This Life of Sounds

Levine Packer

Chronicles an exuberant period of artistic exploration and experimentation in America from an insider's perspective
Provides the first full-length study of the Buffalo new music group, the Creative Associates
Features international leaders in contemporary music such as Morton Feldman, John Cage, Julius Eastman, and Cornelius Cardew
Portrays the growth of the avant-garde during the 1960s and 1970s through previously unexplored terrain

This Life of Sounds

Levine Packer

Description

This Life of Sounds portrays an important and previously unexplored corner of the history of new music in America: the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts int eh State University of New York at Buffalo. Composers Lukas Foss (the Center's founder), Lejaren Hiller, and Morton Feldman were the music directors over the life of "the Buffalo group," during the years 1964-1980. Based on Foss's plan, the Rockefeller Foundation provided annual fellowships for young composers and virtuoso instrumentalists to live in Buffalo for up to two years, thus creating a cadre of like-minded musicians who would spend their time studying, creating, and performing difficult - often controversial - new work. The new legendary group of musicians (some would say "musical outlows") who participated in the Buffalo group included Pulitzer Prize winner George Crumb, Terry Riley, Cornelius Cardew, Maryanne Amacher, Frederic Rzewski, David Tudor, Julius Eastman, and many more. Composers John Cage, Jim Tenney, Iannis Xenakis and others all figure int he story as well. The book provides valuable accounts of the Center's influential concer series, Evenings for New Music, performed in Buffalo, New York and throughout Europe; its famous recording of Terry Riley's In C; the political activism of the time; and the intersection of academic, private, and institutional funding for the arts. Life magazine declared in an article about the 1965 Fest of the Arts Today titled, "Can This Be Buffalo?", "Buffalo exploded last month in a two-week avant garde festival that was bigger and hipper than anything ever held in Paris or New York..." The concerts, the festivals, and the adventurous musical climate attracted filmmakers and young visual arts resulting in what one person called "one of those kinds of places the way people talk about Vienna in 1900-1910."

This Life of Sounds

Levine Packer

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Prelude: A Study in Sonority
Chapter 1: The Rockefeller Years, 1964-Spring 1968
Creating the center
Getting Their Gongs Wet
Settling In
"Can This Be Buffalo?"
"Adagio" and "Canto"
David Tudor
News For You
Excavating Riches
Composer-Performers
Renewal and International Influence
The Berkeley of the East
Diamonds and Mud
Aquarium
Chapter 2: Make It New, Fall 1968-1972
Technology Rising
Continuance
Illiacs and Oscillators
Music and Theater
A Holiday Angel
Julius Eastman
Fusion
Cornucopia
Turmoil
Early Seventies
Mad Kings and Making Do
Chapter 3: Feldman in Buffalo, Fall 1972
The Tenth Year
Closer To Home
Shakeup
The Continuous Present
June In Buffalo
Boston Harbor
Ultrasonics, Subliminal Light and Sound
A Lecture on the Weather
Late January 1977
Chapter 4: The Final Years, 1977-1980
Music of Changes
A Critical Fall
"It's Like the Love Canal"
HPSCHD and Beyond
Non-Continuance
After Image
Chapter 5: Postscript
Appendix 1: Chronology
Appendix 2: List of Interviews
Appendix 3: List of Creative Associates
Appendix 4: List of Creative Associate Graduate Fellows
Appendix 5: Selected Discography
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index

This Life of Sounds

Levine Packer

Author Information

Levine Packer

Born in France, raised in New York and Mexico City, Levin Packer was co-director with Lukas Foss and Morton Feldman of the renowned contemporary music group in Buffalo, New York, and a director of the Contemporary Music Festival at teh California Institute of the Arts. She was Director of the Inter-Arts program at the National Endowment for the Arts, the producer of Steve Reich and Beryl Korot's multimedia opera The Cave, and a dean at the Maryland Institute College of Art. This Life of Sounds: Evenings for New Music in Buffalo received ASCAP's Deems Taylor Award for excellence. Her recent book, with co-editor Mary Jane Leach, Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music was published in 2015.

This Life of Sounds

Levine Packer

Reviews and Awards

"One of the cardinal books in the astounding Buffalo Bookshelf we've seen accrete in the past 15 years...A glorious celebration of the other Buffalo, the aristocratic, innovative city in which a cultural miracle took place whose inspiring residue is still with us, even in an era of decline." - Jeff Simon, Buffalo News"

"In the 1960s a lively New Music scene began at the State University of New York at Buffalo which culminated with the appointment of Morton Feldman as director in the 1970s. He began the June in Buffalo festival which continues to this day. Renée Levine was there at the very beginning as Managing Director and her highly informative book is undoubtedly the best primary source we will ever have about New Music in Buffalo and its offshoots during this tumultuous period."-Steve Reich"

"I had long known that the Creative Associates at Buffalo in the 1960s and '70s were an unprecedented hothouse of wild musical exploration, but Renée Levine Packer's insightful and eye-opening eye-witness account makes me realize that I had underestimated the case."-Kyle Gann, author of Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice and No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage's 4'33""

"Renée Levine Packer has written a compelling and valuable account of an important moment in the history of modernism in America and the many worlds of the avant-garde. It is an indispensable document for students of the history of twentieth-century music."-Leon Botstein, President of Bard College, Music Director of the American Symphony Orchestra and the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra"

"The first in-depth account of the history of the Center and the Buffalo scene, and the factual aspects alone of her account make it invaluable...Anyone interested in new music, American art movements, or the history of the 1960s and its art institutions stands to benefit richly from this thoughtfully crafted research." - American Music