Fast Speaking Music

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Fast Speaking Music is a label founded by poet Anne Waldman and Ambrose Bye, in New York City. Releases by Fast Speaking Music have prominently featured jazz, the literary, and performance art. Its recordings have been made featuring poets, musicians, and interdisciplinary artists such as Anne Waldman, Amiri Baraka, Clark Coolidge, Meredith Monk, Akilah Oliver, Thurston Moore, Thomas Sayers Ellis, and many others. Variously associated with contemporary poetry, Conceptual Poetics and Conceptual Art, the Beat Generation, New York School, Black Arts Movement, New American Poetry, Nuyorican Poetry, Abstraction, Dematerialized Art, rock & roll, jazz, and experimental music and cinema, artists in the Fast Speaking Music catalog have roots that stretch across a broad spectrum of disciplines and art practices ranging from letters to music, dance, film and visual arts. Musicians featured on the label include Daniel Carter, Ha-Yang Kim, Devin Brahja Waldman, Max Davies, and Thurston Moore.

Anne Waldman American poet

Anne Waldman is an American poet. Since the 1960s, Waldman has been an active member of the Outrider experimental poetry community as a writer, performer, collaborator, professor, editor, scholar, and cultural/political activist. She has also been connected to the Beat poets.

Amiri Baraka African-American writer

Amiri Baraka, previously known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka, was an American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays and music criticism. He was the author of numerous books of poetry and taught at several universities, including the State University of New York at Buffalo and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award, in 2008 for Tales of the Out and the Gone.

Clark Coolidge is an American poet.

Contents

Fast Speaking Music covers have featured the artwork of George Schneeman, and Patti Smith. Mariana Luna directed a video for the release of Jaguar Harmonics, and provided artwork for the album cover. [1] Jaguar Harmonics became a live performance including participation of Kiki Smith, and postmodern dancer and choreographer Douglas Dunn.

George Schneeman was an American painter who lived in Tuscany, Italy, and New York City.

Patti Smith American singer-songwriter, poet and visual artist

Patricia Lee Smith is an American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and poet who became an influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses.

Kiki Smith German-born American artist

Kiki Smith is a West German-born American artist whose work has addressed the themes of sex, birth and regeneration. Her figurative work of the late 1980s and early 1990s confronted subjects such as AIDS and gender, while recent works have depicted the human condition in relationship to nature. Smith lives and works in the Lower East Side neighborhood of New York City and in the Hudson Valley in New York State.

Harry's House

Performed Texts published by Fast Speaking Music have often been recorded on campus at Harry Smith Studio, Naropa University. "Harry Smith (1923 – 1991) — archivist, scholar, anthologist (Anthology of American Folk Music, 1952), filmmaker, and cosmologist by way of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics inhabited a cottage on the campus of Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado from 1988 – 1991. It is now the university’s recording studio." [2]

Harry Everett Smith American archivist

Harry Everett Smith was a visual artist, experimental filmmaker, record collector, bohemian, mystic, and largely self-taught student of anthropology. Smith was an important figure in the Beat Generation scene in New York City, and his activities, such as his use of mind-altering substances and interest in esoteric spirituality, anticipated aspects of the Hippie movement. Besides his films, most notably his full length cutout animated film Heaven and Earth Magic (1962), Smith is also widely known for his influential Anthology of American Folk Music, drawn from his extensive collection of out-of-print commercial 78 rpm recordings.

Naropa University University in Boulder Colorado

Naropa University is an American private liberal arts university in Boulder, Colorado. Founded in 1974 by Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa, it is named for the 11th-century Indian Buddhist sage Naropa, an abbot of Nalanda. The university describes itself as Buddhist-inspired, ecumenical, and nonsectarian rather than Buddhist. Naropa promotes non-traditional activities like meditation to supplement traditional learning approaches.

In the 1980s, Smith was invited by his friend Allen Ginsberg to teach shamanism at Naropa. Several Fast Speaking Music releases directly reference Smith — Harry's House Archive, Harry's House, Vol. 1, Harry's House, Vol. 2, and Harry's House, Vol. 3 include performed texts, music and poetry by Amiri Baraka, Anne Waldman, Thurston Moore, Rachel Levitsky, Kenneth Goldsmith, Jerome Rothenberg, Bob Holman, Joanne Kyger, Fred Moten, Eleni Sikelianos, Edwin Torres, Cecilia Vicuña, Eileen Myles, Laird Hunt, Margaret Randall, Reed Bye, Anne Tardos, Akilah Oliver, Stacy Szymaszek, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and others.

Allen Ginsberg American poet and philosopher

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet, philosopher, and writer. As a Columbia College student in the 1940s, he began close friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions.

Thurston Moore American guitarist

Thurston Joseph Moore is an American musician best known as a member of Sonic Youth. He has also participated in many solo and group collaborations outside Sonic Youth, as well as running the Ecstatic Peace! record label. Moore was ranked 34th in Rolling Stone's 2004 edition of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time." In May 2012, Spin published a staff-selected list of the top 100 rock guitarists, and ranked Moore and his Sonic Youth bandmate Lee Ranaldo together at number 1.

Rachel Levitsky is a feminist avant-garde poet, novelist, essayist, translator, editor, educator, and a founder of Belladonna* Collaborative. She was born in New York City and earned an MFA from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Her first poems were published in Clamour, a magazine edited by Renee Gladman in San Francisco during the late 1990s. Levitsky has since written three books, nine chapbooks, and been translated into five languages.

Performing Texts

Material released via Fast Speaking Music engages intellectually and creatively rigorous acts of "performing texts". The University of Richmond has invited Fast Speaking Music founder Anne Waldman to lecture and perform in Performing Texts, "a special series sponsored by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities that focuses not only on the way in which authors perform their texts, but also on the way in which texts themselves perform," held at the University of Richmond. [3] [4] Fast Speaking Music/Anne Waldman has also lectured and "performed texts" as subject of a symposium at the University of Paris (Université Paris Est), [5] taught in Morocco, [6] and will be keynote speaker during the European Beat Studies Network's 4th annual conference in Brussels, Belgium. [7]

University of Richmond University in Richmond, VA

The University of Richmond is a private liberal arts university in Richmond, Virginia. The university is a primarily undergraduate, residential university with approximately 4,350 undergraduate and graduate students in five schools: the School of Arts and Sciences, the E. Claiborne Robins School of Business, the Jepson School of Leadership Studies, the University of Richmond School of Law and the School of Professional & Continuing Studies.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency of the U.S. government, established by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965, dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. The NEH is housed at 400 7th St SW, Washington, D.C. From 1979 to 2014, NEH was at 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. in the Nancy Hanks Center at the Old Post Office.

The European Beat Studies Network (EBSN) and association (EBSN,e.V.,) is a charitable organisation and network founded in 2010 by scholars Polina Mackay and Professor Oliver Harris. It comprises an international community of scholars and students, writers and artists with an interest in the broad field of Beat culture and the writers and artists associated with the Beat Generation. It holds annual conferences and promotes research and collaboration in the field of Beat Studies and the arts. It is particularly transnational in focus, as Dr. Chad Weidner writes: 'The impetus of the European Beat Studies Network (EBSN) provides an additional forum for transnational angles into the Beats.'

Archive

Fast Speaking Music functions as an imprint and archival repository for works of musical, literary, and pedagogical value. It is at once a poetic document-producing entity, performing institution and pedagogical archive whose creators hold educational programs in the United States and internationally (notably within Naropa University's faculty [8] ).

Fast Speaking Music releases are collaborative documents between poets, musicians, artists, activists, historians, and visiting and permanent faculty of the internationally renowned Summer Writing Program (SWP) at Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (JKS). The school, named after Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac, was co-founded by his friend, Beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg, and Fast Speaking Music co-founder Anne Waldman. "Archive, Pedagogy, and Performance" activities undertaken at Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School (JKS), and documented within the Fast Speaking Music imprint have been celebrated, for example, by the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY, in New York City. [9] The Jack Kerouac School's Summer Writing Program (SWP) is part of the curriculum of Naropa University's MFA Writing and Poetics program. Fast Speaking Music performs, records, and releases documents of collaborations and work of students, faculty, and visiting artists [10] such as poet and musician Thurston Moore, [11] [12] poet and musician Clark Coolidge, [13] avant-garde composer and choreographer Meredith Monk, Black Arts Movement founder and legendary music historian Amiri Baraka (former New Jersey Poet Laureate), [14] Reed Bye, [15] [16] performance artist Lydia Lunch, LaTasha Diggs, Thomas Sayers Ellis, and Fast Speaking Music founders Ambrose Bye and Anne Waldman.

Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and Fast Speaking Music co-founder, creator, professor, poet, and scholar Anne Waldman has published over 40 books and is Distinguished Professor of Poetics and Director of the MFA Writing and Poetics Program and Summer Writing Program at Naropa University, as noted by various readily available sources, such as the register of Waldman's papers, held in the University of Michigan's Special Collections Library, [17] and the Academy of American Poets where she was elected Chancellor in 2011. [18]

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References

  1. ↑ "Jaguar Harmonics: Person Woven of Tesserae". The Post-Apollo Press. Retrieved 2015-11-17.
  2. ↑ "Harry's House, Volume 2". Anne Waldman. 2014-01-07. Retrieved 2015-11-17.
  3. ↑ "Performing Texts Anne Waldman". Wn.com. Retrieved 2015-11-17.
  4. ↑ "Calendar - University of Richmond". Calendar.richmond.edu. 2015-09-10. Retrieved 2015-11-17.
  5. ↑ "Poets & Critics @ Paris Est - 7 - 8: Anne Waldman Symposium at Université Paris Est Créteil, May 12-13". Poetscriticsparisest.blogspot.com. 2014-04-08. Retrieved 2015-11-17.
  6. ↑ "Fast Speaking Music". Lecoledelitterature.org. Retrieved 2015-11-17.
  7. ↑ "Biographies of Keynote Speakers | European Beat Studies Network". Ebsn.eu. Retrieved 2015-11-17.
  8. ↑ "41st Annual Summer Writing Program | Naropa University, Boulder, Colorado". Naropa.edu. Retrieved 2015-11-17.
  9. ↑ "Naropa at 40 | The Graduate Center CUNY, The Center for the Humanities". Centerforthehumanities.org. 2014-11-05. Archived from the original on 2015-09-10. Retrieved 2015-11-17.
  10. ↑ "Summer Writing Program 2014 Reading Schedule | Naropa University, Boulder, Colorado". Naropa.edu. Retrieved 2015-11-17.
  11. ↑ Mescher, Daniel (2015-07-09). "Thurston Moore Talks Allen Ginsberg At Boulder's Naropa University". CPR. Retrieved 2015-11-17.
  12. ↑ Jones, Josh (2014-01-22). "Sonic Youth Guitarist Thurston Moore Teaches a Poetry Workshop at Naropa University: See His Class Notes (2011)". Open Culture. Retrieved 2015-11-17.
  13. ↑ Deneson, Amy (2011-11-02). "THIS TIME WE ARE EVERYTHING Reflections On Clark Coolidge". The Brooklyn Rail. Retrieved 2015-11-17.
  14. ↑ "Amiri Baraka Polarizing Poet and Playwright Dies at 79". The New York Times . Retrieved 2015-11-17.
  15. ↑ Ariella Ruth (2015-05-11). "Reed Bye Retiring from the". Jack Kerouac School. Retrieved 2015-11-17.
  16. ↑ "Reed Bye | Naropa University, Boulder, Colorado". Naropa.edu. Retrieved 2015-11-17.
  17. ↑ "Anne Waldman Papers 1945-2012". Quod.lib.umich.edu. Retrieved 2015-11-17.
  18. ↑ "Anne Waldman | Academy of American Poets". Poets.org. 1945-04-02. Retrieved 2015-11-17.
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