BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE MUSEUM AND ARTS CENTER
This evening Susie got us tickets to attend a concert of experimental music at the Black Mountain College Museum in Asheville. We arrived earlier and looked first at the exhibit of Black Mountain College activities before the concert started.
Black Mountain College was founded in 1933 based on the principles of John Dewey, learning while doing. Because of Hitler’s prosecution of Jews a number of the early staff and students were refugees from Germany. Joseph Albers, a member of the Bauhaus school of artists and intellectuals in Germany, arrived as the first art teacher, not speaking a word of English. The college was owned and run by the faculty and operated more as a community with all the maintenance of the college done by the students and faculty together. Buckminster Fuller taught there, John Cage taught there, Merce Cunningham taught there, M.C. Richards taught there and many of the graduates became major figures in American art and dance and music. Black Mountain College had a huge impact on American arts and still does.
By the time I arrived at Warren Wilson College, only a few miles away from Black Mountain the college had closed in the mid 1950’s for financial reasons, but partly because it did not fit into any academic norms, and because survival was never its purpose, hands on learning was. But what struck me as I looked around the exhibit was how close I have lived all my life to this center of the American arts without being very aware of what had happened here just before I arrived at Warren Wilson College. But it turns out that Warren Wilson College did contribute to the legacy and the formation of the Museum through the support of Ben Holden, the President of Warren Wilson in the 70’s and his family.
So there we were not knowing what to expect from new electronic music in the style pioneered by John Cage. I have been listening to bluegrass and mountain music all summer and bluegrass this wasn’t. Two women, Olivia Block and Lea Bertucci, sitting at a piano and a computer with microphones and wires all around pushed buttons, played instruments, hummed and sang.
At first all my bluegrass tuned ear heard was caterwauling and scraping and moaning, but the longer they performed, the piece was 45 minutes long, the more I fell under their spell. They put together all kinds of sounds in a way that fit them all together with a rhythm and haunting discordant tension that was finally mesmerizing. I was sitting in the front row videoing but was nervous about holding my iPhone up where I could frame the action because I would look like a fool, so I shot from the hip without knowing quite what I was shooting. I will include a little of the concert, framed right by chance, here.
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BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 