Electronic and Experimental Music: Pioneers in ... - Aaaaarg

178 ELECTRONIC AND EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC
In the world of the Space Theater, every theatrical piece was also conceived
with an electronic music component. Every performance was live. The two
composers would make use of tapes they had composed in their home studios,
but these were always combined with live electronics. Most of the performances
were about an hour and a half in duration, much longer than most tape
compositions at the time.
Aside from Cage and Tudor and the Ann Arbor group, the only other
performances of live electronic music in the United States at the time were the
“Sonics” events produced by the founders of the San Francisco Tape Music
Center beginning in 1961. These were held in a small electronic music studio in
the attic above the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and attracted a loyal
following who came to hear the early works of Riley, Subotnick, Sender,
Oliveros, and Talbot. Many of their works involved the experimental use of tape
delay and loops (see Chapter 5).
The swan song for the Space Theater came in 1964, although the group didn’t
realize it until after the fact. Italian composer Luigi Nono (1924–1990) invited
Milton Cohen and the Space Theater troupe to perform during the music portion
of the annual Venice Biennale performing arts festival. Ashley designed four
pieces in the four-part manner of the Space Theater performances, and a number
of Ann Arbor people came along to help out. Their performance space was a loft
above the old La Fenice opera house. They did daily shows for five days. The
event was a great success, except that they had trouble getting paid. The growing
differences between the American and European avant-garde were punctuated
one day by a conversation over lunch, which Ashley recalled:
We were taken to lunch by Nono in a beautiful restaurant on the Grand
Canal (where Nono was addressed by the restaurant workers as
“Maestro”). It was the best lunch anyone had ever had. After the lunch,
over coffee, Nono said to me, “May I ask you an important question?” Of
course. “Is John Cage serious?” I said I thought so. 6
Before they left Venice, Cohen quietly announced to his friends that he was done
with the Space Theater and was going to return to sculpture. “Who could blame
him?” says Ashley.
At the time of this writing, the only commercially available recording of music
composed for the Space Theater is one of Gordon Mumma’s compositions, an
excerpt from the Venice production called Music from the Venezia Space
Theater (1964).
The success of the Space Theater and a burgeoning community of performing
artists in Ann Arbor provided the momentum to take their efforts to the next
level. Beginning in 1961, composers Ashley, Mumma, Roger Reynolds (b.1934),
George Cacioppo (1927–1984), Bruce Wise, and Donald Scavarda (b.1928)
joined forces with the local Dramatic Arts Center of Wilfrid Kaplan to produce