Mass Ornaments

The Wire: What was your upbringing like - were you brought into contact with music at an early age?

Alvin Curran: "I grew up in rather normal American childhood. With the exception that my father was a musician, he was a band leader, he had a dance band which operated mostly in the Jewish community in Providence, Rhode Island where I grew up.

"Before that my earliest memories of music - and these have very profound memories as well as very profound influences - was following my father around in these vaudeville theatres where he played on weekends. He was a trombonist, he was busy as a musician and I was this little kid who touted along litterally in the back stage. So I was sitting in the trombone sections of these big bands for most of my childhood.

"At the same time, at the age of five, I did a very conventional thing, I started to learn the piano. For some reasons the piano was a very important cultural element in the community - everyone had to learn the piano. You weren't a validated citizen unless you knew how to play the piano.

"In retrospect I see this background. If you look at any of my contemporaries, La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, almost to the person, they've all had a youthful experience in making popular music and jazz in particular.

"I went on to college where I rejected the normal life. I was heading to be go into medicine and went straight into composition at university and continued into higher degrees of that. And then landed under the wing of Elliott Carter in Berlin [Ford Foundation Grant]. So there I was in Europe, in company of Fred Rzewski, who was also invited by Elliott Carter, Jugi Takahashi (?) who was invited by Xenakis, Louis Andriessen who was invited by Berio. There was this whole core of young composers who were eager to start a life and be essentially bad boys in music.

"The year in Berlin was very exciting, I met Stravinsky and all these other incredible people whose work I didn't even know very well - Xenakis and Berio are people whose work I now revere but at the time there they were sitting opposite me, I was just a kid, I had no idea what they were doing in their music. All I knew was that I wanted to do something like that, but I didn't have a clue.

"Shortly after that, hop in a car, go to Rome and that's where I've been ever since. That's where MEV, with Richard Teitlebaum, Fred Rzewski and myself got off the ground. Basically here we were very academically trained, academically directed, everyone said we were very promising composers, so presumably we would have been very promising composers, then we got to Rome and we figured something really wasn't quite right. And is just at the beginnings of the '68 revolution, about 1966. And for one reason or another there was enough curiosity, discontent and intuition among us to be able to form a group that rejected all forms of hierarchy, all forms of organisation, all forms of leadership. No director, no score, no knowledge of when the music might begin or end.

"It was Tabula Rasa. It was erasing our whole background. Everything we were supposed to be, everything we were supposed to do and basically our whole cultural mission in life."

Where do you think the inspiration from that came from?

"It mostly came from [John] Cage and [David] Tudor. Fred Rzewski had been in Buffalo, New York for one year in a situation where I think he was a performer in a special project and Cage and Tudor were involved in this project. I guess Morton Feldman was there at the same time.

"And Frederic came back with this idea that you could take these contact microphones and amplify all kinds of objects and junk and found things. And Frederic being somewhat of a homegrown revolutionary began to theorise and create these ideas about liberating sound and liberating the music from the page.