Alvin Curran and Walter Prati "Community Garden", Milano, La Fabbica del Vapore, 10.15.2021

I’ve been in the Monumental Cemetery zone in Milan many times in the past. I love to take pictures of the statues in the cemetery with my camera. I have experimented with natural, harsh light, so I suppose sooner or later I’ll came back with a simple direct flash in order to obtain a different effect. But yesterday night I’ve gone to the Fabbrica Del Vapore which is near the Cemetery, in order to see one of the cornerstones of improvised music, Alvin Curran.

Alvin Curran was in the 1960s one of the founders of the group Musica Elettronica Viva, that hosted musicians and composers as Frederick Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum, Steve Lacy, Allan Bryant, Carol Plantamura, Ivan Vandor and John Fetteplace during his various decades of activity. MEV was one of the very first groups of musicians to experiment with the sound of synthesizers, giving life to what, in the following years, would have been called “electro acoustic improvisation”.

Friends of John Cage with whom MEV played a composition titled Solo For Voice 2, where Plantamura voice was trasfigurated by a Moog synthesizer, the group featured many collaborations with master improvisors – there’s a beautiful record from 1976 titled Time Zones featuring Teitelbaum and Anthony Braxton. But the main point with EAI is that it helped widen the concept of composition. 

Preparing a piano is, per se, a compositional gesture, as an example. And this is what I have seen first yesterday night as I entered the room where the concert of Alvin Curran with his longtime collaborator Walter Prati would have been played. Curran had at his own disposition a prepared piano (with cardboards, a small plastic bottle half full of water, a ligther, etc.) and a keyboard previously programmed with many sounds (human voices in English and Japanese languages, the sound of many different musical instruments as trumpet and saxophone, natural sounds like water falling, but also many manipulated sounds).

On the other hand, Walter Prati had a couple of laptops and a small electric viola enriched with a couple of pedals and an arco. Even if the concert was presented as a celebration of a recent CD published by the duo and titled Community Garden, disposable both physically and on many streaming platforms, the music the people filling the room with me listened to yesterday was completely new. The musicians themselves, in fact, didn’t knew what they were creating. So, the listener was attending to the music on the same side of the musician.

The more analogic sounds of the prepared piano were interspersed with samples, electronic sounds, manipulated sounds, the electric viola (both pinched and arcoed), giving life to a multilayered effect from whom emerged some curious moments like the sensation of attending to a music blob and more melancholic reminiscences of Ellington blues. But it is really difficult to describe every moment of the music, and maybe it’s also pointless. 

We can say to our readers that all dynamics of sound and silence, of flux and interruptions, and the sonic ranges have been experimented with success. Creating a music is not only a matter of playing, but also of listening and halting, sometimes, as Prati stated at the initial little speech before the concert. As far as me, I can obviously saying this was the most intense and interesting concert I attended this year, between the ones I wrote a review for this blog.

Community Garden has been for sure an intriguing live performance. The prepared piano, historically meaning the attempt to deconstruct bourgeois music as part of the values of one small but imposing part of society, the idea that composing doesn’t mean only to write down a bunch of notes on a piece of paper but creating an environment for creativity, the mix of sound and noise as part of a sound environment, the blurring of the line between the conscious will of the musician and his unconscious or physical response to the partners, is all we heard and saw yesterday night. 

It is important to testify these little moment of creativity and deconstruction (and reconstruction) of our ideals of what music is, because we all are living in a very conservative period, where music is mostly entertainment or a mere wallpaper for different environments, while in fact the sound world is a recall to our first environment and, this way, an important tool to create a new, collective meaning to life. And so I’m grateful to Curran and Prati for sharing with us their thoughts and feelings under the shape of beautiful music. Don’t miss them, if they’re around to play.