Several decades after its first performances in Rome in the mid-1960s, Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV) continues to enjoy a cult status. Known for its variable line-up and often remembered for the trio of avant-garde musicians Frederic Rzewski, Alvin Curran, and Richard Teitelbaum, the group would have crossed paths with the likes of Giacinto Scelsi, Cornelius Cardew, the Chicago Arts Ensemble, and Yoko Ono among many others. With over 200 performances in Europe and the United States in the first five years of its existence, it is considered a pioneer of live electronic music and free improvisation. MEV is also known for having pushed its aesthetic of spontaneity to the point of involving audiences during concerts; some of these events even ended in near riots, fires, or being ‘greeted with hurled hot dogs and Coke cans’.Footnote 1 Closely associated with the student protest movements of the late 1960s in Europe, MEV is also remembered as one of the few ensembles to have pushed the boundaries of the musical establishment and venture into the world of jazz and underground music. However, MEV’s history – like many mythologized narratives – remains full of gaps and ambiguities. This is particularly true with regard to its first months of activity in Rome between 1966 and 1968.
Among the unknown aspects of MEV’s early activities are notably the dates of its first performances, the programmes the group performed at the time, and who participated in them. It is also unclear in the literature when exactly the group turned to improvised music. Some authors, such as Amy Beal, suggest that improvisation probably coincided with the group’s founding in 1966 and was integrated into its live electronic activities.Footnote 2 The influence of the Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza (GINC) is also difficult to measure. GINC was an Italian musical collective founded in 1964 by the composer Franco Evangelisti to explore improvisation in the vein of Larry Austin’s New Music Ensemble (NME) – Austin was based in the Italian capital at the time and introduced Evangelisti to the music of NME. Not only did Rzewski perform with GINC in 1966 before forming MEV, but Ivan Vandor and John Heineman, early members of GINC,Footnote 3 would later join MEV. In her article on MEV, Beal also discusses Evangelisti’s mentorship of MEV musicians: ‘Nuova Consonanza clearly influenced MEV not only in their thinking about composition, improvisation and collectivity – and their “alternative” status outside the standard practices of the musical establishment – but also in their performance practice and approach to the production of sound itself.’Footnote 4 However, while the connection between GINC and MEV appears to be obvious – it is no coincidence that two improvisation groups were born on the Roman avant-garde scene just two years apart – there is little documentation to measure with care the very nature of this connection.
A number of previously unexplored documents, studied in the context of this contribution, shed light on the early stages of the group’s development and these unknown aspects. In particular, Frederic Rzewski’s archives, currently kept by his family in Brussels,Footnote 5 and his correspondence with family members or fellow composers, allow a better understanding concerning the creation of MEV and its early steps on the avant-garde scene of the time. Thanks to the study of these documents, it has been possible to define more precisely which members took part in the first performances, when they did, and the programme they performed, and to clarify the path that led the group from a live electronic approach to improvisation, which clearly appears in a later phase of the group’s development. Here, the alleged influence of Evangelisti and GINC seems less decisive than assumed in the literature. The impact of the artistic activism of the of the Living Theatre, present on the Italian soil in the mid-1960s, and frequented by members of MEV at the time, seems to explain in many ways the shift towards spontaneous music and the participation of the audience in the improvisations.
In this contribution, I first review the literature on the history of MEV, along with the more and less exploited sources that help to reconstruct this history. On the basis of these documents, I then clarify a number of unresolved issues, particularly concerning MEV’s early performances in Italy and northern Europe. A precise chronology of the group is then established, from 1966 to autumn 1968, when MEV began to involve the audience in their improvisations, notably with the piece Zuppa. Following this chronology, I take a closer look at MEV’s first months of activity to demonstrate that the group was fully embedded in the American live electronic music tradition, and thus relatively unconnected to the aesthetics developed by Franco Evangelisti and GINC. Finally, I examine MEV’s relationship with the Living Theatre, which was present in Rome at the same time, and argue that the group’s impulse towards spontaneous music owes first and foremost to the Artaudian and political approach developed by the experimental troupe.
MEV as we know it
As just mentioned, many aspects of MEV’s early history remain unknown. In a 1989 text, Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum reported that in 1971, during Frederic Rzewski’s move to New York, a box containing the MEV files was accidentally thrown down the incinerator chute.Footnote 6 The likely loss of these archives alone, however, does not explain the relative obscurity surrounding the group’s history. MEV has often been portrayed as a group that developed in a non-institutional framework, and certainly less institutional than GINC; some MEV members themselves have pointed this out.Footnote 7 The portrayal of the group as having operated within an underground environment is not inaccurate, far from it. The group’s daily public improvisation sessions in their studio in Trastevere – then an impoverished suburb of Rome – in autumn 1968, were indeed part of an almost counter-cultural ethos. And traces of such sessions survive only in rare and scattered testimonies. MEV’s connection with the student political uprisings of the late 1960sFootnote 8 also contributed to this image. This anti-institutional stance was not so rare at the time, however. It was shared by many avant-garde artists. Fluxus, which developed in Italy notably through Florentine conceptual artist Giuseppe Chiari,Footnote 9 a close associate of MEV, undoubtedly embodies this approach. The same goes for the experimental theatre troupe the Living Theatre, which will be discussed further in this article. As a matter of fact, such a counter-cultural approach was not incompatible with activities within an institutional framework at the time.Footnote 10 In the case of MEV, the group even seems to have performed more often in an institutional network (concert halls, museums, radios stations) than in alternative contexts. Therefore, the reasons for the obscurity of the group’s history cannot be found solely in its underground activity, which is sometimes somewhat mythologized.Footnote 11
Among the factors explaining the lack of knowledge about MEV, the issue of circulation must undoubtedly be called into question. For example, GINC, often compared to MEV, was a group of mostly Italian musicians, active in Rome, whose careers would later be studied and documented in Italy, for many of them. This is the case for Evangelisti, Mario Bertoncini, and, undoubtedly, Ennio Morricone, who also took part in GINC.Footnote 12 MEV, on the other hand, is a group of mostly American musicians, for the most part active on the Italian peninsula for a limited time, between 1966 and 1971. With the exception of Alvin Curran, who would remain permanently in Rome, Frederic Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum, Allan Bryant, and Jon Phetteplace would continue their careers outside Italy, while a second version of MEV (led by Rzewski) would sporadically continue its activities in the United States from the early 1970s onward.Footnote 13 For these Americans, who passed through Rome at the beginning of their careers thanks to American study grants, research in Italy has not been as developed.Footnote 14 Not to mention that most of MEV members would partly abandon spontaneous group music to focus on their individual careers, with sometimes greater success. Rzewski is thus more often remembered for his minimalist pieces Coming Together (1971) and Attica (1972), or his piano variations The People United Will Never Be Defeated! (1975), than for his work with his Roman improvisation group a decade earlier.Footnote 15
The study of a group such as MEV is also complex in itself: MEV is a collective whose members, as well as its repertoire, have been in constant variation during the five years of its existence in Italy. It began as a trio, then evolved into a quintet, adding more or less frequent members, and finally, as mentioned earlier, including the audience itself during its performances starting from autumn 1968. As a matter of fact, the only permanent member of the group was Frederic Rzewski. In a text written in 1968, Rzewski himself named twenty-four people who collaborated with the group:
Larry Austin, Steve Ben Israel, Allan and Barbara Bryant, Cornelius Cardew, Franco Cataldi, Giuseppe Chiari, Pierre Clementi, Ivan and Patricia Coaquette, John Coppola, Alvin Curran, Hugh Davies, Vittorio Gelmetti, Steve Lacy, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Evan Parker, Jon Phetteplace, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Carol Plantamura, Frederic Rzewski, Edith Schloss, Richard Teitelbaum, and Ivan Vandor.Footnote 16
In a 2008 article published on the MEV blog, and in the inclusive approach that would characterize MEV, dozens of ‘collaborators’ were identified, including the Chicago Arts Ensemble, painter Gregory Gillespie, Charlotte Moorman, Moog, and even the Rebibbia prison where MEV performed on 20 November 1968.Footnote 17 If the history of MEV is sometimes so mysterious, it is therefore also because of its elusive form. It should also be noted, and this is an important point, that the group’s archives are not centralized. At the time of writing, the individual archives of several members of the group have not yet been inventoried; this is the case, for example, with the archives of Rzewski (who died in 2021) and Teitelbaum (who died in 2020), while those of Alvin Curran, private, are kept by the composer in Rome.Footnote 18
Three works a few years apart have attempted to shed light on the history of MEV. In 2009, Amy Beal offered an in-depth exploration of the group’s activities and social aspirations, drawing extensively on John Phetteplace’s (one of the early members of the group) previously untapped archives.Footnote 19 David W. Bernstein followed in 2010, again emphasizing the group’s musical activism.Footnote 20 In 2014, Luigi Pizzaleo published the first monograph on the group, written in Italian and based on research in Alvin Curran’s personal archives.Footnote 21 To these works we will add Tenley Bick’s recent article on MEV’s collaboration with Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Lo Zoo action art group in Turin in December 1968.Footnote 22 But the numerous and rich testimonies published by the group’s musicians themselves over the years should also be mentioned. Larry Austin’s journal Source welcomed very early on – notably in its third issue in 1968 dedicated to groups of new music – MEV musicians’ reflections on their activities as well as instructions for the works they performed.Footnote 23 Among MEV musicians, Rzewski has given regular testimony about his activities. His conversations with Monique Verken in 1969 are particularly noteworthy,Footnote 24 as is the extensive collection of essays, unpublished letters, and programmes published by MusikTexte in 2007. Alvin Curran testified about MEV in Soundings in 1976,Footnote 25 and provided a series of testimonies about his activities from that period in an interview with David W. Bernstein published by Daniela Tortora,Footnote 26 while Richard Teitelbaum published an article in 1974 on some of his electronic activities within MEV, specifically on biofeedback music.Footnote 27
For the purpose of the present contribution, I had the opportunity to revisit John Phetteplace’s archives preserved at the University of California, San Diego, which Amy Beal had already studied in 2009, and to supplement them with research from other collections: in particular Franco Evangelisti’s archive at the Fondazione Scelsi, Rome, and the Alvin Lucier Papers or the Christian Wolff Papers kept at the New York Public Library (and their correspondence with Frederic Rzewski), among others. In particular, Frederic Rzewski’s archive, kept by his family in Brussels, make a decisive contribution to the understanding the early history of MEV. Among a series of documents, two typewritten documents by Rzewski, dating from 1968 and 1970, respectively, list MEV’s concerts. The first is a list that goes from the founding of the group in 1966 to January 1968. The second completes and continues this list of concerts until April 1970, with a series of handwritten notes from Rzewski, indicating in particular the fees received for the concerts mentioned. This last document lists a total of 177 performances. The two documents, together with others preserved in the Rzewski archive, have helped to fill in gaps in the group’s history or to provide new insights into the development and interpretation of various facts related to this history, as explored by Beal, Bernstein, and Pizzaleo. In particular, I focus on a number of uncertainties concerning the early activities of the group. One of these concerns the date of the group’s first performance; another concerns the nature of the group’s early activities, specifically whether they involved the performance of written works or, from the outset, improvisation. Finally, another unknown relates to the founding members of MEV.
Early experiments, first improvisations, and group members
Regarding the group’s first performance, a series of sources identify the Avanguardia Musicale I festival, organized by the members of the group themselves at the Accademia Filarmonica Romana, a musical institution situated in the Flaminio quartiere in Rome, in September 1966,Footnote 28 as the musicians’ first public performance.Footnote 29 Over the course of two evenings,Footnote 30 Rzewski, Bryant, Curran, Teitelbaum, and Phetteplace, accompanied by Maria Monti (an Italian singer and actress) and John Heineman (himself a member of GINC), performed their own electronic works (such as Rzewski’s Zoölicher Garten (1964) or Bryant’s Quadruple Play (1967)) as well as electronic pieces by other composers of new music: John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 5 (1952), David Behrman’s Waye Train (1966), and Vittorio Gelmetti’s Intersezioni II e III (1965). Other informations, however, suggest that a concert by the musicians may have taken place earlier in June, at St Paul’s Church, the American church in Rome where concerts and cultural events are regularly held. In particular, Frederic Rzewski himself claims in a 1991 text that MEV ‘came into being in the spring of 1966 when Alvin and I organized a concert of new experimental music in the crypt of Saint Paul’s American church in Rome’.Footnote 31 This ambiguity regarding MEV’s early activities is reflected in the concert chronologies compiled by Frederic Rzewski himself mentioned here earlier. The original 1968 version begins with the Avanguardia Musicale I concerts, while the revised version adds a concert at St Paul’s church a few months before, in June 1966. Incidentally, the account of the beginnings at St Paul’s has been taken up by David W. Bernstein, who writes:
Something extraordinary began to take form in the spring of 1966 when some American composers living in Rome presented a concert of experimental music in the crypt of St. Paul’s American Church.Footnote 32
No trace of a programme or press clipping attest a possible concert by the group at the time. However, an article written by Edith Schloss about MEV and published in the Village Voice in 1969, provides a clue to such a mention. Schloss was a painter, author, and critic, best known for her landscapes and still lifes in oil or watercolour. Schloss lived in Rome in the 1960s and collaborated with Alvin Curran, who later became her companion. In her 1969 article, she wrote:
It happened in a church crypt: I had a show at the American Student’s and Artist’s Center in the round gallery in the basement of the American church in Rome, Alvin Curran had written a tape called ‘Watercolor Music’ to go with my watercolors, and when one day several composers came to listen to it they said why not have a concert here. That is how [MEV] started more or less.Footnote 33
The idea of forming a group must then have at least begun to take shape by late spring 1966. In his memoirs of the time, Curran also mentions a concert that took place in the crypt, bringing together Jerome Rosen, Jed Curtis, Allan Bryant, and himself.Footnote 34 In practice, the formalization of a group with a proper name came later. While the founders of MEV did indeed come together for Avanguardia Musicale I in September 1966, there is no mention of a group as such at the time, or in Rzewski’s correspondence. Even the next documented appearance of MEV, on 19 December 1966, at the Teatro dei Satiri, did not explicitly mention ‘Musica Elettronica Viva’ but rather a ‘concerto di musica elettronica viva’, which could literally be translated as a ‘live electronic music concert’. An article in the newspaper Il Tempo dated 18 December 1966, announcing the concert, similarly states that the group defines itself as ‘di musica Elettronica viva’ [‘of live electronic music’], ‘because the music is not produced using magnetic tapes but is each time performed based on scores; scores that meet the demands of new instruments’.Footnote 35 The group then performed without Teitelbaum, who had returned to the United States.Footnote 36 Rzewski, Phetteplace, Bryant, and Curran were joined by other musicians, such as Michiko Hirayama, a Japanese-born singer and renowned interpreter of Giacinto Scelsi’s works. Works by Bryant were performed, as well as those by Rzewski, Chiari, Cage, and Behrman.Footnote 37
In a letter dated 18 December 1967, addressed to his parents, Rzewski explained the group’s early performances:
At that time there was no ‘group’, strictly speaking. There were 10 or so people who worked together in a loose sort of collaboration, all more or less interested in performing their own works or in performing in general. Besides myself, these were: Allan Bryant, Alvin Curran, Carol Plantamura, Jon Phetteplace, Giuseppe Chiari, Vittorio Gelmetti, Evan Vandor [sic], and various others who worked with us from time to time.
It was always my intention to get out of the ‘play’ stage and build up a serious and tightly-knit group of musicians dedicated enough to their work to go on the road and bring this unusual, for Europe at least, completely new form of music before a wider public.
As a matter of fact, the name of the group as such only appeared for the first time in January 1967, as part of the concerts organized by the contemporary culture magazine Marcatrè. The concert was organized at the Teatro dei Satiri by Rzewski and Vittorio Gelmetti (a member of the editorial staff of the magazine). Rzewski, Curran, Gelmetti, Bryant, Phetteplace, Hirayama, and also Rzewski’s wife, Nicole Rzewski, conducted by Roman composer Domenico Guàccero, played Rzewski’s Impersonations (1965). They were then identified as the ‘Gruppo musica elettronica viva’.Footnote 38
A second blind spot mentioned earlier concerns the nature of the group’s early performances. In her 2009 article, Amy Beal wrote that ‘in early September 1966, a group improvisation complemented the ambient sounds of the Piazza della Rotonda’, near the Pantheon where Phetteplace lived.Footnote 39 For Beal, the group’s first improvisations could therefore date from 1966. A recording of an improvisation in John Phetteplace papers would bear witness to this for Beal: ‘Jon Phetteplace dates this performance as September 4, 1967, but all available evidence suggests that this session, labelled “Improvisation 5,” was recorded one year earlier.’Footnote 40 The retrospective account by Curran and Teitelbaum might suggest the same:
From memory: MEV was begun one evening in the spring of 1966 by Alan Bryant, Alvin Curran, Jon Phetteplace, Carol Plantamura, Frederic Rzweski [sic], Richard Teitelbaum and Ivan Vandor in a room in Rome overlooking the Pantheon. Though the group would never be able to play in this remarkable domed temple with a hole in its top, 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.Footnote 41
Again, however, a number of sources and testimonies show that the group began improvising not at their first concerts in late 1966 or even early 1967, but many months later. In this respect, it is worth noting that there is no trace of Vandor’s presence before a concert in March 1967, and of Plantamura before Avanguardia Musicale II, at the end of the same month. In other words, Alvin Curran is most certainly talking about spring 1967. There is no mention of improvisation as such in any of the concert programmes prior to summer 1967, whether written by the musicians or not. In a letter to his parents dated 20 February 1967 kept in Brussels, Rzewski makes a separate announcement of his activity with GINC – ‘an ensemble of composers-performers improvising’ – and his activity with his ‘electronic music group’ MEV, without making any stylistic connection or mentioning improvisation in the case of MEV. As an illustration of this retrospective rewritings concerning MEV’s concert dates, it should also be noted that in this same letter Rzewski announced, independently of MEV’s concert identified as such, another concert of his own works at Saint Paul’s Church on 1 March. In his 1968 list, this same concert would be added to MEV’s concerts.
As far as the recordings of improvisations by Phetteplace preserved in San Diego are concerned, there is no indication that they are incorrectly dated. In fact, in his 1967–69 notebook,Footnote 42 Phetteplace wrote well about these recordings in September 1967. In a text entitled Degrees of Freedom, written a little before, in summer 1967, in which he defended the idea that music should be learned as a system for studying degrees of freedom, he also wrote the following:
It is probably as a result of exploring this kind of relation of degrees of freedom that we have begun improvising in a group with electronic means … One must be given the opportunity to try them all out, test these degrees of freedom, for this systematization of the materials of composition to be meaningful to a composer at all. This is what has led me to participate with my friends in an electronic improvisation and not the conception of a ‘composition in space’ that Rzewski has advanced as a branch of ‘communication’.Footnote 43
The mention of Rzewski’s ‘composition in space’ is notable here. It actually refers to the ‘Notes on a Space-piece’, written by Frederic Rzewski on 3 July 1967 and preserved in one of his own (untitled) notebook in Brussels. This was the almost definitive draft of the Plan for Spacecraft that was published in the journal Source a few months later,Footnote 44 and also the instructions for the band’s first live improvisation. In his letter to his parents dated 18 December 1967, Rzewski confirmed that improvisation was born in summer 1967:
In the summer [1967] the Living Theater was here for a while. I had known some of the actors since Berlin, and was always very impressed with their work, and it was partly due to their presence here that I got the idea of starting a completely new kind of work: free improvisation using electrical means.
It is obvious that the interpretation of written electronic pieces such as those written and performed by Cage or Behrman at the time comes close to improvisation in many respects – we will come to this later here – but improvisation as such at MEV and thematized as such is then only attested in the second phase of the group’s development, almost nine months after its ‘first’ concert. In an account from 2000, Allan Bryant wrote:
After a few months of concerts in France and Rome, Alvin and Vittorio Gilmetti [sic] and Ivan Vandor did pieces with us. I had a lot of pieces I wanted to do, but apparently they didnt and we started to do an improvisation for the 2d half.Footnote 45
Bryant’s testimony from 2000 sheds further light on the history of the group and its members. He wrote:
In 1966 Jon Phetteplace, Rzewski and I formed MEV, to do strange amplified and electronic pieces. Alvin Curran would have joined us but he didnt have a nutty piece like this to do. … First it was just Jon, Fred, Alvin and I. … Then the whole concert became just an improvisation – with people like Ivan Vandor, Carol Plantamura and Richard Titelbaum [sic] joining in.Footnote 46
Thus, for Bryant, the group began as a trio, without Curran and Teitelbaum (who we know was in the United States from autumn 1966 to autumn 1967). While this assertion partly contradicts certain later testimonies by Rzewski, Curran, and others, it is not entirely unfounded: in Hugh Davies’s Reference Davies1968 International Electronic Music Catalog, compiled by the author on the basis of information gathered from the musicians themselves, MEV is indeed presented as a ‘live electronic music performance group with studio’ consisting of Bryant, Phetteplace, and Rzewski only.Footnote 47 In his February 1967 letter to his parents, Rzewski wrote about MEV: ‘our electronic music group me, Jon Phetteplace, and Allan Bryant, two other American composers who live here’. The same was true of the article in Il Tempo on 18 December 1966: the core of the group was made up of this same trio.
MEV 1966–1968: a chronology
Alvin Curran’s work at the Edith Schloss exhibition at St Paul’s Church in May–June 1966 was mentioned earlier, as was the Avanguardia Musicale I festival the following September, and the concert at the Teatro dei Satiri in December 1966. These three events form the embryonic part of MEV’s history. The group then performed under its own name in a concert at the same Teatro dei Satiri on 23 and 24 January 1967. According to Curran, it was Vittorio Gelmetti, an electronic music composer close to MEV, who came up with the band’s name,Footnote 48 which had already been partially used a few months earlier, as mentioned earlier.Footnote 49 A new MEV performance then took place on 1 March – a concert of ‘New Choral Music’Footnote 50 – again as part of the Concerti del Marcatrè, at St Paul’s American church. The following day, 2 March, the group performed again as part of an interdisciplinary event entitled Grammatica No Stop Teatro, organized by the art and literature magazine Grammatica for the launch of its second issue.
At the end of March and beginning of April 1967, the Avanguardia Musicale II festival took place once more, organized by and with Musica Elettronica Viva. As at the first festival, the group played live electronic works written by its members, as well as those by Chiari and Gelmetti. New York’s Sonic Arts Group was also present, with Robert Ashley, David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, and Gordon Mumma. Later in April 1967, on three successive evenings at Rome’s Teatro Centouno, MEV members performed Projector piece 2 (1967), a sound and light piece by Rzewski and Clyde Steiner.Footnote 51 MEV’s first concert outside Rome took place on 3 May 1967, at the Fondation Maeght in St Paul de Vence, France. For the first time, a collective work by MEV, Rotonda Combine, for ‘any 4 tapes, photocell-mixer and extras’Footnote 52 was performed. On 13 and 14 May 1967, MEV were joined by Larry Austin for a double concert at the Sala Beloch in Rome. They played a piece by Austin, Accidents (1968), and pieces by MEV members. Another MEV concert took place on 16 June 1967 in the Aula Magna of the Residenza Universitaria Internazionale, and the following day the group recorded for the national public broadcasting company of Italy, RAI.
Frederic Rzewski’s notebook, preserved in Brussels, contains three-page typescript dated 3 July 1967, ‘Notes on Space-Piece, experiment in group composition’. This is, as stated earlier, the first draft of the group’s improvised piece:
Each performer considers his own situation as a sort of labyrinth. Each begins by making music in the way in which he knows how, with his own rhythms, his own choice of materials, et cetera, without particular regard for the others, or for setting up some kind of simple ensemble situation.Footnote 53
This group improvisation was performed for the first time in concert by the group on 11 September 1967, at the Musée Rath in Geneva as part of the Rencontres Internationales, together with a series of the ensemble’s usual pieces.Footnote 54 At the beginning of October, the group embarked on a first tour, in West Germany, with Richard Teitelbaum, back on the continent, as well as Carol Plantamura and Ivan Vandor (already present at the Musée Rath). In early October 1967, MEV gave a series of performances in Berlin and Munich, followed later that month by a concert at Naples. MEV systematically alternated at the time between individual pieces and the collective improvisation The Spacecraft.
Following a concert in Rome on 10 November 1967, MEV undertook a second tour through Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands, performing and recording in cities including Nuremberg, Munich, Cologne, Brussels, Leuven, and Bremen. In December 1967 and January 1968, MEV continued its tour with performances in Amsterdam, Paris, and Knokke, followed by a series of concerts across the Netherlands, including Groningen, Eindhoven, and The Hague. Between March and September 1968, MEV performed widely across Italy and Europe, with concerts in Rome, Parma, Düsseldorf, London, Avignon, and Venice, including appearances at the Festival Internazionale del Teatro Universitario and the Avignon Festival.
Autumn 1968 marked a new phase for MEV. For six weeks, between September and October 1968, the group played every night at their studio in Via Peretti, inviting the audience, sometimes as many as thirty-five people, to improvise with the band. On 25 and 26 October, MEV played at the Galleria L’Attico in Rome with Franco Cataldi, Ivan Coaquette, M. Cohen, Giuseppe Chiari, Alvin Curran, Simone Forti, Vittorio Gelmetti, Frederic Rzewski, Steve Lacy, Jon Phetteplace, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Richard Teitelbaum. This was the beginning of Zuppa (1968), sometimes called Free Soup, from which will emerge The Soundpool, where MEV tour listeners were invited to bring their own sound and throw it into the ‘Soundpool’Footnote 55 (see list of concerts in Table 1).
Table 1 MEV’s concerts 1966 until the first performance of Zuppa in October 1968
MEV’s electronic roots
MEV is often remembered as one of the first free improvisation groups, along with Larry Austin’s New Music Ensemble, Franco Evangelisti’s GINC and AMM, which Cornelius Cardew later joined.Footnote 56 And indeed, one of MEV’s major innovations was to develop improvisation on the avant-garde scene of the time; and even to open it up to members of the audience. As mentioned earlier, there is an obvious connection between indeterminacy and the experimental approach that developed in the wake of John Cage from the early 1950s, and improvisation or spontaneous music favoured by MEV. It is so true so that an author such as George Lewis (and late member of MEV) even suggested that Cage’s emphasis on spontaneity was influenced by bebop; Cage himself then partly disguised this influence.Footnote 57 But what is clear from the MEV archives, and what I would like to emphasize here, is that MEV of the early months was in no way as paradoxical as it may seem, in the tradition of free improvisation à la Larry Austin or GINC, of which it could have been an electronic version. MEV, before July 1967, is a band whose sole aim is to play live electronic music.
In this respect, John Cage’s influence on the group’s aesthetic seems more than crucial. Rzewski bore witness to this in a series of retrospective texts.Footnote 58 We also know that Rzewski, through Christian Wolff and with David Behrman, his classmates at Harvard in the 1950s, invited David Tudor there in 1956; Tudor came with Cage himself, which was the first direct contact between Rzewski and Cage.Footnote 59 By this time, Cage had already written pieces that used electronics and left at the same time a great deal of freedom to the performer, such as Imaginary Landscape No. 5 and Williams Mix (1952). Indeed, the link between electronics and Cagean indeterminacy is a crucial explanation for the development of live electronics groups. As Gordon Mumma, a member of the Sonic Arts Union, explained in Source:
The Cage group of the early fifties … was certainly the most significant extra-institutional group – culturally, musically, and artistically nourishing to all the individuals in it. It was a group which worked in the most radical innovations in music. Since then, other groups have formed, such as the Christian Wolff group in Boston; the international revolutionary group started in New York by Dick Higgins called Fluxus; the ONCE Group; the Foss improvisation ensemble; La Monte Young’s Theater of Eternal Music; Udo Kasemets’s intermedia group in Toronto; Jerry Hunt’s Dallas Chamber Ensemble; the group around Charlotte Moorman in New York; Takehisa Kosugi’s Group-ONGAKU in Tokyo; the New Music Ensemble of Davis; Musica Elettronica Viva of Rome; Cornelius Cardew’s improvisation ensemble in London called AMM; Il Gruppo Internazionale di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza.Footnote 60
One of the works regularly performed by MEV in the early part of their career was Imaginary Landscape 5, in Phetteplace’s version, for two players with two tape recorders and phonograph. Rzewski’s Zoolicher Garten (1964), which was also one of the first pieces performed by MEV, also owes a great deal to Cagean aesthetics. The piece is based on the formal principle of a ‘system of relations’ applied to electronics.Footnote 61 But above all, it bears witness to Rzewski’s joint interest in electronics. One of Rzewski’s first contacts with electronics as a composer took place in Gehrard Steinke’s Berlin studio in 1964 (where he conceived Zoolicher Garten). There is no doubt about Rzewski’s penchant for electronics in the few months before MEV’s creation. Alvin Curran explains that after a spring spent in Buffalo in 1966, Frederic Rzewski ‘was into electronics and had brought back with him some cheap contact mikes and Lafayette mixers, plus some discarded circuitry of David Behrman’s’.Footnote 62 The connection with Behrman is not insignificant. Back in April 1966, Behrman and Lucier, both very close to Rzewski, formed the Sonic Arts Group, a collective of experimental composers and performers exploring live electronics that also included Robert Ashley and Gordon Mumma. In July 1966, Rzewski and Lucier already exchanged letters about the possibility of the group performing in Rome, which they did at the Avanguardia Musicale II festival.Footnote 63 One of the first pieces MEV played before that was Behrman’s Wave Train, in which pickups were placed around the body of a grand piano to explore properties of feedback and resonance; and Wave Train was an integral part of the Sonic Arts Group’s repertoire. In an interview that Rzewski and Teitelbaum gave to Joel Chadabe in 1997, Rzewski said about MEV: ‘In the beginning, we weren’t doing anything collective. We made music by Cage, Behrman and others.’Footnote 64
As a matter of fact, this live electronic approach was not uncommon at the time. The Sonic Arts Group and MEV were two of the groups or collective initiatives of this kind. In New York, for instance, in 1964 at the latest, Monte Young began the Theatre of Eternal Music, which used live electronic equipment and improvised parts.Footnote 65 John Phetteplace knew Young and his music well. In a programme for S2FM, the Florentine electronic music studio with which he collaborated before founding MEV, he mentioned as an inspiration the amplification of strings and voices used by the composer.Footnote 66 Pauline Oliveros, a member of the San Francisco Tape Center, also made electronic music, some of it improvised or spontaneous at the beginning of the 1960s. David W. Bernstein even explains that Oliveros had been experimenting with electronic and improvised music (in this case using tape loops) at least in 1958, with Terry Riley and Loren Rush, for KPFA, a Bay Area listener-sponsored radio station.Footnote 67
The presence of MEV in Hugh Davies’s Reference Davies1968 catalogue of electronic music is not insignificant, as already stated. Here, MEV is presented as a live electronics group. But Davies’s catalogue is also interesting in that it allows us to delve into the programme of works played by MEV, at least until mid-1967 with the appearance of The Spacecraft in MEV’s programmes.Footnote 68 We have already mentioned a number of works in this programme. It included individual pieces by MEV musicians (Rzewski’s Composition for Two (1964), Piece with Projectors (1966); Phetteplace’s Solo for Cello, Paesaggio Naturale (1966); Bryant’s Quadruple Play (1966)). It also included works by other composers: Cage’s Variations IV, Behrman’s Wave Train and Gelmetti’s Traumdeutung (1967). Finally, it included collective pieces of MEV such as Rotonda Combine (1967). Most of these pieces consisted of a series of more or less specific instructions for acoustic-electronic pieces combining tapes, sine-wave generators and micro-contacts, amplifying traditional or prepared instruments or artefacts (such as Rzewski’s amplified glass plates for Composition for Two), the signal of which was more or less modified (e.g., ring modulation, reverberation).
As mentioned earlier, from summer 1967, MEV turned to improvised music with The Spacecraft, usually played at the end of a concert after a few individual pieces. Zuppa is often remembered as the piece that reflects a later development in MEV, from autumn 1968 onwards, when the public was invited to take part in a musical performance, which would later lead to The Soundpool in 1969. In fact, other MEV pieces made the transition to a participatory aesthetic. Symphony, written in June 1968 was for instance an invitation to explore participation and space. A typescript preserved in Rzewski’s archives in Brussels provides the following instructions:
If there are people present who are not singing or whose voices are timid or weak, one tries to draw them into the drone or to encourage or reinforce them. One embraces strangers. The music is a pretext for the momentary banishment of shame.
Street Music, written in August 1968 shortly after MEV’s performance at the Avignon Festival, is an invitation to take over the public space and gave rise to a performance in December 1968 with the Lo Zoo action art group in Turin.Footnote 69 The same applies to Community Sing, written by Alvin Curran around the same time. Play, also performed in Turin in December 1968, explains Rzewski, is a continuation of The Spacecraft, with the abandonment of electronics in favour of a more open form.Footnote 70
Rzewski, Evangelisti, and the living theatre
From live electronic music to free improvisation to involving the audience in performances, there is certainly an internal progression due to the members of MEV themselves. In his book dedicated to MEV, Luigi Pizzaleo transcribes an extract from an unpublished text by Richard Teitelbaum. For Teitelbaum, it was a comment made by the painter Gregory Gillespie before Zuppa, about his own feeling of exclusion from MEV’s performances, which would have been too hermetic, that led Rzewski to the idea of opening up the music to include all those present.Footnote 71 But what about the supposed influence of GINC on MEV’s transition to improvised music before that? Did Evangelisti contribute to putting MEV on the path of improvisation? We need to go back to the early history of GINC to answer the question.
In the early 1960s, Evangelisti was a Roman composer and habitué of the Darmstadt Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik. He composed serial music and electronic music, and he discovered the Cagean aesthetic: from 1957 to 1962, he composed Random or not Random, dedicated to John Cage, then Aleatorio in 1959. It was after this work that Evangelisti stopped composing. Alvin Curran, in Rome from the beginning of 1964, testified to Evangelisti’s stance in this respect. When they met, at the time, Evangelisti told him: ‘You make music? But don’t you know that there is no more music to compose?’Footnote 72 The encounter between Evangelisti and Austin during his stay in Rome in 1964–65 was narrated by the latter:
I played the tapes for Franco Evangelisti, the Italian composer, who was simply astounded: ‘What processes ‘are you using, what score?’ Nothing, I would reply; it’s all the group dynamic, interacting with one another. That was common to jazz, of course, usually based on some tune or chord changes, but not with contemporary classical music so much. We were our own model, as it were. Franco heard these tapes and said, ‘I want to form such a group here in Rome!’ So, we organized a group of composer-performers made up mostly of composer-keyboardists. The variety of instruments wasn’t nearly as great as in the New Music Ensemble. We did a concert that year on the Nuova Consonanza Series in Rome. The group was named Il Gruppo Improvisazione di Nuova Consonanza [sic] and continued after I left. The idea also spawned other groups like the Musica Elettronica Viva with Frederic Rzewski and Cornelius Cardew’s group AMM.Footnote 73
Curran knew Evangelisti well, but Rzewski knew him even better. Evangelisti was his witness at his wedding with Nicole Abeloos in Rome in 1963. But most of all Rzewski played with GINC. In August 1966, Rzewski recorded an LP with the group for RCA Italiana, and a few weeks later he joined the group to improvise on the last night of the Avanguardia Musicale I festival. By March 1967, however, and while MEV had not yet turned to improvisation, there seemed to have been a break. In a letter to his mother in February, Rzewski had announced that he would take part in a concert with GINC at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna on 20 March 1967. However, he never did. In the documentary Nuova Consonanza. Komponisten improvisieren im Kollektiv for the Norddeutscher Rundfunk of Hamburg, which captured part of the concert and interviewed some of the members of GINC,Footnote 74 Rzewski testified on his own:
It was interesting to participate in this thing to clarify certain ideas about improvisation. This concept of improvisation is questionable to me. So from that, I learned that improvisation is only a first stage of composition. And if it serves to make composition, then it is worth it. But the idea of improvisation as a valid musical form in itself seems very questionable to me. And since this seems to be the basic attitude of this group, I have distanced myself somewhat from it.Footnote 75
Did Rzewski really distance himself from improvisation, only to change his mind a few months later? Was there a conflict between the American composer and his Italian colleagues? No exchanges have been preserved on which to judge. A possibility is that, a few weeks after the interview of the German TV, on 13 and 14 May 1967, Larry Austin was to play with MEV at the Sala Beloch, abandoning a concert project with Nuova Consonanza after a complicated correspondence between Evangelisti and Austin.Footnote 76 But regardless of any possible dispute, it is worth noting – as already mentioned – the very tenuous connection between GINC and MEV in the available sources, especially in the writings of Rzewski himself. As mentioned earlier, MEV’s approach to live electronics was completely separate from that of GINC until July 1967. Some members of MEV were certainly familiar with GINC improvisation, even before MEV was formed. But again, it was not until July 1967 that Rzewski seemed to embrace it as a valid form of expression, six months after he had rejected it. How can we understand this turnaround thanks to the archives?
It is crucial to distinguish first between the approaches of the two groups. The work of GINC and MEV cannot be simply equated only because they made improvised music. Rzewski’s Plan for Spacecraft followed an evolutionary trajectory: the musicians start from chaos, go through a phase of sonic exorcism and then seek collective unity, trying to find a fundamental rhythm that transcends their automatisms. This dialectical, almost ritualistic vision gives improvisation a political and spiritual meaning. In contrast, GINC, under the guidance of Franco Evangelisti, did not envisage teleological progression or musical convergence. Their improvisation was based on the raw interaction of sounds, in which the musicians did not play together in the traditional sense, but reacted to sound events without any pre-defined structure.Footnote 77 While Rzewski saw virtuosity as an obstacle to be overcome in order to achieve true expression, GINC radically deconstructed it, preferring raw sonic gestures and a questioning of musical language. Rzewski saw improvisation as an act of liberation, a transcendence of musical and social frameworks, while GINC took a more materialist and experimental approach, rejecting any hierarchy or underlying musical narrative.
In fact, it is once again in Rzewski’s correspondence that clues can be found concerning MEV’s move towards improvisation. In a letter to his parents dated 18 December 1967, he wrote the following:
In the summer the Living Theater was here for a while. I had known some of the actors since Berlin, and was always very impressed with their work, and it was partly due to their presence here that I got the idea of starting a completely new kind of work: free improvisation using electronic means. Some of us went to work and began experimental rehearsals in various apartments, and it immediately became clear that we had hit upon a very lively and promising method of music-making.
In summer 1967, the Living Theatre was indeed in Rome, continuing its exploration of spontaneous and collective theatre. In fact, since spring 1966, the company had been developing a free theatre in Reggio Emilia, in the north of Italy, introducing improvisation as a central element of its practice, which sometimes provoked scandalized reactions, as during a performance in Milan in May of that year.Footnote 78
Indeed, there were many interactions between the Living Theatre, Rzewski and the musicians of MEV at the time. In a letter to Alvin Curran dated July 1967, when Rzewski was conceiving the concept of The Spacecraft, he mentioned a sound production he made with three of his Living Theatre friends for the Italian television.Footnote 79 In the transcript of French visual artist Jean-Jacques Lebel’s interviews with the Living Theatre in winter 1968, when the troupe was preparing its revolutionary work Paradise Now, troupe member Henry Howard mentioned Rzewski, who gave him, he affirmed, contact microphones.Footnote 80 Steve Lacy, a member of MEV at the time, recalls:
It was a period of extreme experimentation, when the Living Theatre was inviting everyone on stage, it was a very revolutionary time, topsy-turvy, everything was wide open. We were letting the people join us, people were coming right up out of the audience and picking up instruments and any sound they made, we would make music out of it; car honks, squeals, animal noises, everything.Footnote 81
In a late interview with Luk Vaes, Rzewski even discussed the origin group’s name:
That was Musica Elettronica Viva. I don’t know how to translate it really. Did you mean ‘live electronic music on a stage’ or ‘long live electronic music? Is it a political statement? [audience laughs]
No, no. I think we were very close to the Living Theatre at the time.Footnote 82
The partially documented interactions between Rzewski and the Living Theatre in Italy, by summer 1967 – when Julian Beck was filming Oedipus Rex by Pier Paolo Pasolini between Rome and Morocco – are far from anecdotal in MEV’s shift towards an improvisational aesthetic. As he stated in a letter to his parents in December 1967, it was through his closeness to the troupe, rather than as a later development following his collaboration with Evangelisti, that improvisation truly emerged.
The precise nature of the relationship between MEV and the Living Theatre, however, remains largely undocumented. It is known that Rzewski was a close friend of Steve Ben Israel, a member of the Living Theatre who would later provide the spoken text for the composer’s Coming Together in 1974. Although the extensive writings of Julian Beck and Judith Malina offer no direct insight into this connection, there is clear evidence of a strong political affinity linking Rzewski and his colleagues to the troupe. With the Living Theatre, it was not merely a matter of aesthetic, or formal influence but also one of ideological convergence: just as the Living Theatre sought to abolish the boundaries between art and society by bringing theatre into public spaces,Footnote 83 MEV sought to make improvisation a collective practice freed from the traditional frameworks of the concert. The profoundly political nature of MEV’s activity is what united the musicians with the theatre troupe, pushing Artaud’s influence to its extreme by breaking down barriers with the audience. ‘MEV was a musical replica of the Living Theatre’, Ivan Coaquette told me in a recent conversation.Footnote 84 Rzewski would later say of the performance at the University Theater of Parma in March 1968, in collaboration with Jean-Jacques Lebel, an artist close to the Living Theatre: ‘The evening performance … basically spontaneous, mainly had to do with the necessity of taking theater out into the streets.’ As Rzewski made clear in the Parma Manifesto, written on the occasion of this performance, improvisation was not merely an artistic tool but also a political gesture. For Rzewski, improvisation constituted a heightened form of communication rooted in urgency and responsibility, capable of awakening sensitivities to the dangers of complacency and the need for transformation.Footnote 85
The exploration of Rzewski’s archives and the examination of MEV’s detailed chronology thus prove crucial in shedding light on certain unknown aspects of MEV’s history, particularly regarding its later transition to improvisation and its relationship with Evangelisti and GINC. Within MEV, musical collective improvisation aimed to create a more accessible and inclusive form of expression, breaking down the traditional hierarchies that separate musicians from the audience, the stage from the hall, and cultural elites from popular forms. By escaping the rigid frameworks of written composition and formal performance, MEV fostered a more immediate and interactive relationship among participants, where anyone could potentially become an active part of the musical process. In this dynamic, and following the example of the Living Theatre – far from the approach developed by GINC – improvisation in MEV was not merely a sonic exploration but also a profoundly political act, seeking to redefine the role of music in society and abolish the distance between artists and their audience.
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