Richard Maxfield

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

life and work

Early years

Maxfield showed musical talent very early on; He later claimed, "I could read music before I could read words." As a child he played the piano and clarinet, was a clarinetist with the Seattle All Youth Orchestra , and wrote a symphony in high school . At 17 he went to the Navy for a year .

Education

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

Electronic compositions and teaching

In 1958 he attended Cage's course at the New School for Social Research and took the same course the following year. He was the first in the USA to teach the production of electronic music from purely electronic sources, i.e. without the use of microphones , which is particularly characteristic of musique concrète . However, his own works mostly contain both “concrete” and electronically generated material.

Maxfield's first surviving electronic composition, Sine Music (A Swarm of Butterflies Encountered over the Ocean) , was written in 1958 and marks the beginning of his most productive period, which lasted until 1964 and in which he completed at least 24 works. Maxfield worked during this time as an independent sound engineer , from 1960 to 1962 also for the company Westminster Records .

On the way to the Darmstadt summer courses , he met his colleague La Monte Young , who was eight years his junior and who was studying in Berkeley, in New York in the summer of 1959 . Young then presented Maxfield's electronic music in concerts in the San Francisco Bay Area , also won the Hertz Prize in 1960 and went to New York, where he became Maxfield's student, assistant and one of the most important interpreters of his works. La Monte Young reports:

“Much of Maxfield's tape music was created using a technique that involved pre-recording sound sources of different lengths and manipulating them electronically, then cutting up the tapes on which all these noises were recorded, and mixing the individual pieces in large glass bowls. Then he randomly pulled pieces of tape from the bowls and bound them, inserting empty tape of varying lengths between the pieces that had already been recorded. Although this was basically an aleatoric a la cage, Maxfield always reserved the right to put any sound he didn't like back into the bowl and select new sounds until the piece sounded like it was found inspiring. Sometimes some of these compounds of noise and silence - these inter-masters , as he called them - were either played simultaneously from different devices in a concert, or mixed in the studio to create a new original master (stereo or mono). His compositions were technically extremely sophisticated, they had a strict, static form and testified to ironic humor and an unusually high level of education. "

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

“The source material for many of his works are the noises of the instrumentalists who improvise with the tape during the performance (which plays their recorded earlier noises, which are alienated by electronic manipulation) ... He is usually very picky about his raw material and its Electronic change concerns, but very freely with regard to the simultaneous placement (organization) of the finished product and the improvisation. "

One of Maxfield's most famous works created in this way bears the name Cough Music ( cough music , 1959): Maxfield cut out coughing noises from the recording of one of his works for a composer friend, and he in turn used this as source material for his own Composition.

Maxfield produced all of the tape elements of his electronic works in his private studio in New York. The equipment of this studio was rudimentary; it consisted of several sinusoidal tone generators built according to instructions , two cassette recorders , a self-made mixer and a self-made record player , microphones , the dynamic space expander (a device for generating reverb), probably some modest filter and switching devices, amplifiers and speakers .

In the late 1950s and early 60s Maxfield performed his works in a variety of venues in New York. The first New York Loft concert series, which La Monte Young organized in Yoko Ono's studio in 1960/1961 , also included two evenings with works by Maxfield. Other artists Maxfield worked with during this period were David Tudor , Terry Riley , Terry Jennings , Dick Higgins (who wrote the libretto of his opera Stacked Deck for Maxfield ) and George Maciunas . This is how the beginnings of the Fluxus movement captured him . Maxfield also took part in numerous dance performances; so he was u. a. musical director of the James Waring Dance Company .

In 1966 he moved to San Francisco , where he taught at San Francisco State College for the following year ; In 1968 he moved to Los Angeles . There, on June 27, 1969 , the drug addict Maxfield threw himself out of a window in the Figueroa Hotel .

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

Richard what an electronic composer.
He wrote a piece called "Cough Music" made up of the coughs
of hundreds of people at concerts.
He was brilliant and well organized.
And then he fell apart.
He was homosexual and took drugs.
He was brilliant and well organized.
I loved "Cough Music" and could not see how such a fine composer
could fall apart as Richard fell apart.

estate

In 1967 Maxfield left all tapes, scores and studio equipment for his electronic music to his artist friend Walter De Maria ; De Maria handed it over to the Dia Art Foundation in 1975 , where the estate was cataloged and archived. It has been owned by the MELA Foundation in New York since 1985 .

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), winner of 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
• Wind (for Terry Jennings ) (1961), saxophone 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
• Electronic Symphony (1964), tape
• Bacchanale II (1966), tape
• Dream (1967), tape
• Venus Impulses (1967), tape

Web links

• Legal free download of audio files from some of Maxfield's works
• Richard Maxfield Collection of Stanford University with several other works in the audio archive
• Detailed catalog of works with numerous links

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Article by William Dawes
2. ↑ Interview with the cellist Charles Curtis, who was involved in Maxfield and La Monte Young's concerts in the early 1960s (Weblink: http://www.paristransatlantic.com/magazine/interviews/curtis.html )
3. ↑ Website of the Other Minds Archive (Weblink: http://www.archive.org/details/AM_1974_06_27 )
4. ↑ Poetry , vol. 122, no. 4 (July, 1973), p. 206