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Performance: BEAMS

Alvin Curran

Performance: BEAMS

Alvin Curran

Information

Information

On the opening evening of When There Is No More Music to Write – a two-person exhibition by Eric Baudelaire and Alvin Curran – Spike Island hosts BEAMS, a special live performance by avant-garde composer Curran with a group of local artists and musicians.

The performance is based on a structured improvisation of singing, shouting and activating a set of “found” musical instruments, all gathered according to a broad definition of what an instrument can be. It follows a series of closed workshops between Curran and the participants earlier in the week.

Watch a video of Alvin Curran's performance BEAMS at Spike Island

ALVIN CURRAN

Alvin Curran (b. 1938, Providence, Rhode Island, based in Rome, Italy) has realised a long and fruitful career as a composer, performer, installation artist, writer, and teacher in the American experimental music tradition. He studied with Ron Nelson, Elliott Carter and Mel Powell, and co-founded the group Musica Elettronica Viva in 1966 in Rome. He has taught at Rome’s National Academy of Theater Arts; Mills College, Oakland and the Mainz Hochschule für Musik, Frankfurt am Main. Recent projects include: Concerto for Bathtub and Orchestra (2017); the disintegrating installation Pian de Pian Piano (2017); Maritime Rites Rome (2018), for musicians on rowboats; and A Banda Larga, a street symphony (2018). He has performed at the Teatro Colón (2017); Big Ears Festival (2017); The New York Armory (2018), and collaborated with poet Clark Coolidge (Other Minds Festival, 2018), pianist Ciro Longobardi, and stage director Achim Freyer (on Der Goldene Topf, 2019). He has published articles in the New York Times, Musiktexte, The Contemporary Music Review, amongst others, and released more than thirty solo and sixty collaborative recordings. A book about his work, Alvin Curran: Live in Roma (2011), was edited by Daniela Tortora, and in 2015 Curran published the alvin curran fakebook, an illustrated compendium of more than two hundred (mostly) notated pieces. In 1975 he won the Logos Award, in 1995 the Leonardo Award for Excellence, and in 2004 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is currently a consultant for the American Academy in Rome.