Martin Riches | Robert Ashley

Born on the Isle of Wight and based in Berlin, Martin Riches has been constructing kinetic objects, interactive installations, and language and music machines since the late 1970s. Works from the 1980s and 1990s include a self-playing violin and several percussion instruments. MaerzMusik presents Martin Riches’ 24 Piece Percussion Installation (1988) playing two pieces by Tom Johnson, Eight Pieces for 24 Piece Percussion Installation and Micro Miniatures. The two artists are old friends and have been collaborating since 1983. For Riches’ first music machine, Flute Playing Machine (1979), Tom Johnson composed eight short pieces in a set entitled Reversibles. Since that time he has created numerous compositions for Riches’ handmade mechanical instruments. The works of the two artists share a clarity and simplicity that is predicated on a minimalist approach to material, emphasis on sound production as process and transparency of musical structures. The experimental installations by Martin Riches are the perfect symbiotic partner for Tom Johnson’s conceptual minimalism. The arrangement of the installation’s percussive elements in space gives the rational musical patterns a new aesthetic and figurative shape.

In an installation including seven screens and headsets MaerzMusik presents Music with Roots in the Aether, a TV opera by American composer and multimedia artist Robert Ashley. Interviews and performances featuring David Behrman, Philip Glass, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros, Roger Reynolds, and Terry Riley make up a fourteen-hour work in which Ashley portrayed the composers he most esteemed. At the same time, this work documents American developments in new and experimental music in the 1960s, concentrating on original works by composers of the post-serialism or post-Cagean era who gained international renown. With David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, and Gordon Mumma, Robert Ashley co-founded the Sonic Arts Union which toured Europe and the United States in 1966–76. On this tour he collected many ideas and a great deal of material. In 1976 the TV opera premièred at the Festival d’Automne in Paris. Since then it has also been shown in television broadcasts and as an installation.

Installations open 20 to 29 March 2009 open one hour before and after the events