Richard Maxfield, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Richard Maxfield

American composer

Date of Birth: 02-Feb-1927

Place of Birth: Seattle, Washington, United States

Date of Death: 27-Jun-1969

Profession: composer, university teacher

Nationality: United States

Zodiac Sign: Aquarius


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About Richard Maxfield

  • Richard Vance Maxfield (February 2, 1927 – June 27, 1969) was a composer of instrumental, electro-acoustic, and electronic music. Born in Seattle, Maxfield studied at Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley (with Roger Sessions) and privately with Ernst Krenek in Los Angeles.
  • A Hertz Prize travel scholarship allowed Maxfield to travel to Europe, where he met Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luigi Nono.
  • in 1953 he studied at Tanglewood with Aaron Copland.
  • In 1954-55 he studied at Princeton University with Sessions and his pupil Milton Babbitt.
  • A Fulbright Scholarship allowed Maxfield to live in Europe between 1955 and 1957, where he studied with Luigi Dallapiccola and Bruno Maderna, lived for a brief period with Hans Werner Henze and met John Cage and David Tudor.
  • In 1958, he attended Cage's courses at the New School for Social Research (now The New School).
  • In 1959 he taught classes there himself, becoming the first American to teach purely electronic music (as opposed to electronic music based on musique concrete-style real life recordings).
  • As a student at University of California and in Europe in the 1950s, he composed instrumental scores in a neoclassical style and then adopted 12-tone techniques.
  • It is however techniques for composing with magnetic tape that would prove decisive in the development of Maxfield's mature compositions.
  • Among his innovations with tape music were the simultaneous performance of improvised instrumental solos with tapes based upon samples of the same soloist, re-editing of tapes before each public performance so that the pieces were not fixed in a single form, and the use of the erase head of the tape machine as a sound source.
  • He was also an active Fluxus participant and a friend of La Monte Young who participated in the publication An Anthology of Chance Operations.
  • Young now maintains the archive of Maxfield's works.In 1960, he and Young co-curated the early Fluxus concerts at Yoko Ono's loft: the first Downtown concerts.
  • In 1967, Maxfield left his tape music, scores and equipment in the care of artist friend Walter de Maria.
  • He moved to San Francisco, where he taught at San Francisco State College (1966–67).
  • In 1969, he moved to Los Angeles.
  • On June 27, 1969, Maxfield committed suicide in LA by jumping out a window of the Figueroa Hotel at the age of 42. Maxfield recorded a number of electronic minimalist pieces, a few of which have seen commercial release. In 2017, art historian Gerald Hartnett finished a doctoral dissertation on Maxfield at the State University of New York, Stony Brook.
  • Hartnett places Maxfield as a crucial contributor to the experimental art and music of the late 1950s and early 1960s, placing him in the context of Guy Debord, William Burroughs, and Samuel Beckett.
  • Hartnett wrote about "...experimental, time-based, and technologically reproducible art objects produced between 1954 and 1964 to represent 'the real'...
  • [in which] ...vectors of influence between art and the cybernetic and computational sciences...responded to technological reproducibility in three ways.
  • First of all, writers Guy Debord and William Burroughs reinvented appropriation art practice as a means of critiquing retrograde mass media entertainments and reportage.
  • Second, Western art music composer Richard Maxfield mobilized chance techniques and indeterminacy to resist scientific and philosophical determinism’s pervasive influences upon post-1945 art and life.
  • Third, author and playwright Samuel Beckett conjectured that ubiquitous recording might become problematic to the quality of experiential life in technologically mediated environments."

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