Music

Marian Zazeela is a light-artist, designer, painter and musician based in New York City. She was a member of the 1960s New York experimental music collective Theatre of Eternal Music, and is known for her collaborative work with minimalist composer La Monte Young.

Obsessed with duration and play upon the senses in saturation, by the late 60s, Zazeela began presenting light-work in collaboration with Young's minimal music in what were envisioned as long-term installations titled Dream Houses. Dream House is a term which defines an artistic "work that would be played continuously and ultimately exist as a 'living organism with a life and tradition of its own'".

Young's first continuous electronic sound environment was created in his loft on Church Street, New York City in September 1966 (where he still lives and where the Dream House still exists) with sine wave generators. This environment was maintained almost continuously from September 1966 to January 1970, being turned off only to listen to "other music" and to study the contrast between extended periods in it and periods of silence. Young and Zazeela worked, sang and lived in it and studied the effects on themselves and visitors.

The work presented within these Dream Houses consisted of a "total environmental set of frequency structures in the media of sound and light". The sound was produced by both the sine wave generators and by the Theatre of Eternal Music, this last playing at prescribed intervals. The sine waves produced are such that they interfere with each other, creating changes of volume both in time and space that can be experienced either walking within the room or staying put. If one chooses to walk, they will change the sound experience of other people in the room by moving the molecules of air.

Zazeela designed two light sources to produce the frequencies in the light medium: a continuous installation of floating sculptures and color sources, and a series of slides entitled "Ornamental Lightyears Tracery".

A Dream House exists at the Mela Foundation on 275 Church Street, New York, and is open to the public.

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A larger-than-life figure on the air and in the black community, Martha Jean Steinberg “The Queen” was a charismatic Detroit media icon who leveraged her radio presence to influence and inspire the public. A pioneering R&B disc jockey, civic activist, spiritual leader and trailblazing station owner, Steinberg cultivated a 46-year career and is a member of the Black Radio Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Born Martha Jean Jones in Memphis, Tennessee on September 9, 1930, she worked as a nurse to support her three children after divorcing jazz musician Luther Steinberg. She entered a contest to win an on-air job at WDIA – reportedly the first white owned station with an all black staff – and earned a weekend shift on the male-dominated airwaves. It was there she was dubbed “the Queen” by a fellow disc jockey.

Steinberg was brought to Inkster in 1963 by the owners of WCHB-AM and became an overnight sensation. Three years later she moved to WJLB-FM, where her on-air persona broadened, focusing less on R&B and more on gospel and social commentary. During Detroit’s 1967 civil disturbance she remained on-air for 48 straight hours, imploring listeners to stay off the streets. That event evolved into a regular call-in show with the city’s police commissioners called “Buzz the Fuzz.”

In 1972, Steinberg became an ordained minister and founded a church called the Home of Love. Her shows became even more spiritual in nature, tagged by her sign-off, “God loves you and I love you.” In 1982, Steinberg and several partners bought a Detroit AM station, changed its format to gospel and talk, and changed the call letters to WQBH (which many say stood for “Queen Broadcasts Here”).

She bought the station outright in 1997 and remained its star broadcaster until her death three years later. Her impact on the station and its listeners was so profound that WQBH continued airing daily recordings of the Queen’s programs for years after her death. The station was sold in 2004 to Salem Broadcasting and is now a conservative talk station, WDTK.

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III. BBB - Allan Kaprow “How To Make A Happening"

Allan Kaprow was an American painter, assemblagist and a pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art. He helped to develop the "Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. His Happenings — some 200 of them — evolved over the years. Eventually Kaprow shifted his practice into what he called "Activities", intimately scaled pieces for one or several players, devoted to the study of normal human activity in a way congruent to ordinary life. Fluxus, performance art, and installation art were, in turn, influenced by his work.

Forget all the standard art forms—don’t paint pictures, don’t make poetry, don’t build architecture, don’t arrange dances, don’t write plays, don’t compose music, don’t make movies, and above all don’t think you’ll get a happening by putting all these together.

The "Happenings" first started as tightly scripted events, in which the audience and performers followed cues to experience the art. To Kaprow, a Happening was "A game, an adventure, a number of activities engaged in by participants for the sake of playing." Furthermore, Kaprow says that the Happenings were "events that, put simply, happen." There was no structured beginning, middle, or end, and there was no distinction or hierarchy between artist and viewer. It was the viewer's reaction that decided the art piece, making each Happening a unique experience that cannot be replicated.

Excerpts from Allan Kaprow’s “How to Make a Happening” -
This is a lecture on how to make a happening. There are 11 rules of the game.

1. Forget all the standard art forms...
2. You can steer clear of art by mixing up your happening by mixing it with life situations...
3. The situations for a happening should come from what you see in the real world...
4. Break up your spaces...
5. Break up your time and let it be real time...
6. Arrange all your events in the happening in the same practical way...
7. Since you’re in the world now and not in art, play the game by real rules...
8. Work with the power around you, not against it...
9. When you’ve got the go-ahead, don’t rehearse the happening...
10. Perform the happening once only...
11. Give up the whole idea of putting on a show for audiences...