Review: Steve Horowitz at Redcat

Francesca came to visit because there was a performance at RedCat which included one of her collaborations with Randy. Steve Horowitz is an advocate of my old friend Randy Hostetler's (1963 - 1996) compositions and so in addition to Steve's compositions Invasion of the Chicken Planet and The Retaking of Pelham 123 there were two pieces for string quartet of Randy's being played including Palm Quart which he did with Francesca.

So I ended up having a rather flash back week-end. RedCat is such a CalArts experience anyway, but at the party after the performance there were all these people who I HADN'T gone to school with, since Randy was getting his graduate degree two years after I had graduated. But the vibe was the same, and I couldn't help feeling that I had met some of these people, glancingly, since a lot of them were involved with Randy and Francesca and the cacophony of the Living Room Series. I guess the Living Room Series is now an archetypal art event - like being at some of the original happenings by Alan Kaprow or with John Cage at Black Mountain College or watching Marcel Duchamp play chess with a naked woman in a gallery. But I remember the ones I went to as fun and chaotic, the Tuba Trio in the kitchen, actually seeing Randy and his friends play the Living Room performing John Cage's Living Room Music. The shower singing. Camden and I did a piece with Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau. The Bowling Hypnosis tape that put everyone to sleep. L.H. wore a neoprene tutu and performed whale songs in a plastic kiddie pool with all of these electric wires criss-crossing in our old tri-plex with substandard electricity. (Which is funny come to think of it, since years later L.H. and I took a class at Machine Project, where we had to be in the basement with our computers and vats of water boiling away on old hot plates and sub-standard electrical wires criss-crossing the basement as we made felt and circuits. So maybe L.H. is much more of an electrical risk taker than I knew.)
Anyway, Randy's two pieces were interesting. First that he would write for string quartets - who knew CalArts even HAD string quartets. Aren't string quartets helplessly old fashioned even with Kronos??? (Randy never forgave me for being low-brow enough to like the Kronos Quartet). Second that he would write both specifically and abstractly with a completely new kind of musical notation that was both visual and metronomic. So the performers had to learn the new notation to play. And the notation was screened so that the audience could start to learn the notational rules at the same time. Floaters had a visual notation that was little boxes or circles of different colors appearing and moving on the screen. It was written on some sort of program that ran on MAC OS Sub 0.1 beta. I mean that was some OLD operating system we got a look at . In Palm Quart palm trees in a video created the musical notation. Both pieces were witty and brilliant and were so Randy.
Invasion of the Chicken Planet and The Re-Taking of Pelham 123 were both large scale pieces with actors and singers and a video by Zig Gron for Chicken and a film by Jane Brill for Pelham. These were the kind of smoking hot post-minimalist, rock-influenced compositions with a whole bunch of stuff that you get used to seeing at RedCat. Very fun, very enjoyable and with the ease of maturity. You know when you are young and serious you can't ease up and everything has to point out your knowledge. Later you add generosity and heart. It made me sad that Randy had never got to live long enough to have a mature body of work. You can look here to see a video Zig made of Randy doing 8 ball which I think starts to point to how his mature work would have gone.