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| Concentration Can Have Its Rewards
Ann Powers, New York Times, 2000
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| Tony Conrad’s Response
to An open letter to La Monte Young and Tony Conrad, 2000
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| An open letter to La Monte Young and Tony Conrad
Arnold Dreyblatt, 2000
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| do-it-yourself DOWNTOWN
Arnold Dreyblatt, 1995
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| Some Personal Musical History Stories
Arnold Dreyblatt, 1989
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| Beginnings, Theory, Histories
Arnold Dreyblatt, 1982, 1997
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| From My Notebooks, 1975-81
Arnold Dreyblatt
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| Concentration Can Have Its Rewards
Ann Powers, New York Times, 2000 |
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(Excerpt)
One could say that the entire history of my work in music has been derived
from a single, subjective experience with sound, the composer Arnold Dreyblatt
wrote in the program notes to a 1986 performance by his Orchestra of Excited
Sounds. It is this experience which generates the music ideas - and not the
other way around. This emphasis on the gut over the mind has had a deeply positive
effect on his music, which he and a stellar ensemble performed Thursday and
yesterday at Tonic...
January 20, 2001
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| Tony Conrad’s Response
to An open letter to La Monte Young and Tony Conrad, 2000 |
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(Excerpt)
I was very glad to see Arnold Dreyblatt’s open letter, directed to La Monte
Young and me, of which (he remarks) an excerpt is to appear in The Wire, September
2000. Dreyblatt speaks from his own perspective, which, as he firmly establishes,
is highly privileged - especially as to his “insider” knowledge of
the history and record(ing)s pertinent to our discourse, but of course also as
to his standing as a “minimalist” composer/performer in his own right.
In fact, he makes me acquainted with details of which I have been previously unaware,
such as the fact that he was “La Monte’s first tape archivist,”
a project and function that has been veiled from my interested view. I knew at
the time that Dreyblatt was working to help Young archive his work, but to read
the terms “first” and then also “tape archivist” puts
a spin on Dreyblatt’s participation that further emphasizes for me the screen
behind which La Monte Young has spent decades recostuming his relationship to
our work together...
Tony Conrad Buffalo, September 2000 |
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| An open letter to La Monte Young and Tony Conrad
Arnold Dreyblatt, 2000 |
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(Excerpt)
Numerous journalists, musicians and composers have been asking me to give an opinion
on the continuing controversy between La Monte Young and Tony Conrad. The unexpected
release of Day of Niagara seems only to make a response more pertinent.
My reluctance until now is in great part due to my utmost respect for the work
of both parties: both of whom has influenced my musical and visual work in countless
ways, regardless of how our paths have later diverged.
Arnold Dreyblatt, Berlin, 2000
(A Shorter Version of this text has been published in “The Wire”, September,
2000) |
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| Interview
EST Magazine. 1998 |
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(Exerpt)
EST: What are you up to these days, musically? Is your music continuing on the
same lines as the previous Orchestra of Excited Strings releases? I get
the impression when I look at the 3 CDs of yours that I have (Nodal Excitation,
Propellers in Love, Animal Magnetism) that theyre more a document of one
large project-in-progress than stand-alone musical works, and I notice that in
the AM inlay you say the music really only exists in performance. Could you expand
on that?
AD: My musical activities have been expanding over the last few years. I had basically
worked with my own performing ensemble, The Orchestra of Excited Strings
since 1979. Last year, the Bang On A Can Allstars from New York commissioned a
new version of Escalator which they have been performing in the States and in
Europe since then. Also, Ive been working on a number of pieces for individual
members of the ensemble. Also last year, I started performing with Jim ORourke
and some of his friends in Chicago. Ive been very much stimulated by interest
among the younger generation in my music, and I'm in a process of opening up the
frame in which my music is made and performed. Already this year, the reissue
of Nodal Excitation as well as The Sound of One String has come
out. And Im going to be co-producing some of the last recordings of my Berlin
ensemble with ORourke in Chicago as well as planning some new projects with Table
of the Elements... |
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| Interview
Christoph Cox, 1998 |
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(Excerpt)
CC: You mentioned that you feel a close kinship with Tony Conrad and that you
were initially most influenced by his film/video work. Did you study with Conrad
at Buffalo? If so, was it in a music or a film/video context.
AD: I first met Tony while a graduate student at the Center for Media Studies
in Buffalo around ‘74- he was still teaching in Ohio and was just visiting.
Tony didn’t come to Buffalo until some years later. At first all I knew
about him was the soundtrack for Flaming Creatures which I had seen
at the Whitney Museum around ‘72. I was very interested in periodic visual
perceptual phenomena- I was making “flicker” videotapes when I was
shown his early experiments and that of filmaker Paul Sharits (who also taught
at Buffalo). But ironically, it was a concert by the Creative Associates of
a work by Alvin Lucier (1974) which involved a display of sine waves in space
that opened up the world of sound for me. As a student of the Vasulkas, (video
artists who were teaching at Buffalo after founding the Kitchen in New York)
I had been made keenly aware of the relationship between “slow”
frequencies of sound waves and those really high bandwiths of the electromagnetic
spectrum. What was important for me was that it was all about waves. So when
I entered that concert of Alvin Lucier, I suddenly realized that these were
waves that one could percieve and experience and touch, that that musicians
where really just comparing frequencies in their heads and that instrument builders
had preserved this knowledge which was no longer concious for musicians. So
I was hooked, and dived into sound and eventually “music” for the
next ten year.
Parts of this interview appeared in another form in The Wire, 1998
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| do-it-yourself DOWNTOWN
Arnold Dreyblatt, 1995 |
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The New Music Scene in New York 1970-1984 (Excerpt)
When speaking about the developments among New York music composers within the
last twenty years, it's perhaps a too often used cliché to speak of American
individualism, eclecticism and a "do-it-yourself" culture. Yet, from
the perspective of Europe, where I've been based since leaving New York in 1984,
the contrast seems all too clear. The explosion of creative activity which centered
around New York in the early sixties mirrored developments in the arts as a whole,
so we might at first take a look at the birth of this "New Music" scene
within a larger cultural context.
Originally Published in the Catalog to the exhibition, US Arts, Berliner
Festspiele, 1995. |
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| Some Personal Musical History Stories
Arnold Dreyblatt, 1989 |
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| New York (Exerpt)
My grandfather Max Dreyblatt played clarinet professionally in ‘pit’
orchestras for vaudeville and silent films in New York City. About to be drafted
into World War One, he enlisted with his buddies from The Bronx as a military
band which spent the war playing patriotic music in the trenches in France.
Their job was to inspire the young boys in the infantry to jump out of the trenches
only to be massacred. His grandparents, immigrants from Galicia operated a family
ensemble entitled La Troupe Maximov which presented evenings of Gypsy,
Russian and Turkish music during the late 19th century in Vienna...
first published in De Salon 1988-89, Groningen |
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| Beginnings, Theory, Histories
Arnold Dreyblatt, 1982, 1997 |
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(Excerpt)
I proceeded from a kind of 'amateur' curiosity about sound and music, and developed
a sense that composition begins with a consideration (often a re-consideration)
of the dynamic materials of sound creation- e.g. strings and pipes, air and motion.
In the development of my music, it has been the instruments themselves which have
been my greatest teachers. For me, a composition is not a moment 'frozen' on a
piece of paper but rather the result of a workshop in progress. The instrumentation
and notations which have been developed for each stage in the history of my ensembles
have been themselves a part of the composition, as is the workshop period in which
new sections are developed while older pieces are gradually edited or abandoned.
It is my hope that some continuity of thought and practice may be discernible
within this text as well as in the music itself.In the early 1970's I had been
working with video and electronic music at the Center for Media Study at the State
University at Buffalo, N.Y. It was through an exposure there to the ideas of Woody
and Steina Vasulka that I developed an interest in the physical characteristics
of vibration...
Parts of this essay were originally published as a Graduate Thesis at Wesleyan
University (1982), and later in the reissue of Nodal Excitation on Dexter's
Cigar (1997) |
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| From My Notebooks, 1975-81
Arnold Dreyblatt |
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(Excerpt)
Proposition IX: To explain why an open string when sounded makes many
sounds at once. Proposition XV: To determine whether it is possible to touch
the strings of an instrument or their keys so fast that the ear cannot discern
whether the sound is composed of different sounds, or if it is unique and continuous.
- Marin Mersenne, Harmonie Universelle, 1637
My work in image and sound synthesis in the early seventies initiated an interest
in the interactions of waveform signal events an their hearing in the audio
range, as sound , on acoustic instruments and finally, as music. Having neither
a traditional music training or childhood indoctrination in this or that cultural
scale or system I have found it convenient to apply my background in experimenting
with electronic sound and image to composition with acoustic instruments: utilizing
a tuning system derived from the harmonic series in lieu of traditional musical
content...
Originally published in the CD Booklet of The Sound of One String,
Table of the Elements, 1998 |
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