Ship horns bellowed throughout the Orwig Music Building last Friday afternoon as experimental composer Alvin Curran '60 played sound clips during his talk on "Music Outside the Concert Halls." The lecture was part of the Department of Music's ongoing "Music, Culture and Technology" speaker series, and Curran used a bevy of audio samples to depict a life lived in music's avant-garde.
Curran spoke to a mixed crowd of faculty and student composers about his life and works.
"In the old days, it was easy," he said of composing. "Everyone wanted to be Beethoven or Bach. Today, that seems sort of 'old hat.' "
Curran is perhaps most famous for his innovative use of ship horns as instruments. His horn concerts, which he dubbed "Maritime Rites," began in 1979 and have been performed in Chicago, Berlin and Kiel, Germany.
Curran has created over 150 separate works. His installations have included "Notes from the Underground," a Holocaust memorial he created in a field in Linz, Austria, where he played millions of singing voices through speakers buried underground.
He has also orchestrated international concerts and has participated in countless innovative music festivals. Curran's thought-provoking pieces have appeared in the Schwetzingen and Donaueschingen Festivals in Germany.
Curran spent much of the lecture discussing the path that led him to experimental music.
A Providence native, Curran concentrated in music and played the trombone in the Brown Band as an undergraduate. He obtained his graduate degree from the Yale School of Music, where he studied under the renowned composer Elliot Carter.
Upon graduation, Carter invited the young Curran to Berlin on an exchange program funded by the Ford Foundation. He said his experiences in Germany profoundly influenced the course of his professional life.
"It wasn't a residency where they give you a box lunch and then you go in your cabin and write your symphony," he said. Instead, Curran said the Ford Foundation encouraged its musicians to explore experimental music in hopes of undermining the Soviet Union's cultural freeze during the Cold War.
"I was fresh out of Yale, still had tweed suits and the rest of it," Curran said. "There was a feeling of liberation coming out of making music spontaneously."
Curran went on to found Musica Electronica Viva, a group dedicated to creating free-form electronic music. In its three-year tour of the United States and Europe, the group played over 200 concerts, providing an apt soundtrack for the growing psychedelic scene of the 1960s.
"There was no leader, no score, no start time, no end time. ... It was very consonant with the time and the place," Curran said. "All kinds of social tendencies were converging in a dream of inner freedom."
After the group disbanded in 1971, Curran decided to reinvent himself with a number of solo projects. In addition to composing music for avant-garde theater companies in Rome, he began recording sounds found in nature. With these soundscapes, he embarked on a long career of using outdoor spaces to create music.
He emphasized that in addition to crafting installation pieces, he has continued to write traditional piano music. From 1991 to 2006, Curran taught musical composition at Mills College in Oakland, Calif. In between staging his installation pieces, he now teaches privately in Rome.
"I only consider myself a composer, no matter what I do ...whether I'm working with a piano or a piece of junk," he said.
Curran's next project will involve staging another performance of "Maritime Rites" on the River Thames in London. He plans to use the facade of the Tate Modern museum to amplify the horn sounds and said he hopes to line the banks of the landmark avenue the Strand with rows of demolished pianos.
