Charlie Morrow

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.

Morrow was born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in Rutherford and Passaic, New Jersey.

His parents were both psychiatrists.

He started playing trumpet at age 10, and then took up bugle.

Subsequently has also performed using conch shells, cow and goat horns, Jew’s harp, ocarina and homemade electronics.

His work has focused on breath, vocalization, gesture and mental dream states.

His "Very Slow Gabrieli" (1957) is a dramatically slowed down realization of Giovanni Gabrieli’s “Sonata Pian’ e Forte” for double brass ensemble.

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.

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.

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.

In 1964 Morrow met his most important collaborator, poet Jerome Rothenberg, who was then teaching at Mannes.

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.

Venues for Morrow’s later sound installations have included Knoll Furniture Retrospective (Louvre Museum, Paris), General Gas Exhibit (Chicago Museum of Science and Industry), 2nd Acustica International (Whitney Museum, New York), an arctic sound room for the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle, Bonn, the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Planet Earth in New York and the Memorial Railroad Museum in Altoona,PA.

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.

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.

Negotiation with the musical past was an element in Morrow’s compositional thinking, along with a taste for musical pranks.

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.

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.

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.,

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.

Morrow’s conceptualist orientation has led him to write a series of Wave pieces, which involve “herds” of a single instrument, such as “Wave Music I” for 40 cellos or “Wave Music VII” for 30 harps.

Early in his career Morrow organized his own concerts, including “New Music for Trumpet and Ensemble” at Carnegie Hall.

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.

It was Art Garfunkel, one of Morrow’s classmates at Columbia College, who introduced him to the commercial music business.

Morrow then worked as arranger and line producer for John H. Hammond at Columbia Records, and provided arrangements for hit recordings by Simon & Garfunkel, The Rascals, Vanilla Fudge and The Balloon Farm.

Morrow installations range from sound drawers and cabinets to wind sails to electronic environments.