Wasn there a Lesh-Constanten band for a brief moment in 1964?
TC: Steve Reich was in on it, too. We’d met him in Berio’s class. It was a series of concerts at the San Francisco Mime Troupe in May 1964. In a way, it was a peak experience. It was a bit like a set of concerts featuring John Cage’s music at 321 Divisadero the year before. We played the same program of highly flexible pieces four times. Phil contributed an ensemble score, the pages of which he shuffled and dealt – the Vegas kid in me loved that – before each performance, including a jubilantly eruptive solo part for me on prepared piano. Then both Phil and I joined Steve’s improvisation ensemble, including Jon Gibson, Georges Rey, and Gwen Watson. The second half of the program began with a solo piece of mine for prepared piano, with prerecorded accompaniment; essentially two other readings – with different preparations of the piano – of the same tesseractile and modular score I was playing from live. Cage-like magic abounded. Often the tape would “imitate” what I’d just done onstage.
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