David Rosenboom

David Rosenboom (b. 1947) has been widely acclaimed as an innovator in American experimental music since the 1960s. Although much of his work has been collaborative, virtually none of his large-scale collaborative works has hitherto been documented on record. How Much Better If Plymouth Rock Had Landed on the Pilgrims (1969-71) is considered to be one of the most important, prompting the following Washington Post review after a 1970 performance: 'If there were a device whereby one could plug into the deepest levels of human consciousness, and then translate this input into sound, what we would hear would probably resemble How Much Better if Plymouth Rock Had Landed on the Pilgrims, the radical composition by David Rosenboom... The elemental pulsations of the piece seem to echo not only our fundamental biological cycles, but those innate psychical tides that govern the flux of human thought and feeling... The listener becomes receptive to fantasy and hallucination and instants seem stretched to eternities... Rosenboom's idiom poses a new esthetic... Against the ascetic, disciplined, puritanical streak that one associates in this country with the Pilgrims, this new music hurls a rejuvenated sensuality and mysticism.' This is the world-premiere recording of the complete work.