Times out of tune, Alvin Curran or a Roman history of musical smuggling

An online lecture by Marseille-based music historian Maxime Guitton on the work of Alvin Curran, to coincide with the exhibition When There Is No More Music to Write.
 
In 2017, Marseille-based music historian Maxime Guitton began a year-long research project exploring the archives of American composer, improviser and pedagogue, Alvin Curran. Guitton’s research unveiled crucial and little-known chapters in the history of avant-garde music and performing arts, and explores how an experimental artistic practice characterised by radical politics, communal experience, contemplation of nature and solitude, can make history.
Since 1964, Curran has worked at the crossroads of composition and improvisation, electronics and instrumental music, radio works and sound installations – often in conversation with post-modern dance, Arte Povera, Fluxus, minimalism, free improvisation, avant-garde theatre, experimental poetry, and artists’ film. In his research, Guitton unveils this crucial and still little known part of avant-garde musical and performing arts history to understand the way an experimental artistic practice –through radical politics, communal experience, contemplation of nature and solitude – can make history.
In this wide-ranging lecture Guitton will trace a thread connecting a complex constellation of locations, landscapes and artists – John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, Simone Forti, Joan Jonas, Michelangelo Antonioni, Cy Twombly, and Trisha Brown among them – who populate Curran’s Rome-based archive.
This event is introduced by Spike Island curator Carmen Juliá and is followed by a Q&A with the online audience.
 
Image: PORTRAIT OF ALVIN CURRAN IN HIS STUDIO, VIA DELL’ORSO, 28 (ROME) COURTESY ADRIANO MORDENTI (1980)