1964
Max Neuhaus performing Fontana Mix - Feed, Carnagie Recital Hall, New York City, December 1, 1966
Max Neuhaus was renowned for his interpretation of contemporary music while still in his twenties. In the early sixties, he gave solo recitals in Carnegie Hall and toured America and Europe as a percussion soloist. He traveled with one thousand kilos of percussion instruments to perform his solo repertoire and extended this palette of sound color by inventing several early electro- acoustic instruments. His solo album recorded for Columbia Masterworks in 1968 stands as one of the first examples of what is now called live electronic music.
Editor’s note
This CD includes recordings of six realizations of Max Neuhaus’ Fontana Mix - Feed which he performed in venues in the US and Europe from 1964 through 1968. With these performances, Neuhaus introduced the idea that acoustic feed- back, previously always abhorred, could be a useful technique for generating sound. This later spawned its use by others in both modern music and rock’n’roll.
If you wish to come close to replicating these per- formances, move your loudspeakers to opposite sides of the listening room and turn the volume of your system up as high as you can stand it... but watch out for your ears.
Fontana Mix-Feed Between 1957 and 1961, Max Neuhaus trained as a percussionist in New York at the Manhattan School of Music. During this period, he met important figures of the contemporary music scene, including Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage and Pierre Boulez, with whom he collaborated between 1962 and 1968 as a percussionist during numerous tours in the United States and Europe. Neuhaus stands out very young by a great technicality, especially during the Zyklus concert, with this score written by Stockhausen in 1959 for solo percussion and 21 instruments. Following the recording of important contemporary pieces for solo percussion on the album Electronics and Percussion – Five Realizations by Max Neuhaus, Neuhaus decided to give up his stage career in 1968. This turning point is already apparent when Neuhaus interprets a score by John Cage, Fontana Mix written in 1958. This is a set of pages to be superimposed by the interpreter: 10 pages with undulating lines, 10 transparencies on which appear black dots, a transparency with a straight line and a transparency with a grid of 20 by 100 boxes . By superimposing these pages and transparencies, the performer determines measures for six parameters on a scale between 1 and 20 which can be freely attributed to volume or timbre, for example. Fontana Mix is both this score and a recording made by Cage in a Milanese studio during the winter of 1958/1959. The result is two stereo tapes with 17 minutes of sound material (city sounds, country sounds, electronic sounds, instrumental sounds, wind sounds, etc.). This score is emblematic of Cage's approach which links all sound to the musical event and which is based on the implementation of operations of chance. Max Neuhaus played Fontana Mix between 1965 and 1968 and named his interpretation Fontana Mix–Feed. To this end, he places two timpani on which contact microphones are hung in front of two loudspeakers. Sound feedback loops are thus created which it associates with the parameters of the score. The waves that result from feedback are only manipulable to some degree by adjustments through the amplifiers and by changing the distance between the loudspeakers. The particularity of the acoustic feedback lies in the fact that the different sound waves cancel and reinforce each other, the initial sounds now being blurred.