Legendary improvisation ensemble, Musica Elettronica Viva have contributed as much to the opening of form as the very lexicon of mid-20th Century free music. Few could call themselves contemporaries of this collective begun in Rome in the spring of 1966, among them London's Spontaneous Music Ensemble and fellow explorers of free music and the academic vanguard, AMM. In the 50 years since MEV initially confounded European audiences, inspired lengthy debate and discourse and pushed at the very threshold of the premise of music the group has gone through intermittent periods of activity and dormancy. All the while its three central members continued their provocative and engaged exploration of the furthest fringes of sound, improv and composition. Alvin Curran, mixing life, art and performance in a single ongoing venture, with an extensive body of recordings among his artistic documents. Frederic Rzewski piano virtuoso and composer of the 1977, "The People United Will Never Be Defeated!", written while Professor of Composition at the Conservatoire Royal de Musique in Liège, Belgium, then directed by Musique Concrete and electro-acoustic pioneer, Henri Pousseur. The three having met while Bard College professor, Richard Tietelbaum, was studying composition under the tutelage of avant-garde titan, Luigi Nono and Goffredo Petrassi in Italy. Focusing on politically engaged live events and improvisational happenings, professional studio recordings can be seen as anathema to their autochthonous explorations generated at the time. Instead the larger body of the releases on vanguard jazz and impov label's like BYG Actuel represent the young ensemble "Live in Roma", on expressive recordings like 1970's "Leave the City" and 1969's "The Sound Pool". With the larger body of their recorded explorations documented on small edition CDRs and limited press LPs. Yet Milan-based label Alga Marghen, specializing in experimental historical obscurities, outsider music, and 20th Century composition have included in their catalog handsome reissues of the central "Friday" and "Spacecraft / Unified Patchwork Theory".
Curran, Tietelbaum and Rzewski continue to perform live in rare settings like this month's night at RedCat contemporary arts center Los Angeles, and Chapel Performance Space, Seattle. As well as release 21st Century performances in dialog with contemporaries as heard on 2004's "Apogee" with AMM and unearth further archival works like that of the extraordinary, (long overdue) and near-comprehensive New World Records retrospective, "MEV 40". For which, Alvin Curran supplied the spirited introduction; "Musica Elettronica Viva was begun one evening in the spring of 1966 by Allan 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 its 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 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."
