ROME.- Musician and composer Alvin Curran (Providence, Rhode Island, 1938) traces more than fifty years of musical research and collaborations, while also recounting his relationship with the city of Rome where he has lived and worked since 1965.
Through a new sound work—a mixtape comprising of fragments from several pieces and recordings—Curran leads the audience on an autobiographical listening journey from his early career, which began in the late-1950s, to his most recent work. From free improvisation to Fluxus, from compositions for boat horns to music for orchestra and piano, to artificial intelligence and the pieces composed for Maria Monti and Memè Perlini, Hear Alvin Here offers an overview which allows us to trace, in filigree, some of the central nodes of experimental and research music from the second half of the 20th-century onwards.
Through this new sound piece Curran looks back at his own work, freely mixing different styles, eras, and languages, as if tuning the frequency from time to time to a different fragment of his production, playing with the infinite possible combinations offered by his repertoire of compositions and sounds. In the world he evokes, everything seems to be able to coexist: from popular music to the most sophisticated and free experimentation, often punctuated by the continuous presence of the piano, his instrument of choice since early childhood.
After his musical training in the United States, the relocation to Rome represents a pivotal moment in Curran’s life, giving rise to a series of encounters and collaborations which marked the evolution of his production. Here, in the spring of '66, together with Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum, he founded Musica Elettronica Viva, an experimental collective devoted to acoustic and electronic improvisation. In Rome, he also assiduously took part in the scenes surrounding the Attico Gallery, the Beat '72 theatre, and later on Radio Arte Mobile. From the mid-1970s, Curran began his work as a solo performer. This was an incredibly prolific period that led to the production of a number of seminal works including: Canti E Vedute Del Giardino Magnetico (1973), Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri (1974), Canti Illuminati (1975) and The Works (1980)—all performed for the first time in Rome's avant-garde theatres. In the following decades Curran worked tirelessly as a composer, performer, teacher, improviser, and sound artist, making use of the most diverse types of sound sources, such as traditional instruments, electronically generated sounds, and environmental recordings. Over the years his projects became increasingly diverse and came to include solo compositions, music for dance and theater, chamber and orchestra music, radio pieces, musical choreographic works, and environmental installations. In addition, the desire to take music outside of institutional spaces designated for listening became central to his work.
Throughout his practice the composer has been 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”.
In 2015, he published The Alvin Curran Fakebook, a book where he recounts his experiences in the form of fragments, instructions, graphic and musical scores: an autobiographical journey through musical thought and practice inside and outside the system. In 2022, artist Éric Baudelaire directed three films that combine first-person accounts of Curran's life with details of the radical political mobilizations that occurred in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s.
With an irreverent and “traditionally experimental” approach, Curran has tested new forms of composition, performance, and unprecedented interactions with audiences, whilst collaborating with artists of all disciplines and playing in unconventional venues. Hear Alvin Here is thus a tribute to his long career as an often elusive but central figure within the history of music as well as contemporary culture at large.
The exhibition is promoted by Assessorato alla Cultura di Roma Capitale and Azienda Speciale Palaexpo.
Alvin Curran (Providence, Rhode Island, 1938) has lived and worked in Rome since 1965.
He studied with Ron Nelson, Elliott Carter, and Mel Powell. In 1966 with Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum he co-founded the collective Musica Elettronica Viva. Curran has taught at Rome’s National Academy of Theater Arts (1975–1980), Mills College (1991–2006), and the Mainz Hochschule für Musik (2011), among others. He has published extensively on music, his own music, and that of other artists; he has staged thousands of live performances, and his discography includes more than thirty solo and sixty collaborative recordings; his sound art works have been exhibited in various international institutions. A book about his work, Alvin Curran: Live in Roma, was edited by Daniela Tortora (Die Schachtel, 2010), and The Alvin Curran Fakebook, an illustrated compendium of notated pieces was published in 2015.
