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MOORMAN, CHARLOTTE - Cello Anthology

Alga Marghen

Regular price $166.00 USD
Regular price Sale price $166.00 USD
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Format
"2007 release. Stunning oversize boxset (similar in production to Alga Marghens OU box). Historic Fluxus sound documentation at its finest. Featuring music by: Earl Brown, Sylvano Bussotti, John Cage, Giuseppe Chiari, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Terry Jennings, Jackson MacLow, Nam June Paik and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Recordings from 1964-1966 & 1982. Performed by David Behrman, Philip Corner, Malcolm Goldstein, Terry Jennings, Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, etc. Limited to only 500 copies and worth the extra pennies.

The cellist Charlotte Moorman can be numbered among the most charismatic and influential protagonists to have appeared on the avant-garde or experimental music scenes since the early 60s. A documentation of her activities as a performer is generally available only in various catalogs which document the crucial intersection with the work of Nam June Paik, or the association with manifestations and events connected with the so exquisitely realistic gestures of the Fluxus movement. Cello Anthology is a collection of documents -- sonic and photographic -- as well as original texts and testimonials, made available for the first time in a unitary form, which permits a complete recognition of Charlotte Moormans work. The biography and chronology faithfully reproduce the materials that the artist herself had ordered in booklet form. The range of her activity not only as an interpreter, but also as a promoter of the avant-garde artistic research progressively open to intersecting with the most varied disciplines -- from music to sound and concrete poetry, from visual and plastic art to cinema and to video art -- is moreover reconstructed through an unpublished text with which Charlotte Moorman meant to review the history of the 15 editions of the New York Avant Garde Festival she organized between 1963 and 1980. At the core of her uninterrupted performative activity, here documented across a rich iconographic apparatus ordered chronologically, the works realized in collaboration with Nam June Paik doubtless represent a culminating moment in her striking career. It therefore seemed appropriate to also integrate the transcription of the primary texts and documents pertaining to them, to better perceive to what extent the aesthetic project of the Korean artist was indissolubly bound to the peculiar corporeality of the cellists performance gesture and to her absolutely unique capacity of translating the musical experience within the limits of her own non-exchangeable physical presence. Giuseppe Chiaris affectionate testimony dedicated to the faithful interpreter of some of his most important works of the early 60s -- works which affirmed the Florentine artist on the international scene -- and the reprint of Gisela Gronemeyers poignant essay dedicated to Charlotte Moorman, likewise offer a useful explanatory setting for the introduction of these copious texts and documents. Indeed, for the first time, the work of Charlotte Moorman can be appreciated by means of a significant selection of vintage recordings. The first two CDs highlight a pair of exceptional documents -- a performance recorded by radio station WBAI in New York on 12 September 1964, and a concert from 25 July 1966 in the Theatersaal in Aachen, Germany. The Aachen event, in fact, is testimony to the progressive and always more pronounced emergence of meta-musical elements deliberately turned toward the demystification of ritualistic" meanings of a concert, even while consciously accepting it as an exhibition frame. The third CD offers an in situ recording realized on one of the three days inaugurating the Paik retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, on 11, 12 and 14 September 1982, which includes a tape collage by Ornette Coleman prepared for Charlotte, also talking with audience. The fourth CD restores three other documents, collateral but definitely not secondary. One happy example is a choral work performed on 3 September 1964, during the second New York Avant Garde Festival, a performance of Jackson Mac Lows composition The Long Hot Summer, sees in an exceptional reunion the names of Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Philip Corner, and Malcolm Goldstein, as well as Mac Low himself. On the relevance of this performance, distinguished by a marked ethico-political intonation and valence, Philip Corner dwells extensively in an unpublished text printed here as an attachment to the sonic documentation. The voice of Charlotte Moorman, characterized by her unmistakable vital charge, is brought back to us through a long and meaningful interview conducted by Harvey Matusow in October of 1969 in the BBC New York Studios. The soundtrack of the video "Waiting for Commercials," realized by Paik in 1972 in collaboration with Russel Connor, completes the anthology put together and offered here. Luxury edition including a 154-page book with original documents, full-color photos and scores; a set of 16 full-color inserts reproducing the original posters and programs of the Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York; 4 compact discs. First boxset edition limited to 500 copies." - Alga Marghen.
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