Allan Bryant

I was born in Detroit (1931), studied chemistry and music at Princeton (1949–53), and after the army, pro-baseball, and working as a chemist at Cape Canaveral, I went to “Koln State” (Music School) in Germany on the GI Bill, (1959-63) and spent a lot of time watching Karlheinz Stockhausen work. I then “visited” Rome (1964–87) where Frederic Rzewski, Alvin Curran, Jon Phetteplace and I put together a group, “Musica Elettronica Viva” (MEV), to create electronic- sounding music in concert. Stockhausen came to a concert of ours in Dusseldorf in 1968, and then started his own electronic improvisation group, so you might say we traded influences. Since the late 1960s I’ve recorded, on and off, a lot of guitar pieces, including the ones on this record, and in the 1980s I wrote a number of melodic orchestra pieces. (One, Lippershey-Orion, was performed with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1987.)...

“Altho” I sometimes make electronic instruments, these “Space Guitars” use no electronics, other than amplification. I make new instruments because it’s a good way to make music different than anyone else’s, and to get played without using number painting, splatter, or “the needle’s stuck” techniques—and of course, because they make fascinating new and completely different sounds —Allan Bryant, 1995