1963
The article by Marjorie Rubin, "Musicians Using Bizarre Sounds; Judson Hall Plans Festival Featuring Unusual Idiom," published on August 17, 1963, announced the first
"Six Concerts of the Avant Garde" festival. This groundbreaking festival, held at Judson Hall in late August and early September 1963, featured a who's who of experimental music at the time and was organized by the cellist and performance artist Charlotte Moorman.
The article discussed plans for an upcoming avant-garde festival at Judson Hall, which aimed to showcase experimental music using unconventional sound sources like sirens, recordings, and common objects. Max Neuhaus was mentioned as a "leading percussionist" scheduled to perform works by contemporary composers such as Morton Feldman and La Monte Young.
The concerts, which ran on August 20, 21, 27, 28, and September 3, 4, 1963, included works by prominent figures such as:
David Behrman
Earle Brown
- Joseph Byrd
- John Cage
- Philip Corner
- Morton Feldman
- Toshi Ichiyanagi
- Frederic Rzewski
- Karlheinz Stockhausen
- James Tenney
- Edgard Varèse
- Christian Wolff
- Yannis Xenakis
- La Monte Young
Max Neuhaus was listed as one of the performers for the festival, along with other musicians like Earle Brown, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Charlotte Moorman, Frederic Rzewski, David Tudor, and Nicholas Zumbro.
The festival was a seminal event in the history of intermedia and expanded arts, bringing the experimental music scene, which was emerging out of Fluxus, to a wider audience. It explored the "unusual idiom" mentioned in the article, which encompassed a wide range of new sounds and performance practices beyond traditional composition, including the use of electronic sounds, everyday noises, and new approaches to instrumentation.
The event marked the beginning of a series of annual avant-garde festivals organized by Charlotte Moorman that became famous for their radical accessibility and boundary-pushing performances.