Bringing People Together in a State of Joy

Peter Catapano interviews Alvin Curran about his long career as an avant-garde composer.

By Peter CatapanoSeptember 21, 2024

• Music

THERE ARE GIANTS walking the earth. Sometimes they step lightly, move silently, live monk-like, or eschew attention. Sometimes they don’t even know they are giants or don’t care to be thought of as such—they are busy being giant! The sort of people I have in mind are usually artists, usually of a certain age, mostly in their seventies or eighties, whose work has gathered force over time. Their experiments and acts of expression change not only the course of their own disciplines but also the quality of the lives of those who encounter them. Their work is sometimes extreme, their methods unfamiliar. They upset our fixed beliefs, simultaneously thrill and confuse us. In many cases, their devotion to their work borders on the holy or the mystical. That work, received openly, may deliver us into a new place, reshaping or refreshing our experience of being in the world.

The artist I am speaking of here is Alvin Curran, the influential American-born composer who has lived in Rome for some 60 years, and whose astonishing, still-growing list of works of avant-garde music, conceptual art, and performance stretches back to 1962. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in December 1938, Alvin’s musical youth was a distinctly American stew: piano lessons, big bands, marching bands, jazz, synagogue music, and radio. He attended Brown University, then Yale School of Music, where he studied with revered composer Elliott Carter, and eventually landed in Rome, where he banded together with the core members of Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV) in 1966 and—with inspiration from free jazz, John Cage, and more—blew the roof off everything. MEV, as Alvin has written,

began sticking contact mics to anything that sounded and amplified their raw sounds: bed springs, sheets of glass, tin cans, rubber bands, toy pianos, sex vibrators, and assorted metal junk; a crushed old trumpet, cello and tenor sax kept us within musical credibility, while a home-made synthesizer of some 48 oscillators along with the first Moog synthesizer in Europe gave our otherwise neo-primitive sound an inimitable edge.

Alvin’s long list of solo works includes his monumental Maritime Rites (1984), which uses recorded boat whistles, ship horns, voices, and other naturally occurring sounds not typically considered music to create a vast environmental sonic tapestry; his epic piano work Inner Cities (2003), which is often cited as one of the longest nonrepetitive piano works; and the joyfully chaotic Oh Brass on the Grass Alas (2006), a composition featuring 300 amateur brass-band musicians and many others. Last year, he produced Una Voce Poco Fa, a sound installation for the Fantasmagoria Callas exhibit staged for the centenary of Maria Callas at the Museum of La Scala in Milan, which just ended. His latest, Footnotes 1.3 for automated piano, will be included at the Venice Music Biennale beginning September 26, 2024.

I first met Alvin in 2006 when I invited him to be a contributor to a forum for contemporary composers at The New York Times called The Score—a crazy idea of mine that worked. Alvin was the elder member of a quartet of authors that also included Annie Gosfield, Michael Gordon, and Glenn Branca. His writing, like his music, is almost always grand-scale—it swings for fences, or just leaps over or runs through them. Alvin the writer, like Alvin the composer, prankster, and horn blower, is full of playfulness and ecstatic joy, radiating an excitement about being alive. Mysticism meets the Marx Brothers.

Alvin is currently at work on an autobiography that I hope to help him finish. His published work is extensive. The book Alvin Curran: Live in Roma (2010), edited by Daniela Margoni Tortora, explores, in both English and Italian, the wild and ambitious scope of his career, and the alvin curran fakebook (2015) is the composer’s own autobiographical gathering of more than 200 artifacts—notated compositions, photos, writings, and sketches. To me, these documents of Alvin’s artistic life represent the avant-garde in the purest, least pretentious, and most joyful sense.

I generally keep in touch with Alvin by email, but in January, as the new year and the question of what to do with it loomed before me, I felt the need to speak with Alvin face-to-face—to the extent that I could from New York to Rome—and we arranged a video call that lasted for two hours. The conversation yielded such insights about life and art that I feel compelled to share at least some of it. The core of our talk involved a concern that has preoccupied me for a few decades now: What are the risks of pursuing an art form that is not universally popular or even understood? What do I stand to lose if I pursue a devotional way of life and turn my back on my material security and professional success?

I don’t contact Alvin often enough, perhaps because I feel that he is always nearby due to the all-encompassing environmental and psychic scale of his work. I hear it in my day-to-day life, in spaces open and closed, vast and intimate, in overheard conversations, traffic horns, handball games, kids playing, old men jabbering in dimly lit rooms, or in the rustle of skirts in church pews. I hear it even in silence. (John Cage doesn’t own silence, you know.)

The following transcript of our conversation was jointly distilled and edited by Alvin and me.

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PETER CATAPANO: It would be better to see you in person, but this will do. I asked you to do this because I think about you all the time. Last night, I was watching Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938) and, you know, with the battle scenes and all, there’s some great horn blowing in there.

ALVIN CURRAN: Yeah, yeah, I know that.

And so I was thinking of you then, watching the movie on my big TV in the middle of the night, and eventually I got tired and shut it off. I live on Grand Street, by the East River, not far from where Morton Feldman and John Cage lived at some point. It was dark and everything was quiet, rare in a way for the city even at a late hour, and then the sound of a ship horn started blowing out on the river. And I thought, How perfect! There goes Alvin again.

I just took a few months off to try to assess my work as a writer and musician. I wonder if you are getting to the point where you are thinking about your legacy. I know that your mentor Elliott Carter lived to be 103, so maybe there is no rush. But I wonder.

There’s a lot going on. Just when you think, in a lifetime of creative work, that you might find a moment to rest, it never comes. In fact, it gets worse.

It gets worse if you are lucky!

So I’m scrambling now to do several things. One is to reorder my own archive. There’s a lifetime of work—of written music, writings, events. There are two people at the moment who are actually assisting me and working on this. One is a French musicologist who has been trying to get at the ultimate essence of my work. He’s focused on my work and nothing else. And so this is helping to get me focused as well.

There’s over 60 years of work. I’ve actually produced quite a lot. And what astounds me more than anything is the direction some of this work has taken. You mentioned Elliott Carter, who was one of my original maestros—I would say the maestro in my life who, without any question, invited me into the back room where real composers sit. Without even saying those words or anything, he just accepted me as a student, but he also accepted me as a composer, and gave me his blessing, the benediction, the approval, or whatever you want to call it.

He sanctioned you.

Elliott allowed me to officially enter into that world of real composers. And I’d say that, as close as I feel to him and as much as I appreciate that blessed invitation to enter into the world of real composers, I feel that, in taking the experimental path that I have—not that I’ve slighted Elliott, but that at some point I abandoned the life of a real composer, that person who sits down at their desk or wherever they sit and writes—the string quartets and symphonies, the piano works and operas, whatever one was thought to have to do in the name of being a composer. Instead, I went off the road, to the sound of some skidding tires, but not a big crash.

Incidentally, Elliott’s only opera was called What Next? And it’s about a car crash. These people are piled in a car and they crash into a guardrail and they get out of the car looking around in a daze and ask, “What’s next?” That’s a big philosophical question. I guess I did hit the guardrail and that sent me flying to other spaces completely, places I never could have imagined. Like you started out talking about ship horns and foghorns and all that. How does someone who’s busy writing his Seventh Symphony come to that stuff? I was just a young composer who at a certain point realized, Hey, music is just sound, any sound, all sound, everywhere, all the time.

This revelation took place quite naturally. There was no prompting, no teaching or instigation. There was no instigation aside from my association with the members of the group Musica Elettronica Viva—Allan Bryant, Frederic Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum—who, very much like me, were all still in their tweed coats with the leather patches on the arm right out of Princeton and Yale, Brown, Harvard, all of us, just taking off these garments and tossing them into the Tiber River once and for all, making a conscious transformation. These early beginnings put me on a sociopolitical path of—I don’t want to use the word enlightenment, but some spaces new to me that hadn’t been very much explored under the general rubric of the so-called composer.

This is actually right where I thought this was going to lead: where is the “so-called composer” amid the overflowing of creativity and energy and enthusiasm outside the given forms—in this case, composed music that is the foundation of Western classical music? Because I want to note—and I know this from reading and editing your writing about your youth—that your real musical beginnings were in popular music of the 1950s and jazz and in these early American multiphonic groups, marching bands, Dixieland, and so on. And what all these forms have in common is an excess of exuberance. The excitement of it can’t be contained, and that results in all this stomping and wild blowing outside the lines, crisscrossing over one another, squawking simultaneously. So my view is that you had already responded to that, and you had already formed your allegiance to this spirited music and perhaps that, in following that calling, your musical, familial, and cultural roots really, and refusing the role of the classical composer, you felt as if you were turning your back on your mentors, your teachers, even your education, and most importantly the people like Elliott Carter who gave you their benediction to pursue that role. 

But perhaps because I have an affinity for religious narratives, I do see your musical path almost like a religious one. The way a mystic will leave the confines of church rules and doctrine to write about the dark night of the soul or the ascent of Mount Carmel or the Cloud of Unknowing and going into these spaces where things are not defined in order to increase what I’d call the sweetness of this experience of feeling and devotion to the life source, the primal force from which the music is derived. And to do that, you have to step directly into places that are undefined, ineffable, and insecure. And I wonder if—even if you weren’t fully aware of the source of this devotion, which might simply be chalked up to imprinting, nurture meeting nature, or even family or hometown loyalty—the act of instinctively pursuing it increased your devotion. 

When you mentioned music happening everywhere all the time, I also thought of artists like John Cage and James Tenney, who were theorizing along those lines as you began your journey. Though it’s not about who came up with the idea of this but more that the seeker will inevitably find himself or herself on this path, repeating that journey toward a state of artistic being that merges art and the physical reality of the world in broad terms but also blazing each path individually, making it their own. 

You basically took the words out of my mouth. This idea of where I went wrong and where I went right in my own adventures, my personal development in music, with this fundamental knowledge of American popular music under my belt. I mean, I was born in a house where music was played all the time. My father sang. He played the trombone. He played the double bass. My mother played the piano. All the kids had to take piano lessons, God knows why, playing Schubert sonatas and whatever. 

All of this took place not in a cultural vacuum but in the center, in the heart, of American musical life. Right off the bat, at the age of 13, just playing straight-ahead jazz and then along with the poet Clark Coolidge—my best friend, and he still is to this day—we started doing something called improvisation, imagining that we could make a music based on nothing. This is in the middle of the 1950s. We’re hearing music at jazz festivals in Newport, Rhode Island, we’re going to Boston to hear Miles Davis, all the jazz greats of the time. But nonetheless, we were immersed in this 1950s jazz world, which itself was an amazing turbulence, artistically, historically, white jazz musicians, Black jazz musicians, people coming together, people not coming together, a world of Afro-Cuban jazz coming in and all this stuff, including John Philip Sousa and whatever, it just determined my musical DNA. 

Incidentally, we have never lived—that is, musically speaking—in a time when all music from everywhere is available all of the time. This is a historical, global, and personal consideration, which I’ve written about to some extent. This idea that the music of the world, all the music of the world, is available instantly. If I want to go to, say, Kazakhstan, I go to my computer and say play me some Kazakh music. I don’t know what they do in Kazakhstan, but I’m sure it’s interesting. And not only that, you can go and listen to a river in Kazakhstan. You can listen to the wind in the trees. You can hear anything anywhere on this damn planet, and this is incredible. We’ve never had so much audio information available.

So now there are whole new issues in music, which, of course, in the popular forms is not changing much, not too much, because the popular forms have their formulas and they’re only interested in money, but in the real music making, it’s about taking chances, about not being sure of anything. And this is the essence of experimentalism in general and American experimentalism in particular.

Had I followed directly in Elliott’s footsteps—I don’t know. The path I took was a much more attractive one, simply because the outcomes on that path were completely unknown and even totally insecure. There was no guarantee of anything. Actually embracing a career in which not only was there no guarantee of making a monetary living, but there was also no guarantee that the work you produced would have any significance or any role in life. And not only that—these works at that time were often based on themes of randomization, accident. On themes of incompletion. On themes like Tom Johnson uses in one of his pieces called “Failing,” these postmodern, borderline themes where, if you step into those spaces and you take them seriously, you can get yourself into real trouble because you don’t know what the outcomes will be. But there are also possibilities of generating models and procedures and visionary landscapes, as it were, where you can operate anew, with fresh eyes and ears.

Yes, I’m naturally inclined to create things that involve exploration. It’s always been the case that if I have an assignment or a topic or something I have to write about, even if I come up with the idea myself, carrying it out as planned doesn’t work for me. I lose interest. It seems that I can only write to explore, not to record previously established thoughts, so in these cases the writing is thinking, not an artifact of it. It’s good for me to find out other artists like you use the word “failure” in relation to this. Because that’s what it feels like. But is it? That’s a very broad way of talking about it. But almost every artist of note that I’ve looked into has a thick binder of experiences that involve this uncertainty, unknowing, this fear that you’ll be using a language that other people won’t understand. And you’ll be exiled and scoffed at, laughed at, or, worse, told that your lifelong pursuit has no meaning. That you were deluded in believing that you might be an artist at all. It’s terrifying.

Even at my age—I’m 60—and with 25 years of editing and some writing and music making under my belt, I still think about this. The other day, I posted a few poems instead of an essay. The language was a little obscure. People are used to me being exceedingly clear, professionally and personally. But when I posted the poems, I thought, You know, my mom and dad are going to read this, and I don’t know if they will get it. Okay, so I’m 60. I’m still thinking, My mom is not going to get this. It’s kind of pathetic, as though committing an act of obscure communication is reason for a sort of shame. That it is some kind of transgression instead of a person trying to have fun and create unexpected effects with language. Maybe that kind of shame is specifically American, because it’s an open rejection of the opportunity to make money. Artists who tend to make money are usually the most economical and coherent. I’ve never been one of them. That’s why I make my money editing other people’s work. 

I can use these words my father said as he lay dying. I had just finished a big piece, I think. I think it was Crystal Psalms [a 1988 concerto for musicians from six European nations, simultaneously performed and broadcast on six separate but synchronized radio stations on the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht]. I played it for my father thinking that he would recognize his own voice—I had recorded him singing some songs at home in Yiddish that I put in the composition—he was a really wonderful singer. So he listened to this piece as he lay dying, and he said: “Alvin. You know, to me, it needs more melody.” 

I think I’ll probably use that as a title. It needs more melody! Hilarious! But it seems to be that, despite all the uncertainty and risks of making art like this, that you’ve always been optimistic about it. I wrote down some words I always think of when I think of your music. The E words: Ecstasy, Excess, Enthusiasm, Excitement. There are at least two levels I can enjoy your work on. One is—“That is just a fucking cool idea. I can’t believe somebody did that. I can’t believe somebody thought of that—and then actually did it.” And then there’s the actual sound, you know, which may or may not line up with how much I’m excited by the concept, but it seems to me that there’s a temperament that shapes your musical responses. You’re an exuberant person—another E word. You get a lot of joy out of life, and that goes into your response to this musical situation. Am I correct? 

You’re absolutely correct. Most people are themselves musical animals. It doesn’t take too much understanding to see what music does to humans, whether they’re isolated or in large groups. Our need for organized sound—and I say that’s all that music is—is universal. It’s global. It’s cosmic, even though you can’t hear anything out in the cosmos. It belongs to all of us. It’s something we can all share. It offers us the possibility of joyous transport, from wherever we are mentally and physically to some other place that is composed of these sounds that we’re hearing in that moment.

It’s also a form of collective and shared happiness, very often among the musicians themselves but also between the musicians and the audience for whom they’re playing. So these offerings that we as musicians make, sometimes for pay, sometimes for ritual, even on the saddest occasions, even in death, they are joyous occasions. And that’s what sound does.

And so, as with bricklayers, woodworkers, or other forms of life-sustaining work, making music is a hard job. Psychically, physically. It takes a lot out of you, but what you’re giving out through your breath or through your energy, through your audio vibrations, through whatever it is that you do to make these sounds, is fundamentally an act of bringing people together in a state of joy. It can sound like we’re just a bunch of simpletons, you know, going around banging on drums and blowing flutes and plucking strings and whacking on this or recording weird sounds in nature. Whatever it is, it’s all heading in one fundamental direction of trying to bring a little happiness into the world.

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Featured image: Photo of Alvin Curran by Amedeo Castellani.