I have long known and admired Charles Amirkhanian, our Mr. Contemporary Music for decades, so I felt comfortable to ask him to assist with a journalistic conundrum.
There has been a flurry of publicity about Rhys Chatham and his A Secret Rose for 100 Electric Guitars. My problem is that I know nothing about Chatham and any 100-piece string group brings back bad memories of the George Melachrino Strings, or in more contemporary terms, André Rieu & Co. Not my thing.
Still, not allowing personal prejudices (and ignorance) to stand in way of reporting what may be news for others, I asked Amirkhanian to do my job. He did, see below, but let me first mention two events this week related to the story:
- On June 7 at 8 p.m. at The Lab, I am quoting: "A Bay Area all-star guitar group will join the composer for Guitar Trio (now called "G3" and scored for an expanded group of six guitars, bass, and drums)." Tickets on a $7-$15 sliding scale.
- On June 8 at 7 p.m. Chatham will speak to a small group in a Mission District art studio, and show film footage of his work performed mostly in Europe, where he has lived since 1987. Admission is $75, but SFCV readers receive a deep discount, and may attend for $25, by using the promotional code ROSE100 on the ticket website.
This also guarantees reserved free seating for The Lab event on June 7. How will the Other Minds folks know about the purchase of one event at the other? Via Eventbrite on their iPhones, I am told; new-music people in the old days would not have had the equivalent of iAnything — everybody around The Kitchen was righteously poor, and Philip Glass drove a cab ...
Quoth Amirkhanian:
The sound of 100 electric guitars performing a five-movement, hour-long symphony will be heard Nov. 17, in Richmond's Craneway Pavilion. It is a presentation by Other Minds, supported by a major grant from the Irvine Foundation. Applications from guitarists who would like to participate will be announced soon at otherminds.org.Rhys Chatham (b. 1952) is an anomaly in avant-garde music because his composing actually took root in his childhood experience of playing Renaissance composers John Bull and Giles Farnaby on his chosen instrument, the virginal. From that beginning, he has progressed to his present fame of being widely known abroad for his large ensemble works that combine the aesthetics of minimalism and punk rock.
Chatham grew up on the streets of Manhattan with a Trotskyite novelist father who counted Early Music proponent Albert Fuller among his friends. In order to prepare young Rhys to earn a living, his father sent him to study tuning with the legendary harpsichord builder William Dowd in Cambridge, MA.
Soon Chatham was on call for Gustav Leonhardt, Rosalyn Tureck, Albert Fuller and Glenn Gould as the go-to harpsichord tuner in New York. Meanwhile he learned flute at the Third Street Music School Settlement and later played the instrument’s modern repertoire — Varèse, Wolpe, and Boulez — opening up new personal vistas.
When Morton Subotnick came to teach a class at Third Street, he singled out Chatham as surprisingly well-read in literature and music and allowed him access to his electronic studio at NYU, along with Ingram Marshall, Charlemagne Palestine, and Maryanne Amacher.
Chatham went on to perform in La Monte Young’s pioneering drone group The Theater of Eternal Music. Eventually leaving drones behind, he composed a breakthrough work, Guitar Trio, which employed one pitch but focused on subtleties of overtones that emerged from the throbbing counterpoint of repeated notes. When I heard this attractive piece performed in 2008 in Moscow, the seed was planted to bring Rhys to San Francisco.
Chatham gradually adopted experimental rock’s sound and spectacle, filling his stages with eye-popping armies of guitarists gathered from each locale where he performed. Ear-popping they were not. In some movements the ensembles play pianissimo, lending an eerie and unexpected subtlety to multi-movement works like A Secret Rose.