Sound Check Live: Tony Conrad, Violin Solo (in D)

Tony Conrad is best known for playing violin with the Theatre of Eternal Music in the early sixties, which utilised non-Western musical forms and sustained sound to produce what they called dream music. He has made music whose nature calls into question the traditional Western role of composer. Generally, this music is improvised on the spot (although dissimilar to ‘improvised music’, especially that developed by musicians such as Derek Bailey), has no score, and needs no conductor. As a film maker, he is best known for The Flicker (1966), considered a key early work of the structural film movement. His principal motivation in making that film was to explore the possibilities for harmonic expression using a sensory mode other than sound. He was interested to see whether there might be combination-frequency flicker-effects, analogous to the combination-tone effects that are responsible for consonance in musical sound. The hypnotic phenomena and trance states that characterise flicker continued to be a topic of research in later works. Recently he has composed more than a dozen audio works with special scales and tuning for an amplified violin solo. He has also issued two archive CDs featuring the work of late New York film maker Jack Smith.