In the photo, U.S. composer and multi-instrumentalist Alvin Curran in 1975
In 1964 Elvin Curran moved from the United States to Rome, coming into contact with the European avant-garde scene: the British composer Cornelius Cardew, an assistant in the late 1950s Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the Italian composer Franco Evangelisti
The latter had founded in 1964 in Rome the Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, with which Curran occasionally collaborated and which included American composer and pianist Frederic Rzewski, pianist and composer Mario Bertoncini, trumpeter Ennio Morricone, at that time already an established composer of soundtracks and pop music pieces, percussionist Egisto Macchi, musician and composer Walter Branchi
In the capital city, Elvin Curran comes into contact with musicians from the Italian free jazz scene who gather at the underground Folkstudio venue and at the experimental theater Beat ’72
In 1966 the American multi-instrumentalist co-founded with Frederic Rzewski, Allan Bryant and Richard Teitelbaum the expanded avant-garde and concrete music ensemble“Musica Elettronica Viva,” in which saxophonist Steve Lacy and saxophonist Ivan Vandor, among the 1948 founders of the Roman New Orleans Jazz Band, also played a part
Between 1974 and 1975 Elvin Curran recorded albums of“solo performance music” titled“Songs and Views Of The Magnetic Garden” and“Light Flowers, Dark Flowers” in which, making his own the lessons of composer and music theorist John Cage, he employed natural sounds filtered through the synthesizer, played the ocarina, piano and trumpet, and recorded on magnetic tape
In the same period he collaborated with drummer Andrea Centazzo and saxophonist Maurizio Giammarco on the recording of the album Before and Beyond the Threshold, in the track“Flash On The Rock Scene,” in which he plays the synthesizer
Contribution shared by Maurizio Giammarco
