Da Vinci Classics
Physical and Digital Release: 21 May 2021
Alvin Curran and Walter Prati create a shared musical space in Community Garden, exploring the interaction of individual voices and evolving sound textures.
13.67€
Digital programme · 4 tracks
Track timings refer to the digital edition.
Alcin Curran: Democratic, irreverent and traditionally experimental, Curran travels in a computerized covered wagon between the Golden Gate and the Tiber River, and makes music for every occasion with any sounding phenomena -- a volatile mix of lyricism and chaos, structure and indeterminacy, fog horns, fiddles and fiddle heads. He is dedicated to the restoration of dignity to the profession of making non-commercial music as part of a personal search for future social, political and spiritual forms.
Curran's music-making embraces all the contradictions (composed/improvised, tonal/atonal, maximal/minimal...) in a serene dialectical encounter. His more than 200 works feature taped/sampled natural sounds, piano, synthesizers, computers, violin, percussion, shofar, ship horns, accordion and chorus. Whether in the intimate form of his well-known solo performances, or pure chamber music, experimental radio works or large-scale site-specific sound environments and installations, all forge a very personal language from all the languages through dedicated research and recombinant invention.
With a fortuitous bang, he begins his musical journey (1965 in Rome) as co-founder of the radical music collective MUSICA ELETTRONICA VIVA, as a solo performer, and as a composer for Rome's avantgarde theater scene. In the 70's, he creates a poetic series of solo works for synthesizer, voice, taped sounds and found objects. Seeking to develop new musical spaces, and now considered one of the leading figures in making music outside of the concert halls -- he develops a series of concerts for lakes, ports, parks, buildings, quarries and caves -- his natural laboratories. In the 1980's, he extends the ideas of musical geography by creating simultaneous radio concerts for three, then six large ensembles performing together from many European Capitals. By connecting digital samplers to MIDI Grands (Diskklavier) and computers, since 1987, he produces an enriched body of solo performance works -- an ideal synthesis between the concert hall and all sounding phenomena in the world. He creates a visually striking series of sound installations, some of them in collaboration with visual artists including Paul Klerr, Melissa Gould, Kristin Jones, Pietro Fortuna, Umberto Bignardi, Uli Sigg. Throughout these years he continues to write numerous pieces for radio and for acoustic instruments.
From 1975-80 taught vocal improvisation at the Accademia Nazionale d'Arte Drammatica (Rome) and from 1991 to 2006 was the Milhaud Professor of Composition at Mills College in Oakland, California. Currently teaching privately in Rome in addition to master classes, residencies, and lectures at Oberlin, Peabody, Brown, Berkeley, The Hague, Haifa, Harvard, Beijing, Bolzano, Mainz, Northwestern, Yale, etc.
Since 1986, Walter Prati has combined composition with performance on electronic instruments. His work centres on the interaction between traditional instruments and electronics, using a variety of live-processing techniques.
In an early collaboration with the Centro di Sonologia Computazionale in Padua, he used the 4i system for real-time synthesis and sound processing to create Aquam flare in media labia tua, for trombone and live electronics, premiered by Giancarlo Schiaffini, and Approximate Combinations of Indefinite Time, for soprano saxophone, trombone and live electronics, performed by Evan Parker and Schiaffini.
During the 1990s he worked with the IRIS research centre, part of Farfisa–Bontempi and directed by Giuseppe Di Giugno, composing works for its MARS workstation. L’isola in un’oasi, for flute and electronics, was performed at Milan’s Teatro Studio by Anna Maria Morini. His collaboration with saxophonist Evan Parker led to the Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, an improvising group using electronics that toured extensively and recorded for ECM.
As an electronic performer, Prati has collaborated with composers including Ivan Fedele, Sandro Gorli, Ludovico Einaudi, Paolo Aralla and Giorgio Magnanensi. With Bruno Canino and Antonio Ballista, he prepared a version of Stockhausen’s Mantra in which the original analogue electronics were reconstructed digitally, performing it at festivals in Milan, Rome, Turin, Naples and Bolzano. He taught electronic-music courses at the Accademia Chigiana in 1995 and 1996.
From 2000 to 2010, his activity included further Electro-Acoustic Ensemble tours and works such as Lumen 3, with texts by Giuliano Corti, a multisensory work performed in complete darkness in European theatres; Gli Angeli sopra Duino, based on Rilke’s Duino Elegies in Corti’s translation and commissioned by the MiTo Festival; and the multimedia performance Sound, Architecture, Image, created for the 150th anniversary of the Politecnico di Milano and presented at its Bovisa campus.
His collaborations with Robert Wyatt include three remixed versions of The Duchess on Postcards from Italy. With Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore, he recorded The Promise and performed concerts in Italy. His Da Vinci recordings include an electronic interpretation of Stockhausen’s Tierkreis with Ricciarda Belgiojoso and Community Garden with composer and artist Alvin Curran. His teaching career has included electroacoustic composition at the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi in Como.
Alvin Curran: Democratic, irreverent and traditionally experimental, Curran travels in a computerized covered wagon between the Golden Gate and the Tiber River, and makes music for every occasion with any sounding phenomena -- a volatile mix of lyricism and chaos, structure and indeterminacy, fog horns, fiddles and fiddle heads. He is dedicated to the restoration of dignity to the profession of making non-commercial music as part of a personal search for future social, political and spiritual forms.
Curran's music-making embraces all the contradictions (composed/improvised, tonal/atonal, maximal/minimal...) in a serene dialectical encounter. His more than 200 works feature taped/sampled natural sounds, piano, synthesizers, computers, violin, percussion, shofar, ship horns, accordion and chorus. Whether in the intimate form of his well-known solo performances, or pure chamber music, experimental radio works or large-scale site-specific sound environments and installations, all forge a very personal language from all the languages through dedicated research and recombinant invention.
With a fortuitous bang, he begins his musical journey (1965 in Rome) as co-founder of the radical music collective MUSICA ELETTRONICA VIVA, as a solo performer, and as a composer for Rome's avantgarde theater scene. In the 70's, he creates a poetic series of solo works for synthesizer, voice, taped sounds and found objects. Seeking to develop new musical spaces, and now considered one of the leading figures in making music outside of the concert halls -- he develops a series of concerts for lakes, ports, parks, buildings, quarries and caves -- his natural laboratories. In the 1980's, he extends the ideas of musical geography by creating simultaneous radio concerts for three, then six large ensembles performing together from many European Capitals. By connecting digital samplers to MIDI Grands (Diskklavier) and computers, since 1987, he produces an enriched body of solo performance works -- an ideal synthesis between the concert hall and all sounding phenomena in the world. He creates a visually striking series of sound installations, some of them in collaboration with visual artists including Paul Klerr, Melissa Gould, Kristin Jones, Pietro Fortuna, Umberto Bignardi, Uli Sigg. Throughout these years he continues to write numerous pieces for radio and for acoustic instruments.
From 1975-80 taught vocal improvisation at the Accademia Nazionale d'Arte Drammatica (Rome) and from 1991 to 2006 was the Milhaud Professor of Composition at Mills College in Oakland, California. Currently teaching privately in Rome in addition to master classes, residencies, and lectures at Oberlin, Peabody, Brown, Berkeley, The Hague, Haifa, Harvard, Beijing, Bolzano, Mainz, Northwestern, Yale, etc.
Born December 13, 1938, Providence, Rhode Island. From five years: piano lessons, trombone, marching bands, Synagogue chants, Jazz, and his father's dance bands. Becomes an artist at age 13 in an apple tree at the house of his lifelong friend, poet Clark Coolidge. Hears Spike Jones, the Rhode Island Philharmonic, Satchmo, The Boston Symphony Orcherstra, Art Tatum, Charlie Parker, The Band of America, Thelonius Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Miles Davis, Coltrane, Bartok and Christian Wolff.
Studies composition with Ron Nelson (B.A. Brown University 1960) and with Elliott Carter and Mel Powell ( M.Mus., Yale School of Music 1963). During summer vacations, plays European crossings with the "Brunotes" on the Holland American Line, in a Greek Dance Band in the Catskills, and in the Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas. In the MUSICA ELETTRONICA VIVA years (1966 -1971 in Rome), performs in over 200 concerts in Europe and the USA with Teitelbaum and Rzewski, Carol Plantamura, Ivan Vandor, Alan Bryant and Jon Phetteplace; and makes significant artistic encounters with Giuseppe Chiari, Edith Schloss, AMM, Cornelius Cardew, Steve Lacy, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Steve ben Israel, Anthony Braxton, Simone Forti, Steve Reich, Joan La Barbara, Michael Nyman, La Monte Young, Trisha Brown, Robert Ashley, David Behrman, Gordon Mumma, Alvin Lucier, Larry Austin, Bill Smith, Paul Ketoff, Robert Moog, Nuova Consonanza, MEV2, Meme Perlini, Mario Ricci, Maria Monti, Prima Materia, Ron Bunzl, Phil Glass, Charlemagne Palestine, Terry Riley, George Lewis, Evan Parker, Gregory Reeves, Serge Tcherepnin, Kosugi, Pulsa, Maryanne Amacher, John Cage, David Tudor, Morton Feldman. Scelsi becomes his friend and mentor.
Walter Prati
Since 1986 he has combined his career as a composer with that of an electronic performer. As a composer he mainly works on the interaction between traditional musical instruments and electronic instruments using different live electronic techniques. In this phase he collaborates with the Computation Sonology Center of Padua using the system for synthesis and treatment in real time 4i with which he creates two musical works: "Aquam flare in media labia tua" for trombone and live electronics (Giancarlo Schiaffini like perforare of the first performance) and “Approximate combinations of indefinite time” for soprano saxophone, trombone and live electronics (Evan Parker soprano sax and G. Schiaffini trombone.
In the 90s he collaborated with the IRIS research center (Farfisa department - Bontempi) directed by Giuseppe Di Giugno composing some works with the MARS workstation designed by Di Giugno and built in IRIS. L'isola in un'oasi for flute and electronics is performed in Milan at the Teatro Studio with Anna Maria Morini on flute. Also in the 90s, started a very important collaboration with saxophonist Evan Parker together they were the animators of the ElectroAcoustic Ensemble, an improvisation ensemble with electronics with which he made several tours and recorded several CDs for the prestigious German label ECM. At the same time he collaborates with electronic performer with composers such as Ivan Fedele, Sandro Gorli, Ludovico Einaudi, Paolo Aralla, Giorgio Magnanensi. Together Bruno Canino and Antonio Ballista set up a version of Mantra by K. Stockhausen by reconstructing the original analogue electronics with digital instruments. With Mantra they are present in important festivals in the most important Italian cities, Milan, Rome, Turin, Naples, Bolzano. He holds courses in Electronic Music at the Chigiana Academy in 1995 and 1996.
In the years 2000-2010 he increased his activity through numerous tours with the ElectroAcoustic Ensemble, with the production of some works such as Lumen 3 with the texts of Giuliano Corti (multisensory work realized in complete absence of light and represented in numerous European theaters) , Gli Angeli sopra Duino, from Rilke's Udinesi Elegies (translation by G. Corti) commissioned by the MiTo Festival and a multimedia performance "Sound, Architecture, Image" created for the 150th anniversary of the Polytechnic Foundation of Milan at the Bovisa Campus (Milan). Significant collaborations with the English musician Robert Wyatt for whom he made 3 remixed versions of The Duckess on the Postcards from Italy CD and with the guitarist Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth with whom he made the CD The Promise and a series of concerts in Italy . He recently recorded for the DaVinci label, together with Ricciarda Belgiojoso, a new electronic version of K. Stockhausen's Tierkreis and Community Garden with the composer and artist Alvin Curran. Currently lecturer in electroacoustic muscal composition at the G. Verdi Conservatory in Como.
This Da Vinci Classics album stems from a friendship and a cooperation. Its protagonists are two musicians, Walter Prati and Alvin Curran, each contributing his own experience, musical principles, creativity and openness to artistic encounters. Walter Prati’s musical background is as unusual as it is fascinating. He describes it as a “mix of non-academic provenances and academic experiences”. His first approaches to music performance date back to his early teens, when he began playing the bass in a rock band with his fellow students at secondary school. (Half-jokingly, he reveals…
This Da Vinci Classics album stems from a friendship and a cooperation. Its protagonists are two musicians, Walter Prati and Alvin Curran, each contributing his own experience, musical principles, creativity and openness to artistic encounters.
Walter Prati’s musical background is as unusual as it is fascinating. He describes it as a “mix of non-academic provenances and academic experiences”. His first approaches to music performance date back to his early teens, when he began playing the bass in a rock band with his fellow students at secondary school. (Half-jokingly, he reveals that his choice of the bass guitar was not entirely deliberate: a bassist was needed, and, moreover, the bass had fewer strings than the guitar, so… it was probably easier to play!). Later, and almost by chance, he had his Damascus moment when listening to a work by György Ligeti. From that point on, his musical itinerary was at the crossroads of diverse musical worlds: from psychedelic rock to Ligeti, from Jimi Hendrix to the free jazz of the Sixties, which he learnt to appreciate some years later. “There was a melting pot of many musical interests, and I transferred this experience into the extemporaneous playing style I had in those years”.
At the same time, Prati befriended young musicians who were attending the Milan Conservatoire and the contexts of academic music. Little by little, he entered that world himself: he began to play the double-bass, then applied to the Conservatory course of electronic music (in 1978, with Paccagnini), and finally followed courses of composition under the guidance of Irlando Danieli.
While learning the different languages and technique of musical composition, Prati tried his hand at electronic music in combination with the world of “radical improvisation”, with which he always remained in close contact.
In the Eighties, Prati found his voice as a composer, building his musical identity both technically and esthetically. The value of his creations was acknowledged by many, and he won several competitions with his compositions of electronic music. Since then, he always tried to stay at the threshold between the two worlds of “composed” (i.e. written) music and improvisation. Whereas these two worlds are considered as antithetic by many, for Prati they equally contribute to his musical profile. This approach corresponded to his deep artistic aspirations, but led to frequent misunderstandings and misapprehensions in the musical establishment. “I always found it difficult to find opportunities for musical encounters here in Italy. In the composers’ eyes I was an improviser, and a composer for the improvisers. I had always to seek and find the borderlands of composition and improvisation. As the years went by, these borderlands became increasingly narrow, and presently they are really limited”.
In the Nineties, Prati resumed his collaboration with Evan Parker, with whom he had followed a seminary during his student days, and for whom he had created his first important composition. Prati participated to Parker’s ensemble since its inception, in 1992; together, they realized concerts, tours and recordings for ECM. “It was not just an important recognition for our work, but rather a test for it. To record our music meant that it was worth transmitting to future generations”, as Prati explains.
In the subsequent years, Prati continued cooperating with many musicians, always trying to create “clashes or layers”, as he puts it, between composed and improvised music.
This interaction was fostered and facilitated by the use of electronic music: “It broadens the horizon because it permits many operations”, as Prati affirms. For example, non-electronic instruments may be played in an improvisation, while electronic instruments may be used in a more precise and defined fashion, or vice-versa. This experience may encompass that of an absolute freedom, as happens when no previous agreement is established among the musicians. “In those cases”, as Prati puts it, “all happens at the moment when the other is perceived with his music”. These experiences proved to be very fecund also from the pedagogical viewpoint. Prati teaches Electroacoustic Musical Composition at the Conservatory of Como, and gives seminars about the techniques of musical improvisation. The encounter of written and improvised music is a formidable resource in the educational field. “This kind of improvisation is not grounded on aesthetical rules, as for example in the case of jazz improvisation. In that or in similar cases, improvisation happens within the framework of established aesthetical principles, and one needs to master a specific musical attitude. Here, what matters is to be familiar with the musical attitudes of the various musical worlds; to be able, in other words, to identify the intervals or musical gestures which are typical for a particular style. Although this can be just a superficial image of a specific repertoire, it leads the listener to a particular musical world”. Eclecticism, or the capability of freeing oneself from the constraints of labels and classifications, is what characterizes also the aesthetics of Alvin Curran, the other musician represented in this recorded. As he writes of himself, his experience of music encompasses many seemingly contradictory realities. Similar to Prati, he appreciates the possibility of crossing the boundary between composition and improvisation, and enjoys the attempt to reconcile tonality with atonality. His large compositional output includes works for classical instruments (such as the piano or the violin), others for instruments at the crossroads between “cultivated” and folk/ethnic music (such as the accordion or the shofar), and others with taped and sampled natural sounds, synthesizers and computers. Among his foundational experiences was one in a “radical music collective” based in Rome, in the mid-Sixties. “Musica elettronica viva” – this was the ensemble’s name – was an attempt to explore the various dimensions of sound and of the human and artistic relationships it enabled and favoured. His various fields of activity include numerous audio/visual installations, in cooperation with visual artists, as well as a core interest in pedagogy and education.
In Prati’s words, Curran’s role in today’s musical scene is fundamental: “He has been and still is not only a witness, but rather a protagonist and an actor throughout several decades of important musical experiences. He has powerful ideas; ideas resulting from his long reflections. He is the torch-bearer of an attitude to improvisation with which I’m fully in agreement”.
The two musicians’ friendship began many years ago. “We always said that we had to make something together, but it never materialized”. In 2019, however, Curran had planned to stay in Milan for a while, and the opportunity came for scheduling a joint recording session. The principle behind it was to create an improvisation “led” by the instruments. The two musicians established which instruments were to be used: the sound medium thus became the stimulus for artistic creation. “The instruments paved the way for us”, says Prati, “through their sounds, technique and performance practice”.
Such an improvisation can only take place when the musicians practise an extreme form of concentrated listening. “When musicians encounter each other, they listen and consequently change their performance style. Whenever I met and performed with other musicians, the final result was always something different from what I could have done in my routine creations”. After the recording sessions, the musicians had produced five recorded tracks; four of them are included in this album, and each represents “a different world”, in Prati’s words. For example, the third track is entirely made of electronic sounds, and this feature is atypical for both musicians. Their encounter, therefore, resembles the “community garden” evoked in the title of this album. The idea for the title is Curran’s, and, for Prati, “it mirrors the reality of our encounter and of what is heard”. The CD cover displays a picture taken by Prati himself, and portraying a composition of seeds and weeds, such as are typical for community gardens. “It is the confluence of various aromas, flavours, spices and kinds of music. As happens with all musical works whose style goes beyond the usual ones, openness is required of the listener, whose perception is stimulated. It is important to be attentive to every detail, and to welcome unusual experiences. Music is for all, but not all are for music… It is the individual’s choice”.
The organic image of the garden and of the vegetables is also a reminder that electronic music possesses an ecology of its own. This music germinates from the human relationship between two artists, and it employs the digital media “as instruments”, not as ends in themselves. They are in the service of the artists’ inspiration and of their musical dialogue; they are similar to the gardener’s tools, whose end is to serve the growth and flourishing of a luxuriant garden.
Album Notes by Chiara Bertoglio
Selected awards, reviews and interviews. Radio broadcasts and podcasts are listed separately below.
Kathodik
Bertinetto gives the album 6/10. He finds parts of the improvisation familiar and over-elaborate, and one track overextended. He responds more favourably to the experimental textures of Major Basil Thim and to the music’s pleasant, occasionally ironic atmosphere.
Read the review ↗ - KathodikMusicaelettronica.it
Curran and Prati discuss Community Garden in a video interview connected with their Tempo Reale appearance. This is a conversation about the project, rather than a review of the recording.
Read the interview ↗ - Musicaelettronica.itRolling Stone Italia
Barro discusses the Community Garden project and Curran and Prati’s performance at the Il Pianeta festival in Milan, highlighting reciprocal listening and collaborative improvisation. The article concerns the live project rather than a separate assessment of the CD.
Explore the coverage ↗ - Rolling Stone Italia![Prati, Trovalusci: Soffio Elettrico [Electric Breath]](https://i0.wp.com/davinci-edition.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/743-New-Booklet-8-Pages.jpg?fit=768%2C799&ssl=1)
Same artist
Same artist
Same artist
Related instrumentation
