Alvin Curran

Alvin Curran was born in 1938 in Providence, Rhode Island. Curran's oeuvre includes large scale, site-specific sound environments and installations. His music-making embraces all the contradictions (composed/improvised, tonal/atonal, maximal/minimal...) in a serene dialectical encounter. His nearly 100 works feature taped/sampled natural sounds, piano, synthesizers, computers, violin, percussion, shofar, ship horns, accordion and chorus.

In Rome, 1965, Curran co-founded the radical music collective Musica Elettronica Viva, a group which has performed several hundred times in Europe and in the U.S.A. He became well-known for bringing music outside of concert halls and developed concerts for lakes, ports, parks, buildings, quarries and caves. In the eighties, he employed his ideas of musical geography by creating simultaneous radio concerts for three, then six large ensembles performing together.

In 1990, he developed a series of visually striking sound installations in collaboration with Melissa Gould. Since 1991 he has been the Milhaud Professor of composition at the Mills College in Oakland, California.

MARITIME RITES/ WASSERKORSO BERLIN

“This work was commissioned by the City of Berlin in 1987 to conclude their daylong celebrations for the 750th anniversary of the founding of that city. For this occasion I created a 22-minute concert for eleven large ship horns, which were activated by a computer. As these ship horns each had a single tone ranging from about 40 Hz to 310 Hz, I composed a musical score in long and short durations, which was then read by the computer, which activated each horn individually. The eleven horns were placed on the banks of the Tegelsee, one of Berlin's largest lakes and their sounds were audible over a range of approximately 3 kilometers.”