Alvin Curran ‎- Maritime Rites

Maritime Rites is a series of ten environmental concerts for radio composed by Alvin Curran. This series features the Eastern Seaboard of the United States as a musical source in collaboration with improvised musical performances by ten distinguished artists in the American new-music scene: John Cage, Joseph Celli, Clark Coolidge, Jon Gibson, Malcolm Goldstein, Steve Lacy, George Lewis, Pauline Oliveros, Leo Smith, and Alvin Curran. The programs use specifically recorded natural sounds as musical counterpoint to the soloists, whose improvisations are freely restructured and mixed by Curran. As nature is spontaneous and unpredictable, so is the music of man. Curran simply brings the two together in a common radiophonic sound-space letting both chance and intention make the music. Featured here are the foghorns of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, and New Brunswick, Canada. Also included are maritime bells, gongs, whistles, and regional bird and animal life. Comments from lighthouse keepers, Coast Guard personnel, and other local people are woven impressionistically throughout.

There are nine eleven-minute programs, each featuring a specific artist as soloist. The tenth program of about twenty-five minutes features Curran in a closing work of “symphonic” dimensions.

Rich in ambient detail, Maritime Rites presents the foghorn as indigenous American “found” music par excellence and the source of one of the most enduring minimal musics around us. The series is also a comprehensive aural documentary of our regional and national maritime heritage, including such historical sounds as the Nantucket II Lightship, now out of service and doing duty as a museum docked in Boston Harbor. The Lightship’s horn is the only one of its kind (and the loudest!) on the East Coast and was recorded extensively during an exclusive session ten miles offshore with the special cooperation of the ship’s crew. As the foghorn gives way to other electronic navigational aids, this work may serve as an historical document of some of the most beautiful and mysterious sounds of the sea.

As an expression of sonic geography, Maritime Rites brings together different areas of the Seaboard in a single musical moment. The series was expressly conceived for radio, the only medium that can safely accommodate more than sixty foghorns at once and bring an entire coastline, seemingly live, into anyone’s home!

As a form of radio-art, Maritime Rites is intended for everyone, however conventional or radical their musical interests. It should have a special appeal to the audiences in the regions where some of the sounds originate and likewise to those who may never have heard the haunting sound of a foghorn.

• Alvin Curran ‎- Maritime Rites (2004) - 320 Kbps

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