Program #131, January 30 2003: Unthemed.

This evening I'd originally planned to do one of my continuous segue programs -- starting with John Hollenbeck's Drum Major Instinct, for three trombonists improvising over an excellent speech by Martin Luther King, as a belated MLK Day salute and a still-too-useful commentary on current events. But I must have been wrong in thinking the station possesses a copy, and I don't have a copy of my own (note to self: change that fact), so I started my playlist at what would have been the second item, then from there segued by texture into a couple of electronic pieces, as planned.

However, the electronic pieces were really doing it for me during the first part of the evening, and so I just ended up sticking with them through most of the program. Most were drawn from two good recent compilations: OHM- The Early Gurus of Electronic Music 1948-1980, and Anthology of Noise & Electronic Music: First A-Chronology, Vol. 1 (see also here for a joint review of both compilations). I think there are probably several reasons this ended up being a mostly-electronic program with a quasihistorical dimension. One was that these two compilations just have a lot of good stuff, and opening them up was somewhat like getting started on a box of chocolates. I availed myself of the opportunity to bring a lot of new flavors and artists into the Prisms playlist (everything after Messiaen through to Lombardi, except for Pearson and Entropic Advance, was new to the show; and isn’t it cool, by the way, to be able to think of Messiaen as an electronic composer, by virtue of his piece for an ensemble of Ondes Martenot?). It was also fun to loop in several local folks -- the aforementioned R.S. Pearson and Entropic Advance, along with atlatl, whose onkyo-flavored work has probably never been juxtaposed with Hovhaness’ lovely trumpet and organ sonata before. There was also just a tinge of the political content I’d originally had in mind for the program, with Mumma’s reference to the bombing of Dresden in World War II and Survival Research Laboratories’ bizarre art performances involving clashes between machines.

All of these pieces led somewhat naturally to a reprise of Robert Ashley’s Automatic Writing, a disturbing piece I played on my second program. Once it was clear that I’d abandoned my original continuous-segue plan, and noticed that OHM had an excerpt from Ashley’s piece, I thought -- why not? it’s about time to hear it again. So we did. And it was all fun, fun, fun, proving once again that sometimes good shows result from the most incompletely prepared scenarios. Pretty cool, huh?