Musician and composer Alvin Curran (Windfall, Rhode Island, 1938) traces greater than fifty years of musical analysis and collaborations, whereas additionally recounting his relationship with the town of Rome the place he has lived and labored since 1965.

By means of a brand new sound work—a mixtape comprising of fragments from a number of items and recordings—Curran leads the viewers on an autobiographical listening journey from his early profession, which started within the late-Nineteen Fifties, to his most up-to-date work. From free improvisation to Fluxus, from compositions for boat horns to music for orchestra and piano, to synthetic intelligence and the items composed for Maria Monti and Memè Perlini, “Hear Alvin Right here” provides an outline which permits us to hint, in filigree, among the central nodes of experimental and analysis music from the second half of the Twentieth-century onwards.

By means of this new sound piece Curran seems to be again at his personal work, freely mixing totally different types, eras, and languages, as if tuning the frequency every now and then to a special fragment of his manufacturing, enjoying with the infinite doable combos supplied by his repertoire of compositions and sounds. On this planet he evokes, every little thing appears to have the ability to coexist: from common music to probably the most subtle and free experimentation, usually punctuated by the continual presence of the piano, his instrument of alternative since early childhood.

After his musical coaching in america, the relocation to Rome represents a pivotal second in Curran’s life, giving rise to a sequence of encounters and collaborations which marked the evolution of his manufacturing. Right here, within the spring of ’66, along with Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum, he based Musica Elettronica Viva, an experimental collective dedicated to acoustic and digital improvisation. In Rome, he additionally assiduously took half within the scenes surrounding the Attico Gallery, the Beat ’72 theatre, and afterward Radio Arte Cell. From the mid-Seventies, Curran started his work as a solo performer. This was an extremely prolific interval that led to the manufacturing of numerous seminal works together with: Canti E Vedute Del Giardino Magnetico (1973), Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri (1974), Canti Illuminati (1975) and The Works (1980)—all carried out for the primary time in Rome’s avant-garde theatres. Within the following many years Curran labored tirelessly as a composer, performer, instructor, improviser, and sound artist, making use of probably the most various forms of sound sources, resembling conventional devices, electronically generated sounds, and environmental recordings. Over time his initiatives turned more and more various and got here to incorporate solo compositions, music for dance and theater, chamber and orchestra music, radio items, musical choreographic works, and environmental installations. As well as, the need to take music exterior of institutional areas designated for listening turned central to his work.
All through his follow the composer has been devoted to “the restoration of dignity to the occupation of creating non-commercial music as a part of a private seek for future social, political and non secular types.”

In 2015, he printed The Alvin Curran Fakebook, a e-book the place he recounts his experiences within the type of fragments, directions, graphic and musical scores: an autobiographical journey via musical thought and follow inside and out of doors the system. In 2022, artist Éric Baudelaire directed three movies that mix first-person accounts of Curran’s life with particulars of the unconventional political mobilizations that occurred in Italy throughout the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies.

With an irreverent and “historically experimental” strategy, Curran has examined new types of composition, efficiency, and unprecedented interactions with audiences, while collaborating with artists of all disciplines and enjoying in unconventional venues. “Hear Alvin Right here” is thus a tribute to his lengthy profession as an usually elusive however central determine inside the historical past of music in addition to modern tradition at massive.

at MACRO, Rome
till March 17, 2024