Composers » M » MetaMusic

MetaMusic, The Sound of Three Hands Clapping was formed in the winter of 1971-72 when around seven people met to explore live electronic music improvisation. The group shortly stabilized as five members: Martin Gotfrit, Ross McAuley, Dawn Luke, Howard Abrams and Kevin Austin. The group met twice a week for 3 to 5 hours in the McGill University Electronic Music Studio, a facility made available by alcides lanza, who also assisted the group in allowing extensive use of studio equipment outside McGill itself. MetaMusic played about 60 concerts.

Most of the works in the Media Library are tapes of rehearsals, sometimes very loose affairs, and sometimes rather well-controled improvisations, such as Marathon, It’s all the Night Train, which is recorded in four channels. A smaller number of other pieces in the collection are concert recordings, mostly stereo mixes of the concerts which took place in eight channels, many with tape delay systems of 30 seconds to about 2 minutes.

David Sutherland helped the group extensively towards the end of the first formation, acting as documentarist, roadie, recording engineer and frequent performer.

In about 1976 this formation disbanded and many new people played together over a period of about three to four 4 years, including Ross Mcauley and Kevin Austin from the original group, David Sutherland, Eric Brown, Barbara Golden, Joanne Milon, Karin Kloppenburg, Brian Finch, and Brian Roach.

[CEC / Concordia Archival Project (CAP), 2008]