Richard Maxfield

Richard Vance Maxfield ( born February 2, 1927 in Seattle, † June 27, 1969 in Los Angeles ) was an American composer and one of the foremost pioneers of electronic music in the United States.

  • 2.1 Non - electronic works
  • 2.2 Electronic Works

Life and work

Early years

Maxfield showed very early musical talent; later, he once claimed, "I could read music before I could read words." As a child he played piano and clarinet, worked as a clarinetist in Seattle All Youth Orchestra with and even wrote a symphony in high school. At 17, he spent a year the Navy.

Study

Maxfield began his studies at Stanford University, where he continued to compose and some of his works were transferred from the radio station of the University. After he had seen the premiere of the opera The Trial of Lucullus by Roger Sessions at Berkeley in 1947, he decided to change at the University of California to study at Sessions. In 1951, he was awarded the Hertz Prize. This travel scholarship enabled him to continue his studies, first for a summer in Los Angeles with Ernst Krenek and then on a tour of Europe, where he met Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Nono. In particular, von Stockhausen, who was involved in the construction of the Cologne electronic music studio, he should have received this decisive impulses for his own work. In 1953 he went to Tanglewood to Aaron Copland, 1954-1955 by Princeton Sessions and his student Milton Babbitt, where he made ​​his MFA ( Master of Fine Arts ) in 1955. In the same year he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship, which enabled him to further his studies in Italy with Luigi Dallapiccola and Bruno Maderna, another pioneer of electronic music. He remained until 1957 in Europe, where he - by Christian Wolff taught - John Cage and David Tudor met.

Electronic compositions and teaching

In 1958 he attended Cage's course at the New School for Social Research, and took the same course as early as next year. Was the first in the U.S., he taught the production of electronic music from purely electronic sources, ie without the - especially for the musique concrète characteristic - use of microphones. However, his own works usually contain both "concrete " and electronically generated material.

Maxfields earliest preserved electronic composition Sine Music (A Swarm of Butterflies Encountered over the Ocean ) was established in 1958 and marked the beginning of his most productive period, which lasted until 1964 and in which he completed it at least 24 plants. Maxfield worked at this time as an independent sound engineer, from 1960 to 1962 also for the company Westminster Records.

Towards the Darmstadt summer courses, he learned the summer of 1959 in New York eight years his junior colleague La Monte Young know who studied at Berkeley at the time. Young then presented Maxfields electronic music in concerts in the San Francisco Bay Area, won in 1960, also the Hertz Prize and went to New York, where he was Maxfields student, assistant and one of the most important interpreters of his works. La Monte Young reports:

Maxfield said himself in 1962 ( in the third person referring to himself ):

One of the most famous incurred in this way works Maxfields named Cough Music ( cough Music, 1959): Maxfield cut out for a fellow composer from taking one of his works coughs of the audience, and in turn he used as source material for their own composition.

Maxfield tape produced all elements of his electronic works in his private studio in New York. The features of this studio was rudimentary; they consisted of several built according to instructions Sinustongeneratoren, two cassette recorders, a home-built mixer and a home-built turntables, microphones, Dynamic Spacexpander ( a device for reverb creation ), probably some modest filtering and switching devices, amplifiers and speakers.

In the late 1950s and early 60s, Maxfield led his works in New York on a wide variety of venues. The first New York loft - concert series, the La Monte Young 1960/1961 organized in the studio of Yoko Ono, also included two evenings of works by Maxfield. Other artists with whom Maxfield worked together in this time were David Tudor, Terry Riley, Terry Jennings, Dick Higgins ( for the Maxfield wrote the libretto of his opera Stacked Deck ) and George Maciunas. In this way it captured the beginnings of the Fluxus movement. At numerous dance performances Maxfield worked with; as he was, inter alia, musical director of the James Waring Dance Company.

In 1966 he moved to San Francisco, where he taught until the following year at San Francisco State College; In 1968 he moved to Los Angeles. There, the drug-addicted Maxfield crashed on June 27, 1969 from a window of the Figueroa Hotel.

The poet Diane Wakoski wrote in 1973 in her poem The Story of Richard Maxfield:

Discount

In 1967, Maxfield left all tapes, scores and studio equipment for its electronic music his friend the artist Walter De Maria; De Maria handed them over again in 1975, Dia Art Foundation, where the estate has been cataloged and archived. Since 1985 he is in possession of the MELA Foundation in New York.

Works (selection)

Non - electronic works

  • Piano Sonata No.. 1 (1947 )
  • Piano Sonata No.. 2 (1948-1949)
  • Piano Sonata No.. 3 (1950)
  • String Trio ( 1951)
  • Structures for 10 wind instruments (1951 )
  • Symphony for string orchestra (1951 )
  • Variations for string quartet (1956 )
  • Five Movements for orchestra (1959 ), awarded the Gershwin Memorial Award

Electronic works

  • Sine Music (A Swarm of Butterflies Encountered over the Ocean ) ( 1958), tape
  • Cough Music ( 1959), tape
  • Pastoral Symphony (1959 ), tape
  • Perspectives (1960), violin and tape
  • Amazing Grace (1960), tape
  • Fermentation (1960), Tape
  • Night Music (1960), tape
  • Stacked Deck (1960-1961), opera, voices and tape, text: Dick Higgins
  • Clarinet Music ( 1961) 5 clarinets and 5 tapes
  • Dromenon (1961 ), dance, lighting, flute, saxophone, piano, vibraphone, violin, double bass and tape
  • Perspectives II for La Monte Young ( 1961), violin, unspecified string and tape
  • Piano Concert for David Tudor (1961 ), piano and tape
  • Toy Symphony (1962), flute, violin, toys, wooden boxes, ceramic vase and tape
  • Bacchanale (1963 ), tape
  • Bhagavad Gita Symphony (1963 ), tape
  • Garden Music ( 1963), tape
  • Electric Symphony (1964), Tape
  • Bacchanale II ( 1966), tape
  • Dream ( 1967), tape
  • Venus pulse ( 1967), tape
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