ballet choreographed by 80-year-old Anthony Nelle revolving around a couple who meet in a port town and dance to an electronic tape realized by Center member Ralph Jones. The ballerina was greeted with great cheering and clapping. Energetic whistling and applause erupted each time Karl Singletary lifted her high above him and as she spread her legs as if to prepare for a running leap forward. They loved it. We were vindicated! Well, almost. The program closed with a new work by Julius Eastman, Stay On It (1973), which the CAs had already performed in Buffalo and Carnegie Hall and across Europe. The poem Eastman wrote for the program reads in part: This is why baby cakes, I’m ringing you up in order to relay this song message so that you can get the feelin O sweet boy Because without the movin and the grooving, the carin and the sharin, the reelin and the feelin, I mean really.17 This audience didn’t like this piece any better than the ﬁrst one. Six months earlier, when the CAs performed it in Carnegie Recital Hall, the reviewer in the New York Times wrote: “Monotony in a loud variety came in Julius Eastman’s Stay On It. While Mr. Eastman, at the piano, chanted his own metapoetry in a piercing falsetto, six other instruments, ampliﬁed, hammered out an eightnote motive that occasionally shifted perspective because of overlaid patterns and phase shifts.”18 It was clear that we had brought the wrong show. The ballet worked because of the girls, but that was all.

Closer to Home David Tudor also returned to Buffalo that spring. Across town, the State University College had just opened a beautiful new building to house its Communications Center. The light, airy ground ﬂoor, with its brick and cement, no-nonsense walls, ﬂooring, and overhead walkways cried out for celebration. Someone suggested that it would be the perfect setting for David Tudor’s Rainforest, and so it

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was. Rainforest was created originally in 1968 as a sound environment for Merce Cunningham’s dance company (with free-ﬂoating helium-ﬁlled silver Mylar pillows by Andy Warhol comprising the decor). In 1973 at Petr Kotik’s summer workshop for composers in Chocorua, New Hampshire, Tudor and colleagues Ralph Jones, John Driscoll, Bill Viola, Ritty Burchﬁeld, and others developed the ﬁrst realization of the piece without dancers.19 Burchﬁeld remembers Tudor— affectionately called the “sound herder”—explaining that Rainforest was about decoding space and time through sound.20 With the blessing of Peter Yates and support from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Center invited Tudor to present his visually intriguing, live electronic sound environment in the new building for two performances on Sunday, May 12, 1974. Rainforest took more than a day to set up, but David, surrounded by his usual supply of little brown paper bags full of wires, nuts, bolts, and other gizmos, was unfazed. Smiling serenely, he seemed genuinely pleased with the space. Herman Trotter, in a review of the afternoon performance for the Buffalo Evening News, described the work as a “timeless sonic environment” and “an intriguing aural experience.” He stated:

FIGURE 3.5 David Tudor preparing Rainforest (Communications Center, State University College Buffalo, May/June 1974). Unidentiﬁed photographer.

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The listener in Rainforest is free to wander in and around an amazing and amusing array of objects, each of which is wired to resonate to the output of prerecorded tapes and acts as a loudspeaker with its own unique, often bizarre characteristics. A bicycle wheel, 53-gallon drum, badminton racket, toilet tank ﬂoats, Volkswagen windshield, large steel rims, and bent galvanized sheet metal, were among the resonators either ﬂoor-standing or suspended in the [Communication] Center’s spacious hall. . . . The truly arresting feature was the inﬁnite variety of densities and spatial effects the listener could encounter in his roamings.21 Thomas Putnam, reviewing the evening performance for the Buffalo Courier Express, wrote, “The live-electronic music is a group work in which several electronic technicians, Tudor among them, manipulate the sound produced by various suspended objects, sometimes using electronic oscillators.”22 My advice was just to sit somewhere, close your eyes, and drench yourself in the sound. Wherever he was, Tudor always attracted a remarkable group of dedicated colleagues who felt privileged to work with him. The performers who assisted David Tudor in the Buffalo performance were Bill Viola, John Driscoll, Linda Fischer, Martin Kalve, and Ralph Jones. The 1973–1974 season closed with another ﬁrst: a concert of works by graduate student composers. Feeling frustrated, the students approached Feldman and asked, “How come the Creative Associates never play any student work?” Apparently, Feldman talked it over with Jan Williams, because the season’s ﬁnal Evenings for New Music concert was made up entirely of new pieces by graduate student composers. As Nils Vigeland tells it, So Fred Rzewski [and Stephen Manes] played a two-piano piece by Charles Casavant. Eberhard Blum played a piece of mine and seven of us got pieces played on a May evening in 1974. It was a shock for us because none of us had ever realized how profound Morty’s inﬂuence on us was. We listened to a parade of seven rather slow, rather quiet pieces and I think we all went out of there a little shell shocked. But it was done!23

Shakeup Funding from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) was playing an increasingly important role in the life of the Center, providing supplemental fellowships (NEA) and partial

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operating support (NYSCA). On occasion, the New York State Council on the Arts also made funds available for new initiatives, such as the creation of multimedia work. Two of the Center’s proposals were funded: one for composer Pauline Oliveros to create a work for the Center ensemble, and the second for a ﬁlmmaker to collaborate with a composer. Several CAs had mentioned seeing ﬁlmmaker Ed Emshwiller’s work with dancers. The Spanish composer Luis De Pablo, the visiting Slee Professor at the time, was intrigued. In 1971, De Pablo composed the electronic tape piece Soledad Interrumpida in collaboration with the sculptor/mime Jose Luis Alexanco, whose soft sculptures in vaguely human forms slowly inﬂated during the performance. De Pablo wanted a ﬁlm on the same idea to add another dimension to the work. I called Emshwiller, who was on a Guggenheim Fellowship at the time, and explained the project. He said he was fairly well committed but would like to hear De Pablo’s tape anyway. De Pablo sent a tape to Emshwiller’s home on Long Island. Some weeks later, Emshwiller agreed to meet us at the Carnegie Deli, located around the corner from Carnegie Hall, where De Pablo would be rehearsing another work for an early December Evenings for New Music concert. Emshwiller—a tall, affable man who threw his head back with a hearty Santa Claus laugh—and De Pablo communicated easily and talked at length about the project. Finally, we discussed the commission fee, and Emshwiller agreed to make a ﬁlm as the third element of Soledad Interrumpida. He designed a three-screen ﬁlm, constructed to appear frameless, and directed that red ﬁlters be taped over the projection lens. The new version with electronic tape, the three inﬂatable doll sculptures situated adjacent to the screen on stage left, and a brilliantly hued abstract ﬁlm premiered on August 17 at the State University in Buffalo in a joint presentation by the Center for Media Studies and the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts. The Center entered its second decade with a mild shakeup in the administrative structure. Foss and Hiller resigned as codirectors of the Center in the summer of 1974, each stating that he was too busy with outside commitments to do justice to the Center’s needs. They would be gratiﬁed, they said, to remain connected to the Center in an advisory capacity. In truth, both directors had been away for almost all the preceding year; hence their decision was not a surprise. Without much fanfare, Jan Williams assumed the ofﬁcial music directorship. I had been named managing director the previous season. We quickly formed an advisory board composed of the Center’s founders, Foss and Sapp, plus Lejaren Hiller and Morton Feldman, all of whom, except Foss, lived in Buffalo. Everyone was still available to us for consultation, and the good energy and momentum remained. As Williams said to Thomas Putnam, “The big

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difference this season is a resident music director. It should be a smoother operation.”24 Despite the shrinking numbers due to money problems, the CA lineup continued to be strong. Flutist Eberhard Blum and violinist Benjamin Hudson carried over from the previous year. Julius Eastman, still teaching theory in the SUNYAB music department, continued performing with the group. First-rate new instrumentalists—percussionist Donald Knaack and pianist Joseph Kubera—joined the ranks, as did two new composers. They were Judith Martin, formerly an electronic music major at Indiana University, who listed her principal performance instrument as the synket, a compact synthesizer with a touchsensitive keyboard; and Tom Constanten, a former member of the Grateful Dead, who had studied electronic music with Luciano Berio at Mills College and, for a summer, with Karlheinz Stockhausen.25 Student composers Ralph Jones and Margaret Scoville were the graduate fellows rounding out the roster. In addition, we budgeted the equivalent of approximately one full fellowship to pay guest players during the season, a stopgap measure that deprived the CA group of a resident cellist or trombonist but provided many more players in the community with an opportunity to work and travel with the CAs.

FIGURE 3.6 Ensemble rehearsal (left to right: Benjamin Hudson, Donald Knaack, Joseph Kubera, Maryanne Amacher, Eberhard Blum, Jan Williams, Judith Martin), Rm. 100, Baird Hall, SUNYAB, 1974–1975. Photo: © Mickey H. Osterreicher.

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Fifty years separated Erik Satie’s Relâche (1924) and Pauline Oliveros’s new work, Crow, both of which were performed in the season’s opening Evenings for New Music concert, along with Oiseaux Exotiques (1956) by Olivier Messiaen and two brief pieces by Charles Ives, Adagio sostenuto (before 1912) and Scherzo, All the Way Around and Back (c. 1908). Audience expectations were tossed upside down by both the Satie and the Oliveros. Satie composed Relâche (which “in ordinary usage means ‘no performance,’ referring to a theater’s schedule”) in collaboration with Jean Borlin of the Swedish Ballet. Dada painter and author Francis Picabia wrote the scenario and designed the set; René Clair made “un entre’acte cinématographique” (a cinematic intermission).26 Picabia conceived the nonsensical scenario for the ballet and the ﬁlm as a succession of arbitrary events. Using repetition as its primary ingredient, Satie’s music provides a neutral frame rather than a depiction of the sometimes hilarious surreal visual events.27 Jan Williams conducted the live performance of Satie’s score that accompanied the screening of the ﬁlm. In Le Piège de Méduse, a playlet with words and music by Satie that the CAs had performed eight years earlier, a stuffed monkey punctuates the action with little dances. In Pauline Oliveros’s Crow, commissioned by the Center and dedicated to the Indians of North America, a stuffed bird perched on Oliveros’s shoulder as she slowly circled the audience. Oliveros wrote the program note for the performance: Crow is part of a long series of works in the oral tradition, entitled Sonic Meditations. Meditation, in Crow is meant to be a dwelling with, or upon, certain prescribed conditions. Each performer is intended to maintain and connect through these conditions with a continuity. The continuity is manifest as feedback from the performers’ actions or as an awareness resulting from the given conditions. The result of actions may be sound or movement or awareness of sound or movement. Breaks in the continuity are errors, but paradoxically inform the performer of the success of his or her meditation. The audience may join by trying to imagine a perfectly black spot.28 “The piece is a very slow motion ceremonial dance by two combatants, Miss Oliveros and Julius Eastman,” wrote Putnam in the Buffalo Courier Express. “They approach each other from opposite sides of the stage, each mirroring the other, ﬁnally to dance around each other and disappear in opposite directions. . . . Meanwhile, pulses and intermittent tones from musicians scattered about the hall . . . provided a background music.”29 Ironically, whereas Richard Wernick, who in the Center’s ﬁrst year had voiced objection to the fact that the programming in the concerts did not

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contain a mix of earlier twentieth-century music, John Dwyer, in his review of the concert, noted, “Tradition seems to be settling in on the Creative Associates in their eleventh season. . . . The programs for the past few seasons have been showing signs of recollection and moderation.”30

The Continuous Present Composer Satie drank absinthe and wore a black velvet suit which he slept in a great deal. —Buffalo Evening News, January 26, 1974 WBFO Radio preempted its regular schedule to broadcast live the entire twentyhour performance. Couches were brought into the Baird Hall studio, and people planning to attend were advised to bring sleeping bags. Refreshments were available. The occasion was a performance of Erik Satie’s Vexations (1893), a nine-measure piano piece, which the composer suggested should be repeated 840 times in succession. Pianist Joseph Kubera, who coordinated the event and set up the performing schedules, kicked off the marathon at 6:00 p.m. At half-hour intervals for the next twenty hours, each succeeding pianist slid onto the bench and seamlessly continued playing without a hitch. SUNYAB students; faculty including Hiller, Sapp, Yvar Mikhashoff, and Stephen Manes; Creative Associate Tom Constanten and others; and members of the community all showed up. A day later, John Dwyer wrote, “The internationally known inventor, Robert Moog, was asleep under the piano. He’d already taken his half-hour turn at the keyboard. But the hypnotic spell of the music had gotten to him, and he didn’t want to go home. . . . This was an hour or so before midnight in the darkened Room 100 of Baird Hall. . . . The piece has an unearthly quality and a feeling of an endless cycle, so that it doesn’t seem to repeat itself so much as merely to exist.”31 But, noted the WBFO radio program guide, “if you prefer the comfort of your own home, Vexations is as close as your dial.” By 1974–1975, our eleventh season, it had become apparent that the Center could no longer afford to present the Evenings for New Music concerts at Carnegie Hall, so we arranged a series at the WBAI Free Music Store, the Paciﬁca Radio station in New York. In the large recording studio, we could rehearse for most of the day without having to pay union stagehands, one of the most expensive aspects of the Carnegie Hall concerts. The concerts, which had a friendly informal atmosphere, were broadcast live before an audience. Although we sacriﬁced prestige by leaving Carnegie Hall, the WBAI broadcasts brought us a larger—and probably younger—audience, prompting the

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composer Eric Salzman to say to me that what he remembered as especially noteworthy about the mid-seventies in new music were the Buffalo concerts and WBAI Free Music Store. During this period, the Center Advisory Committee consisted of Morton Feldman, Lukas Foss, Lejaren Hiller, and Allen Sapp. Feldman was working closely with music director Jan Williams, and Feldman’s inﬂuence was felt most clearly in the arrival of the “one-man show” concept. Although all of us were devout appreciators of his music, I have already pointed out that working with Feldman had its pitfalls. If Feldman disagreed with someone’s point of view or didn’t get his way, he would simply withdraw, cutting off all communication. He knew when he was being difﬁcult; it was as though he wanted to be, didn’t care, or couldn’t help it. One had to be ever alert to his moods or be subjected to the silent treatment. An example surfaced in an episode over the performance of a work by a visiting Slee Professor, British composer Harrison Birtwistle. Feldman had recommended that Jan Williams program a Birtwistle piece, La Plage: Eight Arias of Remembrance, for soprano, three clarinets, piano, and marimba, for concerts in Buffalo and New York. Williams agreed to consider it, pending a review of issues such as compatibility with other pieces already ﬁxed on the program, timing, budget requirements, and so on. Finally, based on the fact that the piece required three extra players in addition to the guests already hired for a large ensemble piece by Mauricio Kagel, Jan decided not to do La Plage. A second Birtwistle piece, Down by the Greenwood Side, a Pastorale in One Act was secured from the music publisher. This time, the soprano pulled out of the performance, as did the stage director, and that piece had to be sacked, too. Feldman was miffed and wrote to Williams: True, Birtwistle’s music is perhaps not the right “image” for the CAs to perform in N.Y.—though the three-clarinet piece would have balanced the Kagel. . . . My feelings about it all is that I will no longer rely on either the CAs or the Faculty (for that matter) in getting things mobilized. . . . All this leads up to the fact that I’m resigning from the CA’s Advisory Board. I would appreciate that my name should no longer appear on any future stationery or advertisement.32 Williams responded, explaining that he had no idea what Feldman meant by “the CA’s N.Y. image,” and that the decision not to include a Birtwistle work was based on ﬁscal considerations. Now it was Williams who was fed up. He resigned his position as music director of the Center.33 Feldman, feeling remorseful and distressed about the turn of events, wrote another letter to Williams urging him not to resign:

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I am distressed that my resignation or rather the way I went about it caused so much anger or whatever on your part. . . . What I feel lousy about is that the center got along without me for 10 years—and I came along and soon was on the outs with Renée—instigated to some degree the Lukas withdrawal—then wrote my letter to you bringing on your resignation. If I seem to be some kind of catalyst for “trouble” then best to be rid of me. I’m not a malicious person. I don’t want control. . . . I think you’re a Beautiful guy and one of the country’s top musicians. I’m sorry that my letter had a “lack of conﬁdence” ring to it. I’ll do anything to correct this.34 Thanks to the diplomatic ﬁnesse of Allen Sapp, the pieces were glued together again. Both Williams and Feldman reconsidered, but the cracks were there.

June in Buffalo Morton Feldman, now in his third year in Buffalo, had been offered a permanent position on the music faculty. Feldman was particularly pleased when the Arts and Letters administration suggested creating a new chair in musical composition for the occasion and gave him the privilege of naming it. Feldman wavered between calling it the Charles Ives Chair and the Edgard Varèse Chair and ultimately decided to call it the Edgard Varèse Chair of Musical Composition. A reliable income, a distinguished title, and a stimulating musical environment with ample time to compose convinced Feldman to call Buffalo home. Not surprisingly, by this point he wanted to create a public event with his personal stamp on it. Technically, the CAs were contracted through June, although their musical obligation to the Center was usually ﬁnished by the end of May. In a conversation in my ofﬁce earlier that winter, he said, “Renée, about that music festival I’ve been thinking of—You know how they talk about April in Paris? Well, I think we should call it June in Buffalo. Yeah, why not? June in Buffalo. And the CAs will still be around. It’ll be great!” He also wanted a fresh format. The concerts would be mainly one-man shows, complemented by the composers lecturing on their work. The plan was to advertise the festival as a summer composition seminar for students from everywhere, recalling the famous Darmstadt Festival in Germany. In lieu of sponsoring one composer for a full semester, funds from the Slee Endowment would now be used to cover June in Buffalo guest artist fees and concert expenses. All the concerts would be in Baird Hall on the SUNYAB campus.

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Feldman discussed his reasons for organizing the new festival in a radio interview on the SUNYAB Arts Forum, a program hosted by Esther Harriott, then the Director of Cultural Affairs at the university: I wanted to do it because Buffalo has been famous as an avant-garde center for the past twelve years, with Lukas Foss and Allen Sapp and then with the Slee composers who came here. Everybody thinks that we are living in a sophisticated city and it’s just natural that we’re going to have contemporary music here. But it’s open for grabs to what degree this is a sophisticated city. I think that if the Creative Associates weren’t here, there would be absolutely no money and not that much public support to start another group. What I’m trying to do is to have an impact on the university and the city by creating a three-week avant-garde event so they can see what the CAs are about and how important they are.35 For the ﬁrst June in Buffalo festival, Feldman decided to focus on the work of his colleagues John Cage, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff. Known as the New York School, Feldman, Brown, and Wolff had all been associated with Cage in the early 1950s in New York. Rather than a “school,” the author Michael Nyman comments, the group really was more of a “‘ﬁeld situation,’ a creative climate that Cage had helped to bring about in which all four composers worked and to which they all contributed.”36 Feldman reiterated this thinking in his radio interview with Harriott, stating that he wanted to emphasize the differences among the four composers, adding that they really met only in one area: where sound became the focus in their work.37 Cage, too, followed this line of reasoning in an interview with Richard Dufallo, saying that, “Earle [Brown] is concerned with control and expressivity. Christian [Wolff] is more apt to be concerned with something about society and with using music for political reasons. Morty [Feldman] is concerned with expressivity and with beauty and with a rather personal notion of what beauty is.” But he [Cage] was not concerned with any of these things: “I like the thing that Joyce did, of making things happen . . . multiple signiﬁcances. . . . I like it better if different meanings arise in different heads, rather than the same meaning arising in everyone’s head. I don’t like to push people around by means of music.”38 June in Buffalo opened with a John Cage week including several lectures given by Cage himself and three concerts devoted to his work. Everything began smoothly enough. The ﬁrst concert took place on Monday evening, June 2, and concentrated mainly on early works such as Third Construction (1941) and A Book of Music (1944) for two prepared pianos. The newest work on the program was Music for Ampliﬁed Toy Pianos (1960) performed by Tom Constanten,

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Donald Knaack, Joseph Kubera, Steve Radecke, and Martin Kalve. According to reviewer Jeff Simon, Cage apparently was tickled by it and was the ﬁrst to jump to his feet applauding after the performance was over.39 It was the second concert that provoked the ﬁreworks. Feldman asked Petr Kotik and his group, the S.E.M. Ensemble, to prepare a performance of Cage’s Song Books (1970). The S.E.M. Ensemble, founded by Kotik in 1970, was at that time a loosely knit performance group made up of local musicians, including many CAs, that focused on performances of Kotik’s own compositions and the work of others, such as Alvin Lucier, John Cage, Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, and Morton Feldman. The score of Song Books is a sizable tome, consisting of “Instructions,” “Solos for Voice 3–58” and “Solos for Voice 59–92.” The Instructions permit four categories for performance: “1) song; 2) song using electronics; 3) theatre; and 4) theatre using electronics.” The singers’ parts may be combined, each singer may make a program that will ﬁll an agreed-on program length, and the entire score need not be performed. The texts are drawn from writings by Henry Thoreau, Marshall McLuhan, Norman O. Brown, Buckminster Fuller, Marcel Duchamp, and Cage’s own poetry. “To prepare for a performance,” Cage instructs, “the actor will make a numbered list of verbs (actions) and/or nouns (things) not to exceed sixty-four with which he or she is willing to be involved and which are theatrically feasible (those may include stage properties, clothes, etc.; actions may be ‘real’ or mimed, etc.).”40

FIGURE

3.7 John Cage. June in Buffalo, 1975. Photo: Irene Ikner Haupt.

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The performers in the Baird Hall performance were Petr Kotik, ﬂutist/ director; Julius Eastman, voice; Judith Martin, synthesizer; and Jan Williams, percussion. As Thomas Putnam reported in the Courier Express, “Judith Martin vocalized with the aid of distorted ampliﬁcation, Jan Williams played an ampliﬁed typewriter, and Petr Kotik did a sleep-walking dance with his coat pulled over his head.”41 Julius Eastman was not mentioned. Eastman had prepared a mock lecture on a “new system of love,” using two live “specimens” that he named Mister Charles and Miss Susiana. According to Jeff Simon’s review, “By the time Eastman’s little performance was ﬁnished, Mister Charles was completely undressed and Eastman’s leering, libidinous, lecture-performance had everyone convulsed with the burlesque broadness of his homoerotic satire.”42 Cage was furious. Audience and performers’ ridicule, indifference, even sabotage, were not unfamiliar to him. A few years earlier he had endured a disastrously unprepared performance of his orchestral work Cheap Imitation by the Gaudeamus Orchestra in Holland and, before that, a performance of Atlas Eclipticalis by a hostile, undisciplined New York Philharmonic Orchestra.43 But in his lecture the morning after the Baird Hall performance, a visibly agitated Cage expressed his disappointment and frustration, saying that in Buffalo, of all places, and with such experienced performers, he had expected a more sensitive, knowledgeable reading of his work. When a student asked him how he could be so upset as he didn’t provide an explicit score, Cage pounded the piano and responded that he expected that anyone who was serious about performing his music should have read Thoreau and know the music of Satie. These references, he felt, would enable the performer to approach the performance of his work in the appropriate spirit. It was startling to see the usually sunny Cage so dismayed, and all of us were disheartened about it. Jan Williams describes it: I do remember that John also singled out my performance as being “with a tic.” I was devastated and went home after the “lecture,” skipping a rehearsal for a concert [the next night] that included etcetera, which I produced. I think John actually telephoned me to talk, but I can’t remember. . . . I think he wanted to encourage me to take part in the rest of the performances that week, which I did. They all went off without a hitch.44 The next two weeks of June in Buffalo, with Earle Brown and Christian Wolff in attendance, followed the same format of performances—often with the composers participating—and classroom sessions. Things went well. Over time, Kotik and Cage repaired their rupture and came to a warm understanding once again.

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Artpark, a huge new performing arts center, had opened the preceding year in Lewiston, New York, not far from Buffalo on the border between the United States and Canada. Dramatically situated in a park overlooking the Niagara River gorge, seven miles north of Niagara Falls, Artpark was envisioned as a summer home for the Buffalo Philharmonic, which performed at a gala opening with Lukas Foss conducting. In early summer 1975, following the June in Buffalo concerts, the CAs were invited to Artpark to present a series of programs during the day, culminating in an evening performance in the 2,500-seat performance shed. The daytime performances featured Pauline Oliveros’s meditative piece Crow. In the large round outdoor amphitheater, the dynamics of the piece changed from the intense, almost confrontational event we had experienced in the AlbrightKnox theater setting to a slowly changing, contemplative tableau in nature. The evening performance included Robert Moran’s L’aprés-midi du Dracoula, during which the musicians huddle together on a dark stage illuminated only by candlelight, making ampliﬁed creaking and groaning sounds that simulate the prying open of a cofﬁn, and Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King. Both were great audience favorites. Because the Artpark stage was so large, several rehearsals were required to adjust the sound and space requirements. During one late-morning rehearsal, I was seated in the audience next to Jane Ward, the Artpark performing arts coordinator. Julius Eastman was on his stage throne marking his part as mad King George III, when Ward leaned over and whispered, “How much longer do you think this rehearsal will take?” “Another twenty minutes or so,” I replied. “Oh,” she said, “I just needed to know because I’m getting married during lunch.”

Boston Harbor In 1975–1976, our twelfth season, the CAs numbered seven people, with ﬁve new CAs joining the two returning fellows, ﬂutist Eberhard Blum and pianist Joseph Kubera. The new members of the Center were Linda Cummiskey, violinist; Donald Knaack, percussionist; Walter Gajewski, electronicist; Nora Post, oboist; and the composer Robert Moran. Julius Eastman and Benjamin Hudson were no longer in Buffalo, but some former CAs did stay in town. Charlotta Kotik, by then an important curator at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, was certainly a major factor in Petr Kotik’s decision to direct his S.E.M. Ensemble touring and performing activities from a Buffalo base. Former CA violinist Charles Haupt became concertmaster of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra; soprano Sylvia Brigham-Dimiziani and Jan Williams were on the SUNYAB

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Music Department faculty; Makoto Michii, a former CA contrabassist who had come to Buffalo from Japan with his new wife, Takoto, joined the orchestra and later started a music business. These musicians, along with a cadre of Philharmonic players who performed as guests in the CA programs over the years and selected graduate student performers, made up a network of experts from which the Center could draw as the need arose. The group was also augmented from time to time by invited guest composer-performers from out of town, such as trombonist-composer Garrett List. Michael Tilson Thomas, by then in his ﬁfth year as conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic, was designing musical seasons replete with contemporary pieces. In the 1975–1976 season, the orchestra performed Charles Ives’s Symphony No. 4, an all-Stravinsky program, several works by Carl Ruggles, including Sun Treader and Men and Mountains, an all-Gershwin program, Concerto for Orchestra by Wittold Lutoslawski, plus works by Aaron Copland, Charles Tomlinson Griffes, and Samuel Barber. What existed at that time in Buffalo was a true climate, to use Lukas Foss’s words, in which contemporary

FIGURE 3.8 Members of the Center (left to right, front: Jan Williams, Renée Levine, Walter Gajewski; back row: Harley Gaber, Linda Cummiskey, Garrett List [guest composer], Nora Post, Joseph Kubera, Donald Knaack). Not shown: Eberhard Blum, Robert Moran. Fall 1975. Photo: J & J Productions (Buffalo).

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music stood side by side with the immortals, such as Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, and Brahms.45 On September 14, 1975, an article appeared in the Buffalo Courier Express under the headline, “Creative Troupe off to Iceland.” We were about to leave on another tour of Europe, and the article outlined the itinerary and the works slated to be performed. But the orchestra and the CAs were not the only ones exploring new territory on Buffalo’s arts scene. Curiously, on the ﬂip side of the page another article appeared, titled “Century Woos Showgoers with Bright, Mixed Package.” It described how two young men, Harvey Weinstein and Corky Burger, both under twenty-ﬁve years of age and coproprietors of the Century Theater, were producing “Buffalo’s ﬁrst full ﬂedged road company theater series since 1972.” The Harvey in Harvey and Corky Inc. was Buffaloborn Harvey Weinstein, who with his brother, Bob, founded Miramax Films a few years later. Had the Center been aware of such budding talent in their midst, it might have beneﬁted greatly from the pair’s ﬂamboyant savvy and expertise. In mid-September, the group embarked on its second European tour. Things went much more smoothly this time, partly because we were only eight people. These trips were especially valuable to the players; not only did they bring fame to the Buffalo enterprise but also the frequently broadcast state radio tapes brought the composers and the players a wide listenership. Concerts were scheduled in Reykjavik, The Hague, Baden-Baden (to record a tape for West German radio), Vienna (for a series of concerts at Amerika Haus), London (to make a tape for the BBC), and a return engagement in Poland, where the CAs were the sole American ensemble represented at the 1975 Warsaw Autumn Festival. Again we brought works by American composers, including Robert Moran’s L’aprés-midi du Dracoula (1966) and Wallpaper Music (1975), Garrett List’s Three Processes on Nine Sets from “The Orchestral Etudes” (1975), Harley Gaber’s Calligraphies/Page 5 for solo violin (1974), Morton Feldman’s Instruments (1974), Lejaren Hiller’s Portfolio for Diverse Performers and Tapes (1974), Clapping Music by Steve Reich (1972), and Ni bruit ni vitesse by Lukas Foss. Feldman and Hiller wrote their pieces expressly for the tour. Because it was early in the season, the group hadn’t been playing together long enough to create true ensemble with all the intersensitivity that implies. But it came soon enough and, once again, the concerts were well received. It was gratifying, too, that in each country so many composers turned out to hear us. Shortly after the group’s return from Europe, we traveled to Boston to participate in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Arttransition Festival, produced by the Center for Advanced Visual Studies and the University Film Center. The CAs performed works by Cage, Feldman, and Moran, plus the De

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Pablo/Alexanco/Emshwiller multimedia piece Soledad Interrumpida. The Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) had been founded in 1967 by artist György Kepes, a pioneer in the linking of arts and technology, as a workshop and “idea breeder” for outstanding artists. In 1974, the painter and sky artist Otto Piene took over the leadership of CAVS. Among his areas of interest were environmental art and design, the interaction of art with science and technology, celebrations and public art, and education toward the new disciplines of video, holography, and computer-aided design and programming.46 The similarities between CAVS and Buffalo were evident. During this period, more and more composers were voicing their dissatisfaction with the traditional concert format of musicians performing on a stage separated from an audience seated neatly in rows in front of them. Composers wanted more control of the entire environment—aural and visual—in which their works would be seen and heard. At the same time, the visually oriented people at MIT wanted to introduce sound into their installations. With the help of former CA Maryanne Amacher, then a fellow at CAVS, and her colleague Paul Earls, a composer-musicologist working with electronic instruments, laser projections, ﬁlm, and environmental sound works, we decided to try an exchange program for fellows from each center to spend time at the other. With performances and other commitments, the scheduling became sticky, but Eberhard Blum was the ﬁrst to go to M.I.T. for a residency. One of his projects while there was Incoming Night: Blum at Ocean, Pier 6, Boston Harbor, 11:30 p.m., by Maryanne Amacher. The purpose of this work was to link distant spaces in time. Amacher accomplished this by installing a dedicated telephone line at a partially open window in a small shack on the pier. The “incoming night” harbor sounds, along with Blum’s on-site ﬂute playing, were received “live” in an exhibition room at CAVS via a 15 k.c. New England Bell program channel. Amacher then mixed the live sounds with prerecorded sounds selected for the CAVS exhibition space. What emerged was an intriguing dialogue between Blum, the seagulls, and the nighttime shore sounds of horns and wind that surprised listeners with a unique and gentle poetry. Some time later, the Center hosted Paul Earls in Buffalo for a week. Earls collaborated with CA oboist Nora Post to create a work entitled Doppelgänger, Lightmusic for Oboes and Laser. About the challenge they set for themselves, Earls wrote: Oboist into oboe into two mikes into a wire into voltages into electromagnetic ﬁeld changes into mirror positions into laser beam scanning (one vertical, one horizontal) into Lissajous patterns onto a wall into a mirror into oboist’s eyes/brain, mixed with sound; oboist

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sees/hears/feels—performs a total system including composer’s directions, oboe, acoustical/optical electronics, columnated light, audience, self.47 This cross-referencing was short-lived but stimulating. Both communities were formally acknowledging that these investigations were not just isolated occurrences but that something new was taking root. Blum had also been concentrating on learning what would become his signature work, Ursonate (1922–1932) by painter-collagist Kurt Schwitters. An outstanding artist in the Dada movement, Schwitters wrote the spoken Ursonate in a four-movement musical form using phonetic nonsense syllables instead of musical notes. Precise instructions are given to the performer regarding tempo, dynamics, and rhythm. As Blum recalls, “One of the experiences I valued most at the Center was having the time to learn and perform the Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters. My ﬁrst performance of it took place in January 1975. Tom Johnson wrote a rave review in the Village Voice and WBAI broadcast the work seven times.”48 At the end of January 1975 a group of musicians from the Center went to New York to record Morton Feldman’s piece For Frank O’Hara (1973) for Columbia Records’ Modern American Music series. Feldman wrote the work, for ﬂute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and percussion, especially for the tenth anniversary of the Center. About the work Feldman says, “My primary concern (as in all my music) is to sustain a ‘ﬂat surface’ with a minimum of contrast.”49 The Center was not involved in making side 1 of the recording, a performance of Feldman’s Rothko Chapel. After a dozen years of operation, it was becoming abundantly clear that things were different. We all knew that the Center needed to step back to reevaluate its work and assess the possibilities for the future. I wrote down some thoughts about the Center needing to adapt to a changing environment and sent a few pages to the other members of the Center’s board, which had been enlarged to include Gerald O’Grady, Robert Moog, and Michael Tilson Thomas. It would be useful, I felt, to rethink the laboratory aspect of the Center and ways to strengthen cross-disciplinary endeavors. Composers were expressing their impatience with the traditional concert hall setting. The number of undergraduate and graduate student composers, as well as advanced instrumentalists in the music department, had tripled. The students, now well versed in a rich variety of musical styles, were composing, playing new music, arranging performances, and creating their own groups. The growing use of electronics and computers, contemporary performance techniques, and the interest in large environmental projects suggested fertile areas in which CAs could work with

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university students already enrolled in music, media studies, and theater. I noted that Jan Williams was, in fact, designing just such a course to present to the Curriculum Committee of the Music Department. Fewer CA fellowships resulted in a less rich social interaction between members of the group. The M.I.T. experience had suggested that new alliances within and beyond the university promised a more invigorating experience for our own Center members. I proposed a shift toward a more research-oriented focus and advocated concentrating on making recordings rather than touring. But with hardly any staff to follow through on new ideas, and with the momentum of a busy season in full swing, nothing much changed. Despite the budget crunch, the Center continued to perform in New York, once again presenting concerts at the WBAI Free Music Store and, for the ﬁrst time, at the Kitchen, an alternative arts space then located in Soho. Composerpianist Robert Moran joined the CAs in January, and a month later the Center presented an all-Moran concert at the Albright-Knox and at WBAI. Moran thinks big. His oeuvre includes compositions for entire cities (San Francisco and Graz, Austria, among others), a shadow-puppet epic, operas, and pieces for multiple orchestras and choruses. The scores for many of these works are beautiful graphic drawings, rendered to give more compositional responsibility to the performer. The concert at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery that took place on February 8, 1976, included three of Moran’s musical compositions, a short playlet that he and actress Anne Gerety had assembled from the writings of Gertrude Stein, and an exhibition of scores in the Gallery’s North Corridor. Reviewing the event, John Dwyer wrote, “Moran’s dream world is romantic, hypnotic, occasionally witty, often gentle, always theatrical.”50 Nora Post, a highly talented oboist, was our whiz kid. A Ph.D. candidate at New York University during her time in the Buffalo group, she was also an accomplished master of the two-keyed baroque oboe. In her early February recital with SUNYAB Music Department faculty member David Fuller, an accomplished harpsichordist and music historian, she demonstrated her notable range of interests and abilities. She and Fuller performed works by Frescobaldi, Telemann, and Couperin in the ﬁrst half of the evening, making way for new works by Isaac Nemiroff, Luciano Berio, and student composer Charles Casavant in the second half. It came as a surprise to learn a few years later that she was to be married to the SUNYAB Vice President and amateur oboist, Albert Somit. Later that month, on February 26, 1976, we were shocked to learn that Peter Yates had died of a sudden heart attack the night before in his home near the Buffalo State University College. Since becoming chairman of the Music Department at the State College in 1968, Yates and his wife, Frances Mullen,

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had added a great deal to the musical life of the city. Yates, sixty-six, had been a staunch supporter of the Center. In his writings and as host of a weekly radio series, he had cultivated a devoted following. The season came to a close with works by ﬁlmmaker-composer Phill Niblock, Toru Takemitsu, Bernard Rands, Ken Gaburo, and Robert Erickson, among others, and, before we knew it, June in Buffalo had rolled around again. The second June in Buffalo festival in 1976 was even better than the ﬁrst, wrote former SUNYAB graduate student and Buffalo Evening News reporter Andrew Stiller. Feldman chose to highlight the composers Iannis Xenakis, George Crumb, and Steve Reich, each dramatically representing different stylistic tendencies. Stiller continued, “Our own Hiller and Feldman made the overall variety even greater, and there were additional concerts devoted to Ives, Boulez, Satie, and—presumably as a Bicentennial gesture—an evening of early American salon music.”51

Ultrasonics, Subliminal Light and Sound Food was always a big deal with the CAs—a kind of community glue. David Tudor’s Indian meals, Carol Plantamura’s color-themed dinners (with her cats, White Kitty and Karlheinz, dancing around the stove), Doug Davis’s Black Forest tortes, Jan and Diane Williams’s clambakes, and the Kahles’ homemade pasta were culinary high points. Clarinetist Paul Zonn was an accomplished chef; dinner at the Kotiks’ was always an event presented with old-world grace. Dennis Kahle remembered, “There were some great cooks in that bunch and three informal dinner parties a week seemed to be the norm. The guest list would usually encompass whoever was in town from André Watts to Michael Tilson Thomas and so on.”52 Morton Feldman made dinner for me frequently. “Come over on Friday night,” he’d say. “The shrimp I’m going to make will give you a fever.” By now we were the Center’s codirectors, and the purpose of Morty’s dinners was to talk over programming, ﬁnances, or personnel matters, each of us making his or her points as diplomatically as possible. These were friendly interludes, a chance to share perspectives on this or that during some quiet time. At one of our dinner meetings in his apartment, he took me into the small second bedroom to show me his almost ﬁnished opera Neither, which he had tacked up all around the room and into the hallway page by page, at eye level, so that he could literally walk through the piece. “Look at this,” he would say, pointing out several phrases on the page, “and when I get here,” he said, stopping at a sudden chord or tempo change and humming all the while, “it just makes me swoon.”

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Commissioned by the Rome Opera and scored for orchestra and soprano, Neither, a seventy-minute “opera” in one act, is set to a short poem by Samuel Beckett. Feldman, a longtime Beckett fan, had asked Beckett for a text when they met in Berlin, preferably something new that he might use as the basis of the opera. Not long thereafter, Beckett sent Feldman a poem, Neither. Feldman was elated, and, adding to his delight, the Rome Opera commissioned a stage set for the premiere by the Italian painter Michelangelo Pistoletto. Martha Herr-Hanneman, a CA graduate fellow who had performed works by Milton Babbitt and Arnold Schoenberg in Center concerts, was the soprano soloist. The previous spring, I had written to the Rockefeller Foundation requesting a small grant to enable the Center to invite composers interested in doing cross-disciplinary research in music and technology. The idea was that the grantees would utilize the resources of the university as a laboratory base for several months. In spring 1976, the Center received a grant for $21,000. We lost no time in spreading the word for composers to submit proposals. The panel included experts such as Lejaren Hiller, Steina and Woody Vasulka, and Gerald O’Grady from Media Studies. They selected four grant recipients: Max Neuhaus, ﬁlmmaker-composer Ralph Jones, Victor Grauer, and French composer Giuseppe Englert, all of whom would be ofﬁcially in residence at the Center for periods ranging from two to ﬁve months. Victor Grauer’s project, undertaken jointly with the Media Studies program at the university, was concerned with research in subliminal sounds and light. A Ph.D. in music composition, Grauer was interested in the upper extremes of sound. He consulted with Buffalo-area resident Harald Bode, an engineer and the developer of audio tools such as ring modulators, frequency shifters, and the Bode Vocoder. The meetings with Bode, which had been arranged by CA electronicist Walter Gajewski, were a high point in a rich process that included working with Woody Vasulka’s DEC microcomputer to experiment with the use of video monitors as light sources. Grauer’s residency culminated in a performance of a new work, Polyhyperchord. He described the piece as a study in subliminal effects created through interplay of instruments and extremely high electronic sounds, with subliminal light effects made by the special use of video. “The music starts with low pitches,” Grauer explained to Thomas Putnam, “and goes up. Four forms of a 12 tone row are played in ascending polyphony in four parts by violin, cello, ﬂute, piccolo, oboe, and pitched percussion. In addition to the music there are lights, video, and electronic sound.” Grauer’s point was that the audience gradually begins to hear things it hadn’t noticed previously, the “refrigerator syndrome,” as he called it. “When the refrigerator turns off, you suddenly are aware it was there.”53

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During this same period, the French composer-conductor Pierre Boulez was ﬁnalizing his ambitious plans for a Paris-based institute dedicated to bringing music, science, and technology into a collaborative dialogue on another scale entirely. As the fortunes of the State of New York—hence the university— ﬂagged, Georges Pompidou, the president of France, was initiating a lavish cultural program that would be “forward looking and contemporary” while addressing a large public. The Centre Pompidou, as it was called, would include the National Museum of Modern Art, a public-information library, and a music wing. The French president invited a leading artist-intellectual and one of Europe’s most inﬂuential composers, Boulez, to lead the music initiative. According to Georgina Born, Pompidou offered Boulez carte blanche to design the new research center. After years of planning, IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique) opened in 1977 in an underground facility at the Place Igor Stravinsky. IRCAM’s purpose was to bring music, science, and technology into collaborative dialogue in order to produce research and technology to aid the progress of musical composition. The annual budget amounted to approximately 12 million francs (about four million U.S. dollars).54 As Reginald Smith Brindle writes, “IRCAM is the most thoroughgoing ‘confrontation with technology’ in the musical world. But it too has had its difﬁculties—most particularly in the public relations realm—from monopolizing musical research to lack of public outreach.”55 Boulez created ﬁve departments in his new center: Electro-Acoustics, Computer, Pedagogy, Instruments and Voice, and Diagonal (coordinating between the others). A number of Americans were inﬂuential at IRCAM from the start, most notably Max Matthews from Bell Laboratories, who became IRCAM’s ﬁrst scientiﬁc director. Former CA Vinko Globokar was appointed the ﬁrst director of the Instruments and Voice section. The institute also enjoyed a special relationship with the chamber orchestra Ensemble Intercontemporain, a separate performance organization, which Boulez had founded in 1976.

A Lecture on the Weather In contrast to the nascent utopia envisioned in Paris, by September 1976 the Buffalo group was down to ﬁve full-time Creative Associates. The group was augmented with the graduate student fellowships, the Rockefeller technical grant recipients, a small cadre of former CAs who lived in the area, and the now-generous local reserve of like-minded musicians, such as pianist Yvar Mikhashoff. Guest composer-performers were still brought in from time to time, sometimes with the help of Meet the Composer, an organization that

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promotes the music of living American composers. With relatively small grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Seymour Knox Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, we still managed to carry on. Danish ﬂutist Henrik Svitzer, whom Jan Williams recruited for the group, arrived that fall, and in the spring cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, an American who had been living in Rome, completed the roster. Morton Feldman called the 1976–1977 season’s ﬁrst Evenings for New Music “a political trip.”56 États, for Six Percussionists and Violin (1969) by the new Slee Professor, Betsy Jolas, opened the concert. Jolas, the daughter of Maria Jolas, translator, and Eugene Jolas, poet, journalist, and founder of the legendary literary magazine Transition, was born in Paris and settled in the United States in 1940. She attended Bennington College and returned to live in Paris in 1946, eventually assuming Olivier Messiaen’s chair as Professor of Analysis and, later, Composition at the renowned Paris Conservatoire. The word états (states), according to the composer, “is associated in French with a great variety of meanings: état general (general condition), état d’âme (mood), état d’esprit (frame of mind), état d’urgence (state of emergency).”57 As Thomas Putnam noted in his Buffalo Courier Express article, “It is also a work that confronts tradition and change, pitting the traditional solo violin against the most characteristic contemporary ensemble–the percussion ensemble.” In this performance, Putnam noted in his review, “Charles Haupt, who was a Creative Associate before becoming concertmaster of the Buffalo Philharmonic, played the solo part with a state of grace.”58 Jolas’s work was followed by Arnold Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, a polemic against Hitler with a poem by Lord Byron marking the demise of another tyrant. The performers were the Rowe String Quartet and music department faculty members Heinz Rehfuss, reciter, and Yvar Mikhashoff, pianist. The U.S. premiere of a new multimedia piece by John Cage, Lecture on the Weather, constituted the second half of the program. Lecture on the Weather was commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in observance of the U.S. bicentennial. In the score, Cage states that the work may be presented as an unconducted radio broadcast or a theatrical performance. It is scored for twelve speaker-vocalists (or instrumentalists) “preferably American men who have become Canadian citizens” (implying people who had moved to Canada to avoid the U.S. draft). Each performer uses an individual sound system “given an equalization distinguishing it from the others.” The speakers read excerpts from Thoreau selected through chance operations and interspersed with intermittent opportunities for vocalization or other sound production. Additional performance materials consist of recordings of breeze, rain, and thunder, along with a ﬁlm of lighting effects produced by means of brieﬂy projected negatives

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of drawings by Thoreau. The performance directions state that any performance of the piece, whether in a theater or over the radio, should be preceded by a reading of the Preface.59 A group from the Center had heard the ﬁrst performance of Lecture on the Weather at York University in Toronto, and several of the original York performers—former CA David Rosenboom and pianist Casey Sokol, along with composer James Tenney, who was on the York faculty—participated in the American premiere at Buffalo. Maryanne Amacher returned to supervise her storm recordings, along with painter Luis Frangella, who created the ﬁlm sections. As at the Canadian performance, John Cage read the preface, in which he quietly speaks about the shortsightedness of the nation’s leaders and the problem of a government led, in large part, by lawyers who are “concerned with precedent, not with discovery . . . not with vision and intuition.” In the text, he discusses his use of Thoreau’s writings and cites Thoreau’s inﬂuence on Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Cage dedicates the work “to the U.S.A., that it may become just another part of the world, no more, no less.” In his review for the Buffalo Evening News, John Dwyer called Lecture on the Weather “an astounding work . . . a high point in their 13 seasons of the Evenings for New Music series.”60 We felt buoyant and encouraged. The Center continued to excite, stimulate, and challenge not only our audiences but also those of us working behind the scenes. One person who became a champion of the Center was the new Music Department chairman, William Thomson. His letter, dated December 13, 1976, to Provost George R. Levine, aptly describes the Center’s situation within the university at that time: A curious irony prevails with our Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. During its twelve years of existence, it has produced extraordinary national and international attention for our Campus, yet it plods along today in a state of ﬁnancial neglect. Any musician in the United States who pays the slightest attention to the avantgarde recognizes “those people in Buffalo” as one of the cutting edges in new music. The center’s reputation was a strong argument for me to join this faculty. People who have never been to Buffalo know two things about it: its bad weather and its good climate for new music. We can blame God and His lake for the former, but the center deserves all the credit for the latter. . . . The University has in its possession a bargain. It is a bargain for two basic reasons. First, the center provides a dramatic stimulus and example for our Music Department students and faculty. Its presence

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is insurance against becoming just another little Music Department with feet stolidly planted in fallow ground. Our composition, theory, history, and performance segments beneﬁt tremendously from the center’s presence. Music is not just a post facto object; it is an alive creative process for composer, performer, and listener. And second, the center’s attractive power for the University and for Buffalo should not be disregarded. It is unique that a Center for the Creative and Performing Arts is the public image-setter for a University, and this is the case here. The [James] Joyce Archives cannot be transported for public display; our handful of Distinguished Professors project strong but narrow beams of prominence; the University has no “winning athletic teams.” I feel honored that a segment of the Music Department is the most visible asset of our academic community. For those who doubt this prominence, I can supply glowing reviews of the group’s concerts from the past ﬁve seasons at various cultural centers of the world. I therefore urge increased support for the center in ways that will both revitalize it now and also ensure its continued health. My proposal would in substance mean only a return to a semblance of the support the center once enjoyed. It would entail the following: 1. Six state [salary] lines for Creative Associates (fellows attached to the center); 2. An increase of individual CA stipends from $8,500 per academic year to $10,000 for fellows who are retained after a ﬁrst year; 3. A grant of $8,000 for the replacement and/or repair of badly worn instruments and electronic equipment; and 4. A substantial raise in salary for Renée Levine, who has at times held the center together in the face of depressing conditions . . . and should more adequately reﬂect her key role within this signiﬁcant operation’s scheme. I think the time has come for the University to make a crucial decision about the center. Either it decides that this project provides an irreplaceable and precious service to the University community, or it should be allowed to die away. Now is the propitious time to make a move. Morton Feldman has generously agreed to serve as the Musical Director of the center. Lejaren Hiller has assumed the responsibility of directing the research end of operations, aiding in the broad experimental phases

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of the group’s productions, as well as the research demanded for some aspects of its presentations. Jan Williams remains as Resident Conductor, thus providing the many years of expertise he has developed in working within this framework. These, with Renée as continued Managing Director, ensure us of a spectacular artistic machinery. Allowing this potential to waste away because of insufﬁcient funding would be tragic. I hope you will ﬁnd it possible to apply pressure to produce evidence that the University recognizes its good fortune and will move to protect it. Sincerely yours, William Thomson, Chairman61 According to George Levine, by the mid-1970s, the university budget was indeed a serious problem. The president’s ofﬁce began to pull money out of the already reduced number of CA salary lines in order to build up the schools of management, law, and engineering, where, as he put it, “the students were coming.” “My associate Bernice Poss and I tried to use bits and pieces of faculty positions to support the CAs and insure some kind of continuity.”62 Vice President Somit, however, who controlled the budget, was not convinced. Eight years had passed since the eleven CA state lines amassed by Allen Sapp had been replaced with accrued endowment funds. It was inevitable that those funds would be depleted. Now the CAs were hostage to an executive administration that, far removed from the original founders, could only be termed indifferent at best. In spite of George Levine’s sympathy for Chairman Thomson’s plea, the Center continued on an increasingly precarious footing.

Late January 1977 The vocalist-composer Joan La Barbara was in town, rehearsing several of her pieces that employ extended vocal techniques and electronics for an upcoming performance with Jan Williams and Nora Post. A few months earlier, Morton Feldman had met with La Barbara at Wolﬁe’s Deli on Fifty-seventh Street and Sixth Avenue in New York to discuss the possible performance of her work in the Evenings for New Music series. In the mid-1970s, La Barbara was composing a series of pieces she called The Ides of March, based on the acoustic phenomenon of beating that occurs between closely tuned instruments with microtonal variations.63 As Feldman gleefully reported on his return, “When I asked her

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FIGURE 3.9 Joan La Barbara (center) rehearsing her works with Jan Williams and Nora Post (Albright-Knox Art Gallery). February 1977. Unidentiﬁed photographer.

which pieces she wanted to do, she looked me squarely in the eye and said, ‘Tun-dah!’” Feldman, a committed fan of La Barbara’s, was bowled over, and several works, including Thunder, were programmed for Buffalo and New York. The CAs were back at Carnegie Recital Hall and looking forward to the concert. In addition to La Barbara’s work, the program included Fantasia for Violin and Piano (1974) by Charles Wuorinen, performed by violinist Benjamin Hudson and the composer, and the premiere of a ten-minute composition written for Jan Williams and Nora Post by Iannis Xenakis. The preceding June, while he was in town for the June in Buffalo Festival, Xenakis had agreed to Feldman’s request that he write a piece for Post and Williams. Word of the new Xenakis piece Damaathen had created something of a stir. For the ﬁrst time in thirteen years of presenting concerts in New York City, a critic from the New York press called me to request a copy of the score in advance of the performance. “It was snowing/And it was going to snow.”64 Those lines, by the poet Wallace Stevens, were never as apt as on the morning of January 28, 1977. There were predictions for snow—nothing new for that time of year. It had been snowing

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a little on and off each day for 28 days straight. And there was still a lot of work to do for the upcoming concerts at Carnegie Recital Hall on February 2nd and at the Albright-Knox ten days later. I was at the university early that morning. By 11:00 a.m. the grey ﬂannel sky was growing even darker and the snow seemed to be getting heavier. Everything was very quiet. The parking lot in front of Baird Hall was nearly deserted. Someone came into my ofﬁce and said the weather report sounded serious and everybody should head out. Living in Buffalo, one can become cavalier about the snow, but this time it seemed like the right call. While driving downtown to my home located just a few blocks off Main Street, a major north-south artery, visibility dropped from three-fourths of a mile to zero. The twenty-ﬁve-minute trip home took me close to an hour and a half. By the time I arrived, I was barely able to maneuver the car up the slight incline into my driveway. Later that day, weather reports stated that in just over four hours, the temperature had dropped twenty-six degrees to zero, and by late afternoon the winds were gusting at 70 miles per hour. The wind howled endlessly, sounding like huge ocean waves crashing against the house. Wind chills reached ﬁfty to sixty degrees below zero. Blizzard conditions prevailed on and off for the next three days. On Saturday, January 29, for the ﬁrst time in 145 years, the Buffalo Courier Express could not publish its morning paper. All roads were closed. The snowdrifts that had been blown in from Lake Erie reached rooftops and, in some cases, completely covered cars. People over the entire region were trapped. At least twentynine deaths were blamed on the storm. Factories and industries closed. Mail delivery was suspended. People called each other to ask whether they were all right, whether they needed anything, setting up a spontaneous community help chain. Banks and hotels kept their lobbies open to host stranded commuters. By Sunday night, a neighbor, John Wadsworth, arranged a blizzard party. All friends who could walk or ski over were invited. The “where were you when . . . ?” and “how did you get home?” stories ﬂowed and a cozy camaraderie prevailed. We had lived through what would later be called “the storm of the century.” On Monday, civilian vehicles were still banned from the roadways. I called Ed Birdwell, the assistant manager of Carnegie Hall, trying to ﬁgure out what to do about the Wednesday Evenings for New Music concert there.65 Someone had heard that a Greyhound bus had gotten out and was headed for the Toronto airport. That sounded like a plan. I called the local police and explained the situation. Carnegie Hall has a certain cachet that impressed even the Buffalo police. They suggested that, if people were willing to walk with their instruments from their homes to a designated main thoroughfare and wait on an

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appointed corner at an agreed-on time, they would authorize two vehicles to travel down the avenue to collect them and proceed to the Greyhound terminal. On Tuesday morning, nine of us trudged to our appointed corners on Elmwood Avenue, where two stalwart friends of the Center in heavy cars picked us up and delivered us to the bus station. There we boarded the Greyhound bus to Toronto and ﬂew on to New York. On the bus, we encountered video artist Woody Vasulka. He had a presentation to make at UNESCO in Paris and had hit on the same, the only, solution. “If nothing else,” the New York Times’ Joseph Horowitz wrote, “Iannis Xenakis’s furiously energetic Damaathen for oboe and percussion (1976) . . . provides a grueling workout for the performers . . . Nora Post and Jan Williams.” “Miss Post’s oboe part,” Horowitz continued, “extending beyond the instrument’s conventional range, repeatedly called both for athletic runs and loud, sustained multiphonics. Mr. Williams, who often seemed called upon to play as loudly and quickly as possible, was in charge of six or seven drums as well as a marimba and a vibraphone, the keyboards of which were aligned so that he could play both instruments at once.” Horowitz went on to discuss the three works by Joan La Barbara that demonstrated her new vocal techniques, such as “vocalizing wordless, up and down glissandos while inhaling and exhaling,” and employing “an electronic unit that produced a variable echo as well as additional pitches.” The evening had opened with Milton Babbitt’s Philomel, in honor of the composer’s sixtieth birthday, which was performed by soprano Martha Herr-Hanneman with the composer manning the tape deck. As Horowitz noted, in such company as the Xenakis and La Barbara pieces, Babbitt’s Philomel (1964) “took on the guise of a genial classic.”66 The large number of works performed in the 1976–1977 season that were scored for solo instrumentalists or very small ensembles testiﬁes to the severely reduced Center forces. Pieces utilizing tape and electronics were now in evidence on almost every program. Hiller’s absence from the programming end of things, compounded by the growing expense of staging large productions, had all but banished multimedia work from the concerts. One theater work that made it onto the program that season was Samuel Beckett’s Not I (1973), a short play consisting of one speaker seen only as an illuminated mouth in a sea of darkness. The disjointed text, apparently constructed in sonata form, consists of poignant, barely-coherent babbling with phrases repeated as leitmotifs throughout the work. Elizabeth Hiller was riveting as the performer. The season concluded with notable performances, including Under the Umbrella (1976) for ﬁve percussionists by Jo Kondo and Ygghur (1965) for solo cello by

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the Italian iconoclast Giancinto Scelsi. The cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, a champion of Scelsi’s work, performed. Feldman’s third June in Buffalo festival concentrated mainly on American composers. Aaron Copland, Terry Riley, Milton Babbitt, Lukas Foss, Lejaren Hiller, and Jacob Druckman each had a “one-man show,” as Feldman liked to call concerts devoted to a single composer. One concert, however, did embrace a number of earlier American composers, such as Charles Tomlinson Griffes and Amy Beach. An array of excellent performers participated, including not only the CAs but also composer-pianists Leo Smit, Yvar Mikhashoff, and Nils Vigeland, pianist Stephen Manes, and the Concord String Quartet. Budget problems or not, Buffalo continued to be home to a startling array of ﬁrst-rate artists.

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4 The Final Years: 1977 to 1980

The 20th century . . . is a time when everything cracks, where everything is destroyed, everything isolates itself, it is a more splendid thing than a period when everything follows itself. —Gertrude Stein, Picasso

Music of Changes There is something inevitable about the disintegration of a circle. The theorists postulate that conﬂicts may accumulate and go unresolved; that some members may conclude that the costs of working together outweigh the gains. In this case, the ever-worsening ﬁnancial difﬁculties and the strain of having to justify the Center’s existence with each rotation of the university’s administrative staff ultimately leeched the spirit. Yet even though the undertow was palpable, there existed a stubborn momentum as well. A powerhouse of musical talent was represented in the small number of new Creative Associates who arrived in the fall of 1977. Feldman had lured the pianist John Tilbury from England for a semester. Tilbury, an old friend and colleague of Cornelius Cardew, was a ranking member of that now legendary group of pianists devoted to experimental music: David Tudor, Frederic Rzewski, and Cardew. The virtuoso ﬂutist-composer Robert Dick came to the Center from Yale and French contrabassist Joëlle Léandre from

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Paris. In a stroke of good fortune, the Center had received a grant from the Kosciuszko Foundation to help bring two young musicians from Poland in the spring. The Evenings for New Music concerts were as provocative as ever, although the strained ﬁnancial picture meant that only compositions calling for very small forces were programmed. Except in rare circumstances, such as a concert devoted to works by the visiting Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, most pieces used no more than four players, if that. The group still managed to present the Evenings for New Music concerts in New York that season at Carnegie Recital Hall, WBAI Free Music Store, and Columbia University. As had usually been the case, the campus-based CA recitals continued to be vibrant affairs. Tilbury performed works by Cage, Terry Riley, Arnold Schoenberg, and Bach on his recital, and Robert Dick presented an entire evening of music by Jo Kondo. Weronika and Krzysztof Knittel were expected at the start of the second semester. Weronika was an accomplished violinist in her twenties who had been concertmaster of the Polish Chamber Orchestra in Warsaw. Krzysztof was a pianist-composer with an active interest in electronic music. We were eagerly anticipating the arrival of the two new CAs from Poland, whose residency was underwritten by the Kosciuszko Foundation. Buffalo has a large Polish community—a signiﬁcant part of the ethnic population of the city—and there was always the possibility that the Knittels would help lure new audiences to the concerts. Because the Knittels were married and required only one abode, they had been offered (and each had accepted) a somewhat smaller stipend than two single CAs would have received, thereby saving precious dollars that might be applied to a guest artist’s honorarium. On a snowy evening in early February, I picked them up at the airport. While driving back to the city, I explained that they could stay with me for a few days until they found an apartment that suited them. They promptly informed me in matter-of-fact tones that they were planning to be divorced and no longer wished to live together. Once settled in separate living quarters, the Knittels proceeded to work together as cordial colleagues through the end of the semester, at which time Krzysztof Knittel returned to Europe, and Weronica stayed in Buffalo through the end of the calendar year. In January 1978, I, too, decided to leave Buffalo. My private life had changed, and after fourteen years of wrestling with the Center’s perennial ﬁnancial and administrative struggles, my zest for the task was depleted. Monica Polowy, a recent graduate in music from the university who had worked in the Ofﬁce of Cultural Affairs on campus, came to my attention. Young and bright, Polowy was familiar with both the CAs and the broader university administration. She agreed to relinquish her post as executive director of

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4.1 Earle Brown conducting his Syntagm III with Creative Associates and

guests (left to right: Robert Dick, Weronika Knittel, Gary Hatt, Krzysztof Knittel, Michael Peebles, Mario Falcao, Jan Williams). Not shown, Gregory Ketchem. (Albright-Knox Art Gallery). February 1978. Unidentiﬁed photographer.

Buffalo’s Polish Community Center and that spring took on the job of managing director of the Center.1 Jan Williams, who was conducting and overseeing the music production aspects of the operation, assumed co-music directorship of the Center with Feldman. The majority of works performed in the Evenings for New Music concerts during the spring semester of 1978 were written in the 1970s, including pieces by Leo Smit, Earle Brown, Roger Reynolds, Wlodzimierz Kotonski, Jo Kondo, and Lukas Foss. The oldest piece was Giacinto Scelsi’s Rucke di Guck written in 1955. In June 1978, Feldman made a proposal to Music Department Chairman William Thomson to redeﬁne the Center’s focus and operational format. Faced with only four to six CA funding lines for the 1978–1979 season, Feldman proposed splitting off the CAs from the concert-producing aspect of the Center. While supporting one or two composer-scholars in residence, the main work of the Center would be to produce the best possible Evenings for New Music concerts in Buffalo and in New York City. A cadre of New York– based musicians, augmented by former CAs, as well as people from the Buffalo Philharmonic and the university music department, would serve as performers. The majority of funds previously designated for the resident

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fellowships would now be allocated for the guest musicians. Feldman concluded by stating that if his proposal was not accepted, he would cease serving as Center music director. Thomson emphatically opposed Feldman’s plan, terming it “wholly unacceptable.” He wrote Feldman that he and the faculty members he had consulted agreed that such a plan “would emasculate the total operation, [and] undermine the very reason for the center’s afﬁliation with the Department.”2 Thomson countered with the suggestion that in Feldman’s absence a performing nucleus of CAs would be augmented by four to six visiting composers and conductors who would be designated as Visiting Slee Professors. The CAs would have a voice in selecting the visitors and the repertoire. Thomson wrote that he could assume the role of acting director of the Center, with the department’s executive committee, the CAs, and Monica Polowy as central sources of planning and decision making. He also advocated reviving the Advisory Board, which, he wrote, “should—and could— become more than the window dressing it has been for the past two years.”3 In spite of the difﬁculties that had surfaced, accord was reached over the summer, and Feldman was persuaded to remain in place as the Center’s music director, along with Jan Williams. The university’s budget crisis continued. In August 1978, Vice President Somit wrote a letter to Dean George Levine (in an administrative reorganization the title of “provost” was replaced with that of “dean’) regarding programs within Arts and Letters that were supported by unrestricted endowment funds. He reminded Levine that approximately three years earlier he had been advised by a university ﬁnancial administrator that Presidential Endowment funds allocated to the Center to replace a few of the lost state lines would be terminated by the close of the 1977–1978 academic year. And although the Presidential Endowment itself had been faced with reduced income and a dwindling surplus, funding for the Center had been continued, albeit at a reduced level, from twenty-ﬁve thousand to nineteen thousand dollars for the 1978–1979 academic year. Somit continued, “In retrospect, I think that was a mistake,” and he went on to say that “except in unusual cases, endowment is used for seed money, rather than to underwrite continuing programs.”4 Hence, by fall 1978, in spite of plans to integrate the CAs even more into the music department as teachers and mentors, university support was weaker than ever. A further blow to the Center’s ability to function was that the New York State Council on the Arts concluded that it was illegal for the agency to make grants to other state agencies or entities that were part of New York State institutions. Twelve months later, by fall 1979, there would be virtually no Center left.

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A Critical Fall On September 10, 1978, the beginning of the Center’s ﬁfteenth year, the headline in Thomas Putnam’s article in the Buffalo Courier Express read, “Fewer Creative Associates Will Tune Up at SUNYAB This Season.” Flanked by a photo of a smiling Morton Feldman, Jan Williams, and Monica Polowy, the article quoted Feldman as saying, “We have to do more with less.” He noted that the university was cutting back everything in Arts and Letters. “The healthy news,” he continued, “is that Jan and Monica and myself have decided not to go down to New York this season. It was like bringing coals to Newcastle. . . . So we’re putting the performance budget into Buffalo.”5 They were also putting a good face on an increasingly dire situation. In fact, ofﬁcials in the higher university administration had been having sporadic conversations on what to do about the Center. Because the Center existed in what Allen Sapp had once termed “a happy combination of University support and autonomy,” the focus of the administrators was likewise fractured. The Center’s autonomy was exceedingly useful in some instances, such as hiring, but it was perilous in others, particularly if the university was being counted on for a heftier percentage of its funding base. Semiautonomous operations such as the Center, whose personnel had no formal teaching obligations, were ﬁnding fewer advocates in the administration. Nevertheless, Dean Levine and his associate, Bernice Poss, scratched to ﬁnd bits and pieces of money from various divisions to paste together the all-important state personnel lines. In October, Levine wrote to Feldman, “I know there is a good deal of goodwill toward the Center and toward you personally from all those I spoke to during the summer. Bill [Thomson] is particularly concerned that the center continue its successful program and I know that you can count on his support and hope that you will not hesitate to call on him.”6 The Evenings for New Music concert program for October 28, 1978, lists four CAs, four featured guest artists, and seventeen additional assisting musicians. The CAs were ﬂutist Eberhard Blum, the former CA back in Buffalo for the fall semester while Robert Dick spent time at IRCAM; Mario Falcao, harpist on sabbatical from the State University College at Fredonia; Ken Ishii, a cellist from Cal Arts; and the violinist Weronika Knittel. The featured guests were Richard Field, principal violist of the Buffalo Philharmonic; Elizabeth Hiller and Saul Elkin, reciters; and New York–based pianist Ursula Oppens. Morton Feldman and Jan Williams served as artistic directors, Lejaren Hiller as research consultant, and Monica Polowy as managing director. The program states that the concerts were made possible in part by grants from the National

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Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Seymour H. Knox Foundation, and Meet the Composer. The late October concert opened with Arnold Schoenberg’s String Trio, Op. 45 (1946), followed by Alban Berg’s Kammerkonzert (1925) and a four-yearold work by West Coast composer William Kraft, Des Imagistes (1974) for six percussionists (positioned to surround the audience) and reciters. Poems by Ezra Pound or poets strongly inﬂuenced by Pound constituted the texts for the Kraft work. The December 1978 Evenings for New Music concert opened with Webern’s String Trio, Op. 20 (1927), and was followed by works by British composer Nigel Osborne, Tokyo-based Yoshio Hachimura, American composer Maurice Weddington, and Luciano Berio. The Weddington piece, titled Mehr Licht, was written in 1977 for ﬂutist Eberhard Blum. The program note, supplied by the composer, states, “In this work nuance seems to be the key to understanding. . . . As the horizontal webbing accumulates, the ear is ever so slowly and gently shattered by further pitch distinctions; half tones, quarter tones, harmonics allowed to remain out of tune, multiphonics, and ordinary pitches which by now have become the oddity.”7 Something of the series’ old ﬂair was evident in the February 1979 concert: Schoenberg’s Phantasy for Violin and Pianoforte, Op. 47 (1949), performed by Charles Haupt and music faculty pianist Stephen Manes, was followed by two works by Pierre Boulez, Sonatina for Flute and Pianoforte (1946) and Improvisations sur Mallarmé, I and II (1958–1960), for a large group with guest soprano Phyllis Bryn-Julson. John Dwyer wrote a glowing review in the Buffalo Evening News, saying that the concert was distinguished by “artists who could have taken these performances straight to Lincoln Center and rivaled just about anything in the chamber music life there.”8 The program closed with Julius Eastman conducting his recent twenty-ﬁveminute work If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?—a piece scored for brass nonet (two horns, four trumpets, two trombones, tuba), wired string basses, chimes, and ampliﬁed violin. Former CA Benjamin Hudson was the violin soloist. Composed for Lukas Foss and performed by the Brooklyn Philharmonia, Eastman thought of it as one of his best pieces. When asked about the title, he said, “It’s what my mother always asked.”9 About the piece, Kyle Gann has written, “This big essay . . . is a strange sonic meditation on one of the most pedestrian phenomena possible, the chromatic scale. One suspects that the opening trumpet solo is an exercise in working up to the trumpet’s highest performable note, which is then picked up by the ensemble.”10 Dwyer characterized the work as a “brass-knuckled chromatic assault on an indifferent or contemptuous society . . . written by a composer who has suffered a deep, deep wound.”11

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Morton Feldman went on sabbatical during the 1979 spring semester and invited composer James Tenney, who was on the faculty at York University in nearby Toronto, to ﬁll in as artistic director of the Center while he was away. According to Feldman’s composition student and then-companion Bunita Marcus, Tenney, an Ives specialist, was an old friend who had Feldman’s trust and respect.12 On the Evenings for New Music concert at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery that March, Tenney performed as pianist and conducted a group of short works by Charles Ives, Angels (1921) by Carl Ruggles, two of his own pieces—Seeds I–VI (1956–1961) and Harmonium #5 (1978)—before closing with Varèse’s Intégrales (1926). The concert was striking for its interesting programming of early twentieth-century music, but it was hardly CA signature programming. What’s more, audiences were falling off. The Center was losing its steam. Had the years of revolving university leadership and increasing budgetary constraints ﬁnally thwarted the Center’s ability to remain relevant? Was there a lack of sufﬁcient ﬂexibility to adapt to new realities, or a lack of the right kind of leadership for the time? As Monica Polowy observed, there just wasn’t the will to push it forward, to champion the cause. Feldman cared but wasn’t passionate about it, and he still had the June in Buffalo festival, which was, after all, his creation. Lejaren Hiller, Jan Williams, and Music Department Chairman William Thomson all had multiple responsibilities within the department, and, although each did what he could, university support was fading. Government funds were dwindling as well, and, apart from Seymour Knox’s private assistance, the Center had never concentrated on cultivating a broader base of ﬁnancial support in the community. The stalemate seemed unbreakable.13 For ﬂutist-composer Robert Dick, the Center was still an opportunity to work with contemporary music players at an incredibly high level. “Playing with Jan Williams made me a better musician,” he recalled. His experiences as a CA in the late 1970s read like the scenario painted by Foss in his original proposal for the Center seventeen years before: The Center came at the perfect time in my life. I was just out of Yale, single and in my twenties. I was able to concentrate on putting my playing together in Buffalo and didn’t have to take every little gig that came along like the Ice Capades or part time piccolo with the New Haven Symphony. I met and worked with composers such as Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, and Toru Takemitsu. I learned how they thought about their music, what they wanted. I created an improvisation trio with colleagues Joelle Leandre and Greg Ketchum.

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We did outreach concerts, WBFO radio broadcasts, improvisation performances. But by spring 1979, when Robert Dick returned from his fall stint at IRCAM, he remembers, “There was a palpable sense that the Center was dying, that the energy was bleeding out of it. One felt that the Center was going nowhere.”14

“It’s Like the Love Canal” As the Presidential Endowment faced reduced income and dwindling surplus, the funds that had been the source of CA salary lines in recent years were cut. In an eerie semblance of the children’s nursery rhyme, “Ten Little Indians,” only two CA fellows remained—the ﬂutist Robert Dick and the astonishing pianist Aki Takahashi, sister of Yuji, who had been a CA in 1967. The balance of funds available from an NEA grant would be used for guest performers. Pared-down preparations went forward for the Center’s sixteenth season, with no New York concerts and only one event at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, to be held in the spring. To save on equipment cartage expenses, most of the Center’s concerts would be presented on the university campus. The ﬁrst Evenings for New Music concert of the 1979–1980 season, however, followed a slightly different plan. Patricia Kerr Ross, director of the University Wide Programs in the Arts, had received a matching grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to make the arts resources of the State University of New York more available to the public. Part of the proposal was to engage the documentary ﬁlmmakers Donn Alan Pennebaker and Chris Hedegus to create a ﬁlm for television featuring the SUNYAB Center of the Creative and Performing Arts in a concert of composer Elliott Carter’s music. Scheduled for October 15, the event would be held at a university-owned theater in downtown Buffalo, whose stage could easily accommodate a large grand piano, a harpsichord, and a ﬁlm crew. In late September, as preparations for the concert and the ﬁlming were under way, Monica Polowy, the Center’s managing director for a year and a half, announced her resignation to become the administrative director of the Center for Music Experiment at the State University of California at San Diego. Her resignation exposed once and for all the Center’s fragility. Within days it became clear that the university administration was reluctant to replace Polowy, who occupied the Center’s only remaining full-time state salary line. Feldman, Hiller, and Williams met with department chairman William Thomson to discuss various options for keeping the Center going. The ﬁnal

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result of their lengthy discussion, Thomson wrote the dean, was the distinct sense that the Center could not survive the dual blow of losing a full-time managing director and the support from the university endowments. He closed by saying, “I hope we can bring about some quick mini-miracles that will put the center back on a reasonable footing.”15 “It’s like the Love Canal,” Feldman told John Dwyer, referring to the chemical dumpsite in Niagara Falls that became an environmental disaster. “No one wants to take responsibility.”16 But hope still glimmered for the Center. Efforts were being made by Dean George Levine, he said, to keep the Center open, although it might be only a “short lease on life.” Five days later, on October 11, 1979, the university publication, The Reporter, wrote, “Forget the eulogies—at least for now. The Center of the Creative and Performing Arts is still alive (although not well) and will continue to function.”17 Despite all the uproar over the Center’s presumed demise, the opening Evenings for New Music concert went forward. The concert, which was devoted to the music of Elliott Carter, took place at the SUNYAB Center Theater on Main Street because the Albright-Knox stage could not accommodate the size of the chamber music forces involved. It was, by all accounts, a sparkling affair of the highest quality. “Some of the most sophisticated and complex music of the century has been written by that reﬁned and quietly elegant classicist,” wrote John Dwyer of the all-Carter program. The major work of the evening was Carter’s daunting Double Concerto (1961) for piano, harpsichord, and chamber orchestra, conducted by Jan Williams. Ursula Oppens and Paul Jacobs were the guest soloists. Violinist Paul Zukofsky, a CA in the Center’s ﬁrst years, and Oppens opened the evening in a dazzling performance of Carter’s Duo for Violin and Piano (1974). John Dwyer called the concert “Among the Associates’ Finest Hours.”18 A zoom shot of the timeless torrents of Niagara Falls opens the PennebakerHedegus ﬁlm Elliott Carter at Buffalo. Carter, then in his seventies and already one of America’s most esteemed composers, projected an understated, gentlemanly aspect, which the ﬁlmmakers captured as they recorded the rehearsals, the conversational asides, a sightseeing trip to the Falls, and meals shared. The culmination of the ﬁlm is the performance of Carter’s twenty-three-minute Double Concerto, about which Stravinsky is said to have remarked, “at last one could speak of an American masterpiece.”19 One scene in the ﬁlm that provides an amusing glimpse of the personalities involved takes place in Morton Feldman’s apartment, where Carter and the other guest musicians were summoned to tea: (to assembled group): What the world doesn’t need is one more twenty-minute contemporary piece. We need a good piece of about

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an hour and a half in one movement that really starts developing about forty minutes later. That’s what we need. CARTER (in quiet, measured tones): We need an hour and a half piece that isn’t played by anybody and not heard by anybody? Who’s we? . . . It may be more of a strain to write a ﬁve-minute piece because you really have to have a good idea right then and there.20

A member of the Pennebaker-Hedegus ﬁlm crew, Sara Hornbacher, had received her master’s degree from the SUNYAB Center for Media Studies the preceding spring. Hornbacher, a video artist, was interested in the avant-garde and had attended CA concerts. She also knew her way around the thickets of elaborate technical equipment requirements. Once the music department received the green light to replace Monica Polowy, Feldman and Williams turned to Hornbacher to steer the Center through the end of the season. Hornbacher, who understood that the post was secure only through August, was particularly intrigued with the charge of mounting HPSCHD by John Cage and Lejaren Hiller, which was scheduled for two performances that spring at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Hornbacher’s ﬁrst Evenings for New Music coincided with a notable debut. It was the ﬁrst time that Michael Tilson Thomas conducted a work in the series. Joan La Barbara, who covered the event for Musical America, wrote that it was mainly due to the persistence of Buffalo Philharmonic player Lawrence Trott that the concert took place at all. Trott and the Piccolo Society had commissioned a new work from composer Morton Subotnick, Parallel Lines, scored for piccolo accompanied by nine players, and “ghost electronics.” Subotnick has written a number of pieces using what he terms “ghost electronics,” including 2 Life Histories, performed in an Evenings for New Music concert two years earlier, for clarinet, voice, and electronics. The ghost pieces consist of an instrumental work performed live along with a parallel (unheard) “ghost” score on tape. The tape contains information that controls the electronics, which, in turn, signal a potential acoustical composition in time and space.21 La Barbara commented on the “expressiveness and sensitivity Michael Tilson Thomas showed in conducting this moving, energetic piece,” which was performed by Trott, guest musicians from the Buffalo Philharmonic, and university players.22 John Dwyer wrote in the Buffalo Evening News, “Piccolo virtuoso Trott played the very devil out of the work.” Also on the concert were several quiet, subtle works: Hyxos (1961), a work for alto ﬂute and gongs by Giacinto Scelsi; Bryce (1976) for two harps, two percussion, and ﬂute by Toru Takemitsu; and Piano (1977) by Morton Feldman. Dwyer closed his review of

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the concert by saying that “they have presented here a virtually ideal recital, in performance quality and artistic imagination.”23 But Dwyer’s appreciation was not universally shared. As businessman Sheldon Berlow pointed out, “The Buffalo area has about a million people. If ﬁve hundred of them were tuned into the CAs from ‘totally committed’ to ‘maybe committed’ support of their activities, that was a lot.” Elsewhere in the same edition of the paper as the Evenings for New Music review, a letter from a Buffalo citizen appeared in response to an article announcing—prematurely as it had turned out—the demise of the Center: In the opinion of many area music lovers, the only real loss here will be to those artists of the big grant who no longer will ﬁnd easy pickings in Buffalo. The fact that genuine music has been shunted aside for so much faddist musical charlatanism has been a disgrace long enough to the university and the community at large. . . . The center (and its lucrative grants) may be loved in Iceland, Germany and Poland, but here at home we need to lend more support to our own talented artists, while putting an end to the subsidizing of those who so obviously place grants, and grantsmanship above music and musicianship.24

HPSCHD and Beyond The highly anticipated performances of HPSCHD were scheduled to take place from 6:00 P.M. to midnight on two consecutive nights (March 22 and 23, 1980) in six upstairs galleries off the Sculpture Court at the Albright-Knox. HPSCHD (computer code for harpsichord) is an elaborate multimedia extravaganza composed by John Cage and Lejaren Hiller between 1967 and 1969. It was ﬁrst presented at the University of Illinois’s Urbana campus on May 16, 1969. The score calls for one to seven harpsichords and one to ﬁfty-two ampliﬁed tape recorders with loudspeakers around the audience, in addition to a kaleidoscope of projected ﬁlms and slides. All but one of the harpsichord parts was generated by a computer program based on Mozart’s Musikalisches Wurfelspiel, K. 294.d—a piece commonly known as the “Musical Dicegame”— and the I-Ching (Book of Changes). The music directions specify twenty-minute solos for the harpsichordists. In addition to playing his own solo, “each harpsichordist is free to practice or perform any Mozart composition or to play any of the other solos. . . . The audience is free to move in and out of the performance space.”25

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FIGURE 4.2 HPSCHD with performers Yvar Mikhashoff and Aki Takahashi. (Albright-Knox Art Gallery). March 1980. Photo: Irene Ikner Haupt.

In the Buffalo performances, ﬁve harpsichords, forty slide projectors, and ﬁfty-one tape recorders were used. The harpsichord soloists were David Tudor and Neely Bruce, who performed in the Illinois premiere; Aki Takahashi, whose brother Yuji also performed in the premiere; and David Fuller and Yvar Mikhashoff of the SUNYAB music faculty. Joel Chadabe, director of the Electronic Music Studio at SUNY Albany, who had produced HPSCHD at Albany and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, was the technical director; Ron Kuivila was the technical assistant. Amassing the mountains of equipment required to mount this grand multimedia environment began months in advance. Because Hornbacher was charged with managing the Center on a very stringent budget, she was required to solicit the donation of all the equipment involved. Other requirements were commissioning the projection screens and sculptural creations by Buffalo artist John Toth and selecting additional media to be incorporated into the materials originally created by Cage and Hiller eleven years before. Images compiled under the supervision of Ronald Nameth and Calvin Sumsion for the Illinois performance were used, along with a large body of ﬁlms and slides from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The Buffalo library,

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the science museum, and SUNYAB Media Studies all contributed ﬁlms or slides. The dominant visual imagery was of space and astronauts. The density of sound and visual content was meant to envelop and overwhelm. As Cage points out to Richard Kostelanetz, “You don’t have to choose. . . . As you go from one point of the hall to another, the experience changes; and . . . each man determines what he hears. . . . Freedom of movement, you see, is basic to both this art and this society.”26 The ﬁrst Buffalo performance was a gala evening for an invited audience, celebrating the long-standing relationship between the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Center; the second performance was open to the public. The festive cacophony of an event such as HPSCHD feels like a big party reminiscent of the Electric Circus, a psychedelic nightclub in Greenwich Village in the late 1960s. John Dwyer termed the Buffalo HPSCHD performances “a sort of Phoenix rising out of the ashes of the once-blazing ﬁres of avant-garde music in Buffalo.”27 For a moment, the Center had recaptured something of the old excitement, but, regrettably, nothing much arose. On April 18, 1980, the last Evenings for New Music took place in Baird Hall with the last CA, Aki Takahashi, and guest pianist Ursula Oppens playing Monument/Selbstportrait/ Bewegung für zwei Klaviere by György Ligeti. They closed the concert with Olivier Messiaen’s monumental forty-eight-minute work, Visions de l’Amen.

“Noncontinuance” I would like to say right away how important it seems to me that things change. —John Cage, For the Birds “I think I should let you know that the story is breaking on the noncontinuance of our Center for the Creative and Performing Arts,” the acting dean, William Hamilton, wrote to the vice president of academic affairs, Ronald Bunn, on June 9, 1980. That short sentence reveals several of the root causes of the Center’s ongoing difﬁculties—yet another newly appointed administrator talking to his colleagues in academic speak, a language crafted to nimbly skirt directness. Under the circumstances, one might agree that “noncontinuance” is a most peculiar choice of words. John Dwyer said it plainly ten days later in the Buffalo Evening News: After sixteen years, the Center is “ﬁnally and irrevocably dead.”28 The ofﬁcial announcement of the Center’s closing was timed to coincide with news of wider university cuts that had been mandated by the State Legislature in Albany. No one disputed the fact that the university was

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experiencing harsh ﬁscal blows imposed by the state government. “It’s simply awful here,” remarked a faculty member to John Dwyer. “There’s no money, almost no vacancies, no replacements, no clear planning ahead. And the word from on high is that if anybody drops in his tracks, leave him there. We’re going with the troops we have.”29 And the troops were leaving: Music Department Chairman William Thomson to the University of Southern California; Vice President for Academic Affairs (the ﬁfth in ten years) Ronald Bunn, who voiced his frustration with having to give up forty-ﬁve faculty and twenty-ﬁve nonfaculty positions in two years; and Executive Vice President Somit, who had called Dean George Levine at one point to say, “Why don’t we convert the CAs into a program that produces musical theater?”30 All during the late summer, the headlines told the story: “Faculty, Fund Drains Are Leaving SUNYAB Anemic”; “SUNYAB’s Departing Professors Cite Loss of Drive, Morale”; “SUNY’s Procedures Hamper SUNYAB.” According to the August 3rd article in the Buffalo Courier Express, the severe spending controls were the result of revised priorities in Albany that favored the health sciences. As Buffalo Courier Express staff reporter Nick Mason wrote: Fading dreams of developing the University of Buffalo into the “Berkeley of the East” vanished this year for more than a dozen prominent faculty members and administrators. Most posted “For Sale” signs on their homes and headed for what they think are greener higher education pastures outside New York State. All left SUNYAB . . . because they believe SUNYAB and the State University of New York (SUNY) have declined in recent years and face increasingly tough years ahead.31 Nevertheless, as John Dwyer wrote in the News, “The feeling among those who cared was that the Center rested in the wrong hands and was disposed of for the wrong reasons by upper administrators with no conception of its worth in the music world.”32 According to Michael Farrell, if “the right external and internal conditions do not exist, even the most effective leader could not make a collaborative circle work.” He continues, “Without the right kinds of leadership at the right times, a circle will ﬂounder, even under the best of circumstances.” For the state university system, 1979–1980 was an era of contraction. Everyone agreed that the ﬁnancial crisis was dire. The Buffalo campus was no longer what Farrell terms “a magnet place perceived as rich in resources.”33 The existing leadership, although caring, was fractured. One may ask, however, why, as the Center still had high visibility and a strong legacy, was no solution found? What was missing at that moment was a fresh, energetic champion, a person of stature

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who would be passionately devoted to reinventing a center for the composers and performers of a new time.

After Image Communities based on merit and passion are rare and people who have been in them never forget them. —Bennis and Biederman, Organizing Genius What I have written is not the whole story. How can it be? Everyone has his or her own perspective, his or her own stories to tell about what happened and how it was. The Center was a world of ideas. Some worked, some didn’t. The document Lukas Foss and Allen Sapp submitted to the Rockefeller Foundation in October 1963 was titled, “A Proposal for the Establishment of a Center of the Performing and Creative Arts with Emphasis on New Music.” The new Center would invite instrumentalists, composers, musical scholars, and vocalists. Music would be the glue, but eventually, as the title suggested, the Center would encompass other disciplines, such as theater and dance. From the beginning, Sapp plugged in the technological component by designating a CA fellow to set up an electronic music studio. Attempts were made along the way to bring a scholarly component into the Center, such as the appointment of a musicologist, theorist, or critic, but budget constraints always seemed to get in the way. When Lejaren Hiller arrived in Buffalo in 1968, he was known as a brilliant scientist-musician working with electronics and computers. Hiller’s presence sparked a keen interest in technology among the students and the CAs. Hiller wanted the Center to expand its commitment to experimental theater and felt that I was an obstacle in this endeavor. My position was that producing interdisciplinary work, an area of increasing interest to composers, was one thing, but committing signiﬁcant resources in personnel and performance speciﬁcally for theater without additional income and logistical support compromised all sides of the equation. An art world is born, writes Howard Becker, when it brings together people who have never cooperated before, to produce art based on and using conventions previously unknown or not exploited in that way. “Art worlds change continuously,” Becker writes. “No art world can protect itself fully or for long against all the impulses for change, whether they arise from external sources or internal tensions. . . . An art world dies when no one cooperates any longer in its characteristic ways to produce art based on its characteristic conventions.”34 “The Center died of its own success,” said music department faculty member David Fuller. “The whole idea was that you get people here who would

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have the time to learn very difﬁcult music. It was innovative. Then it sprang up in other places and a whole generation of musicians developed for whom this music was not a big problem. So it ceased to be unique because it was successful. It did what it set out to do.”35 Esther Harriott, Allen Sapp’s successor as director of cultural affairs, sees it from another perspective. “The Center was a unique convergence of composers and musicians that was very much of its time. Composers, and poets, too, seemed to say, ‘If you don’t understand it, that’s your problem.’ And audiences got tired of that.”36 Harriott makes a valid point. It is true that audience building and outreach was not a Center priority. Although it was the Center’s policy to ask each composer to write a note for the concert program in order to help illuminate the impulse and process of a work, that is about as far as it went. A number of CAs did form groups to visit the schools over the years. Alyssa Rabach, a student intern with the Center in the early 1970s, remembers: I placed some of the CAs in the schools to give music presentations. One time it was the violinist Benjamin Hudson and Julius Eastman, and I went along. The kids were totally intrigued. Julius started just banging on the ﬂoor and the kids banged on the ﬂoor, tapping their pencils, tapping on their arms; they were yelling. I suggested they pass out the music so the kids could see the graphic nature of the scores. A lot of these children were taking instrument lessons at school and were used to the standard stuff. Ben and Julius brought the students to the stage so they could see the unorthodox notation and choose which page would come next in the performance, showing them that the music was not necessarily in a ﬁxed order. That way, the kids became collaborators.”37 This picture of the children’s engagement with such charismatic musicians underscores how effective an ampliﬁed outreach effort might have been for both children and adults. The fact is that the Center had neither the staff nor the zeal to make a signiﬁcant effort in this area. In February 1958, nearly six years before the Center commenced operations, the composer-mathematician Milton Babbitt wrote an article that was published in High Fidelity magazine titled “Who Cares If You Listen?” The widely quoted article with its contentious title (given to it by the editors) caused great debate at the time and, indeed, still provokes raised voices. Serious contemporary music, he said, was created by highly trained specialists using an efﬁcient tonal vocabulary not readily accessible to the untutored layman. “The time has passed,” he wrote, “when the normally well-educated man without

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special preparation could understand the most advanced work in, for example, mathematics, philosophy, and physics. . . . Advanced music scarcely can be expected to be more intelligible.” In the face of the resulting public hostility or, more likely, indifference to their work, Babbitt suggested that composers consider withdrawing from the public world “to one of private performance and electronic media.” He proposed that composers be supported, as research scientists are, by the university—for without the opportunity to evolve, music will “cease to live.”38 The Center, conceived by the original directors as a place for both study and performance, had never ﬁt into an isolationist mold. From the beginning, the Center’s public face was evident with the arrangement to produce the Evenings for New Music concerts off campus at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. The CAs, mostly young virtuosi, wanted to perform or to have their music heard. Extra income was useful, and the CAs usually seemed pleased when opportunities arose with the symphony, in churches, local coffeehouses, or on radio broadcasts. At the same time, those interested in experimenting with electronics or learning about computers had ample opportunity to do so privately within the music department, where it was possible to consult Hiller, the staff “electronicists,” or even Robert Moog when he was in town. If, in practice, Babbitt’s thesis was relevant to the Center at all, it was in the realm of the lackluster audience outreach efforts. Did the Center function, as Isaac Stern had hoped, to separate the true from the false? A good deal of the work played over the years came up short in many people’s estimation. For Richard Wernick, the Center’s stance was problematic from the beginning. “Most of the music was very, very current. There was too much emphasis on what was perceived as being ‘the future.’ It lost sight of the fact that there’s a tradition, an immutable thread, a musical quality that runs through centuries. I think that philosophical gap was probably the most serious ﬂaw.”39 (For the record, it should be noted that out of the 162 works performed in the ﬁrst ﬁve years of Evenings for New Music concerts, 15 pieces were written before 1940. These included ﬁve works by Charles Ives and two each by Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern. Other composers represented in this group were Darius Milhaud, Béla Bartók, Alban Berg, and Erik Satie. Works by Ives, Schoenberg, Webern, Wallingford Riegger, Igor Stravinsky, Carl Ruggles, Edgard Varèse, and Olivier Messiaen also turned up in later years.) That emphatic break with tradition helped propel Buffalo into the forefront of contemporary art developments and established its reputation worldwide as a mecca for adventurous art making. Businessman and arts patron Sheldon Berlow explained:

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Buffalo, an old, conservative community with a lot of old conservative money, had just started to enter the 20th century culturally with the combination of the new wing at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and Lukas Foss’s arrival as conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. Something in this very conservative Buffalo audience really clicked. Whether or not a lot of the people understood some of the performances, whether they really liked them didn’t matter. They were ready to be a part of what was happening. The press also helped create the supportive climate. People read those reviews and said, “I’ve got to go to one of those things.”40 Former Buffalo resident June Schneider remembers that everybody in the cultural community talked about Evenings for New Music. The comments ran from “You can have it,” or “I’ve been and that’s enough,” to thinking, as she did, that it was great for the city. “Even the antique shop owners I frequented were interested in the Creative Associates.”41 Students such as Buffalo-born composer Peter Gena were wide-eyed: I can’t imagine where I would be if it weren’t for the Center. I was a piano major with no idea about what the contemporary musical world was. It was a real eye-opener for me. Buffalo was like the Ferrara of the Renaissance—the hottest place for new music, where it seemed like everybody who was anybody was coming through. People don’t believe it now when I tell them.42 And Vinko Globokar’s tenure as a CA mirrors the similar experiences of many of his colleagues: “During this period in Buffalo, I composed a huge work for orchestra and choir called Voie. It was performed at the Zagreb Biennale, and it got me my publisher, Edition Peters. So, for me, Buffalo was the base on which I began building my career.”43 Composer-conductor Harvey Sollberger, who in 1962 cofounded and directed with Charles Wuorinen the Group for Contemporary Music at Columbia University, remembers that the Center’s international scope helped to seed the environment with ideas from abroad.44 Nils Vigeland also found the mixture of European, American, and Asian music on the programs to be striking. “It wasn’t just American music and that doesn’t happen much, even in New York, anymore.”45 Frederic Rzewski sees things from another perspective: “It was a great idea, and it was wonderful to have done it. A lot of great friendships and collaborations came about as a result of it; but on sober assessment, I don’t think it ﬁt in at all with the American scene. It was more of a European idea, an attempt to connect Americans with the European scene.”46

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At times, the “collaborations” Rzewski refers to became unruly. Contrariness and dissension were no strangers to the group. The Center fellows often came out of very different cultural backgrounds. Most of the time, works were performed without a conductor. From the earliest days there were disagreements. Passions ran high about the music. Shouting, hurling of music stands, walking out of rehearsals, irritation over work habits such as promptness, complaints about the music directors or the administration were all part of the picture. On a more pragmatic level, some people wanted to rehearse only in the mornings, others insisted that they had to practice in the mornings and could only rehearse in the afternoons. Composers would be late with promised scores or might make unreasonable demands. Mauricio Kagel’s famous dictum when discussing preparations for the performance of his work Sur Scène during the ﬁrst Festival of the Arts Today—“I must have forty-four hours of rehearsal time or I cannot make”—became a mantra around the Center for several years. “The greatest irritant at the legendary Black Mountain College,” write Bennis and Biederman, “seems to have been the same as its greatest strength—the idiosyncratic group of people, many of them highly talented, who came together there.”47 They could have been writing about the Buffalo group. The Center’s concerts were eclectic. The works performed ranged from the difﬁcult, rhythmically complex music of Elliott Carter, Charles Wuorinen, and Milton Babbitt to Klaus von Wrochem’s work Stück, a theater piece with a part for a pneumatic drill and a character playing Martin Luther tossing an ink bottle onto a white backdrop. (Von Wrochem, it should be noted, is known today as “Klaus der Geiger.” He lives in Cologne, where he is a political street musician who, in his words, has “experienced almost everything—poverty, jail, popularity, being a hero, being a monster.”)48 “We were so occupied with making performances,” Robert Martin remembered, “with doing it, playing it, satisfying the composer, and bringing it off, that it wasn’t a matter of liking this or that.”49 “The Center fostered innovation,” Maryanne Amacher remarked, “and yet at the same time there was this very worldly, practical approach that really helped someone’s career, someone’s presence in the world. The idea could be for a twenty-eight-hour-long piece using remote installations and no one said, ‘What are you talking about?’”50 “Somehow,” as Morton Subotnick said, “the Buffalo group managed to skirt the academic constraints that so often can function like a beta-blocker on creativity.”51 “It was a model of what a contemporary music and art resource should be,” comments composer Joel Chadabe, “professional, touring, open to the outside world, not artistically ideological or narrow, a lot of performances. What an incredible resource for students as artists. I’d say that Lukas was the pivotal ﬁgure in setting the tone.”52 Gwendolin Sims concurs:

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There was room for creativity. It was challenging because the music was technically difﬁcult, musically difﬁcult, but you could be yourself and produce the gift that’s in you. I think I found myself there. . . . Of course there was a lot of crazy stuff. Once I was going to do a gig with Lukas and the Buffalo Philharmonic out of town somewhere. Lukas wasn’t supposed to drive because he had lost his license for speeding. So he came by the Lenox Hotel where I was staying and said, “You’ll have to drive because I’m not allowed to.” I started driving but we were running late. In the midst of all of this, Lukas was changing into his tux in the front seat. On the thruway, there were big trailer trucks passing us, and the truckers are looking into the car seeing this black woman driving and this white guy changing his clothes in the front seat. We got lost in one place so we stopped at a tavern to order a sandwich and ask directions. Lukas is still adjusting his clothes. Now these trucker types were big, burly guys and I’m thinking, “Someone’s going to kill us out here.”53 Richard Wernick asserts: There’s always a need [for a group like the Center] as far as composers are concerned. Don’t forget, composers had it in the past, only we don’t think of it in those terms. Haydn had the equivalent of Buffalo, except it was Eszterháza. You listen to those middle Haydn symphonies with those absolutely wacky horn parts that go all over the place. Horn players look at it today and say, “Oh, my God.” Now he had some guy who could play all that stuff and so he wrote things for him. It’s no different.54 The collaboration of a private foundation, a public university, and an art gallery, abetted by astute civic leaders and a receptive press, actually worked. Buffalo had initiated a tradition of contemporary music support that was unmatched in any American city of its size. Cofounder Allen Sapp’s words, written in 1975 for the preface of the Center’s concert catalogue, still hold: The passage through its ranks of Creative Associates of an army of a stellar array of composer-performers and performer-composers, drawn from all round the world, its annual contribution to an immense tribe of composers of advanced viewpoints, its function as a laboratory of performance practice, its assorted benign roles in affecting the entire city of Buffalo by symbolizing—in a city not customarily identiﬁed with adventure—a spirit of restless quest, and its precious archives representing a slice of the history in sound and

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185

in manuscript of an era of musical history—all combine to a record of distinction.55 As Lukas Foss remarked, “I would say the Center made modern music a part of the living world. It made it important. I think anyone who took part in those events looked at music from a different point of view, a more spontaneous point of view. It was no longer old museum pieces.”56 In March 1978 I left Buffalo for a new post at the California Institute of the Arts. A number of former members of the Center had joined the School of Music there, and when the president, Robert Fitzpatrick, invited me to visit the school and subsequently offered me a job, I accepted. The spirit of the school felt right. It seemed as close to what I had heard about the fabled Black Mountain College as I would ever encounter in the United States at that time. Upon arriving in Valencia on a sunny Saturday afternoon, I went over to the school, where a contemporary music festival was in progress. I entered the darkened Roy O. Disney Concert Hall in the middle of a performance of Auftrag by former CA Carlos Alsina, a work we had performed in Buffalo a decade before. A day or two later I saw Elliott Carter at the home of the music school dean, Nicholas England, and he asked me how I liked Cal Arts. “So far, I like it a lot,” I said; then I whispered, “but they’re not that advanced here in terms of the music they play,” and proceeded to tell him about the ten-year-old Alsina piece. “Well, what do you expect?” Carter replied, “You were in the Center!”

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5 Postscript

The signiﬁcant involvement of universities with the arts is relatively new. According to Tyler Cowen in his book Good & Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding, the ﬁrst American university to employ a noted artist was Columbia University, which appointed composer Edward MacDowell to be chairman of the Department of Music in 1896. The ﬁrst artist-in-residence in an American university was American painter John Steuart Curry, who worked at the University of Wisconsin in the 1930s. Robert Frost received support from the University of Michigan. Painter Roy Lichtenstein taught at SUNY Oswego and then at Douglass College in New Jersey, where he met and was inﬂuenced by members of the Fluxus group. John Barth spent the ﬁrst twenty years of his career at Penn State and SUNYAB before becoming professor of ﬁction in the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University. A study of the New York Times Book Review found that 31 percent of the reviewed authors earned their livings from the academic world.1 Dance found a haven early on at Bennington College, which opened in 1932. The Bennington School of the Dance was initiated during the summer of 1934 as a center for the study of modern dance in America.2 For the next eight years, choreographers such as Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, and Hanya Holm created some of their most important work at the school.3 The summer program, supervised by pioneer dance educator Martha Hill, was largely self-sustaining due to revenue from student tuition,

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but it could not have survived without the provision of housing, studios, and performance space by the college. In 1933 Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina, was founded by John Andrew Rice and a group of colleagues from Rollins College in Florida. The visual, literary, and performing arts were at the core of the unorthodox curriculum, where a number of faculty members who were refugees from Europe, such as Josef and Anni Albers, composer Stefan Wolpe, and Xanti Schawinsky, greatly enriched the school’s intellectual life. In her book, The Arts at Black Mountain College, Mary Emma Harris reveals how, over the twenty-four years of its existence, this small experimental college community that included Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Arthur Penn, poets Charles Olsen and Robert Creeley, along with students Robert Rauschenberg, John Chamberlain, Dorothea Rockburne, and Kenneth Snelson, helped to shape a new movement of modern art in America.4 In recent years, consortia of universities such as the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Iowa, the Wexner Center at the Ohio State University, and others have banded together with presenting organizations and museums such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Kennedy Center, or the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis to jointly commission new works of dance, music, and theater. An article in the New York Times stated that in 2002 Miami-Dade Community College had an annual commissioning budget of more than one hundred thousand dollars. The University of California, Davis, with a seven million dollar annual performing arts budget, spent about forty thousand dollars on commissioning work, including a fanfare for brass ensemble and a piano quintet by faculty members for the opening of its Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts.5 The annual arts presenting budget of UC Berkeley’s Cal Performances is twelve million dollars. Currently engaged in a ﬁfteen million dollar Centennial Campaign, Cal Performances states that one of its three main priorities is to “Establish a Creative Venture Fund to strengthen our capacity to present, produce, and commission ambitious projects.”6 At their best, universities are incubators—“the association of older and younger in the enterprise of learning” poised to stimulate “the potential of creativity.”7 It may be, however, that the vast beneﬁts of institutions, their services and resources, cross-disciplinary access, the semblance of ﬁnancial stability, and so on, ultimately come at too high a price—the sacriﬁce of independence and ﬂexibility. The ﬁnal vision for saving the Center (albeit well intentioned), reﬂected a tightening institutional grip that would have required conforming to codiﬁed operational systems. At that point, the Center, conceived by the founders as a postdoctoral laboratory-cum-artists’s colony located

POSTSCRIPT

189

in a university, ceased to exist. The Center’s original eclecticism, stemming largely from Foss’s point of view—his own interest in and use of various techniques and styles—was manifested in the assorted personalities and varied interests (which may or may not have included teaching) of the people who found their way to the Center. The very characteristic that gave the Center its individuality could no longer prevail. To quote Allen Sapp’s remarks from his Preface to the Evenings for New Music concert catalogue, which he wrote in 1975, “That the Buffalo Center survived without censorship, without artistic interference while it continued to move more closely to ancillary support of the university’s educational missions as well as maintaining the earlier traditions of research and ‘scholarship’ as appropriate to this ﬁeld [for as long as it did], is astonishing.”8 David Felder, a composer on the SUNYAB music department faculty who revived the June in Buffalo festival (which had ceased operations after the summer of 1980), concurs, “I’m in awe of what was accomplished here. There was an ideal about how best to represent what the composer was trying to bring forth. There was a huge investment here of personal energy, money and, more importantly, an artistic commitment. There was a torch that was lit all those years ago which was, in fact, a beacon.” Felder works to keep that torch alive. He directs June in Buffalo today based largely on the Center’s policy, which is evidenced, Felder stated, by the “lessons he learned from Jan Williams, Yvar Mikhashoff, and to some extent, Lejaren Hiller.” “These people,” he remarked, “were very catholic in their tastes and operated with the proviso that as long as it [a new work] was excellent, and the person really knew what they were doing as a composer, then the feeling is, ‘Let’s go ahead and put this on. This is exciting.’ ”9 June in Buffalo remains a direct link to the Center, as are the recordings and the meticulously catalogued archive of materials to be found in the SUNYAB music department library. One cannot reﬂect on the Center’s broader legacy, which must include Buffalo’s artist spaces, Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Arts (CEPA), and Hallwalls, without taking note also of the music written by the directors and the CAs for the ensemble or speciﬁc members of the group. Probably the ﬁrst piece written at the Center was George Crumb’s Madrigals, Book I (1965). Crumb states, “My ﬁrst book of madrigals came out of that year and it was written in Buffalo.” Madrigals, Book I turned out to be an important work for Crumb that, along with Night Music I (1963), developed into what he envisioned would eventually consist of nine cycles of pieces based on the work of Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca.10 Parts of Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise: American Pages were written, performed, and published in Buffalo. Don Ellis, Richard Wernick, Jim Fulkerson, David Gibson, David

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Rosenboom, and Thorkell Sigurbjornsson—in fact, almost every composer in residence at the Center—wrote music for their CA colleagues. Foss, Feldman, and Hiller composed works for the Center’s tenth anniversary tour, in addition to other pieces, as did Iannis Xenakis, Earle Brown, and Elliott Carter. Petr Kotik formed his own group, the S.E.M. Ensemble, in 1970 in Buffalo, just months after he arrived from Europe. The ﬁrst members of his ensemble included Jan Williams, Julius Eastman, clarinetist-composer Roberto Laneri, and trombonist James Kasprowicz, the latter two graduate student fellows with the Center. More than thirty-ﬁve years later and now based in New York City, former CA Joseph Kubera still plays with the S.E.M. Ensemble and the expanded Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble. Steve Smith, writing in New York magazine in 2002, noted that Kotik’s “Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble has carved a distinctive niche for itself through its steadfast dedication to a vibrant and vital body of work that virtually no other ensemble ever touches: the bold, iconoclastic orchestral music of the ‘New York School’ composers of the 1950s.”11 As Robert Martin, now Vice President for Graduate Studies and Director of the Music Conservatory at Bard College, sees it, the Center trained a generation of players who were going to be advocates for new music for the rest of their lives. “It has a long-term payoff, but the condition is that you have to assemble them and have them in residence. You can’t just hire them for one particular piece because it’s the recitals, it’s the things we did on the side–the value added that you get by having all those people together—the accidents. The great thing is that it wasn’t a permanent group. It shouldn’t be. It was a fellowship. It was a great idea then; it’s still a great idea!”12 And so it was. Jan Williams summed it up in his preface to the Evenings for New Music concert catalogue for the years 1977–1980: “The real legacy of the Center is the music making that took place.”13 Finally, one must add, it was the music making and the Creative Associates who brought so much energy and talent to the work—their expertise, the fun, the magic that they cast. They changed the way Buffalo perceived itself, and, in turn, Buffalo gave them life-changing opportunities. Even today, they continue to share their knowledge in their studios, with their students, and on stages throughout the world.

Appendix 1: Time Line

1961

Allen Sapp appointed chairman of the music department of the University of Buffalo.

1962

University of Buffalo becomes State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNYAB). Allen Sapp invited to chair the music advisory committee of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra.

1963

Lukas Foss appointed conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra; Foss is also a consultant for the Rockefeller Foundation; Foss and Sapp make a proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation to establish a center for the study and performance of new music at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

1964

The Center of the Creative and Performing Arts opens at the SUNYAB with eighteen resident fellows; Lukas Foss and Allen Sapp are the Center directors; Richard Wernick is the Center coordinator. Renée Levine joins the Center as assistant coordinator.

1965

First Festival of the Arts Today. Richard Wernick leaves Buffalo; Renée Levine becomes Center coordinator.

1968

Second Festival of the Arts Today. Allen Sapp resigns as music department chairman and Center codirector. Lejaren Hiller assumes Center codirectorship with Foss.

1969

Lukas Foss resigns as conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and moves to New York City but retains codirectorship of the Center. Center records Terry Riley’s In C for Columbia Records.

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APPENDIX

1

1971

Center receives New York State Arts Award from Governor Nelson Rockefeller for “signiﬁcant contributions to the ﬁeld of new music and the experimental performing arts.”

1972

Morton Feldman becomes Slee Professor of Music at SUNYAB.

1974

Lukas Foss and Lejaren Hiller resign as Center codirectors; Jan Williams is appointed Center music director; Renée Levine is named managing director; Morton Feldman becomes artistic advisor.

1975

Morton Feldman organizes ﬁrst June in Buffalo festival.

1976

Jan Williams resigns as Center music director. Morton Feldman assumes music directorship of Center. Jan Williams agrees to be co-musical director.

1978

Renée Levine resigns; Monica Polowy appointed managing director.

1979

Monica Polowy resigns; Sara Hornbacher becomes managing director.

1980

Center ceases operations.

Appendix 2: Interviews

Maryanne Amacher

CA composer, 1966–67

1/2/2003

M. Carlota Baca*

SUNYAB administrator

2/10/04 e-mail

Anthony Bannon

Reporter, Buffalo Evening News

3/20/2002

John Bergamo

CA percussionist-composerconductor, 1964–66

3/16/2000

Sheldon Berlow

Buffalo community

4/27/2000

Eberhard Blum*

CA ﬂutist, 1973–76

11/29/2000

Earle Brown

Composer

2/19/2000

Robert Buck

Director, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1973–1983

11/20/2002

Joel Chadabe*

Composer

4/12/01 e-mail

George Crumb

CA composer, 1964–65

11/21/2000

Robert Dick

CA ﬂutist-composer, 1977–80

6/26/2004

Sylvia BrighamDimiziani

CA soprano, 1964–66

4/28/2000

Rocco Di Pietro*

Composer-author, Buffalo community

4/4/01 e-mail

David Felder

Composer, SUNYAB music faculty

4/27/2000

Lukas Foss

Center founder-director, 1964–74

2/18/2000

Stuart Fox

CA guitarist, 1970–72

3/16/2000

James Fulkerson*

CA trombonist-composer, 1969–73

11/16/00 e-mail

194

APPENDIX

2

David Fuller

SUNYAB music faculty

4/26/2000

Peter Gena

Composer-performer with Center, 1972–74

5/21/2000

Vinko Globokar

CA composer-trombonist, 1965–66

6/22/2000

Esther Harriott

SUNYAB administrator, 1966–85

3/6/2000

Jon Hassell

CA composer-trumpeter, 1969–71

3/15/2000

Charles Haupt*

CA violinist, 1966–68

4/26/2000

Sara Hornbacher*

Center Managing Director, 1979–80

5/10/04 e-mail

Benjamin Hudson

CA violinist, 1973–75; 1978–79

3/28/2007

Ralph Jones*

Center graduate student fellow, 1974–77

4/30/04 e-mail

Bruce Jackson

SUNYAB Distinguished Professor

7/20/2004

Dennis Kahle

CA percussionist, 1972–74

2/27/2004

Charlotta Kotik

Museum curator

9/4/2006

Petr Kotik

CA composer-ﬂutist, 1970–73

2/21/2000

Joseph Kubera

CA pianist, 1974–76

4/6/2000

Joan La Barbara

Composer-soprano

11/15/2003

Cristyne Lawson

SUNYAB dance faculty, 1969–73

3/17/2000

George Levine

SUNYAB administrator and faculty

4/27/2000

Renée Levine Packer**

Center Coordinator/Managing Director, 1965–78

3/7/2001

Bunita Marcus

Composer

7/10/2008

Robert Martin

CA cellist, 1966–68

11/17/2000

Howard Mischel

SUNYAB student, 1969–74

2/10/2003

Barbara Monk Feldman

SUNYAB student, 1983

5/15/2003

Robert Moog*

Inventor

6/13/02 e-mail

Gerald O’Grady*

Founder, Media Studies, SUNYAB

1/9/2004

Randall Packer

Composer-author

2/12/2007

Carol Plantamura

CA soprano, 1964–66

11/24/1999

Monica Polowy (Winter)

Center Managing Director, 1978–79

4/8/2004

Henri Pousseur*

Slee Professor, SUNYAB, 1966–68

12/17/00 e-mail

Thomas Putnam*

Music critic, Buffalo Courier Express

4/28/00

Alyssa Rabach

Center arts intern, 1973–75

4/28/2000

David Rosenboom

CA composer-violist, 1967–68

3/17/2000

Frederic Rzewski*

CA composer-pianist, 1966; 1974

1/19/01 e-mail

APPENDIX

2

Michael Sahl

CA composer-pianist, 1965–66

2/19/2000

June Schneider

Buffalo community

1/8/2000

David Shostac

CA ﬂutist, 1967–68

3/18/2000

William Siemering

Manager, WBFO Radio, SUNYAB

11/26/2002

Jeff Simon*

Arts Editor, Buffalo Evening News

9/30/04

Gwendolin Sims (Warren)

CA soprano, 1968–70

10/18/2002

Harvey Sollberger*

Flutist-conductor-composer

2/26/01 e-mail

Andrew Stiller

Center graduate student fellow, 1971–73

2/27/2007

Morton Subotnick*

Composer

7/9/2007

Steina Vasulka

Video artist

5/16/2003

Woody Vasulka

Video artist

2/11/2004

Marijke Verberne

CA cellist, 1968–70

3/4/2000

Nils Vigeland

Composer; Buffalo community

3/6/2000

Richard Wernick

Composer; Center Coordinator, 1964–65

11/21/2000

Diane Williams

Violist, Buffalo Philharmonic

4/28/2000

Jan Williams

CA percussionist, 1964–80; music director, 1974–80; resident conductor, 1976–80

4/28/2000

195

Klaus von Wrochem* CA violinist, 1966–67

12/09/04 e-mail

Edward Yadzinsky

7/27/2000

Saxophonist, Buffalo Philharmonic

* Interview not recorded. ** Interview conducted by Dr. John Spitzer, Professor, John Hopkins University/Peabody Conservatory.

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Appendix 3: Creative Associates, 1964 to 1980

Miriam Abramowitsch

Soprano

1967–1968

Carlos Roqué Alsina

Composer-pianist

1966–1968

Maryanne Amacher

Composer

1966–1967

Larry Austin

Composer

1968–1969

David Behrman

Composer

Spring 1968

Merete Bekkelund

Mezzo-soprano

1967–1969

Shaul Ben Meir

Flutist

1966–1967

John Bergamo

Percussionist-composer

1964–1966

Michael von Biel

Composer

1965–1966

Eberhard Blum

Flutist

1973–1976, 1978–1979

Laurence Bogue

Baritone

1964–1965

Edward Burnham

Percussionist

1966–1970

Sylvano Bussotti

Composer

1964–1965

Cornelius Cardew

Composer-pianist

1966–1967

Niccolo Castiglioni

Composer-pianist

Fall 1966

Amrom Chodos

Clarinetist

1972–1974

Thomas Constanten

Composer

1974–1975

Edward Cox

Stage designer

1970–1971, Spring 1972

Robert Cram

Flutist

1968–1969

George Crumb

Composer-pianist

1964–1965

Linda Cummiskey

Violinist

1975–1976

198

APPENDIX

3

Douglas Davis

Cellist

1970–1972

David Del Tredici

Composer-pianist

1972–1973

Stuart Dempster

Trombonist

1967–1968

Robert Dick

Flutist-composer

1977–1980

Sylvia Brigham-Dimiziani

Soprano

1964–1966

Donald Downs

Violinist

1967–1968 (part time)

Richard Dufallo

Conductor

1964–1967

Joseph Dunn

Theater director

1970–1971

Jean Dupouy

Violist

1964–1967

Julius Eastman

Composer-pianist

1969–1975

Donald Ellis

Trumpeter-composer

1964–1965

Giuseppe G. Englert

Composer

1977

Mario Falcao

Harpist

1978–1979

Morton Feldman

Music Director

1976–1980

Lukas Foss

Founder, codirector

1964–1974

Stuart Fox

Guitarist

1970–1972

Sherman Friedland

Clarinetist

1964–1966

James Fulkerson

Trombonist-composer

1969–1972

Mary Fulkerson

Dancer

Spring 1971

Ramon Fuller

Composer

1965–1967

Harley Gaber

Composer

Fall 1967

Walter Gajewski

Electronicist

1975–1977

David Gibson

Cellist-composer

1972–1974

Vinko Globokar

Trombonist-composer

1965–1966

Anne Graff

Mezzo-soprano

1966–1967

Victor Grauer

Composer

Spring 1977

Jon Hassell

Trumpeter-composer

1967–1969

Charles Haupt

Violinist

1966–1970

William Hellermann

Composer-guitarist

1977–1978

Lejaren Hiller

Codirector

1968–1974

Warren Hoffer

Tenor

1966–1967

Sara Hornbacher

Managing director

1979–1980

Thomas Howell

Flutist

Fall 1969

Benjamin Hudson

Violinist

1973–1975, 1978–1979

Edward (Jay) Humeston III

Cellist

1964–1966

Ken Ishii

Cellist

1978–1979

APPENDIX

3

199

Charles Joseph

Violinist

1964–1966

Dennis Kahle

Percussionist

1972–1974

James Kasprowicz

Trombonist

Spring 1978

Jerry Kirkbride

Clarinetist

1967–1970

Donald Knaack

Percussionist

1974–1977

Krzysztof Knittel

Pianist-composer

Spring 1978

Weronika Knittel

Violinist

1978–1979

Petr Kotik

Flutist-composer

1969–1974

Karl Kraber

Flutist

1964–1966

Joseph Krysiak

Theater director

1969–1970

Joseph Kubera

Pianist

1974–1976

Garry Kvistad

Percussionist

1971–1972

Spencer Lee Larrison

Violinist

1966–1967 (part time)

Joelle Leandre

Contrabass

1977–1978

Jesse Levine

Violist

1970–1971 (part time)

Renée Levine

Center coordinator

1965–1974

Managing director

1974–1978

Garrett List

Trombonist

1975–1976

Stanley Lunetta

Composer-percussionist

1968–1969

Jonathan Marcus

Guitarist

1967–1969

Judith Lynn Martin

Composer

Spring 1975

Robert Martin

Cellist

1966–1968

Egon Mayer

Composer-violinist

Spring 1968

Makoto Michii

Contrabassist

1966–1969

Terry Moore

Actor

1971–1972

Robert Moran

Composer-pianist

Spring 1976–1977

Fredric Myrow

Composer-pianist

1964–1966

Buell Neidlinger

Contrabassist

1964–1966

Max Neuhaus

Composer

1976–1977

Ursula Oppens

Pianist

1978–1979 (part time)

Rospo Pallenberg

Dramaturg

1965–1966

Frank Parman

Theater director

1970–1972

Ronald Peters

Pianist-harpsichordist

1969–1970 (part time)

Carol Plantamura

Soprano

1964–1966

Monica Polowy

Managing director

1978–1979

Nora Post

Oboist

1975–1978

Alyssa Rabach

Assistant

1975–1976

200

APPENDIX

3

Howard Riley

Pianist-composer

1976–1977

Terry Riley

Composer

Spring 1969

George Ritscher

Electronicist

1969–1974

David Rosenboom

Composer-violist

1967–1968

Henry Rubin

Violinist

1971–1973

Frederic Rzewski

Composer-pianist

Spring 1966, Spring 1974

Michael Sahl

Pianist-composer

Spring 1965–1966

Allen Sapp

Founder, codirector

1964–1968

Roger Shields

Pianist

1970–1971

David Shostac

Flutist

1967–1968

Thorkell Sigurbjornsson

Composer-pianist

Fall 1973

Stanley Silverman

Composer-guitarist

1964–1965

Gwendolin Sims (Warren)

Soprano

1968–1970

Lawrence Singer

Oboist

1967–1969

Mark Sokol

Violinist

1970–1971

Henrik Svitzer

Flutist

1976–1977

Aki Takahashi

Pianist

1979–1980 (part time)

Yuji Takahashi

Pianist-composer

1967–1969

James Tenney

Composer

1978–1979

John Tilbury

Pianist

Fall 1977

Richard Trythall

Pianist-composer

1972–1973

David Tudor

Pianist-composer

1965–1966

Frances-Marie Uitti

Cellist

Spring 1977

Marijke Verberne

Cellist

1968–1970

Klaus von Wrochem

Violinist-composer

1966–1967

Richard Wernick

Center coordinator

1964–1965

Andrew White III

Oboist-composer

1965–1967

Jan Williams

Percussionist

1964–1980

Director and/or codirector

1974–1980

Resident conductor

1976–1980

Charles Wyatt

Flutist

1968 (part time)

Paul Zonn

Clarinetist-composer

1966–1967

Paul Zukofsky

Violinist

1964–1965

Howard Zwickler

Percussionist

1970–1971

Appendix 4: Creative Associate Graduate Fellows

John Boudler

Percussionist

1976–1977

Gerald Cash

Percussionist

1969–1970

William Furioso

Percussionist

1969–1971

Gary Hatt

Clarinetist

1977–1978

Martha HerrHanneman

Soprano

1976–1977

Ralph Jones III

French hornist-composer

1973–1975, Spring/1977

Jeffery Kowalsky

Percussionist

1971–1973

Roberto Laneri

Clarinetist-composer

1970–1972

Margaret Scoville

Composer

1974–1975

Delmar Stewart

Violist

1973–1974

Andrew Stiller

Bassoonist-composer

1971–1973

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Appendix 5: Selected Discography of Recordings by Members of the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts (Prepared with Ryan Dohoney)

Information about archival recordings of the Evenings for New Music and recitals by the Creative Associates may be found at the SUNYAB Music Library Website: http://library.buffalo.edu/music/collections/strengths.php. Amacher, Maryanne. Sound Characters (Making the Third Ear). Tzadik TZ 7043, 1999. ——— . Sound Characters 2. Tzadik TZ 8055, 2008. Ashley, Robert et al. Music from the Once Festival, 1961–1966. New World Records, 80567-2, 2003. Austin, Larry. The Composer in the Computer Age: A Larry Austin Retrospective, 1967–94. Larry Austin, J. Robert Floyd, Robert M. McCormick, Mel Mobley, David Tudor. Centaur CRC 2219. Bergamo, John, and Walter Quintus. On the Edge. CPM Records CD 27, 1986. Biel, Michael von. Cellomusiken. Cybele Records CD 960.306, 2006. Blackearth Percussion Group. The Blackearth Percussion Group. Opus One Records 22, 1974. Blum, Eberhard. Alea. Hat Hut ART CD 6180, 1995. ——— . Berlin to Buffalo EMF Media CD 041, 2001. Brown, Earle. Four Systems. Eberhard Blum. Hat Hut ART CD 6147, 1994. Brown, Earle, John Cage, Moton Feldman, and Christian Wolff. The New York School. Eberhard Blum, Frances-Marie Uitti, Nils Vigeland. Hat Hut ART CD 6101. ——— . The New York School #2. Eberhard Blum, Steffan Schleiermacher, Jan Williams. Hat Hut ART CD 6146, 1993.

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——— . The New York School #3. Eberhard Blum, Art Lange, Jan Williams. Hat Hut ART CD 6176, 1995. Bussotti, Sylvano. La Passion Selon Sade. Elise Ross, Orchestra di Roma della Radio Italiana/Marcello Panni. Ricordi CRMCD 1002, 1987. ——— . The Rara Requiem. Delia Surrat, Carol Plantamura, Giuseppe Baratti, Claudio Desderi, Gianpiero Taverna, Giuseppe Sinopoli. Musikhochschule des Saarlandes, Saarländischer Rundfunk Sinfonie-Orchester, Norddeutscher Rundfunk Sinfonie-Orchester. Deutsche Grammophon 437 739-2, 1993. Cage, John. 62 Mesostics. Eberhard Blum. Hat Hut Art CD 2-6095, 1991. ——— . Fontana Mix. Eberhard Blum. Hat Hut ART CD 6125, 1992. ——— . Imaginary Landscapes. Maelstrom Percussion Ensemble/Jan Williams, Eberhard Blum. Hat Hut Records ART CD 6179, 1996. ——— . Music for Five. Eberhard Blum, Marianne Schroeder, Robyn Schulkowsky, Nils Vigeland, Frances-Marie Utti. Hat Hut ART CD 60701, 60702, 1990. ——— . Music of Changes. Joseph Kubera. Lovely Music LCD 2053, 1998 ——— . Ryoanji. Robert Black, Eberhard Blum, Iven Hausman, Gudrun Reschke, John Patrick Thomas, Jan Williams. Hat Hut ART CD 6183, 1995. Cage, John and Lejaren Hiller. HPSCHD. John Cage, Lejaren Hiller, Antoinette Vischer. Neely Bruce, David Tudor, Ben Johnston. Nonesuch H-71224, 1969. Cardew, Cornelius. Piano Music. Andrew Ball and John Tilbury. BCM B&L Records BLCD011, 1991. ——— . Piano Music 1959–1970. John Tilbury. Matchless Recordings MRCD 29, 1996. ——— . Treatise (Prague 1967). QUaX Ensemble/Petr Kotik. Mode MOD205, 2009. Chadabe, Joel. Rhythms. Jan Williams, Joel Chadabe. Lovely Music VR-1301, 1981. ——— . Many Times Jan. Jan Williams, percussion EMF CD 050, 2004. Concord String Quartet. American String Quartets 1950–1970. Vox CDX 5143, 1995. Crumb, George. An Idyll for the Misbegotten, Vox balaenae, Madrigals. Zizi Mueller, Gordon Gottlieb, Benjamin Herman, Stephen Payson, Fred Sherry, James Gemmell, Jan De Gaetani, Richard Wernick. New World Records NW 357-2, 1987. Davies, Peter Maxwell. Eight Songs for a Mad King. Julius Eastman and the Fires of London. Nonesuch H 71285, 1973. Reissued as Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot/Eight Songs for a Mad King. Unicorn-Kanchana CD 9052, 1987. Del Tredici, David. An Alice Symphony. Phyllis Bryn-Julson, Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra/Oliver Knussen. CRI CD 688, 1995. ——— . Final Alice. Barbara Hendricks, Fred Hemke, Robert Black, Fred Spector, Frederic Chrislip, Herman Troppe, Chicago Symphony/Sir Georg Solti. Decca Eloquence 442 9955, 2008. ——— . In Memory of a Summer Day: Child Alice, part 1, 1980. Phyllis Bryn-Julson, Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra/Leonard Slatkin. Nonesuch 9 79043-2, 1983. ——— . Joyce Settings/Scherzo. Phyllis Bryn-Julson, Benita Valente, Mary Burgess, Richard Dufallo, Robert Helps. CRI CD 689, 1995.

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Dempster, Stuart. Underground Overlays from the Cistern Chapel. New Albion NA076CD, 1995. Dorian Woodwind Quintet. 20th Century Music for Winds. Vox CDX 5083, 1993. Duchamp, Marcel. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even/Erratum Musical. Donald Knaack. Finnadar SR 9017, 1977. Eastman, Julius. Unjust Malaise. Georgia Mitoff, Petr Kotík, Benjamin Hudson, Amrom Chodos, Joseph Ford, Doug Gaston, Dennis Kahle, Jan Williams, Akram, Daniel Wittmer, Lori Osgood, Charles Lirette, Philip Christner, Geoffrey Brown, Christopher Conlon, James Kasprowicz, Thomas Miller, Don Harry, Michael Pugliese, Edward Folger, Paul Schmidt, Thomas Perl, Jodi Beder, Sarah Carter, Barry Gold, Julie Green, Christine Gummere, Maureen Hynes, Chase Morrison, Abby Newton, Larry Rawdon, David Sabee, Frank Ferko, Janet Kattas, Patricia Martin. New World Records 80638-2, 2005. Feldman, Morton. Crippled Symmetry. Eberhard Blum, Nils Vigeland, Jan Williams. Hat Hut ART CD 60801, 60802; 1990. ——— . For Christian Wolff. Eberhard Blum, Nils Vigeland, Jan Williams. Hat Hut ART CD 61201, 61202, 61203; 1992. ——— . For John Cage. Paul Zukofsky, Marianne Schroeder. CP2 101, 1990. ——— . For Philip Guston. Eberhard Blum, Nils Vigeland, Jan Williams. Hat Hut ART 61041, 61042, 61043, 61044; 1991. ——— . For Philip Guston. S.E.M. Ensemble. Dog w/a Bone DWAB02, 2000. ——— . Morton Feldman. Cantilena Chamber Players, Members of the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts. Edition RZ 1010, 1994. ——— . Music of Morton Feldman. Karen Phillips, Anahid Ajemian, Seymour Barab, David Tudor, Paula Robison, Arthur Bloom, Raymond DesRoches, Matthew Raimondi, Paul Jacobs, Yuji Takahashi, Arnold Fromme, Richard Fitz, Eberhard Blum, Jan Williams. CRI CD 620, 1992. ——— . Only: Works for Voice and Instruments. Joan La Barbara, Ralph Grierson, Erika Duke Kirkpatrick, Stephen L. Mosko. New Albion NA085CD, 1996. ——— . Rothko Chapel/For Frank O’Hara. Karen Phillips, Gregg Smith Singers/Gregg Smith, Members of the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts in the State University of New York at Buffalo/Jan Williams. Odyssey Y 34138, 1976. ——— . Three Voices. Joan La Barbara. New Albion NA NA018, 1989. ——— . Why Patterns/Crippled Symmetry. Eberhard Blum, Nils Vigeland, Jan Williams. Hat Hut ART CD 60801, 60802; 1990. Feldman, Morton, and Arthur Schnabel. Spring of Chosroes/Sonata for Violin and Piano. Paul Zukofsky and Ursula Oppens. CP2 Recordings 102, 1991. Foss, Lukas. Echoi. Lukas Foss, Jan Williams, Douglas Davis, Edward Yadzinski, Miriam Abramowitsch, Melvin Strauss, Robert Betts, Oswald Rantucci, Jonathan Marcus, Edward Burnham, Lynn Harbold, Brock McElheran, Guy Davenport. Wergo WER 60 040, 1968. Reissued as EMF CD 005, 1998. ——— . Music for Six. University at Buffalo Percussion Ensemble/Jan Williams. CRI SD 413, 1980.

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——— . Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Rose Marie Freni, Robert Dick, Jan Williams, Yvar Mikhashoff. CRI SD 442, 1981. Foss, Lukas and Jan Williams. Elytres, Paradigm, Ni bruit ni vitesse, Dream Lesson. John Wummer, Felix Galimir, Hiroko Rhodes, Robert D. Levin, Jan Williams, Stanley Silverman, Ronald Roseman, Jesse Levine. Turnabout TV-S 34514, 1972. Foss, Lukas, Lejaren Hiller, and Elliott Schwartz. Paradigm, Algorithms I–IV, Signals. Members of the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts in the State University of New York at Buffalo, James Fulkerson, Nicholas Malfese. Deutsche Grammophon 2543 005, 1971. Fulkerson, James. Force Fields and Spaces. Etcetera KTC1175, 1994. Gaber, Harley. Ludus Primus. David B. Gilbert, Karl Kraber, Raymond DesRoches, Linda Cummiskey. CRI SD 299, 1972. Globokar, Vinko. Globokar by Globokar. Harmonia Mundi HMC 5214, 1992. ——— . Toucher. Vinko Globokar, Matthias Kaul. Wergo WER 6662 2, 2004. Harrison, Lou. La Koro Sutra. Karen Gottlieb, Agnes Sauerbeck, David Abel, John Bergamo, University of California, Berkeley, Chamber Chorus/Philip Brett. New Albion NA 015 CD, 1987. Hassell, Jon. Fascinoma. Jon Hassell, Ry Cooder, Jacky Terrasson, Ronu Majumdar. Water Lily Acoustics WLA-CS-70-CD, 1999. ——— . Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street. Jon Hassell and Peter Freeman. ECM 2077, 2009. Hiller, Lejaren. Computer Music Retrospective. Charles Ames, John Myhill, Leonard M. Isaacson, G. Allan O’Connor, Jan Williams, Robert Dick, Nora Post, Royal MacDonald, Norma Marder, Robert J Rosen. Wergo WER 60128-50, 1989. ——— . A Total Matrix of Possibilities. Lejaren Hiller, Robert Baker, Helen Hamm, Jack McKenzie, Gregg Smith Singers/Gregg Smith, Concord String Quartet. New World Records 80694-2, 2008. ——— . Twelve-tone Variations, for Piano (1954); Machine Music, for Piano, Percussion, and Tape (1964); Sonata no. 3, for Violin and Piano (1970). Roger Shields, Jeffery Kowalsky, Mark Sokol. Turnabout TV-S 34536, 1973. Knaack, Donald. Dance Music. RRRecords RR-CD-16, 1994. Kolb, Barbara, and Richard Moryl. Figments, Chansons Bas, Three Place Settings, Chroma, Illuminations. Jan Herlinger, Cheryl Setzer, Valerie Lamoree, Julius Eastman, Jan Williams, Charles Haupt, Ed Yadzinsky, Makoto Michii, Barbara Kolb, Jeannette Stellato, the New England Contemporary Ensemble/Richard Moryl. Desto DC7143, 1972. Kotik, Petr. Many Many Women. S.E.M. Ensemble. Dog w/a Bone DWAB03-A, 2000. La Barbara, Joan. Voice is the Original Instrument. Joan La Barbara. Lovely Music LCD 3003, 2003. List, Garrett. The Unbelievably Light: The Music of Garrett List. Garrett List Ensemble/ Garrett List. Garrett List /World Citizens Records/Music for Trees, 1995. Moran, Robert. L’après-midi du Dracoula. San Francisco Conservatory New Music Ensemble. Wergo WER 60057, 1971.

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——— . Open Veins—Music of Robert Moran. Sound Affairs/Craig Smith, Charlie Barber, Conductor, Alexander Balanescu, Piano Circus, Jayne West, Ensemble Chrismos/Robert Moran. Innova Recordings IN627, 1994. Neidlinger, Buell. Basso Profundo. Vivace 8801. Neuhaus, Max. Electronics and Percussion: Five Realizations by Max Neuhaus. Sony SICC 79, 2002. Oliveros, Pauline. Deep Listening. Panaiotis, Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster. New Albion NA 022, 1989. Reich, Steve. Drumming. Bob Becker, Ben Harms, Russ Hartenberger, Garry Kvistad, James Preiss, Steve Reich, Gary Schall, Glen Velez, Thad Wheeler, Pamela Wood Ambush, Jay Clayton, Mort Silver. Nonesuch 79451-2, 1997. ——— . Sextet. Steve Reich, Bob Becker, Kory Grossman, Russell Hartenberger, James Priess, Bill Ruyle, William Trigg, Garry Kvistad, Glen Velez, Edmund Niemann, Nurit Tilles. Nonesuch 79138-2, 1986. Riley, Terry. In C. Terry Riley, Members of the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts in the State University of New York at Buffalo. Columbia MK 7178, 1968. Remastered and reissued. Sony Classics B001R4SYPG, 2009. Rosenboom, David. Future Travel. David Rosenboom, Jacqueline Humbert. New World Records 80668-2, 2007. ——— . How Much Better If Plymouth Rock Had Landed on the Pilgrims. David Rosenboom, Erika Duke Kirkpatrick, Vinny Golia, Swapan Chaudhuri, Aashish Khan, I. Nyoman Wenten, William Winant, Donald Buchla, Thomas G. McFaul, Lynn Newton, Gerald Shapiro, Michael Slevin. New World Records 80689-2, 2009. Rzewski, Frederic. Coming Together, Attica, Les Moutons de Panurge. Frederic Rzewski, Blackearth Percussion Ensemble. Opus One Records 20, 1973. ——— . Jefferson, Antigone-legend. Carol Plantamura, Frederic Rzewski. CRI CD 747. ——— . The People United Will Never Be Defeated. Ursula Oppens. Vanguard VSD 71248, 1978. Sahl, Michael. A Mitzvah for the Dead: For Violin and Tape. Paul Zukofsky. Vanguard VCS 10057, 1968. Satie, Erik. Pièces pour piano. Yuji Takahashi, Alain Planès. Denon C37-7485, 1985. Schwitters, Kurt. Ursonate. Eberhard Blum. Hat Hut ART CD 6109, 1992. Shields, Roger. Piano Music in America. Vox CD3X 3027, 1993. Sigurbjörnsson, Thorkell. Thorkell Sigurbjörnsson Portrait. Gunnar Egilson, Ingvar Jónasson, Thorkell Sigurbjörnsson, Manuela Wiesler, Haﬂi¶ Hallgrímsson, Hans Pålsson. Wim Hoogewerf, Thora Johansen, Unnur María Ingólfsdóttir, Hörður Áskelsson. ITM 7-02, 1991. Silverman, Stanley. Elephant Steps. Philip Steele, Michael Tilson Thomas, Karen Altman, Susan Belling, Larry Marshall, Luther Rix, Patti Austin, Patricia Price, Maeretha Stewart, Rose Taylor, Richard Kostelanetz, Pril Smiley. Columbia Masterworks M2X 33044, 1974. Takahashi, Aki. Aki Takahashi Plays Morton Feldman. Mode 54, 1996.

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——— . The Perilous Night: Aki Takahashi Plays John Cage. Camerata CMCD 28142, 2007. Tenney, James. Pika-don. Maelstrom Percussion/Jan Williams. Hat Hut ART CD 105. Tudor, David. Rainforest II. New World Records 80540-2, 2000. Tudor, David, and Gordon Mumma. Gordon Mumma and David Tudor. New World Records 80651-2, 2006. White, Andrew N. Andrew’s Theme. Andrew Nathaniel White, Kevin Toney, Steve Novosel, Keith Killgo. Andrew’s Music AM-7, 1974. ——— . Gigtime 2000. Andrew Nathaniel White, Steve Novosel, Allyn Johnson, T. Howard Curtis. Andrew’s Music AMCD-45, 1999. ——— . “Live in New York”: Loft Sessions. Andrew Nathaniel White, Donald Waters, Steve Novosel, Bernard Sweetney. Andrew’s Music AM 31--AM 32, 1978 Wolff, Christian. Exercises. Eberhard Blum, Roland Dahinden, Steffen Schleiermacher, Jan Williams. Hat Art CD 6167, 1995. ——— . Ten Exercises. Christian Wolff, Natacha Diels, Garrett List, Larry Polansky, Michael Riessler, Frederic Rzewski, Robyn Schulkowsky, Chiyoko Szlavnics. New World Records 80658-2, 2006. ——— . Works for Trombone. James Fulkerson, the Barton Workshop. Etcetera KTC 1227, 2000.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. Nils Vigeland, interview with the author, March 6, 2000. Information on interviewees can found in the List of Interviews in Appendix 2. 2. Charles Hamm, Music in the New World (New York: Norton, 1983), 562. 3. Lukas Foss, “The Changing Composer-Performer Relationship: A Monologue and a Dialogue,” Perspectives of New Music (Spring 1963), 46. 4. Lukas Foss, “Talk of the Town,” The New Yorker, January 30, 1965, 23. 5. Allan Kaprow, “Experimental Art,” in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley, 73 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 6. Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors (New York: Penguin, 1968), 193. 7. John Hanhardt, The Worlds of Nam June Paik (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2000), 96. 8. Ibid., 101. 9. Diane Taublieb, “Arthur Weisberg’s Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, 1960–1983: A Documentary Study” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2005). 10. Gordon Mumma, “The Once Festival and How it Happened,” http://www.brainwashed.com/mumma/once.htm (accessed March 3, 2007). See also Leta E. Miller, liner notes, “Music from the Once Festival 1961–66” (New World Records 80567, 2003). 11. Susan Deaver, “The Group for Contemporary Music, 1962–1992,” (PhD diss., Manhattan School of Music, 1993). 12. Lukas Foss, interview with the author, February 18, 2000.

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13. Michael Sahl (Creative Associate [CA] 1965–1967), interview with the author, February 19, 2000. 14. Allen Sapp to Norman Lloyd, August 25, 1967 (University archives, SUNYAB, Department of Music). 15. Henry James, Hawthorne (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1909), 25. 16. Michael P. Farrell, Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2001). Coincidentally, Michael P. Farrell is a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Buffalo. 17. Ibid., 19. 18. Ibid., 14. 19. Reyner Banham, Buffalo Architecture: A Guide (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 29. 20. Richard O. Reisem, Classic Buffalo (Buffalo, NY: Canisius College Press, 1999), 162. 21. Banham, Buffalo Architecture, 29. 22. Ibid., 15. 23. Reisem, Classic Buffalo, 15. 24. Mark Goldman, City on the Edge: Buffalo, New York (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2007), 38. 25. Banham, Buffalo Architecture, 89; see also Goldman, City on the Edge, 64. 26. Reisem, Classic Buffalo, 18. 27. Ibid., 17. 28. Kerry S. Grant, The Rainbow City (Buffalo, NY: Canisius College Press, 2001), iv. 29. Robert Buck, interview with the author, November 20, 2002.

PRELUDE

1. Hamm, Music in the New World, 565. 2. Ken Licata, “‘Evenings for New Music’ Commemorating the Future,” The Spectrum, October 31, 1973. 3. John Dwyer, “Gala Evening of Music Led by Showman Foss,” Buffalo Evening News, October 29, 1973. 4. Harry Weintraub, “New Music Program Includes Nostalgic Stravinsky,” Buffalo New Times, October 29, 1973.

CHAPTER

1

1. Goldman, City on the Edge, 40. 2. Ibid., 50–51. 3. Reisem, Classic Buffalo, 13; see also Richard Brown and Bob Watson, Buffalo: Lake City in Niagara Land (Buffalo, NY: Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society, 1981). 4. Allen Sapp, A Report to the Provost (University archives, State University of New York at Buffalo, Department of Music, October 1965).

NOTES TO PAGES

16–23

211

5. John Dwyer, “Nation Comes to Know Buffalo as a City of Musical Ferment,” Buffalo Evening News, January 26, 1966. 6. Karen L. Perone, Lukas Foss: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991), 4. 7. Lukas Foss and Allen Sapp, A Proposal for the Establishment of a Center of the Performing and Creative Arts with an Emphasis on New Music (University archives, SUNYAB, Department of Music, October, 1963, n.p.). According to Foss, he and his wife, Cornelia, conceived the idea of a resident group of composer-performers together. 8. Alan Green, Allen Sapp: A Bio-Bibliography (New York: Greenwood Press, 1996), 24–28. 9. Carol Bradley, A History of the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts, 1963–1980 (Unpublished notes, SUNYAB, Department of Music, 1996), 3. 10. Alan Rich to Gerald Freund, December 31, 1963, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Folder 3716, Box 432, Series 200R, Record Group 1.2. Rockefeller Foundation Archive Center, North Tarrytown, New York (hereafter designated RAC). 11. Brown and Watson, Buffalo: Lake City in Niagara Land, 120. Seymour H. Knox Sr., ﬁve-and-dime-store pioneer, opened one of his early stores in Buffalo in 1890 and established his main ofﬁce there. The Buffalo-based S. H. Knox chain of ﬁve-and-dimes had more than 100 stores by the time Knox merged it with similar chains to form the F. W. Woolworth Company. 12. Gerald Freund, interofﬁce memo, January 17, 1964, RAC Folder 3716, Box 432, Series 200R, Record Group 1.2. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. In June 1964, Foss signed a four-year contract with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, running through the 1967–1968 season. 15. Allen Sapp, “Preface,” Evenings for New Music, A Catalogue, 1964–1977. Buffalo: Department of Music, University of New York at Buffalo, 1978, vii. 16. Alexander Schneider to Lukas Foss, 1964 (University archives, SUNYAB, Department of Music). 17. Bradley, “A History of the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts,” 5. 18. John Bergamo (CA, 1964–1966), interview with the author, March 16, 2000. 19. Jan Williams (CA 1964–1980; Codirector 1974–80; Resident Conductor, 1976–1980), interview with the author, April 28, 2000. 20. Many of the American CAs, including Dimiziani, Myrow, ﬂutist Karl Kraber, and others, were returning to the United States from extended residencies abroad, some funded by Fulbright fellowships. 21. Sahl, interview. 22. Vinko Globokar (CA 1965–1966), interview with the author, June 22, 2000. 23. “General Description of the Center for Creative and Performing Arts.” Folder 3716, Box 432, Series 200R, RG 1.2, RAC. 24. Amy C. Beal, New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reuniﬁcation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 4–7.

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23–35

25. Ibid, 153–159. 26. Vigeland, interview. 27. Anthony Bannon, interview with the author, March 20, 2002. 28. Richard Wernick, “George Crumb: Friend and Musical Colleague” in George Crumb: Proﬁle of a Composer, ed. Don C. Gillespie (New York: Peters, 1986), 67. 29. Richard Wernick (CA Coordinator 1964–1965), interview with the author, November 21, 2000. 30. Sylvia Brigham-Dimiziani (CA1964–1966), interview with the author, April 29, 2000. 31. Robert Martin (CA 1966–1968), interview with the author, January 17, 2000. Between 1964 and 1980, the Center fellows performed 127 recitals in Buffalo. 32. George Crumb (CA 1964–1965), interview with the author, November 21, 2000. 33. John Dwyer, “SUNYAB-Rockefeller Associates Make Fine Debut in Concert,” Buffalo Evening News, December 1, 1964. 34. William Bender, “Who’s Who Hear What’s What,” New York Herald Tribune, December 2, 1964. 35. Lukas Foss, “Talk of the Town,” New Yorker, January 30, 1965, 23. 36. John Dwyer, Buffalo Evening News, “‘New Wave’ Concert Often Provocative, Wholly Unusual,” January 11, 1965. 37. Wernick, interview. 38. Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (New York: Schirmer Books, 1974), 70. 39. Wernick, interview. 40. Nyman, Experimental Music, 68–69. 41. Douglas Kahn, “The Latest: Fluxus and Music,” in In the Spirit of Fluxus, ed. Janet Jenkins, 104 (Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 1993). 42. Ken Friedman, “Introduction: A Transformative Vision of Fluxus,” in The Fluxus Reader, ed. Ken Friedman (Chichester, UK: Academy Editions, 1998), viii, ix. 43. Andreas Huyssen, “Back to the Future: Fluxus in Context,” in In the Spirit of Fluxus, ed. Janet Jenkins, 144 ( Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 1993). 44. Jan van der Marck, “George Brecht: An Art of Multiple Implications,” Art in America, July-August, 1974, 48–57. 45. Helen Molesworth, Work Ethic (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art and Pennsylvania State University, 2003), 182. 46. Nyman, Experimental Music, 66–67. 47. van der Marck, “George Brecht.” 48. Leslie A. Fiedler, Being Busted (New York: Stein and Day, 1969), 135–138. 49. Goldman, City on the Edge, 242. 50. Richard Siggelkow, Dissent and Disruption: A University Under Siege (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991), 36–43. 51. Farrell, Collaborative Circle, 15. 52. Wernick, interview. 53. Warren Bennis and Patricia Ward Biederman, Organizing Genius (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997), 198.

NOTES TO PAGES

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213

54. Wernick, interview. 55. Allen Sapp to Gerald Freund, February 1, 1965 (University archives, SUNYAB, Department of Music). 56. Creative Associate Fellows to Lukas Foss and Allen Sapp, March 5, 1965. This communiqué would seem to illustrate Michael Farrell’s theory of a collaborative circle’s “rebellion against authority stage,” when members seem to ﬁnd it easier to talk about what they dislike rather than what they like; Collaborative Circles, 15. 57. Farrell, Collaborative Circles, 11. 58. Sahl, interview. According to Richard Wernick, the drug of choice was hashish. “They would take a perfume bottle with an atomizer and put LSD in it. They sprayed the hashish with the LSD and then smoked it.” 59. Lukas Foss and Allen Sapp, Proposal. 60. Crumb, interview. 61. Ibid. 62. Globokar, interview. 63. Carol Plantamura (CA 1964–1966), interview with the author, November 24, 1999. 64. Farrell, Collaborative Circle, 151. 65. Sahl, interview. 66. Jon Hassell (CA 1967–1969), interview with the author, March 15, 2000. 67. Ed Yadzinsky, interview with the author, July 27, 2000. Twentieth-century composers programmed by Foss in the Buffalo Philharmonic’s 1963–1964 season include Alban Berg, Benjamin Britten, David Diamond, Aaron Copland, Hector Villa-Lobos, Alexei Haieff, George Rochberg, Arnold Schoenberg, Leonard Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. 68. Rosalind Constable, “Can This Be Buffalo?” Life, April 23, 1965, 63–64. 69. Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, Annual Report 1964–1965,. Vol. 29, No. 1, March 1966, 7–8. 70. Thomas Putnam, “Buffalo Arts Festival Stirs Controversy,” Buffalo Courier Express, March 1965. 71. Howard Taubman, “Far Out Artists Stir Arguments” Buffalo Courier Express, March 8, 1965. 72. Constable, “Can This Be Buffalo?” 73. Theodore Strongin, “Music: Foss’s 3rd Evening,” New York Times, March 10, 1965. 74. Vigeland, interview. 75. Jan Williams, “Elliott Carter’s ‘Eight Pieces for Timpani’—The 1966 Revisions,” Percussive Notes, December 2000. 76. Crumb, interview. 77. Wernick, interview. 78. Sahl, interview. 79. Martin Gottlieb and James Glanz, “The Blackouts of ‘65 and ‘77 Became Deﬁning Moments,” New York Times, August 15, 2003, A22. 80. Williams, interview.

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81. Bergamo, interview. 82. Martin, interview. 83. Henri Pousseur, e-mail to the author, December 17, 2000. 84. Nyman, Experimental Music, 13. 85. Brigham-Dimiziani, interview. 86. Sahl, interview. 87. Harold C. Schonberg, “Music: Another Evening of the New,” New York Times, December 22, 1965. 88. John Dwyer, “Creative Associates Offer Deft Jazz Recital,” Buffalo Evening News, October 14, 1965. 89. Sahl, interview. 90. Allen Hughes, “‘Evenings for New Music’ Offer Satie Piece and Two Premieres,” New York Times, April 28, 1966. 91. In 1948, John Cage had directed a festival of Satie’s music at Black Mountain College with Buckminster Fuller portraying Baron Medusa, Elaine de Kooning as his daughter Frisette, and Merce Cunningham as a mechanical monkey. See Mary Emma Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 154. 92. Hughes, “‘Evenings for New Music’ Offer Satie Piece.” 93. Allen Sapp to President Martin Meyerson, September 30, 1966 (University archives, SUNYAB). 94. Cornelius Cardew to Renée Levine, October 13, 1966 (University archives, SUNYAB). 95. Cornelius Cardew, program note, Plus Minus, Evenings for New Music, April 29, 1967. 96. Larry Austin, “Groups,” Source, Issue #3, January 1968. 97. Paul Grifﬁths, Modern Music: The Avant-Garde Since 1945 (New York: Braziller, 1981), 81. 98. Nyman, Experimental Music, 99. 99. Williams, interview. 100. Christian Wolff, “Cornelius Cardew,” Cal Arts Contemporary Music Festival Program, February 1982. The piece Christian Wolff suggested was Cardew’s The Great Learning, paragraph 2: “The ﬁrst chapter of the Confucian classic with music in 7 paragraphs.” 101. John Dwyer, “Far-out Crowd Is Back in, with (Yes) Lovely Effect,” Buffalo Evening News, November 7, 1966. 102. Foss and Sapp, A Proposal. 103. Jack Allen, “SUNYAB Campus Radio Station Provides Coverage for Festival of the Arts,” Buffalo Courier Express, March 3, 1968. 104. Buffalo Evening News, “Meyerson Is Appointed New President of SUNYAB,” April 15, 1966, p. 1. 105. Warren Bennis, “The Sociology of Institutions, or Who Sank the Yellow Submarine?” Psychology Today, November 1972. 106. Siggelkow, Dissent and Disruption, 52.

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107. “SUNYAB Knuckles Under,” Buffalo Evening News, October 10, 1967. 108. “Students Rap SUNYAB Plan,” Buffalo Courier Express, October 31, 1967. 109. “So This Is Victory,” The Spectrum, October 31, 1967. 110. Siggelkow, Dissent and Disruption, 70. 111. George Levine, interview with the author, April 27, 2000. 112. Bruce Jackson, interview with the author, July 20, 2004. 113. Siggelkow, Dissent and Disruption, 82. 114. Bennis, “The Sociology of Institutions,” 120. 115. David Rosenboom (CA 1967–1968), interview with the author, March 17, 2000. 116. John Dwyer, “A Psychedelic Week-End of Color, Sound: Beauty Is Where you Find It in Buffalo,” Buffalo Evening News, October 20, 1967. 117. John Dwyer, “‘In-City’ Concert Honors Grand Old Architecture,” Buffalo Evening News, October 21, 1967. 118. Max Neuhaus, “Drive-in Music,” Source, Issue #5, 55. 119. Carter Ratcliff, “Max Neuhaus: Aural Spaces,” Art in America, October 1987, 154–159. 120. Dwyer, “A Psychedelic Week-end.” 121. Ratcliff, “Max Neuhaus: Aural Spaces,” 157. 122. Ibid. 123. Brown and Watson, Buffalo: Lake City in Niagara Land, 116. 124. Lukas Foss, “Buffalo Is Not a Vacuum,” New York Times, May 28, 1967. 125. David Fuller, interview with the author, April 26, 2000. 126. Williams, interview. 127. Sharon Grieggs Almquist, A History of the State University of New York at Buffalo Music Department to 1968” (master’s thesis, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1986), 111–112. 128. Ibid. 129. Ibid., 113–114. 130. Marijke Verberne (CA 1968–1970), interview with the author, March 4, 2000. 131. Vigeland, interview. 132. Almquist, “A History of the SUNYAB Music Department,” 113. 133. Gerald Freund, memo to Howard Klein and Norman Lloyd, RG 1.2, Series 200R, Box 432, Folder 3718, RAC. 134. John Dwyer, “Avant-Garde, Foss Combine in Inventions and Phantasms,” Buffalo Evening News, December 18, 1967. 135. Rosenboom, interview. 136. John Dwyer, “Futuristic Music Brings Drama, Creative Brilliance to Festival,” Buffalo Evening News, March 4, 1968. 137. John Cage, “The Future of Music: Credo,” in Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan, 1960), 3. 138. Sahl, interview. 139. David Revill, The Roaring Silence: John Cage: A Life (New York: Arcade, 1992), 67–68. 140. Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors, 135.

216

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141. John Cage, “Preface,” in Notations (New York: Something Else Press, 1969), n.p. The collection of scores Cage amassed for Notations resides in an archive at Northwestern University. 142. Ibid. 143. David Behrman, “The Score of In C,” Music of Our Time, Columbia Records MS7178, 1968. 144. Robert Carl, Terry Riley’s In C (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 58–59. 145. Susan Key and Larry Rothe, “Mixed Voices: The 60s Generation,” in American Mavericks, ed. Susan Key and Larry Rothe, 91–93. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 146. Robert Dunn, ed., John Cage [Catalogue of works]. (New York: Henmar Press, 1962), 17–21. 147. Bennis, “The Sociology of Institutions.” 148. Gerald Freund to Lukas Foss, May 21, 1965. RG 1.2, Series 200R, Box 432, Folder 3718, RAC. 149. Lukas Foss to Gerald Freund, May 25, 1968. RG 1.2, Series 200R, Box 432, Folder 3718, RAC. 150. Allen Sapp remained on the music department faculty until 1975, when he left the University. 151. Benjamin Boretz, “Grass Roots Under Siege,” The Nation, June 17, 1968. 152. Thomas Putnam, “Program of New Music to Continue,” Buffalo Courier Express, June 23, 1968. 153. During this same period, the Rockefeller Foundation grant for the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble’s residency at Rutgers University was not renewed.

CHAPTER

2

1. Tom Goldstein, “SUNYAB Experiment in Sounds Spawns New Form of Art,” Buffalo Courier Express, July 3, 1967. 2. Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, eds., Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality (New York: Norton, 2001), 33–38. 3. Ibid. 4. Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time (New York: Penguin Books, 1980), 164–166. 5. Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964). 6. George Sanderson and Frank Macdonald, eds., Marshall McLuhan: The Man and His Message (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1989), 120. 7. John Cage, Diary: Inter-Arts, presentation to the National Council for the Arts during the annual review of the Inter-Arts Program, Washington, D.C., February 4, 1983. 8. Christian Wolff, remarking on Cage’s inﬂuence after attending a concert of Cage’s music at Mills College, wrote, “It was Cage’s piece that allowed these people to make those sounds and have those sounds be their own sounds. It was an opening of

NOTES TO PAGES

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217

the space for other people to do their own work in and to do it in the best possible way.” David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch, eds., Writings Through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 177. 9. Sanderson and Macdonald. McLuhan: The Man and His Message, xi. 10. Gerald O’Grady, “Throwing a Snowball with a Rock in It: Momentum Mori for Marshall McLuhan,” Buffalo News, January 11, 1981. 11. John G. Hanhardt, The Worlds of Nam June Paik (Guggenheim Museum, 2000), p. 99. 12. Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall, 251. 13. Yvonne Rainer, Feelings Are Facts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 275. 14. Clive Barnes, “Dance or Something at the Armory,” New York Times, October 5, 1966, 33. 15. Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall, 248. 16. Annual Report, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1968–1969. 17. Siggelkow, Dissent and Disruption, 91. 18. Janet Mansﬁeld Soares has written a book about this remarkable woman, Martha Hill and the Making of American Dance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009). 19. Norman Lloyd, memo, September 21, 1968, RG 1.2, Series 200R, Box 432, Folder 3718, RAC. 20. Andrew Stiller, “Lejaren Hiller (1924–1994),” http://www.kallistimusic.com/ Hiller.html; accessed March 2, 2007. 21. Peter Gena, “Lejaren Hiller (1924–1994),” http://www.petergena.com/ lhobit.html; accessed January 14, 2010. 22. Bernstein and Hatch, Writings Through John Cage’s Music, 199. 23. Thomas Putnam, “Slee Professor, Lejaren Hiller, to Play Friday,” Buffalo Courier Express, October 6, 1968. 24. Packer and Jordan, Multimedia, xviii. 25. Hamm, Music in the New World, 585–587. 26. Ibid., 616. 27. Morton Subotnick, interview with the author, July 9, 2007. I am indebted to Morton Subotnick for much of the material regarding the origins of the San Francisco Tape Center. 28. Pinch and Trocco, Analog Days, 33–37. 29. Morton Subotnick, Randall Packer, and the Mills College Web Site, http:// www.mills.edu/campus_life/center_for_contemporary_music/archives.php, were important sources for this section; see also David Bernstein, ed., The San Francisco Tape Music Center (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 30. Hassell, interview. 31. Rosenboom, interview. 32. Lejaren Hiller, program note, Evenings for New Music, February 8, 1970. 33. John Cage, “HPSCHD,” Source, July 1968, 11. 34. Thomas Putnam, “To New SUNYAB Professor, That’s Life,” Buffalo Courier Express, January 25, 1969.

218

NOTES TO PAGES

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35. HPSCHD was completed and premiered in a sports arena at the University of Illinois in May 1969. 36. Reginald Smith Brindle, The New Music: The Avant-Garde Since 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 149. 37. John Dwyer, “‘Sur Scène’ Has Brilliant Premiere,” Buffalo Evening News, February 8, 1965. 38. Perone, Lukas Foss: A Bio-Bibliography, 115–118. 39. Thomas Putnam’s article, “New Music Seeks Mass Audience,” in the Buffalo Courier Express on November 10, 1968, was helpful in describing Foss’s Paradigm. The work was performed numerous times in Evenings for New Music concerts in the United States and throughout Europe. See Evenings for New Music, 1964–1977: A Catalogue. 40. Alan Rich, “Innovations Old and New,” New York Magazine, October 1968. 41. Cristyne Lawson, interview with the author, March 17, 2000. 42. Kyle Gann, “That Which Is Fundamental: Julius Eastman, 1940–1990,” Village Voice, January 22, 1991. Reprinted in Gann, Music Downtown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 289–292. 43. Herman Trotter, “Creative Associates Offer Mod Thrust at the Curious,” Buffalo Evening News, May 5, 1969. 44. Harold C. Schonberg, “Music: Loud Last Word,” New York Times, May 7, 1969. 45. Barbara Probst Solomon, “Life in the Yellow Submarine,” Harpers, October 1968, 97. 46. John Dwyer, “Lukas Foss Finally Lucks Out, Gets into Own Way-Out Show,” Buffalo Evening News, November 10, 1969. 47. Petr Kotik (CA 1969–1974), interview with the author, February 21, 2000. 48. Bennis, “The Sociology of Institutions,” 120. 49. Siggelkow, Dissent and Disruption, 136. 50. Ibid., 139–145. The SUNYAB student newspaper The Spectrum’s “EXTRA!! INVASION” editions on February 25, 1970, and February 26, 1970, also served as a helpful reference for this section. 51. Howard Mischel, interview with the author, March 17, 2000. 52. Siggelkow, Dissent and Disruption, 155. 53. Ibid., 183. 54. Ibid., 203–219. 55. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Braziller, 1987, rev. 1993), 410. 56. Siggelkow, Dissent and Disruption, 226. 57. “Colleges’ Strike Theme: No Business as Usual,” The Spectrum, May 7, 1970. 58. Perone, Lukas Foss: A Bio-Bibliography, 8, 226. 59. “Foss to Leave Philharmonic Director Post,” Buffalo Courier Express, May 13, 1969. 60. Gitlin, The Sixties, 411. 61. Albert Cohen to Robert L. Ketter, February 19, 1971 (University archives, SUNYAB, Department of Music).

NOTES TO PAGES

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219

62. Renée Levine to Walter Anderson, January 21, 1971 (University archives, SUNYAB, Department of Music). 63. Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller to Messrs. Foss and Hiller, January 18, 1971 (University archives, SUNYAB, Department of Music). 64. Allen Sapp to Howard Klein, July 15, 1970 (University archives, SUNYAB, Department of Music). 65. Lejaren Hiller and Allen Sapp, “Funding Proposal Draft,” n.d., SUNYAB Special Archives. 66. John Dwyer, “Eastman’s ‘Mad King’: Mighty Work of Theater,” Buffalo Evening News, November 2, 1970. 67. Harold C. Schonberg, “‘Eight Songs for a Mad King’ a Delight,” New York Times, December 11, 1970. 68. James Fulkerson, emails with the author, November 16, 2000, and August 28, 2008. 69. Ibid. 70. Lejaren Hiller, program note, Three Rituals for Two Percussionists and Light, Evenings for New Music, May 1, 1971. 71. Sahl, interview. 72. Dorothy Lamb Crawford, Evenings On and Off the Roof (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 73. Anthony Bannon, “Image Scavengers,” Buffalo Evening News, July 1, 1983, Gusto section, 14. 74. Gerald O’Grady, interview with the author, January 9, 2004. 75. Anthony Bannon, “1974–78: The Early Years,” in Consider the Alternatives: 20 Years of Contemporary Art at Hallwalls, eds. R. Ehmke and E. Licata, 21–26 (Buffalo, NY: Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, 1996). 76. Ibid., 21. 77. Renée Levine, “Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Inc.,” in Alternative Arts Organizations in the United States: A Report to the Ford Foundation, 1988. Unpublished report. 78. Bannon, “Image Scavengers.” 79. Levine, “Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Inc.” 80. Robert Hirsch, ed. Contact Sheet: CEPA Gallery at Thirty (Syracuse, NY: Light Work, 2005), 2–5, 29. 81. Lukas Foss, program note, Ni Bruit Ni Vitesse, Evenings for New Music, February 13, 1972. 82. Joseph Kubera (CA 1974–1976), interview with the author, April 6, 2000.

CHAPTER

3

1. Gerald Freund, “Memo re telephone call from Lukas Foss,” RG 1.2, Series 200R, Box 432, Folder 3717, RAC. 2. Morton Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, ed. B. H. Friedman (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2000), 112–113.

220

NOTES TO PAGES

117–140

3. John Dwyer, “Delightful Variety of Clever Music,” Buffalo Evening News, October 29, 1972. 4. Richard Dufallo, Trackings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 161. 5. David Del Tredici, interview by Tom Voegeli, American Mavericks, http:// musicmavericks.publicradio.org/features/interview_deltredici.html, May 2, 2005. 6. Lukas Foss in conversation with Renée Levine Packer, October 1972. 7. Thomas Putnam, “Wall-to-Wall Piano Music is Hum-Dinger,” Buffalo Courier Express, October 29, 1972. 8. Karen Brady, “Music’s ‘Boy’ Wonder: Powerhouse of Energy,” Buffalo Evening News, November 23, 1970. 9. Tom Johnson, “Morton Feldman, ‘Voices and Instruments II,’” Village Voice, February 22, 1973. 10. Herman Trotter, “Blum: Virtuoso on the Flute,” Buffalo Evening News, January 24, 1974. 11. Grifﬁths, Modern Music: The Avant-Garde Since 1945, 251. 12. Stuart Fox, interview with the author, March 16, 2000. 13. Denis Kahle, email to the author, February 2, 2004. 14. Musicologist Danielle Fossler-Lussier’s research has borne this point out to some extent. See her “American Cultural Diplomacy and the Mediation of AvantGarde Music” in Sound Commitments, ed. Robert Adlington (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 232–253. 15. Goldman, City on the Edge, 258. 16. John Dwyer, “Inmate’s Letter: Powerful Musical Drama,” Buffalo Evening News, April 1, 1974. 17. Julius Eastman, Evenings for New Music program note, December 16, 1973. Stay on It is recorded as part of a three-disc set produced by Mary Jane Leach and Paul M. Tai for New World Records, Julius Eastman: Unjust Malaise (New World Records #80638–2, 2005). 18. Donal Henahan, “Monotony Gloriﬁed in New Music Evening,” New York Times, December 7, 1973. 19. The version we presented was Rainforest IV. See “The Art of David Tudor,” www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/digitized_collections/davidtudor, accessed June 19, 2008. 20. Ritty Burchﬁeld, conversation with the author, Washington, D.C., 2005 21. Herman Trotter, “Tudor Rainforest Gives New Aural Experience,” Buffalo Evening News, May 13, 1974. 22. Thomas Putnam, “‘Rainforest’ Adventure in Electronics,” Buffalo Courier Express, May 14, 1974. 23. Vigeland, interview. 24. Thomas Putnam, “Williams, Levine Now in Key Posts,” Buffalo Courier Express, September 3, 1974. 25. Pinch and Trocco, Analog Days, 104. 26. Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France: 1885 to World War I (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 173.

NOTES TO PAGES

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27. Margaret Scoville, “Relâche,” program note, Evenings for New Music, October 20, 1974, 2. 28. Pauline Oliveros, program note, Crow, Evenings for New Music, October 20, 1974. 29. Thomas Putnam, “New Music Gives a Lot to Look At,” Buffalo Courier Express, October 21, 1974. 30. John Dwyer, “New Music Evenings Start on Note of Fun,” Buffalo Evening News, October 21, 1974. 31. John Dwyer, “Musical Marathon with a Flock of Pianists,” Buffalo Evening News, November 7, 1974. 32. Morton Feldman to Jan Williams, March 29, 1975. 33. Jan Williams to Morton Feldman, April 9, 1975. 34. Morton Feldman to Jan Williams, April 30, 1975. My thanks to Jan Williams for furnishing me with the correspondence relating to this episode. 35. My thanks to Esther Harriott for furnishing me with the information relating to her spring 1974 radio interview with Morton Feldman on the UB Arts Forum. 36. Nyman, Experimental Music, 43. 37. Esther Harriott, radio interview with Morton Feldman, Spring 1974. 38. Dufallo, Trackings, 232–233. 39. Jeff Simon, “June in Buffalo Begins Brilliantly,” Buffalo Evening News, June 3, 1975. 40. John Cage, “Instructions,” Song Books, C.F. Peters catalogue, P6806 (New York: Henmar Press, 1970). 41. Thomas Putnam, “John Cage Work Not Very Moving,” Buffalo Courier Express, June 5, 1975. 42. Jeff Simon, “Artists Enjoy Options in All-Cage Program,” Buffalo Evening News, June 5, 1975. 43. Revill, The Roaring Silence, 206, 245. 44. Williams, interview. The author was in frequent contact with Jan Williams throughout the writing of this manuscript. In addition to the lengthy initial interview with Jan and his wife, Diane, numerous telephone and e-mail conversations took place over a period of several years. 45. Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra website: http://www.music.buffalo.edu/ bpo/bxr-7576.htm, (accessed July 12, 2005). 46. Ann Christensen, ed., Arttransition (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Center for Advanced Visual Studies, 1975). 47. Paul Earls, program note, Doppelgänger, Lightmusic for Oboes and Laser, Evenings for New Music, March 20, 1977. 48. Eberhard Blum, letter to the author. 49. Morton Feldman, liner notes, Rothko Chapel/For Frank O’Hara, Columbia Records Y34138, 1976. 50. John Dwyer, “Lone Discordant Note Jolts Moran’s World,” Buffalo Evening News, February 9, 1976. 51. Andrew Stiller, “Anemic ‘June in Buffalo’ Needs a Transfusion,” Buffalo Evening News, June 1980.

222

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52. Dennis Kahle (CA 1972–1974), e-mail to the author. 53. Thomas Putnam, “Grauer Explains ‘Refrigerator Syndrome’,” Buffalo Courier Express, March 13, 1977. 54. Georgina Born, Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 2, 66. I am indebted to Ms. Born’s book as a main source for information on IRCAM. 55. Brindle, The New Music, 201. 56. Thomas Putnam, “Feldman Says ‘Evenings’ Will Face Tough Stuff,” Buffalo Courier Express, October 10, 1976. 57. Betsy Jolas, program note, États, Evenings for New Music, October 16, 1976. 58. Thomas Putnam, “Ghost of Henry Thoreau Flits over Composition,” Buffalo Courier Express, October 17, 1976. 59. John Cage, Lecture on the Weather, C. F. Peters catalogue, P6817 (New York: Henmar Press). 60. John Dwyer, “‘Lecture on the Weather Is Fit for All Seasons,” Buffalo Evening News, October 18, 1976. 61. William Thomson to George R. Levine, December 13, 1976 (University archives, SUNYAB). 62. George Levine, interview with the author, April 27, 2000. 63. Joan La Barbara, interview with the author, November 15, 2003. 64. Alfred A. Knopf, ed., The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1989), 192–195. 65. Years later, Ed Birdwell and I would be colleagues at the National Endowment for the Arts, where he was director of the Music Program, while I was director of the Inter-Arts Program. 66. Joseph Horowitz, “Music: Xenakis, Wuorinen, et al.,” New York Times, February 4, 1977.

CHAPTER

4

1. Monica Polowy stayed with the Center until October 1979. 2. William Thomson to Morton Feldman, June 7, 1978 (University archives, SUNYAB). 3. Ibid. 4. Albert Somit to George Levine, August 15, 1978 (University archives, SUNYAB). 5. Thomas Putnam, “Fewer Creative Associates Will Tune Up at SUNYAB This Season,” Buffalo Courier Express, September 10, 1978. 6. George Levine to Morton Feldman, October 13, 1978 (University archives, SUNYAB). 7. Maurice Weddington, program note, Mehr Licht, Evenings for New Music, December 16, 1978. 8. John Dwyer, “Performances of New Music Worthy of the Best,” Buffalo Evening News, February 12, 1979.

NOTES TO PAGES

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223

9. Thomas Putnam, “Kitchen Composer ‘King’ Eastman Dreams Up ‘Burger Style’ Piece,” Buffalo Courier Express, February 11, 1979. 10. Kyle Gann, “‘Damned Outrageous’: The Music of Julius Eastman,” liner notes, Julius Eastman: Unjust Malaise, New World Records #80638–2, 2005. 11. John Dwyer, Buffalo Evening News, February 12, 1979. 12. Bunita Marcus, interview with the author, July 10, 2008. 13. Monica Polowy (Center Managing Director 1978–1979), interview with the author, April 8, 2004. 14. Robert Dick (CA 1977–1980), interview with the author, June 26, 2004. 15. William Thomson to George Levine, October 5, 1979 (University archives, SUNYAB). 16. John Dwyer, “Music: It’s All Over,” Buffalo Evening News, October 5, 1979. 17. The Reporter, “Center’s Death Notice ‘Greatly Exaggerated’,” October 11, 1979. 18. John Dwyer, “All-Carter Concert Among Associates’ Finest Hours,” Buffalo Evening News, October 15, 1979. 19. Charles Rosen, “Charles Rosen on Elliott Carter,” http://www.classical.net/ music/comp.lst/articles/carter/rosen.php. Last accessed January 14, 2010. 20. D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, Elliot Carter at Buffalo, Pennebaker Hegedus Films, 1980. 21. Morton Subotnick, program note, 2 Life Histories, Evenings for New Music, March 19, 1977. 22. Joan La Barbara, “Buffalo’s Center of the Creative and Performing Arts,” Musical America, March 1980. 23. John Dwyer, “Intense Emotions, Strong Ideas Woven into Piccolo Solo,” Buffalo Evening News, November 19, 1979. 24. John B. Armesto, “Arts Center Demise Is No Great Loss,” Buffalo Evening News, November 19, 1979. 25. Richard Kostelanetz, John Cage (ex)plain(ed) (New York: Schirmer Books, 1996), 99–104. 26. Ibid. 27. John Dwyer, “Avant-Gardists Stage Comeback with HPSCHD,” Buffalo Evening News, March 25, 1980. 28. John Dwyer, “The Passing of the (Avant) Garde: How It Happened,” Buffalo Evening News, June 29, 1980. 29. Ibid. 30. George Levine, interview. 31. Nick Mason, “Faculty, Fund Drains Are Leaving SUNYAB Anemic,” Buffalo Courier Express, August 3, 1980. 32. Dwyer, “The Passing of the (Avant) Garde.” 33. Farrell, Collaborative Circles, 294. 34. Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 300–310. My thanks to Bruce Jackson, SUNY Distinguished Professor, for recommending the Bennis and Becker texts. 35. David Fuller, interview with the author, April 26, 2000.

224

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180–189

36. Esther Harriott, interview with the author, March 6, 2000. 37. Alyssa Rabach, interview with the author, April 28, 2000. 38. Milton Babbitt, “Who Cares If You Listen?” High Fidelity, February 1958, 38–40, 126. 39. Wernick, interview. 40. Sheldon Berlow, interview with the author, April 7, 2000. 41. June Schneider, interview with the author, January 8, 2000. 42. Peter Gena and Rhoda Levine Gena, interview with the author, May 21, 2000. 43. Globokar, interview. 44. Harvey Sollberger, e-mail to the author, February 26, 2001. 45. Vigeland, interview. 46. Frederic Rzewski, e-mail to the author, January 19, 2001. 47. Bennis and Biederman, Organizing Genius, 160. 48. Klaus von Wrochem (CA 1966–1967), e-mail to the author, September 18, 2005. 49. Robert Martin (CA 1966–1968), interview with the author, November 17, 2000. 50. Maryanne Amacher (CA 1966–1967), interview with the author, January 2, 2003. 51. Subotnick, interview. 52. Joel Chadabe, e-mail to the author, April 12, 2001. 53. Gwendolin Sims Warren (CA 1968–1970), interview with the author, October 8, 2002. 54. Wernick, interview. 55. Sapp, “Preface.” 56. Foss, interview.

CHAPTER

5

1. Tyler Cowen, Good & Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 55–57. 2. Sali Ann Kriegsman, Modern Dance in America: The Bennington Years (Boston: Hall, 1981), 6–8. 3. Karen Arenson, “Arts Groups and Artists Find Angels: Universities,” New York Times, October 16, 2002. 4. Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College. See also Martin Duberman, Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972). 5. Arenson, “Arts Groups and Artists Find Angels.” 6. Cal Performances, http://www.calperfs.berkeley.edu/campaign (accessed October 23, 2007). 7. Jacques Barzun, The American University (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 210, 217. 8. Sapp, “Preface.”

NOTES TO PAGES

189–190

9. David Felder, interview with the author, April 26, 2000. 10. Crumb, interview. 11. Steve Smith, “The Petr Principal,” New York Magazine, December 12–26, 2002, 219. 12. Martin, interview. 13. Jan Williams, “Preface,” Evenings for New Music: A Catalogue, 1977–1980 (Buffalo: SUNYAB, Department of Music, 1981).

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Index

Abel, Lionel, 32 Abramowitsch, Miriam, 71 Ad-Hoc Trystereo System Jug Band, 114 Addison, Adele, 19 Albee, Edward, 70 Albers, Josef and Anni, 188 Albright Museum, 9 See also Albright-Knox Art Gallery Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 9, 18, 19, 41, 70, 79, 87, 109, 111, 113, 147, 173, 174, 175, 177 collection of, 18, 67 Evenings for New Music at, 11, 19, 24, 26, 27, 56, 60, 65, 77, 94, 116–18, 122, 161, 171, 172, 181 renaming and expansion, 17, 182 Allen, Jack, 61 Almquist, Sharon Grieggs, 67 Alsina, Carlos Roqué, 46, 51, 56, 58, 69, 75, 119, 122, 185 Auftrag, 185 alternative arts organizations, 111–12, 115, 152 See also Hallwalls Gallery; Kitchen, the Amacher, Maryanne, 23, 59, 84, 157, 183 City Links, 60–61 In City, Buffalo 1967, 64–65 Incoming Night, 150

Amidei, Romano, 43 Amy, Gilbert, 47 Inventions, 47 Antheil, George, 85 Ballet Mécanique, 85 Anthone, Alyssa Rabach. See Rabach, Alyssa Appleby, William, 117 Arrigo, Girolamo, 27, 28 Quatro Episodi for soprano and ﬂutes, 28 Art Today—Optic and Kinetic (exhibition), 41 Ashley, Robert, 6, 24, 72 See also Sonic Arts Union Attica Correctional Facility, 92, 133–34 Austin, Larry, 78, 88, 89, 90. Magicians, the, 90 See also Source Magazine Ayler Brothers, 70 Ayler, Albert and Donald. See Ayler Brothers Babbitt, Milton, 73, 84, 85, 154, 163, 180–81, 183 All Set, 107 Philomel, 162 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 7, 8, 108, 149, 166 Baird Hall, 24, 26–27, 72, 99, 102, 141, 143, 146, 161, 177

234

INDEX

Baird, Cameron, 16, 18 Bannon, Anthony, 24, 111 Bard College, 190 Barnes, Clive, 81 Barth, John, 32, 79, 187 Bartók, Béla, 181 Beach, Amy, 163 Beatles, 74, 79, 109 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 109 Becker, Howard, 179 Beckett, Samuel, 116, 154, 162 Beckwith, Robert Sterling, 51 Behrman, David, 72, 74 Bekkelund, Merete, 63 Bell Aircraft, 9, 16 Bennington College, 156, 187 Bennington School of the Dance, 3, 187 Bennis, Warren, 35, 62, 63, 77, 99, 179, 183 Bentley, Cornelia Sage, 9 Berberian, Cathy, 43 Berg, Alban, 27, 170, 181 Bergamo, John, 21–22, 26, 27, 38, 50, 52, 122 Berger, Arthur, 27 Berio, Luciano, 43, 69, 70, 86, 139, 152, 170 Visage, 43, 86 “Berkeley of the East.” See State University of New York at Buffalo Berlow, Sheldon, 175, 181–82 Bernstein, Leonard, 28, 72 Bertolo, Diane, 112 Bethune, Louise Blanchard, 9 Beuys, Joseph, 31 Biederman, Patricia, 35, 179, 183 Biel, Michael von, 47, 98 Book for Three, 52 Birdwell, Edward, 161 Birtwistle, Harrison, 142 Black Mountain College, 3, 53, 183, 185, 188 Blauvelt, Ralph, 117 Bloom, Julius, 26, 95 Blue, James, 111 Blum, Eberhard, 120, 121, 137, 139, 147, 150–51, 169, 170 and Ursonate, 151 Bode Vocoder, 154 Bode, Harald, 154 Bogue, Laurence, 28 Bookspan, Martin, 19, 20 Boretz, Benjamin, 77 Born, Georgina, 155

Borup-Jorgensen, Axel, 69 Boston Symphony Orchestra, 17 Boulez, Pierre, 6, 47, 73, 153, 155, 170 See also Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique Brecht, George, 31 Solo for Violin, Viola, Cello, or Contrabass, 31 Brigham-Dimiziani, Sylvia, 43, 51–52, 117, 147 Brindle, Reginald Smith, 89, 155 Brooklyn Academy of Music, 122, 176, 188 Brooklyn Museum, 87 Brown, Earle, 24, 26, 27, 122, 144, 145, 146, 167, 171, 190 Novara, 27 Syntagm III, 167 Bruce, Neely, 176 Buchla, Donald, 85, 87 Buchla Box, 5, 86 Buck, Robert, 9, 111, 116 Budapest String Quartet, 16, 18, 50 Budd, Harold, 27 Budowski, Edward, 57 Buffalo, New York, City of early musical life, 16–17 history of, 8–9, 15–16 public resistance to the Center, 67, 175 West Side neighborhood, 9, 24, 25, 33 Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, 41 Buffalo Courier Express, 24, 42, 61, 62, 65, 78, 79, 85, 117, 137, 140, 146, 149, 156, 161, 169, 178 Buffalo Evening News, 13, 24, 27, 32, 60, 62, 64, 65, 83, 89, 93, 94, 99, 101, 106, 115, 118, 121, 136, 141, 153, 157, 170, 174, 177 Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, 41 Buffalo New Times, 13 Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, 17, 18, 20, 27, 33, 40, 41, 42, 45, 64, 67, 68, 70, 73, 147, 182 and the Creative Associates, 96, 108, 124, 148, 156, 167, 169, 174, 184 ﬁnancial difﬁculties, 102 and Michael Tilson Thomas, 118, 148 Buffalo State College, 62, 83, 152 Buffalo Today, 15 Bunn, Ronald, 177 Bunshaft, Gordon, 26 Burger, Corky, 149 Burnham, D. H., 9

INDEX

Burnham, Edward, 56, 93, 96 Bussotti, Sylvano, 22, 25, 38, 43, 47 La Passion selon Sade, 43–44, 88–89 Sette Fogli, excerpt: No.6 Manifesto per Kalinowski, 28, 29 Butor, Michel, 51, 53 Cage, John, 5, 11, 23, 24, 30, 31, 42, 47, 58, 69, 70, 71, 72–74, 97, 110, 121, 177, 188 Amores, 107 Book of Music, 144 Forever and Sunsmell, 97 HPSCHD, 88, 174, 175–77 and June in Buffalo, 144–46 Lecture on the Weather, 156–57 and multimedia, 5 Music for Ampliﬁed Toy Piano, 144 Music for Carillon No. 4, 53 Notations, 74 She Is Asleep, 75 Song Books, 145–46 and technology, 80–82 Theatre Piece, 88 Third Construction, 144 Cal Performances, Berkeley, 188 California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), 169, 185 Cambodia, bombing of, 101 Campus unrest, 32–33, 62–63, 99–102 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), 156 Cardew, Cornelius, 46, 51, 53, 55–58, 59, 64, 68, 97, 98, 165, 189 Schooltime Compositions, 97 Treatise, Fragment: American Pages, 57, 189 Carnegie Hall, 26, 28, 35, 48, 49, 91, 95, 113, 117, 133, 135, 138, 141, 161 Carnegie Recital Hall, 24, 26, 27, 42, 45, 53, 69, 78, 92, 93, 95, 107, 119, 135, 160, 161, 166 Carnegie Tavern, 49 Carter, Elliott, 24, 27, 28, 172, 173, 183, 185 Double Concerto, 173 Duo for Violin and Piano, 173 Six Pieces for Kettledrums, 45–46 Tell Me Where Is Fancy Bred, 28 Castiglioni, Niccolo, 56, 58, 59 Cathcart, Linda, 111 Center for Media Studies (SUNYAB), 110–11, 138, 174 Center for Music Experiment (UCSD), 172

235

Center of the Creative and Performing Arts advisory committee of, 138, 142 dissolution of, 175, 177–79 early selection process, 21–23 European Tour, 1974, 124–32 European Tour, 1975, 149 ﬁnancial difﬁculties and instability, 7, 77–78, 82–83, 157–59, 168 founding, 15–25 musical and programming philosophy of, 7, 29, 73, 98, 117, 181, 183, 189 CEPA Gallery (Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Arts), 112, 189 Chadabe, Joel, 120, 176, 183 Chamber of Commerce (Buffalo), 15 Chamberlain, John, 188 Charles Eliot Norton Professorship (Harvard), 16 Chavez, Carlos, 50 Chicago Symphony Orchestra, 6 Childs, Barney, 94 Jack’s New Bag, 94 Chodos, Amrom, 134 Chopin, Frederic, 47, 130 Clarkson, Max, 13 Cleveland String Quartet, 50 Clough, Charles, 111 Coetzee, John (J.M.), 101 Cohen, Albert, 103 Cold War, 98, 130 and cultural diplomacy, 124, 129–32 Cole, Horace, 33 Colf, Howard, 17 collaborative circles, 7, 8, 33, 37, 38 Coltrane, Alice, 39 Columbia University, 166, 182, 187 Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, 85 Composers Union (Warsaw), 98 Concord String Quartet, 104, 163 Conrad, Tony, 111 Constanten, Tom, 139, 141, 144 Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, 6 Contemporary Chamber Players (Contempo), 6 Corner, Philip, 31 Corso, Gregory, 79 Cowell, Henry, 26, 27, 28 Twenty-Six Simultaneous Mosaics, 27 Cowen, Tyler, 187 Cox, Edward, 106 Cram, Robert, 78, 122

236

INDEX

Creative Associates as analogous to research associates, 19 and community relations, 24, 182 drug use, 37, 125 grievances, 35–37 listing of, 197–200 recital series, 26–27, 114, 120–21 stipends and fees, 34, 98, 129, 158 Creeley, Robert, 188 Crumb, George, 12–13, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 38, 46, 153 Eleven Echoes of Autumn, 125 Madrigals, Book I, 38, 189 Night Music I, 13, 27 Nocturnes, 27 Vox Balaenae, 12 Cummiskey, Linda, 147 Cunningham, Merce, 42, 47, 53, 70, 73, 136, 188 Curry, John Steuart, 188 Curtis Institute of Music, 17, 92 Curtiss-Wright, 9 Dada, 30, 107, 140, 151 Dallapiccola, Luigi, 69 Davidovsky, Mario, 86 Davies, Peter Maxwell Eight Songs for a Mad King, 92, 107, 123, 147 Davis, Douglas, 104, 113 De Carvalho, Eleazar, 72 De Pablo, Luis, 50, 128, 132, 138 Soldedad Interrumpida, 138 Del Tredici, David, 46, 69, 116–17, 119 Vintage Alice, 117 DeLancy, Charles, 17 Dempster, Stuart, 63, 74, 122 Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), 23, 116 Dick, Robert, 122, 166, 169, 171–72 Dimiziani, Sylvia. See Brigham-Dimiziani, Sylvia Domus (performance space), 95, 98 Doran, Terry, 24 Douglass College (Rutgers University), 187 Dow Chemical Company, 62 Downey, Juan, 5 Downs, Donald, 198 Doxiades, Constantin, 70 Druckman, Jacob, 108, 163 Animus I, 108

Duchamp, Marcel, 30, 145 Dufallo, Richard, 17, 27, 53, 144 Dunn, Joseph, 90, 105, 106 Dupouy, Jean, 22, 51, 53 Dwyer, John, 13, 24, 27–29, 52, 60, 64–65, 69, 71, 89, 94, 106, 112, 115, 117, 133, 141, 152, 157, 170, 173, 174–75, 177, 178 Dwyer, Nancy, 112 Dylan, Bob, 9 Earls, Paul, 150–51 Eastman, Julius, 46, 78, 91–92, 96, 97, 104, 113, 117, 127, 129, 133, 135, 139, 140, 147, 180, 190 and Eight Songs for a Mad King, 106–107, 147 and El Cimarrón, 123–24 If You’re So Smart Why Aren’t You Rich?, 92, 170 Piano Pieces I-IV, 92 and Song Books, 146 Stay On It, 92, 125, 135 Thruway, 92 Edition Peters, 182 Electric Candle, 109 Ellicott Square Building, 9, 64–65 Ellis, Don, 22, 26, 27, 28, 52, 189 Emshwiller, Ed, 138, 150 England, Nicholas, 185 Englert, Giuseppe, 154 Ensemble Intercontemporain, 155 Erickson, Robert, 153 Erie Canal, 9 Erie rail line, 15 Erie-Lackawanna Station, 16 Evenings for New Music, 73, 92, 98, 105, 108, 110, 112, 113, 116, 119, 120, 122, 124, 137, 138, 140, 156, 157, 159, 166, 167, 169, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 177, 181, 182, 189, 190 at Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 24, 26, 27, 28, 45, 52–53, 60, 71, 77, 92, 93, 110, 116, 171 at Carnegie Recital Hall, 24, 26, 27, 45, 52–53, 69, 92, 93–94, 95, 107, 138, 161 at WBAI Free Music Store, 141–42, 166 Evenings on the Roof, 5 See also Monday Evening Concerts experimental music, 3–9, 13, 18, 23, 38, 51, 57, 59, 73, 102, 165 and technology, 80–82, 84–88

INDEX

Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT), 81, 87 Expo ’70, 81, 108 Farrell, Michael P., 8, 33, 37, 38, 178 Felder, David, 189 Feldman, Irving, 32 Feldman, Morton, 8, 23, 28, 37, 42, 47, 52, 58, 96, 122, 127, 138, 145, 156, 159 arrival in Buffalo, 115–118 as artistic advisor and music director of the Center, 120, 153, 158, 169, 171 conﬂicts with, 127, 142–43, 173–74 For Frank O’Hara, 125, 151 For Franz Kline, 96 Instruments, 149 Journey to the End of the Night, 96 and June in Buffalo, 143–44 King of Denmark, 132 Neither, 153–54 Piano, 174 Pianos and Voices (Five Pianos), 117 Rabbi Akiba, 96 Rothko Chapel, 151 and Slee Professorship, 51 Vertical Thoughts II, 96 Festival of the Arts Today, 1965, 36, 41–45 Festival of the Arts Today, 1968, 70–72 Fiedler, Leslie, 32 Filliou, Robert, 31 Fitzpatrick, Robert, 185 Fluxus, 29, 30 Ford Foundation, 23 Foss, Cornelia, 34, 211n7 Foss, Lukas, 3, 8, 27, 28, 29, 36, 71, 72, 79, 89, 94, 110, 113, 117, 132, 138, 142, 148, 163, 167, 170, 185, 190 as conductor, Brooklyn Philharmonia, 116, 170 as conductor, Buffalo Philharmonic, 17, 20, 27, 40, 42, 67, 102, 118, 147, 182 as consultant to Rockefeller Foundation, 17–18 departure from Buffalo, 102 as founder and director of the Center, 4, 17–24, 25, 26, 33, 34, 35, 38, 46, 60, 61, 67, 69, 73, 75–76, 77–78, 82–83, 91, 92, 93–94, 98, 107–8, 115–116, 120, 124, 144, 179, 185 Ni Bruit Ni Vitesse, 113, 149 Paradigm, 89–90, 94, 125

237

resignation as codirector, 138 on “The Changing Composer-Performer Relationship,” 8 See also Improvisation Chamber Ensemble Fox, Stuart, 104, 123–24 Frampton, Hollis, 111 Frangella, Luis, 157 Freund, Gerald (Rockefeller Foundation), 19–20, 21, 35, 69, 75, 115 Friedland, Sherman, 27, 44 Frost, Robert, 187 Fulkerson, James, 23, 94, 96, 104, 108, 189 For Norma, 94 Fulkerson, Mary, 90, 106 Fuller, Buckminister, 70, 145, 188, 214n91 Fuller, David, 67, 152, 176, 179 Fuller, Ramon, 84, 86 Music for Two Channel Tape and Two Percussionists, 86 Furnas, Clifford, 20, 61, 77 Gaber, Harley, 69, 148, 149 Gaburo, Kenneth, 83, 94, 153 Antiphony IV, 94 Gajewski, Walter, 147, 148, 154 Gann, Kyle, 92, 170 Gauguin, Paul, 17 Gearhart, Livingston, 68 Gena, Peter, 114, 117, 126, 182 Genet, Jean, 92 Gerhard, Roberto, 56 Gibson, David, 120, 121, 126, 189 Ginsberg, Alan, 70, 79 Gitlin, Todd, 101 Globokar, Vinko, 22–23, 38, 49, 122, 155, 182 Voie, 182 Goldman, Mark, 31 Goodyear, A. Conger, 17 Gottschalk, Louis Moreau, 38, 47 Graham, Martha, 187 Grauer, Victor, 154 Polyhyperchord, 154 Great Lakes, 15 Great Northern Hotel, 48 Griffes, Charles Tomlinson, 148, 163 Griffes, Larry, 111 Grifﬁths, Paul, 57, 123 Group for Contemporary Music, 6, 77–78, 182

238

INDEX

Haieff, Alexei, 50, 213n67 Hallwalls Gallery, 111–12, 189 Halprin, Anna, 85 Halsey, Elizabeth. See Hiller, Elizabeth Halsey Hamilton College, 95 Hamilton, William, 177 Hamm, Charles, 4 happenings, 5, 81 Harper’s Magazine, 94 Harriott, Esther, 144, 180 Harris, Mary Emma, 188 Harrison, Lou, 108, 110 Concerto for the Violin, 108 Hassell, Jon, 39, 78, 87, 89, 93 Goodbye Music, 93 Hassell, Margaret, 74 Haupt, Charles, 89, 147, 156, 170 Hellerman, William, 108 Formata, 108 Henze, Hans Werner, 122–23 El Cimmarón, 122–24 Herald Tribune (New York), 28, 32 Higgins, Dick, 21, 30 High Fidelity Magazine, 180 Hill, Martha, 82, 187, 217n18 Hiller, Elizabeth Halsey, 84, 89, 132, 162, 169 Hiller, Lejaren, 8, 23, 79, 94, 98, 113, 116, 117, 120, 124, 127, 130, 132, 141, 142, 153, 158, 163, 169, 171, 172, 174, 189, 190 Algorithms I, 87–88, 90, 125 Avalanche, 90 as co-music director of the Center, 82, 90–91, 107 HPSCHD, 81, 88, 174–77 Illiac Suite (Quartet No. 1), 84 and modern technology, 59, 84–88, 154, 179, 181 Portfolio, 149 Rage over the Lost Beethoven, 114 resignation as codirector, 138 as Slee Professor, 50, 82 and theater, 89–90, 104–6, 162 Three Rituals, 108–9 Hindemith, Paul, 17 Hog Farm, 79 Holiday Magazine, 16, 62 Holm, Hanya, 187 Hornbacher, Sara, 174, 176

Houdaille Industries, 16 Hudson, Benjamin, 121, 126, 139, 147, 160, 170, 180 Hughes, Allen, 53 Humeston, Jay, 43 Humphrey, Doris, 187 Hunter College, 89 Huyssen, Andreas, 30 Ichiyanagi, Toshi, 47 Imani, 13 improvisation, 4, 17, 21, 27, 38–39, 52, 57, 109, 113, 123, 171–72 Improvisation Chamber Ensemble, 17, 21 indeterminacy and chance music, 28, 29, 30, 73, 109, 113, 156 authorship and, 56–58 Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), 155, 169, 172 Interstate Commerce Commission, 16 Ionesco, Eugene, 42 Ives, Charles, 28, 108, 110, 125, 140, 143, 148, 171, 181 Adagio sostenuto, 140 Aeschylus and Sophocles, 28 All the Way Around and Back, 140 Angels, 171 Requiem, 28 Scherzo, 140 Sonata, Violin-pianoforte, no. 4, 108 Symphony No. 4, 148 The Innate, 28 Jackson, Bruce, 63 Jacobs, Paul, 173 James, Henry, 7 jazz, 4, 8, 17, 38, 39, 52, 70, 92 Jewish Community Center (Buffalo), 65 Johns Hopkins University, 187 Johnson, President Lyndon, 63 Johnson, Tom, 119, 151 Johnston, Ben, 69 Jolas, Betsy, 50, 156 Jolas, Eugene, 156 Jolas, Maria, 156 Jones, Ralph, 121, 126, 135, 136, 137, 139, 154 Jordan, Ken, 85 Joseph, Charles, 29 Juilliard School, 8, 34, 78, 82

INDEX

June in Buffalo, 143–47, 171 founding, 143–44 revival, 189 second festival, 153 third festival, 163 Kafka, Franz, 76 Kagel, Mauricio, 38, 50, 113, 142 Sur Scène, 89, 183 Kahn, Douglas, 30 Kaprow, Allan, 5, 31, 116 Kasprowicz, James, 190 Kennedy Center, 188 Kennedy, President John F., 8 Kennedy, Robert, 99 Kent State University, 101, 102 Kepes, György, 150 Ketter, Robert L., 103 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 75, 99, 157 Kirchner, Leon, 50 Kirkbride, Jerry, 78, 89 Kitchen, the, 85, 152 Klaus der Geiger. See Wrochem, Klaus von Klein, Howard, 69 Kleinhans Music Hall, 33–34 Kluver, Billy, 80, 81, 87 Knowles, Alison, 31 Knox, Seymour, 12, 13, 19, 26, 27, 67, 77, 116, 156, 171 Kolb, Barbara, 113 Koljonen, Irja, 105 Komorous, Rudolf, 96 Lady Blancarosa, 96 Kondo, Jo, 108, 162, 166, 167 Breeze for 9 Players, 108 Under the Umbrella, 162 Korot, Beryl, 5 Kosciuszko Foundation, 91, 166 Kostizewski, Lt. Benedict, 32 Kotik, Charlotta, 98, 111, 147, 153 Kotik, Petr, 96, 97, 104, 106, 136, 145, 146, 147, 153 escape from Czechoslovakia, 98 founding of S.E.M., 98, 190 See also S.E.M. Ensemble Kotonski, Wlodzemierz, 27, 167 Koussevitzky, Serge, 17 KPFA Radio, 85 Kraber, Karl, 22, 47, 122 Kraft, William, 170 Des Imagistes, 170

239

Krimsky, Katrina. See Hassell, Margaret Krips, Josef, 16, 40, 67 Krysiak, Joseph, 90 Kubera, Joseph, 114, 139, 141, 145, 147, 148, 190 Kuivila, Ron, 176 Kurtz, Allen H., 62 Kvistad, Garry, 113, 114, 122 La Barbara, Joan, 159, 160, 162, 174 Lackawanna Rail Line, 15 Laneri, Roberto, 106, 113, 190 Lanza, Alcides, 107 Penetrations V, 107 Larrabee, Eric, 68, 77, 105 Laub, David, 20 Lawson, Cristyne, 92 Leacock, Richard, 71 Léandre, Joëlle, 165 Legalize Marijuana Movement (LEMAR), 79 Lehigh Valley Rail Line, 15, 16 Leinsdorf, Erich, 19 Lennon, John, 74, 109 Levine, George R., 63, 159, 168, 173, 178 Levine, Jesse, 33, 119 Levine, Renée, 121, 126, 148 as Center coordinator, 34–35 departure from the Center, 166 as managing director, 138–39, 158 Lewis, Rice, Tucker, Allen and Chubb (law ﬁrm), 91 Lichtenstein, Roy, 187 Life magazine, 40, 42 Ligeti, György, 31, 41, 42, 44, 177 Monument/Selbstportrait, 177 Poème symphonique, 31, 41, 42, 44 List, Garrett, 133, 148, 149 Three Processes on Nine Sets, 149 Lloyd, Norman, 69, 76, 82 Lorca, Federico Garcia, 38, 189 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 6, 110 Luening, Otto, 85 Lunetta, Stanley, 78, 89 Lye, Len, 17 MacDowell, Edward, 187 Maciunas, George, 30, 31 MacLow, Jackson, 31 Maderna, Bruno, 69

240

INDEX

Manhattan School of Music, 3, 22, 44, 52 Marcus, Jonathan, 89 Marisol (sculptor), 17 Martin, Anthony, 85, 86 Martin, Judith, 139, 146 Martin, Robert, 27, 50, 56, 183, 190 Martirano, Salvatore, 64, 83, 108 Cocktail Music, 108 Mason, Nick, 178 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 149, 150, 152 Arttransition Festival, 149 Center for Advanced Visual Studies, 149–50 Maxwell Davies, Peter. See Davies, Peter Maxwell Mayuzumi, Toshiro, 27 McKinnon, James, 77 McLuhan, Marshall, 80–81, 145 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 80 McMaster University, 112 Meet the Composer, 91, 155, 170 Mekas, Jonas, 70 Melville, Sam, 92, 133 Messiaen, Olivier, 140, 156, 177, 181 Meyerson, Martin, 54, 61, 62, 63, 77, 99 Miami-Dade Community College, 188 Middlebury College, 112 Mikhashoff, Yvar, 122, 141, 155, 156, 163, 176, 189 Milhaud, Darius, 181 Millonzi, Robert, 118 Mills College, 86, 87, 139 Mingus, Charles, 50 minimalism, 40, 75 Mischel, Howard, 100, 102 Monday Evening Concerts, 5, 110 Monk, Thelonius, 79 Moog, Robert, 5, 86, 87, 93, 141, 151, 181 Moore, Terry, 90 Moran, Robert, 147, 148, 149, 152 L’aprés-midi du Dracoula, 147, 149 Morris, Robert, 42 Morton, Lawrence, 6 Mullen, Frances, 5, 110, 152 Mumma, Gordon, 6, 72 music and theater, 88–90, 178, 179, 183 Musical America, 174 Myrow, Fredric, 22, 28, 29 Songs from the Japanese, 28

National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA), 86, 176 National Endowment for the Arts, 91, 95, 103, 137, 156 National Gypsum, 16 Neidlinger, Buell, 22, 38, 39, 48, 49, 52, 122 Neuhaus, Max, 65, 66, 154 Drive-in Music No. 1, 65, 66 Water Whistle, 65 New York Car Wheel Company, 16 New York Central rail line, 15 New York magazine, 90, 190 New York Post Journal, 33 New York School (of composers), 144, 190 New York State Arts Award, 104, 105 New York State Council on the Arts, 20, 41, 91, 104, 113, 133, 136, 137–38, 156, 168, 170 New Yorker Magazine, 28, 42 Niagara Frontier, 9 Niblock, Phill, 153 Nine Evenings: Theater and Engineering (festival), 81–82 Nixon, President Richard, 102 North Beach, 3 Nyman, Michael, 31, 51, 57, 144 O’Grady, Gerald, 81, 110, 111, 151, 154 See also Center for Media Studies Ohio National Guardsmen, 101 Ohio State Award, 61 Ohio State University, 188 Oliveros, Pauline, 24, 69, 85, 86, 138, 140, 147 Crow, 140, 147 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 9 Olsen, Charles, 32, 70, 188 ONCE Festival, 6 Ono, Yoko, 31, 109 Oppens, Ursula, 169, 173, 177 Orgad, Ben Zion, 107 Trio for Strings, 107 P. S. 122, 112 Packer, Randall, 85 Packer, Renée Levine. See Levine, Renée Paik, Nam June, 5, 31 Pallenberg, Rospo, 53 Pan-American Exposition, 9 Parman, Frank, 90, 106

INDEX

241

patronage of experimental music, 12, 20–21, 23, 182, 188–89 See also Ford Foundation; New York State Council on the Arts; Rockefeller Foundation; universities Peace Bridge, 9, 79 Penn, Arthur, 188 Penn State University, 187 Pennebaker, D. A., 71, 172 Pennebaker-Hedegus Films, Inc., 172, 173, 174 Elliott Carter at Buffalo, 172–74 Performance Research Unit, 105 Perle, George, 114 Persichetti, Vincent, 28 Perspectives of New Music, 4 Peters, Ronald, 94 Piene, Otto, 150 Pierce-Arrow Plant (Buffalo), 9, 95, 98, 105 Pierre, Francis, 47, 52 Plantamura, Carol, 21, 22, 27, 38, 44, 49, 153 Plaut, Fred, 75 Polowy, Monica, 166, 168, 169, 171, 172, 174 Poons, Larry, 41 Poss, Bernice, 159, 169 Post, Nora, 147, 148, 150, 152, 159, 160, 162 Pousseur, Henri, 47, 50, 51, 53, 54, 69, 71, 83 Miroir de Votre Faust, 51, 70 Répons, 51, 53 Presser Music Publishers, 34 Princeton University, 84, 85, 132 Probst Solomon, Barbara, 94 Project Themis, 99 Putnam, Thomas, 24, 65, 78, 85, 88, 117, 137, 138, 140, 146, 154, 156, 169

Revill, David, 73 Reynolds, Roger, 6, 24, 167 Rice University, 110 Rice, John Andrew, 188 Rich, Alan, 19, 90 Richards, Mary Caroline (M. C.), 53 Richardson, H. H., 9 Rickey, George, 17 Riegger, Wallingford, 12, 181 A Study in Sonority, 12 Riley, Terry, 40, 58, 63, 74, 93, 163, 166 In C, 74, 86 Kundalini Dervish, 93 Ritscher, George, 87, 114 Rochberg, George, 50 Rockburne, Dorothea, 188 Rockefeller, Governor Nelson, 104, 105, 133 Rockefeller Foundation, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 35, 53, 54, 60, 61, 67, 69, 75, 77, 82, 85, 86, 104, 105, 115, 154, 156, 172, 179 Rodenbeck, Judith, 30 Rollins College, 188 Romanowski, Joseph (Joe), 87, 89 Rorem, Ned, 50 Rosenboom, David, 63, 69, 70, 75, 87, 157, 190 Ross, Patricia Kerr, 113, 172 Rowe String Quartet, 156 Ruggles, Carl, 148, 171, 181 Russell, Mark, 112 Rutgers University, 23, 76, 78, 95 Rzewski, Frederic, 22, 23, 39, 46, 47, 51, 92, 98, 122, 132–33, 134, 137, 165, 182–83 Coming Together, 92, 133 Composition for 2 Performers, 47 Les Moutons de Panurge, 134

Rabach, Alyssa, 180 Rainer, Yvonne, 42, 81 Rands, Bernard, 153 Ratcliff, Carter, 65 Rauschenberg, Robert, 5, 42, 81, 82, 116, 188 Regan, Edward V., 12, 13 Regan, Peter, 100 Rehfuss, Heinz, 156 Reich, Steve, 86, 149, 153 Reid, Albert, 53 Reserve Ofﬁcer Training Corps (ROTC), 99, 101

S.E.M. Ensemble, 98–99, 145, 147, 190 Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble, 190 Saarinen, Eliel and Eero, 34 Sahl, Michael, 7, 22, 37, 38, 43, 44, 46, 47, 51, 52, 73, 109 Salzman, Eric, 142 San Francisco Tape Music Center, 6, 85, 86 Sapp, Allen D., Jr., 7, 18, 25, 26, 34, 50, 67–68, 86, 91, 110, 116, 138, 141, 142, 143, 159, 169, 184, 189 Chairman, Music Department, SUNYAB, 18

242

INDEX

Sapp, Allen D., Jr. (continued ) Cofounder and codirector of the Center, 19, 20–22, 33, 35–36, 53–54, 60, 61, 69, 73, 76, 82, 144, 179 Dean of Cultural Affairs, 83, 104–5, 180 Resignation as music department chair, 77 Satie, Erik, 53, 140, 141, 146, 153, 181 Relâche, 140 Vexations, 141 Scelsi, Giancinto, 163, 167, 174 Hyxos, 174 Rucke di Guck, 167 Schawinsky, Xanti, 188 Schein, Artie, 33 Schneider, Alan, 70 Schneider, Alexander, 21 Schneider, June, 182 Schneider, Mischa, 50 Schoeffer, Nicolas, 41 Schoenberg, Arnold, 6, 17, 47, 52, 123, 154, 156, 166, 170, 181 Herzgewächse, 52 Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, 156 Phantasy for Violin and Pianoforte, 170 Pierrot Lunaire, 123 String Trio, 170 Schonberg, Harold, 93–94, 107 Schubert, Franz, 27 Schuller, Gunther, 6, 27, 28, 78 Schultz, Douglas, 111 Schwartz, Elliott, 90 Signals, 90 Scoville, Margaret, 139 Sender, Ramon, 6, 85 Sessions, Roger, 84, 85 Seymour Knox Foundation, 156 Shankar, Ravi, 79 Shapey, Ralph, 6, 21, 27 Sharits, Paul, 111 Sherman, Cindy, 111 Shields, Roger, 104, 106, 113, 114, 122 Shostac, David, 63, 64 Siemering, William (Bill), 24, 61 Sigurbjornsson, Thorkel, 46, 120, 121, 190 For Renée, 121 Silverman, Stanley, 22, 28, 35, 44 Simon, Jeff, 24, 145, 146 Sims Warren, Gwendolin. See Sims, Gwendolin Sims, Gwendolin, 78, 94, 96, 183 Singer, Lawrence, 87, 93

Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (architects), 26 Slee, Frederick and Alice, 16 endowment bequest, 1957, 16 Slee Professorship of Music, 12, 16, 18, 50–51, 82, 103, 111, 114, 115, 116, 128, 138, 142, 156, 168 Smit, Leo, 50, 56, 163, 167 Snelson, Kenneth, 104, 188 Snow, Michael, 111 Sokol, Casey, 157 Sokol, Mark, 104, 106 Sollberger, Harvey, 6, 78, 182 Something Else Press, 74 Somit, Albert, 159 Sonic Arts Union, 72 Source Magazine, 87, 88 Spectrum, The, 100, 102, 103 St. Lawrence Seaway, 15, 16 State Department, United States, 23, 98, 124, 129 State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNYAB), 3, 8, 16, 21, 23, 34, 79, 81, 92, 110, 111, 112, 141, 143, 152, 169, 173, 187 Arts Forum, 144 “Berkeley of the East,” 61 Campus unrest, 32, 99–102 decline in funding, 178–79 Ofﬁce of Cultural Affairs, 77, 83, 91, 104, 144, 166, 180 See also Center for Media Studies; Center of the Creative and Performing Arts Steinberg, William, 16, 40, 67 Stella, Frank, 81 Stern, Isaac, 19, 181 Stevens, Wallace, 160 Stiller, Andrew, 113, 114, 153 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 40, 47, 52, 56, 58, 69, 114, 139 Kontakte, 114 Momente, 40 Plus Minus, 56 Stoll, Clifford, 87 Stow, Randolph, 107 Strauss, Richard, 27 Till Eulenspiegel, 27 Stravinsky, Igor, 6, 12, 13, 40, 47, 75, 110, 148, 173, 181 L’Histoire du Soldat, 13 Rite of Spring, 40, 75 Strongin, Theodore, 44

INDEX

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 100 Studio School (New York City), 96 Subotnick, Morton, 6, 24, 85, 86, 87, 174 Parallel Lines, 174 Silver Apples of the Moon, 86 2 Life Histories, 174 Sullivan, Louis, 9 Sumsion, Calvin, 176 SUNY Albany, 95, 113, 176 SUNY Oswego, 187 SUNY Stony Brook, 100 Svitzer, Henrik, 156 Swartz, Esther. See Harriott, Esther Tactical Patrol Unit (Buffalo), 100 Takahashi, Aki, 172, 176, 177 Takahashi, Yuji, 46, 50, 63, 69, 75, 78, 93, 122, 172, 176 Takemitsu, Toru, 108, 153, 166, 171, 174 Bryce, 174 Sacriﬁce, 108 Taubman, Howard, 42 Taylor, Cecil, 52, 70 Toll, 52 technology and the arts, 5, 9, 64–65, 80–82, 149–51, 154–55 See also Amacher, Maryanne; Cage, John; Hiller, Lejaren; Kluver, Billy; McLuhan, Marshall Tenney, James, 84, 157, 171 Harmonium #5, 171 Seeds I-IV, 171 Thomas, Michael Tilson, 110, 118, 148, 151, 153, 174 Thomas Flyer (automobile), 9 Thomson, Virgil, 50 Thomson, William, 157–59, 167, 171, 172, 178 Thoreau, Henry David, 80, 145, 146, 156, 157 Tinguely, Jean, 80 Tomkins, Calvin, 5, 73, 80, 81 Toth, John, 176 Trott, Lawrence, 174 Trotter, Herman, 93, 98, 121, 136 Trythall, Richard, 46, 114, 122 Tudor, David, 23, 38, 39, 46–47, 48, 51, 52, 53, 70, 81, 122, 135–37, 153, 165, 176 Rainforest, 135–37 Tyner, McCoy, 39

243

Uitti, Frances-Marie, 156, 163 universities and public-private partnerships, 20–21, 184 and student activism, 62, 99–101 as incubators for artists, 188–89 as patrons of the arts, 6–7, 23, 188–89 See also State University of New York at Buffalo University of Buffalo. See State University of New York at Buffalo University of California at Berkeley, 61, 62, 188 University of California at Davis, 188 University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), 17, 188 University of Chicago, 6, 20, 23 University of Colorado at Boulder, 21 University of Illinois, Urbana, 83, 84, 88, 175 University of Iowa, 23, 103, 188 University of Michigan, 62, 103, 187 University of Pennsylvania, 23, 77, 99 University of Wisconsin, 101, 187 University-Wide Committee on the Arts (SUNY), 113, 172 Urban Company, 9 Urubod, Avillugd, 32 Ussachevsky, Vladimir, 85 Utica Daily Press, 33 Varèse, Edgard, 84, 143, 181 Intégrales, 171 Vasulka, Steina and Woody, 5, 111, 154, 162 Vautier, Ben, 31 Vaux, Calvert, 9 Verberne, Marijke, 68, 78, 89–90, 96 Victor Hugo apartments, 25, 51, 55, 59 Vietnam War, 8, 32, 62, 63, 64, 79, 82, 99 Vigeland, Nils, 3, 24, 44, 68, 114, 137, 163, 182 Village Voice, 92, 119, 151 Waldhauer, Fred, 81 Walker Art Center, 188 Walton, William, 27 Façade, 27 Wardlow, Elwood, 24 Watts, Robert, 31 Webern, Anton von, 40, 54, 55, 170, 181 String Trio, 170 Weidman, Charles, 187

244

INDEX

Weinstein, Harvey, 149 Weintraub, Harry, 13 Weisberg, Arthur, 6 Wernick, Richard, 8, 25, 26, 29, 30, 34, 44, 47, 140, 181, 184, 189 Wexner Center, 188 White, Andrew, III, 38, 49, 52, 56 White, Stanford, 9 Williams, Diane, 48, 153 Williams, Jan, 22, 44, 47, 49, 56, 57, 67, 89, 93, 96, 104, 113, 118, 122, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 137, 139, 146, 147, 148, 152, 156, 159, 160, 162, 168, 171, 189, 190 as Center Music Director, 138, 142, 167, 168, 169 collaboration with Elliott Carter, 45–46 as Resident Conductor, 140, 159, 173 Wolff, Christian, 28, 57, 125, 127, 144, 145, 146 Burdocks, 125, 127 In Between Pieces, 28 Wolpe, Stefan, 56, 119, 188 Wood, James, 111 Woolf, Virginia, 33 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 9 Wrochem, Klaus von, 56, 58, 183 Stücke, 183 Wuorinen, Charles, 6, 78, 160, 182, 183

Xenakis, Iannis, 26, 27, 70, 74, 153, 160, 162, 190 Damaathen, 160, 162 Morisma-Amorisma, 27 Yadzinsky, Edward, 40 Yale University, 17, 52, 165, 171 Yates, Peter, 5, 83, 110, 136, 152 York University, 95, 157, 171 Young Audiences, Inc., 34 Young, La Monte, 28, 29, 30, 42, 58, 93 “Map of 49’s Dream,” 93 Composition No. 6, 28 Piano Piece for David Tudor #1, 29 The Four Dreams of China, excerpt: The Second Dream of the High Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, 28, 29 Yuasa, Joji, 108 Projection for Violincello and Piano, 108 Zagreb Biennale, 182 Zazeela, Marian, 93 Zonn, Paul, 153 Zukofsky, Louis, 70 Zukofsky, Paul, 22, 27, 29122, 173 Zwack, Michael, 112 Zwickler, Howard, 104, 106