At the same time that the liberation movement catalyzed by San Francisco's Compton Cafeteria Riot (1966) and New York City's Stonewall Uprising (1969) was blowing open closet doors, a wave of artistic experimentation was shattering time-honored definitions of what constituted music. One of the chief instigators of musical boundary-breaking on the West Coast was Fresno-born composer/radio producer Charles Amirkhanian (b. 1945). Co-founder of the Other Minds New Music Foundation, Amirkhanian became Music Director of KPFA-FM Pacifica Radio in Berkeley in 1969.
Amirkhanian began playing his text-sound compositions on the air. Benefiting from breakthroughs made at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, which opened its doors in 1960 and reconstituted itself at Mills College in 1966, Amirkhanian's taped text-sound constructions stopped people in their tracks. The number of doors they opened was roughly equal to the number of buttons they pushed.
You need only to listen to Amirkhanian's relatively short (5:28) composition "Mugic" (1973) to understand why he upset so many people. One of his six sound-text compositions just reissued by Other Minds Records on Lexical Music (CD, download), "Mugic" found its inspiration in the sounds of the hinde-whoo flute and the vocal music of the Ba-Benzele pygmies of the Congo. Amirkhanian's response to such cultural esoterica was to speak in a monotone and use a time-delay feedback loop to create permutations of his intentionally dull utterances. With its manipulated voicetrack punctuated by breath sounds and mechanical noises, "Mugic" brought to mind the sounds of a dog growling while daring you to tug on her rubber bone. The work ends with sounds similar to someone in the death throes. But as much as "Mugic" dares us to drop our preconceived notions of what constitutes music, it is also playing with us.
Amirkhanian's playful side emerges more fully in the dada-esque "Seatbelt Seatbelt" (1973), where his voice is joined by those of tenor John Duykers, pianist Karl Goldstein, composer Janice Giteck, and early-music artist Susan Napper. Beginning with the words "Seatbelt seatbelt," it expands to include "Chum chum quack quack bone." As the cacophony grows and sounds go in and out of phase, the 14:50 composition grows more ridiculous. By its end, those who have not thrown up their hands in dismay will likely have joined me in screaming with laughter.
And so it goes. Unless you get trapped in rational linearity, you will likely find the short "Dutiful Ducks" (1977) delicious. "Muchrooms" (1974), dedicated to John Cage and referring to his hobby of collecting mushrooms, takes five minutes to mushroom to a head. From me, it elicited major wows. While few of these works are as immediately catchy as contemporaneous compositions by Steve Reich (including his early taped experiments), they grow on you with repeated listening.
"Mahogany Ballpark" (1976), commissioned for the 1976 Cabrillo Music Festival founded by gay composer Lou Harrison, was initially performed to a series of silly slides created by Amirkhanian's wife, visual artist Carol Law. Rich in historical references, the work includes a section, recorded just outside the studio of Man Ray in Paris, on which the voices of Law and B�ske Antheil (wife of the "bad boy of music," George Antheil) are heard alongside the bells of a cathedral in the Square St. Sulpice. Other sounds were recorded in the San Francisco Zoo and Forest Hill subway station under Twin Peaks.
The title of Amirkhanian's "She She and She" (1974) derives from composer and critic Charles Shere's request for a piece for a 100th Anniversary celebration of the birth of lesbian innovator Gertrude Stein. If you can put yourself in the revolutionary headspace of the minds that were blowing at the same time that Amirkhanian's thoughts on sound-text were peaking, you are in for a major treat.