Oakland Museum Concerts:
Songs Concert

This is a recording of a concert of art songs, (and some sound poetry), which was held at the Gallery of California Art of the Oakland Museum on March 19, 1972. Most of these songs were composed by 20th century American composers, some of them well known, such as Ernst Bacon. Lou Harrison, and Henry Cowell, but others perhaps not as well known to mainstream audiences, such as Anne Kish and Barry Taxman, among others. The texts for these songs include poems by such famous authors as Emily Dickinson, James Joyce, and A. E. Housman, but also include settings of ancient Chinese and Japanese poems as well as lesser known contemporary American poetry. The list of performers read like a veritable who’s who of the San Francisco Bay Area New Music scene of the 1970s, and includes vocalists Miriam Abramowitsch, John Duykers, and James Tippey, as well as musicians like Alden Gilchrist, Mike Nock, and Wayne Peterson.