Charlie Morrow

In 2010 Finnish pianist Ilmo Ranta performed a concert of Morrow’s piano music at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. The programme included his “Requiem for the Victims of Kent State for Solo Piano”, “Soundpiece for Rock Amplified Piano” and more recent “Mozart Reconstructions: Sonatas K331, 332 for piano and midi piano, a 3D spatial work with sound environments.

The Little Charlie Festival, a five-day celebration of Morrow’s life and work held in New York City during Fall 2010, gave some indication of the category-defying scope of his creative activity.

Morrow was Visiting Professor of Spatial Sound, VMK Esbjerg, Denmark, 2007-2009. He has lectured on sound art and design at numerous prestigious venues including The Aspen Design Conference, Columbia University, Oberlin College, Helsinki University of Technology, Copenhagen University, Cornell University and St. Martin’s College of Art, London.

In 2004 Morrow participated in the Future of Sound event at the British Academy Awards, co-produced the New Sound New York Sound Cube show at The Kitchen, and had a solo sound art show in the MUU Gallery, Helsinki.

In 2000 Morrow created audio work for the National Museum of Natural History exhibition Vikings. He has also created audio tours for Kennedy Space Center, the Great Platte River Road Memorial Archway and the Empire State Building, New York.

The interactive CD-ROM, ScruTiny in the Great Round, featuring Morrow’s music and visual art by Tennessee Rice Dixon and Jim Gasperini won the 1996 Grand Prix du Jury Milia d'Or in Cannes, France.

Morrow has created feature film soundtracks for Frances Thompson’s NASA Moonwalk One, Ken Russell’s Altered States and Eleanor Antin's Man Without A World. He designed music and sound for the 13 parts of Time-Life's "America" series. His video Paul's Story: A Sami in New York, premiered at The Margaret Mead Film Festival, December 1989. In 2007 he provided score and sound design for Jean-Jacques Lebel’s film Les Avatars du Venus.

The Birth of the War God Music by Charlie Morrow, texts by Jerome Rothenberg, sung by The Western Wind. (Laurel Records, 1988)

Morrow has played in a variety of musical contexts over the years, including Derek Bailey’s Company at London’s ICA in 1981. He has also provided sympathetic musical accompaniment for numerous poets over the years, including Allen Ginsberg. In April 1980 Morrow and Swedish sound poet Sten Hanson organized the 12th International Sound Poetry Festival, at Washington Square Church in New York City.

Early in his career Morrow organized his own concerts, including “New Music for Trumpet and Ensemble” at Carnegie Hall. But in 1973, after “An Evening with the Two Charlies”, a programme of pieces by Morrow and Charles Ives presented at Lincoln Center, he turned away from the concert hall, preferring to work in public spaces, parks, harbours and city streets. “I became more interested in working with environmental acoustics rather than the blank canvas of the concert hall, where you remove all other sound in order to create your own,” Morrow has explained. Most of his event compositions are immersive and defy capture; Morrow has consequently released few recordings.,

In 1973, Morrow organized a Summer Solstice celebration, the first in a series staged annually in New York until 1989. Increasingly Morrow has shown an interest into integrating radio and television broadcasts into these celebratory occasions. Amongst his other large scale public events Citywave, realised on the streets of Copenhagen in 1985, involved around 2000 participants, including folk singers, bell ringers, rock groups, marching bands, a helicopter and clowns on bicycles.,

In 1969, painter Carol Brown invited Morrow to create a piece for the Marilyn Monroe Show at New York’s Janis Gallery. He created a soundscape portrait of Monroe using collaged found sound.

In 1964 Morrow met his most important collaborator, poet Jerome Rothenberg, who was then teaching at Mannes. Between 1974 and 1989 they were co-directors of The New Wilderness Foundation, which staged concerts, published EAR Magazine and New Wilderness Letter and issued cassette recordings under the New Wilderness Audiographics imprint.

In 1963, Morrow received a Diploma in Composition from Mannes College of Music where his teachers had included Stefan Wolpe and William Jay Sydeman. During this time, he also encountered figures from the New York avant garde, notably Philip Corner. Morrow performed with Corner in the Tone Roads Ensemble which also featured James Tenney and Malcolm Goldstein, and through Corner he met radical figures including John Cage and Fluxus artist Alison Knowles.

During the mid-1960s Morrow helped Charlotte Moorman organize her acclaimed annual Avant Garde Festival in New York City. Morrow has subsequently worked with professional musicians, such as singer Joan La Barbara in The New Wilderness Preservation Band and percussionist Glen Velez in the Horizontal-Vertical Band. But involving members of the public and participation by non-specialists has been a consistent goal of Morrow’s work. He conceived the Ocarina Orchestra as an ensemble that could be musically effective without requiring technical expertise.

Morrow attended Columbia College (1958–1961), where his teachers included composer Otto Luening and, importantly, ethnomusicologist Willard Rhodes, who introduced Morrow to oral cultures and shamanic traditions.

Negotiation with the musical past was an element in Morrow’s compositional thinking, along with a taste for musical pranks. His "Very Slow Gabrieli" (1957) is a dramatically slowed down realization of Giovanni Gabrieli’s “Sonata Pian’ e Forte” for double brass ensemble. A later collage work, “Book of Hours of Catherine of Cleves” (1992), shows a mature late twentieth-century imagination engaging in unexpected ways with late medieval style.

Charlie Morrow (born Charles Morrow, February 9, 1942) is an American sound artist, composer, conceptualist and performer. His creative projects have included chanting and healing works, museum and gallery installations, large-scale festival events, radio and TV broadcasts, film soundtracks, commercial sound design and advertising jingles.