KPFA-FM Music Dept. ➔ Ode To Gravity: Seven American Women Composers

Analog Audio

Event Type

Music

Origin

KPFA

Identifier

AM.1978.01.20

Program Series

Ode To Gravity

Program Length

70 min

Dates

1978-01-20 | broadcast
| 1978-01-20 | created

Description

Charles Amirkhanian plays selections from an LP he produced called “New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media - Women in Electronic Music”. The music on this album exhibits an exciting, wide-open, freewheeling approach to the medium of electronic music which was typical of this genre in the late 1970s. No longer were composers obsessively concerned with the agonizing, expressionistic, and purely "electronic" (synthesized) sound formulas which marked much of the electronic music composed between the mid-1950s and the late 1960s. Instead, by the 1970s composers were willing to mix media and sonic materials in thoroughly inventive ways to achieve ends which were new-sounding, and often more engaging, than that of the "academic" avant-garde. Several composers represented here were deeply concerned with Eastern music and its subsequent metamorphoses into such popular forms as Rock and Roll. Still others brought to bear a sense of wit and satire that was rarely a prominent feature of avant-garde music in the early 1960s. This first anthology of women's electronic music demonstrates great refinement and skill at work in a variety of different styles, several of which were unfamiliar or new even to those who followed contemporary music.
- Charles Amirkhanian

Genres

New music
Electro-Acoustic / Electronic

Musical Selections

Music of the Spheres (1938) (5:59) / Johanna Magdalena Beyer -- World Rhythms (1975) (8:28)/ Annea Lockwood -- Bye Bye Butterfly (1965) (8:09) / Pauline Oliveros -- Appalachian Grove I (1974) (5:37) / Laurie Spiegel -- I Could Sit Here All Day (1976) (6:25) / Megan Roberts -- Points (1973-74) (5:32) / Ruth Anderson -- New York Social Life (1977) (3:32) / Laurie Anderson -- Time to Go: for Diego (1977) (2:58) / Laurie Anderson

Performers

Phil Loarie, voice (Sit Here All Day)
William Novak, voice (Sit Here All Day)
Danny Sofer, drums (Sit Here All Day)
Electric Weasel Ensemble: (Spheres)
Charles Amirkhanian, triangle (Spheres)
Donald Buchla, mixing, (Spheres)
Brenda Hutchinson, pulse control (Spheres)
Scott Johnson, guitar, organ (Spheres)
David Morse, easel synthesizer (Spheres)
Stephen Ruppenthal, easel synthesizer (Spheres)
Allen Strange, easel synthesizer (Spheres)

Subjects

Women composers
Songs with instrumental ensemble
Electronic music
Electro-acoustic
New music
Ambient sounds
Percussion music
Music for meditation