Program 746: Intimacy and Meditation
KALW Broadcast Date: June 18, 2023 | Host: Liam Herb
Composed nearly 50 years apart, Ruth Anderson‘s Conversations (1974) and Annea Lockwood‘s For Ruth (2021) use voice recordings collaged with sounds of music and nature to express their deep love for one another. Conversations is a work filled with romance, excitement, and intimacy that Anderson composed using recordings from their private phone conversations and tape manipulated recordings of piano tunes. For Ruth (2021) features the voices of Anderson (1928-2019) and Lockwood over recordings made at Ruth’s final resting place in Flathead Lake—an elegy for her lost partner.
In 2022, Zhao Cong and Zhu Wenbo set out to record a single sound from their everyday life, once a day, for a month and a half on a single cassette tape. They passed the tape back and forth, but never recorded at the same time or in the same space until the final day when they were together cleaning the house and making bread.
Tom Johnson‘s An Hour for Piano (1971) is a greatly underappreciated jewel of early American Minimalism. Composed of fragments Johnson used to play for the modern dance class at NYU, the work contains only six textures, each of which blend together into a murky sea of “G”— the pedal point which drones throughout the work.
Program Audio
30-Second Spot
Track Info & Links
Title: Conversations (1974)
Composer: Ruth Anderson
Recording Title: Tête-à-tête
Record Label: Ergot Records
Title: For Ruth (2021)
Composer: Annea Lockwood
Recording Title: Tête-à-tête
Record Label: Ergot Records
Title: were some sound days, one separately be placed
Performers: Zhao Cong and Zhu Wenbo: objects, instruments, home appliances, movements, voices, cassette recorder manipulations
Recording Title: were some sound days, one separately be placed
Record Label: Ftarri Records
Title: An Hour for Piano (1971)
Composer: Tom Johnson
Performer: R. Andrew Lee
Recording Title: An Hour for Piano
Record Label: Irritable Hedgehog
Catalog Number: IHM001
