Draft text notes:  "Futurismo", compact audio disk featuring the music of composers whose work reflects Futurist attitudes.
Issued, 1998, by P22 type foundry, Rich Kegler, Producer.

The present selection
"Carnival Musicians", was Bice's early, first score for computer-synthesized sounds, done in 1984.  The descriptive scene is of a grotesque band dancing and flailing-in from afar. They build a frenzied crescendo, then disappear.

This piece and another, "Siena Renaissance Festival", were in part inspired by the composer's residency in Italy, during the 1960s. There he directed State University of New York art studies and coordinated activities with the University of Siena and the Academia Chigiana.

To Rich Kegler, Producer:
Rich - Thanks for taking the time to filter a little biographical info for the production.  I took time to read the Futurist manifestos, and began reflecting about any influences or parallels in my works.
Jack


John Avery Bice  (1923 - present)
"Carnival Musicians", 1984.

This Santa Fe-based (currently, Austin) composer/painter/video artist entered an early search for expressiveness through the technology of his times.  His first musical excursions (1959-1961), real time piano improvisations for the left hand, to be played back double speed, made innovative use of the tape recorder.  Then (1969-75) came tape loop audio collage works.  His latest compositions (1984 to present) employ sampled as well as synthesized sounds and feature original computer scores.  Many of these are written ultimately for live performance.

Bice's long-term search for expressive potential in mechanical and electronic tools thus seems quite obviously to reflect some of the spirit of the Futurist artists, poets and musicians of the turn of the 20th Century.  Yet, philosophically he differs greatly:

Experience Shapes Philosophy
Bice was a combat liaison photographer in Europe during World War II.  As such he was subjected to a different perspective no doubt - especially concerning the "glory of war" - than that of the Futurists.  The war's dramatic, violent milieu did give him adequate immersion in technological "solutions" - large and small.  His battlefield photo craft required spontaneous innovations for myriad, transient, mechanistic problems.

But this craft was functional, not expressive.  In contrast, within their fresh, turn-of-the-Century purview the Futurists foresaw marvelous, unfolding promises in science.  They lived within vibrant, swirling energies.  Their clanging, sleek, industrialized world obviously challenged the insipid dogma oozing out of cultural antiquity.  It all became a grand dynamic, inspiring the raucus - some would say reckless and callous - enthusiasms of those pre-WW I poets and artists.

Similarities with a Difference
Nevertheless, parallels evolved.  Bice recalls, "I grew up within the persistent sense of  'American ingenuity' and exploration.  My father and brother were engineers, and after the war I quite naturally embraced the American post-war culture of the mid-20th Century with its somewhat arid 'faith in science'."

Yet, this ethos, lacked the Futurists' self-aware ebullience.  It presented an undercurrent of doubts.  "For example, I still have troubling, early memories of the clean, brave-but-questionable world in the 1930s H.G. Wells movie, 'Things to Come', which I saw as an adolescent.  The film ends with artists storming the first launch to the Moon.  The artists were trying to claim a more humane purpose for mankind, that of creating a beautiful life on Earth, rather than polluting the Heavens."  (Contemporary talks of commercializing the Moon seem relevant here.)

Attitudes Mature
"So, I had an intuitive connection with gadgetry, but also a growing philosophical conviction - not a new idea - that technology must be mastered for both expressive and practical ends or become humanity's Armageddon.  Those experiences and compulsions (besides studying, in 1949, with Max Beckmann, whose Expressionistic images so powerfully, poetically depicted Nazi brutality and Gothic grotesqueries) shaped my attitudes as an artist."

"The music is the essence, the technology only a tool," Bice says, "yet each tool presents its own, expressive aesthetic to be explored and developed."  Consequently, while he has been an established painter for over fifty years, as a photographer he invented stereoptic techniques and devices and in the 1970s was a well-known innovator in the evolving video art movement - which for him typically became a combination of technical manipulation and visual and auditory poetry. 

Other Composers on the disk:
Tony Conrad
www.tonyconrad.com
Inonarumori, Unit Circle Music-BMI
Paul Szp
PaulSzp@localnet.com