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SUMMARY:Charlemagne Palestine - in concert
DESCRIPTION:“GRADUALLY MY ARPEGGIOS BEGAN TO BECOME STRUMMMMMSSSSS AND STRUMMMMINGGGGSSSS” \n  \nCharlemagne Palestine returns to Los Angeles for a rare performance of his monumental Strumming Music\, which he has been developing since the early 1970s and describes as an approach and technique that is always different. “It is not a ‘composition’ as such” he says\, “it is an evolutionary liquid sound continuum process that I have presented hundredsss of versions that I have performed over the last 50+ years.” \n* \n \nBorn in 1947\, Chaim Moshe Tzadik Palestine\, known as Charlemagne Palestine\, came from a Russian Jewish family who left Odessa and Minsk at the dawn of the twentieth century to settle in Brooklyn\, New York. He began his musical training singing traditional synagogue musics. From the age of 7 until 14\, he was a member of the Stanley Sapir traditional chassidic music choir singing in synagogues all over the east coast of America. Later he enrolled at the High School of Music and Arts in upper Manhattan and studied voice\, accordion\, piano\, drawing\, painting and sculpture\, and immediately  developed an interest in the composers who were creating sounds using recording tape techniques and  generating sounds by electronic music machines as well as non-western musics from all over the world that he discovered listening to disks from the Folkways label founded by Moses Asch. In 1963\, he became the bell ringer at St. Thomas Episcopal Church in New York City\, located next to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Every day for six years\, he played traditional Protestant hymns as well as inventing an experimental sound approach using the large resonant church bells as his sound source and devised a soap opera sequence of hundreds of variations of complex bell sonorities every day at 5pm for several years. His performances resonated throughout the church’s surroundings and attracted the attention of thousands passersby each afternoon\, including artists\, choreographers and composers like Alwin Nikolais\, Len Lye\, Moondog\, John Cage\, Tony Conrad\, and Ingram Marshall. \nHe took advantage of the geographical proximity to MoMA to become a regular visitor of the museum and explore all the museum’s collections\, where he discovered French Impressionists and American Abstract Expressionist painters who were a revelation and inspiration to him. The color explorations of Monet\, Seurat\, Rothko\, Albers\, Still and others became one of the catalysts for his own aesthetic quest. He imagined inventing a continuous sound form that paralleled the visual artists canvases and structures and imagined created sound canvases and structures that continued to exist nonstop and always present as visual art works were. \nDuring this period\, he associated with numerous figures of the artistic avant-garde and counterculture: Allen Ginsberg\, Kenneth Anger\, Richard Serra\, Tony Conrad\, Steve Reich\, Gordon Matta Clark\, Philip Glass\, Jean Dupuy\, La Monte Young\,  Sol LeWitt\, Terry Riley\, and many others. \nFollowing a meeting with electronic music composer Morton Subotnick at his New York University electronic music studio in 1967 he began to compose numerous electronic sound works using continuous synthesized sounds made with a Buchla 2000 electronic music synthesizer that was the sound source for Subotnick’s electronic music studio. In 1968-69\, he deepened his knowledge of electronic synthesizers and especially the changing timbre spectrum possible with multiple sound oscillators and electronic filters at night at this NYU music studio. There he met other experimenters\, Eliane Radigue\, Rhys Chatham\, Serge Tcherepnin\, Maryanne Amacher\, Ingram Marshall\, and many others. In 1969\, at Subotnick’s invitation\, he and Ingram Marshall moved to Los Angeles\, California\, and began experimenting and teaching  at CalArts\, where he discovered large pipe organs in downtown Los Angeles  and a Bösendorfer Imperial Grand Piano with an extra lower octave  in the enormous concrete ultra resonant cube of the new Cal Arts building in Valencia that he named The Temple but that would eventually become the celebrated Modular Theatre of Cal Arts Valencia. From 1971 he began creating long continuous works for piano and organ that he named “Spectral Continuums\,” often lasting as long as five hours for the piano  and 48 hour works for church organs. Simultaneously\, he worked on a synthesizer prototype with Don Buchla and Serge Tcherepnin and developed with them a synthesizer he called The Spectral Continuum Drone Machine. \nAround this time\, he met the dancer Simone Forti\, with whom he began a sound and movement ritualistic collaboration that they called Illuminations. Their first performance in Los Angeles at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1971  was greatly appreciated  by the then large avant-garde group of artists\, dancers\, and musicians from Los Angeles and the many who had now been imported from all over the art world as members of the faculty of the new California Institute of the Arts and especially Alan Kaprow the dean of arts then and convinced them to continue and develop this Illuminations ritual performance form. From then on for nearly 50 years Simone and Charlemagne were invited worldwide to present Illuminations.   \nCharlemagne Palestine was also interested in Javanese and Balinese gamelan. He traveled to Indonesia in 1971 with Ingram Marshall to study this music. He was also introduced to Hindustani music by Pandit Pran Nath. \nA champion of sonic continuum\, drone\, and trance\, Charlemagne Palestine is particularly renowned for his strumming technique\, a term that can be translated as “struck music.” Derived from flamenco and the chime technique\, strumming is based on repetition and the physicality of playing\, but also on the idea that the instrument has its own voice and can\, depending on how it is played\, produce a series of harmonics that seem to emerge spontaneously. Thus\, in his works (primarily improvised)\, Palestine plays on resonance and the layering of sounds to sculpt sonic masses in a perpetual quest for the “golden sound.” By extension\, during his concerts\, he seeks to engage in a dialogue with the performance space by saturating the available sonic space in such a way as to make it vibrate. \nMarked by spirituality\, tradition and shamanism\, his performances are ritualized: he drinks cognac\, smokes Indonesian clove cigarettes\, and places a multitude of teddy bears (his “deities”)\, scarves and other fabrics on the concert venue and on the instrument. \nAlthough associated with the minimalist music movement\, he rejects this label in favor of “maximalist\,” a term which\, according to him\, allows one to set no limits. \nCharlemagne Palestine was also a video artist pioneer (Body Music series\, 1973-74\, Island Song\, 1976\, and Ritual in the Emptiness\, 2004) creating an audio visual form that became classics of early video art performance works and also invented and developed a multimedia form of installations merging his sounds\, rituals and the inclusion of the stuffed animal toy as a modern shamanic divinity totem and created Gesamtkunstwerks (total art works) for MoMA NYC\, 356 Mission in LA\, The Kunsthalle Vienna\, The Museum of Art and History in Paris\, Documenta Kassel Germany and many other installation venues all over Europe and the US.. He deploys his teeming universe of stuffed animals and sacredly charged rags in site-specific installations\, often monumental in scale. He began as an artist of the Sonnabend Gallery in NYC in the early seventies and then became represented by the Toselli Gallery Milano\, Oppenheim Gallery Cologne\, Lara Vincy Gallery Paris\, and most recently by the Meredith Rosen Gallery in New York City. Though born in Brooklyn\, for years he lived in Soho\, Tribeca\, and Dumbo in NYC while settling from time to time in Paris\, Lyon\, Rotterdam\, Geneva\, and now has lived in Brussels\, Belgium since 1999.
URL:https://pianospheres.org/event/charlemagne-palestine-in-concert/
LOCATION:The Brick\, 518 N. Western Ave.\, Los Angeles\, CA\, 90004\, United States
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://pianospheres.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/CPalestine-1.png
ORGANIZER;CN="pianospheres":MAILTO:pianospheres@gmail.com
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