RHYS CHATHAM altered the DNA of rock. The New York-born composer began as a classically-trained prodigy, but by 1975, Chatham was fusing the overtone-drenched minimalism of John Cale and Tony Conrad with the relentless, elemental fury of the Ramones. It was an inspired amalgamation — the textural intricacies of the avant-garde colliding with the visceral punch of electric guitar-slinging punk rock — and with it Chatham created a new type of urban music. Raucous and ecstatic, this sound energized the downtown New York scene throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, prefigured the No Wave movement and cast a huge influence over the subsequent work of Chatham’s many protégés, including Glenn Branca and future members of Sonic Youth.

For this evening, we present a concert of Rhys Chatham's solo trumpet music.

RHYS CHATHAM

A contemporary music devotee from an early age, Chatham studied at NYU where he met Morton Subotnick, who encouraged him to compose electronic music. Working under Subotnick's guidance at the NYU Studio for Electronic Music, he met Maryanne Amacher, Charlemagne Palestine, Serge Tcherepnin, Ingram Marshall, and Eliane Radigue. These composers, more than anyone else, kindled Chatham's interest in music of long duration, which ultimately led him to study and work with La Monte Young, tuning his piano in just intonation in exchange for lessons. His ability to tune and hear harmonics lead to his interest in making compositions incorporating the overtone series.

Rhys Chatham was also founder of the music program at the Kitchen Center in downtown Manhattan in 1971 and its music director between 1971-73 and later from 1977-80. He was responsible for programming more than 250 concerts of living composers during this period including Robert Ashley, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich Ensemble, Don Cherry, Tom Johnson, Jeanne Lee, Phill Niblock, Larry Austin, Joel Chadabe, Charles Dodge, George Lewis, Alvin Lucier, Laurie Spiegel, David Behrman, Tony Conrad, Jon Gibson, Annea Lockwood, Charlemagne Palestine, Ivan Tcherepnin, Jon Hassell, David Mahler, Gordon Mumma, Michael Nyman, Richard Teitelbaum, "Blue" Gene Tyranny, Laurie Anderson, and many more.

Chatham wrote his first composition in just intonation in 1971. Following the lead of musicians such as Young, Terry Riley, Tony Conrad, Cornelius Cardew, and Frederic Rzewski, he then began working as a composer-performer with non-notated music of various sorts, which culminated in 1976 when he first started working with hard rock. Rather than simply appropriating rock music, he worked as a kind of "secret agent" in the field, becoming an active figure on the late-night rock scene in New York City. With his composition, GUITAR TRIO (1977), Rhys Chatham became the first composer to make use of multiple electric guitars in just intonation to merge the extended-time music of the sixties and seventies with serious hard rock.

By 1982, Chatham was going deaf from playing too much loud music. He decided to make a series of fully notated pieces first for the slightly quieter brass family of instruments. Following improvements to his hearing he used his renewed interest in notated music to electric guitar ensembles, concluding this period with an ultimate work, AN ANGEL MOVES TOO FAST TO SEE (1989) for a symphony of 100 electric guitars, electric bass, and drums and one of the most extraordinary works in the minimalist canon.

Rhys Chatham's compositional concern has been to bring together seemingly incompatible elements and put them through a personal filter so as to vertically align them. During the seventies and much of the eighties, he devoted himself to combining the pounding, throbbing rhythms of rock with the aesthetic concerns of post-minimalism. At the end of the eighties, his compositional interest turned to making full use of the enormous freedom composers now have available to them by launching an investigation into the nature of this freedom itself.



EX EASTER ISLAND HEAD

Ex-Easter Island Head is a Liverpool based ensemble of varying numbers playing solid body electric guitar with mallets to produce shimmering drones, ghostly overtones and sustained consonances elicited through gradually changing rhythmic patterns. Utilising repetition, resonance and amplification, the music of Ex-Easter Island Head is poised between minimalist austerity and sonic density.