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March 15, 2010
Desert Plants Renewed
Walter Zimmermann's Desert Plants: Conversations with 23 American Musicians, published 1976, long time out of print, is now accessible again on Walter's website, here.
For those of you who do not know either Desert Plants or its author, it remains a real landmark both for American experimental music and as an account of a young composer, from Germany, discovering his own musical sensibility, with a relationship to history and geography, through an encounter with a musical other, in this case a collection of American musicians who, at the time, received almost as little attention at home as they did abroad. While several of the musicians interviewed remain less well-known or well-known only in niches, with the passage of time the music of many of those included in Desert Plants has attained a prominence that sometimes makes it hard to recall how great a challenge their music posed to the then-establishment (and, to some extent, still-institutional) avant-garde, both American and European.
For the record, my opinion here is completely biased. I was fortunate to find a copy of Desert Plants around '78 or '79 while still in High School and many of the interviews — the music those interviews drove me to — registered like lightning, a real source of inspiration, no, better: posture, funky typos and all, alongside Cage's writings, Lou Harrison's Music Primer, Nyman's Experimental Music and Peter Garland's magazine Soundings. When, with my wife, I moved to Frankfurt a decade later, knowing vaguely that Frankfurt was a town in which new music was taken seriously (Adorno, for better or worse and all that), I had no idea where the Walter Zimmermann of Desert Plants might be, but I called the only Walter Zimmermann in the Frankfurt phone book and it turned out to be the right one. Since then, Walter has become a mentor and friend, an encouraging and nurturing presence, and his sensitivity, ethical stance, musical/cultural/culinary appetite and fine sense of adventure as well as constant moral support have been a constant gift.
Originally from Renewable Music, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Mar 15, 2010 at 05:11 PM