When There Is No More Music to Write, and Other Roman Stories (Éric Baudelaire, 2022) (Patreon)

This new featurette by Baudelaire is actually more of a compilation, comprised to two short films and the longer titular work, a documentary about experimental composer Alvin Curran. One learns a great deal about Curran's post-Cagean philosophy of collective improvisation, in particular how he sees it as an aesthetic model for a more just, egalitarian society. Curran certainly isn't the first to consider the concept of the composer as somewhat authoritarian, but based on what we hear in WTINMMtW, his work with Musica Elettronica Viva attempted to do away even with the idea of a discrete work, with a starting or stopping point. This suggests that Curran's work may be a hinge point between "official" art music figures like Cage, LaMonte Young, Morton Feldman, and Terry Riley, and their far less academic brethren, groups like Einstürzende Neubauten, Nurse With Wound, Coil, and the like.

The Curran film, however, is essentially anchored by an extended interview with the man, and at times even the music itself seems secondary. Much more visceral are the two shorts. Four Flat Tires is a complex collage of audio and visual material that conveys a sort of humanist footnote to the Red Brigade's kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro. The Lost Score combines scenes from Zabriske Point with fragments of music Curran and MEV wrote for the film, a score that was never used. Although all three parts are edited by the great Claire Atherton, there are limits to what she can accomplish in the longer film. Experimental though it may be, it still has a didactic function, whereas the two shorts reflect a much more complex archeology of media images. This bundling of films means that Baudelaire nearly achieves feature length, and all center around the general atmosphere in which Curran was active. But I'm not sure any of the works are best served in this manner.