While reading modern Mongolian poetry, what better accompaniment could there be than unusual and unrecognised experimental music? In my life away from Mongolian lit, I am not a poet (far from it) but a composer, and so i thought that I would offer some music and composers with which and with whom you will probably not be familiar.
It is always pleasurable to blow my own trumpet. And so here is a whole page of my music, in this otherwise excellent archive.
And here is an interview with the late great Richard Maxfield, conducted on November 11th 1960, with consequent curiosity from the interviewer. Maxfield (1927-1969) - with whom I, James Joyce and the Mongolian revolutionary leader Sühbaatar share a birthday (2 February) - was an extraordinarily talented composer, who taught a composition class at UCLA during the late 1950s where LaMonte Young, Terry Riley, Pauline Oliveros, Loren Rush and Morton Subotnik came together. He must have had the most phenomenal hand-ear coördination, listen to his wonderful piece "Cough Music" on the interview tape, and marvel at the deexterity and beauty of the result.
You can order the only CD available of his music (where he is twinned oddly, yet effectively, with an early piece by Harold Budd) here. Read more about Maxfield at LaMonte Young and Marian Zazeela's MELA Foundation website www.melafoundation.org. What you will not find is the following poem requiem by Diane Wakoski for Maxfield, who threw himself from a window in NYC in June of 1969, while high on drugs. His was, in my opinion, a tragic loss to contemporary music, but we are still very lucky to have a few pieces and the talented (and now senior) composers which his brilliance helped to foster.
