Loren Rush

Last updated

Loren Rush (born August 23, 1935) is a U.S. composer.

Contents

Biography

His works include the drone piece Hard Music (1970) for three amplified pianos. The piece features no melodic figuration but rather clouds created by only one note, the low D above cello C, repeated quickly enough by each player to be heard as nearly continuous. The surface results from the composite rhythms of percussive attacks and the interplay of partials brought out through the rhythms and fortissimo dynamics. The fifth through the ninth partials are particularly easy to hear and the louder passages feature higher partials. [1]

In 1957, he formed an improvisation group with Terry Riley, Pauline Oliveros, Robert Erickson, and Bill Butler with a focus an aleatoric and improvisational techniques. " [2]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Terry Riley</span> American composer and performing musician (born 1935)

Terrence Mitchell "Terry" Riley is an American composer and performing musician best known as a pioneer of the minimalist school of composition. Influenced by jazz and Indian classical music, his work became notable for its innovative use of repetition, tape music techniques, improvisation, and delay systems. His best known works are the 1964 composition In C and the 1969 album A Rainbow in Curved Air, both considered landmarks of minimalism and important influences on experimental music, rock, and contemporary electronic music. Subsequent works such as Shri Camel (1980) explored just intonation.

Free improvisation or free music is improvised music without any general rules, instead following the intuition of its performers. The term can refer to both a technique—employed by any musician in any genre—and as a recognizable genre of experimental music in its own right.

<i>In C</i> Musical composition

In C is a musical piece composed by Terry Riley in 1964. It consists of series of 53 short melodic fragments that can be repeated at the discretion of the musicians. It is often cited as the first minimalist composition to make a significant impact on the public consciousness and inspire a new movement. The number of performers is unspecified. Riley suggests "a group of about 35 is desired if possible but smaller or larger groups will work".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pauline Oliveros</span> American composer and musician

Pauline Oliveros was an American composer, accordionist and a central figure in the development of post-war experimental and electronic music.

Robert Erickson was an American composer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stuart Dempster</span> American trombonist, scholar, and professor

Stuart Dempster is a trombonist, didjeridu player, improviser, and composer.

In music, a drone is a harmonic or monophonic effect or accompaniment where a note or chord is continuously sounded throughout most or all of a piece. A drone may also be any part of a musical instrument used to produce this effect; an archaic term for this is burden such as a "drone [pipe] of a bagpipe", the pedal point in an organ, or the lowest course of a lute. Α burden is also part of a song that is repeated at the end of each stanza, such as the chorus or refrain.

Lovely Music is an American record label devoted to new American music. Based in New York City, the label was founded in 1978 by Mimi Johnson, an outgrowth of her nonprofit production company Performing Artservices Inc. It is one of the most important and longest running labels focusing exclusively on new music and has released over 100 recordings on LP, CD, and videocassette.

Chris Brown is an American composer, pianist and electronic musician, who creates music for acoustic instruments with interactive electronics, for computer networks, and for improvising ensembles. He was active early in his career as an inventor and builder of electroacoustic instruments; he has also performed widely as an improviser and pianist with groups as "Room" and the "Glenn Spearman Double Trio." In 1986 he co-founded the pioneering computer network music ensemble "The Hub". He is also known for his recorded performances of music by Henry Cowell, Luc Ferrari, and John Zorn. He has received commissions from the Berkeley Symphony, the Rova Saxophone Quartet, the Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio, the Gerbode Foundation, the Phonos Foundation and the Creative Work Fund. His recent music includes the poly-rhythm installation "Talking Drum", the "Inventions" series for computers and interactive performers, and the radio performance "Transmissions" series, with composer Guillermo Galindo.

<i>Church of Anthrax</i> 1971 studio album by John Cale and Terry Riley

Church of Anthrax is a collaborative studio album by musicians John Cale and Terry Riley. It was recorded in the spring of 1969 but only released two years later, in February 1971 by record label CBS. It followed Riley's success with 1969's A Rainbow in Curved Air and Cale's influential work with the Velvet Underground.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">San Francisco Tape Music Center</span> Non-profit organization

The San Francisco Tape Music Center, or SFTMC, was founded in the summer of 1962 by composers Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick as a collaborative, "non profit corporation developed and maintained" by local composers working with tape recorders and other novel compositional technologies, which functioned both as an electronic music studio and concert venue. Composer Pauline Oliveros, artist Tony Martin and technician William Maginnis eventually joined the SFTMC.

Sound Patterns (1961) is a musical piece for a cappella mixed chorus by Pauline Oliveros. Oliveros won the Gaudeamus International Composers Award in 1962 with this work.

<i>A Rainbow in Curved Air</i> 1969 studio album by Terry Riley

A Rainbow in Curved Air is the third album by American composer Terry Riley, released in 1969 on CBS Records. The title track consists of Riley's overdubbed improvisations on several keyboard and percussion instruments, including electric organ, electric harpsichord, dumbec, and tambourine. The B-side "Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band" is a saxophone-based drone piece featuring tape loops and edits, drawing on Riley's all-night improvisatory performances in the 1960s.

Noah Georgeson, is an American musician, record producer, engineer, mixer, and solo recording artist. Georgeson's debut album Find Shelter was released through Plain Recordings on November 28, 2006.

NewMusicBox is an e-zine launched by the American Music Center on May 1, 1999. The magazine includes interviews and articles concerning American contemporary music, composers, improvisers, and musicians.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brenda Hutchinson</span> American classical composer

Brenda Hutchinson is an American composer and sound artist who has developed a body of work based on a perspective about interacting with the public and non-artists through personal, reciprocal engagement with listening and sounding. Hutchinson encourages her participants to experiment with sound, share stories, and make music. She often bases her electroacoustic compositions on recordings of these individual collaborative experiences, creating "sonic portraits" or "aural pictures" of people and situations.

Tony Martin was an American painter and new media artist known for his groundbreaking light art and viewer interactive sculptures and installations, and the paintings associated with those works. His six decade painting career includes expressionistic figural work and abstraction developed from his life and environs.

<i>Terry Riley: Cadenza on the Night Plain</i> 1985 studio album by Kronos Quartet

Terry Riley: Cadenza on the Night Plain is a studio album by the Kronos Quartet, the first album-length recording of a collaboration between the quartet and American composer Terry Riley.

The Bay Area Improv Scene is a commonly used name for a loose association of musicians and composers centered in the San Francisco Bay Area who create a style of music that evolved largely from avant-garde jazz and modern classical music, with influences from other areas such as electronic art music, free improvisation, and musique concrète. Other names of this scene tend to use phrases such as "Creative Music" to try to incorporate a wider focus than just the improvisational approach.

<i>All Is Always Now – Live at The Stone</i> 2019 live album by Fred Frith

All Is Always Now – Live at The Stone is a 2019 three-CD box set of live improvised music performed by English guitarist Fred Frith with other musicians, including Theresa Wong, Ikue Mori, Pauline Oliveros and Laurie Anderson. It was recorded between 2007 and 2016 at The Stone in New York City, and was released in March 2019 by Intakt Records in Switzerland.

References

  1. Erickson, Robert (1975). Sound Structure in Music. University of California Press. ISBN   0-520-02376-5 p.95
  2. "Early Improvisations with Pauline Oliveros, Loren Rush, Terry Riley, and Others (1957) Other Minds Audio Archive at Archive.Org