Composer:  John Avery Bice  (1923 - present)

        The scene is of a grotesque band dancing and flailing-in from afar. They build a frenzied crescendo, then disappear.
        This piece and another, "Siena Renaissance Festival", were in part inspired by the composer's residency in Italy, during the 1960s. (There, he directed State University of New York art studies and coordinated activities  with the University of Siena and the Academia Chigiana.)  One pertinent memory is of a ragtag band of street musicians blaring, banging with discordant tunes down the narrow, cobblestone street in front of his garden apartment in Siena.  His small children, Juliet and Warrick, followed them as they dissapeared around the corner like Pied Pipers.

Rich - I took time to read the Futurist manifestos, and began reflecting about any influences or parallels in my works.  Thanks for taking the time to filter a little biographical info for the production. 
  Jack

        His first musical excursions, real time taped piano improvisations for the left hand (1959-1961) to be played back double speed, made innovative use of a primitive tape recorder.  (A right hand paralyzed by polio in 1946 led to this approach.)  Then (1969-75) came tape loop audio collage works.  His latest compositions (1984 to present) employ sampled as well as synthesized sounds and feature original computer scores.  Many of these are written ultimately for live performance.
          Bice's long-term search for expressive potential in mechanical and electronic tools thus seems quite obviously to reflect some of the spirit of the Futurist artists, poets and musicians of the turn of the 20th Century.  Yet, philosophically he differs greatly:

        Bice was a combat liaison photographer in Europe during World War II.  He no doubt gained a different perspective concerning the "glory of war" than the Futurists.    Within their fresh, Turn-of-the-Century purview the Futurists foresaw marvelous, unfolding promises in science.  They lived within vibrant, swirling energies.  Their clanging, sleek, industrialized world obviously challenged the insipid dogma oozing out of cultural antiquity.  It all became a grand dynamic, inspiring the raucus - some would say reckless and callous - enthusiasms of those pre-WW I poets and artists.
        In contrast, the war's dramatic, violent milieu did give Bice adequate immersion in technological "solutions", large and small - his battlefield photo craft required spontaneous innovations for myriad, transient, mechanistic problems.  But this craft was functional, not expressive.

        Nevertheless, parallels evolved.  Bice recalls, "I grew up within the persistent sense of  'American ingenuity' and exploration.  My father and older brother were engineers, and after the war I quite naturally embraced the American post-war culture of the mid-20th Century with its somewhat arid 'faith in science'."
        This ethos lacked the Futurists' self-aware ebullience.  It presented an undercurrent of doubts.  "For example, I still have troubling, early memories of the clean, brave-but-questionable world in the 1930s H.G. Wells movie, 'Things to Come', which I saw as an adolescent.  The film ends with artists storming the first launch to the Moon.  The artists were trying to claim a more humane purpose for mankind, that of creating a beautiful life on Earth, rather than polluting the Heavens."  (Contemporary talks of commercializing the Moon seem relevant here.)

        "So, I had an intuitive connection with gadgetry, but also a growing philosophical conviction - not a new idea - that technology must be mastered for both expressive and practical ends or become humanity's Armageddon.  Those experiences and compulsions (besides studying, in 1949, with Max Beckmann, whose Expressionistic images so powerfully, poetically depicted Nazi brutality and Gothic grotesqueries) shaped my attitudes as an artist."
        "The music is the essence, the technology only a tool," Bice says, "yet each tool presents its own, expressive aesthetic to be explored and developed."  Interestingly, while he has been an established painter for over fifty years, as a photographer he invented stereoptic techniques and devices.  And in the 1970s he was a well-known innovator in the evolving video art movement which for him typically became a combination of technical manipulation and visual and auditory poetry.