The Alvin Curran Fake Book

Pianist, composer, and pioneer of live electronic music, Alvin Curran performs a rare solo concert on piano and synthesizer. Democratic, irreverent, and “traditionally experimental,” Alvin Curran’s body of work combines sampling, environmental soundscapes, synthesized sound, and live instruments in the service of social, political, and spiritual change and “the restoration of dignity to the profession of making non-commercial music.”

Born and educated in the Eastern US, Curran (b. 1938) studied classical composition while playing jazz, pop, and dance music.  “Popular music,” he writes, “decades of it, from Stephen Foster to Snoop Dog, is the schoolyard, the conservatory from which we all graduated.” He co-founded the legendary Musica Elettronica Viva in Rome in 1965, the world’s first improvising electronic ensemble. Curran’s collaborators and co-performers are a who’s who of contemporary music, including composers Steve Reich, Michael Nyman, and John Cage, musical radicals Frederic Rzewski and Cornelius Cardew, improvisers Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton, and George Lewis, and multimedia experimenters La Monte Young and Robert Ashley.

The Alvin Curran Fake Book is a collection of compositions, improvising situations, and “hypotheses for making music” for unusual, and under-represented instruments - from bass saxophones to musical saws, jugs to oboe d’amore, singing tea kettles to piccolos – as well as pieces that can be played on any instrument. The music is written in such as way as to be playable by professionals and virtuosi as well as beginners and non-reading musicians. This long term project has been enabled by the Guggenheim Fellowship Program. Curran performs his own non-standard “standards” on piano and keyboard.