Eclipse 2025 – EBA

Phil Edelstein, Woburn MA, May 2025

… a work in progress … breadcrumbs 1971 or so to 1977 with some precedents and antecedents

One of Many Beginnings

The exactitude of the intersection of Tom, I and eba is obscured by passage of time and the passage of people. I’ll try here to weave together fragments and vignettes of those passages.

Originally, Electronics Body Arts that quickly became eba and then more officially was a coming together around 1971. By 1972 coalesced around a core group of 20’somethings. The braid of our story is intertwined with the projects with Tom then DeWitt.

This is very much about creative collaborative community and communion.

I use dates and years here as and aid to memory. There is little narrative as jumps forward and back. Many of the fragments here physically happened at one point and the significance and realizations at very different times.

Who, Who

Bill Parker, Maude Baum, Ann Morris

There was a core initial formulation at the nucleus: Maude Baum, George Kindler, Caroline Meyers, and I with dancers Billy Parker, Elisa Letterman Marsha Heather Harris, Ann Morris, Marcia Kindler, Dennis Ficken and then many others in the next decades as Maude will tell and the musicians the Richards – Richard Kelly, Richard Lainhart. Very soon after eba coalesced, Tom’s visage then full presence was manifest.

George Kindler

One of the beginnings is incorporation of Electronic Body Arts Inc. Other beginnings were how George and Maude met – she’ll have to fill that in.

Maude and I conjunction was probably first in her role as adjunct at SUNY Albany and organized performances from the NEA Dance Touring program including companies and choreographers; Paul Taylor, José Limón, Merce Cunningham, Jennifer Muller, Garth Fagan (others to be supplied) . I had an assistantship in lighting in the theatre department thanks to professor Jerry Hanley and wound up as technical director for these outside groups at the SUNYA Performing Arts Center (PAC).

Another beginning was with Warren Burt, a fellow student that I knew from our freshman year at the campus radio station WSUA (now WCDB) in AM pre-history before their getting their FCC FM license later in the 70’s. In my sophmore year in 1968, I had the gift of an independent study project working with the Audiology Department’s Chairman Dr. Boomsliter to program the 3rd computer on campus, a DEC PDP-12 for hearing tests. Warren brings composer Joel Chadabe who had formulated the electronic music studio with the first generation of Robert Moog‘s modular sythesizer recently installed in the new Performing Arts Center.

Possibly another beginning was childhood interest in electronics much learned by disaasembly of the family first black and white television set for tubes, capacitor and resistors once that was replaced by the familes first color TV (yar … maybe 1962 plus minus). Or the ham radio and cyclotron clubs at Stuyvestant High School. A path not taken was would have been the alternative to the Audiology department on the 2nd computer on campus working on a PDP-15 that was instrumentaton for the linear accelerator but I digress.

Clearly the introduction to Joel was transformative. He invited me to take his electronic music composition course with fellow students Caroline Meyer and Virginia Quesada.

That of course is how I met Tom and that remarkable beginning. what must have been around 1971.

I’ll have to find the more exact dates to make some sense how those beginnings led us all down a wonderful mashup of converging and diverging paths a bit out of the Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths.

I can only describe my state in those years as feral and productive. There was for me a transformational pair of projects produced at the beginnings of eba as additional points of departure with Tom becoming a life long friend, source of inspiration and exasperation.

The first vignette was Called Off where we commandeered the black box studio at PAC around a collection of ideas between Maude, George and I. I had this idea for a performance event with simultaneous actiities evolving over the evening in visually separated but common acoustic space. George had the solution that we hang sheets of brown paper to provide performance areas for Maude’s choreography and other concurrent performance activities. One of the spaces was an early piece by Bill Viola. My recollection is of him laying nude on the floor with a video monitor and burning candle for both nights. I had met Bill the year before at New Music In New Hampshire in 1973. The digressions here as indicative of trying to keep to the story line. Tom had given me the old Dewitt family station wagon as means of my getting to Chocorua with instructions to keep adding the most viscus weight motor oil for the trip i could find. The other gift from Tom for Called Off was the circuit boards purloined i suppose from electronic surplus from his friend Hawkeye that I had interfaced to the 4th Albany computer, the PDP-11 Joel had obtained for the studio. We borrowed the PDP-11, the Link -Singer DAC boards and haywired to the Kleigl dimmer banks for an early automaton of theatre lighting.

This was the seque to Pantomation with the PDP-8L obtained from the dismantling of the WNET-TV Lab – as the apocryphal Nam Jun Paik computer. (also on YouTube)

We’ll have to find in Tom’s memoir how he and George established the video synthesis studio at WRPI .

By 1977, and intense period in Albany had come closure. I took job with Digital Equipment Corporation. This put an end to the 1967-1977 decade that was origin of so much of my creative life.

Of influences – on how i came to eba

Joel was instrumental in these beginnings and introductions.

This is intertwined with Tom’s visual music works.

Joel and the Free Music Store

One of the points of reference for what turned out to be the my creative path and eba as a music and media venue was the Free Music Store concert series Joel organized at the Performing Arts Center. The Free Music Store title was lifted from the NYC WBAI radio station program to my recollection.

The Richards and I were put to service for concerts by the cohort of composers that formed my practical education. Here and incomplete and inaccurate remembrance: Laurie Spiegel, Liz Phillips, Sonic Art Union – David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, Robert Ashley; Pauline Oliveros, the Creative Associates from Buffalo (including Julius Eastman and Jan Williams, Ralph Jones), Phill Niblock, Music Electronic Viva (MEV)– Fredric Rzewski, Richard Teitelbuaum, Alvin Curran); John Cage , David Tudor, Christian Wolfe, Sal Matirano, ZAJ, Charlemagne Palestine, Charles Dodge and many others.

See also Charlotte Mormon’s NY Avante Garde Festival of that era that evidently crawled deeply into my impressionable feral brain – memories from Floyd Bennet Field and Grand Central Station in 1973 and 1975.

Here John Driscoll setup for our performance of Interfeed SUNYA PAC from the EBA archive.

Experiments In Art and Technology, Cunningham Events, Silence, HPSCHD

It will take some digging to pin point when Experiments in Art and Technology creeped into my consciousness. In puzzling this through, likely it was topical in Joel’s composition class and our involvement in HPCHD in NY, the Event evening from the Cunningham Dance Company performance in the SUNYA gym, working on Birdcage and Monobird. Perhaps fortold in the required reading and ramifications of John Cage Silence.

Some links…

EBA + Dewitt

…need to expand here content and context… a bit of disjoint fragments in the prequel and sequels

I’ll add here more images and links…

Point of Inflection – Shrieks And Nuptials (1976)

In recent parallel thread in submitting ideas for a proposal to the International Computer Music Conference for the fall 2025, I scratched out this note…

Shrieks and Nuptials (link): a duet that in the most recent incarnation uses a gen~ chaotic oscillator manipulated via MIRA  (or perhaps MiraWeb) combining a simple group of sliders,  the accelerometers and / or gyroscopes from the IMU.  Requires typically 4 channels of loudspeaker output from generic computer output interface.  The work originated on the Coordinated Electronic Music Studio (CEMS) modular Moog at University of Albany in 1975, then ported to a DIY XR-2206 performance device in 1976  for Composers Inside Electronics residency as part of the Paris Festival du Automne, and for the Kitchen for our residency there in 1977. Revisiting a digital implementation in MAX and Mira (2018) for a return engagement at the Kitchen is proposed for consideration for ICMC 2025.

Perhaps to fill in pieces is reference to the work from 1976 that marked several turning points and inflections. The work if a piece of physical and sonic theatre of the electronic for two performers with an instrument that involves the physical interaction between the two players. In the original, the force exerted on a heavy elastic band was the principle variable controlling a chaotic oscillator. The elastic band was affixed to a pressure sensitive device with the electronics mounted on a school desk chair so that silence was just around the threshold of the dancer pulling the seated musician across the floor. There are no extent photos or recording I have of the two performances of the original with dancer Marsha Heather Harris. The parameters of the chaotic oscillator required the musician to make fine adjustments with a jewelers screw driver. The original work was created as my contribution to the CIE performances a the Paris Festival du Automne in 1976 and at the Kitchen in January of 1977.

The audio recording was issued on the CIE at the Kitchen CD in the early 2007.

The clip below is an excerpt from the re-implementation of the work performed by Michael Johnsen and I at the Kitch in 2018. Here, I used motion sensors on the iPads and Therabands adapted from a bit of physical therapy for a torn achilles tendon. The original desk chair replaced by rocking chairs.

Heather went of to work with Tom as seen in the Pantomation clip.

In the turning point later in the blur of 1977, I had taken the first of my various full time corporate jobs working for Digital Equipment Corp in Rochester which temporarily was the estrangement and point of departure in so many other ways.

The video technology of that era wasn’t readily adaptable to a style of touring performance in those early CIE and eba years. I tried in the late 1980’s to pickup the thread using camera input on Amiga’s without success. I find in ironic to come around some 50 years later to picking up where I left off on some of this.

There was also for Tom and I an underlying bifurcation of our differing creative focus. Behind this for me was an occupation of the nature and unintended consequences of chaotic and complex systems as Tom interests went to the harmonic structure as seen in Philharmonia and his interest in holography and optics and astronomy.

Of Intersections

Let’s take a look also at the Gene Youngblood book from 1970 Expanded Cinema.

Of the many crossings, in the graph of connections of people and projects, I went back piecing together Tom’s connection to Stan Van Der Beek and following up on Tom’s mention of working on one of the John Cage Variations, We had extremely orthogonal views of Cage’s use of indeterminacy & chance operations, and a particular pivotal view I have of Tudor’s use of complexity and chaotic systems.

Variation V (1965) surfaced in the brain worm that was my work on the E.A.T. Exhibition at the Getty Research Institute in 2023-4 (along with Julie Martin, John Driscoll and Michael Johnsen). As of this writing that exhibition is on loan an Luma Arles having opened May 1 2025.

With a bit of digging in the for of the internet and cross hatched with Tom’s vitae, a reference on a Dance & Technology blog

David Rodger (auricle@alphalink.com.au)
Mon, 12 Jan 1998 20:22:13 +0100

…

>Reply To: thecla@cs.sfu.ca
>Variations V was commissioned by the French-American Festival.
>Cunningham choreographed the work. David Tudor worked with
>John Cage to prepare the sound environment.
[…snip…]

>Behind the platform with the musicians was the large
>Philharmonic Hall movie screen — very large. Stan VanDerBeek
>and his assitance Tom Dewitt had in the weeks ahead of this made
> a number of reels of film of Merce and the company
>dancing, doing moments of the piece. Stan came to the studio
>one day when the company was rehearsing and without
>disrupting the dancers at all, shot through and all around them.
>Stan used these images, and other images, still shots, shots
>from movies, a montage of contemporary scenes, automobiles,
>a man in space, nature, buildings.

Of I

Part of my telling here is how Tom was an integral and appeared with so many of the crucial turning points in my creative and personal life.

In the pieces of chronology, a point in time what must have been wintery night 1972-3 with Tom, VQ and together at the store front I called home for a year on Central Ave. There is a blank spot then between a few months of living briefly in Stuyvesant NY what must have been the summer of 1971 but it must have been earlier that year I would put Tom appearing at the studio. I’ll need to check his ghostly ecollections if that could be right.

A picture I think from Tom of I in those early years.

For my own sense of self, the recollections of the places i’ve lived and been, the places I’ve passed thru are sometimes essential in how i process and recall relationships. I fall to a sense of vignette and episodes often rather than a capability for continuous sequential narrative. I struggle a bit to take such disjioint and give the appearance of coherence and wonder if that’s necessary any more.

I have always suffered an erratic unreliable and inconsistent memory and tenuous attempts at continuity pieced together from pointilistic flashbacks. I find compelling and not always comfortable to come upon these fragments. Of necessity, to find equilibirim and recognition. What’s lost is when exactly I met Tom. Somehow imortant to me to find the fragments that connect us.

It was a college roomate of mine Douglas Wager that’s part of one of these beginnings most significantly a production of Viet Rock Doug directed that I did lighting design (probably 1969). Somewhere in that Doug pulls out The Theatre and It’s Double. Certainly unfolded coincident with eba the reverberations from Black Mountain College . The sequence is murky but no doubt how these shaped me in the early eba formulatons.

There was a moment in what must have been the spring of 1971 when a recording I had made in the studio was included in one of the student Free Music Store concerts notably in the Art Gallery across from the Performing Arts Center. I’m not sure I realized at the time, but that was the tell-tale on the an expressive and creative path as distinct from the technical and engineering as means and ends.

My attendance at David Tudor’s workshop at New Music in New Hampshire was a more foundational beginning and turning point. And of course Tom in his way helped me on that way.

New Music In New Hampshire – origins or Rainforest IV (1973)

This was posted on the bulletin board outside the studio… I applied and got a $150 half price scholarhip and the rest history.

New Music New Hampshire Flyer

The workshop was the point of origin for what coalesced to Composers Inside Electronics by 1976 and Rainforest at the Autumn Festival in Paris and closing chapter with my intimacy with early eba years.

Along the way here, is the realization of the emanations from Black Mountain College as an essential point of reference certainly for me through Tudor and I suspect Tom via Van Der Beek. Of place is then the Gate Hill Co-op. Van Der Beeks dome house just up the road from Tudor’s cottage.

There are direct influences shadows, unconcious gestalt that are parts of recovered memories and these warm visitations. Not so much ghosts and vital visages.

1973-1977

There are a number of significant performances in these eba years that stand out for me in various ways perhaps meaningful …

  • Parachute to a Weather Balloon – Main Stage SUNYA PAC
  • Called Off – Studio Theater SUNYA PAC
  • At Once – EBA loft on Central Avenue
  • Horn – Chapter House
  • Carnival

There some parts to the story to fill in from the concert series Phil Glass just before the breaking out of Einstein on the Beach in 1976, David Gibson – cellist and composer from the Music Department.

Parachute To Weather Balloon and Some Other Photos

EBA Archive Project

We’ll add material here from the EBA Archive Project as that is released and posted. The EBA 50th video edit Tom did perhaps can suffice for the moment… EBA 50th … unmute and starts about 30s in…

Our Town

With due respect to Thorton Wilder.

There is a quote from Isaac Bashevis Singer’s acceptance speech…

“Firstly, I like to write ghost stories and nothing fits a ghost better than a dying language. The deader the language the more alive is the ghost. Ghosts love Yiddish and as far as I know, they all speak it. Secondly, not only do I believe in ghosts, but also in resurrection.”

As what may be coming here, without undue fuss, Tom’s passing has me communing and celebrating with he and so many of the ghosts that I live with for what time remains.

Archives and Legacy

David Tudor’s passing in 1996 was a catalyst that produced a vibrant resurrection of the collaboration between John Driscoll and I. Perhaps only now, do I have the perspective to try to weave this together.

After many year of pretty disparate contact, in what was likely the week in March 2020, I recall a unique dinner with Maude, Joel and I arranged by Michael Cusick around the idea of our shared legacy and arriving at a point in our lives in the realization of the eba and CEMS /EMF /Chadabe archives. It was around that time, I had a similar conversation with Phill Niblock. Joel and I had been able to stay in touch over the years. I was often reminded of how it was his encouragement and creative support over the year and what that meant to me. The connection with Maude was very indirect after 1977 with the occasional third party remembrances.

2 More Vignettes

The Tinkerbell Effect

I have harbored the idea that a I must do a new work “The Tinkerbell Effect” – not the faerie image but the fleeting flickering of how positive common shared belief unfolds. Now over fifty years, it is perhaps that image that would be enough to finish my work from the WNET TVLab redisency… how a pinhole burn in the phosphor could be animated and brought to life.

The Hoh Rainforest, Olympic Penninsula

Several years ago, I had the good fortune to visit the temperate rainforest of the Olympic Pennisula.

There is a void at the base of those majestic trees that gave me a clear sense of the what and why of legacy and evolution. Of how the fallen trunks become the nurse logs and it is that void I seek to inhabit.