Park Foundation Music App

Home > Releases

Maritime Rites

Overview

Maritime Rites --- 2004

Comes with a 19 pages booklet. This edition is on CD, however, there’s also a later edition on CD-r. 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. 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, featuring a specific artist as soloist. The recordings of the Eastern Seaboard were done in 1984. Maritime Rites was originally produced in 1985.