by Ingram Marshall

Charlemagne Palestine's careening career through the avant garde music/ art world of the sixties and seventies in New York and the West Coast (not to mention Europe and Canada) could be said to typify the wide ranging, inclusive crossover, anti-establishment characteristics of that very world; yet, at the same time, in a broader sense, there is nothing typical about Palestine. He seems to fit in no known vessel.

Although he is best known as a composer and performer of his own music, most of which is improvised, at least in the sense of being performed from memory as opposed to being written out, he has also ventured into parallel worlds of performance art, painting-sculpture and experimental video.

Although he began to develop his unique vocal styles and massed-cluster-of-sound music in New York in the late sixties, he did not really associate with the main characters of the then emerging "minimalist" style as exemplified by La MonteYoung, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich. He did study briefly with the Indian singer, Pandit Pran Nath who eventually became Young's guru (and Terry Riley's as well). It was at CalArts in the first two years of its existence, 1970-71, that Palestine connected with Simone Forti, the dancer who had been associated with not only the Fluxus scene in New York, but the San Francisco Tape Music Center through her work with Anna Halprin. Palestine and Forti collaborated both as teachers and performers in California and later in New York where they both resettled—the California thing for both of them was always a temporary home. It was at CalArts however that he discovered his piano, the Bösendorfer, and when he moved to New York he was able to secure loans and grants from friends to purchase one (later the Bösendorfer company supplied him with pianos for concerts in Europe). For a few years there were almost weekly performances in his loft on North Moore Street in Tribeca, and before that on Reade Street where he shared a studio with Philip Glass.

Palestine also encouraged other young performance artists, dancers and musicians to use his space, and he often performed at venues such as the Experimental Intermedia Center (Phill Niblock's loft), the Kitchen, and 112 Greene Street. Music critics such as Tom Johnson and John Rockwell of The New York Times wrote favorable reviews and profiles of this eccentric artist whose hours long piano events often involved not only singing and chanting, but dizzying perambulations around the space, with kretek cigarettes and cognac perfuming the air. The array of stuffed animals on and around the piano grew with each performance, until, in a way, they seemed to take over.

It was the Sonnabend Gallery in Soho which first took him seriously as a visual artist, showing his videotapes and giving him the space to do performance art pieces; for a few years, it was not clear if he was destined to be a composer, a painter, or a performance artist. And he still has persisted in blurring the lines, seeking instead not perfection in a prescribed art form but seeking vessels or modes d'emploi for his searching for the sacred. In the late seventies and early eighties when Minimalism became big—that is to say composers such as Reich and Glass became commercially successful and many other composers from the straight concert world began to employ repetition and static forms—Palestine basically said goodbye to all that, left Soho for Brooklyn and Europe, and devoted most of his energies to his make-believe visual arts world of stuffed animals and sculptural creations that used them. Performance art and music performances became rare, and more about memory than manifestations of his current mind.

There was no question that he influenced a host of slightly younger composer-performers (one, Glenn Branca, had started his own record company and paid a sort of homage to Palestine by recording his music). The richness of the scene in lower Manhattan in those days was astonishing; poets, theater people, artists and composers all knew each other, and genre lines were blurred. Minimalist art installations in permanent galleries by people such as Judd or deMaria would attract the same audience as a Laurie Anderson performance, or a Meredith Monk dance-concert event, or a sound installation by Max Neuhaus or MaryAnn Amacher. Simone Forti and Joan Jonas, also a sometime collaborator with Palestine, used video in their dance. Severely minimal composer-performers such as Niblock, Yoshi Wada or Bill Hellermann, performed regularly in their own spaces. It was a time and place where private and public space could become the same, where the work of art became just a part of everyday life, or everyday life became transformed at times into art itself.

The avuncular John Cage seemed to reign over the whole scene, if not stylistically, at least spiritually. Some of the experimental composers of this time who used electric guitars to achieve levels of ear splitting volume in order to reveal hidden overtones and difference tones such as Rhys Chatham and Branca, dismayed Cage in fact, who publicly referred to the latter's music as Fascistic. So even amongst the "downtown" scene there was dissension. Very little of this art worked its way uptown, at least not for a while. For about ten to fifteen years there was a golden age where art, performance, and music co-existed and crossed boundaries without regard to preordained venues or forms. There have not been many eras in art wherein a person could actively pursue creation in two or three "disciplines" because those disciplines were in the process of being redefined—such a time was this and in this soup of influences, allowances, permissions, and encouragements, a unique personage such as Palestine could thrive and find his audience.

—Ingram Marshall

Ingram Marshall is a composer and sometime writer on music. Although currently living in Connecticut, he was for many years active on the West Coast. Recent recordings are on Nonesuch, New Albion, and New World Records.

reprinted with permission