Malcolm Goldstein
Turning paintings into sound
The last and only time avant-garde violinist Malcolm Goldstein visited Boulder was in the 1960s, when he shared the marquee with none other than Sammy Davis, Jr. This time, Goldstein is coming to town to finally act on twenty years’ worth of talk about collaborating with a good friend, artist Junko Chodos.
Chodos’s exhibit A Passionate Witness is currently on display at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. On Saturday night, Goldstein will choose a couple of his friend’s paintings to “make into sound.”
His improvisations will dig deeper into the textures of Chodos’s artistic questioning, which began in Japan during World War II. Her childhood was marred by terror, destruction and repression associated with the war and a feeling that her society didn’t value the role of the artist. Her works are jarring and simultaneously meditative as she emerges on the other side of a dark journey through her own inner landscape.
Goldstein and his peers (like the late John Cage) revolutionized the way people thought about music. Stretching far beyond popular perceptions,
Goldstein mixes scratches, scrapes and straining notes with sharp bursts and snaps of the bow.
Goldstein mixes scratches, scrapes and straining notes with sharp bursts and snaps of the bow. His work may sound like the noises we usually try to turn off or drown out—like construction sounds or worn-out brakes, a tea kettle. These are not tunes you’ll hum to yourself afterward.
They are the documentation of an expedition through the places we try to hide from. At once terrifying and illuminating, his compositions raise questions like: What is music? What is valuable? What’s the purpose of art? Does it have to make sense?
Goldstein and Chodos became friends partially because of their shared artistic approach. Both push their audiences to stretch beyond preconceived ideas toward the controversial, the abstract, and the strange.
“What is music? What is valuable? What’s the purpose of art? Does it have to make sense?”
“We have a strong respect and affinity for each other’s work,” he says. “The openness, the richness of the sound in my compositions is analogous to what she is doing in her artwork.”
Goldstein has been a force in experimental music and dance since the early sixties. He was the co-founder/director of the Tone Roads Ensemble and a participant in the Judson Dance Theatre, the New York Festival of the Avant-Garde and the Experimental Intermedia Foundation. According to the Village Voice, Goldstein “… reinvented violin playing. His sighs, rasps, bumps have finer gradations and more varied range of color than pure tone has.”
Although hailed as a master of improv, Goldstein says his approach isn’t necessarily intellectual.
“Improv is not a matter of controlling something or working out a system,” he says. “For me, it is a matter of being present in the moment. … It’s not intellectual in the sense that I stand back and think about it.”
For first-time listeners, Goldstein’s work might be shocking and unfamiliar, but he encourages the audience to stick with it.
“On first encounter, the music will seem strange,” he says. “On the other hand, if one just keeps their ears open and doesn’t have preconceived ideas of what music should be, they can experience different dimensions.”
Originally published by The Colorado Daily