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Joan La Barbara

Joan La Barbara (born June 8, 1947 in Philadelphia, PA) is an American vocalist and composer associated with contemporary music. She is a former student of Helen Boatwright. She has worked with her husband Morton Subotnick since 1979, as well with many other contemporary composers such as John Cage, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass, Larry Austin, Peter Laurence Gordon, and the dancer Merce Cunningham. She has also worked with Kenneth Goldsmith. She also composed the music for the Sesame Street animated film “Signing Alphabet,” for electronics and voice. While she is known primarily for her vocal abilities and extended techniques, she is also an accomplished and respected composer.

Joan La Barbara (born June 8, 1947 in Philadelphia, PA) is an American vocalist and composer associated with contemporary music. She is a former student of Helen Boatwright. She has worked with her husband Morton Subotnick since 1979, as well with many other contemporary composers such as John Cage, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass, Larry Austin, Peter Laurence Gordon, and the dancer Merce Cunningham. She has also worked with Kenneth Goldsmith. She also composed the music for the Sesame Street animated film “Signing Alphabet,” for electronics and voice. While she is known primarily for her vocal abilities and extended techniques, she is also an accomplished and respected composer.

Sound
Sound: An Exhibition of Sound Sculpture, Instrument Building and Acoustically Tuned Spaces opened at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art in the summer of 1979 (and was also on view later that year at PS1 in New York). Curated by Bob Wilhite and Robert Smith, the exhibition surveyed the field of sound art. The forty-four participants were painters pivoted toward performance, conceptual artists attracted to time-based mediums, self-styled creators of environments, and musicians (formally…
Vers Quelques Attracteurs Etranges
The first album of Cévennes, a project of Didier Delrieu. Slow electronic music composed mostly on Buchla and various analog synthesizers, this work is interested in sound poetry, exotic and cinematographic atmospheres.
Last Afternoon
** Edition of 200 ** The second release on Constructive is ‘Last Afternoon’ by Japanese composer Takuma Watanabe. Having studied at Berklee College in the USA he is currently living in Japan where he composes for film using a string ensemble founded by himself. This is Watanabe’s first full length artist album. ‘Last Afternoon’ features collaborations with American vocalist and composer Joan La Barbara known for her recorded works with John Cage, Morton Feldman, Robert Ashley and composer and so…
Desert Plants
**Essential reading!** Walter Zimmermann interviews Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, John Cage, Philip Corner, Jim Burton, Phil Glass, Steve Reich, Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier, Joan La Barbara, Pauline Oliveros, David Rosenboom, Richard Teitelbaum, Larry Austin, James Tenney, J. B. Floyd (about Conlon Nancarrow), La Monte Young, Charlemagne Palestine, Charles Morrow, Garrett List, John Mc Guire and Ben Johnston (about Harry Partch).
73 Poems
Joan La Barbara's composition, 73 Poems, was commissioned, produced and recorded by Permanent Press (Brooklyn, NY) to accompany the publication of Kenneth Goldsmith's 73 Poems as a book and as a suite of lithographs. La Barbara's works often involve multiple layers of her own voice, creating a kind of sonic canvas on which she throws splashes of vocal colors. On this CD, her potent combination of vocal and studio expertise makes it possible for her to represent in music some of the most distinct…
The Early Immersive Music of Joan La Barbara
**Milestone recordings. Joan La Barbara's controlled experiments into the limits of the human voice took her beyond music** Joan La Barbara is one of great figures in the history of the American musical avant-garde – holding equal standing as an innovator, composer, and performer. She has defined the field of extended vocal technique for the better part of half a century, pushing our understanding of the sonic possibility of the human voice – drawing on its primal root, and thrusting it into the…
Tapesongs
Tapesongs (1977) is the second of two crucial Joan La Barbara reissues on Arc Light Editions, following Voice Is The Original Instrument (1976) (ALE 005LP, 2016). Joan La Barbara is a composer, performer, sound artist and actor, renowned for her unique vocabulary of experimental and extended vocal techniques, which have influenced generations of composers and singers. This reissue is presented in full collaboration with La Barbara. Tapesongs makes use of early electronics, and multi-tracked…
Voice is the original instrument
Masterpiece!! Voice Is The Original Instrument was the first record released by Joan La Barbara in 1976 on Wizard Records. This is the first time the original LP, with artwork, has been made available again. It has since become iconic as one of the initial examples of extended vocal techniques in experimental music. The human voice is the only instrument on the recordings. The works on Voice is the Original Instrument were some of Joan's earliest compositions, researching the possibilities of th…
ShamanSong
Composer/performer Joan La Barbara (b 1947) has been an influential figure in experimental music since the early 1970s. She has devoted her career to the exploration of the human voice as a multi-faceted instrument. Going far beyond traditional boundaries, she has created works for multiple voices, chamber ensembles, music theater, orchestra and interactive technology. ShamanSong features three premieres of vintage La Barbara "sound paintings" of pensive beauty and spiritual resonance.  ShamanSo…
Sound Paintings
Joan La Barbara begins Sound Paintings with a scream that pushes you into an unusual world of vocal sound. Her virtuoso singing style, developed over a 20-year period, can be heard on this disc, which combines some of her earlier works with more recent compositions. She takes her extended techniques, which include multiphonics, overtone singing, and glottal clicks, and orchestrates them in layered soundscape compositions using from 8 to 16 tracks of material.
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