Art Metropole

CCMC. ‘Free music orchestra’ formed in 1974 in Toronto as the Canadian Creative Music Collective. Only the abbreviation was in use by 1978. Defining itself as ‘a composing ensemble… united by a desire to play music that is fluid, spontaneous, and self-regulating,’ the CCMC, by its instrumentation, by the backgrounds of several of its founders, and by the improvised nature of its music, was initially aligned with the free jazz community.

Its original members were Peter Anson (guitar and later synthesizer); Graham Coughtry (trombone); Larry Dubin (percussion); Greg Gallagher (saxophones); Nobuo Kubota (saxophones); Allan Mattes (bass, bass guitar, electronics); Casey Sokol (piano); Bill Smith (saxophones); and Michael Snow (piano, trumpet, guitar, analogue synthesizer). Gallagher, Coughtry and Smith left 1976-7, Dubin died in 1978 and Anson departed in 1979. The remaining quartet was augmented by the drummer John Kamevaar in 1981. Sokol left in 1988, Kubota in 1991 and Damevaar and Mattes in 1994, and the vocalist Paul Dutton became a member in 1989 and John Oswald (alto sax) as of 1994. The CCMC began moving toward improvised electroacoustic music: instrumentation in 1990 comprised guitar-synthesizer and double bass (Mattes); wind synthesizer (Kubota); tapes and live electronic sampling (Kamevaar); voice (Dutton and Kubota); and piano (Snow).

After early performances in private, the CCMC established the Music Gallery in 1976, performing there on a twice-weekly basis until 1983, and later weekly. CCMC members were responsible for the gallery’s operation until 1987 – Anson and Mattes 1976-80, Mattes alone thereafter – and established the Music Gallery Editions record label and Musicworks. After 2000, the CCMC’s relationship with the Music Gallery ceased.

The CCMC has travelled widely, making four tours in Canada by 1982 and five in Europe 1978-85. It performed at the FIMAV (Festival international de musique actuelle de Victoriaville) in 1984 and again in 1997, at the 1984 summer Olympics in Los Angeles, at Expo 86, in Japan in 1988 and for New Music America, Montreal, in 1990. It later appeared in France (1998); Texas (1999); New York (2001); and in 2002 in England, the Netherlands, France and Germany. It has also played in various festivals in Canada, eg, Open Ears (Kitchener-Waterloo) and No Music Festival (London, Ont). The ensemble since 1995 has been a trio, consisting of Dutton (voice or soundsinging, harmonica); John Oswald (alto sax); and Snow (piano, analogue synthesizer).

Music Gallery Editions released six LPs recorded by the CCMC 1976-80: CCMC Vol 1 (MGE-1), CCMC Vol 2 (MGE-2), CCMC Vol 3 (MGE-6), Larry Dubin and the CCMC (3-MGE-15), Free Soap (MGE-22) and Without a Song (MGE-31). Two cassettes, CCMC 90, documenting the 1989-90 season at the Gallery, were issued in 1990. These were followed by the CDs Decisive Moments (TLR 02, 1994); Accomplices (VITOcd063, 1998) and CCMC + Christian Marclay (NMRx0003/ART MET CD004, 2002).

Multifaceted artist John Oswald nearly always incorporates an electroacoustic element to his productions. His works are part of the regular repertoire of Kronos Quartet, Culberg Ballet of Sweden, Ballet of Monaco, Deutsche Opera Ballet Berlin, Modern Quartet and Penderecki Quartet. Among his recent activities are a sound procession for Brazilia; a choregraphic work for twenty two choregraphers (among which Bill T Jones, Margie Gillis and Holly Small); commissions from groups such as Le ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon, Change of Heart, SMCQ as well as Dutch National Radio and the CBC.

He has just completed a work for orchestra, robot piano and the sung and disincarnate voice of Glenn Gould for the National Ballet of Canada. In the recent years, he has created a collection of photographic portraits for a series of Moving Stills. One of his “plunderphonics”(audio-video collages made from existing works) was presented at Hayward Gallery of London in May 2000. He is currently creating the soundtrack for Stress, a Bruce Mau film which will be projected onto eight screens, to be presented in Vienna in May. Among his recent productions, there is a radiophonic creation in four languages (Brazilian, Dutch, English and German); writing of the animation and score for Homonymy (for chamber music and cinema); writing of a music for the classic silent film Metropolis; production of a soundtrack for the gay porn movie Hustler White; as well as his participation in the movies Un©ut by John Greyson and Sonic Outlaws by Craig Baldwin.

John Oswald’s work is all about metamorphosis, “détournement” and eclectism often realised from existing materials. In 1990, his most famous recording, Plunderphonics (sound collage made from existing musics) whose cover artwork represented a naked Michael Jackson with a woman’s body, has been destroyed by the prudes of the recording industry. Since then, his music was published by Elektra, Avant, ReR Megacorp, Blast First, Swell and empreintes DIGITALes transforming the musics and performances of Stravinsky, Metallica, James Brown, György Ligeti, Dolly Parton and many others. A retrospective of his Pluderphonics is currently under preparation. The first disc of his production around the Grateful Dead, Grayfolded, was chosen as the number one international production of the decade by the Toronto Sun. The final version of Grayfolded, finished this year, was selected as the best productions of the year by Rolling Stone, New York Times and many others. That same year, his recording of improvised music, Acoustics, was the first choice of critics at Coda magazine.

Michael Snow was born in Toronto not so long ago, and lives there now – but has also lived in Montreal, Chicoutimi and New York.

He is a musician (piano and other instruments) who has performed solo as well as with various ensembles (most often with the CCMC of Toronto) in Canada, USA, Europe and Japan. Numerous recordings of his music have been released.

His films have been presented at festivals in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Korea, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Turkey, United Kingdom and USA, and are in the collections of several film archives, including Anthology Film Archives in New York City, the Royal Belgian Film Archives (Brussels), and the Österreichische Film Museum (Vienna).

He has been a painter and sculptor, though since 1962, much of his gallery work has been photo-based or holographic. Work in all these media is represented in private and public collections world-wide, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Museum Ludwig (Cologne), Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig (Vienna), Centre Georges-Pompidou (Paris), and both the Musée des beaux-arts and Musée d’art contemporain in Montreal.

Since 1970 he has done video, film, slide and sound installations, and made such bookworks as Michael Snow/A Survey (1970), Cover to Cover (1975), 56 Tree Poems (1999), and BIOGRAPHIE of the Walking Woman 1961-1967 (2004), as well as magazine works for Impulse (1975), Photo-Communique (1986), and C magazine (1993).

Retrospectives of his painting, sculpture, photoworks and holography have been presented at the Hara Museum (Tokyo), of his films at the Cinémathèque Française and Centre Georges-Pompidou (Paris), Anthology Film Archives and Museum of Modern Art (New York) and L’Institut Lumière (Lyon) and of his work in all media simultaneously in 1994 at the Power Plant and the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto). A retrospective of his photoworks 1962-99 called Panoramique was presented in 1999 at the Palais des Beaux Arts (Brussels), touring the following year to Centre national de la photographie (Paris), MAMCO (Geneva), and Centre pour l’image contemporaine Saint-Gervais (Geneva). Additional retrospective exhibitions have been mounted at the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.

Solo and group shows of his visual art works have been presented at museums and galleries in Amsterdam, Atlanta, Berlin, Bonn, Boston, Brussels, Kassel, Lima, Los Angeles, Lucerne, Lyons, Minneapolis, Montreux, Munich, New York, Ottawa, Paris, Pittsburgh, Quebec City, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Toronto and elsewhere.

Michael Snow has executed several public sculpture commissions, the best known being Flight Stop at Eaton Centre (1979) and The Audience (1988-1989)at Skydome (now Rogers Centre), both in Toronto. His installation The Windows Suite was opened in September 2006 at the Pantages Hotel and Condominium complex on Victoria Street, Toronto.

He has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1972) the Order of Canada (Officer, 1982; Companion, 2007), and the first Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2000) for cinema. Snow was made a Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres, France (1995) and in 2004 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Université de Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne.

(from Fondation Langlois website)

American sculptor, installation artist and musician. He studied at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston in the late 1970s, and whilst on an exchange programme to New York he began presenting performances involving experimental music. His early visual work played on his interest in music: his Record without a Cover, released in 1985 by Recycled Records in New York, was a recording of his music distributed to record shops in the normal manner but bearing the instructions that it should not be placed in any kind of sleeve or cover. The Beatles (1989; see 1998 exh. cat., p. 24) destroys the possibility of sound altogether, consisting as it does of a pillow crocheted from cassette tape of the entire Beatles back catalogue. The relationship between sound and non-sound, and between objects brought together in unexpected combinations, are central concerns in Marclay’s work. Black and White (1992; see 1998 exh. cat., p. 43) is one in a series of composite images made by sewing LP covers together to make hybrid figures, echoing the scratching and sampling of his earlier sound work. In the installation Echo and Narcissus (1992; Jerusalem, Israel Mus.), 14000 CDs cover the gallery floor so that the viewer walks over them, their purpose as music recordings warped into a shiny surface, with the only sound being the viewers’ footsteps. Marclay’s practice purposefully straddles both gallery-based visual art and pop music, exploring ways of disrupting our perceptions of sound and identity using techniques of collage, scratching, misplacement and surprise.