1964
Max Neuhaus solo, ONCE Festival, Ann Arbor, Michigan, February 11, 1965
(duration 17’28”)
“The max is (or was) a new music percussionist famous for filling entire stages with tons of equipment for works of Cage, Feldman, Stockhausen, and all the like.
The afterwards makes a performance of Max’s taking down all this stuff, and being the last piece of the program, permitted him for once to enjoy the party afterwards. First formulated as intermission (Charles Ross’s dance sculpture being restructured) and then expanded in concept to any purposeful work done before, after, or during.”
“From Thaïs” (1962)
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I also wish to thank Neuhaus’s friends and collaborators: Joseph Byrd, Philip Corner, Malcolm Goldstein, and Jan Williams. Their recollections of Max aided in giving a better understanding of who he was as an individual and what he accomplished as a performer. I will cherish all of the personal stories shared during each interview. I am also grateful to the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library and Northwestern University for granting me access to their primary source documents.
Megan Elizabeth Murph, 'Max Neuhaus and the musical avant-garde', Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, 2013 :
Megan Murph, “Max Neuhaus and the Avant-Garde” (Master’s Thesis, Louisiana State University, 2013).
-Records into Wollensak tape recorder, mixed with Y-branch connector (duration 09’42”)
“I believe that i have been the only composer to have made a music at the request of Yvonne Rainer.
My music for Yvonne was a tape piece, collaging mostly extracts from ‘Thaïs’ by Massenet. which is what she asked for. If i remember right it was for the section, a duet, where Trisha Brown throws a black brasserie up in the air and catches it on her breasts. (This is just as nice to imagine as to remember).
Unforgettable moment in the making…… Mix after Mix made to get the thrown-around fragments of the opening - through two cables going into a Y-branch plug (- -the cheapest kind of electronic hardware) until it is all down on one tape and then, into the remaining channel to be Mix’d with all that Mess, goes the heroic trombone passage from the Overture, tuneful coherence making a mighty crescendo through.”
Philip Corner