Alvin Augustus Lucier Jr. was an American composer of experimental music and sound installations that explore acoustic phenomena and auditory perception. A long-time music professor at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, Lucier was a member of the influential Sonic Arts Union, which included Robert Ashley, David Behrman, and Gordon Mumma. Much of his work is influenced by science and explores the physical properties of sound itself: resonance of spaces, phase interference between closely tuned pitches, and the transmission of sound through physical media.
AMM was a British free improvisation group that was founded in London, England, in 1965. The group was initially composed of Keith Rowe on guitar, Lou Gare on saxophone, and Eddie Prévost on drums. The three men shared an interest in exploring music beyond the boundaries of conventional jazz, as in free jazz and free improvisation. AMM never achieved widespread popularity, but have been influential in improvised music. Most of their albums have been released by Matchless Recordings, which is run by Eddie Prévost. In a 2001 interview, Keith Rowe was asked if "AMM" was an abbreviation. He replied, "The letters AMM stand for something, but as you probably know it's a secret!"
Alvin Curran is an American composer, performer, improviser, sound artist, and writer. He was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and lives and works in Rome, Italy. He is the co-founder, with Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum, of Musica Elettronica Viva, and a former student of Elliott Carter. Curran's music often makes use of electronics and environmental found sounds. He was a professor of music at Mills College in California until 2006 and now teaches privately in Rome and sporadically at various institutions.
Frederic Anthony Rzewski was an American composer and pianist, considered to be one of the most important American composer-pianists of his time. His major compositions, which often incorporate social and political themes, include the minimalist Coming Together and the variation set The People United Will Never Be Defeated!, which has been called "a modern classic".
Joan Linda La Barbara is an American vocalist and composer known for her explorations of non-conventional or "extended" vocal techniques. Considered to be a vocal virtuoso in the field of contemporary music, she is credited with advancing a new vocabulary of vocal sounds including trills, whispers, cries, sighs, inhaled tones, and multiphonics.
David Rosenboom is a composer, performer, interdisciplinary artist, author, and educator known for his work in American experimental music.
Karl Hans Berger was a German-American jazz pianist, vibraphonist, composer, and educator. He was a leading figure in jazz improvisation from the 1960s when he settled in the United States for life. He founded the educational Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, New York, in 1972 with his wife and Ornette Coleman, to encourage international students to pursue their own ideas about music.
Richard Lowe Teitelbaum was an American composer, keyboardist, and improvisor. A student of Allen Forte, Mel Powell, and Luigi Nono, he was known for his live electronic music and synthesizer performances. He was a pioneer of brain-wave music. He was also involved with world music and used Japanese, Indian, and western classical instruments and notation in both composition and improvisational settings.
George Emanuel Lewis is an American composer, performer, and scholar of experimental music. He has been a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, when he joined the organization at the age of 19. He is renowned for his work as an improvising trombonist and considered a pioneer of computer music, which he began pursuing in the late 1970s; in the 1980s he created Voyager, an improvising software he has used in interactive performances. Lewis's many honors include a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his book A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music received the American Book Award. Lewis is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music, Composition & Historical Musicology at Columbia University.
Carol Plantamura is an American soprano specializing in 17th and 20th century music.
Philip Lionel Corner is an American composer, trombonist, alphornist, vocalist, pianist, music theorist, music educator, and visual artist.
Chaim Moshe Tzadik Palestine, known professionally as Charlemagne Palestine, is an American visual artist and musician. He has been described as being one of the founders of New York school of minimalist music, first initiated by La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Robert Moran, and Phil Niblock, although he prefers to call himself a maximalist.
Garrett List was an American trombonist, vocalist, and composer.
The Nurse with Wound list is a list of musicians and bands that was included with Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella (1979), the first album by Nurse with Wound. There are 291 entries on the list. The list was expanded with Nurse with Wound's second album, To the Quiet Men from a Tiny Girl (1980).
Zaj was an experimental music and performance art group formed in 1959 in Milan, Italy by composers and intermedia artists Walter Marchetti and Juan Hidalgo, with the support of the American composer John Cage. The group received major contributions by different artists from the Spanish avant-garde scene, notably from the writer and diplomat José Luis Castillejo and from the interdisciplinary artist Esther Ferrer. During the 1960s, members of Zaj took part in different Fluxus events organised by George Maciunas. With the help of John Cage and his agent Mimi Johnson, Zaj also toured in the United States in the late 1970s. The group officially disbanded in 1993.
Source: Music of the Avant-Garde – also known and hereafter referred to as Source Magazine – was an independent, not-for-profit musical and artistic magazine published between 1967 and 1973 by teachers and students of the University of California, Davis, California. It emerged from the flourishing Californian musical experimentalism of the late 1950s-early 1960s, at UC-Davis and Mills College. The 11 issues document new music practices of the period like indeterminacy, performance, graphic scores, electronic music and intermedia arts.
OHM: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music is a compilation of early electronic music and excerpts from 1948 to 1980. Many works are essentially experiments with sound, using a variety of non-traditional instruments including homemade circuits, tape ribbon, and early synthesisers.
Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza was an avant-garde free improvisation group considered the first experimental composers collective.
The Aesthetic Research Centre (A.R.C.) was a Canadian publisher of academic books, scientific journals, LP recordings and graphic scores in the field of sound sculpture, Avant-garde music and process music, as well as neurofeedback in the arts.
