Workshops and Classes

Dream Music of Malaya: A Listening Session by Alexander Keefe

Tuesday, Jun 28, 2016
8:00pm -> 9:30pm
Beirut Art Center

Dream Music of Malaya: La Monte Young and the 60s downtown scene, reoriented.

This is a listening session and talk in three parts, tracing the complex transmission and adaptation of music and influences from what used to be called the “Third World” by a circle of musicians, artists, gadflies, freaks and friends on the New York downtown scene in the early to mid 1960s. La Monte Young and his peers, including Terry Riley, Tony Conrad, Jack Smith, Angus Maclise, Marian Zazeela and John Cale, together retuned American music, injecting it with viral, dissident strains of drone and improvisation, staging their performances as cosmic ritual theater, “going native” in search of liberation, or perhaps just after that most American of goals: freedom. That their music was deeply American and utterly modern goes without saying, despite the trappings of antiquity and essence with which they so often presented it.

About Alexander
Alexander Keefe is a writer living in Los Angeles, California. His work has appeared in Bidoun, East of Borneo and Artforum, among others. Keefe did graduate work in Sanskrit and Indian studies at Harvard University and later taught as an assistant professor at Ohio University. A 2010 grantee of the Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program, he has also received a Fulbright for research in India and currently holds the Inaugural Alan Erasmus Fellowship in Unpopular Culture at NYU’s Colloquium for Unpopular Culture.

Free Entrance

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