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About Musica Elettronica Viva - MEV 40
Product Description Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV) was begun one evening in the spring of 1966 by Alan Bryant, Alvin Curran, Jon Phetteplace, Carol Plantamura, Frederic Rzweski, Richard Teitelbaum and Ivan Vandor in a room in Rome overlooking the Pantheon. MEV s music right from the start was also totally open, allowing all and everything to come in and seeking in every way to get out beyond the heartless conventions of contemporary music. Taking cue from Tudor and Cage, MEV began sticking contact mics to anything that sounded and amplified their raw sounds: bed springs, sheets of glass, tin cans, rubber bands, toy pianos, sex vibrators, and assorted metal junk; a crushed old trumpet, cello and tenor sax kept us within musical credibility, while a home-made synthesizer of some 48 oscillators along with the first Moog synthesizer in Europe gave our otherwise neo-primitive sound an inimitable edge. In the name of the collectivity, the group abandoned both written scores and leadership and replaced them with improvisation and critical listening. Rehearsals and concerts were begun at the appropriate time by a kind of spontaneous combustion and continued until total exhaustion set in. It mattered little who played what when or how, but what the fragile bond of human trust that linked us all in every moment remained unbroken. The music could go anywhere, gliding into self-regenerating unity or lurching into irrevocable chaos-both were valuable goals. In the general euphoria of the times, MEV thought it had re-invented music; in any case it had certainly rediscovered it. - Alvin Curran This 4-CD set, covering the years 1967 2007, comprises the best surviving recorded documents from four decades of performances, personally curated by its three core members - Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski, and Richard Teitelbaum. As such, it is an invaluable historical anthology of one of the pioneering and truly legendary exponents of live-electronic music. Review ...Musica Elettronica Viva's MEV 40 (NEW WORLD RECORDS 80675-2) is a four-disc set compiling a number of selected performances of the last 40 years from this very special and pioneering improvising noise combo who formed in Rome in 1966. I've tried my utmost to get my hands on every record, CD, bootleg and tape I can from this fabulous group of players, of which the core members (Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum) were composers, jazz musicians and classical players in their own right. Their international membership was often supplemented with additional players, as is the case here including certain geniuses I never heard of before and some names which surprised me for example Steve Lacy, the American jazz alto player who often interpreted Monk s work with such innovation, who joined them for a 1982 performance in Amsterdam...If you never heard any MEV before, this selection (personally curated by members of MEV) is a fine place to start where you can immerse yourself in a strange and scary world of unidentifiable clanking noises mixed with extremely impolite (sometimes wild and fierce) electronic sounds. And it is always worth reading what the composers/performers have to say about the development of their working methods, which have involved a considerable degree of intelligent thinking and preparation for a particular kind of collaborative working, along with very radical decisions about choice of instrumentation and methods of playing...oh, this stuff is just matchless! Share the excitement of MEV's explorations and please hear this soon. - Ed Pinsent --thesoundprojector.com The eight lengthy pieces in this impressive, unexpected, welcome four-CD, 40-year retrospective practically double the amount of MEV's music currently available. Given the risky nature and ambitious scope of MEV s enterprise, it's not surprising they reveal flaws (passages of vagueness or, conversely, overly literal symbolism) as well as strengths (their provocative Ivesian simultaneity, and
