Charlemagne Palestine

Charlemagne Palestine occupies a foundational position among experimental American sound practitioners, serving simultaneously as composer, visual creator, and live performer, and commands international recognition for the thunderous, rhythmic, flowing sustained tones he produces on keyboard instruments and tower bells across marathon recitals that in earlier decades sometimes concluded with visible traces of his blood left on the keys. He ranks among the most elusive figures to surface from the New York experimental art milieu of the 1960s and 1970s. Although frequently grouped with reductionist composers such as Terry Riley and LaMonte Young, both of whom attended his tower-bell recitals at St. Thomas' Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue, Palestine rejects the association. During a 2010 conversation with the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper he stated: "There was never anything minimal about my style. If anything, I invented maximalism."

The Brooklyn-raised child of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Palestine, originally named Charles Martin and uncertain whether his birth year was 1945 or 1947, absorbed the sounds of klezmer ensembles and Russian folk melodies from an early age; he further credits his childhood service as a synagogue treble singer with forming his view of music as an endurance discipline. A youthful recollection involving an organ or harmonium recurs as a thematic element across his body of work. At twelve he began providing conga and bongo accompaniment for Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. From 1962 through 1969 he held the post of carillonneur at Manhattan’s St. Thomas Episcopal Church, performing hymns for fifteen minutes and improvising for the balance of each hour-long session; he later assembled these efforts into a single composition consisting of 1,500 fifteen-minute carillon pieces. Between 1968 and 1972 he studied vocal technique with Pandit Pran Nath, collaborated with Len Lye on kinetic light sculptures, and supplied music for Tony & Beverly Conrad’s film Coming Attractions. Both underground and mainstream publications covered his concerts. He instructed at Cal Arts alongside Morton Subotnick and jointly devised the sound-and-movement work Illuminations with Simone Forti, which appeared commercially in 2010. He also constructed his personal alternative synthesizer, the Spectral Continuum Drone Machine.

Throughout the 1970s he issued several privately pressed recordings; three in particular attained legendary status: the 1973 release Body Music together with the 1974 albums Strumming Music and Four Manifestations on Six Elements, each containing dense, ceremonial music intended to challenge Western listeners’ assumptions about beauty and significance in sound. His most familiar piece, Strumming Music, consists of only two pitches struck in quick alternation that gradually builds a hypnotic effect before expanding into dense tone clusters.

Even as his standing within new-music communities expanded during the late 1970s and 1980s, Palestine increasingly turned toward visual art, largely abandoning studio recording while continuing to appear live at intervals. Amid this phase of limited visibility his explosive performances and pioneering sonic output distinguished him from the market-oriented minimalism then gaining acceptance in classical institutions. He additionally produced videos, sculptures, and visual music notations.

He relocated to Brussels in 1995 and presented work at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and Documenta 8. In the same period he established the Ethnology Cinema Project in New York, an initiative devoted to safeguarding films that document vanishing traditional cultures. Palestine resumed recording in 1997; his initial return, Three Compositions for Machines, realized with Mika Vainio and Pita, appeared on Staalplaat, followed in 1998 by the album Godbear, drawn from a 1987 live performance in a Washington, D.C. church. In 1999 he issued the vocal-and-tambura piece Hommage à Faquir Pandit Pran Nath with Stéphane Roux and the electronic work Jamaica Heinekens in Brooklyn.

With the arrival of the new millennium his output increased markedly. In 2000 he issued five albums of fresh and previously unreleased material, the most prominent being Mort Aux Vaches, created with Pan Sonic, and the extended harmonium-and-voice composition Karenina. The 2001 solo carillon recording Music for Big Ears followed on Staalplaat. The next year Michael Gira’s Young God Records brought out Maximin, a joint project involving Palestine, David Coulter, and Jean Marie Mathoul. Gira joined the same trio for the 2004 release Gantse Mishpuchah on Fringes Recordings. Two years later the widely traveled composer issued collaborative recordings with Perlonex and Keith Rowe under the title Tensions as well as the widely praised An Aural Symbiotic Mystery with Tony Conrad on Sub Rosa. An archival document of a 1979 Paris concert, The Golden Mean, preserves Palestine performing simultaneously on two Bösendorfer Imperial Grand Pianos. Between 2007 and 2013 he released no fewer than twenty albums of new or archival material, working alone or alongside Conrad, Christoph Heemann, Rhys Chatham, Z'ev, and Janek Schaefer. His most active year proved to be 2015, which yielded seven complete albums, among them Fluxus with Mama Bär and Franz Kamin, Bells Studies for carillon and magnetic tape, and the solo organ program Organo Rinascimentale Non Temperato. Another substantial solo organ performance appeared in 2016 as Cathdrale de Strasbourg on Erratum. The year 2017 likewise proved productive, generating four releases that included the well-received Omminggg And Schlomminggg with Grumbling Fur Time Machine Orchestra and the archival Arpeggiated Bösendorfer + Falsetto Voice from 1974 on Alga Margen. In 2018 Palestine’s explorations on a custom-built analog synthesizer were documented on the pair of Moog Library releases Ttuunneesszz Duh Rruunneesszz and Interrvallissphereee, while his four-month retrospective exhibition and installation at BOZAR, Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels, produced the archival collection Aa Sschmmettrroossppecctivve, which incorporated a self-recorded performance on a New York Bösendorfer model 220 dating from 1974.