Eric Baudelaire and Alvin Curran: When There is No More Music To Write

About

Curated in collaboration with music historian Maxime Guitton, the exhibition includes three new films by Baudelaire, two large-scale ‘sound sculptures’ by Curran, and an archive display assembled by Guitton. Together these works give an overview of Curran’s life and work since the early 1960s, tracing a musical revolution that took place in a time of radical political mobilisations in Italy, which reached a boiling point with the kidnapping and subsequent murder of politician Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in 1978.

Curran is a key figure in the history of experimental music and has produced many revolutionary sound works that combine composition, improvisation and sound-installation. By broadening the notion of what an instrument can be to include objects from nature and everyday life, his work has opened up a broad range of new musical possibilities. The bustling sounds and chaos he found when he moved to Rome in the mid-1960s captivated him, and the city became a laboratory for his musical research. Shortly after his arrival in the city, he met the Italian electronic music composer Franco Evangelisti, who told him: “Don’t you know that there’s no more music to write?” Over the years this phrase became a model for Curran to follow, opening up new horizons in his musical development, and leading him to embrace improvisation as a way forward.

Baudelaire’s three films build on Curran’s first-person accounts of his life in Rome during the 1960s and 70s. They capture a time that was deeply shaken by revolutionary politics, positioning Curran’s work in the context of an artistic avant-garde infused by the creative possibilities of collaboration and chance. When There Is No More Music to Write (2022) combines Super 8 footage recorded by Baudelaire in the Roman landscapes that inspired Curran’s work with found footage from various archives, echoing the music that Curran created with found sounds. A Lost Score (2022) merges image fragments from Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 film Zabriskie Point with the original but unused score that Curran composed together with the improvisational group Musica Elettronica Viva, which he co-founded with Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum in 1966. Finally, Four Flat Tires (2022) takes us to the morning of Aldo Moro’s kidnapping, revisiting this historic event through the prism of a little-known anecdote about a Roman flower vendor, Antonio Spiriticchio, who used to sell flowers at the intersection where Moro was kidnapped, but who wasn’t present that morning because his tires were slashed the night before. The story is told with archive footage, excerpts of a police deposition and recollections of former Red Brigades members, with music by Curran and Evangelisti.