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Remembering Composer (and live looper) Dr. Richard Zvonar
*I was just remembering Dr. Richard Zvonar today with great fondness
(and more than a little sadness
that he's no longer with us).
I found this biography/obituary of him and wanted to share it with
anyone who didn't know of his important
work, artistically.
R.I.P. Dr. Richard Zvonar 1946-2005
*Rick Walker*
*
Dr. Richard 'RZ' Zvonar
Composer Richard Zvonar, 1946-2005
by E. "Doc" Smith‚ Aug. 05‚ 2005
Review it on
NewsTrust<http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://www.beyondchron.org?itemid=343>
"I'm sad to report that Richard "RZ" Zvonar has passed away after a long
bout with cancer.", wrote good friend Steve Ellison last night. "He was
a breath of fresh air to me when I moved out here, and was a big help
and very supportive over the years." Indeed, I'll miss him too, as will
countless others who benefited from his vast musical and electronic
knowledge, from Jon Hassell, to Diamanda Galas to the Grateful Dead.
Zvonar once told me of how he first arrived in California from New
England, nearly broke and living out of his car. Yet his determination,
conviction kept him going. He succeeded, earned a doctorate, and became
one of the most respected innovators in his field.
Richard Zvonar was a composer/performer and intermedia artist who
specialized in electroacoustic music. Some of his significant early
influences included Louis and Bebe Barron's electronic sound track to
the 1956 film Forbidden Planet, the Wizard of Oz ("Pay no attention to
the man behind the curtain"), and the Witch Doctor and Chipmunk
recordings of David Seville.
During his freshman year as an Aeronautics and Astronautics major at MIT
the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan. Intensive guitar practice and first
attempts at song writing ensued.
Boston was not a major center for avant garde music in those years (has
it ever been?) but Zvonar pursued an autodidactic education courtesy of
the electronic music and new music bins at the record department of the
Harvard Coop. Recordings of Stockhausen, Cage, Oliveros, Reich, Riley,
Subotnick, and the Columbia-Princeton crowd were as influential on his
musical thinking as the music of Zappa, Hendrix, the Beatles, the Who,
and other '60s pop experimentalists.
Zvonar's undergraduate thesis was a short film for three synchronized
projectors. During this period he also began composing tape music.??His
first performances of electroacoustic music, using quadraphonic sound
and tape delay systems, as well as several short theater pieces, came
while a student at Cabrillo College in the Santa Cruz area. This
supportive community college environment was an ideal springboard into
graduate study, and Zvonar was accepted to the composition program at US
San Diego. His teachers included Pauline Oliveros, Bernard Rands, Roger
Reynolds, Robert Erickson, F.R. Moore and others, all active
contemporary music thinkers and practitioners.
Zvonar emerged from academia after seven years with a PhD in Composition
from UCSD and a brain filled unto bursting. Zvonar's work at this time
included purely electronic music, musique concrete, pieces for live
performer and tape, and intermedia performance works. His Doctoral piece
was a 45-minute intermedia theater piece based on the memoirs of a
schizophrenia German judge ("soul murder"), combining multi-screen slide
projections, kinetic staging, choreography, and a mix of electronic and
processed vocal sound played through a multichannel sound system.
In 1980 Zvonar started a five-year collaboration with singer Diamanda
Galas, recording and performing works for solo voice, live electronic
processing, and multitrack tape. The two split in 1985 and Zvonar began
working with Macintosh computers and MIDI systems for composition and
performance.
For several years after his move to Los Angeles in 1986 Zvonar was part
of the technical staff of Good Sound Foundation, researching and
promoting the use of high-quality multichannel sound systems for live
performance. He also worked as an independent consultant and software
developer for clients such as Pauline Oliveros, Jon Hassell, the
Grateful Dead, sound artist Max Neuhaus, and Marc Canter's Media Band.
In 1994 he started working with Steve Ellison's company, Level Control
Systems, bringing similar concepts and technologies to the world of
commercial entertainment. The work with LCS included training and
technical support for theme parks and Broadway and Las Vegas shows.
Also during the 1990s, Zvonar's work with live signal processing
continued in the context of the "ambient groove and spoken word" band
Cosmic Debris. Live recordings of the group's performances have been
compiled into several CDs (available from MP3.com), and a studio remix
project under the name of Alias Zone was released commercially, debuting
at the #1 position in the New Age Voice chart in February 2002. Zvonar's
recent work includes pieces for multichannel surround sound (the
8-channel tape piece "Frikkit!") as well as solo performances using
digital looping and signal processing (recent participation in the Y2K2
Loopfest and Woodstockhausen Festival). He was also in a "woodshedding"
phase of learning new software and re-learning the guitar, with the
vague notion of melding all his past musical lives into some
Frankensteinian new genre.
Some of his more recent works and writings included his "History of
Spatial Music" and "An Extremely Brief History of Spatial Music in the
20th Century", his famous L.A. "Technology Salons", and I couldn't help
but notice Tower Records still sporting his "State of the Bass"
compilation album with the likes of James Sellars, Orlando Jacinto
Garcia, Amy Knoles, Paul Dresher, Robert Black and the great John Cage
on "snare drum".
Dr. Richard Zvonar, aka "RZ", will always have a place in our hearts,
for his insights, his genius, his humor, and in these final years, his
compassion. He was one of those unsung heroes you never hear about, but
are unknowingly influenced by everyday.
We will miss him...
/E. "Doc" Smith is a musician and recording engineer who has worked with
the likes of Brian Eno, Madonna, Warren Zevon, Mickey Hart, Jimmy Cliff,
and John Mayall among others. He is also the inventor of the musical
instrument, the Drummstick. He can be reached at drummstick@earthlink.net/